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SONS AND LOVERS: TENNYSON'S FRATERNAL PATERNITY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 August 2005

Monica M. Young-Zook
Monica M. Young-Zook
Affiliation:
Macon State College
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Extract

TERRY EAGLETON has suggested that “the mid-nineteenth century bourgeois state had problems in resolving its Oedipus complex” (76). Eagleton's semi-serious remark certainly holds true for nineteenth-century British culture, which, while supposedly patriarchal in its political structures, features a great number of significant literary narratives in which the paternal parent is either missing, dead, or never mentioned. The poems of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, are no exception. Gerhard Joseph, Christopher Ricks, and Linda Shires, among others, turn to Freudian psychoanalysis, the Oedipal complex, and Freud's seminal essay “Mourning and Melancholia” for insight into why so many father figures are absent from Tennyson's work. Yet neither the Oedipus complex nor “melancholia” accounts for how these father figures, while literally absent, are nevertheless present and influential. Another model is needed to describe the relationship between Tennyson, the missing paternal figures of his narratives, and the age that he has come to represent.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 33 , Issue 2 , September 2005 , pp. 451 - 466
Copyright
© 2005 Cambridge University Press

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