Much of this conflict stems from the strict set of rules Tennyson created for her and tied her up in so tightly that she couldn’t win for losing.276 Not only is Guinevere bound in an impossible situation, but the expectations of her are higher than any person could hope to achieve. “Arthur and his knights exploit the women of Camelot for their own ends,” writes Stephen Ahern. “This exploitation follows a common trajectory: the knight idealized 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.”277
In the Idylls, Arthur is a godlike figure who is presented as an example of perfection. Therefore, those around him can only be seen as inferior by comparison. Guinevere, for example, is highly judgmental. She is critical of Arthur for his spotless reputation and his insistence on seeing only the good in others, saying he needs to be brought down to earth in order to love her. She is critical of Lancelot as well and constantly exploits him, “demonstrating the very power the Victorians feared to tempt and control men through their weaknesses,”278 writes Swanson. Guinevere is a woman of contradictions, whose weakness is her humanity, which pales in comparison to Arthur’s supernatural perfection. Walters argues she is fighting two opposing polarities at the same time, so she is bound to lose. “Torn between regal dignity and a passionate nature, Guinevere is a creature of extremes whose tragic flaw is her inability to appreciate the highest of human values, which find their ultimate incarnation in her husband, Arthur.”279
In Tennyson’s fictional world, women were believed to be the forces that made the men in their lives—kings, knights, and nobles—better men. Ahern cites a specific example: “The interior monologue [Arthur] delivers when first captivated by Guinevere’s beauty exemplifies the kind of Victorian rhetoric that proffers refuge in woman as the palliative to a life spent tossed about by the storms of fortune.”280 In this monologue, Tennyson has Arthur say:
What happiness to reign a lonely king,
Vext—O ye stars that shudder over me,
O earth that soundest hollow under me,
Vext with waste dreams? for saving I be joined
To her that is the fairest under heaven,
I seem as nothing in the mighty world,
And cannot will my will, nor work my work
Wholly, nor make myself in mine own realm
Victor and lord. But were I joined with her,
Then might we live together as one life,
And reigning with one will in everything
Have power on this dark land to lighten it,
And power on this dead world to make it live.281
In other words, Arthur believes that if he could only marry the fair maiden, he could live up to his full potential, both as a man and as a king, and the world would be better for it. Because, in Tennyson’s view, Arthur is godlike in character, it stands to reason he would expect Guinevere to be a goddess. As Arthur’s strength, she should embody the Victorian ideals of the blameless, angelic noblewoman by being fertile, pure, supportive, and true. Instead, she is barren, vain, demanding, and jealous. “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, and spiritual fulfillment. The ideal of woman as ennobling influence gained especial force in Tennyson’s ear, which saw a revival of interest in the culture of chivalry,”282 explains Ahern.
In short, Guinevere is a sinner like all other mere mortals, but she commits the grave sin of betraying the Christ-like figure of Arthur and, therefore, must take upon herself “most of the blame and the pain for her downfall”283 and that of those around her. Gordon-Wise explains this shift in guilt: “Guinevere becomes responsible for Lancelot’s inability to find the Holy Grail and his inability to marry the chaste Elaine; thus she becomes the destroyer not only of Camelot but also of family values and religion.”284 Tennyson implies the queen’s sin is the reason for the destruction of the realm. In fact, she admits as much to Lancelot, saying, “Mine is the shame, for I was wife and thou/unwedded.”285 By making her so clearly fallible in comparison to the spotless Arthur, Tennyson “turns the story from a tragedy to a melodrama, and turns Guinevere from a good and shrewd queen to a pitiful and pitiable woman.”286
Comer clearly sees Guinevere’s blood on Tennyson’s pen. “Tennyson had a great love of Arthur and elevated the character to, if not a godlike level, then at least one of an impeccable man and ruler. Consequently, Guinevere is vilified both for not loving the highest of men and for destroying his proverbial city on the hill. It is Tennyson’s interpretation of Guinevere that haunts our contemporary culture, but each interpretation brought her one step closer to the character we recognize: an intricate character condemned by the roles she is forced to enact.”287 Arthur is clearly the hero of Idylls, with everyone else playing a secondary role and fulfilling the same basic function: glorifying Arthur. Comer writes, “These supporting characters are pawns, both for Tennyson and Arthur: for Tennyson, they are placed in the same way that mirrors are placed in a room to maximize light and to focus the eye, and for Arthur, they are used to achieve his goals and his dreams. Guinevere, in particular, is used in this way. She is an ancillary figure, berated for her failure to live up to her husband’s impossible standards.”288
