chivalry – Kate Macdonald

Submission and cross-dressing: Tennyson’s The Princess

We’re in the 19th century for the Really Like This Book podcast scripts catch-up, in the Victorian era, when the British Poet Laureate, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, published an epic poem called The Princess, on the subject of what to do about bizarre ideas about women’s education, independence, and silly things like that.

The submission of Victorian women was expected due to their supposed intellectual inferiority. A woman who tried to educate herself was violating Nature, because women were to be angels in the house, and to stay there, expecting nothing more from life than to serve their husbands (because they would all of course get married), and to raise their children as perfect souls. The artist and critic John Ruskin was particularly annoying on this subject, since he believed in some terrifying double standards. The Victorian woman must be incapable of error, incorruptible, infallible (though I’d like to know where she was to get this wisdom if she wasn’t allowed to leave the house), and would rule men in her own domestic domain. If the woman of the home allowed danger or harm to enter the house, it was her fault, because then the house would not be a home. He made no space for the possibility that a man might bring the danger home (his list included disease, crime, drink, and false religion). A man might also refuse to be ruled by his wife. Imagine that.

Thankfully for common sense, these ideals, though widespread, were also widely disagreed with. Many Victorian novels (including those we teach now, for their alignment with modern thinking) will show you that middle-class women in particular were disturbed by these restrictions, because the plots seem to try to winkle them out of such restricted lives and show them a different way of living, even if they all rush nervously back to the drawing-room and predictable safety.

So where does that leave us with Tennyson? He published The Princess in 1847. It consists of a Prologue, and seven Books: this marks it as an epic in form alone. It’s one of Tennyson’s earlier works, but is very well-known because of some of the individual poems within it, called the ‘intercalary poems’. It’s very easy to read, because it’s written in blank verse, a classical conversational form in unrhyming iambic pentameters.

Here’s the story: Princess Ida retreats from male society and creates a university for women where nothing male may enter. This feminine intellectual paradise is infiltrated by the Prince to whom she is betrothed, plus a couple of his friends, all disguised in frocks. He tries to persuade her to relent and marry him after all, and then his aggressive father declares war on her father, and the university is turned into a war hospital. The poem ends with Ida being persuaded by the Prince that they can co-exist harmoniously in marriage.

This poem is a ‘problem poem’, but it’s designed to be a comedy (in the Shakespearian sense), in that the women are made to see the error of their ways through the gentle persuasion of love. The Princess has to surrender, although she ends the poem in a ‘triumphant union’ with the Prince. She is sad that she can’t continue her resistance to patriarchal society (conservative, brutal, instinctive, unthinking) or continue her mission of a separate educational establishment for women (an intellectual, futuristic and abstract goal).

The Princess really is a very odd poem, because it’s self-consciously archaic, and deliberately farcical in many respects. It begins with a hissy-fit by the Prince’s father, a mighty king, who is furious when Ida’s father sends a message that the Princess has decided not to marry his son. He stomps and rages, and tears things up, and vows to send an army to crush the Princess’s pride. The Prince, who seems a resourceful sort of chap, suggests that he goes to discuss things with the Princess, but his father, still in a right old temper, forbids him, Naturally, the Prince, and his two best friends Florian and Cyril – I don’t know why I can’t find the Prince’s name: perhaps he’s an Everyman character – disobey this petulant ruling, and slip out of the palace at night to travel to Princess Ida’s realm. But remember that this is a women-only realm: no men may enter. So the three gallant gentlemen dress up as women, and here’s where the farce begins. Cross-dressing is a staple ingredient in British comedy: we really do find it funny when men wear frocks. They register at the Princess’s university as gentlewomen students, and attend classes in philosophy led by, ta da!, Florian’s own sister, Psyche, with whom Cyril immediately falls in love.

photograph by Julia Margaret Cameron to illustrate The Princess — photograph by Julia Margaret Cameron to illustrate *The Princess*

Princess Ida is treated with respect in the poem, though there is a bit of undergraduate sniggering when she first meets the three adventurers. We know that they’re men fooling the girls, and so we can enjoy the humour of the situation where Ida gravely lectures them on how unnecessary men are, and how much better a society is when it is ruled by women. Ida is a symbol of heroic will rather than a spoiled girl who won’t do what the men want. She embodies heroic comedy, rather than the domestic comedy which is what all the marriage-making is about. Marriage is a comic symbol, the ultimate in joining and making.

