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Listening to Guinevere:Female Agency and the Politics of Chivalry in Tennyson's Idylls Stephen Ahern Nature, Universe, Destiny, Existence, howsoever we name this grand unnamable Fact in the midst of which we live and struggle, is as a heavenly bride and conquest to the wise and brave, to them who can discern her behests and do them; a destroying fiend to them who cannot. -Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present (1843) In 1857 Alfred Tennyson printed the first of his Idylls of the King under the title Enid and Nimüe: The True and the False.1 Tennyson's early choice of title indicates much about the treatment of identity and gender in his poem cycle as a whole, for throughout the Idylls a model of femininity is elaborated in the terms of truth and falsity. Consistently a woman's essential character is defined according to her degree of loyalty to a male counterpart. She is "true" or "false" insofar as she fulfils the expectations of her lover, who articulates the expectations of her society in general. The women of Arthur's court occupy positions on a spectrum of ethical capacity. Ranging from the madonna figure to the whore figure, from the ever-suffering Enid to the cunning [End Page 88] Vivien, the women of the Idylls embody aspects of morality in a quintessentially Victorian construction of woman as a symbolic repository of social values. Largely because of the role he played as poet laureate and cultural sage, Tennyson has often been read as propagating unequivocally the patriarchal assumptions of the Victorian literary and socio-economic establishment. With few exceptions recent critics contend that Tennyson's lyrics reinscribe and thereby reinforce the gender ideology of his time.2 As Linda M. Shires has suggested, however, Tennyson's relationship to his culture's ideology is more equivocal and complex than critics have noticed.3 I will argue here that as he updates Arthurian romance to speak to the concerns of contemporary England, Tennyson does not mirror uncritically the sexual politics of his culture. The Idylls candidly depicts the problems that result from subscribing to a model of feminine nature that pervaded Victorian thinking. The contradictions of this model appear in stark relief in the epigraph I quote above from Past and Present, in which Carlyle invokes a discourse that makes woman the cipher of a given metaphysical conceit-here, Nature, Universe, Destiny, Existence. The problem with such rhetoric becomes evident when abstract qualities are projected onto an actual person. It is of course absurd to construct an individual-let alone half the human population-as the embodiment of a concept as arcane as "the grand unnamable Fact" that gives meaning to human life. Yet such a construction of woman has a long history. Codified initially by the medieval courtly love tradition, the myth of romantic love permeated western literature with a conviction that union with the beloved will enable sexual, emotional, [End Page 89] and spiritual fulfillment. The ideal of woman as ennobling influence gained especial force in Tennyson's era, which saw a revival of interest in the culture of chivalry.4 Identifications of the beloved with a promise of ennobling self-realization pervade the Idylls.Yet throughout the poem cycle there is a pattern of implicit, and at times explicit, criticism of the ways Arthur and his knights exploit the women of Camelot for their own ends. This exploitation follows a common trajectory: the knight idealizes his female counterpart, and when the woman does not live up to the demands such a role dictates, she is blamed for his failure to succeed in the world. Within the allegorical schema of the Grail quest, attainment of the ideal woman becomes, like attainment of the Grail itself, a figure for the fulfillment of desire. In their dealings with the women of Camelot, Arthur's knights exhibit behavior that ranges from Pelleas's naive infatuation to Geraint's jealous obsession. These varied responses to womanhood become comprehensible when the knights' actions are read as manifestations of the same passionate yearning. The narrative makes clear that each of these men is driven by a longing for atonement, which is a longing both for...
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