English
Poetry of the XIX and XX Centuries. Factultat de Filología. Universitat de Valencia.
Professor:
Dr. Vicente Forés
Student:
Marcos A. Palao Contreras
On
the moated grange
By
Alfred Lord Tennyson
I am going to comment on the poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson entitled
“Mariana” and how through it Tennyson depicts the role and situation of the
Victorian woman.
The Victorian woman was considered the weaker, more innocent sex. She
had little to no sexual appetite, often capturing all the sympathy and none of
the blame over indiscretions, while the Victorian man represented the fallen,
sinful, and lustful creatures, wrongfully taking advantage of the fragility of
women (Elizabeth Lee, 1997).
And just the source of inspiration for the author seems to support this
idea, because the subject of this poem is drawn from a line in Shakespeare's
play Measure for Measure: "Mariana in the moated grange."
(sparknotes, 2006))
This line describes a young woman, Mariana, waiting for her lover
Angelo, who has abandoned her upon the loss of her dowry in a shipwreck.
Shakespeare's Measure for Measure centers around the fate of Claudio, who is
arrested by Lord Angelo, the temporary leader of Vienna. (wikipedia.org).
Thus two of the characters of Shakespeare’s work are the main characters
of Tennyson’s poem. The first, Mariana would represent Victorian women and her
(formerly) man (inspired by Angelo) would represent Victorian man; the former
being present and the latter being absent, but who is responsible for her
situation.
The main theme in the poem "Mariana" seems to be isolation or
ignominy. Although this is the main subject of the poem we can see other side
themes to it such as the feelings of loss of hope and the consequences of
behaving or not according to one’s feelings. Mariana, the character in the poem
chooses not to act and through this course of lack of motion she found herself
lonely and eventually losing hope. Well, she could act, but probably just to
kill herself, because she says and repeats once and again that “I would that I
were dead!”
Tennyson’s first inspiration seems to be the isolation in which Mariana
is left in Measure for Measure, because the isolation is a kind of feeling that
would come out of Victorian woman situation depicted above and as a result of
being the disposable part of the relationship, those who are unable to exist in
a world without men and are entirely inferior to men in their society,
something that carried the theme of the woman at the window (that is waiting
for someone to come, as Mariana is) to a further extreme, and which became a
major subject for artists during the nineteenth century. A prove of which is
that often she appeared as the romantic victim of love in paintings like “The Blessed
Damozel” by Dante Gabriel Rosseti (Brenda Mondragon) or Millais' Mariana
itself, in which the disconsolate heroine of Tennyson's lyric
"Mariana" waits, cut off from the world, for her lover to come to her
(Elisabeth Nelson)
This isolation is portrayed in the poem right in the title the author
choses, as she is in a “moated grange”, which is a country house –an already
isolated setting- and which is surrounded by a deep ditch filled with water, a
moat, and which was usually found around fortresses (wikipedia.org), thus it
could also be an image of the isolated princesses that knights were supposed to
rescue during the Middle Ages, and that’d be why Mariana is longing for her
love to come. But also the description of the house and the surroundings it’s a
pretty cold and dark and sad and lonesome one, as we can see in several lines
where Tennyson’s description includes expressions such as “blackest moss” (line
2), “rusted nails” (line 3) or “[…]
sheds look’d sad and strange” (line 5) or where this first stanza is about to
finish when Tennyson finally describes how “weeded and worn the ancient thatch”
is (line 7) “upon the lonely moated grange” (line 8).
This image of isolation and sadness is a real one she feels at all time,
it does not matter whether it is day or night time, she feels bad along the
day which is stated when Tennyson
writes that “[…] her tears fell with the dews at even / Her tears fell ere the
dews were dried” (lines 13 and 14) that there’s not hope for her neither,
because she can not expect to happen any good to her as “She could not look on
the sweet heaven” (line 15) not during day time neither at night (“Either at
morn or eventide”, line 16).
The loss of hope, the sense of despair is portrayed in the refrain of
the poem, which is placed at the end of each stanza where she expresses her
lament for her man to have come (“He cometh not […]”) and says that as a result
she is “[…] aweary, aweary” and that there is no possibility of change because
“From the dark fen the oxen’s low / Came to her: without hope of change” and
that the only solution she envisages to her situation is death (“I would that I
were dead!”).
Besides, this placement of the refrain seems to work as a spell song that contributes to the atmosphere of grey (Victorian) enchantment of the house and surroundings which reinforces the sense of isolation. This grey atmosphere is described throughout the poem as I have already stated above when Tennyson describes de grange, but also later on when he describes the surroundings as for instance when “the thickest dark did trance the sky” (line 18) and “she glanced athwart the glooming flats” (line 20) and when “Upon the middle of the night / waking she heard the night-fowl crow” (lines 25 and 26). This description of the inside (the grange) and of he outside (the surroundings) could symbolize the whole situation of negativity in which all Victorian women found themselves and what was their mood like and that of the world around them: being alone, being hopeless.
SOURCES:
-
Elizabeth Lee. “Victorian Theories of Sex and Sexuality”. 1996.
victorianweb.org. National University of Singapore. 9 Mayo 2006. <http://www.victorianweb.org/gender/sextheory.html>
-
“Tennyson’s poetry: Mariana”. 2006. sparknotes.com. SparkNotes LLC. 9 Mayo
2006. <http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/tennyson/section1.html>
-
“Measure for measure”. 6 Mayo 2006. wikipedia.org.
Wikipedia. 9 Mayo 2006. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measure_for_Measure>
Dante
Gabriel Rosetti. “Neurotic poets: The Blessed Damozel”. neuroticpoets.com.
Brenda C. Mondragon. 9 Mayo 2006.
<http://www.neuroticpoets.com/rossetti/damozel.shtml>
-
Elisabeth Nelson. “The Embowered Woman: Pictorial Interpretations of "The
Lady of Shalott". 30 November 2004. Victorianweb.org. National University of Singapore. 9 Mayo 2006.
<http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/tennyson/losbower.html
-
“Moat”. 3 May 2006. wikipedia.org. Wikipedia. 9 Mayo 2006. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moat>