Art and Self Relations in Tennyson's Works

The relationship between art and the self is a reoccurring theme in Tennyson’s poetry; indeed in The Palace of Art the narrator declares “I built my soul a lordly pleasure-house”[i]; bridging the gap between the interior (soul) and exterior (palace) through art. In Maud we are given a poem which also deals with external and internal landscapes, seen through the subjective lens of the poet attempting to navigate his broken inner identity in a world apparently devoid of meaning. His muse, in the form of the ethereal Maud, acts as a vehicle for which the narrator can construct a sense of selfhood, which ultimately deteriorates in her absence and later death. Tennyson links the artist and his medium with the psychology of the self, highlighting how the breakdown of the relationship between the artist and his muse resembles, and can even be correlated to, the breakdown of the self.

The self is immediately thrown into question in the opening of the poem, as the narrator must face the harsh realities of an apparently meaningless world. The catalyst arrives in the form of the death of the patriarch – the narrator’s father - whose body lies “mangled, and flatten’d and crush’d”, with the brutal imagery reflected in nature itself as the “wind like a broken worldling wail’d”. The narrator, without the guidance of a paternal figure – much like Hamlet - is left to, in the words of critic Matthew Campbell, “construct his own unstable consciousness, and his story, in words”[ii]. The poem becomes both an expression of a fragmented psyche and a medium with which to forge meaning through story. Nevertheless the narrator faces significant difficulties in constructing this meaning, perhaps due to his scepticism towards the very institutions which are supposed to prescribe it. The Church, as he claims in his maddened frenzy, has “kill’d their Christ”; the scientist is “fonder of glory, and vain”; the poet is “whirl’d into folly and vice”. A historicist approach might try to see the narrator’s disillusionment as a reflection of 1850s anxieties, a decade in which science and religion rupture most prominently with the publication of Darwin’s On The Origin of Species (four years after Maud). Tennyson’s poetry can be said to occupy a space which incorporates a proto-Darwinian worldview, as illustrated in the line “nature red in tooth and claw” from In Memoriam, which has become a “canonical descriptor” of Darwinism[iii]. It is also clear that the narrator of Maud mourns the loss of old scientific thought, lamenting the “sad astrology” which rather than providing meaning to the universe and the self – as in the fortune-telling astrology of old - results in “iron skies”. On one level, it is possible to see the narrator’s conflicted psyche as a reflection of the challenges of a time where self-identity can be seen as separate from the institutions that previously defined it, as the narrator remarks “we men are a little breed”. Arguably the narrator’s story, which provides a beginning, middle and end – while fragmented, can be seen as a way of providing some sort of structural ordinance to a reality which lacks this quality.

It is in this vacuum of meaning that Maud enters, providing the narrator with an outlet from which he can construct a sense of selfhood. Through the use of his “British English lily”, he is able to articulate a natural world which is not bleak and antagonistic but painterly and decorous. From the mid-section of Part 1 the poem is filled with rich imagery ranging from the “million emeralds” to “liquid azure bloom of a crescent of sea”. Alongside this the interior world of the narrator’s psyche is shown to be alienated from the public discourse of “gossip, scandal and spite”. Contemporary critics criticised Tennyson’s decadent writing style with one reviewer referring to the poem as “a little like the foam without the wave”. Perhaps rather than taking a purely historicist approach, which risks anachronism, it would be more appropriate to examine – in particular – the work as an examination of the psychology of the poet. In contrary to the views of mid-century Victorian critics, when interpreted as an analogy for the artistic process, the decadent language is an accurate representation of an aestheticized, proto-cinematic world of the artist or poet. Through creating a poetic landscape around Maud, the narrator is able to seek meaning within his fragmented story, expressing hopes for the future with his “bride to be”. While the narrator’s internal sense of self is alienated from the external world around him, Maud bridges the gap between the external and internal as a seamless figure of divine beauty. There are moments in the poem where she literally merges with the natural world as “the sunlight broke from her lip” and “her mouth a rose”. Perhaps it is not only romantic, but artistic obsession that fuels the narrator - he treats her as if she were art form or a “work divine”. As she becomes more distant he becomes more introspective, wishing to “bury myself in myself”. Indeed, rather than the Cartesian sense of simply body and mind being two separate entities, to Tennyson the mind and self are also two distinct categories, with the narrator internalising one within the other, claiming “so dark a mind within me dwells”. Interestingly in The Poet’s Mind, Tennyson actually implores the reader not to delve into the psychology of the poet:

