Yoshiko Seki. The
Rhetoric of Retelling Old Romances: Medievalist Poetry by Alfred Tennyson and
William Morris. Japan: EIHŌSHA,
2015.
Reviewed by Nicole Lobdell (nicole.lobdell@lmc.gatech.edu)
Yoshiko Seki’s The
Rhetoric of Retelling Old Romances: Medievalist Poetry by Alfred Tennyson and
William Morris offers readers a focused consideration of the rhetoric that
canonical Victorian poets Tennyson and Morris developed in their later
medievalist poetry. In her introduction, Seki introduces two concepts,
medievalism and Victorianism, that underpin her study, and argues that
Victorianists cannot “simply [assume] that the mid-nineteenth century was
congenial for the medievalists even if it is also true that medievalism and the
Arthurian revival were a genuine cultural phenomenon” (10). To complicate her
initial premise further, Seki also points to Victorian complaints that the age
was “unpoetical,” implicating the Victorian age’s perceived affinity for prose
over poetry. So, why in an age that is both anti-medievalist and unpoetical
would two major poets such as Tennyson and Morris turn to medievalist themes
and Arthurian legends for inspiration, and how did these poets retell such
legends in the nineteenth century? These questions drive Seki’s work, and at
the initial outset of her study, they are compelling questions to ask.
The structure of Seki’s monograph retains markers of a
dissertation project completed before 2010, namely the choice of authors,
division of chapters, and the lack of recent research criticism and secondary
sources from the last five years. In the acknowledgements, Seki owns that the
project has taken eight years to complete; in reading the study, however, it
becomes apparent that most of her critical research ends in approximately 2008,
with little to no discussion of research published after 2010. There were surges
of scholarly interest in Victorian medievalism in the 1960s-70s and again in
the 1990s, and it is from these decades that Seki draws the bulk of her secondary
sources. Although the premise of her study is compelling, its lack of
engagement with current research is disappointing, and one senses there are
missed opportunities to expand the argument in new and interesting directions. Her
study would make a useful overview of secondary materials and how medievalism
and Victorianism came together at two different periods of the twentieth
century, and perhaps her work indicates that we are fast approaching a renewal
of such interests.
Four of the chapters were published previously in 2005,
2007, and 2008, respectively, as articles in journals such as the Osaka Literary Review. Three of the Morris
chapters are comprised of these articles, and, incidentally, it is these
chapters that are the more tightly constructed, more tenacious, and more daring
in their assertions. The chapters devoted to Tennyson are less evolved and less
exacting; the writing is less demanding and less precise than that of the
Morris chapters. Perhaps this stems from the sheer volume of Tennyson materials
that Seki endeavors to cover in those devoted chapters.
The Tennyson portion of the study is divided into three compositional
moments of the idylls: 1859, 1869, and 1885. The author’s purpose is to examine
how the idylls “took on different ‘glancing colours’ in every iteration through
successive publication” and in what ways the poet changed his plans for
composition as the result of outside influences including reviewers’ and
readers’ responses and his nomination as Poet Laureate (46-8). This observation,
however, is not new. In 1872, Swinburne sneeringly, and famously, renamed “The
Morte d’Arthur” (1833), Tennyson’s poem on the death of Arthur, as “The Morte
d’Albert, or Idylls of the Prince Consort,” a comment on Tennyson’s position as
Poet Laureate to Queen Victoria. Seki further divides the chapters devoted to
Tennyson into three smaller sections: “the cultural climate in which Victorian
poets wrote their works … their process of composition, and the reception of
their works by contemporary critics and the reading public” (13).
Seki’s plan is ambitious, and her choice of Tennyson’s Idylls is a compelling one. Generally, the
Idylls are not the preferred choice
of scholars interested in Tennyson’s medievalist poetry; they are frequently passed
over for the more popular poems such as “The Lady of Shalott.” Additionally,
the complicated composition and publication history of the Idylls contributes to their overall incoherence as a unified set of
poems. In 1855-56, for example, Tennyson composed “Enid,” which he published
privately in 1857 and then published publicly in 1859 as “Enid.” In 1869, he
expanded it and retitled it “Geraint and Enid”; in 1873, he divided it into two
poems, which received their final titles as “The Marriage of Geraint” and “Geraint
and Enid” in 1888. To help readers maneuver this history, Seki includes a
detailed set of date charts in the appendix, which demonstrate Tennyson returning
and revising works he composed decades earlier. The chronological, linear
argument, which Seki relies upon, is enticing but ultimately a false one that
goes against the point she attempts to argue – namely, Tennyson’s construction
of a plural present. Not interested in the past or the future of Camelot,
Tennyson is concerned solely with iterating it in the present moment. Unlike
Malory, Tennyson returns to the Arthurian romances in order to project moments
of great social and cultural change in Victorian England. In effect, Tennyson
produces a world of Camelots that exist simultaneously together in the present
moment – a plural present.
