An Ecofeminist Reading of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's Selected Major Poems

Khalid Qais Abd, Sarmad Majeed Midhin
University of Anbar, Iraq

ABSTRACT

Much has been written about the reality of women in the Victorian poetry, focusing on the many circumstances that result in their misery and despair, but, more recently, there are so scarce studies that tackle the portrait of women in the Victorian poetry from an ecofeminist perspective. Ecofeminism can be defined as an activist movement that highlights the relation between women and nature. Thus, it shed light on such issues as the relation between women and nature so as to identify that relation from environmental perspectives. This paper aims at identifying the image of women and nature from male viewpoint in the Victorian era. It also aims at elucidating the concept of ecofeminism in selected major poems of one of the pillars of the early Victorian poets, Alfred, Lord Tennyson. It deals with the relation between nature and women to reveal their true reality at that era and find whether their main dreary sources of sorrow are related to environmental concerns or not. One of the noteworthy conclusions is that Tennyson has been appreciated as a true Victorian voice because he takes up the relation between woman’s crises in the Victorian society and the many environmental factors from which those crises were resulted. He had succeeded to convey an actual image of the Victorian era throughout his poetry. In this works, a woman’s life is viewed as detached from her milieu because of the conflict between science and religion on one hand, and drastic change of the Victorian England from rural to urban on the other.

KEYWORDS

Ecofeminism, nature, human, non-human, gender, class, oppression, women in Tennyson’s poetry

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