An Adventure in Modern Marriage: Domestic Development in Tennyson's Geraint and Enid and the Marriage of Geraint (Alfred Tennyson) (Critical Essay‪)‬

Tennyson committed decades of his life to recrafting medieval Arthurian romance into his eventual Victorian epic, Idylls of the King, but his earliest publication from the venture shows that he approached the project with concern for its relevance to modern society. "The Epic," his frame poem for the 1842 "Morte d'Arthur," concludes with a dream of Arthur returning, but an Arthur who appears "like a modern gentleman / Of stateliest port." (1) The heroic Arthur of the battlefield has already passed away, and this decorous modern replacement arrives. Tennyson's shift to the modern seems to anticipate Elizabeth Barrett Browning's assertion that epic poets should look to their own age for inspiration, and his next published foray into the project enacts, in a way, her conviction that what goes on "Betwixt the mirrors of its drawing-rooms" (2) is worthy of epic treatment. Tennyson's 1859 edition of the Idylls reinforced the impression that the battlefield scene of "Morte d'Arthur" was not going to be the dominant setting or preoccupation of his larger Arthurian narrative. The volume, entitled The True and the False: Four Idylls of the King, contained four idylls, each named for a female character, which take as their subjects the romantic, sexual, and domestic negotiations carried out by their principal subjects. Tennyson's centering of women in his Idylls reflects a Victorian society in which women really were central to ideas of order, morality, and national stability; where an ideal king might say "I seem as nothing in the mighty world, / And cannot will my will, nor work my work" without an ideal queen (The Coming of Arthur, ll. 86-87). The ultimate goal of the Round Table is the creation and maintenance of order in a chaotic world; and, in this Victorian version of the material, establishing order comes to mean building solid domestic arrangements. The Geraint and Enid episodes from Idylls of the King, among the first in order of composition as in the eventual epic, exemplify Tennyson's attempt to be the laureate for his age-the laureate whose hero and heroine may go questing like medieval knight and lady but ultimately face their greatest challenges in learning how to fulfill the roles of husband and wife in a particularly Victorian domestic arrangement. "Brave Geraint" and Enid, with all of her "bashful delicacy" (The Marriage of Geraint, ll. 1, 66), do face the strange dangers posed by Edyrn and Earl Doorm, but their greater challenges arise as they negotiate the complex gender constructions and exacting demands of domestic ideology.