For Seki, these moments of great change included the
publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of
Species (1859) and the changing roles of women in society. “In the first
four Idylls [1859],” she writes,
“[Tennyson] focused on the heroines of the romance so as to deal with the
question of women’s roles in society. He handled the conflict between science
and religion in the next Holy Grail and
Other Poems” (91). Seki contrasts the female characters in Tennyson’s
earlier poems with those of the later Idylls:
“While the ladies in the early poems are isolated from their society and are
found in a melancholic condition, the four heroines in the Idylls are actively involved in the world around them by the use of
their own voice” (61). Seki bases some of her reasoning on the fact that in
1850, Tennyson had succeeded Wordsworth as Poet Laureate, and that perhaps this
shift in portrayals of women was due to his new role. This interpretation is
certainly a possibility, and Seki suggests that Tennyson, compelled by his
reviewers, was attempting to respond to the cultural moment regarding women’s
rights. She argues that Guenevere’s “self-defensive monologue shows us her
mentality, where she struggles to build a medieval world by recounting an
allegorical story and by recalling her cherished memories of earlier days”
(119). So, even though Guenevere’s dramatic monologue does not follow the
traditional rules of Victorian dramatic monologues, it creates an alternate,
independent world within the Arthurian legend for Guenevere.
The argument over gender and poetic form is one of the
strengths of Seki’s volume. One wishes, however, that Seki had engaged more
fully the feminist reading at which she hints. A fuller discussion of
Tennyson’s female-centric medievalist poetry alongside other Victorian poets,
namely female Victorian poets such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning who composed
at the same cultural moments as Tennyson and Morris and incorporated similar medieval
and Arthurian imagery, themes, and characters into her poetry, would be a
welcome addition to the study. The choice to focus on Tennyson and Morris, two
prolific and canonical Victorian poets, is never justified beyond the facts
that they both wrote long narrative poems, had widespread readerships, were
interested in the Arthurian romances, attempted grand epics, and had similar
dates for composition. One feels that Seki is constantly scratching at the
surface, attempting to cover an expansive argument rather than delving into
specific depths, a fact reflected in the brevity of the volume.
In the second half of the volume, Seki turns to William
Morris’s poetry and aesthetics. She argues that Morris’s early poems on
Arthurian motifs, ranging from lyric, narrative, soliloquy, and verse drama,
are his etude pieces that reflect the influences of Tennyson and Browning on
Morris’s evolution as a poet. To support her claim, she offers a comparative
reading of Tennyson’s “Sir Galahad” (1842), Browning’s “Childe Roland to the
Dark Tower Came” (1855), and Morris’s Galahad poems from The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems (1858), arguing that
Morris blends the secular version of Galahad from Browning’s poem with the “iconographical
figure” from Tennyson’s portrayal (125). Her research demonstrates that Morris
“created a new Galahad … by blending medieval romance with the medieval drama
cycle” (125).
The final two chapters examine Morris’s poetics as laid out
in his epic poem The Earthly Paradise,
which appeared a decade following The
Defence of Guenevere and offered retellings of popular myths and legends. Modern
critics including F. R. Leavis and T. S. Eliot criticized Morris’s romanticism
and influenced Morris scholarship for decades, downplaying Morris’s poetry as
escapism. Following Jerome McGann’s lead, Seki argues for a reevaluation of
Morris’s poetics within the “original context of Victorian poetics” (139). Seki
reconstructs that context by considering Morris’s original plans for an
illustrated edition of The Earthly
Paradise, with the physical housing of the poem mirroring its poetic
scaffolding. Although such an edition never came to fruition, Morris’s
aesthetics influenced other writers including Walter Pater.
The concluding chapters of The Rhetoric of Retelling Old Romances position William Morris as a
lynch pin connecting Tennyson’s medievalist poetry to Pater’s aesthetics. One
of Seki’s strengths is her ability to generate promising, new connections through
big claims, such as those proposed in the chapters devoted to Morris’s poetry. One
of the weaknesses, however, is the lack of specific and thorough follow through
that takes the established criticism in new and unexpected directions. At
times, the author’s heavy reliance on summaries of earlier criticisms can make
her distinct, original contributions to the field difficult to discern. The
volume has problems with organization and cohesion of the different critical
threads, but these may stem from the fragmented nature of the material (as Seki
demonstrates in her discussion of composition and publication histories) compounded
by the critical disagreements between scholars over the past century. Readers
of this volume will find it a useful distillation of the complex and nuanced
critical arguments that surround Tennyson’s and Morris’s medievalist poetry.
Nicole Lobdell
Georgia Institute of Technology
