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A Semiological Reading of Alfred Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and Other Poems and Julia Margaret Cameron’s Photographic Illustrations
Abstract
Alfred Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and Other Poems connects poetry with photographic illustrations by Julia Margaret Cameron. The book is one of the pioneering examples of illustrated poetry. Cameron had her friends and family members dressed in medieval clothes to pose for her and photographed them for Tennyson’s epic. However, when she willingly accepted Tennyson’s request to illustrate his poetry book with photographs, she did not envisage how her photographs would look reduced in scale in a poetry book. Then she had them reprinted in a deluxe edition to increase the effect of poetry through her photographic illustrations. In time, her portraits of family and friends reached a level of not only illustrating Tennyson’s poems but also passing over the influence of poetry. Cameron’s photographs, despite the technological difficulties of her age in printing photography, reflected the themes and characters of Tennyson’s poems to carry their meanings further.
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Keywords: Photography Appropriation Portrait Portrait Photography In the early years of photography, portrait photography has produced quite a lot of different art and style, from the self-portrait of Robert Cornelius (1839) to the 'Self-portrait as a drowned man' (1840) photograph by Hippolyte Bayard, from the pictorial portraits of Julia Margaret Cameron to the present day handled by the artist in different ways. Portrait approaches that go back and forth between reality and fiction have turned into a completely different structure with the Postmodern period. With the postmodern period, a stance was determined in which different understandings were exhibited against modernism by moving away from the existing modernist norms. One of the distinctive understandings of art observed in the postmodern period is Appropriation. This approach manifests itself as an understanding of representing an image by owning it. Appropriation portrait approach, on the other hand, contains neither Cameron's aesthetic and pictorial understanding nor the concern of capturing the character; Nadar who is trying to capture in the portrait. Appropriation portraits are produced with an understanding that is quite different in the history of photography and far from traditional portrait rules. Appropriation portraits have created images by centered on "reproduction", as the Postmodern destroys originality and is fed by different styles and contradictions. Richard Prince's reproduction of the 'Cowboys' in Marlboro advertisements, Sherrie Levine's re-photographing of modernist photography classics such as Walker Evans, Edward Weston, Alexander Rodtchenko without any changes, Cindy Sherman's frames from films in the Untitled Film Still series as models and even Aneta Grzeszykowska's reproduction of the Untitled Film Still series reproduced by Cindy Sherman are among the significant examples. In this study, 'Appropriation' portraits were examined by considering the portrait approaches created in the context of the new understanding.
A detailed study of the famous 'Moxon Tennyson' of illustrated poems of 1857. The monograph sets out to revise traditional readings which stress importance of the book as a showcase for Pre-Raphaelite design by exploring the work of all of the illustrators involved in the project.
The entries for the words 'medieval' and 'medievalism' in the OED's third edition give the dates 1827 and 1849, respectively, as their earliest appearances. I re-date these appearances, showing that 'medieval' can be found in 1817 and as coming into more general use in the course of the 1820s, while the other term first emerged in print in 1844. I show how the hitherto forgotten antiquarian Thomas Dudley Fosbroke was responsible for popularising the adjective 'medieval', while John Ruskin—once credited with the coinage of 'medievalism' in 1853—was in fact trying to rescue a term already several years old when he used it from the pejorative senses it had attracted. At stake, in the use of both terms, was the way in which the nineteenth century viewed the Middle Ages: as I argue, 'medieval' first emerged as, ideologically, a neutral term, contrasting directly with 'gothic', which was compromised by its routine association with barbarity. Soon, however, the new term 'medieval' was imbued with the pejorative sense of the old, so that in the 1840s it too became a byword for barbarity and obscurantism. As a result, when 'medievalism' emerged in the 1840s, it already expressed an ideologically weighted view of the Middle Ages, quite different from Ruskin's later usage. I trace uses of the term 'medievalism' and conclude with a discussion of the implications for the nascent modern discipline of 'medievalism studies', which has always been overly invested in Ruskin's founding status, with a particular concern for its relationship to medieval studies.
In The Coming of Arthur, the first idyll in the narrative sequence of Idylls of the King, the youthful Gawain, who is not yet a knight, wanders a terrain that is not yet Arthur's:
And Gawain went, and breaking into song Sprang out, and followed by his flying hair Ran like a colt, and leapt at all he saw.
The gush of a spring and its animalistic counterpart, the gallop of a colt, evoke untamed and irrepressible ebullience. The act of breaking into a song, which suggests a sudden outburst, complements the overwhelming energy that Gawain's actions embody. Unbroken like a colt, Gawain sings and travels impulsively. This glimpse at the pre-Arthurian world suggests a link between music and spontaneity that the Idylls in its entirety develops and elaborates. I will suggest in this essay that, through this link, the poem provides a sophisticated commentary on the affective and political functions of music—and, in fact, of the aesthetic as a general category—that is in dialogue with contemporary debates about the topic.
