The poetry of Victorian masculinitiesmasculine prerogatives, then women would be more womanly in accepting
their subordination to men.
Masculinity proves inextricable from femininity in Tennyson's Idylls of
the King. Arthur emphasizes that gender complementarity is the corner-
stone of the world of Camelot in "Guinevere." Like the Prince in The
Princess, the King relies on the woman's performance of femininity as the
guarantee that legitimizes his own performance of masculinity. Authorized
not by patrilineal culture but by a principle of the feminine in nature (the
Lady of the Lake bestows the magic sword, signifier of phallic power, upon
him), Arthur initially defines heroic masculinity in terms of a quest for a
perfect feminine counterpart: "But were I join'd with her / Then might we
live together as one life / And reigning with one will in everything / Have
power on this dark land to lighten it" ("The Coming of Arthur" AT
89-92). He attempts to forge a new mode of masculinity based on moral
ascesis or self-discipline rather than brute force: "I knew / Of no more
subtle master under heaven / Than is the maiden passion for a maid, / Not
only to keep down the base in man, / But teach .../... all that makes a
man" ("Guinevere," AT 474-78, 480).
Arthur's project, however, involves a slippage from heroic to domestic
masculinity that risks a slide from virility into effeminacy. Throughout the
Idylls, Arthur tries to navigate between a martial male subjectivity -
evidenced by his quests, battles, and rulership - and a spiritualized
"gentleness" marked as feminine. In order to maintain the masculine
position as dominant, this appropriation of the feminine must be partial
(moral qualities only) and must remain clearly distinguishable from the
other attributes of woman (physical weakness, maternity). Refusing to
perform the patriarchally sanctioned feminine (the roles of wife and
mother), Queen Guinevere's barren infidelity deconstructs the hierarchized
opposition of sexual difference that underpins King Arthur's experiment in
domesticating heroic masculinity: "thou has spoilt the purpose of my life,"
he tells her (450). Put on the defensive in the battle of the sexes, Arthur falls
back on traditional misogyny in his denunciation of Guinevere as a threat
to the entire social order; she is "like a new disease" (515). He remasculi-
nizes himself by invoking his manly duty to reassert patriarchal priority on
a domestic level: "I hold that man the worst of public foes / Who .../...
lets his wife / Whom he knows false abide and rule the house" (509-12).
The conflict between heroic and domestic masculinities brings about the
downfall of the Knights of the Round Table. In "Balin and Balan" (1885),
the effeminizing ineffectuality of King Arthur's "gentleness" drives two
brothers to an extreme of homosocial violence (AT 180). Christian salva-
tion is marked as inaccessibly feminine in "The Holy Grail" (1869); only
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