Commerce and conquest in Tennyson's The Princess and Maud

Abstract

Alfred Lord Tennyson's propensity to contribute with regularity during the first half of his career to feminized, popular "gift books" gives credence to the question of motivation for such frequent contributions. Certainly a poet of his stature would have found such contributions demeaning, and to a certain extent, Tennyson himself confesses that he did indeed find these publications beneath his stature as an author. However, Tennyson was consumed by and fearful of being poor, and found in these publications a means by which to both expose his name and secure income. This willingness to use publications he clearly disapproved of leads to speculation regarding how much financial issues affected the subject matter and themes of his poetry. In The Princess and Maud, for example, debate regarding content and theme has raged since publication. What has led to this constant speculation is the very obscurity inherent within the poems, allowing each to be interpreted to suit the social and political leanings of the reader. The Princess can be read as a feminist poem protesting an unjust patriarchal social and legal system, or it can be interpreted as a confirmation of those systems, satisfying at once both male and female readers. In Maud, published after his appointment as Poet Laureate, Tennyson seems to be very conscious of his Queen's government's policies during the Crimean War, while he himself, in later commentaries, distances himself from any political stance readers might find in the poem. These vacillations point to conflicting themes in each of the poems, and the question becomes, then, why Tennyson would have deliberately, it seems, created such confusion. His preoccupation during much of his career with poverty, and his fears of failure would seem to give motivation to an obscurity in content and theme so that no readers would find offense and all readers would find confirmation of their own convictions regarding the social and political implications of the poetry's content.