The poetry of Victorian masculinitiesthe masculinity of the poet and the femininity of his genre: Victorian critics
found the texts about women and their emotions in domestic settings in
Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830) unacceptably effeminate. 5 Consider the
poem "Mariana" (1830) which describes the heightened senses of a woman
waiting for her lover in a "lonely moated grange" (AT 8). Staring at the
"rusted nails" (3) on the "gable-wall" (4) imprisoning her, Mariana sees not
a rescuer but a "gnarled" (42) tree on the "level waste" (44). The refrain
emphasizes her extreme despair: "I am aweary, aweary, / I would that I
were dead!"; she is like the Victorian woman who, denied access to the
world of action, depends on a man and marriage to realize herself. Mariana
goes mad from waiting: "the mouse / Behind the mouldering wainscot
shrieked, /... Old voices called her from without" (63-64, 68). Framing
Mariana's experience in the descriptive narrative, the male poet ventrilo-
quizes her voice in the refrain; he adopts a feminine persona. Imagining the
domestic situation of women enables Tennyson to represent feelings
different from those of Victorian men engaged in public life. But the fact
that Mariana wishes to die suggests that the male poet's appropriation of
the feminine preserves rather than changes the dominant ideology of
separate spheres.
Matthew Arnold struggles with the relation between poetry and the
feminine under domestic ideology throughout his career. His work often
represents men and women interacting but always from a male point of
view. "The Forsaken Merman" (1849) raises questions about the Victorian
doctrine of separate spheres within a distanced setting of fairy tale. The
merman calls to his children to come back home to the undersea world: "let
us away; / Down and away below!" (MA 1-2). The paterfamilias has been
"forsaken" by his wife who has betrayed her womanliness in preferring
"the white-walled town" (25) to his "Sand-strewn caverns, cool and deep"
(35). As the merman realizes that Margaret will not return, the poem turns
elegiac; he laments days past of domestic bliss when "Once she sate with
you and me, /... And the youngest sate on her knee" (50, 52). Familiar
gender roles are reversed: the mother ventures out into the social world
while the father takes refuge with the children in the "kind sea-caves" (61):
"She said, 'I must go, for my kinsfolk pray / In the little grey church on the
shore to-day'" (56-57). Arnold speaks the feminine through the voice of
the merman: "She sits at her wheel in the humming town / Singing .../...
'O joy, O joy'" (87-89). A wounded but defiant masculinity characterizes
"The Forsaken Merman." Margaret's refusal of her maternal and spousal
roles has led to her "sorrow-clouded eye, / And a heart sorrow-laden"
(103-04). A figure for the male poet, the merman remains bitterly nostalgic
for a lost ideal harmony between man and woman, symbolized by the gap
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