The Princess at Cafe Madeline

I know I've used Cafe Madeline in a post title before, but, you know, I'm not traveling anymore, so I'm basically going to be in my house, or on the subway, or at a friend's house who also has to do a lot of reading, or in one of a limited number of cafes. And also, imagine a princess at Cafe Madeline! Doesn't that sound like a fancy situation?

I first heard about Tennyson's "The Princess" in college, when I was writing a paper about the depiction of female university students in Victorian women's and girls' magazines (like The Girl's Own Paper). I was excited that there was a whole famous poem that was about BOTH women's education and princesses! Some of my favorite things! But when I took a look at it, I wasn't encouraged to read more--maybe because it seemed to be more a medieval romance with battles and stuff rather than a delightful school story with princesses in it? I think what I wanted was Harry Potter with princess. Okay, I guess Harry Potter + princesses = The Princess School. Anyway, when I started reading "The Princess" this summer, I had a vague memory of not being impressed with it in the past, but a strong feeling of wanting to give it another chance--and, of course, a certain wariness about reading a text that makes FUN of princesses at the university, and women's education in general, which is so mean, because how else are those princesses going to learn Frog-Kissing and Embroidery, and how will Snow, Rose, Ella, and whatever weird name they came up with for Rapunzel forge friendships that will last a lifetime?

The framing story for "The Princess" is set during an educational/recreational treat being held at Sir Walter Vivian's country estate for the local rabble; Sir Walter is a patron of the "Institute" in the neighboring borough, which is presumably an institute of practical education for working men. So from the beginning there's this suggestion of medieval romance (Sir Walter's last name is quite Arthurian) as well as the idea of education for people who haven't historically been educated. A different kind of education is represented by the narrator and his friends, who are on break from college (presumably Oxford or Cambridge) visiting Sir Walter's son. The poem establishes early on that the same kind of education isn't appropriate for everyone. The education offered by the Institute is more like entertainment: "sport/Went hand in hand with Science" as the educators from the Institute do what seems like a series of magic tricks, "rear[ing] a font of stone" and "dr[awing], from butts of water on the slope,/ The fountain of the moment, playing, now /A twisted snake, and now a rain of pearls, /Or steep-up spout whereon the gilded ball /Danced like a wisp." This scientific magic strikes me as both a bread-and-circus type of amusement, and as an indication of how strange and magical C19 scientific advances seemed to Tennyson and his contemporaries (and incidentally how strange this potential class leveling through science might be--"strange was the sight and smacking of the time," Tennyson says of the sporting tenants.) Throughout "The Princess" there's a fascination with geology and paleontology that you also see in In Memoriam, and that seems interestingly fused with images of medieval history and legend. There's something going on in this text where the ammonite is equivalent with the Arthurian: as the visiting college students explore the house (another example of Victorian great-house-showing) they see

Carved stones of the Abbey-ruin in the park,
Huge Ammonites, and the first bones of Time;
And on the tables every clime and age
Jumbled together; celts and calumets,
Claymore and snowshoe, toys in lava, fans
Of sandal, amber, ancient rosaries,
Laborious orient ivory sphere in sphere,
The cursed Malayan crease, and battle-clubs
From the isles of palm:

I guess this is also just a classic cabinet of curiosities, mixing the exotic & oriental with the British historical with fossils--a jumble of knowledge available to British imperialists in 1847. But I don't know. I feel like Tennyson's making use of this jumble to make education & science & knowledge magical again, as part of that weird Victorian medievalism. (Was there ever an era when science didn't seem magical? Maybe just that poor reviled 18th century? but that would have been enough for the Victorians to react against it.)

Anyway, among the legends of the manor is some story about a woman warrior who defended her castle in the Crusades or something. All the aristocratic kids go sit in some ruin with young Walter's aunt and his sisterd Lilia (probably his sister) and talk about the story and how there are no such women now. Lilia retorts

'There are thousands now
Such women, but convention beats them down:
It is but bringing up; no more than that:
You men have done it: how I hate you all!

She says she wishes she was a princess and a poetess who could start her own college and show everyone that with the right education women can be as good as men! And the boys are like, "hey, that would be nice, there are no girls at our college, huh? Imagine if we had

prudes for proctors, dowagers for deans,
And sweet girl-graduates in their golden hair

And Lilia is like, "no way, there would be no boys allowed in my college so you guys couldn't ogle us." Then everybody decides they should tell a story for some reason (I think because Lilia is like, "what do you guys do at college when there are no girls" and they're like "we make up stories"?) and of course the narrator is a poet because he is Tennyson, so he starts.

But the conceit is that "The Princess" is actually serially narrated by all seven of the college friends (like that part in Little Women), and so I was really looking forward to seeing all the funny twists the different college friends  would put in the story, and I was extremely disappointed to find that the whole story is in the exact same consistent meter and voice and tone. The whole time you're like, "No way is this being narrated by seven different guys" and at the end Tennyson explains it by saying the version you just read is the version he smoothed out and made uniform after they improvised it--apparently after they make up the story they're like, "Tennyson, make it poetic for us!"

