The Thing in the Poem: Maud's Hymen

The Thing in the Poem: Maud’s HymenMatthew Rowlinson

differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Volume 12, Number3, Fall 2001, pp. 128-165 (Article)

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A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 12.3 (2001)d – i – f – f – e – r – e – n – c – e – s :

matthew rowlinson

The Thing in the Poem: Maud ’s Hymen

Embodiment, hymen, foreclosure

In the section of Gender Trouble on heterosexual melancholy, Judith Butler proposes that what she calls heterosexuality’s “literalizing fantasy” of the connection between desire and the body derives from the foreclosure of homosexuality. Let me quote at some length:

The conflation of desire with the real—that is, the belief that it is parts of the body, the “literal” penis, the “literal” vagina, which cause pleasure and desire—is precisely the kind of liter-alizing fantasy characteristic of melancholic heterosexuality. The disavowed homosexuality at the base of melancholic het-erosexuality reemerges as the self-evident anatomical facticity of sex, where “sex” designates the blurred unity of anatomy, “natural identity,” and “natural desire.” [. . .] The loss of homo-sexuality is refused and the love sustained or encrypted in the parts of the body itself, literalized in the ostensible anatomical facticity of sex. Here we see the general strategy of literalization as a form of forgetfulness. (71)

d i f f e r e n c e s 129

From these observations, I want to retain above all the notion of literaliza-tion as a form of forgetfulness. In what follows, I shall be concerned both with the implication of literal bodies in the structures of symbolic exchange that constitute heterosexuality and with the embodiment of letters in things. Both kinds of embodiment, I shall argue, entail the encryption of an utterance that they render impossible.

The “literal” part of the body with which I will be concerned is the hymen. The word “hymen” designates both an institution and a membrane. As the OED has it: on the one hand, “[m]arriage; wedlock; wedding, nuptials”; on the other, “a fold of mucous membrane stretched across and partially closing the external orifice of the vagina.” The word’s first sense is figural, even theological in origin: it derives by metonymy from the Greek word for a wedding song, which, according to ancient writers, was originally the name of a legendary quasi divinity.1 The second sense seems literal, “hymen” in this sense being the unambiguous name of an anatomical feature. My concern in this paper will be with what Butler would call the literalizing fantasy by which the two senses of the word are crossed; by which, for instance, the institution of marriage is embodied in the rupture of a membrane or an issue of blood. Historically, this fantasy may not only attach symbolic meaning to the body; it may be literalizing in the stronger sense of actually producing the literal body that supports it. For the hymen, in its current anatomical sense, had no existence in the Graeco-Roman world. It was unknown to Hippocrates and Galen and formed no part for ancient Greeks in the symbolization of the virginal female body (Sissa 107–17).2 Its discovery occurred in the Christian era and coincided with the transformation in sexual rep-resentation and practice that the new era brought about. Most notably, for our purposes, it accompanied a reconfiguration of sex by which the dimorphism of penetrator and penetrated was replaced by that of female and male.3 The “discovery” of the hymen as a trait specific to women played a part, if not in the eventual invention of heterosexuality, then in the investiture of what we would now call heterosexual practices with a new set of functions and privileges, and in the concomitant relegation of male-male sexual practices to the sphere of the extrajudicial or the pathological.

Hymen thus came to embody what Derrida terms a “loi du genre”—a term that has been translated, or not translated, as “law of genre” but that can of course also be rendered “law of gender.”4 In read-ings of Mallarmé and Blanchot, Derrida characterizes a trait that both

130 The Thing in the Poem

constitutes a genre as such and is also subject to a chiasmatic interchange of traits between genres. In Derrida’s account, the concept of genre, which is also to say that of gender, is unsettled by this contradictory trait, whose exemplary instance is the hymen. On the one hand, a membrane proper to a woman’s body, on the other, the name of an institution entailing this membrane’s rupture, hymen locates a contradiction in the form of gender’s embodiment. Insofar as it names a bodily trait, it names one that appears from the outset to be given up to symbolic exchange.

Insofar as it names a bodily trait, moreover, hymen names one that does not appear in its own right. It needs to be represented and is itself representative. A consistent strain in Derrida’s argument proposes that the hymen is a paradigmatic instance of the hysterical symptom.5 In what follows, Derrida’s use of hymen as the key term in a reading of the operation of the symptom, trace, or citation in the construction of gender (genre) will be the major point of theoretical reference. My critical project will be the exegesis of Alfred Tennyson’s poem Maud (1855). In pursuing this project, however, I hope to expand on Derrida’s account of the symptom. As I noted above, the hymen was not always embodied. Recalling this, we may ask, as Judith Butler proposes, what had to be forgotten when it became so. In Lacanian terms, we may ask what hymen forecloses that it should emerge as a symptom, bearing with it a kernel of the Real.6

Tennyson’s hymen

The deepest love of Alfred Tennyson’s life was for the man who was to have married his sister. Before he died in 1833, Arthur Hallam was not only an object of love for Tennyson; by his courtship of Emily Tennyson, he also provided the model for his friend’s heterosexual object choice (Martin 103–04).7 Poems Tennyson wrote during the early 1830s, such as “The Gardener’s Daughter,” dramatize a heterosexuality that is thoroughly mimetic in character and whose formation depends on a prior friendship between men. But after Hallam’s death, Tennyson’s narratives of desire undergo a change whereby, in the relations they chart between men, identification is replaced by rivalry. These later narratives display a new misogyny, such that the rival who competes with the protagonist for a woman’s love is himself compared to a woman and characteristically bears what is now the stigma of an excessive and out-of-place femininity. Finally, the narratives are now organized around the topic of money:


the protagonist is always too poor to marry the woman he loves, and she, in consequence, chooses or is compelled to choose his wealthy and effeminized rival.8

The major poems in Tennyson’s canon that work out versions of this story are “Edwin Morris,” “Locksley Hall,” Maud, and “Aylmer’s Field.” But the question of how this transformation followed from Hallam’s death is most acutely posed by Maud for two reasons. The first is that the rival lover here plays only a minor role, the speaker’s primary antagonist being Maud’s brother, whom he kills in a duel that precipitates the poem’s catastrophe. The brother of the beloved is just what Tennyson was to Hal-lam at the time of his death; Maud reimagines their relationship under a generalized reversal of signs. The second reason to connect Hallam with Maud is that the poem’s germinal lyric, “O that ’twere possible,” was first drafted in late 1833, immediately after his death. Barring ephemeral publications in 1837, Tennyson made no use of the lyric for twenty years, until in October of 1853 he obtained a copy with a view to including it in Maud. Susan Shatto’s variorum makes clear that “O that ’twere possible” remained at every stage of composition the pivot around which the whole sequence turned.9

In 1853, Tennyson had been married for three years. Like the sister who had been Hallam’s fiancée, his wife was named Emily. Hallam had been present at the beginning of their courtship in 1830 (see note 7). They had been engaged from about 1837 to 1840, when Tennyson appears to have broken the relationship off. Hallam retained his position as the mediating third between them even after his death, as is attested by the intertwining of the events leading up to the publication of In Memoriam, Tennyson’s elegy for him, in May of 1850, and to the poet’s long-delayed marriage in the second week of June the same year. Though the chronol-ogy of these events is not completely known, two points do seem clear. One is that Tennyson agreed with Edward Moxon to publish In Memoriam just before finally recommitting himself to marry Emily Sellwood. The other is that the additions Tennyson made to In Memoriam, particularly to the Prologue, after he had agreed to publish, were in part addressed to her. She hesitated in acceding to his renewed proposal, and her reservations were only overcome when in mid-March of 1850 Tennyson conveyed a copy of the elegy’s trial printing to her through mutual friends. Reading it apparently convinced her to marry Alfred; at any rate, the wedding followed on June 13. On the next day, the couple traveled to Clevedon and visited Hallam’s grave, which Tennyson had never seen.


