Reading Tennyson Reading Fuller Reading Tennyson: The Anti-Feminism of The Princess

Abstract

In Evidence on Her Own Behalf,feminist critic and historian Elizabeth A. Say points to the mid-nineteenth century as the time when strong women’s voices first began effectively challenging British male hegemony, exposing ‘the falsehood of the normative claims that History has made’ and usurping ‘traditional groundings of authority’ (114–16). According to Say, the self-interested voices of Victorian women’s rights workers questioned the very bases of ‘patriarchal reality’ (4), but, she notes, as ‘women’s demands for the vote, for education, and for legal rights increased, so did male hostility’ (41). In the previous chapter, I argued that stirrings of such hostility during the early 1840s account for the undercurrents of fear and violence in Martin Chuzzlewit, where assertive women are portrayed as uncontrolled, conspiratorial, and potentially emasculating. Sairey Gamp’s mouth is the focus of considerable consternation because of what goes into it; she is appropriative, self-serving. But in an increasing number of works from mid-century, it is what comes out of women’s mouths that generates the most acute concern.