SOURCE: “Iseult of Brittany: A New Interpretation of Matthew Arnold's Tristram and Iseult,” in Arthurian Women: A Casebook, edited by Thelma S. Fisher, Garland Publishing, 1996, pp. 205-28.

[In the following essay, originally published in 1980, Leavy argues that Arnold's sympathetic portrayal of Iseult, especially the fantasy world she has created for herself to help cope with the monotony of her existence, is an astute example of “female fantasy in nineteenth-century literature.”]

Matthew Arnold was pleased with his version of the Tristram and Iseult legend. He was especially proud of having gotten to the story before Richard Wagner popularized it, and Arnold thought that he himself had done the better job. An audience unfamiliar with Wagner, however, did not find Tristram and Iseult easy to read. Such narrative details as the drinking of the love potion are only alluded to, and the story, told in flashbacks from the deathbed of the hero, was not easy to follow. Modern readers are less likely to face such difficulties. Nevertheless, critics of Arnold's poetry find themselves in much the same situation today that his general readers did in the past: “Tristram and Iseult, though it will stand as the most brilliant of Arnold's poems on love, is not an easy work to approach or to comprehend.”¹ The major problem concerns Part III, the conclusion of the poem. In it, a widowed Iseult of Brittany tells her children an ancient tale from her country. She relates how Merlin and Vivian were traveling together in a forest, how they stopped to rest (and, implicitly, to make love), and how Vivian imprisoned Merlin in a magic plot of ground from which she left him to follow her own way. The end of Iseult's story is also the end of Arnold's poem.

Explanations for the presence of this tale in Tristram and Iseult vary, as do opinions about whether Arnold added Part III as an afterthought or whether it was part of his plan from the outset. Some critics find the story added merely to provide comic relief in a tragic poem, but this is a rather lame interpretation—especially since the story of Merlin and Vivian is far from comic in any sense of that word. Others find a parallel between Tristram and the Irish Iseult on one hand, and Merlin and Vivian on the other, but at least one Arnold scholar admits that the analogy is inept.² Nothing but a consuming love unites Tristram and Merlin. In their Commentary, Tinker and Lowry even suggest a parallel between Iseult of Brittany and Merlin: both have been the victims of a “disastrous love.”³ Tinker and Lowry argue that the final episode of the poem may “be interpreted as her conscious, though indirect, presentation of her own case to Tristram's children” (p. 124).

In their reading, Tinker and Lowry emphasize the central role Iseult of Brittany plays in Arnold's poem. In the legend, as in Wagner, the usual heroine is Tristram's mistress, Ireland's Iseult, and the triangle involves her husband, King Mark of Cornwall. Iseult of Brittany plays but a minor role in the drama, a role that portrays her as a deceitful woman. Quite different is Arnold's triangle; according to G. Robert Stange, the “whole tendency of Arnold's treatment of the legend is toward a balanced opposition, a contrast between two kinds of women and two kinds of love, an issue which is not even suggested in earlier versions.” Stange expresses surprise that through a startling “shift of emphasis Iseult of Brittany becomes the central figure of the poem” (p. 257). In fact, critics generally find themselves wondering whom the poem is about. It is divided according to the subtitles “Tristram,” “Iseult of Ireland,” and “Iseult of Brittany.” I will argue with Paull F. Baum that from “beginning to end the poem is her poem, the Breton Iseult's.”⁴ But I will also offer an entirely new reading of the poem to explain the significance of Arnold's unique focus of interest.

Arnold's Tristram and Iseult portrays a young wife and mother who has spent her youth at stereotyped female tasks while the men she knew were occupied with more exciting pursuits. As she tends her dying husband in the dutiful fashion that would be expected of her, he, in turn, longs only for his mistress, who is herself bored with a tedious marriage. Moreover, in a Shelleyan fashion, Tristram expects his wife to accept calmly his passion for another. After he dies, she does continue to care for their children in a faultlessly maternal fashion, living an existence whose monotony and emptiness are described so emphatically that the description cannot possibly be read as a minor element in the poem. But here the narrative takes a surprising direction: the stoical, long-suffering wife has an extraordinarily rich fantasy life, one in which she reveals what the poet in another work calls the “buried life,” a fantasy existence in which she can draw on a legend of her own country, the story of Merlin and Vivian, to project herself imaginatively into the role of her rival and conceive of a relationship in which she is the adventurous and dominating rather than passive and submissive partner. In short, Arnold's poem offers one of the most extraordinarily astute examples of female fantasy in nineteenth-century literature.

The basis for identifying Iseult of Brittany with Vivian exists in a source for Arnold's version of Merlin's tale, the essay by Villemarqué in the Revue de Paris.⁵ Baum has analyzed this source in detail, but has failed to take up Villemarqué's depiction of the Druidesses who inhabit the Brittany forest in which legend has it that Merlin is buried. Vivian is one of these shape-changing fairies about whom Villemarqué has a great deal to say. A major theme in his discussion is of crucial importance to a reading of Arnold's Tristram: the Druidesses of Brittany are very unhappy about their inability to bear children. Villemarqué refers to them as “ces vierges du druidisme, á qui une loi fatale refussait les noms de mére et d’épouse” (p. 55). For this reason, they frequently serve as nurses to other women's babies, for they are also the “bonnes fées auxquelles on voue les petits enfans, et qui veulent parfois leur servir de mére pour se consoler de ne pouvoir l’être” (p. 48). One of the longer stories about them that Villemarqué relates comes from a thirteenth-century manuscript, “Le Roman de Brun de la Montagne,” and it is important because—as will be seen later in this essay—it describes one of these frustrated would-be mothers in details that Arnold would later employ to portray Iseult of Brittany, a real mother who could in her buried life imagine herself a Vivian. In the medieval tale, Butor de la Montagne decides to take his newborn infant to be blessed by the fairies. One of these is so taken with the child that she is not content merely to hold and bless it, relinquishing it as she must when the cock crows. The next day she arrives at the castle where the baby lives, and, claiming that she has lost her own child, begs to be allowed to serve as a nurse to the newborn. Villemarqué describes at some length her tender ministrations towards the child, whom she “baisa toujours en chantant” (p. 52), returning to her forest after he slept, but then only until she could once again return to offer him her attentions. Arnold plays a variation on this theme when the children of Iseult are asleep at night and their mother's imagination is free to roam in ways that are not revealed until she expresses her own visions of the forests of Brittany and the legendary lovers, Merlin and Vivian, who are associated with them.