It would be excessive to say that in reading In Memoriam, Emily Sellwood was inspecting the goods with which Tennyson proposed to endow her. Moreover, the near retraction with which the Prologue ends seems designed to forestall just that idea: “Forgive these wild and wandering cries, / Confusions of a wasted youth” (41–42). This last phrase, a double pun, describes at once the poet’s body and the time he has spent without profit. He is a wasted youth because he has wasted his youth. This preface to In Memoriam figures the poem as a record of unprofitable expenditure and in so doing announces in it a generalized refusal of the logics of exchange, compensation, and substitution. The poem does not, for instance, monumentalize itself, does not figure itself as an object capable of filling a gap left by Hallam’s death or of speaking for him and compensating for his inability to speak. Nor does it narrate the poet’s acceptance of a substitute object for Hallam—a career, say, in “fresh woods and pastures new,” or a wife. The wedding with which the poem ends is not the poet’s, and the song he produces for it is figured as unasked for and unnecessary. The wedding would have happened without the song and without Hallam’s death. Finally, by its close, the poem has renounced the figure of address, at least insofar as this figure is a form of exchange that in its essence demands an answer. Hence the Prologue’s figuration of its words as “wandering cries” (41), utterances with no addressee.

By portraying In Memoriam as the support for Tennyson’s mar-riage to Emily, then, I do not mean to suggest that the poem should be read as having a hidden project of courtship or as adding up to an elaborate demand for love. Such a demand would solicit a reply from a voice in the place of Hallam’s. And a reply would of itself, in retrospect, make fruitful the apparent wastefulness of the poem’s discourse. The poem’s internal resistance to such a reading is supported by the chronology of its composition. Its writing apparently accelerated markedly after the breach of 1840 and, at least as a form of idle labor, came to a symbolic close early in 1849 with the decision to publish. Only once In Memoriam had already been sold did Tennyson show it to Emily. The foreclosure of the possibility that it might be given or addressed to her or to anyone else seems virtually to have been a condition of its writing.

That said, I will add that the dialectic of exchange is open-ended, and it may be impossible to say with certainty that a given object lies outside it. The purest form of gift exchange may involve objects that announce themselves as waste. Canceling themselves on arrival, they would seem to leave no obligation behind them, but only an unsymboliz-


able residue or trace.10 How, therefore, could it ever be possible to decide that a certain labor will have been idle or that a given utterance has no addressee? At any rate, it is possible that Tennyson’s poem announcing that everything he might have offered her earlier had been wasted was, in fact, the very offer that Emily Sellwood could not refuse. The extravagance of mourning that had seemed a bar to marriage could thus have turned in retrospect to advantage11 and have been found to supply its specific precondition.

Maud was the title poem of the first volume Tennyson pub-lished after In Memoriam and after his marriage. My reading will show its formal determination by an object that forms as the residue of the work of mourning, appearing after the fact as both a bar to marriage and as its sine qua non.

The optative and the letter O

“O that ’twere possible” is the utterance of a speaker who is incapable of completely emptying himself out. In its early drafts of 1833 and 1834, Maud ended with an expression of longing for an utterance without reserve or return: “Always I long to creep / To some still cavern deep / And to weep, and weep, and weep / My whole soul out to thee” (mss. H21 and H13, TM 143). Though Tennyson added some stanzas after these lines when the poem was published in 1837, in Maud these stanzas were deleted and, with minor variants, the poem closed as it had done in 1833. The crucial effect of this close is to identify the poem itself as something short of the utterance it longs for. The speaker does not stand in the still cavern and does not grieve as he desires to grieve. Something less, or something other, than his whole soul is at issue in the utterance that constitutes the poem. Something else besides grief is at work in it.

These considerations help to open a reading of the poem as a whole—although the wholeness of the poem is partly what they put into question, as also does the history of its publications. Its opening stanza, like its last, articulates a wish. More explicitly than the last, it also affirms that this wish cannot be fulfilled: “O that ’twere possible / After long grief and pain / To find the arms of my true love / Round me once again” (mss. H21 and H13, TM 137). Positing the impossibility of the very possibility they long for, these lines virtually cancel themselves, leaving behind as a residue of meaning the “O” of longing at their threshold—a threshold that is thus aptly marked by the grapheme that is itself a threshold. Being


nothing other than the difference between an inside and an outside, the O sets in motion a discourse structured by this difference as an expres-sion of longing for an interiority from which it is constitutively excluded. Grammatically, this liminal O takes the place of the utterance’s subject in a construction that would otherwise be equivalent to an impersonal optative in Latin.12

In “O that ’twere possible,” the speaker’s longing for his lover’s embrace is also, as almost invariably in Tennyson, a longing to find “once again” something lost in the past. The temporal difference that gener-ates longing is furthermore aligned with a spatial displacement, so that the poem’s narrative of loss becomes a narrative of exile; the speaker remembers the embrace of his lover in “the silent woody places / By the home that gave me birth” (2.146–47),13 a rural setting that contrasts starkly with the urban “squares and streets” in which he now wanders (2.232). Among my aims in what follows is to describe the insistence of the letter O throughout Maud : folding into the poem a structuring differentiation between two terms, the O itself repeatedly appears as a doublet, often doubled again in pairs of rhymed words: wood/blood, brood/mood, and so forth. In the chronology of Maud ’s composition, “woody” was the first appearance of the doubled O. In the context of “O that ’twere possible,” it situates the original embrace that the speaker longs to refind. But it identifies this original as multiple, having always apparently belonged to more places than one. (The silence of the woody places, as of the embraces that they locate, suggests the graphematic nature of the symbolization of body and landscape in this poem and throughout Maud.) Of the places of this multiple origin, we can further say that they are already off center, characterized as they are by their difference-in-proximity from the place of another kind of origin, “the home that gave me birth.”