But is it a good poem? Is it enjoyable? It does use many different tones, which shows that, in trying to do too many things, Tennyson was never going to succeed. It’s also a right old mix of genres, using the heroic, the comic, the domestic, the epic, the lyrical, the idyllic, almost all at the same time. Good professional showmanship of technique, but is it good art? Some attempts at genre effect fail completely: the poem is framed by a Prologue and a Conclusion set in a standard mid-Victorian country-house party, and the seven Books of the poem are supposed to have been narrated by seven different speakers (to whom we were introduced in the Prologue), yet their voices are indistinguishable. They were supposed to have different personalities and points of view, yet the background society from which they come is so conventional, that in comparison with this fantasy landscape of Princes and Princesses, they are all the same.

Something I rather like about this poem is that it is particularly British. It uses Arthurian and chivalric ideas and terminology as a basis for the university experiment, and for the actions of the three young male invaders, who are knights errant on a quest in the service of love. It is totally fantastical, utterly unrealistic, a delirious exercise in sheer romantic silliness. The great Victorian satirists Gilbert and Sullivan saw its potential immediately, because this was the inspiration for their magnificent comic operetta Princess Ida. The Princess is fun to read; do try it.

Woman causes Oxford mayhem: Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson

the copy I was given for my 21st birthday, by a rather lovely young man called Max (as it happened)

This Really Like this Book podcast scripts catch-up is about the incomparable Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm, from 1911. Tremble at the tale of her assault on the august traditions of Oxford and its university, when she made every student fall in love with her, and worse, after which she went home to have a relaxing bath before taking the Cambridge train the next day. How could so many young men lose their minds for a mere woman? How could a mere woman, who didn’t appreciate anything about Oxford’s traditions, enthrall so many young men of, we assume, normal or even above-normal intelligence? Max Beerbohm is the answer, since for several years his professional purpose had been to puncture Oxford’s pomposity, its self-regard and its noxious habit of thinking itself better than any other place.

Beerbohm was one of the great fin de siècle satirists. Before 1900 he was most famous for his contribution to The Yellow Book, that reputedly scandalous but actually rather pretentious quarterly magazine that was published mainly for those who wished to be seen reading it. His contributions are remarkably unpretentious, because he is always poking fun at the avant garde writers and artists of the day. They had very little sense of humour, and so could not defend themselves from his clever wit. He began his satirical career while at Oxford as a student, as a caricaturist, and parodist, mingling with the wits and following the path of Oscar Wilde. He left Oxford without the bother of taking a degree, and developed a career as an artist and writer. George Bernard Shaw called him ‘the incomparable Max’, an amazingly high accolade from the grumpiest man in the English theatre. By the time of the Second World War he was still a highly regarded Grand Old Man of British humour, and his collection of short pieces, Seven Men, is a work of comic genius.

Beerbohm’s drawings are exquisite, really clever and very beautiful watercolour illustrations. As a writer he skewered the lumbering behemoth that Oxford had become; as a cultural artefact (its architecture, its monuments, its geography), and as a social mountainside for the inadequate to fall down from, and for the magnificent to sit astride. Gosh: Max’s style is infectious. I will try to revert to normal speech patterns.

Zuleika Dobson is the granddaughter of the Warden of Judas. This is the first important thing we learn about her, and already the terms have to be explained for those who don’t know Oxford as much as Oxford expects them to know it. And before all that, I have to explain that by ‘Oxford’ I mean the university and its colleges, not the town, which (in the early 1900s) was held as negligible, a mere provider of food, beds and service for the students. Oxford University is made up of colleges, in which students live and from which they are taught. Each college at Oxford is run by a man (now also by women) of either great learning, great moral stature, great achievement or great connections, and his formal title is something like the Warden, or the Master. He has administrative and legal power, but is not necessarily a great scholar (though often is). So Zuleika comes from a Victorian scholarly family. This is a good thing for boys, but for girls its principal advantage is that it makes her socially acceptable. Judas is an invented name for a college, so no real college will be demeaned by the actions in the novel, and Beerbohm can invent as many rituals about Judas as he wants. Dorothy L Sayers also did this some 20 years later in her novel Gaudy Night, where Harriet Vane’s college, Shrewsbury, is a complete and perfect invention for plot purposes only.