In short, it is the thwarting of a Vivian's maternal instincts that Arnold read about in Villemarqué. Would it take much of an imaginative sleight of hand in an age that recognized only too ruefully the existence of “two voices” and “divided aims” to toss the coin and conversely imagine that a mother might be a frustrated Vivian? The shape-changing motif itself would sustain this double vision.

A proper Victorian wife could never openly confess to a secret longing to be Vivian. A clue to the response she might receive were she to reveal her buried life can be found in a note added to a later edition of another source for Arnold's poem, John C. Dunlop's History of Fiction. A footnote to Tristram's story records Robert Southey's dismay at learning that the Arthurian hero whom some legends praise is reported in others as an adulterer. Southey's moral disgust is reflected in his question, “Who could bear Desdemona represented as an adulteress?”⁶ Who indeed! The question itself hints at buried longings that dare not be exposed to conscious awareness. Arnold would not have read this note, added to Dunlop more than forty years after his poem was written. Nevertheless, Southey's reaction remains interesting within the context of Arnold's poems. First, it recalls the passage in “The Terrace at Berne” in which the beautiful Marguerite is unaccountably depicted as a prostitute. Second, it reflects both the antithesis and the synthesis that exist in the Iseult of Brittany-Iseult of Ireland duality. (Was there ever a more Desdemona-like heroine than the Breton Iseult?) Was Arnold himself indulging in a common Victorian fantasy? For Southey's disgust also points to the popular (although now disputed) assumptions about Victorian female sexuality. Wives were expected to be uninterested in sex, and the innocence of young girls was assiduously guarded. Is it not possible, then, that part of the Victorian “buried life” could be described by a popular, if distasteful, saying that every man wants his wife to be a whore in bed, and that Iseult's projection of herself as Vivian represents a corresponding female fantasy?

Again, the desire to have a wife who behaved as a courtesan was hardly a wish that the well-bred Victorian man could admit to, and it is ironic that his projection of the wish on to her might be unwittingly accurate. The wife and the courtesan formed polar opposites, and as Peter Cominos expresses it, there was an “unbridgeable gulf formed between the chaste and the unchaste.”⁷ And yet the very denial of shared sexual impulses between the proper lady and her fallen sister is evidence that the idea had occurred to someone. In The Other Victorians, Steven Marcus quotes from William Acton that

it is a delusion under which many a previously incontinent man suffers … to suppose that in newly married life he will be required to treat his wife as he used to treat his mistresses. It is not so in the case of any modest English woman. He need not fear that his wife will require the excitement, or in any respect imitate the ways of a courtezan.⁸

From this statement, one is hardly surprised to read further in Marcus that in Victorian pornography, wives as well as prostitutes are sexually excitable and active. The suppression of such an idea so that pornography becomes its only medium of expression is significant for a reading of Tristram and Iseult and an understanding of how Iseult of Brittany sees herself in Vivian. To quote from Cominos once more, in Victorian times “the respectable ideal of purity represented unadulterated femininity; her opposite represented the projection of those rejected and unacceptable desires and actions that must be destroyed to keep women pure beings.”⁹

Sex is not the entire story. Many aspects of the proper Victorian wife's personality had to be repressed and her lack of freedom is reflected in the constrained life of Brittany's Iseult. It is ironic that the only essay given over to Mrs. Matthew Arnold (a corrective to the usual scholarly attention to the mysterious Marguerite), an article that purports to establish Arnold's contentment within his marriage, also reveals how many of her husband's needs Frances Lucy Arnold could not satisfy. In addition, the reader is left with the distinct impression that she was damned with faint praise: “Several contemporaries have left general one-sentence estimates of her.”¹⁰ It does not matter then whether Arnold's Marguerite was fact or fiction. Indeed, if she were but a figment of his imagination, as he claimed, all the more significant. No wonder Arnold was drawn in the Villemarqué essay to the motif of the shape-changing fairies, Vivians who also longed to be gentle mothers. And when he created in Tristram and Iseult a wife most critics think represents Mrs. Arnold, she was not one who stayed in the background, but was rather the center of his poem. In light of the conclusion of the poem, this seems less an homage to his marriage partner than a recognition of the implications of choosing a wife about whom no one cared to write more than one line. But in projecting his fantasy onto her, Arnold succeeded in providing an uncannily accurate depiction of female fantasy.

To read Part III of Tristram and Iseult as a projection of the Breton Iseult's fantasies has the virtue of clearing up the difficulties critics almost unanimously admit to in interpreting the poem. The remainder of this essay will undertake an exposition of Tristram that focuses both upon the organic relationship of Part III to the rest, specifically Part I, and the way in which Part III parallels Part I as it provides the contrast between Iseult's real life and her imagined existence as Vivian.

One of the links between the parts is the relationship of both the Tristram legend and the story of Merlin to Keats's “La Belle Dame sans Merci.” In both Arnold and Keats an ailing knight is introduced with a similar question: “What Knight is this so weak and pale” (Arnold, 1. 9)¹¹ “Ah, what can ail thee knight at arms, / Alone and palely loitering” (Keats). The image of Keats's “wretched wight”¹² can be found in Tristram, who is called a “fever-wasted wight” (I. 107), and in the portraits of both Iseults, each of whom at some point in the poem is described as pale and wasted. More significant is the comparison between Iseult of Brittany, whose “looks are mild, her fingers slight” (I. 30), and Keats's fairy, whose “foot was light, / And … eyes were wild.” Arnold has preserved Keats's rhyme while modifying his diction in a manner that will prove significant.

Despite the change of meaning, the contrast between Iseult's mildness and the fairy's wildness, the allusion to Keats's poem is but one of many. But the allusion does not make the seemingly logical connections, that is between La Belle Dame sans Merci and Iseult of Ireland, each a temptress who has lured the hero away from the world to which he belongs. Instead, Arnold has drawn his reader's attention—even if by way of contrast—to La Belle Dame and Iseult of Brittany, preparing the way for the conclusion of the poem, in which Tristram's wife imagines herself a temptress, a Vivian whose resemblance to the light foot of Keats's fairy lies in her freedom: “But she herself whither she will can rove—/ For she was passing weary of his love” (III. 223-224).

