Victorian Poetry

The critical fortunes of Victorian poetry

the usefulness of psychoanalytic theory for reading Victorian poetry and
provides a good example of how issues of gender and sexuality may be
combined with issues about language and representation. 28 In his view, the
Lady of Shalott's weaving connects to Freud's reading of weaving as a
means by which women resist the gaze and conceal their castration: woven
fabric is also a threshold, like the hymen, or like that dash that separates
binary oppositions from one another. For the Lady, weaving is a defense
against castratory lack, since she is visible as a body only as a sign of loss.
So for Rowlinson Tennyson's poem allies the loss that constitutes textuality
(when the Lady becomes a visible text to the outside world, you can no
longer hear her voice - just as the poem goes forward on the printed page
without the author's voice behind it) with the loss that makes women
visible (castration, lack). Lancelot functions as a sort of phallus made out
of poems - a sign of the poetic belatedness the Lady embodies and defends
against. When he enters the poem, he brings sexual difference with him,
breaking the intactness of the Lady's mirror and her weaving. The defense
against castration is no longer possible, the Lady becomes visible as
woman, as lack, and as text, and with that the poem can end.

Poetry, gender, and sexuality

That the Victorians played a central role in inventing gender and sexuality
as we now know them is a critical commonplace. The work of Michel
Foucault (notably his introductory volume to The History of Sexuality
[1976]) and the research of countless feminist scholars of the 1980s
demonstrated how the Victorians constructed the categories of normal and
perverse, heterosexual and homosexual, masculine and feminine. As Nancy
Armstrong has argued, during the nineteenth century gender and sexuality
were particularly useful in providing an arena into which political material
could be transferred and depoliticized. 29 Further, because of the way in
which Victorian culture constructed public and private, economic produc-
tion and cultural and sexual reproduction as gendered spheres, it followed
that gender and sexuality became intricately intertwined with issues of art
and artistry. When Tennyson portrays the artist in "The Lady of Shalott" as
an enclosed feminine consciousness and figures her problems as both
aesthetic and erotic, he inaugurates a century-long concern with the sex
and gender of art and artistry, a concern that culminates in British
aestheticism's use of the erotic in the 1870s and 1880s to mark out a space
for an elite autonomous art.
To the immediate heirs of the Victorians, however, gender and sexuality
were givens. Since the Victorians did not have the benefit of Freud and