The poetry of Victorian masculinitiesYet as a woman, Sappho dies. Although ever defiant of the dominant order
("But, having made me, me he [God] shall not slay" [I, 65]), and although
asserting her right to desire ("neither moon nor snow nor dew / Nor all
cold things can purge me wholly through" [I, 66]), Sappho finally takes her
life by plunging into "Thick darkness and the insuperable sea" (I, 66). To
what purpose does the male poet appropriate the feminine here? Arguably,
the woman herself is expelled (Sappho's death) while the poet himself
(Swinburne speaking as Sappho) remains.
Near mid-century, Tennyson represents the disturbances and adjustments
in Victorian men's and women's gender identities in a long mock-heroic
narrative poem, The Princess: A Medley (1847). Tennyson's strategy is to
accommodate the gathering Victorian women's movement while reassuring
his readers that the Chartist revolts of the 1840s do not signal a revolution
in England like the French one of 1789. Both the masculinized Princess Ida
("Grand, epic, homicidal" like a formidable warrior ["Prologue," 218]) and
the feminized Prince ("With lengths of yellow ringlet, like a girl" [I. 3]) are
unconventionally gender-crossed. But the medievalizing setting of the story
places them under the sign of courtly love, thereby carrying forward a
residual ideology of gender and power relations into Victorian times. The
Princess has left home and refused marriage in order to found a college for
women who have historically been denied an education and equality with
men. The Prince and two friends breach this chaste gynotopia by disguising
themselves i n "female gear" (I. 196) and speaking in falsetto. When in the
presence of Ida herself, though, the Prince several times undergoes "weird
seizures" (I. 14), as if he is overcome by the power of the feminine. The
paradigm of courtly love allows for male submission to the female within
the sphere of feelings but promotes a heroic ideal of manliness in the realm
of action: the Prince rescues the Princess from a fall and he is wounded
while jousting to save the Princess's cause.
Hegemonic masculinity is modified but not overthrown in The Princess.
Although she finds them out early on, Lady Psyche does not expose the
cross-dressed men to punishment because they appeal to a shared domestic
ideal. Princess Ida traduces femininity by insisting on "theories... I
Maintaining... / The woman were an equal to the man" (I. 128-30),
instead of accepting her natural role of engaging in "Sweet household talk,
and phrases of the hearth" (II. 294). The Prince seems more liberal in his
sexual politics. Infused with a feminine "gentleness" (V 160), he repudiates
his father's aggressive style of manliness - "Man is the hunter; the woman
is his game" (V 147) - and absolutist patriarchalism: "Man for the field
and woman for the hearth: / Man for the sword and for the needle she; /
Man to command and woman to obey" (V 437-40). But look closely at
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