Zuleika Dobson is not perfect; her eyes are too large, her waist too small, her hair too curly, her regard too intense, and so on. She is a governess, but has had to take a second career, as a professional conjuror, a turner of tricks for the masses, because she is an orphan, obliged to support herself. She had to avoid serial proposals of marriage in every house she entered as a governess, until one day she was given a conjuring set by the besotted eldest son, and absconded that night to develop a career beyond the reach of soppy boys. She becomes an international sensation, receives proposals of marriage by the barrow-load, but she is not interested. She vows that she will never love where she is loved. This is important: her decision is a satire on the perverseness of women, but is also a neat and perfectly executed fact on which the plot of the novel will turn.

On arriving at Oxford to visit her grandfather, Zuleika observes, as usual, with a little ennui, that all the men she passes stare at her as if conjured into immobility; except one, the Duke of Dorset. (That’s another invented title: Beerbohm was not interested in libel suits, not after Wilde’s trial.) And Zuleika smiles. This is the beginning of the duke’s downfall that will lead to the immolation of Oxford’s youth (again: not the townsfolk, just the students. The townsfolk have more sense.)

The Duke of Dorset is the most august and noble undergraduate of whom Oxford can boast. Yet Beerbohm asks us to notice that the Duke eats to the same standard as his peers, lodges in simple college rooms like every other man, and does not presume, very much, on his personal and hereditary magnificence. He knows the importance of humility when it has a place. And then he falls in love with Zuleika, who will not have him precisely because he is in love with her. When he is angry with her behaviour, and her rejection, she falls back in love with him, briefly. Their matching pearl ornaments change colour in indignation. She throws water at him when he will not stop pestering her. But he is obliged to escort her about the town, and down to the river, because a gentleman must obey a lady’s commands, even when he is also on his way to the river to commit suicide for love of her. He obligingly promises to call out her name as he jumps, and to make sure that everyone will know that he does it for her alone. But the grandeur and folly of his quixotic action is utterly ruined by all the other Oxford undergraduates. Not that Zuleika cares. As I said, after seeing this great act of youth’s devotion, she walks home happily in the rain (though also very sorrowfully and nobly, bearing her great responsibility with satisfied pride) to have a bath.

Why is this novel so funny? The most important factor for modern readers is its speed. Edwardian literature can be ponderous; it took the First World War to make rapid-fire wit and a snappy storytelling pace popular. Beerbohm was a great wit, which always requires good timing, and this comes out beautifully in the pace of the story.

The second factor is the bathos, the juxtaposition of the high with the trivial, the magnificent with the low. Any joke picked at random from (say) Monty Python is bathetic, because it takes a serious theme (eg death) and a common or low subject (eg a parrot), and releases them together into the world to be ridiculous. Beerbohm is satirising Oxford society, and the pretentiousness of the very proud and the very self-important, and it is always attractive to read about high society and its stupidities, and to laugh at them.

The third reason why this novel is funny is that Zuleika Dobson is absolutely not an object for adoration and desire. Yes, she is beautiful, a dazzling, elegant and modern young woman wearing clinging gowns in sophisticated fabrics, but she is greedy, selfish, stupid, ignorant, ill-educated, self-obsessed, uncaring and inconstant. If all the youth of Oxford fall for her pretty face (big eyes, tiny teeth, curly hair and all), what stupids they must be. She isn’t even particularly good at her conjuring. She was taught her art, but did not develop it. She has no natural talents except for dressing, and her French maid does most of that for her.

The fourth source of humour is the stupendous arrogance of the Duke of Dorset. I have to say, this apparent paragon of Oxford youth and of the British nobility always reminds me of Lord Peter Wimsey, because Dorothy L Sayers eulogised all his perfections too, some 15 years later, but without any sense that she might have been over-egging the cake of her adoration. At least Wimsey has an intellect. Dorset’s intellect – for instance, his capacity to write poetry in seven or eight different languages and styles as an after-dinner amusement – is simply too ludicrous to be endured.

I love this book because Beerbohm deliberately messes around with the forms. He is constantly addressing the reader; he is perpetually hopping off to visit the Muses on Parnassus (because this is supposed to be a satirical tragedy and Melpomene, muse of tragedy, is dragged through the story looking more and more distressed). He changes his tone willy-nilly, and he builds in irreverent, extended jokes. My favourite is the one in which he speculates about how Lord Byron would have grown old, had he not died at Missolonghi, deteriorating into a pompous old bore with Dundreary whiskers, always writing letters to the Times.

