The poetry of Victorian masculinitiesremasculinizing his poetry after such comments, Tennyson writes "Ulysses"
(1842), in which the speaker both invokes the ascetic norm of manhood
and reinscribes sexual difference in terms of domestic ideology: "It little
profits that an idle king, / By this still hearth... / Matched with an aged
wife, I mete and dole / Unequal laws" (1-4). Renouncing rest at the end of
his life, Ulysses vows "To follow knowledge like a sinking star, / Beyond the
utmost bound of human thought" (31-32). Unlike the effeminately idle
mariners in "The Lotos-Eaters" who sigh "Oh rest ye ... we will not
wander more" (173), Ulysses exemplifies the ideal of strenuous manliness
in his vow "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield" (70). Tennyson's
poem has been widely interpreted as a salvo in favor of British imperialism.
Yet the goal of the questing envisioned by Ulysses himself involves less
altruistic renunciation than personal pleasure. Confirming his patriarchal
prerogatives by designating his son as the next ruler, Ulysses dubs himself
"this gray spirit yearning in desire" (30) and describes voyaging as satisfac-
tion: "I will drink / Life to the lees" (6-7). Is the "margin" which "fades /
For ever and for ever when I move" the ever-elusive fiction of masculinity
(20-21)?
Arnold's construction of an ideal of masculinity from classical culture is
an ongoing agonistic project that informs both his poetry and his critical
prose. In "Empedocles on Etna" (1852) he tries to inflect a Romantic male
subjectivity, modeled after Byron's Manfred (1817), with a socially respon-
sible one that corresponds to mid-Victorian ideas about manliness; these
divergent masculinities are held together within a rationalizing frame of
Greek philosophy. The eponymous hero is poet and philosopher, religious
skeptic and humanitarian, tempestuously passionate and severely logical.
On the one hand, Empedocles deconstructs Romantic masculinity: "Man
with his lot... fights" (MA 153) because "he makes... will I The measure
of his rights" ignoring the laws of "Nature" (154-55). On tne other hand,
Empedocles celebrates "That longing of our youth" that "Burns ever
unconsumed" (369-70) and wishes to preserve "desire" (386) in all its
fullness, rejecting "but moderate bliss" (391). He knows that the "wise
man's plan" (267) in life is, as Carlyle urged, "To work" (269), but he
cannot bring himself to renounce "Pleasure" and "dreams" (357). The
"naked, eternally restless mind" (330) produced by this encounter of
Romantic and mid-Victorian subjectivities produces an impasse which
poetry, represented by the five intercalary lyrics about Greek myths
composed by Callicles, cannot overcome. Anticipating Arnold's own
renunciation of poetry in favor of critical prose, Empedocles lays aside his
lyre and, unconsoled by Callicles's verses, chooses death as the only way to
"cut his oscillations short" (233).
217