Jill Marie Treftz’s “Tennyson’s The Princess and the Culture of Collection.”

摘要

Tennyson famously dismissed The Princess (1847) as “only a medley” (qtd. in HallamTennyson 2.71). Jill Marie Treftz argues in her cornucopia of an article that ThePrincess is not only a medley but “eminently a medley” (258), mirroring in its form – alyrical collection – the poem’s engagement with the nineteenth-century culture ofcollection. Collection, through its connection to discourses surrounding education,natural history, gender and colonialism, offered a “scientific, or at least quasi-scientific,rationale for what might otherwise be construed as a purely consumerist and evendecadent pursuit” (239); the “science” of collecting became “one way of ordering theworld according to the modes of British thought and British morality” (242). ThePrincess, according to Treftz, both participates in, and endorses, the culture ofacquisition: the collection at Vivian-place, and the various collections portrayed in thepoem, reaffirm “the importance of these acquisitions to the establishment and survivalof British national identity and the imperial power that relies upon it” (239). While theinterior narrative, where collection is directly linked to gender norms, helps preserve“the domestic social order upon which British national and imperial identity rests”(239).