In this novel pomposity is pricked perfectly. Arrogance and the accretion of traditions for no good reason, fossilised unchanging rituals and the dominance of the classics, are all ridiculed. Women are of no importance in Oxford, and are treated badly by the youth, either ignored and abandoned when Zuleika is in sight, or trampled underfoot in a rush for another sighting. So, in a way, it’s rather nice that Zuleika can leave these ridiculous men to go back to college in peace for a nice bath. How many women can take this comfort after a trying time caused by men?

Mark Twain’s A Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

Launching into a new miniseries of podcast scripts from Why I Really Like This Book, the next few weeks will see a long and enjoyable wallow in stories about King Arthur. This will include early British history, fantasies about Merlin, and the utterly compelling theory that when the Romans pulled out of Britain, somehow the Saxon warlord culture that emerged also brought forth the stories about Arthur that were medievalised into the knights of the Round Table. I don’t begin with Sir Thomas Malory, because, entrancing as the Morte Darthur is, it’s rather hard to read, since it isn’t a novel at all, but a collection of repetitious events stuck together. I’m going to start with the American writer Mark Twain’s satire on knight errantry, A Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, first published in 1889, and now more commonly known as A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. (Warning: here be spoilers.)

Mark Twain was irreverent. This work of Arthurness may have come as a shock to the pious late Victorians who were used to swooning over Tennyson’s Arthurian poems from The Idylls of the King, only a few years earlier. Tennyson wrote as though he were a Pre-Raphaelite without a sense of humour. The whole point of the Yankee is that the story juxtaposes the ignorant 6^th century against the knowitall, up to the minute, technologically superior 19^th century, and the 19^th century wins, right until the last chapter. Twain makes no explanation as to how his 19^th-century man, one Hank Morgan, travels back in time and place from Hartford,, Connecticut, to 6^th-century England; he just wakes up one morning and there he is. He is also dealt with as any 6^th-century stranger would be: he is challenged by a knight, refuses to fight, and is taken prisoner as that knight’s personal property, and condemned to die at the stake. Luckily (and this is the most ridiculous coincidence in the novel) Hank just happens to know that in a day’s time there will be an eclipse of the sun, so on the strength of that, he sends out word that he is a wizard, and will cause mighty terrible things to happen unless he is released. He is not, the eclipse happens, the populace are very much impressed and terrified, and Hank Morgan becomes King Arthur’s prime minister.

He can see a lot of scope for his brain and superior knowledge, and the nice thing is, none of it is for his own aggrandisement. The Boss, for that is now his name, is not at all interested in getting rich, or commanding power where he doesn’t need it. He is a reformer, and is determined to reform 6^th-century society with judicious applications of 19^th-century technology. The first things to make their absence known are the basic necessities of life; no soap, no matches, no mirrors. There were no books, paper, pens or ink, and no glass for windows. There was no sugar, coffee, tea or tobacco: and now I think we get the picture. Twain’s hero is not at all interested in enjoying life in the 6^th century; he just wants to return to his own time as fast as he can, or, if that isn’t possible, to make where he is like his own time. It helps that the entire nation thinks that he is a magician, and that Merlin (who in this novel is a doddering and malign old man with no power whatsoever) is not going to get in his way. At least, he won’t get in the Boss’s way once the Boss has blown up Merlin’s tower with homemade dynamite. Now that the Boss really is the boss, King Arthur’s sole advisor, the Boss can get on with a more noble long-term plan, of relieving the oppression of the poor, and removing the tyranny of the knightly class. The rest of the novel is part adventure, part philosophical nature ramble, on how an ignorant and illiterate populace can be persuaded to help turn themselves into a republic. Spot the American influence.

