SONS AND LOVERS: TENNYSON'S FRATERNAL PATERNITY

Abstract

TERRY EAGLETONhas suggested that “the mid-nineteenth century bourgeois state had problems in resolving its Oedipus complex” (76). Eagleton's semi-serious remark certainly holds true for nineteenth-century British culture, which, while supposedly patriarchal in its political structures, features a great number of significant literary narratives in which the paternal parent is either missing, dead, or never mentioned. The poems of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, are no exception. Gerhard Joseph, Christopher Ricks, and Linda Shires, among others, turn to Freudian psychoanalysis, the Oedipal complex, and Freud's seminal essay “Mourning and Melancholia” for insight into why so many father figures are absent from Tennyson's work. Yet neither the Oedipus complex nor “melancholia” accounts for how these father figures, while literally absent, are nevertheless present and influential. Another model is needed to describe the relationship between Tennyson, the missing paternal figures of his narratives, and the age that he has come to represent.