Being a trespasser on so grand a scale, the only possible redemption open to Guinevere would come only after she has suffered greatly for her sins and been moved to sincere and deep remorse. So important was this idea to Tennyson that he devotes more space and details to her life as a nun than we’ve seen thus far, even in the stories written by monks and clerics. Bonner notes that unlike previous authors, Tennyson shows Guinevere getting the reward for her repentance. “[He] awards her with a visible and outward sign of her redemption as she becomes Abbess because of ‘her good deeds and pure life,’ [an] ending distinctly different from those of the narratives where she is never heard from again after disappearing behind convent walls.”289
Guinevere as a Reflection of Victorian Society
There is some debate among critics about whether Idylls is meant to be read as “an allegory on the struggle between the soul and the flesh, or whether Tennyson meant it to be a commentary on Victorian society.”290 Comer argues it was Tennyson’s obvious need to imbue his Arthuriana with the morals of his time that turned Guinevere into “a tragic character, condemned by the very conventions she is forced to enact.”291 His fictional world was both “medieval and Victorian—taking elements of both but never properly fitting in either.”292
Elizabeth Brewer puts it more bluntly. “In the Idylls of the King, Tennyson humiliated his Guinevere as only a Victorian male writer could.” We can almost hear Brewer’s sarcasm as she continues, “Of course, he had the good of the nation at heart: as Laureate, he felt it his duty to do what he could to uphold moral standards.”293
Victorian society in both Britain and America was one of contradictions, especially when it came to sex and morals. On one hand, women were expected to behave like angels, being chaste, silent supporters of their fathers, husbands, and brothers. Yet the nineteenth century is when both nations saw women stand up in the streets for the first time and demand surety in the courts for married women’s property, a fair divorce law, reform in women’s education, women’s suffrage, and a woman’s right to work outside the home.294 On the other hand, it was considered perfectly normal for men—even married ones—to visit prostitutes, while those women were denied even the basic respect of a Christian burial.295 Adultery was decried from the pulpit and the judges’ bench, yet it was the most rampant open secret of Victorian society.
Debra Mancoff argues Guinevere’s treatment in Idylls is a direct reflection of Victorian society. “The harsh light Tennyson turns on Guinevere illuminates the King, whose fury at betrayal seemed justified in a time when marital stability and s
ervice were so central to the social order.”296 Umland takes this idea one step further, noting that although Guinevere has had every privilege and opportunity in life, she “has betrayed both her public duty of assisting Arthur in his creation of a moral atmosphere that would encourage the prorogation of his ideals, and her private vows to the husband who deserves her love and fidelity.”297
Arthur may have been justified in his actions by the morals of the time, but Guinevere certainly was not. Bonner notes that Guinevere was in many ways the opposite of the ideal Victorian lady. “Guinevere can, on the other hand, be seen as very not Victorian because of her adultery, [which was] one of the most unpardonable, but common, sins of the Victorian age.”298 Tennyson condemns Guinevere for her adulterous relationship with Lancelot time and again: “this is all woman’s grief,/That she is woman, whose disloyal life/Hath wrought confusion in the Table Round;”299 “so glad were spirits and men/Before the coming of the sinful Queen.”300 Even Arthur, who claims to love her still, condemns her:
Well is it that no child is born of thee.
The children born of thee are sword and fire,
Red ruin, and the breaking up of laws.301
Victorian society had no patience for female adulterers and even the legendary Guinevere could not escape their judgment.302 Women who dared to express their sexuality were roundly condemned as plagues upon their society. Guinevere should be included in this group, Swanson argues. “The blame is placed on Guinevere for Lancelot’s failure to find the Holy Grail, further enforcing that Guinevere has become an infection to her society. Sexually manipulative and the ultimate temptation to lead a man astray, she is equated with harlotry and prostitution, eventually bringing everyone down with her rapidly spreading disease.”303 This is because such actions disrupt the stability of the family and institution of marriage, upon which Victorian society relied to keep their sense of moral balance.304
Just as in Tennyson’s poetry, to be a woman in the Victorian era was to be subject to contradictions on a daily basis. Women were at once indispensable because they brought forth life, and utterly perplexing in a male-dominated world, especially once they showed a willingness to go against cultural norms and began, for the first time in history, to demand their rights. “The dichotomy of the feminine which we see in the Idylls…reflect the patriarchal nature of Victorian society and its concern with the ‘woman question,’ certainly a key issue in the last half of the nineteenth century, ”305 writes Gordon-Wise.