This developing identification between Iseult of Brittany and Keats's fairy is reinforced by a reading of Villemarqué's description of the Breton Druidesses (e.g. Vivian). Again, one would expect Arnold to pick up details from their portraits for his own of Tristram's mistress. But once again the reverse is true; it is his hero's wife who resembles them. According to Villemarqué, “leur peau était plus pure que neige; elles portaient de blanches robes de soie et des couronnes d’or” (p. 51). Arnold's depiction of Iseult of Brittany seems almost an expanded translation of this passage:

What Lady is this, whose silk attire
Gleams so rich in the light of the fire?
The ringlets on her shoulders lying
In their flitting lustre vying
With the clasp of burnish’d gold
.....I know her by her mildness rare,
Her snow-white hands, her golden hair;
I know her by her rich silk dress.

(I. 24-28, 50-52)

The Druidesses possess skin “plus pure que neige”; Iseult of Brittany is known in legend, Malory, and in Arnold's poem by her “snow-white hands.” In both passages the ladies wear robes of silk; and in both instances, gold (crowns or clasps) adorn their persons. Now admittedly, white skin, silk robes, and gold ornament are hardly original to either Villemarqué or Arnold. Yet the poet has spent much time on the description of Iseult of Brittany's appearance, and very little on that of her rival. More crucial, if Vivian in Part III is to be linked with Iseult of Ireland, as she is by those critics who read the final story as an analogue to Tristram's fated love affair with his uncle's wife, then it is very strange that Arnold has gone out of his way to endow Tristram's wife rather than his mistress with Vivian's physical appearance. But in so doing, he prepares the way in Part I for her final fantasy, her vision of herself as the woman whose appearance she has possessed all along.

Other structural resemblances between Arnold's and Keats's poems illuminate Iseult's fantasy, for, as will be seen later, they help explain the meaning of her imagined transformation. One of the changes that Arnold made in Villemarqué's story of Merlin and Vivian brings his own poem still closer to Keats's. In Villemarqué, Merlin and Vivian are walking in a forest when she imprisons him. In Tristram and Iseult she is riding on horseback, a detail which again invokes Keats's analogue to the legendary Arthurian material. In both poems the man falls asleep with his enchantress, either to dream of thralldom or to wake up literally imprisoned. Finally, a recurrent image in Tristram evokes the concluding image of Keats's knight, who, awakened from his dream, wanders disconsolate about the scene of his tryst: “And this is why I sojourn here, / Alone and palely loitering.” Arnold's Tristram, similarly “Thinn’d and paled before his time” (I. 108), is more than once portrayed as a sojourner—“Whither does he wander now?” (I. 189)—also searching for a lost love:

Ah! he wanders forth again;
We cannot keep him; now, as then,
There’s a secret in his breast
Which will never let him rest.

(I. 243-246)

In summary, Keats's “La Belle Dame sans Merci” is reflected both in Parts I and III of Tristram, providing a link between the beginning and the end of the poem. But the significance of Arnold's borrowing from Keats does not stop here. Keats's ballad, and its many sources and analogues so popular in England, form a pattern into which Tristram and Iseult easily fits. The story of the man who leaves the world (and often a wife in it) to seek a more blissful existence with a supernatural mistress in her magic realm was commonly told in nineteenth-century Europe.¹³ Such stories depicted man's dilemma in being torn between mundane reality and a more carefree or more passionate existence. It was not unusual to conceive of his split psyche as embodied in two women (in this sense Arnold had ample precedent for his conception of the Tristram triangle), his wife representing the seemingly inferior part of himself:

There were two Iseults who did sway
Each her hour of Tristram's day;
But one possess'd his waning time,
The other his resplendent prime.
.....She is here who had his gloom,
Where art thou who hadst his bloom?

(I. 68-71, 76-77)

Arnold's contribution to this basic story in his time, however, is less obvious in Tristram and Iseult than it is in one of his most popular poems, “The Forsaken Merman.” And it will be significant to note that in this well-known work, the protagonist is a woman. For Margaret there is no merging of reality with yearning imagination, but only an oscillation between the productive demands, not always unhappy, of her everyday existence on the one side, and the symbolic world of her musings on the other. During the day she spins and sings joyfully,

Till the spindle drops from her hand,
And the whizzing wheel stands still.
She steals to the window, and looks at the sand,
And over the sand at the sea;
And her eyes are set in a stare;
And anon there breaks a sigh,
And anon there drops a tear,
From a sorrow-clouded eye,
And a heart sorrow-laden,
A long, long sigh;
For the cold strange eyes of a little Mermaiden
And the gleam of her golden hair.

(ll. 96-107)

When, a few years later, Arnold depicted a similar scene in Part III of Tristram, its unique applicability to the life of women, rather than the plight of mankind in general, was emphasized. Iseult of Brittany, left alone to care for her children, peacefully if not joyfully fulfills the duties of each day. The embroidery she takes up each night has much in common with Margaret's spinning, and she too pauses or stops at times, although the exact cause of her distraction, other than concern for her children, is left deliberately vague:

                                                                                and there she’ll sit
Hour after hour, her gold curls sweeping it;
Lifting her soft-bent head only to mind
Her children, or to listen to the wind.
And when the clock peals midnight, she will move
Her work away, and let her fingers rove
Across the shaggy brows of Tristram's hound
Who lies, guarding her feet along the ground;
Or else she will fall musing, her blue eyes
Fixt, her slight hands clasp’d on her lap.

(III. 82-91)

It is ironic that Margaret, who has deserted her children in the otherworld, and Iseult, who is so irrevocably bound to hers in this, should enact so similar a routine. But the important question is raised only in Tristram:

And is she happy? Does she see unmoved
The days in which she might have lived and loved
Slip without bringing bliss slowly away,
One after one, to-morrow like to-day?

(III. 64–67)

This question, and its relation to Arnold's choice of a female heroine in poems whose traditional conflicts are usually centered on a male figure, pick up added meaning from a very important influence on the poet, Homer. For behind the image of Margaret's weaving and Iseult's embroidery (there is also an image of a woman darning in “The Scholar Gipsy” and weaving is crucial to the Philomela story) stands the classical and archetypal figure of Penelope, the virtuous and faithful wife. She, in turn, easily becomes the ideal Victorian housewife as the latter has been recently described: “Sentiment's favorite domain in Victorian times was near the warm cozy hearth of the home where the wife, sweet, passive and long-suffering, waited patiently for the return of her husband.”¹⁴ Homer's epic bears a noteworthy relationship to Arnold's work as a whole, and to Tristram and Iseult in particular,¹⁵ mainly because of the prominence in his poetry of the wanderer image. But as clear as it is in his poems that Odysseus was a more important symbol to Arnold than critics acknowledge,¹⁶ so is it equally clear that “Penelope” was ordinarily to remain at home. His wanderers are invariably men, whether they are on long journeys, eternal quests, or short hunting trips.

