『왕의 목가』에 나타난 테니슨의 정치성

Abstract

Many critics tend to think that Alfred Tennyson turned conservative after he became a poet laureate, and to use The Idylls of the King to support their argument. This may sound convincing since the poet dedicated this poem to Prince Albert and Queen Victoria and seemed to praise King Arthur in the poem. This paper, however, argues that the poem portrays the inevitability of the collapse of the kingship, which is out of sync with the new liberal trend of the kingdom. It tries to unveil Tennyson’s political unconscious, that is, what Fredric Jameson calls “ideologeme,” the smallest unit of the antagonistic collective discourses in The Political Unconscious by revealing the negative images throughout the poem. The skepticisms around Arthur’s origin and his ruling capability evoke anxiety and tension. Many critics attribute the collapse of the kingdom to the corruption of the queen and the knights, not the king himself who is ideal and innocent. The poem, however, seems to suggest that if the king had not been too idealistic to sense the real world, he could have saved his kingdom.