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The Female King: Tennyson's Arthurian Apocalypse

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Elliot L. Gilbert
Elliot L. Gilbert*
Affiliation:
University of California, Davis
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Abstract

Most readers of the Idylls of the King wonder how the traditionally virile and manly King Arthur of legend and romance evolved into the restrained, almost maidenly Victorian monarch of Alfred Lord Tennyson's most ambitious work. Many of the earliest readers of the Idylls saw the change as disquieting evidence of the growing domestication and even feminization of the age, and later critics, however they may have moderated the emotionalism of that first response, still see in Arthur's striking metamorphosis a key element in any analysis of the poem. I argue that such a metamorphosis was inevitable, given the nineteenthcentury confluence of what Foucault calls “the history of sexuality” with what we may call the history of history, and that Tennyson's Arthurian retelling, far from being weakened by its revolutionary premise, is stronger and more resonant for depicting its hero as a species of female king.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 98 , Issue 5 , October 1983 , pp. 863 - 878
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1983

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