Gender and Sexuality in the Works of Alfred Lord Tennyson

In his critical commentary on In Memoriam A.H.H., Christopher Ricks refers to Alfred Lord Tennyson’s sentiments towards Arthur Henry Hallam as a love “passing the love of women” (Tennyson, 332). The implications of this phrase are multitudinous and significant: in the body of work that Tennyson produced following Hallam’s death, the relationship between the two men became a primary contextual backdrop against which some of Tennyson’s finest poetry could be read. The queer-coded elements of Tennyson’s writing provide insight into his complex negotiation of sexual and gender identity in the heteronormative confines of Victorian England, with subtextual expressions of homoromantic impulse lending a subversive quality to In Memoriam, while an intricate depiction of gender and power dictates the narrative of The Princess. The conflation of desire and convention in these two poems generates tension between the cultural norms of Victorian England and the social worlds of the texts, providing the thematic foundation for larger discourses surrounding gender and sexuality in both works. Between the latently queer desires of In Memoriam, and the deeply gendered discourses of The Princess, a nuanced representation of passion, power, and masculinity within Tennyson’s works can be observed and understood.

An understanding of the socialized imposition of compulsory heterosexuality is imperative for expanding and reexamining the critical discourses that surround western literature; its demonstrable presence in the poetry of Tennyson bears specific relevance to the notion of Victorian masculinity, and by extension, to the formulation of intimate relationships between the men of Tennyson’s time. Indeed, the most notable shortcoming of many heteronormative readings of In Memoriam is their failure to fully account for Tennyson’s observable passion for Arthur Hallam. Many critics have attempted to circumvent the potential implications of homoeroticism by constructing a sterile narrative of friendship between the two men: Gordon Haight, for instance, argues that, “The Victorians’ conception of love between those of the same sex cannot be understood fairly by an age steeped in Freud. Where they saw only pure friendship, the modern reader assumes perversion… Even In Memoriam, for some, now has a troubling overtone” (Ricks, 208). Of course, a certain level of homophobic subtext is evident in the very language of Haight’s assertion: the identification of queerness as “troubling,” and of potential same-sex desires as “perversion,” lends little credence to the impartiality of the observation at hand. The more relevant flaw in this reading, however, is its erroneous presupposition that heterosexuality exists as an organic norm through which a complete understanding of all interpersonal human relationships can be achieved. This narrative of ‘natural’ heteronormativity discredits substantial historical and cultural evidence to the contrary: as Adrienne Rich identifies in Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence, “The failure to examine heterosexuality as an institution is like failing to admit that the economic system called capitalism or the caste system of racism is maintained by a variety of forces, including both physical violence and false consciousness” (Rich, 648). A queered reading of Tennyson is necessarily cognizant of the fact that compulsory heterosexuality, particularly as it appears in western culture, is a product of oppressive and oftentimes violent socialization, and does not necessarily reflect a ‘pure,’ ‘natural,’ or accurate state of being. With this in mind, a reading of Tennyson’s poetry that willingly engages with its homoerotic subtext is academically as well as politically relevant; far from being narrow or limiting, such resistance to preexisting structures of compulsory heterosexuality can in fact broaden the parameters of discourse that encompass Tennyson’s poetry as a whole.

In Saint Foucault: Towards A Gay Hagiography, gender and queer theorist David M. Halperin writes, “Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers…. Queer demarcates not a positivity but a positionality vis-à-vis the normative” (Halperin, 62). This notion of relative positionality is evoked through metaphor in In Memoriam, when Tennyson writes, “O Sorrow, wilt thou live with me / No casual mistress, but a wife” (Tennyson, IM, LIX 1-2). The conceptualization of Sorrow in these lines, as an emotion so prevalent as to actually become anthromorphized within the text, demonstrates a relative existence: her presence within the poem is necessarily contingent upon the absence of Hallam, because it is Hallam’s death that generates Sorrow to begin with. The heterosexual nature of the relationship between Tennyson and the female-coded Sorrow, then, is similarly relative: as Jeff Nunokawa observes, “[Tennyson’s] heterosexual situation is thus defined as the ghost of prior passion” (Nunokawa, 429). In other words, the notion of Sorrow as “wife” constitutes a heterosexual positionality that exists in relation to whatever preceded it; the implied specter of marriage in these lines contrasts the relationship between Tennyson and Hallam not only through its contingence upon Hallam’s absence, but also through its gendered situation relative to the homosocial relationship that predates it. Tennyson goes on to proclaim of Hallam, “My spirit loved and loves him yet, / Like some poor girl whose heart is set /On one whose rank exceeds her own” (Tennyson, IM, LX 2-4). By feminizing his narrative self, Tennyson constructs an image that simultaneously reproduces and subverts heterosexual norms of affection. This sense of homoromantic desire is further echoed through the rhythmic structure of the poem as a whole: Tennyson’s use of iambic tetrameter lends In Memoriam an organic, bodily cadence that underscores the poem’s foundations of passion.

