THAIS E. MORGANthe plot and narrative frame of The Princess: action and its resolution
depend on marriages sanctioned by the patriarchal order; the tale is told by
young men who ventriloquize both the feminine (Ida and her followers)
and the effeminate (the cross-dressed Prince and his friends). As Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick has shown in Between Men: English Literature and
Male Homosocial Desire (1985), Tennyson's The Princess sets up a
structure of exchange triangles in which a woman is the object of desire
through which men bond with each other and against her. In Part VII and
the "Conclusion," the Prince reasserts the masculine prerogative in a series
of ambiguous equivalences even as he seems to accommodate Ida's fem-
inism. "The woman's cause is man's" (VII. 243), he declares, as long as she
embodies "All that harms not distinctive womanhood. / For woman is not
undevelopt man, / But diverse... / Not like to like, but like in difference"
(VII. 258-62).
Sidestepping the issue of gender equality, the Prince confirms the right-
ness of sexual difference. Princess Ida and her followers are transfigured by
images of flowers and light when they realize true womanhood by turning
the college into a hospital in Part VI to care for the men after the fighting in
Part V A salient theme throughout the poem, the maternal feminine
provides a cornerstone of its resolution of gender conflict - from the
masculine point of view. By way of encouraging the Princess to become a
wife and mother, the Prince adduces his own mother as the paragon of
womanhood: "all dipt / In Angel instincts, breathing Paradise" (VII.
301-02). He himself has been infantilized by fainting after the jousts and
by relying on Ida's sympathetic nursing care. A charming child, Lady
Psyche's Aglaea, circulates among the women as if to remind them and us
of woman's truest destiny. Typifying mid-Victorian liberalism, Tennyson
maintains a hierarchized opposition between male and female in which the
former is always already superior to the latter.
Tennyson's Princess makes a strategic cultural intervention: the poem
exceeds the bounds of hegemonic masculinity without destroying it.
Victorian feminism is at least partially accommodated; aspects of femi-
ninity are appropriated (the androgyny, "weird seizures," and cross-dres-
sing of the Prince); masculine hegemony (the chivalrous ideal of manliness,
the homosociality of the frame and the plot, the overall superiority of men
to women) is left standing. Nonetheless, gender trouble leaves its trace in
the mixed genre of The Princess, a "strange experiment," a "medley" which
at times turns into a melee between the sexes ("Prologue," 228, 230). As a
male poet, Tennyson must mediate between the requirements of member-
ship in patriarchy and the desire as well as the demands represented by the
feminine. The issue of the female poet threads anxiously throughout the
208