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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Lionel Stevenson has written persuasively of Shelley's influence on Tennyson and has traced the “high-born maiden” in Tennyson as a symbol of Shelleyan origin. By following the figure through Mariana, The Lady of Shalott, The Palace of Art, Lady Clara Vere de Vere, Locksley Hall, and The Princess, Stevenson has found that the maiden is transformed from a weary, isolated, usually suffering figure in the early poems into a “matter-of-fact literary stock-character” in the later poems, like Elaine in the Idylls; and he has suggested that the figure conforms with Jung's archetypal image of the anima. This is very convincing, but, it seems to me, Stevenson has forgotten that host of maidens—Lilian, Madeline, Margaret, Adeline, Rosalind, Eleänore, Kate—who, unlike Mariana, are not suffering damsels at all, but strong, often cruel, haughty ladies who capture the imagination of the poet and who command his devotion but give nothing in return. These maidens, who at first glance might appear to be nothing more than insensible and flirtatious women, occur with persistency in the 1830 Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, and continue to turn up, in suggestion at least, throughout the first part of Tennyson's poetic career. Like the isolated maidens whom Stevenson has pointed out, they are significant in a study of Tennyson because of the frequency with which they occur and because of the change which they underwent after the publication of the poet's first volume. They are, I believe, a variation on the femme fatale figure and draw their inspiration from Keats, especially from La Belle Dame Sans Merci.
1 “The ‘High-Born Maiden’ Symbol in Tennyson,” PMLA lxiii (March 1948), 234-244.
2 G. H. Ford has a chapter on Tennyson in his Keats and the Victorians (New Haven, 1944), but he does not treat this particular aspect of Keats's influence.
3 Alfred Tennyson (New York, 1949), p. 34.
4 There are many echoes of The Eve of St. Agnes in Eleänore. The most interesting of these, perhaps, is the heat imagery.
5 Psychological Types (London, 1949), p. 594. Jung points out that in a man with “an inoffensive outer attitude, the soul-image, as a rule, has a rather malevolent character” (p. 599).
6 The Fatal Woman plays a very definite role in English literature of the 19th century. When Jerome H. Buckley writes that Mario Praz's The Romantic Agony, concerned with “that morbid eroticism which finds its typical expression in the voluminous literature of the femme fatale and the Byronic anti-hero,” has “little direct relevance to most of the major poets or to the great bulk of Victorian English poetry” (The Victorian Poets: A Guide to Research, ed. Frederic E. Faverty, Cambridge, Mass., 1956, p. 16), he undoubtedly has forgotten that at least suggestions of the femme fatale turn up in the works of several major authors of the Victorian period.
7 Hallam Tennyson, Tennyson, A Memoir (London, 1897), i, 81.
8 Poems like The Two Voices were written during a period of intense self-questioning, at a time, said Tennyson, when “I was so utterly miserable, a burden to myself and to my family, that I said, ‘Is life worth anything?‘ ” (Tennyson, A Memoir, i, 249). The Palace of Art originated in a remark (“Tennyson, we cannot live in art” [ibid., i, 118]) by one of his friends, R. C. Trench, who was seeking to persuade the poet to forego his isolation in art.
9 Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (London, 1928), p. 258.