The poetry of Victorian masculinitiesPart I, Tristram, once a "peerless hunter, harper, knight" (MA I. 22), lies on
his deathbed; he appears "weak with fever and pain" (I. 85) helpless and in
"deep distress" (I. 209) -the very anti-type of the "brilliant youthful knight
/ In the glory of his prime" (I. 109-10). Pain, both physical and psycholo-
gical, feminizes the hero. Tristram recalls a battle during which his prowess
failed him because he was consumed by passion for Iseult of Ireland.
Arnold, after giving voice to Tristram, uses third-person narration to
emphasize Tristram's falling away from his knightly duty under the pressure
of emotion: while his comrades-in-arms revel in "the ringing blows" (I.
259) as "the trumpets blow" (I. 264), Tristram suffers from "Sick pining"
(I. 261) for a woman: "Ah! what boots it... / If oneself cannot get free /
From the clog of misery?" (I. 267-68).
In Part II of "Tristram and Iseult," Arnold invents a meeting between the
doomed lovers at Tristram's deathbed. Whereas Part I alternates dialogue
between the characters with narration, Part II focuses on a dialogical
exchange of feelings of regret, loss, and love. Gentleness, a feminine quality
introduced into masculinity in several other poems by Arnold, tempers the
harshly heroic in the dying Tristram. Illicit passion has been spiritualized by
mutual suffering - "Both have pass'd a youth consumed and sad" (II. 54) -
which unites the lovers eternally. Iseult of Ireland, once a "cruel" lady,
returns to true womanliness ("I am now thy nurse" [II. 70]), enabling
Tristram to indulge in a melancholy manliness that replaces the pugnacious
virility conventionalized for medieval heroes. Part III of "Tristram and
Iseult" doubles this reinscription of the domestic feminine. The narrator
presents Iseult of Brittany caring for her "laughing children" (III. -/-/),
unhappy in her love for the now dead Tristram but content with her
"home" (III. 76), "her broidery-frame" (III. 82) and "her prie-dieu" (III.
92). The narrator observes that suffering may make passion transcendent
but that passion remains dangerous in "subdu[ing] our souls to it, / Till for
its sake alone we live and move" (III. 128-29).
The narrator further urges that men's "fool passion" (III. 134) for
women creates an imbalance of power between them and that this
"unnatural" (III. 136) situation - "Being, in truth, but a diseased unrest"
(III. 135 ) - destroys the men: "They straightaway are burnt up with fume
and care" (III. 139). "Tristram and Iseult" ends with the story of the once
mighty magician Merlin and Vivian, that "lovely" (III. 164) but "false fay"
(III. 161) who seduced him and left him to waste away in "a sleep .../...
more like death, so deep" (III. 213-14). Desire for a woman undoes both
Tristram and Merlin, two heroes of Arthurian legend. Is "Tristram and
Iseult" an oppositional poem because Arnold represents a feminized,
gentled masculinity in the hero Tristram? Or is it a misogynistic text