Alfred Tennyson
From Commonplace Book
Mariana
- held by Armstrong 1993 to be paradigmatic example of the Victorian "double-poem," in which "the poetic work invites us to consider its expressive lyric utterance [its subject] as itself 'the object of analysis and critique'" (LaPorte 2016 38).
The poignant expression of exclusion to which Mariana's state gives rise, and which is reiterated in the marking of barriers - the moat itself, the gate with clinking latch, and curtained casement, the hinged doors - is simultaneously an analysis of the hypersensitive hysteria induced by the coercion of sexual taboo. These are hymenal taboos, which Mariana is induced, by a cultural consensus that is hidden from her, to experience as her own condition. Hidden from her, but not from the poem, the barriers are man-made, cunningly constructed through the material fabric of the house she inhabits, the enclosed space in which she is confined. It is the narrative voice which describes these spaces, not Mariana as speaker. (13)
- self-reflexivity in the repetitions