“O that ’twere possible” thus already remembers a love that did not have a place in the parental home, a point that Maud, with its narrative of meetings and partings at the gate or at the door, seeks to elaborate and explain. In Maud, it seems, moreover, to be a love that cannot even be spoken at home; even before the speaker’s exile, the soliloquies that make up the sequence are uttered out of doors, in the landscape that lies between and around his home and Maud’s. As the utterance of “O that ’twere possible” turns about an interior space from which it is excluded and into which it is never fully able to empty itself, so the desire of Maud belongs to the environs and borders of a home that it does not enter. This home gave the speaker birth; it is a womb of sorts. I hope to explain why the poem’s utterance is so often fixed at its threshold.


Before pursuing this topic, however, let us return to “O that ’twere possible.” The poem announces that it is not the utterance of the poet’s whole soul. Who then does speak in it? And what is it that blocks utterance? Both as it exists in Maud and at every stage of composition, the poem represents the utterance of a man mourning a woman. But its earli-est version was written in late 1833 when, as Christopher Ricks affirms, it was “plainly precipitated by the death of Hallam” (Tennyson, Poems 2:20). How Tennyson’s mourning for Hallam generated the utterance of “O that ’twere possible” is a central problem in the poem’s interpretation and, given its status as the beginning to which he returned in writing Maud, in the interpretation of the sequence as a whole. We can see the possibility of a solution if we think of Tennyson as haunted in the wake of Hallam’s death by some passages from the Song of Songs in which the Shulamite speaks of her longing for her lover:

By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth: I sought him, but I found him not. I will rise now, and go about the city in the streets, and in the broad ways will I seek him whom my soul loveth: I sought him, but I found him not. The watchmen that go about the city found me: to whom I said , saw you him whom my soul loveth? It was but a little while that I passed from them, but I found him whom my soul loveth: I held him, and could not let him go, until I brought him to my mother’s house, and into the chamber of her that conceived me. (Song Sol. 3.1–4)

I sought him, but I could not find him; I called him, but he gave no answer. The watchmen that went about the city found me, they smote me, they wounded me; the keepers of the walls took away my veil from me. (5.6–7)

In these lines, a female speaker longs for her male lover;14 she lies in bed, perhaps waking, perhaps sleeping, then either goes or dreams that she goes into the streets to seek him. This narrative provides a model for that of “O that ’twere possible.”15 I quote the version of 1837, which was drafted in 1833 and the first half of 1834:


Oh! that ’twere possible, After long grief and pain,To find the arms of my true-love Round me once again!

[. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .]

Half the night I waste in sighs, In a wakeful dose I sorrowFor the hand, the lips, the eyes— For the meeting of to-morrow, The delight of happy laughter,The delight of low replies.

Do I hear the pleasant ditty, That I heard her chant of old? But I wake—my dream is fled.Without knowledge, without pity— In the shuddering dawn behold, By the curtains of my bed, That abiding phantom cold.

Then I rise: the eave-drops fall And the yellow-vapours choke The great city sounding wide;The day comes—a dull red ball, Wrapt in clouds of misty smoke, On the misty river-tide.Thro’ the hubbub of the market I steal, a wasted frame;It crosseth here, it crosseth there—Through all that crowd,confused and loud, The shadow still the same;And on my heavy eyelids My anguish hangs like shame. (TM 226–28)

In representing his speaker’s troubled nights and wanderings in the city, Tennyson’s poem follows the Biblical narration of the bride’s desire. This fact, however, does not identify Tennyson’s speaker with her.


The poem recalls her utterance, but does not directly represent or cite it. Rather, the Biblical utterance of the woman is recalled as a compulsion that, however alien it remains to what the speaker wills himself to say, is nonetheless incorporated as another will that inhabits his body and the body of the text. Earlier, the poem has made it clear that the speaker wanders in the streets at night because he is led there by a spectre that haunts him. He demands that she leave him—“Get thee hence, nor come again”—but the demand is futile because he cannot prevent himself from following her, or even properly distinguish himself from her. She is his symptom—“the blot upon the brain / That will show itself without” (TM 230). In a passage from the 1837 version of the poem not adopted in Maud, the speaker refers to the spectre moving around him “With the moving of the blood / That is moved not of the will” (231). The text incorporates by allusion a desire that it does not utter, which explains why it is unable to be the utterance that its speaker wills.

This desire is in its essence an extravagant one, impossible to identify with any given subject. Tennyson’s poem follows the Song of Songs in making its spectre a streetwalker. In the passage quoted above from the fifth chapter of the Song of Songs, the bride’s presence in city streets, alone and at night, leads the watchmen to treat her as a prostitute. Tennyson’s poem appears to offer a similar presumption with regard to its spectre, who haunts the marketplace at night fixing the speaker with a sunken eye, and imposes upon him an anguish like shame. But, as the identity of the prostitute is in the eye of the beholder in the Song of Songs, so too is it a fortiori in “O that ’twere possible,” where not only the spectre’s identity but her very body seem to be the speaker’s hallucination. That said, her conformity with the nineteenth-century typology of the fallen woman is by no means arbitrary. By the mid-1830s, the prostitute had ceased to be one kind of petty criminal among others,16 and had become a symptom in the social body. Her very existence was the diagnostic of an excessive desire that, though she was its image, always circulated through her to implicate others—men for whom she was an object of desire and women who, in certain discursive contexts, could not distinguish themselves or be distinguished from her.17 Thus it is that in Tennyson’s poem, her spectral appearance alone is enough to communicate a taint of doubt to the speaker’s memory of the dead, and to himself a corresponding shame-like anguish.

Or perhaps it would be clearer to say that her spectral appear-ance figures the doubt about his betrothed that has come to haunt the


speaker, who refers to it as a blot upon his own brain that shows itself without. At once an image of the lost object folded into the subject and a part of the subject that appears as a hallucinated object, the spectre marks the limit of the suffocating interiority that otherwise characterizes the speaker of the lyric and of Maud as a whole. It marks this limit by crossing it, haunting the text at a boundary at which it remains undecideable what belongs inside the subject and what outside.

The spectre is thus a liminal figure—it appears at the threshold of consciousness, as the first thing that appears to the speaker on waking, by the curtains of his bed. Or at the boundary of memory and doubt, blurring the line between present and past by raising the possibility that what the speaker longs for was already lost to him even in the past that he remembers. Even when it does not appear explicitly at a threshold, the spectre is always hard to place, crossing here and there as it flits about the borders of vision.

We have seen that “O that ’twere possible” is an utterance arrested at the threshold of utterance, having as its formal cause the speaker’s inability to empty his whole soul in speech. The spectre is the poem’s figure for this condition of its existence. As a body that is nothing but surface, it could not contain or be contained by another body. Its place cannot be thought in conjunction with the figures of the embrace or the cavern, or of discourse as the sacrificial pouring-out of the soul. In a topography governed by the opposition of interior and exterior, the liminal surface at which the two are conjoined will tend to appear as double; hence the spectre’s appearance as the ghastly external double of a figure from the speaker’s memory. And hence, more crucially, its character as an internal blot that scandalously reproduces itself without.

