The critical fortunes of Victorian poetryVictorian poetry as "a complex entity, defining and participating in an area
of struggle" (10). In her view, part of what the Victorian poem struggles
with is "the logic of its own contradictions" (15). What such poetry
anticipates, indeed makes possible, is not just, as for Langbaum, modernist
poetry but also, and perhaps most importantly, post-structuralist criticism.
From Armstrong's perspective, the modes of reading that Victorian poetry
invents ultimately lead to deconstruction, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and
most other contemporary theories about representation. At the same time,
Victorian poetry is deeply political, intensely engaged in political debates
and invested in questions of social change.
One of the central features of Armstrong's work is its tendency to draw
upon an eclectic mixture of methodologies and approaches to demonstrate
the complexity of Victorian poems, rather than expecting them to yield
their riches to one master narrative, however compelling. In a long essay on
"The Lady of Shalott," she views the work as two poems: first, a poem in
which the lady is caught between binary oppositions like rural/urban,
labor/mercantilism, isolation/community, passivity/action and cannot
mediate between them; and second, a critique of that poem in which these
oppositions are almost revealed as ideological constructs and interrogated
as such. Yet her analysis does not stop there. The Cambridge Apostles - the
avant-garde group of conservative intellectuals to which Tennyson be-
longed in the 1830s - were very much concerned with the role of the
intellectual in the regeneration of society. (The Apostles included among its
members Arthur Hallam, whose death prompted In Memoriam, as well as
R.C. Trench, the philologist.) Placing "The Lady of Shalott" in the context
of the Cambridge Apostles' study of myth and early nineteenth-century
theories about myth, Armstrong shows how the poem both attempts to use
myth as a political tool and interrogates this use of myth. Moreover, she
sees the poem in the context of the plight of industrial cotton weavers,
noting how the Lady's weaving connects her to the other workers of the
poem, the reapers in the field. The Lady's weaving allows contemporary
industrial issues to be displaced on to her, so that the reapers can provide a
Romantic organic version of what was a source of serious social unrest.
Further still, Armstrong interprets the poem in the context of psycho-
analytic theories of gender and language, demonstrating how the poem "is
about binary opposition rather than being an expression of it." 17 Whereas
a more traditional Marxist reading like Sinfield's locates the poem's politics
primarily in its construction of the private realm of desire, subjectivity and
gender, Armstrong's reading disturbs the distinctions between personal and
political by showing how they provide different kinds of vocabulary for
addressing the same issues.
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