Not that Twain has anything against King Arthur. Arthur remains a noble and honourable figure throughout (I think it would be hard to change his character in any circumstances), but he is a bit dim. Twain does an excellent job of thinking through how 6^th-century man might think, speak, and reason, and he sticks to it. There is very little anachronism here, in the way of 6^th-century people thinking like 19^th-century people, that can’t be explained by sustained exposure to the Boss’s own speech and thought processes. His chief assistant, Clarence, learns fast how to keep up with the Boss and his schemes and planning, but he still speaks in the way he was brought up: he’s just a fast learner with the flexibility of youth. King Arthur, on the other hand, is a great and noble savage, with excellent instincts for truth and justice, but that’s about it. The Boss takes Arthur on a tour of his kingdom in disguise, so that the king may see the common people close up, but Arthur’s inability to act common nearly gets them caught several times, and in the end they are sold as slaves. The Boss, in his turn, has to act like a 6^th-century knight, especially when a fair maiden arrives at court with a tale of woe and captured ladies. He is provided with a horse and weapons and armour (complicated to put on and manage), and off he goes on a quest, with the lady sitting behind him chattering unstoppably. Problems begin when the sun gets stronger and the shade gets weaker, and he gets hotter, and has an itch on the back, and a fly inside his helmet. These unbearable conditions force him to dismount, and get Sandy (the lady’s name is Alisande, so naturally he calls her Sandy) to take his helmet off and pour water inside his armour until he is comfortable again. Only now, he can’t get back on the horse, so he walks and Sandy rides. By such means are the impracticalities of knight errantry skewered lengthily and lovingly by Twain.

Bing Crosby as The Boss?Not very believable. — Bing Crosby as The Boss? Not very believable.

They run into Morgan Le Fay, a terrifying witch, married to King Uriens, who is a doddering old man with no courage (very much like the Red Queen and Red King from Alice in Wonderland, which had been published a few years earlier). In Morgan’s castle the tone of this novel begins to turn sharp, since real human misery and cruelty are here, in her dungeons. The Boss sets people free, and does what he can to alleviate suffering, but he can’t wipe away years of torture and confinement. This is what I admire about this novel. It is not fantasy wish-fulfilment, in which all ills are easily wiped away by a stroke. Actions have consequences, which can’t be got rid of. People get killed and die of other means: the casual brutality of the 6^th century is accepted by the Boss, possibly because in the 1880s there was a lot of casual 19^th-century brutality as well. The Boss blows people up, kills people, arranges for things to happen that will inadvertently kill people: it’s all rather shocking but also very real. This is what people are like. He deals with the knightly class once and for all by first defeating his most hated enemy in a joust with a lasso, and then with a revolver. Many knights die, and no-one thinks anything of this, because (we are reminded) jousting was not about the spectacle and the romance, it was about maiming and disabling your opponent with heavy, fast and sharp weapons and then cutting his head off. If death has to happen the Boss’s method is cleaner and faster and more humane. In a passage near the end, when the Boss is describing the advance of newspaper journalism in Arthur’s kingdom, he mentions as an aside that the first novelist to have his book published made a bad joke once too often, and so the Boss suppressed the book and hung the author. That sort of thing comes as a shock when we also read about the Boss’s enlightened practices and useful inventions for the betterment of mankind. He really is not like us at all. He’s like we might have been over 120 years ago.

Will Rogers and Maureen O'Sullivan? Much better. — Will Rogers and Maureen O’Sullivan? Much better.

What does this novel have to say about Arthur, and the Round Table? Arthur is untouchable: a bit gullible, but a hero and a great man. Guenevere is a bored and foolish queen in love with Sir Launcelot, which Arthur knows about, but is more sad that the queen doesn’t seem to love him. Sir Launcelot is the greatest of the knights, and a sportsman as well, we can’t say anything bad about him. This eternal love triangle brings the kingdom to ruin in the end, as it must, because you can’t change the end of this story, even if the middle has been seriously messed around with. And after the death of Arthur, in comes the Church, about whom the Boss has been railing all along, since he is afraid of the Church, and rightly so. He had plans for getting rid of the Catholics and encouraging an early growth of Protestantism, but something else demanded his attention, and so the Reformation had to wait for another thousand years. Most sad of all (spoiler alert), now that the Boss has married Sandy and they have a baby girl, he inadvertently gets killed by a malign knight and is flung forward to his own time, where the reader first met him. Luckily he dies not very long afterwards, because to be missing your wife and child who have been abandoned 1300 years ago is torture we don’t want to hear much about.

But don’t be sad: there is so much humour in this novel. Satire means laughter, and the witty asides and terrific snappy dialogue in the inner thoughts of the Boss make this a novel to treasure.

Tag: chivalry

Submission and cross-dressing: Tennyson’s The Princess

Mark Twain’s A Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

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