On the one hand, the spectre embodies for the speaker that of which he cannot speak. On the other, its body is itself a form of utterance. It marks the speaker with a blot that he cannot prevent from showing. It produces in him an anguish marked on his face like shame—an anguish that thus seems to consist above all in the consciousness of its own vis-ibility. More generally, its central function in the poem is to figure the impulse that leads the speaker out into the streets, where amid the crowds that he encounters he is all the more set apart by the marks of the haunting that led him there in the first place. Paradoxically, the speaker is silenced by his own legibility, which is why at the end of the poem he imagines the utterance he longs for as one that would be possible for him only in a place where he could not be seen.


If, as I have argued, the spectre figures the conditions of exis-tence of the poem in which it appears, it does so above all by the twin facts of its silence and its extravagant visibility. It is everywhere the speaker looks, and its visibility to him is itself visible to others. It figures his utterance (though we might ask, his by what title?) not as spoken, but as written on his body—as, for instance, the sighs in which he wastes his nights becoming visible in his wasted frame. These sighs we may take as offering a paradigm for the text in its entirety, as they are written at its threshold in the “O” (“Oh!” in 1837) with which it begins.

Hymen

Formally, “O that ’twere possible” is an utterance that doubles and divides itself: as address to an absent “thou” who is doubled by a spectral presence “Not thou, but like to thee” (TM 227); as representation, whose status is at once that of memory and doubt; as expression, in which a wish is uttered in terms that also imply the impossibility of its fulfillment. These double forms of utterance tend in each case to cancel themselves out, hence the impossibility of speech that forms the poem’s major burden. But they do not cancel themselves without leaving a certain residue. This residue is in the first instance the text itself, an utterance that figures itself as formed between memory and doubt, between speech and waking, between the body’s interior and exterior as neither held within it nor poured out of it—even as it calls into question the opposition of these terms and hence the possibility of distinguishing places between them for it to occupy.

Such claims evidently tend to make of this poem a particular instance of a general problematic of writing. Rather than pursue this problematic in all of its ramifications, I shall, in what follows, consider the particular interpretative questions posed by its appearance in a poem whose thematic concerns are above all with hymen and the hymeneal. Hymen first of all as marriage. In both its published versions, in 1837 and as part of Maud in 1855, the speaker of “O that ’twere possible” makes it clear that the dead woman he mourns had agreed to become his bride. The lyric is thus anhymeneal; it concerns a wedding that will not take place. But it figures the impossibility of hymen by the presence to the speaker of his absent bride’s spectral double. In Maud this spectre is explicitly identified as a “spectral bride” (2.318) to whom the speaker was married in the dreadful hollow at the center of the poem’s landscape. Even in


the 1833–34 drafts of “O that ’twere possible,” she haunts his bedside and flits before him in a white robe that could be either a shroud or a wedding-dress. The lyric’s figure for the impossibility of hymen is itself hymeneal.

Not only a bride, however, the spectre in “O that ’twere pos-sible” is also a streetwalker. The figure of the prostitute/bride sets at the poem’s center the absence/presence of the hymen as a membrane situated at an interior threshold of the body. The centrality of this topic is underscored by the lyric’s allusion to the passages from the Song of Songs in which the bride describes how she passed from lying in bed longing for her lover to searching in the streets for him, and how while she was there, she was beaten as a prostitute by the night watch. The narrative trajectory of “O that ’twere possible,” in which the speaker passes from longing for his lover in bed to walking the streets, follows that of the scriptural text. The speaker, however, asserts that his following this trajectory is the effect not of his own will, but of the lead he takes from a spectre that cannot be securely located either within him or outside him. As something that the speaker follows and that is folded into him from outside to constitute his interior, the spectre is among other things a figure of intertextuality; it allegorizes the equivocal place of the bride’s discourse in Tennyson’s text. And this equivocal place, we may now propose, is itself characterized in terms of the poem’s central topic, as that of the hymen.18

What is the place of the hymen? An interior fold in the exterior envelope of the body, it locates a boundary that becomes visible only on condition of its own rupture. It is for this reason that Derrida’s writing on hymen takes as its point of departure the term’s double meaning as the name both of a membrane and of the ceremony that entails its loss. This loss leaves behind as trace or residue precisely the institution of hymen. The rupture of the hymen institutes a mark at the threshold of the body, or rather marks the crossing of that threshold and the incorporation of another body in the body.

Maud’s frames

The central project of my reading of Maud is to propose analo-gies between a literal membrane, an institution, and a set of utterances that, because they are posited as impossible, constitute formally analogous problems in the poem’s field of representation, which locates them in rifts or gaps. I have characterized “O that ’twere possible,” Maud ’s germinal


lyric, as the residue of failed or wasted utterances. The speaker fails to speak as he wishes to; the poem is the trace of that failure. This formal characteristic of the text is allegorized by the determination of the speak-er’s utterance by a spectre that it fails to dispel. The spectre is what the poem utters; it is what is left when the speaker has wasted his breath. It thus determines the identity the poem represents but determines it, not as another identity with which the speaker is identified, but rather, as one that is marked by something it cannot say (or do with words). This mark is neither interior nor exterior to the speaker; it is the trace of an utterance that, never having been opened, cannot be closed or enclosed.

I have suggested that the poem figures the undecideable status of this mark or spectre as the undecideability of hymen. In broadening our focus to Maud as a whole, I shall want to return to this figure. Let me begin, however, simply by noting some of the ways in which the longer poem is formally determined, like “O that ’twere possible,” by the incorporated traces of what it cannot utter. If Maud as a whole puts a narrative frame around “O that ’twere possible” to explain how the speaker and his betrothed were separated, there is a fundamental sense in which the frame only redoubles this separation. For it is a general rule of the poem that it represents only solitary utterances; “O that ’twere possible” remains in it as the only lyric with a strictly dramatic situation.19 It includes a direct address of the spectre—“Get thee hence, nor come again”—and the failure of this address is what marks the speaker. If the frame doubles what it encloses in this sense, it does so also in the sense of itself requiring a narrative frame. Because the poem consists of monologue, its events are represented only as mediated by the speaker’s consciousness and, with one exception, only in prospect or retrospect.20 The utterances represented in the poem themselves frame and are framed by a narrative that continuously unfolds in the interstices between them.21 The events that determine the poem, and the other persons and utterances referred to by its speaker, remain like the spectre of “O that ’twere pos-sible” in an indeterminate position between its interior and its exterior.

As a result of this indeterminacy, the poem’s narrative is in crucial respects impossible to summarize. It turns on a duel between the speaker and Maud’s brother that constitutes the explanation for the separation from Maud that is mourned in “O that ’twere possible.” The speaker gives his retrospective narrative of the duel but leaves the fates of both Maud and her brother in obscurity. In the case of the brother, the speaker remarks on his own ignorance; after the duel, he leaves England


for Brittany, where he wonders, “Who knows if he be dead? / Whether I need have fled? / Am I guilty of blood?” (2.119–21). But the case of Maud is odder, since she disappears in the flesh and reappears as a spectre without any comment from the speaker at all.

