Tennyson's "The Lotus-Eaters" and the Politics of the 1830s

Abstract

The obvious tiling to say about audience and the dramatic mono logue's "art of disclosure" is that the reader bears the burden of interpretation (see subtitle, Tucker 1980). The less obvious but more important thing to say is that the form has often constrained readers, fixing limits of interpretation at the same time as it has enfranchised the reader's hermeneutic activity. The dramatic monologue in its clas sic male Victorian form ? exemplified by Tennyson and Browning ? has recurrendy in recent critical history thrown the weight of the reader's interpretation on to questions rooted in character: irony, accidental revelation, the relationship between the authorial view point and the subtly critiqued attitudes vocalized by the monologist. And character readings have been dominated by the patterns of what Robert Langbaum called in his highly consequential account of the work of the dramatic monologue the tension between sympa thy and judgement (Langbaum 1957; see also Scheinberg 1997 and O'Gorman 2004). Linda Hughes typically spoke of the way in which the "dramatic monologue depends far more on the reader"(Hughes 1979: 301) than other forms of poetry, comprising a genre that reveals in an explicit way that which Wolfgang Iser distinguished as the "esthetic" of the text as it is constructed by the reader (see Iser 1978). But Hughes's account of Tennyson's "The Lotos-Eaters" (1832/42), like James Kincaid's earlier view of the poem in Tennyson's Major Poems (1975), demonstrated the way in which the dramatic monologue has limited the terms of critical reading. Concentrating on "the inner life of the speakerfs]" in the Choric Song of the