The poetry of Victorian masculinities"It is one of the most touching and exquisite monuments ever raised to a
departed friend - the pure and unaffected expression of the truest and most
perfect love". 19 A few raised alarm at "the tone of - may we say so? -
amatory tenderness" which Tennyson adopted: "Surely this is a strange
manner of address to a man." 20 Like other early and mid-Victorians, this
reviewer judges poetry according to whether or not it upholds the pre-
sumably natural differences between masculinity and femininity, as elabo-
rated in domestic ideology. Influenced by sexology and psychoanalysis,
twentieth-century interpreters of In Memoriam have focused on the ques-
tion of male-male desire in In Memoriam. Christopher Ricks asks "Is
Tennyson's love for Hallam a homosexual love?" and answers with a
resounding "no!" 21 In contrast, Christopher Craft argues that Tennyson's
strategy of "recuperational homosexual desire" or legitimizing male-male
intimacy in In Memoriam is the poet's challenging response to the
"radically homophobic male homosociality" in Victorian culture. 22
Consider the extended analogies in In Memoriam. Tennyson often figures
his feelings toward his dead friend, Arthur Hallam, in terms of romantic
love. In section VI, for example, he imagines himself as a woman who,
happily awaiting her man's homecoming, is overcome by news of his death:
"To her, perpetual maidenhood, / And unto me no second friend" (AT
43-44). In section VII, the speaker revisits Hallam's house, apostrophizing
it like a forlorn lover: "Doors, where my heart was used to beat / So
quickly, waiting for a hand" (3-4). The class difference between the
speaker and Hallam is translated into an impossible love match in section
LX: "He past; a soul of nobler tone: / My spirit loved and loves him yet /
Like some poor girl whose heart is set / On one whose rank exceeds her
own" (1-4). Tennyson also imagines himself and Hallam in a gamut of
family roles. Physical grief overtakes the speaker in section XIII, where he
compares himself to a bereaved husband with Hallam as his deceased wife:
"Tears of the widower, when he .../... moves his doubtful arms, and
feels / her place is empty" (1, 3-4). In section XCVII, the speaker represents
himself with Hallam as "Two partners of a married life" (5). Taking the
wife's part, he admires the husband's (Hallam's) "greatness" from afar: "I
cannot understand: I love" (36). On the one hand, Tennyson reinscribes the
dominant ideology of domesticity; on the other hand, he destabilizes the
heterosocial contract by using familiar male-female analogues to represent
male-male desire.
The major intertexts of the literary tradition to which In Memoriam
alludes are similarly overdetermined, suggesting both conventional hetero-
sexuality and dissident homoeroticism. Dante's The Divine Comedy pro-
vides a model for the poem's movement from funeral to marriage, sorrow