Indeed, the poem as Tennyson originally published it revealed absolutely nothing about Maud’s fate. The loss mourned in “O that ’twere possible” remained unrepresented. In the face of early reviews that com-plained of this reticence (Shannon 410–12), Tennyson set out to clarify matters with a section added to part 2 in the second edition of 1856:

Courage, poor heart of stone!I will not ask thee whyThou canst not understandThat thou art left for ever alone:Courage, poor stupid heart of stone.—Or if I ask thee why,Care not thou to reply:She is but dead, and the time is at handWhen thou shalt more than die. (2.132–40)

This lyric can less properly be said to refer to Maud’s death than to frame a reference to it, suggesting that there is an alignment between the poem’s reticence in representing events and its framing of thwarted or self-canceling utterance.22 Hedged about by the double negation, or denegation, of the speaker’s initial refusal to ask his heart why it does not understand, the reference to Maud’s death is in effect cited as the object of an imperative: “Care not thou to reply.” This imperative, moreover, could mean either “do not trouble to reply” or “do not be troubled if you reply”—that is to say, it appears undecideably as an interdiction on speech and as a demand for speech addressed by the speaker to his heart. The heart, furthermore, is to reply to a question that either will or will not be uttered in the future but that is here in either case not uttered but cited—just as the heart’s reply is not uttered but cited—under a sign that makes it undecideable whether the citation refers to an event that will or that will not take place.

Such reference as the lyric makes to the event of Maud’s death is thus in fact a reference to a reference, one that is undecideably com-manded or forbidden, but that in any case will occur, if at all, as much outside the representational frame of the poem as the supposed event


itself. In this respect, the poem’s treatment of Maud’s death recalls its references in its first part to the utterances that constitute one of the major events of its narrative, the speaker’s addresses to Maud. These addresses are never quoted; the poem never does represent the dialogue that, even in “O that ’twere possible,” is recalled only as an occasion of anticipatory longing, in a passage that oddly renders this anticipation indistinguishable from memory:

In a wakeful doze I sorrowFor the hand, the lip, the eyes,For the meeting of the morrow, [to-morrow, 1837]The delight of happy laughter,The delight of low replies.(2.166–70; [1837, 29–34])

Even in retrospect, the speaker remembers his meetings with Maud in prospect, as belonging to the morrow, in a passage that gives the general rule to the poem that Tennyson elaborated from it, which consists for almost its entire length of anticipations and recollections of events and utterances that do not belong to the present.

The lyric whose reference to Maud’s death I have discussed above was added late to the poem and echoes two earlier passages that also thematize the eccentric relation of the poem to other utterances that it does not represent:

O heart of stone, are you flesh, and caughtBy that you vowed to withstand?For what was it else within me wroughtBut, I fear, the new strong wine of love,That made my tongue so stammer and tripWhen I saw the treasured splendour, her hand,Come sliding out of the sacred glove,And the sunlight break from her lip? 23

(1.268–75)

Catch not my breath, O clamorous heart,Let not my tongue be a thrall to my eye,For I must tell her before we part,I must tell her, or die. (1.567–70)


The paradox of the heart of stone that is also a heart of flesh is here aligned with the speaker’s discovery that he is in love, in spite of having wished earlier in the poem to “flee from the cruel madness of love” (1.156). The heart of stone turns out not to be the opposite of the heart of flesh but its disguise, as the wish to flee love is by a dialectical irony a disguised avowal of love. The utterance of the wish cancels itself out; its self-cancellation leaves behind love itself as a surplus, of a kind analogous to that which we have seen to constitute the speaker’s utterance in “O that ’twere possible” and his reference to Maud’s death.

Love thus appears in Maud as the trace of a wish that frustrates itself. As the trace of an utterance thus internally self-divided, love brings with it both an imperative and an impediment to speech. The speaker’s utterance of love to Maud is thus not merely an event framed by the discourse recorded in the poem, but one that is determined by the con-tradictions of that discourse. It is framed as another utterance in the rifts of the discourse recorded in the poem; the contradictions of that discourse are the reference that it makes to this other utterance, which it seeks to release by asking for silence (“Catch not my breath, O clamorous heart”) and whose addresses to Maud it makes contingent upon a defense against her (“Let not my heart be a thrall to my eye”).

The utterances that the poem thus equivocally frames are both produced and thwarted by the opening of Maud’s lip and by the slipping apart of hand and glove, of skin from second skin. The rifts in the poem’s discourse at which the speaker’s love appears are projected onto Maud’s body—though, as we shall see, not only onto hers—and have their fullest representation there. The poem comes closest to attaching an image to the love that is precipitated out from its own self-cancellation when the speaker describes Maud’s appearance as “Faultily faultless [. . .] splendidly null” (1.82).

Citation as disfiguration

In a universe where faultlessness is itself a fault, fault will be universal. The term appears in only one other section of Maud, at the start of part 2, where it has an ethical sense apparently not in play in its earlier use. It appears in the section’s first line as an unattributed quotation: “‘The fault was mine, the fault was mine’” (2.1). We are not told who speaks these words—which are doubled in a self-citation—until line 30, when the quotation is repeated (once) and assigned to Maud’s brother. The section consists of the speaker’s narration of the duel between


the two of them, into which he incorporates what turns out to be his antagonist’s acknowledgment of fault. For twenty-nine lines, however, this acknowledgment is itself unacknowledged, and even when it is assigned to the brother, the effect of the quotation is as much to absolve him of fault as to determine where it finally lies. Confessing fault tends to cancel it, making of the quoted words another version of an utterance that undoes itself, only to survive as the residue or trace of its own enunciation.24

Here, this residue takes the form of a quotation that, like the fault it names, resists any final appropriation.25 Its place in the speaker’s discourse as a fragment incorporated from the outside would in this sense be its place in any possible discourse; there will never quite be a “me” who corresponds to its “mine.” The argument of this section of the poem is indeed to show how the violence it narrates is caused by an endless logic of citation, which it links to the figure of echo. The duel results from the doubling of the speaker’s utterance with that of Maud’s brother: “He fiercely gave me the lie, / Till I with as fierce an anger spoke, / And he struck me, madman, over the face” (2.16–18).26 And the “code” that mandates a duel after this blow is itself dictated by echo: “a million horrible bellowing echoes broke / From the red-ribbed hollow behind the wood, / And thundered up into heaven the Christless code, / That must have life for a blow” (2.24–27).

This scene is governed by echo to signal that the death of Maud’s brother forms a series with that of the speaker’s father. Since the latter’s madness and suicide were caused when he was bankrupted by the speculation that made the fortune of Maud’s father, the murder of one son by the other is the repetition and return upon itself of a prior act of violence. Tennyson’s use of the figure of echo further links the principle of repetition thus established to a particular place—the “red-ribb’d hollow” where both deaths occur, whose description opens the poem:

I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood,Its lips in the field above are dabbled with blood-red heath,The red-ribb’d ledges drip with a silent horror of blood,And Echo there, whatever is asked her, answers “Death.”