“The Church of Brou” provides the typical example of the male-female relationship that forms the central conflict in Tristram and Iseult:

In the bright October morning
                    Savoy's Duke had left his bride.
From the castle, past the drawbridge,
                    Flow’d the hunters' merry tide.
Steeds are neighing, gallants glittering;
                    Gay, her smiling lord to greet,
From her mullion’d chamber-casement
                    Smiles the Duchess Marguerite.

(I. 5-12)

Even Iseult of Ireland leaves on her sea journey only when she is so commanded by her father or summoned by Tristram. In only three poems is a woman conceived of as a wanderer, and significantly in all three are joined the themes of her wandering and of illicit sexual passion. One instance has drawn much critical attention; it is, again, the puzzling treatment of Marguerite that is at issue:

Or hast thou long since wander’d back,
Daughter of France! to France, thy home;
And flitted down the flowery track
Where feet like thine too lightly come?

(“The Terrace at Berne,” ll. 17-20; italics added)

In another instance, Philomela, victim rather than perpetrator of her eternal travels, is, like Odysseus, a “wanderer from a Grecian shore.” It would not be going too far to say that Arnold's “Philomela,” with its theme of rape, incest, and infanticide, could be read as a nightmarish inversion of respectable Victorian domesticity. The horrendous outcome of the story was, moreover, the personal nightmare of a poet for whom stoic acceptance and quietude were a precious goal: eternal passion, eternal pain.

For a man to be an Odysseus was to be for Arnold immature, unsettled, alienated; and the famous letter he wrote to his sister shortly before he married makes clear that for him family life was a haven for a wandering spirit that threatened his stability, however reluctantly he might relinquish his freedom. But for a woman to be an Odysseus was far worse, especially since the respectable Victorian woman was raised not only to curb her own instincts, but ultimately to help her husband curb his. Hence it is significant that in Part III of Tristram and Iseult the substance of Iseult's fantasy lies not so much in her love affair, but in her freedom to end love affairs when she pleases—in short, in her freedom to wander, to abandon her role as Penelope, and to assume that of a female Odysseus.

In Part I of Tristram and Iseult the Odysseus-Penelope motif is worked out through the reiterated themes of Tristram's wandering and the steadfastness of Iseult of Brittany. His journeys are both actual and symbolic, as various time levels interact within this portion of the poem. The narrator describes not only the present scene in which a dying Tristram awaits his mistress, but presents as well the flashbacks in which the legend of Tristram and the two Iseults is recounted. At times the flashbacks and his memories merge to become one, and it is Tristram's wandering mind that we follow back through the years. His early and tranquil love for his “timid youthful bride” (I. 214) is described so that at first she seems less a Penelope than a Naussica:

—Whither does he wander now?
Haply in his dreams the wind
Wafts him here, and lets him find
The lovely orphan child again
In her castle by the coast;
The youngest, fairest chatelaine
Whom this realm of France can boast
Our snowdrop by the Atlantic sea,
Iseult of Brittany.

(I. 189-197)

Such memories of these early years soothe him in his feverish state, and the narrator encouragingly begs,

Hither let him wander now;
Hither, to the quiet hours
Pass'd among these heaths of ours
By the grey Atlantic sea;
Hours, if not of ecstasy,
From violent anguish surely free!

(I. 228-233)

But this second best will not long content Tristram, and the lure of ecstasy causes him to “[wander] forth again,” to follow the “secret in his breast / Which will never let him rest” (I. 243-246).

In contrast to Tristram's wandering,

Thy lovely youthful wife grows pale
Watching by the salt sea-tide
With her children at her side
For the gleam of thy white sail.
Home, Tristram, to thy halls again!

(I. 269-273)

Her role as Penelope is one for which Brittany's Iseult has been trained since childhood. Once again the time sequence in the poem is deliberately blurred as youthful and adult reality merge while she sorrowfully hovers over her ill husband:

Is it that a deep fatigue
Hath come on her, a chilly fear,
Passing all her youthful hour
Spinning with her maidens here,
Listlessly through the window-bars
Gazing seawards many a league,
From her lonely shore-built tower,
While the knights are at the wars?
Or, perhaps, has her young heart
Felt already some deeper smart,
Of those that in secret the heart-strings rive
Leaving her sunk and pale, though fair?

(I. 37-48)

Of all the emotions in this poem of tragic passion, those of Brittany's Iseult remain the most complex, because they are the least specifically articulated. The passage is fraught with merely suggestive possibilities. First of all, it depicts a young woman trapped in her role, gazing “listlessly” through barred windows, her separation from the active life emphasized. In contrast, the men in her life are free to roam, to follow the adventures that war represented in the Arthurian tales. Second, the source of her fear is left deliberately vague. The imminent death of her husband revives emotions long familiar to her, associated with her maiden years and buried deep in her unconscious.

To repeat, it is the blurring of past and present that creates the mood of the passage, for the final impression is of a young woman experiencing deep emotional conflict that saps all vitality as she buries her secret desires. The nature of this conflict may have to do with the battle Cominos has described as perpetually ongoing in the personality of the Victorian lady as she “waged her battle between sensual desire and duty at an unconscious level.” For respectable Victorians “‘Innocence’ or ‘pure-mindedness’ or ‘inherent purity’ was an exalted state of feminine consciousness, a state of unique deficiency or mindlessness in their daughters of that most elementary, but forbidden knowledge of their own sexuality” (pp. 156-157).

Innocence is probably the most emphasized characteristic of Iseult of Brittany in Part I. There is, again, the reference to Tristram's “timid youthful bride,” with its unmistakable sexual implications. Her looks further emphasize her purity, the whiteness of her skin and hands an almost clichéd symbol. Also stressed is her youth; and she is named the “sweetest Christian soul alive.” Moreover, her beauty is not such as would imply passion, but is rather the “fragile loveliness” of a “patient flower” or “snowdrop,” an image of frigidity as well as delicacy (I. 49-55, 72). The asexual childishness that these descriptions imply is at one point in the poem made explicit: “Sweet flower! thy children's eyes / Are not more innocent than thine” (I. 325-326).