The woman question was brought about by a flawed model in which women were expected to be submissive models of physical and spiritual purity,306 argues Bonner. Ahern explains how this idea relates to Tennyson’s work: “The Idylls candidly depicts the problems that result from subscribing to a model of feminine nature that pervaded Victorian thinking… The problem with such rhetoric becomes evident when abstract qualities are projected onto an actual person,”307 illustrating the impossibility of the demands this society placed on women. Comer concurs. “The Victorian version of a trophy wife [is] useful only in so far as she can fulfill a prescribed role, that of the ‘angel in the house’ or the ideal woman.”308
As in other time periods, those who do not conform are condemned and named as the purveyors of all evil in society, and Ahern reminds the reader that Guinevere must suffer the same fate. “Because [Guinevere] has refused to conform to the submissive wifely role her husband and her society prescribe, she has become not only a threat to social order, but the signifier of all threat to that order. Guinevere’s assertion of free will represented by her choice of lover is an example of behavior that shakes the foundations of her patriarchal culture… Because she is ‘taken everywhere for pure’ such a woman will spread moral contagion to the entire population.”309
When such rigorous restraints are placed on a society, a kind of morbid fascination develops surrounding what is forbidden. People became fascinated by illicit love310 and the idea of the fallen woman, especially as embodied by Guinevere. Ahern calls her “the kind of Magdalen figure that fascinated a Victorian reading public eager for tales of sin punished and virtue rewarded.”311
According to Comer, few of these characters were written by women, and therefore their experiences are of limited value. “The ‘fallen’ woman in literature has long been a topic of discussion, curiosity, and analysis. Deborah Ann Logan, in her article on fallen women in Victorian texts, notes that male writers write about fallen women, and not from the perspective of fallen women, the result being that the characters ‘remain one-dimensional, talked about but not developed, objectified in euphemistic terms that fail to establish the social contexts leading to fallenness.’”312
So after Tennyson had his way, one of the most famous literary queens was reduced to little more than a miserable failing, a secondary citizen who finds redemption only after much pain and suffering. His Guinevere may show more depth than previous incarnations, but overall little good has been done for her character in this retelling. While Tennyson “examines a more complex Guinevere [than the medieval one], we are uncomfortable with her ‘groveling’ and his Victorian moralizing,”313 both of which alienate modern readers.
* * *
261 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, “Guinevere” Idylls of a King (Public domain book, 2012), 319.
262 John and Caitlin Matthews assert “Tennyson had debated calling the collection The True and The False, a title that reflected his desire to contrast the various kinds of love described in the poems” (328). This title could also have been a reference to the tradition of the True and False Guineveres, which would have been especially apt, given that Victorian women were given two main roles, as we shall explore further in this chapter: the angel in the house or the fallen woman.
263 Comer, "Behold Thy Doom," 6.
264 Ibid., 54.
265 Bruce, "Guinevere the False," 245.
266 Comer, "Behold Thy Doom," 65.
267 Swanson, Kelsey, “Guinevere: Victorian Gender, Sexuality and Nature” (Literature 330: Romancing Arthur, Harlaxton College, 2010), 16.
268 Gordon-Wise, The Reclamation of a Queen, 49.
269 Bonner, "Guinevere as Heroine," 51, Comer, "Behold Thy Doom,"53.
270 Bonner, "Guinevere as Heroine," 51.
271 Ibid., 52.
272 Comer, "Behold Thy Doom," 57.
273 Ibid., 53-54.
274 Ibid., 53.
275 Ibid., 55.
276 Ibid., 69.
277 Ahern, Stephen, “Listening to Guinevere: Female Agency and the Politics of Chivalry in Tennyson’s ‘Idylls,’” Studies in Philology 101, no. 1 (2004): 90.
278 Swanson, "Guinevere: Victorian Gender," 10.
279 Walters, “Introduction,” xi.
280 Ahern, "Listening to Guinevere," 92.
281 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, “Guinevere,” , 3-5.
282 Ahern, "Listening to Guinevere," 89-90.
283 Ellis, Kimberly, “Lancelot and Guinevere: The Love Affair through the Ages” (Hanover, December 12, 2000).
284 Gordon-Wise, The Reclamation of a Queen, 65.
285 Tennyson, "Guinevere," lines 118-119.
286 Comer, "Behold Thy Doom," 65.
287 Ibid., 10-11.
288 Ibid., 52.
289 Bonner, "Guinevere as Heroine," 60.
290 Comer, "Behold Thy Doom," 6.
291 Ibid., 53.
292 Ibid., 74.
293 Brewer, Elizabeth, T. H. White’s The Once and Future King (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1993), 287.
294 Gordon-Wise, The Reclamation of a Queen, 66.
295 Goldsmith, Barbara, Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism and the Sc
andalous Victoria Woodhull (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 153.
296 Mancoff, Debra N., “To Take Excalibur: King Arthur and the Construction of Victorian Manhood,” in King Arthur: A Casebook, ed. Edward Donald Kennedy (New York: Routledge, 1995), 268.
297 Umland, Rebecca, “The Snake in the Woodpile: Tennyson’s Vivien as Victorian Prostitute,” in Culture and the King: the Social Implications of the Arthurian Legend, eds. James P Carley, Valerie M Lagorio, and Martin B Shichtman (Albany: New York State U of New York P, 1994), 283.
298 Bonner, "Guinevere as Heroine," 7.
299 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, “Guinevere,” lines 214-216.
300 Ibid., lines 265-266.
301 Ibid., lines 557- 560.
302 Ellis, Kimberly, "Lancelot and Guinevere: The Love Affair through the Ages," Hanover College (2000).
303 Swanson, "Guinevere: Victorian Gender," 12.
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