Tennyson's King Arthur and the Violence of Manliness

Abstract

Beginning with Tennyson's contemporaries, one of the targets for hostile criticism of Idylls of the King was his adaptation of the warrior-king protagonist portrayed in Malory's Le Morte Darthur. Swinburne mockingly referred to the "Morte d'Albert, or Idylls of the Prince Consort" and proclaimed that Tennyson had "lowered the note and deformed the outline of the Arthurian story, by reducing Arthur to the level of a wittol, Guenevere to the level of a woman of intrigue, and Launcelot to the level of a 'co-respondent.'" Henry Crabb Robinson thought Tennyson's Arthur was "unfit to be an epic-hero" and Henry James called him a prig. T. S. Eliot asserted that Tennyson had adapted "this great British epic material--in Malory's handling hearty, outspoken and magnificent--to suitable reading for a girls' school." 1 Clearly the gender issue is central to all these comments--contemporary readers were dissatisfied with the way Tennyson portrayed Arthur's "manhood," a problem of which Tennyson was well aware, and many modern readers either voice concerns similar to those of Swinburne and T. S. Eliot or offer readings of the Idylls which in my view seriously distort Tennyson's attempt to explore gender issues. Tennyson's modern editor and interpreter Christopher Ricks makes no serious attempt to defend Tennyson against the traditional critics who ridicule the Poet Laureate for making Arthur a wimp, something less than a real man. 2 On the other hand, more politically attuned critics taking a feminist or gender studies approach either ignore or deal inadequately with the question of Arthur's masculinity. 3

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