This juxtaposition of sexual innocence and motherhood would not have seemed at all unusual to the Victorian mind. William Acton wrote that the “best mothers, wives, and managers of households, know little or nothing of sexual indulgences. Love of home, children, and domestic duties are the only passions they feel” (Marcus, p. 31). In addition, Victorian man, trained to view his own fleshly desires as part of his lower nature, would depend upon his wife's innocence to help him conquer his animal instincts. Or so the scholarship on the subject tells us. But D. H. Lawrence, much of whose writing is directed against the remnants of Victorian sexual attitudes, has warned us to heed the tale and not the teller. What is noticeable in Tristram and Iseult is that Arnold depicts the effect of Iseult's purity in such a way that her innocence seems almost the wound from which Tristram is dying.

To pursue this subject it is necessary to quote more fully a passage partially quoted in another context:

There were two Iseults who did sway
Each her hour of Tristram's day;
But one possess'd his waning time,
The other his resplendent prime.
Behold her here, the patient flower,
Who possess'd his darker hour!
Iseult of the Snow-White Hand
Watches pale by Tristram's bed.
She is here who had his gloom
Where art thou who hadst his bloom?
One such kiss as those of yore
Might thy dying knight restore!

(I. 68-79)

The diction—“prime,” “waning,” “bloom,” “restore”—suggests that what is at stake is actual sexual potency; Iseult of Ireland possessed Tristram's prime, his wife merely his waning time. And sexual potency is no less than a matter of life and death. Iseult of Brittany watches ineffectually by (not in) Tristram's bed as the life ebbs out of him. One might argue that this is the appropriate place for the wife of a sick man: at his bedside. But the poem suggests that the scene has another significance. The passion of a kiss from Ireland's Iseult might arouse enough energy in Tristram to save his life. Finally, then, innocence is death and only sexuality bestows life:

Does the love-draught work no more?
Art thou cold, or false, or dead,
Iseult of Ireland?

(I. 80-82)

The theme of impotence was explicitly presented by Dunlop in an appendix to the 1816 edition of his History of Fiction (too explicitly for the Philadelphia editors of the book, who omitted the passage in their 1842 edition). In the brief passage, a beautiful and even seductive Iseult lies asleep in the arms of her husband. He kisses her, but then memories of his mistress keep him from going any further:

Tristan se couche avec Yseult sa femme. Le luminaire ardoit si cler, que Tristan pouvoit bien voir la beauté d’Yseult: elle avoit la bouche vermeille et tendre, yeux pers rians, les sourcils bruncs et bien assis, la face claire et vermeille comme une rose a l’aube du jour. Sy Tristan la baise et l’acolle; mais quante il lui souvient de Yseult de Cornouailles, sy à toute perdue la voulonté du surplus. Cette Yseult est devant lui, et l’autre est en Cornouailles qui lui defent que à l’autre Yseult ne fasse nul riens que a villeinie lui tourne. Ainsi demeure Tristan avec sa femme; et elle qui d’acoller et de baiser ne savoit riens, s'endort entre les bras de Tristan.

[“Tristan lies down with Yseut, his wife. The light burned so clearly that Tristan could see Yseut's beauty: she had a red and tender mouth, merry blue eyes, brown and well-arched eyebrows, a face that was bright and pink like a rose at dawn. Tristan kisses and hugs her; but when he remembers Yseut of Cornwall, he lost all desire for lovemaking. This Yseut is before him, and the other is in Cornwall, who prevents him from doing anything to the other Yseut that might turn into vileness. Thus Tristan remains with his wife; and she, who knew nothing of hugging and kissing, falls asleep in Tristan's arms,” I, 491.]

The passage weakens arguments, such as Stange's, that earlier versions of the Tristram and Iseult legend did not present a balanced contrast between two kinds of women and two kinds of love. In addition, the passage suggests that Arnold quite consciously altered his sources and that what is noticeably original in his version is the innocence of Brittany's Iseult, who—again—is pictured by but never in her husband's bed. What Arnold has depicted in this poem is the double tragedy, for man and for woman, of Victorian attitudes towards sexuality. For Iseult of Brittany, repressed desire is associated with the symbolic barred windows through which she can only gaze listlessly at a life closed to her forever. Her education and upbringing have fitted her for no tasks beyond motherhood, so that in Part III of the poem it is said of her unhappy existence that a “noisier life than this / She would find ill to bear, weak as she is” (III. 100-101). Critics have found in Tristram's wife an example of that stoic acceptance Arnold is supposed to have extolled, but it is impossible to applaud an acquiescence on her part to a life in which playing games with her children—that is, a perpetuation of her own childhood—is her only recreation.

On the other side, her husband has also been victimized by the assumptions that governed her life, his own sexuality being thwarted by the role he is forced to play with respect to his wife. The Tristram legend embodied within it not only the dualism between duty and love, but a social system which in Victorian England created polar opposites in woman, the one side denied the desires that were in reaction projected so emphatically on to her opposite that she could be conceived of as a diabolical temptress.

The dichotomization of women into the Eve and Mary prototypes is hardly unique to Victorian times. But something new had been added: the century was particularly aware of the existence of two voices. They were, for Arnold, the cause of “this strange disease of modern life, / With its sick hurry, its divided aims” (“The Scholar Gipsy,” ll. 203-204). His desire for unity in such a world is reflected in much of his prose writing as well as his poetry. It is a desire particularly noteworthy in Tristram and Iseult because of lines that do not appear in the final version of the poem in a passage he obviously had some difficulty with. In Part II, after Iseult of Ireland has come to Tristram's side too late to save his life, he asks her to approach his wife and request that she, Iseult of Ireland, be allowed to stay at his side. Counting on the obedience as well as the goodness of his wife, he orders, “Say, I will’d so, that thou stay beside me” (II. 95). Two other versions of this line, however, suggest a quite different meaning: “Say I charg’d her, that ye live together. / Say, I charg’d thee, that thou stay beside her” (p. 145n). What has finally been discarded depicts the strong desire that somehow a union be established between the two Iseults. Why did Arnold reject this conception? Of course, one can only speculate. The rejected lines do have a Shelleyan ring which might have led Arnold's audience to unfortunate conclusions. Even a relatively modern, enlightened reader probably finds it difficult to read the Romantic poet's letter to his first wife, in which he asks Harriet to come and live with him and Mary as their sister, without thinking that Shelley was insensitive, mad, or both. To expect your wife and mistress to live in harmony and become friends is asking, for most people in any event, too much. Yet the request is highly significant, for it reflects the yearning on the part of the man that somehow his life might be fulfilled if only he could find one who combined the qualities of both wife and mistress, who thus might allow him a deeper satisfaction than life had bestowed by forcing him to choose between them.

