The Princess and the Generosity of Tennyson's Imagination by Linda K. HughesPublication Date: November 2018
Journal Title: The Tennyson Research Bulletin
Opening Paragraph: My title may seem unexpected, even oxymoronic. Though recent essays by Rebecca Stott and Jane Wright challenge critical orthodoxy, prevailing scholarly opinion about the first long poem that Tennyson published remains heavily influenced by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's 1985 chapter on the poem in Between Men. Sedgwick asserts that The Princess 'begins with the astonishing vision of a feminist separatist community, and ends with one of the age's definitive articulations of the cult of the angel in the house'. As she more provocatively adds, 'it was the peculiar genius of Tennyson to light on the tired,' moderate, unconscious ideologies of his time and class, and by the force of his investment in them, and his gorgeous lyric gift, to make them sound frothing-at-the-mouth mad' (Sedgwick 119-20). Nonetheless, I explore the generosity of Tennyson's imagination in two respects. In Part I, I examine the unusual production and distribution of Tennyson's five new versions of The Princess from 1847 to 1853 which demonstrates the fecundity of his imagination both in itself and allied to new technologies. This line of argument draws from my chapter on The Princess in Replication in the Long Nineteenth Century: Re-makings and Reproductions (2018), which I have co-edited with.Julie Codell. Thanks to emergent technologies and the proliferating copies they generated, replication was a specifically nineteenth-century phenomenon, one that lies behind replications in our current digital era. In Part II, I turn to the intersection of The Princess with nineteenth-century women; specifically, I examine the reception of the poem by nineteenth-century transatlantic feminists, who more typically perceived generosity than oppression in Tennyson's imaginative vision of university women.
Author: Linda K. Hughes, Addie Levy Professor of Literature, English