407–8, and Marion Shaw, Alfred Lord Tennyson (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1988), pp. Two recent studies have stressed the features of this lyric as providing the germ for the poem: see Tucker, pp. 21 (1983), 369–78, for the view that no sexual consummation occurs, and Jonathan Wordsworth for the view that Maud is deflowered (not necessarily in this scene). Kurata, ‘“A Juggle Born of the Brain”: A New Reading of Maud’, Victorian Poetry, vol.
See also Tucker’s point that Maud’s ‘worth’ as a sign arises from her place within a social system (Tucker, p. Dorothy Mermin’s argument that ‘Maud as an object of love is a literary object’ (272) acknowledges Maud’s status as a sign within literary discourse in general, but that reading severely delimits Maud’s function as a signifier within the subjectivity of this speaker’s discourse. In my reading, the poem proposes the impossibility of a world of ‘unified contraries’, replacing that impossible and Romantic dream with an unfixed world of Romantic irony, of dialectical continuities and process. 120) suppresses the force of the speaker’s utterance that Maud troubles the mind with a ‘joy’ and a ‘glory’ which he will ‘ not find’ (my italics). 176), tends to minimise its function as hieroglyph (sign), and while James Kincaid’s reading, in Tennyson’s Major Poems: The Comic and Ironic Patterns (London: Yale University Press, 1975), suggests that the song really emerges from deep within the speaker, Kincaid’s conclusion that Maud ‘announces the fully realized self and calls the narrator to participation in a world of unified contraries’ (p. David Shaw’s view, for instance, in Tennyson’s Style (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976), that the voice is ‘a disembodied hieroglyph for something beyond her’ (p. 1977), 402–4.Įarlier readings have been inclined to seek a meaning for Maud’s voice in I.iv that is substantive and referential, outside the function of the discourse itself. Giordano, Jr., ‘The “Red-Ribbed Hollow”, Suicide and Part III in “Maud”’, Notes and Queries, vol. The speaker’s suicidal impulse has been frequently discussed see, e.g., Jonas Spatz, ‘Love and Death in Tennyson’s Maud’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, vol.
Withycombe, The Oxford Dictionary of English Christian Names, third edition (1977), pp. Jonathan Wordsworth, in ‘“What is it, that has been done?”: the Central Problem of Maud’, Essays in Criticism, 24 (1974), 356–62, observes that ‘once it has been pointed out it is difficult not to see the details of the first two lines… in terms of the female body’ (358). Textual references will be given to Part, section and line number. Susan Shatto (Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986). 265.Īll quotations from Maud are taken from Tennyson’s ‘Maud’: A definitive edition, ed. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977), p. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. 149–93, and for another application of this theory to Victorian writing, see Steven Connor, Charles Dickens (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), chap.
For an excellent account of the development of the subject in Lacanian terms, see Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. The appropriateness of Lacanian theory for Tennyson’s poetry has already been explained by Sinfield (pp. Schulman, ‘Mourning and Voice in Maud’, SEL, 23 (1983), 633–46 Alan Sinfield, Alfred Tennyson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), partic. Petch, ‘Tennyson: Mood and Myth’, Sydney Studies in English, 4 (1978–79), 18–30 Samuel E.
Mermin, ‘Tennyson’s Maud: A Thematic Analysis’, TSLL, vol. Carr, ‘Tennyson as a Modern Poet’, in John Killham, ed., Critical Essays on the Poetry of Tennyson (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960), pp.
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