The queer undertones present in this reading of In Memoriam are simultaneously complicated and informed by Tennyson’s regressive treatment of gender in his other works. The Princess takes on a particular relevance through its status as an oddly subversive, yet ultimately antifeminist text; although varied and nuanced discourses surrounding gender take place throughout the narrative, The Princess fundamentally devalues the feminist principles it discusses through its narrative prioritization of heterosexual male desire and emphasis on female submission. The treatment of gender within The Princess is nevertheless uncommonly nuanced; in her 1990 book Gender Trouble, Judith Butler writes, “…gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which “sexed nature” or “a natural sex” is produced and established as “prediscursive,” prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts” (Butler, 7). This notion of gender as a fluid and in some senses performative construct emerges repeatedly throughout The Princess: many of the poem’s male characters are coded feminine, with the protagonist himself described as, “Of temper amorous, as the first of May / With lengths of yellow ringlet, like a girl” (Tennyson, TP, I 2-4). Furthermore, in the course of the narrative, the Prince and his companion assume women’s clothing in order to gain access to the Princess’s exclusively female spaces. Through Tennyson’s description of this subversive action, the binary notion of gender is simultaneously transgressed and reinforced: the ability of the Prince and his companion to pass as women emphasizes the performative nature of gender, but also underscores the vast differences between the men and women of the text. By the end of the poem, the success of these masculine efforts is evident in the romantic submission displayed by the Princess. In light of this, although it seems to occasionally examine gender as a mutable state of performativity, The Princess ultimately fortifies, rather than disrupts, the oppressive structures it seeks to address. The poem as a whole is irrefutably male-centric, introducing elements of feminist discourse, but undercutting them through the events of the narrative. As Donald Hall asserts, “In The Princess we find enacted a zero-sum game of gender and power; men can only regain consciousness and, by implication, potency, when the empowered woman is subdued and male ability exalted” (Hall, 55).

The relation of gender identity and antifeminism in The Princess to the politics of sexuality in In Memoriam is primarily observable in the complex reading of Victorian masculinity that both poems offer. In The Embodiment of Masculinity, western masculinity in is observed as being “defined in opposition to all things feminine” (Mihskind, 103). This ideal naturally entails the disavowal of queerness in men, as compulsory heterosexuality would categorize sexual or romantic attraction to men as the provincial territory of the female. Sociologist R.W. Connel explains that, “To many people, homosexuality is a negation of masculinity, and homosexual men must be effeminate… hegemonic masculinity was thus redefined as explicitly and exclusively heterosexual” (Connell, 736). When read through a cultural lens of heterosexual male hegemony, then, Tennyson’s writings involve a self-contradicting performance of masculinity: the poet rigidly reinforces systems of gendered subjugation in works such as The Princess, even as latent homoerotic desire forms the perpetual subtext of his most famous work. In this fashion, the undertones of In Memoriam, coupled with the narrative of The Princess, form an intricate nexus of desire and power that characterizes the gendered and sexual ethos of Tennyson’s work: compellingly queer and irredeemably antifeminist, the two poems shed light upon the contradictions and complications of subversive masculine identity within Victorian England.

Works Cited

Connell, R. W. “A Very Straight Gay: Masculinity, Homosexual Experience, and the Dynamics of Gender.” American Sociological Review 57.6 (1992): 735-51. JSTOR. Web. 16 Nov. 2015.

Hall, Donald E. “The Anti-Feminist Ideology of Tennyson’s “The Princess”” Modern Language Studies 21.4 (1991): 49-62. JSTOR. Web. 15 Nov. 2015.

Halperin, David M. Saint Foucault: Towards A Gay Hagiography. New York: Oxford UP, 1995. Print.

Mishkind, Mark E., Judith Rodin, Lisa R. Silberstein, and Ruth H. Striegel-Moore. “The Embodiment of Masculinity: Cultural, Psychological, and Behavioral Dimensions.” The American Body in Context: An Anthology. By Jessica R. Johnston. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2001. 103-20. Google Scholar. Web. 15 Nov. 2015.

Nunokawa, Jeff. ““In Memoriam” and the Extinction of the Homosexual.” ELH 58.2 (1991): 427- 38. JSTOR. Web. 15 Nov. 2015.

Rich, Adrienne. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” Signs 5.4, Women: Sex and Sexuality (1980): 631-60. JSTOR. Web. 17 Nov. 2015.

Ricks, Christopher. Tennyson. New York: MacMillan, 1972. Google Scholar. Web. 16 Nov. 2015.

Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson. Tennyson: A Selected Edition. Ed. Christopher B. Ricks. Harlow: Longman, 1989. Print.