The poetry of Victorian masculinitieslegitimize the homoerotic overtones of In Memoriam by referring the bond
between Tennyson and Hallam to the Biblical precedent of David and
Jonathan. 25
Like "Mariana" and The Princess, In Memoriam raises the question of
the gender of poetry. Does the male poet who ventriloquizes women and
privileges androgyny become feminized to the point of losing his manliness?
"He loves to make parade of pain" (XXI, 10): the speaker displays his grief
extravagantly, masochistically aligning himself with the feminine as excess.
Compare the ideological effects of male masochism in "Laus Veneris" and
In Memoriam. Whereas Swinburne sets his perverse anti-hero against the
residual ideology of Christian chivalry and its Victorian twin, bourgeois
morality, Tennyson shows the strenuous progress of the male subject as he
passes through early homoerotic attachment - "Confusions of a wasted
youth" ("Prologue," 42) - to mature heterosexual responsibilities: "For I
myself... have grown / To something greater than before" ("Epilogue,"
19-20). The Christological fantasy of his marriage with Hallam is counter-
balanced by the familiar actuality of what was the planned marriage of
Hallam to Tennyson's sister Emily. Hegemonic heterosexuality contains
male-male desire as heterosocial marriage resanctions homosocial
bonding. The female personifications of "Sorrow" and "Nature" onto
which the speaker displaces his private emotions are superseded by
"Wisdom" and virile action in the public sphere. Ultimately, the poet is
remasculinized as a patriotic sage: "Ring out the old, ring in the new" (CVI,
5), he declares; "Ring in the valiant man and free, /... Ring in the Christ
that is to be" (CVI, 29, 32). Hallam, "divinely gifted" (LXFV, 2), stands as a
paragon of middle-class manhood: he "breaks his birth's invidious bar"
(LXIV, 5) to rise above class; he "makes by force his merit known" and
would, had he lived, have been the ideal statesman (LXIV, 9). Terry
Eagleton reads In Memoriam as a "triumphant reaffirmation" of hegemonic
values, but Alan Sinfield finds "the confusion of gender categories" in the
poem... more difficult... for bourgeois hegemony to handle." 26
Tennyson interpellates or ideologically appeals to the dominant, hetero-
sexual audience without entirely banishing the possibility of homoerotic
desire.
Is the "pair of lovers together at night" in Arnold's famous dramatic
monologue, "Dover Beach" (1851) a male-female couple, as Norman N.
Holland assumes? 27 Or could the addressee "be the kind of man who was
versed in the ancient Greek" plays of Sophocles alluded to in stanza three,
as Joseph Bristow suggests? 28 The "melancholy" expressed here belongs to
the alternative masculinity based on feminizing "gentleness" which char-
acterizes the male speakers in the Switzerland cycle and "Tristram and223