Abstract: Calls to decolonize the Victorian canon have contributed to increased critical interest in Indian poet Toru Dutt. Our current scholarly approaches have proffered nuanced evaluations of the relationship between colony and metropole in Dutt’s English-language poetry. But admirable efforts to center Dutt’s voice in scholarly readings of her work have deprioritized close reading of the English texts with which Dutt was in conversation. The effect of this approach has been to obscure the complexity of Dutt’s poetic engagement with her English referents. This essay offers a Miltonic reading of Dutt’s most anthologized poem, “Our Casuarina Tree,” to show how attending to Paradise Lost as closely as Dutt did makes available new readings of her work. While a conventional interpretation of “Our Casuarina Tree” posits the poem as a meditation on the poet’s fraught dual identity, I read the poem’s deployment of Miltonic form, imagery, and thematics as a reflection on feminine labor and the work of the woman poet. Training a close eye on Milton’s epic, I argue, helps us more fully credit Dutt’s own poetic labor. Ultimately, I suggest that decolonizing our analytic frames requires enabling colonial poetry itself to direct our readerly attention.
Abstract: This essay examines the role of women in Tennyson’s Idylls of the Kin g, focusing especially on the significance of towers within the poem. I argue that Tennyson rereads these structures’ usual coding as glorified medieval backdrops as sites of confinement, which thus prompt rebellion. The towers reflect societal pressures on women and embody their individual struggles against the patriarchal ideals iconized by Camelot. The women of the Idylls , such as Enid, Elaine, and Isolt, critique the chivalric codes by reinterpreting and resisting their prescribed roles, activity that plays out through their interactions with the poems’ complex spaces. Through their experiences, the poem places a gendered individualism against the monolithic cultural narratives of heroism. This essay argues that the enclosed spaces of the towers foster a rich inner life for the women, allowing them to undermine Camelot’s stability through nuanced, but profound, acts of defiance.
Abstract: The elegy and the amatory sequence, although we study them as different genres with distinctive histories, are often intertwined. The first two parts of this essay juxtapose poems by three Victorian poets that are at once love poems and elegies: Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” (1850), Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “The House of Life” (1870, 1881), and Christina Rossetti’s two sequences “Monna Innominata: A Sonnet of Sonnets” and “Later Life: A Double Sonnet of Sonnets” (both 1881). Caught between lyric and narrative, between the stasis of love or grief and willed movement along a difficult narrative trajectory, each poet seeks ways to make the isolating intensities of feeling less so: through the impersonality of form or personification, through larger timescapes with cultural as well as personal resonance. The concluding section focuses on temptations to silence confronted in their lyric sequences by all three poets. Finding “no language but a cry,” each is tempted not to write at all. And yet, they do, mourning a loss that threatens to become the loss of poetry—a fatal alienation from language epitomized in a wordless cry with its own history in English poetry and song. They write at once toward and against their own deaths.