""Vex not thou the poet’s mind
With thy shallow wit:
Vex not thou the poet’s mind
For thou canst not fathom it”[iv]

This is ironic if we consider Maud, Tennyson’s favourite of his own works[v], to be about a poet narrator who seeks to delve into own mind to form a sense of self. Indeed, if we are to accept the parallel between the narrator and the poet or artist, then a case could be made that the reason for the eventual descent into madness is because the narrator has tried something “thou canst not fathom” – the impossibility forging a sense of self through the medium of poetry.

A crucial facet of the artist is their relationship to the muse, and in Maud the narrator projects his hopes and dreams onto the eponymous character to the extent that his own sense of self becomes intrinsically tied to her. Yet, due in part to the subjective first-person narration, Tennyson restricts our access to Maud’s interior life, resembling the treatment of female muses as figures meant for objectification. She simply becomes a “beautiful voice”, a “rose” and even “womanhood” itself. The conflation of her image with nature, while helping the narrator to construct meaning, reduces her character to a fantasy. In exploring the psychology of the self within the poem, it is crucial to note that the titular character’s selfhood is itself marginalised within the narration. As critic Robert E Lougy emphasises in his comparison of Maud to Graves’ White Goddess, her cold, pallid yet entrancing appearance “embodies an image of Woman frequently found in nineteenth –century art.”[vi] Indeed the influence Tennyson had on the Pre-Raphaelites cannot be overstated, with both The Lady of Shallot and Mariana being visualised by members of the brotherhood. Perhaps the best critique of the Victorian relationship between the artist and his muse comes from the sister of artist Gabriel Dante Rossetti, Christina Rossetti in her poem In the Artist’s Studio. Written a year after Tennyson’s Maud the narrator laments that the muse in her brothers’ studio is

“Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright;
Not as she is, but as she fills his dream”.

Likewise, the character of Maud is an entity without selfhood, acting more as a construction than an individual; much like Rossetti’s muse it is when she “fills” the dreams of the narrator that she’s at her most enigmatic and complex, as the narrator proclaims in a line broken by caesuras “what is she now? My dreams are bad. She may bring me a curse.” This of course lends itself to feminist interpretations, with critics such as Linda Shires arguing that the major struggle for the narrator’s self-knowledge stems from a crisis in masculinity, shown through his demonisation of other male figures such as Maud’s brother, whom he describes as “this lump of earth” and eventually murders, illustrates this insecurity. She further criticises Tennyson for his representation of the female body as either repulsive or an object, even deeming the “dreadful hollow” to be a symbol for the womb, in which the narrator is “reborn”[vii]. Yet while Tennyson does depict the female muse as vacuous, perhaps this is his intention. In the second part of the poem the narrator declares – after Maud’s death - “He may take her now, for she never speaks her mind” and “she is not beautiful now”. Arguably in some ways the poem acts a critique of the relationship between the artist or poet and his muse, as after her demise the construct of the ethereal-Maud dissolves, and along with it the poet’s sense of meaning. As his sense of identity had becomes so intertwined with Maud – herself a projection, and yet his only link to the outside world - her death results in his impending loss of sanity. Therefore, while masculinity plays a role in the narrator’s search for selfhood, it is the death of his muse – his creative outlet - that is the more prominent factor in his psychological collapse as his entire worldview is constructed around her.