What is striking in Tristram and Iseult is that Tristram's dying wish, that somehow wife and mistress would unite as one, is fulfilled after his death through his wife's own fantasy. Pragmatically, she is the only one left alive in the poem to satisfy his wishes and is specifically referred to as the “young surviving Iseult” (III. 5). But this pragmatism has happy dramatic results for the poem: the dream of a temptress to be a mother, as was the case in the stories recounted by Villemarqué, is nowhere near as enthralling to the reader as the dream of a mother to be a temptress. In addition, a “fallen” woman can quite openly and consciously long to be a respectable member of society, since her very dream would thus suggest a conscience at least potentially pure. The contrary is not true. The desire of a “good” woman to lead the life of her counterpart involves feelings that must be so deeply repressed that they surface only through unconscious fantasy.

Cominos writes of the repressed Victorian woman that she “became subject to motives and desires of which she was not aware. … Repressed Victorian sexuality reasserted itself in indirect ways in the symbolic disguises of dreams and fantasies and in the symptoms of commissions wherein acts alien to the actors themselves were carried out” (p. 164). One of the resultant patterns of behavior that Cominos emphasizes is what he calls the “urge towards domination,” which is a reaction against the usual submissiveness and passivity experienced by the Victorian woman. Interestingly, there are two themes in Part III of Tristram and Iseult, particularly in the Merlin and Vivian story: one of these has to do with freedom; the other, quite explicitly, with Vivian's domination and control over Merlin, he becoming literally her prisoner.

The beginning of Part III of Tristram establishes a crucial context for the tale of Merlin and Vivian, a tale not actually told until the climax and end of the poem. A seemingly unimportant change that Arnold made in an earlier conception of the poem is significant. Originally the wording of the fifth and sixth lines was a description of how “one bright day, / Drew Iseult forth” to play with her children out of doors. The revision of what can be found in the Yale manuscript of the first sixty-three lines of Part III establishes Iseult as one of Arnold's rare female wanderers: “The young surviving Iseult, one bright day, / Had wandered forth. Her children were at play” (III. 5-6). Now it has been noted that when Arnold's women explicitly “wander,” as in the case of Marguerite or Philomela, they do so within the negative context of illicit sexual passion, unsettled lives, and alienation. If Tristram's wife were merely on an aimless walk now, Arnold would probably have chosen another word to describe her sojourn. That Iseult “wandered” forth now suggests her uneasy state of mind and Arnold's commentary on a potentially dangerous mood. It is at this point that she calls her children to her to narrate “an old-world Breton history” (III. 37).

There are two noteworthy aspects to the telling itself. First, the story elicits from the children a reaction that is vague enough to create some ambiguity as to what Arnold intended:

From Iseult's lips the unbroken story flow’d,
And still the children listen’d, their blue eyes
Fix’d on their mother's face in wide surprise
.....And they would still have listen’d, till dark night
Came keen and chill down on the heather bright.

(III. 45-47, 50-57)

What is it that has so surprised the children? Merely the story of Merlin and Vivian? Unlikely, for children are with ease able to suspend their disbelief in a world of fairy tales. Their “wide surprise” may more likely be attributed to their having caught something of their mother's uncharacteristic mood; they may be reacting, that is, more to the teller than to the tale.

Significantly, the story itself is told in motion, Iseult wandering with her children, although on safely warm, dry roads. But reality eventually beckons:

                                        when the red glow on the sea grew cold,
And the grey turrets of the castle old
Look’d sternly through the frosty evening-air
Then Iseult took by the hand those children fair,
And brought her tale to an end, and found the path,
And led them home over the darkening heath.

(III. 58-63)

The end of the yet untold (for the reader) tale coincides with the journey homewards, with Iseult's abandonment of her wanderer role and her assumption once more of her role as mother providing the safety of a home that “look’d sternly” at her to remind her of her responsibilities.

Once home, mother and child-woman again merge to become one; no longer free to wander, Iseult

                                                            moves slow; her voice alone
Hath yet an infantine and silver
tone,
But even that comes languidly; in truth,
She seems one dying in a mask of youth
And now she will go home, and softly lay
Her laughing children in their beds, and play
Awhile with them before they sleep.

(III. 72-78, italics added)

But there is a crucial difference between the once-child and the still child-woman. She is no longer really innocent; it is clear that she has crossed the line into the realm of experience, her voice alone retaining its “infantine and silver tone.” Marriage to Tristram, suffering his passion for another, her experience with sexuality and motherhood have to have awakened in her some of those buried impulses that made her maidenhood trapped and languid. And thus it is not really true, as the poem says, that the stories she tells her children mean for her now what they may have meant when, a child, she learned them. Her innocence is indeed but a “mask of youth,” a lie perpetrated to keep her imprisoned in her status as child-woman:

                                                                                the tales
With which this day the children she beguiled
She gleaned from Breton grandames, when a child,
In every hut along this sea-coast wild.
She herself loves them still, and, when they are told,
Can forget all to hear them as of old.

(III. 106-111)

As of old? Only so if one can attribute special meaning to the “Breton grandames.” Such figures play a significantly ambiguous role in the literature Arnold would have known. For example, the influence on Tristram of Keats's “The Eve of St. Agnes” has been noted by some critics, although restricted to the pictorial imagery in the poem, especially the description of the tapestry in Part II. In Keats's poem, Angela, intended to protect Madeline's purity, actually cooperates in the young virgin's seduction by Porphyro. Angela is modeled on the nurse in Romeo and Juliet, who similarly cooperates with Romeo and his designs on Juliet. Shakespeare's nurse, in turn, is thought by some to be modeled on Chaucer's Wife of Bath, a woman of unrestrained sexual impulses, whose main target for abuse is a treatise extolling virginity. Angela, Juliet's nurse, and the Wife of Bath all have stood on end the role each would have been expected to play as the experienced guardians of young women's chastity, just as the fallen woman would be seen as the resultant counterpart of unguarded innocence, seduced unawares.

Therefore it is possible that Iseult of Brittany, hearing the story of Merlin and Vivian from Breton grandames, might have been made aware all along of the sexual implications of the tale. If so, then her education has not been entirely pure, and her fantasy life may have been fed from the outset by the legends of her country, legends whose meaning she has recognized from the start.