For there in the ghastly pit long since a body was found,His who had given me life—O father! O god! was it well?—Mangled, and flatten’d, and crush’d, and dinted into the ground:There yet lies the rock that fell with him when he fell. (1.1–8)


At the threshold of the poem, then, there is a landscape haunted by Echo. Her presence here foreshadows both the pattern of repetition that will organize its narrative and the formal character of the poem as a series of reinscriptions of its own frame.

To speak of Echo as present in this passage, however, is to understate the negativity of Tennyson’s figure. Part of the horror of Ten-nyson’s hollow is that it does not echo—an echo that returns the same reply whatever is asked it is not properly an echo at all, but the figure of a citation whose original is lost. The poem forecloses here at its outset Echo’s traditional significance as a figure for the verbal invention by which poetry makes of a system of verbal iteration a voice capable of answering questions or expressing desire.27 Echo is traditionally a figure for the figure of personification; Tennyson’s personification here recalls the tradition, but strips Echo of the capacity to hear and to reply that it attributes to her. An Echo who is deaf and deprived of all words but one is, then, the trace of a figure.

Not only the trace of a figure, Echo is in this opening stanza the figure of a trace—she gives a voice to the blood that the speaker imagines spattering the edges of the hollow, blood that is for him the trace of his father’s death. Like Echo, these traces are fixed in a single spot and a single significance. Like her, they do not answer questions: “Did he fling himself down? who knows?” (1.9). The nonvoice of Echo figures the trace as the binding in place of a silence, of a mute and mutilating utterance. The hollow is a place in which the speaker cannot hear himself speak—or, when he does, where it will only be to recognize his utterance as alien to him: “What! am I raging alone as my father raged in his mood? / Must I too creep to the hollow and dash myself down and die?” (1.53–54). Here, what had seemed the speaker’s own utterance is abruptly recognized as an echo of the dead father and, like Echo herself at the poem’s opening, assumes the qualities of the trace, bearing an uncanny link to a place and an act.

The opening of the poem may indeed be said to stage a general disfiguration of utterance and its reduction to the status of trace. The hollow itself is among other things a silent mouth on whose lips sits blood rather than words. It is also a petrified figure of the letter O, the insistence of whose written form in “O that ’twere possible” we took at the outset to indicate the poem’s eccentricity with respect to the spoken utterance it longs for. Tennyson had punned on the hollowness of O before, in “The Epic,” a frame he appended to “Morte d’Arthur” some years after it was


written. There he describes a reading of the poem that follows, the poet “mouthing out his hollow oes and aes” (50)—where “hollow” refers both to the sound of the poet’s voice and to the letter of the text from which he reads, while the graphematic and phonic doubling of “hollow oes” enacts a doubling of the poem’s form, whereby the frame is made, in effect, to frame itself.

In the opening of Maud, it is the graphematic quality of the O, whose attribute of hollowness is displaced and petrified in an image, that determines the poem’s setting. The letter, or the letter reduced to a mute frame, precedes and mutes any spoken word that might be pronounced upon or within it. The poem’s speaker speaks, as it were, about a letter that already frames his utterance, and that iterates and disperses itself as that utterance spells itself out—“hollow,” “wood,” “ horror,” “blood.” It is the primacy of the graphematic form that determines that what represents itself within it as spoken will nonetheless remain unheard, even, or above all, when the speaker seeks answers to questions bearing upon his own being: “O father! O God! was it well [to have given me life]?” (1.6).

Tennyson’s first draft of the poem’s opening stanza, in fact, began with the apostrophic O, the word that more than any other figures lyric vocalization, addressed here as we now see to its own disfiguring double:

O rock-ribb’d hollow behind the woodThe [intentional blank] lipThy red-ribb’d ledges ever dripWith a silent horror of bloodWhatever is ask’d her answers whispering death. ( TM 41)

The revision by which Tennyson transformed this fragment into the open-ing of Maud as it was published further testifies to the mute power of the lyric O, for which the poem here is something like a rebus. For the missing term that mediates between the vocative “O [. . .] hollow” and the declarative “I hate the [. . .] hollow” is the Latin “odi”, “I hate,” which itself makes available a pun on the Greek term for song from which, in both Latin and English, “Ode” derives.28


Why hymen survives the cancellation of symbolic exchange. On broken words and broken seals

The basic formal donnée of Maud is that the utterances it represents belong to a hidden lyric interiority and are without public consequence. We have seen that these utterances frame others, publicly uttered, heard, and answered, but also that these other utterances are not represented in the poem and are only very equivocally incorporated into it by citation. Finally, we have seen that the framing utterance that is the poem itself opens with the mute, petrified incorporation of a vocative “O.” The rendering of “O” as a bloody hollow allegorizes the poem’s relation to an utterance eccentric to itself, an utterance that it incorporates only as disfigured and muted but which, were it to come into existence, would shed blood and leave a trace. This utterance appears allegorically in the hollows that the poem frames—the hollow of the father’s death and the duel, and also “the woody hollows” in which Maud and the speaker meet (1.892). If the poem frames the fantasy of such an utterance, it is in turn marked by the presence/absence of what it frames. This marking is visible in the poem’s syntax in the contradictory reference it makes to utterances it frames but does not represent, and in the way these contradictions leave behind them a certain residue of undecideability, a fault. But it is above all visible in the allegorical images of the pit or hollow and the trace of blood.

The allegorical functions of these images can be linked because of their contiguity at their presentation and because of the pat-terns of phonic and graphematic doubling that link the hated “dreadful hollow” and the “silent horror” of blood. Crucial terms from this opening passage are joined in the last section of the poem, where the speaker refers to the shames of the peace now come to an end as “Horrible, hateful, monstrous, not to be told” (3.41). The formulation suggests that the hor-rible or hateful representations of the previous sections may be read not only as rendering an image, but also as the poem’s allegorical renderings of the borders or rifts of its own utterance, where it is marked by what it cannot tell.

It is on such a border or rift that the trace of blood is set—which is to say that its place is precisely what the poem cannot tell. Is there blood on the “red-ribb’d ledges”? Is there a real analogy between the red


of blood and the color of the heath-flower underlying the metaphor by which the speaker identifies them? Or is the analogy the product of the speaker’s “extravagant fancy, which is already on the road to madness,” as Tennyson is said to have commented?29 On this reading, there would be a trace of madness in the figure itself rather than in the landscape it describes. Where to locate the trace? The question returns at a different level of figuration in the speaker’s question after the duel: “Am I guilty of blood?” As with the “fault” in “the fault was mine,” the poem cannot assign a location to the trace or commit itself to its existence. The utterance it records is determined by this instability of reference, which might be said to constitute in itself the madness of its speaker.30

The bloody trace would thus, if it came into being, appear in the poem without a proper place. When blood does not leave or function as a trace, however, we know exactly where it is; indeed it appears early on precisely as a figure for property. The speaker figures the speculation that bankrupted his father as one in which his partner, Maud’s father, drained him of blood: “that old man, now lord of the broad estate and the Hall, / Dropt off gorged from a scheme that left us flaccid and drained” (1.19–20). The ruined man who died in the hollow was drained of blood; any blood that might have marked the site of his death would thus already have been a remainder left over from a disappropriation that was in principle total.

