THAIS E. MORGANtones of a loved voice" (83) to realize the "pulse of feeling" otherwise
"lost" (85) to his awareness. The poem raises an unanswerable question: Is
the feminine presence that completes masculinity outside Arnold's speakers,
inside them, or both/and?
Swinburne in the first series of Poems and Ballads (1866) takes aim at
the Christian moralism and patriarchalism dear to the Victorian middle
class. Besides critiquing Victorian notions of love and God, "Faustine"
hyperbolizes the enshrinement of the feminine in Victorian domestic
ideology to a deliberately outrageous extreme. "Faustine" portrays Woman
as a gorgeous desiring machine that vampirically metamorphoses over
time, destroying men with pleasure. By the same token, the ascetic norm
of manhood is undermined: the male speaker in "Faustine" remains
prostrate with desire. Swinburne exposes the discourse of courtly love as
oppressive to both men and women in "Les Noyades," set during the
French Revolution, where desire triumphs over the class system and the
sacrament of marriage is trumped by lust and death: "Shall she not know
me [carnally, in the Biblical sense]... / Me, on whose heart as a worm she
trod? / You [the executioners] have given me... / What man yet never
was given of God" (ACS I, 50). Whereas Tennyson deploys the residual
ideology of courtly love to support the Victorian ideology of separate
spheres in The Princess, Swinburne turns courtly love against ideals of
manliness and womanliness throughout Poems and Ballads. "He is either
the vindictive and scornful apostle of a crushing iron-shod despair, or else
he is the libidinous laureate of a pack of satyrs," commented a disgusted
contemporary. 7
Heroic masculinitiesCultural sages and literary critics called upon the Victorian male poet to
represent paradigms of heroism. Responding to the medieval revival in
Victorian culture, Tennyson, Arnold, and Swinburne each draw on Thomas
Malory's Le Morte Darthur (1485) to represent heroic masculinity but with
divergent ideological effects. 8 A residual formation in which sexual differ-
ence is strongly marked, courtly love supports domestic ideology: the
chivalric knight ventures forth in the world of action in order to serve and
protect the lady who adorns his castle home with her beauty, both physical
and spiritual. This kind of heroism in many ways extends, if only to
complicate, the domestic manliness that these poets would elsewhere
explore.
Arnold reorients the external glories of combative masculinity into the
internal sufferings of male melancholy in "Tristram and Iseult" (1852). In