Queer for Art: Tennyson’s Poetic Autonomy as Female Same-Sex Desire

This article argues that in ‘The Lady of Shalott’, and later, to lesser degree, in In Memoriam, Alfred Tennyson expresses artistic autonomy by a Renaissance poetic trope of female same-sex desire. He does so to do away with the aesthetic closure and separation from the world implied by lesbianism in the Renaissance poetic imaginary. Via readings of these two poems, as well as historical and biographical examination of Tennyson’s writings and contemporaries’ writings about Tennyson – including later sexological writings – this article suggests that Tennyson’s choice of early modern aestheticized lesbianism as figure over the Hellenistic, intellectualized, male homoeroticism newly available in his Oxbridge milieu was personally as well as poetically motivated. Tennyson’s letters and biographies show that the poet was steeped in the tradition of erotic similitude. His poetry suggests that he anticipated the negative association between aestheticism and male homosexuality that would mark the end of his own century, so he portrayed solipsistic artistic production as linked to a female homoeroticism verging on autoeroticism. This article then offers a history of the strategic revival of a specific cultural-imaginary arrangement of female same-sex desire, and re-evaluates Tennyson’s place in the history of nineteenth-century homosexuality. Finally, in tracing erotic similitude’s relationship to autoeroticism, this article articulates the poetic and political stakes of historical morphologies of male homosexuality constructed as social, productive, and active, versus persistent constructions of female homosexuality as sterile, heretical, and anachronistic.