The poetry of Victorian masculinitiesespecially in Maud (1855), whose "hysteric" speaker and "overloaded
style" anticipate those of Swinburne (32). Tennyson, who has represented
"that wonderful apotheosis of Masculine Chastity" (86) in King Arthur (in
Idylls of the King), is equally capable of the kind of "effeminacy" that
Buchanan finds characteristic of the Fleshly poets (70). 32
This chapter has shown that Tennyson, Arnold, and Swinburne represent
several contesting masculinities in their poetry. Alternative and oppositional
masculinities are constructed in relation to the dominant domestic ideology.
Medievalism and classicism provide residual ideologies of manliness and
womanliness that can either support or interrogate the hegemonic ideal.
Feminized masculinities and homoeroticism emerge from the very dominant
and residual formations of manliness that sought to contain them.
NOTES
1 Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the
English Middle Class, 1750-1850 (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press,
1987), 13.
2 Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the
Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 4.
3 Raymond Williams, "Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory," in
Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: Verso, 1980), 31-49; further
page references appear in parentheses.
4 Antonio Gramsci, "Hegemony, Relations of Force, Historical Bloc," in An
Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings, 1916-1935, ed. David Forgacs
(New York: Schocken Books, 1988), 189-221.
5 A typical critic accuses Tennyson of "a want of all manliness" in topic and "an
emasculate floridity in style," resulting in "effeminacies": "The Faults of Recent
Poets: Poems by Alfred Tennyson," New Monthly Magazine 37 (1833), 74.
6 John Morley, "Review of Swinburne, Poems and Ballads," Saturday Review, 22
August 1866, 145-47, reprinted in Swinburne: The Critical Heritage, ed. Clyde
K. Hyder (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), 24.
7 John Morley, "Review of Swinburne, Poems and Ballads,'" 29.
8 Debra N. Mancoff surveys 1800s medievalism in The Arthurian Revival in
Victorian Art (New York: Garland, 1990).
9 See Elliot L. Gilbert, "The Female King: Tennyson's Arthurian Apocalypse,"
PMLA98 (1983), 863-78.
10 Swinburne, Under the Microscope (1872), in Swinburne Replies, ed. Clyde
Kenneth Hyder (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1966), 56, 58 ; further
page references appear in parentheses.
11 Alfred Austin, The Poetry of the Period (London: Richard Bentley, 1870;
reprinted New York: Garland, 1986), 96.
12 Swinburne, Notes on Poems and Reviews, in Swinburne Replies, 32.
13 [Charles Kingsley,] "Review of Arnold's Poems of 1853," Eraser's Magazine 49
(1854), reprinted in Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Scrutinies: Reviews of Poetry,
1830-1870 (London: Athlone Press, 1972), 174, 176.225