Paper Summary:

This paper explores how Alfred Lord Tennyson's poems reflect the widely accepted Victorian attitudes towards male and female gender roles by the analysis of his poems "The Lady of Shalott" and "Mariana" and references to material by the nineteenth-century writer, John Ruskin. It discusses how in both these poems, which were written between 1830 and 1832, Tennyson is essentially describing the attitudes towards women in Victorian society. It looks at how he portrays a period where women are perceived to be unable to exist in a world without men and are entirely inferior to the men in their society.

From the Paper:

"This may be a subtle way in which Tennyson demonstrates that not all women are so purely and completely perfect, as it is when Mariana is alone at night in bed she feels most lonely due to her sexual longing. A piece of writing about early Victorian Britain states that a woman "was not supposed to desire sexual intercourse for any pleasure she might derive from it, but solely as a duty to her husband". In John Ruskin's famous passage, "Sesame and Lilies" (1865) he asserts that "she (the woman) must be enduringly, incorruptibly good; instinctively". The role of the woman in Victorian times was extremely disciplined and sexually restricted and here, Tennyson may be showing that women did not always conform to the rules society enforced upon them."

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