As recent scholarship has revealed, music in early- and mid-Victorian culture was "a charged site of struggle insofar as it was promoted as both a transcendent corrective to social ills and a subversive cause for these ills." From educational reformists to public moralists, many believed that instrumental and vocal music could strengthen the sense of national belonging, foster religious devotion, and promote domestic happiness. As music theorist Herbert Spencer noted, music developed an "emotional language" that cultivated sympathy, the "essential element" of "friendship, love, and all domestic pleasures." W. E. Hickson, known as the "father of English school music," ascribed a positive moral valence to music's appeal to emotion: "[Music] has a tendency to wean the mind from vicious and sensual indulgences; and, if properly directed, it has a tendency to incline the heart to kindly feelings, and just and generous emotions." Another music educator, Joseph Mainzer, justified musical education by reference to its religious benefits, arguing that school songs "remind[ed] [children] of their duty towards God." Anglican and nonconformist churches contributed immensely to the popularity of music among all classes of society because of the prominent role singing played in worship. The interest in hymnody peaked by the mid-Victorian period, with more hymn books being published than ever before. Oratorios reinforced the affinity of music with spirituality. Wagner observed upon hearing Handel's Messiah at the Exeter Hall in London that "an evening spent in listening to an oratorio may be regarded as a sort of service, and is almost as good as going to church." But, as Linda Colley reminds us, The Messiah also owed its appeal to its glorification of Britain as a second Israel. Nationalism played a central role alongside religion in exalting musical experiences, with the coronation hymn, the national anthem, and military bands playing crucial roles in rituals of nation-building.
The theory that musical sounds mobilized emotions affiliated music with unruly passion in addition to linking it to domesticity, spirituality, and patriotism. Music appeared to produce rapture and sensuality. Frequently, "musical entertainments of a low and immoral character" available in "public houses of an inferior stamp" shouldered the stigma of music's appeal to passion, but the broad category of music, too, could receive criticism for it. In 1838, the young John Ruskin wrote, "music . . . raises the passions, or excites the feelings; but it cannot direct intellect, convey ideas, or furnish materials for thought." He asserted that music offered a type of pleasure that is more instinctive than cultivated: "Brutes can enjoy music: mice, in particular, are thrown into raptures by it; horses are strongly excited by the sound of trumpets, and may be taught to dance in excellent time, or even beat a tambourine with their fore-feet; the iguana, a kind of lizard, is so passionately fond of music that if you will do him the favour to whistle a tune to him, . . . he will allow you to kill him rather than stir." This diatribe against music suggests that by allowing oneself to enjoy music, one invites rapturous joy that knows no limits. Ruskin is issuing numerous warnings here: listen to...
Tennyson is not only breaking out of the pedestrian clichés and frozen critical expectations that for so long enshrouded him; he is gradually but steadily emerging as a poet of arbitration, as one of the poet-practitioners by whose work the nature of poetry must itself be defined and against which the work of poets habitually preferred to him will more and more be measured.
The fascination with the Middle Ages that stimulated Carlyle's Past and Present , Tennyson's Idylls of the King , Morris's Defence of Guenevere volume, and Swinburne's Tristram of Lyonesse registered slight effect in Browning's poetry. Perhaps alone of Victorian poets, Browning recorded no impressions of Malory's Morte Darthur — which appeared in three separate editions early in the century and not only inspired the Laureate's magnum opus and the Pre-Raphaelite murals in the Oxford Union, but nearly prompted Morris to found a chivalric order before he alighted on the more practical scheme for a furniture company. Whereas Browning used specifically medieval settings and characters in two early unsuccessful works, Sordello and The Return of the Druses , he later returned to the Middle Ages in only a small number of poems. Though Arthur Symons praised Browning for having “distilled the very essence of the Middle Ages,” the claim that “there is scarcely a salient epoch in the history of the modern world which he has not touched, always with the same vital and instinctive sympathy based on profound and accurate knowledge” holds true for the Renaissance and later periods far more than for the Middle Ages. Even though his medieval interests, compared to those of his contemporaries, seem slight, Browning's perception and uses of the Middle Ages constitute an intriguing and rather neglected facet of the many-sided phenomenon, Victorian medievalism. To understand his sense of the Middle Ages – the period's viability and meaning as a contemporary subject – we may turn, first, to Browning's evaluations of nineteenth-century medieval works, and then to his poems themselves.
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