The tale of Merlin and Vivian itself forms a striking contrast with the description of Iseult of Brittany in Part I of Tristram. Whereas Iseult stares listlessly out of barred windows while the men of her court are at war, Vivian travels with Merlin, the two of them wanderers together. He is on foot and she is on horseback, but lest it be thought that the difference suggests her helplessness, to which he is chivalrously deferring, a special point is made of how, after he suggests a resting place, she “Nodded, and tied her palfrey to a tree” (III. 212). Her control of her own horse, her independence in action, prepare the way for her final imprisonment of him. Vivian, of course, has won her dominance over Merlin through typically feminine beauty and wiles, and that “he grew fond, and eager to obey / His mistress, use her empire as she may” (III. 183-184), does not imply more than that the battle of the sexes involves inequality from the outset. Cominos points out that “in the Victorian battle of the sexes, women were disarmed of the weapon of their sexuality” (p. 163). Not so Vivian, and her passive assent to Merlin at this point in the poem seems but a pose intended to disarm him.

The next section of the passage is properly demure, less suggestive, for example, than the corresponding section of “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” where, to the extent that Keats could make it clear, the sleep of his knight follows upon sexual satisfaction. Merlin's deep sleep is not so explicitly described, although a reference is made to Vivian's “sleeping lover” (III. 218). What thereupon ensues is an incantatory description of Vivian's spell, in lines evocative of the magic conclusion to “Kubla Khan”:

Nine times she waves the fluttering wimple round,
And made a little plot of magic ground.
And in that daisied circle, as men say,
Is Merlin prisoner till the judgment-day.

(III. 219-222)

The final lines in this episode are also the climactic lines of the entire poem: “But she herself whither she will can rove—/ For she was passing weary of his love” (III. 223-224).

And this is the story Iseult of Brittany told her children, as she wandered with them from their home, which finally beckoned her with stern reminders of duty and responsibility. It is a story in which the contrasts to her own life are clear. She is bound in her role as Penelope. She was so bound in her youth, yearning after the adventuring heroes she knew; she was so bound in her marriage, waiting on her homebound shore for Tristram's sails to appear; and she is so bound now in an existence where every day will be “To-day's exact repeated effigy” (III. 95). Is it any wonder that she is drawn by a tale of one who “whither she will can rove”? Moreover, she has been the passive partner in her love relationship, suffering a martyr's role, expected even to tolerate her husband's love for another. Vivian, in contrast, chooses her lovers as she will, discarding them as she pleases, for it is she who dominates in her affairs with men. She is also sexually free, her travels with her lover an expression of desires she has no need to repress, her role as a temptress one in which she has no need or inclination to deny her sexuality. As Cominos writes, women in Victorian England “were either sexless ministering angels or sensuously oversexed temptresses of the devil” (p. 167). In Iseult's fantasy, the imprisonment of Merlin by such a temptress is no less than the revenge exacted by the ministering angel whose enforced asexuality was, again, symbolically represented by her own prison, the barred windows by which she was constrained.

It has already been suggested that Arnold may have projected upon Iseult of Brittany Victorian man's forbidden desire for synthesis, his wish that his wife share the attributes of his mistress (real or imagined), an idea vehemently denied in such popular works as Acton's. This psychological mechanism has been made part of the theory involved in a recent anthropological study of “Gypsy Women: Models in Conflict”—a study that bears comparison to Tristram and Iseult because the Carmen-Micaela dichotomy that arises from myths of the gypsy woman as temptress corresponds to the motif of the two Iseults. Bizet's librettist and Arnold were working out the same pattern. But the reality, notes Judith Okely, is that gypsy women are in fact bound by sexual codes more stringent than women outside their group, and she argues that each woman projects upon the other characteristics her own culture insists be repressed. Okely's depiction of this interrelationship between gypsy and female outsider corresponds to the interrelationship between the fairies of Brittany who long for the motherhood denied them, while mothers constrained by domestic duties long for the life of the footloose Vivian. In addition, Okely extends this mutual projection to relations between the sexes, and what she has to say may illuminate the division that took place in Arnold's poem and in his age as women were divided into the mutually incompatible temptress and angel: “Just as men may be dissatisfied by the ideal woman and ideal role they have created for themselves, so may women be troubled by alternative images and tendencies within themselves. Both men and women protect themselves by giving these tendencies, oversimplified, to an alien people.”¹⁷

The battle of the sexes, as Cominos has described its manifestation in Victorian culture, does divide men and women, husband and wife, into alien camps. Yet, Arnold's depiction of the fantasy life of Brittany's Iseult is too astute and too sympathetic to be only a projection on to her of his own forbidden impulses. It is, however, difficult to speculate about what might account for this unusual insight into the female psyche. Arnold was extremely circumspect about his personal life, and if Tristram and Iseult does reveal some of his conflicts about married life, he would have endeavored to bury the clues as well as the feelings. In addition, Arnold did not write on the question of woman's role in society. Thus one can only be tentative about the source of the poet's insight into woman's repressed fantasies.

A. Dwight Culler has provided a source of help in his study of “Monodrama and the Dramatic Monologue,” for although Arnold's poem does not fit perfectly the genres Culler is studying, Tristram can nevertheless be viewed in the same context. As Culler writes,

One may say that there arose in the decades immediately before and after the turn of the century several related art forms that focused on a solitary figure, most frequently a woman, who expressed through speech, music, costume, and gesture the shifting movements of her soul. That the figure was solitary and that virtually the entire text consisted of her utterance was evidence of an attempt to focus on her subjectivity; that she was feminine was a further indication that the drama was one of passion.¹⁸

Two points about the classical tradition behind many of these monodramas are significant here. First, figures from ancient literature who served as models for such treatments of feminine passion were often deserted or betrayed women—(Œnone and Dido, for example. Second, Culler has noted the part that the prosopopoeia played in the education of students during this period. As part of their training in rhetoric, they wrote speeches in which they took the part of persons not themselves (and, presumably, frequently quite alien to themselves) whose feelings they were nevertheless encouraged to depict and whose cause they were to plead. From these points alone one could partially account for Arnold's portrait of Iseult of Brittany and for his attempts to reconstruct sympathetically her emotions as a betrayed wife. In addition, “passion” was Arnold's theme in Tristram much as it was the theme of the monodrama:

                                        And yet, I swear, it angers me to see
How this fool passion gulls men potently;
Being, in truth, but a diseased unrest,
And an unnatural overheat at best.

(III. 133-136)

This passage is, however, puzzling. What, specifically, is the source of the passion from which Arnold's narrator is recoiling? Has it to do with the illicit love of Tristram, which is about to be recounted through Merlin and his enthrallment by Vivian? Or, perhaps, is the passion Iseult's, a temporary welling up of strong feelings which, were they to find no utterance, would result in her failure to achieve the quietism Arnold seems to have advocated?