Crucially, the dissolution of the muse and the descent into madness leads to the dissolution of the structure and language in the poem itself, as the poet struggles to express himself within his own medium. As the narrator continues to internalise or “to bury me [him], bury me / Deeper, ever so deeper” the metre and rhyme scheme become increasingly erratic with the triple rhyming of “foe”, “low”, and then two lines later “blow”. It is this incoherence that mirrors madness in a way that a doctor friend of Tennyson referred to as the “closest representation since Shakespeare”[viii]. Without any meaning from which to produce his art, the poet struggles to articulate language itself, regressing into what Lougy considers “babble”[ix]. Furthermore, Lougy argues that in a state of true madness, the poetic form ceases to function, and Tennyson comes as close as one can within the medium to replicate this. Indeed, had he chosen to end the poem at the end of Part 2, one could see the death of the muse as the symbolic, or literal, death of the poet and his sense of self.

Yet the complete change of tone in Part 3 complicates this idea – his poem continues without a muse, and instead he finds meaning within the Crimean war and jingoistic, national pride. The apparent advocating of war as the “purpose of God” contradicts the narrator’s previous commitment to the insignificance of man, and the ending sees a return to the institutions that were rejected at the beginning of the poem. It is possible to see the fragmented nature of an actual war as naturally appealing to a man who in Part 1 stated he was “at war with myself”, with the internal finally reflecting the external. Indeed, contemporary reviews tended to argue the case that “Maud is an allegory of the war”[x]. Nevertheless, from the perspective of the narrator as poet, perhaps the reason the ending was found by many readers to be unsatisfying[xi] is that part of the appeal of the poem was in the poet-narrators’ self-destructive obsession for his muse, which produces some of his most animated sections, for example the iconic “Come into the garden, Maud”. The newfound sense of self and purpose within war lacks this artistic obsession, and the language and form, while remaining rich and vivid is more prosaic in style; the poet may have found selfhood without his muse but this comes with the cost of conforming to that which he previously is known to despise – which is what Lougy justifiably considers the ultimate mad act of the poem.

Through Maud, Tennyson articulates an individual whose sense of self has become so fragmented that the poem itself resembles his fractured consciousness, resulting in a work that is emblematic of a time in which institutions historically linked to self-identity were arguably being challenged and undermined. Furthermore, through the analogy of the narrator to poet, Tennyson explores the selfhood of the artist and his relationship to the world around him. In the case of the narrator in Maud this relationship is shown with his eponymous muse whose own selfhood remains a patriarchal construction. Eventually the fragmented narrator descends into madness as his identity is lost with the death of his love, akin to the loss of a muse to the artist. The reestablishment of the self through war may appear a natural union for the narrator’s own internal warfare, but Tennyson, through his language and structure highlights how this attempt to stitch together a sense of self relies on conforming to societal norms that were previously rejected. Therefore, Tennyson illustrates how sense of self is both fragile and dependent on our relationship with the external world around us, but crucially he challenges the concept of whether art and poetry itself can help us bridge this gap or whether to “vex the poet’s mind” is an act of madness in itself.

Endnotes:

[i] A. Tennyson, The Palace of Art: Poems by Alfred Tennyson. London: Edward Moxon, 1833

[ii] Campbell, M. Rhythm and Will in Victorian Poetry (Cambridge studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture ; 22). Cambridge University Press. 1999, p114

[iii] Gould, Stephen Jay. “The Tooth and Claw Centennial.” Dinosaur in a Haystack: Reflections on Natural History. New York: Harmony Books, 1995. p63

[iv] A. Tennyson, The Poet’s Mind: Poems by Alfred Tennyson. London: Edward Moxon, 1833 [v] A. Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson The Major Works. Oxford, 2000, p598

[vi] R E. Lougy. “The Sounds and Silence of Madness: Language as Theme in Tennyson's ‘Maud.’” Victorian Poetry, vol. 22, no. 4, 1984, pp. 407–42

[vii] L. Shires "Maud", Masculinity and Poetic Identity. Criticism, 29(3), 1987 pp269-290

[viii] A. Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson The Major Works. Oxford, 2000, p601

[ix] R E. Lougy. “The Sounds and Silence of Madness: Language as Theme in Tennyson's ‘Maud.’” Victorian Poetry, vol. 22, no. 4, 1984, pp. 407–42

[x] V. Cunningham, Victorian Poets: A Critical Reader. John Wiley & Sons, 2014 p224

[xi] ibid p232