ENGLISH LITERATURE (CBSE/UGC NET)

Detailed explanation-1: -Tennyson’s poem implies that women can develop intellectually without threatening men’s stature, but men cannot develop emotionally and spiritually without losing worldly power.

Detailed explanation-2: -Tennyson explains his views towards women by equating femininity with seclusion through his choice of selecting a cloistered “Lady”-rather than a “Lord”-thus reinforcing conventional Victorian gender roles. This recurring theme of purity among Victorian women is common in Tennyson’s poems.

Detailed explanation-3: -This blank verse narrative poem by Tennyson (1809–1892) is a satire on the state women’s education. The narrative centres on a princess who sets up a University for women, although her plans are disrupted by the intrusion of a prince.

Detailed explanation-4: -The Lady of Shalott by Alfred Lord Tennyson is a popular ballad that illustrates the isolation of a woman in a tower far from what she wants to live and experience. She lives a life imprisoned by a curse she knows no consequence for and so hesitates to live her life the way she would have liked.

Detailed explanation-5: -In his still influential 1958 study of The Princess, John Killham suggests that Tennyson’ s elevation of femininity through the progressive Ida makes him a feminist, and that his poem is “really a serious attempt, artfully disguised, to change an outworn attitude to an important human problem” (3).