Abstract

GUIMARAES, Paula Alexandra. The image of the mythical woman in mid-victorian gynotopia: gender and genre in Alfred Tennyson’s The Princess (1847). Diacrítica [online]. 2014, vol.28, n.3, pp.229-250. ISSN 0807-8967.

This article intends to explore the image of the mythical woman (Athena) in one of the first Victorian works on a feminist utopia, Alfred Tennyson’s long mock-heroic narrative poem The Princess (1847), and how contemporary women poets such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning in Aurora Leigh (1857) responded not only to his representation of the feminine, and of the battle of the sexes enacted in it, but also to his way of writing. As its subtitle A Medley indicates, the poem is a deliberate mixture of different genres and genders: the lyrical and the epic, the feminine and the masculine, suggesting not only innovative experimentation in terms of traditional literary forms but also a problematization of essentialist images and concepts. Yet, for Tennyson, the resolution of the political conflict is dependent on the resolution of the love plot, which ultimately results in the highly contested transformation of the feminist ‘Ida’ in a domestic figure.

Keywords : Athena; gynotopia; Tennyson; gender; genre.

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