If the trace is figured as a bloodstain, the poem’s narrative assigns it the formal qualities of a broken promise. When they entered the scheme that made the fortune of one and ruined the other, Maud’s father and the speaker’s father had been partners. The broken agreement between them was the originary lie about which the speaker’s father raved throughout his last days and on which the speaker himself is drawn to brood, even as he is drawn to follow his father into the hollow: “Must I too creep to the hollow and dash myself down and die / Rather than hold by the law that I made, nevermore to brood / On a horror of shattered limbs and a wretched swindler’s lie?” (1.54–56). The trace at the hollow may thus be seen as the residue of a wounded word or a word that wounds. It proliferates and reproduces itself throughout the poem.

The bond between the two partners was to have been ratified by the marriage of their children—a plan that the speaker recalls in words that appear in the poem in the now familiar form of a citation whose origin is lost:


Did I hear it half in a doze Long since, I know not where?Did I dream it an hour ago, When asleep in this arm-chair?

Men were drinking together, Drinking and talking of me;“Well, if it prove a girl, the boy Will have plenty: so let it be.”

Is it an echo of something Read with a boy’s delight,Viziers nodding together In some Arabian night? (1.285–96)

The father’s word, if that is what it is, is of course broken. His son will not have plenty; the trace of the broken word will be his sole legacy. Nor will the marriage that these lines decree ever take place; the son’s legacy will be the trace of the forestalled hymeneal bond, here plotted as an exchange between patriarchs.31

In response to reviewers’ complaints about the obscurity of the poem’s narrative (Shannon 411), Tennyson added a section for the second edition of 1856 in which Maud confirms the speaker’s recollection of his father’s plans. The impossibility of deciding the origin of the citation in the passage quoted above was thus rectified; the passage, however, also affirms the link between the breaking of the father’s promise and the shedding of blood. The speaker relates Maud’s account of her mother’s deathbed affirmation:

That Maud’s dark father and mineHad bound us one to another,Betrothed us over their wine,On the day that Maud was born;Sealed her mine from her first sweet breath.Mine, mine by a right from birth till death.Mine, mine—our fathers have sworn.

But the true blood spilt had in it a heatTo dissolve the precious seal on a bond,That if left uncancelled, had been so sweet [. . .]. (1.720–29)


Shed blood in the poem thus cancels a bond. This bond was embodied in Maud, who is figured, like it, as sealed by the father’s promise. By thus developing the figure, however, Tennyson makes it equivocal. For while the seal on the woman’s body affirms a promised bond of marriage, it is also a figure for the hymen, as in a passage from the Song of Songs that echoes throughout the first part of Maud : “A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed” (4.12).32 The figure of the seal—like every hymeneal figure, as Derrida argues—will thus be divided against itself. Hymen will on the one hand be impossible: the figure of the body sealed from birth till death will, as much as that of the dissolved seal, make of hymen an institution that Maud cannot encompass. Hymen will on the other hand be inescapable: the very figure of the dissolution of the seal by which the poem forecloses it is itself a hymeneal figure.

In spite of the speaker’s claim that the fathers’ bond, if left uncancelled, would have been sweet, we may then say that such a fate is, in fact, one that the poem cannot think for it.33 Utterances in Maud are embodied only as the residue of their own cancellation. There is thus a contradiction between the fantasy of hymen’s embodiment in the trace and its institution by a symbolic exchange of promises. This contradiction is not only the topic of the poem’s narrative, but also the basic formal law that relates its insistence on the somatic reality of its own utterance—which claims throughout to incorporate the breathing, the flowing blood, and the beating heart of its speaker—to its residual position with respect to the exchange of affirmations, promises, threats, and acquittals that make up its narrative.

That narrative, like that of the events prior to the poem’s action that we have been discussing, relates how bloodshed cancels a promised marriage. The promises in this case are exchanged by Maud and the speaker and lead to the meeting in Maud’s garden at which they are surprised by her brother. Here, the speaker relates, her brother “Heaped on her terms of abuse” and “gave me the lie” (2.14–16). In this usage, the “lie” refers to the denunciation or unmasking of a lie; to give the lie is thus to cancel a lie’s effect. The double sense of the word suggests how the unmasked lie survives and reiterates itself as trace; we may indeed say that here there is nothing but trace, since the poem does not specify what utterance of the speaker’s occasions the brother’s denunciation. Like that of the fault, the proper place of the lie here is undecideable; having been given, however, it opens the path back to the red-ribbed hollow, to the spilling of blood, and to the equivocal institution of the trace.


The trace is equivocal because, as we have already seen, it is around the consequences of the speaker’s duel with Maud’s brother that the poem’s narrative is most obscure. Is the brother dead? Need the speaker have been parted from Maud by exile? Is she dead? If she is dead, how did she die? We have seen how the poem broaches these questions but offers no assertions in reply to them.

The undoing of utterance figured in the poem by the hollow thus does not bear only on the promises that it represents as broken there. It is also a formal characteristic of the poem itself, whose utterance turns around a hole in the field of its representation. This hole is the missing place in which the speaker’s relation to Maud would be symbolized. It is represented in the poem’s narrative by the hollow marked with the presence or absence of the traces of the broken promises of marriage between them. That is why the events in the hollow occasion the poem’s most explicit registrations of the limits of its own utterance.

These limits, we may now say, are principally expressed by the equivocal representation of hymen. As we saw above, the figuration of the impossibility of hymen in “O that ’twere possible” is itself hymeneal. This fact is even more evident in Maud, where the hollow is the site of both the speaker’s permanent separation from Maud and his marriage to her spectre:

I know where a garden grows,Fairer than all the world beside,All made up of the lily and roseThat blow by night, when the season is good,To the sound of dancing music and flutes:It is only flowers, they had no fruits,And I almost fear they are not roses, but blood;For the keeper was one, so full of pride,He linkt a dead man there to a spectral bride;For he, if he had not been a Sultan of brutes,Would he have that hole in his side? (2.310–20)

In referring to the trace of blood in the poem as the residue of a broken promise, then, we have oversimplified the case. The promises of hymen around which the poem turns are in some sense fulfilled at the same moment that they are broken. This duplicity of the trace is irreduc-ible. At once present and absent in itself, it is the residue of a promise that


is both kept and broken. When it reappears in Maud’s face as a blush or as a trembling lip, it signifies her awareness that she has been both given to the speaker and forbidden him. And it produces in him a desire that is indistinguishable from defense, and a will to speak that also entails the muting of his clamorous heart.

