Idylls of the King Alfred, Lord Tennyson - U. C. Knoepflmacher (essay date 1992)
U. C. Knoepflmacher (essay date 1992)
SOURCE: "Idling in Gardens of the Queen: Tennyson's Boys, Princes, and Kings," in Victorian Poetry, Vol. 30, Nos. 3-4, Autumn-Winter, 1992, pp. 343-64.
[In the essay that follows, Knoepflmacher explores Tennyson's treatment of gender in the Idylls.]
The child is the link through the parts.
—Tennyson on The Princess
'Since the good mother holds me still a child!
Good mother is bad mother unto me!
A worse were better; yet no worse would I.'
—"Gareth and Lynette," 11. 15-17
Tennyson's completed Idylls of the King offers a significant revision of the self-understanding he had reached in The Princess, almost three decades earlier, about the psychosexual foundations of his art. In his analysis of Tennyson's movement from female to male self-projections and his reading of The Princess as "a...
[The entire page is 10186 words long]
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