So the only polyvocality you get comes from these interstitial songs, which are supposedly sung by the aunt and Lilia and the other women listening to the story as little intermissions between each college student's part of the story. These songs are probably the most famous part of "The Princess," because they're considered beautiful little Tennysonian lyrics, while most people aren't that excited about the narrative itself (and apparently Tennyson added the songs later, to make his meaning clearer? but I still don't understand his meaning.) Wikipedia claims that these songs, sung by real women in the framing story, are supposed to provide a genuine and sincere feminine perspective to contrast with the satirical, anti-feminist voice of the main narrative, but I'm not sure it works that way. The songs are all really all about the nuclear family and how sad the wife is that the husband is at war, or that somebody died, so I guess they humanize the women, but they certainly don't make a case for women's education or feminism or something that contrasts with the satire of the narrative.

This is partly because the narrative, while it satirizes women's education and presents a man-hating feminist bluestocking as the primary villain, isn't necessarily misogynist--it ends up presenting what Tennyson probably thinks is a very centrist, balanced perspective on gender and love and learning, a very Victorian separate-but-equal, separate-spheres attitude that reverences women's unique qualities and their humanizing effect on men. So the man-hating feminist bluestocking is bad, but so is the imperialist he-man misogynist homophobic father of the prince who tells the story (and who goes to seek Princess Ida, to whom he was betrothed in childhood and who reneges on their engagement to found this college in the wilderness.) The dad is always like "be a man and fight with men!" and "Man is the hunter; woman is his game . . . We hunt them for the beauty of their skins; /They love us for it, and we ride them down" and he's clearly wrong; more sympathetic but also quite comic is the princess's brother, who says "'sdeath" every three seconds to hilarious effect. Princess Ida herself is kind of a tragic and beautiful figure, although the message seems to be that she should throw off that misguided effort at learning and work on being an emotional caregiver who sings gorgeous love lyrics like "Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white" and binds up her lover's wounds. But I do think the antifeminism is tempered a little by the suggestion that both sexes are changing, perhaps due to each other's influence (something like this is going on with all the mirror imagery in "Angel in the House" as well), a theme that brings us back to all these dinosaurs and geologic time and history and scientific progress, stuff that Tennyson finds exciting and scary and upsetting and inevitable.

At one point Ida takes everyone on a geologic expedition and points out a big fossil lying on a bank, saying that women's condition will look to future generations of women like this fossil does to us; later, the prince says to his dad that rather than having to go to war with Ida's family

I would the old God of war himself were dead,
Forgotten, rusting on his iron hills,
Rotting on some wild shore with ribs of wreck,
Or like an old-world mammoth bulked in ice,
Not to be molten out.

So there's this suggestion that traditional models of both masculine and feminine behavior might be on their way out, and because of the way in which Tennyson has equated ammonites and fossils and so on with heraldry and Gothic ruins and so on, there's something very sad and anti-English-tradition about this fact, and therefore this text is still very anti-feminist--but I think it's an interesting example of a certain kind of conservative but practical attitude to social progress, one that also comes out at the end, in the framing story, when one of the college friends (the son of a conservative MP) points across the channel to France and is like "what a disaster it is over there!" He says

God bless the narrow sea which keeps her off,
And keeps our Britain, whole within herself,
A nation yet, the rulers and the ruled—

In his analogy, France is like the Princess's college, because it's so revolutionary and terrible, but also England is like the Princess's college, because it's self-contained, celibate, a walled garden. So we know that can't last, either. And Tennyson's speaker gives us his final word of cautious social progressiveness:

'Have patience,' I replied, 'ourselves are full
Of social wrong; and maybe wildest dreams
Are but the needful preludes of the truth:
For me, the genial day, the happy crowd,
The sport half-science, fill me with a faith.
This fine old world of ours is but a child Y
et in the go-cart. Patience! Give it time
To learn its limbs: there is a hand that guides.'

The poem ends with "little Lilia, rising quietly" removing some fancy clothes she'd playfully draped over a statue of the family ancestor Sir Ralph at the beginning of the story, and everyone going home. Lilia's quietness is interesting to me--she was the one who incited the boys to the the story, and in the middle she got sick of their "raillery" and kind of bloodthirstily demanded a battle scene, which she got. We can read her silence at the end as her having been put in her place by the story and by the failure of the Princess's experiment, but on the other hand we didn't get a Taming of the Shrew-type recapitulation; we don't know what Lilia thinks, or what she's going to do when she grows up. Lilia's frustrations, because she's a "real" character and not part of the allegorical story, seem to be recognized by Tennyson as legitimate and real in a way that maybe the Princess's are not, and are another suggestion that he does think things are changing.

In the end, I think Tennyson's coolly centrist attitude comes from the fact that he's not that interested in women's education or feminism or the Woman Question--he thought it would be a nice topical subject for a poem, and as a poet he naturally sympathizes with the women he writes about as well as the men, and he had fun imagining a women's college and writing love lyrics. I think he's more interested in the large-scale change of which women's issues may be a small part--the instability of life and history and the literary tradition and where does he fit in and also where does Arthur Hallam fit in and that, my dear ones, is another story for another time.