For there is one other possibility that can be explored to show that Arnold might have recognized (as the result of personal experience or imaginative projection) and even sympathized with the repressed desires of women to live existences quite different from the ones allowed them, but that this recognition and sympathy do not necessarily imply approval. One of the functions of storytelling is to supply the medium through which emotions otherwise forbidden can find outlet. This compensatory feature of the narrative has in recent years drawn the attention of folklorists who try to determine what role folktales play in the societies that retain them as part of their culture. One theory, propounded by anthropologist J. L. Fischer, is that it is in the best interests of a society to allow its people some outlet for the tensions built up in the conflict between personal desires and the “demands of other members of the society that the individual pursue his personal goals only in ways which will also contribute to, or at least not greatly harm, the welfare of the society.”¹⁹ There is evidence in Tristram and Iseult that Iseult's final story serves the function that many folklorists attribute to the folktale.

The articulation of her repressed fantasies by Iseult of Brittany through the story of Merlin and Vivian does not, in fact, come in the poem until the reader has some assurance that all is well with the teller and with her family. Nothing specific about Iseult's inner-life is at first known except that it is allowed to surface only after her children have been put to sleep each night. The reader nevertheless learns from the outset that Iseult has told them a story and that she “brought her tale to an end, and found the path, / And led them home over the darkening heath” (III. 63-64). Having been assured that some disequilibrium expressed earlier through Arnold's use of the wanderer image has been restored, the reader then learns the source of Iseult's tension through Arnold's poignant description of her bleak day-to-day existence. And then—only then—the story itself is told, with its final climactic protest. But Iseult's fantasy life has already been rendered harmless, for Arnold has established for the reader, as well as for himself, that the status quo has remained undisturbed. It is perhaps within the haven of this security that Arnold can retain enough sympathy for his heroine to allow himself to explore her buried life, creating as a result one of the most sympathetic, insightful portraits of female dependency and resultant fantasy to come to us from his age.

Notes

1. G. Robert Stange, Matthew Arnold: The Poet as Humanist (Princeton Univ. Press, 1967), p. 254.

2. Howard W. Fulweiler, Letters from the Darkling Plain: Language and the Grounds of Knowledge in the Poetry of Arnold and Hopkins (Univ. of Missouri Press, 1972), p. 77.

3. C. B. Tinker and H. F. Lowry, The Poetry of Matthew Arnold: A Commentary (Oxford Univ. Press, 1940), p. 124.

4. Ten Studies in the Poetry of Matthew Arnold (Duke Univ. Press, 1985), p. 39.

5. Theodore de la Villemarqué, “Visite au Tombeau de Merlin,” Revue de Paris, 41 (1837), 45-62.

6. (London, 1888), I, 207.

7. “Innocent Femina Sensualis in Unconscious Conflict,” in Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age, ed. Martha Vicinus (Indiana Univ. Press, 1972), p. 166.

8. (New York, 1966), p. 29.

9. “Innocent Femina,” p. 168. Cominos' views have been disputed by Carl Degler in “What Ought to Be and What Was: Women's Sexuality in the Nineteenth Century,” The American Historical Review, 79 (1974), 1477. For the purposes of this essay, however, the controversy is not important; as I will try to show, Arnold's poem seems almost an illustration of Cominos' essay.

10. Patrick J. McCarthy, “Mrs. Matthew Arnold,” TSLL [Texas Studies in Literature and Language: A Journal of the Humanities], 12 (1971), 647.

11. Citations are to The Poems of Matthew Arnold, ed. C. B. Tinker and H. F. Lowry (Oxford Univ. Press, 1963).

12. Arnold could have known Keats's other version of line 1.

13. Lionel Trilling is only one of the critics who have pointed out, for instance, that Arnold was probably familiar with the popular tale of Undine. Major British Writers, ed. G. B. Harrison (New York, 1959), II, 597.

14. Helene E. Roberts, “Marriage, Redundancy or Sin: The Painter's View of Women in the First Twenty-Five Years of Victoria's Reign,” Suffer and Be Still, p. 48.

15. To argue for the importance of the Odyssey in Arnold's poems is counter to prevailing scholarly opinion. Warren D. Anderson contrasts Arnold with Joyce, citing Arnold's Oxford lectures to prove that Arnold “ignored” this particular Homeric work. See Matthew Arnold and the Classical Tradition (Univ. of Michigan Press, 1965), pp. 89-90. Also see Ellen S. Gahtan, “‘Nor help for pain’: Matthew Arnold and Sophocles' Philoctetes,” VN [Victorian Newsletter], No. 48 (Fall. 1975), pp. 21-26. The resemblance between the Philoctetes and Tristram stories is striking; in the former, Odysseus plays a major role and may have contributed to some of the motifs in Tristram and Iseult. Arnold was sensitive to any comparisons between himself and Tennyson, and for this reason he might have muted the obvious evidence for the influence on his own poetry of Odysseus' wanderings. For evidence of this sensitivity see the Letters of Matthew Arnold 1848-1888, ed. George W. E. Russell (New York, 1896) I. 375: “I am rather troubled to find that Tennyson is at work on a subject, the story of the Latin poet Lucretius, which I have been occupied with for some twenty years.”

16. Subtle identifications between himself and Odysseus can be found in the letters. One of these can be seen in the famous letter to his sister in which he describes the “aimless and unsettled” nature of youth, which for him threatens a gulf across which he fears he may never again be able to have close personal contact with his family. He intends to fight these tendencies within himself that isolate him from those he loves, although to leave the freedom of youth “is a melancholy passage from which we emerge shorn of so many beams that we are almost tempted to quarrel with the law of nature which imposes it on us” (Letters, I, 17). The sea journey here is but a metaphor for his state of mind; in another letter he writes to his wife that he is on his way home from one of the journeys his work as school inspector has necessitated: “My face is now set steadily homewards,” he writes his Penelope, “Chamouni, Geneva, Dijon, Paris, London, Fox How. Kiss my darling little boys for me” (Letters, I, 86). Years later, in another letter to his sister, he reveals that these business trips hardly satisfied his wanderer impulses: “Much as I could have desired to see Greece, too, and the East, I know that my time is not yet come” (Letters, 1, 230).

17. In Perceiving Women (London, 1975), p. 79.

18. PMLA [Publications of the Modern Language Association of America], 90 (1975), 375.

19. “The Sociopsychological Analysis of Folktales,” Current Anthropology, 4 (1963), 259.