E. WARWICK SLINNpossibilities for cultural critique, whether to expose cultural ideologies or
indicate the material grounding of lyrical idealism.
Tennyson's Maud illustrates both features. This poem was virtually
written backward: Tennyson started from an already written lyric, "O that
'twere possible," and added both preceding and ensuing contexts. The
result provides a series of lyrics, all of which differ in stanzaic structure and
size, that represent the shifting and oscillating moods of the protagonist-
speaker, much in the manner of a monodrama (a subtitle Tennyson added
in 1875). True to the format of monodrama, the speaker remains embroiled
in his (or her) own highly wrought sensitivities; he is obsessed with Maud,
his childhood sweetheart, and he rails periodically at the increasingly
bourgeois culture ruined by laissez-faire economics that he feels has
dispossessed him of his birthright as a man from the landed classes. In
attempting to indict his society, he remains aloof. But the poem extends
beyond the tenets of monodrama precisely to the extent that it exploits the
irony of a maniacal personality whose mania may reflect the very social ills
of which he complains. In the climactic moment at the end of Part II, the
speaker enacts what has become known as the madhouse cell scene. He
believes that he killed Maud's brother in a duel and he has consequently
fled England. Now isolated from Maud's influence and from his own
landed society, he becomes further enclosed within his own introspective
processes. His introspection culminates in a fantasy of burial: "my heart is
a handful of dust, / And the wheels go over my head" (AT II. 241-42). Yet
the quietness of the grave is contaminated by the unceasing utterance of
other people. These figures represent social icons - lord, physician,
statesman - and all participate in an "idiot gabble" (II. 279) that for him
begins to characterize all human speech, whether inside or outside the
madhouse. Personal and social discourses thus become coextensive; private
utterance is social speech: "For I never whispered a private affair I... I But
I heard it shouted at once from the top of the house" (II. 285-88).
Following this episode, in Part III the speaker leaves his "cells of madness"
(III. 2) and proposes to rejoin his "kind" (III. 58), to fight in the Crimean
War with his countrymen. If, however, the noticeable brevity of Part III and
its shift into the public rhetoric of war hardly provides an acceptable
resolution for the poem, then echoes of earlier images and an identification
between protagonist and society through the battle-cry of a nation never-
theless imply a closure of the gap between self and culture which has been a
source of irony throughout. It can, therefore, be argued that several
elements of the poem combine at this point: poetic structure (form),
psychological need (content), and cultural belief (theme). All coalesce in the
concluding embodiment of public and private rhetoric, in the private
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