More on hymen as survival: Introduction of the Real

In the specific Lacanian sense of the term, the hymen in Maud is represented as a piece of the Real. An unlocatable extra organ of the body, it comes into being as the place where something is foreclosed in the Symbolic. It is the site of an unaccountable surplus of pain that accompanies the exchange of signifiers on which the Symbolic is founded. Maud ’s concern with the Real explains why any goods that might answer to the speaker’s needs appear to him in the first part of the poem as adulterated with poison. The deadly trace that inhabits the means of life is structurally homologous with the hollow or pit that underlies the poem’s landscape and everywhere threatens to open in it: “O let the solid ground / Not fail beneath my feet” (1.398–99). It is also structurally homologous with the residual materiality of the letter, the hollow thing that inhabits it and survives its signifying function.

If the hymen locates in Maud the site of a foreclosed utterance, it is because it is the embodied form of compulsory heterosexuality; among the utterances it forecloses is, for instance, “I (a man) take you (a man) in marriage.” Under the regime of hymen such an utterance, were it to be pronounced, would simply fail to operate. It would be, in J. L. Austin’s sense, infelicitous, or unhappy (14–15). To pronounce it happily would not be forbidden, but impossible. There would thus be no need to pronounce an interdiction on it; unlike the prohibitions on incest laid down in canon law and sustained by the veiled signifier of the phallus, the foreclosure of marriage between men would depend on that which appears in the Symbolic only—and for this purpose indifferently—as the veil itself or the trace of its absence.

Maud, like “O that ’twere possible,” is a poem set entirely in the space between betrothal and marriage, a space that in Maud extends from Maud’s birth to her death and even beyond. This space is that of the O of “O that ’twere possible”—the space of a longing constituted by the promise of hymen, which, even though it cannot be fulfilled, leaves as its


trace the impossibility of finding a substitute for the person it designates. “There is none like her, none” (1.600, 611), repeats the speaker of Maud after Maud has promised to marry him. The uniqueness constituted by hymen will not only be of a person, but also of an orifice, a woman’s genitals, which hymen both veils and opens. The regime of hymen secures genital primacy as well as heterosexuality. It is only insofar as they have already been marked out by and for hymen that the O of “O that ’twere possible” and the hollow into which Tennyson transforms it in Maud may both be read as vaginal.34 Both are the image of a particular opening in a particular body, on whose border or lip the speaker is fixed by the residual, spectral presence/absence of the promise, seal, or trace of hymen.

But everything we have said tells us that genital primacy is, in Maud, less secure than the general structure that can be summarized as “every utterance makes a hole.” Within the hole is the residual object, undecideably present or absent, that we have followed Lacan in desig-nating as Real. The Real comes into being where something has been foreclosed in the Symbolic; it will be recalled that our first instance of it was that thing in the mourning subject that cannot be emptied out by his utterance. That thing will survive the subject, becoming within him the undead bearer of an unsymbolizeable shock.35 Maud stages the harness-ing of this thing within the subject to the demands of heterosexuality.

First figure for the poem: a machine for iterating shock, con-stituted within the subject and within which the subject is constituted. Here are three instances:

1) My pulses closed their gates with a shock on my heart [. . .] 36

(1.15)

2) Just now the dry-tongued laurels’ pattering talkSeem’d her light foot along the garden walk,And shook my heart to think she comes once more;But even then I heard her close the door,The gates of heaven are closed, and she is gone. (1.606–10)

3) She is coming, my own, my sweet;Were it ever so airy a tread,My heart would hear her and beat,Were it earth in an earthy bed;My dust would hear her and beat,


Had I lain for a century dead;Would start and tremble under her feet,And blossom in purple and red. (1.916–23)

If the Real here becomes the machine by which the subject is constituted and that is for him the bearer of the drive, it can also be, as Lacan puts it, elevated to the dignity of the Thing to become the drive’s sublime object. In this form, it will retain its character as residue with respect to the Symbolic but will appear in it no longer as a hole, but as a principle of transcendence. If there is nothing outside the boundless plan of the Symbolic, the sublime object will be that nothing.

Second figure for the poem: hymen as a sublime object. This object, too, stands in a certain relation to the shock that opens the hole in the Symbolic where the Real is hidden. In these instances, however, the relation is that of a countershock, a trope of resistance:

1) Following Maud’s promise of marriage, the speaker medi-tates on the stars37 as subject to

A sad astrology, the boundless planThat makes you tyrants in your iron skies,Innumerable, pitiless, passionless eyes,Cold fires, yet with power to burn and brandHis nothingness into man.

But now shine on, and what care I,Who in this stormy gulf have found a pearl,The countercharm of space and hollow sky [. . .]. (1.634–41)

2) See what a lovely shell,Small and pure as a pearl,Lying close to my foot,Frail, but a work divine,[. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .]What is it? a learned manCould give it a clumsy name.Let him name it who can,The beauty would be the same.

[. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .]


Slight, to be crush’d with a tapOf my finger-nail on the sand,Small, but a work divine,Frail, but of force to withstand,Year upon year, the shockOf cataract seas that snapThe three decker’s oaken spine,Athwart the ledges of rock [. . .]. (2.49–76)

Within the creature or without, there is a kernel or carapace of dead matter that survives it and constitutes, unbeknownst to it,38 the end of its existence. As figures for hymen, the passages in this series are deeply perverse. In Freudian terms, they suggest that the poem’s apparent narrative of desire is properly read as a staging of the drive. Rather than implicating the body in a symbolic exchange, hymen would in this view embody a law of ethical or aesthetic practice.

The poem’s ethical argument is beyond the scope of this paper;39 my concern has been rather with the poem’s formal law, which is determined by a pervasive thematic concern with utterances that fail or suffer foreclosure, of which the poem itself appears as a residue or trace. The poem thus necessarily insists on its own difference from other utterances that, however, it must incorporate as a condition of its own intelligibility. It frames the appearance of a series of dead letters, which determine its existence while remaining inassimilable to it. The poem’s own body in these regards resembles the bodies of its characters, with their crossed identifications, their confusions of boundaries, and their simultaneous excesses of permeability and hardness. My concern has been above all with the way letters become things in the body of the poem, as the tokens of symbolic exchange become things in sexed human bodies, only when something becomes unspeakable or fails to be said.

In the context of Tennyson’s life, I have linked these claims about Maud to his long mourning of Arthur Hallam, to his marriage, and to the question of these two events’ relation to one another. Both Tennyson’s love for Hallam and his mourning were preconditions for his marriage. To consider them in retrospect this way, however, closes off some possible meanings they had before the marriage was decided on, including some in In Memoriam. In a broader context, Tennyson’s life is of interest partly as a register of important shifts in the discursive


construction of sexuality. The years in which he wrote In Memoriam and Maud were those in which “homosexual man” was being made visible as a “species,” as Foucault puts it (Sexuality 1:43). At the same time, the homosexual was most visible in his exclusion from marriage,40 and it is to the new character of the wedding as a site for the policing and rectification of identity that I attribute its strikingly frequent representation in texts from the half-century after Maud as an affair of mourners and of the undead. Often these representations deploy symbolism of blood and of bodily rupture that, as in Maud, it is possible to read as hymeneal. As also in Maud, however, this symbolism proves extraordinarily mobile, apt at traversing borders of all kinds, but particularly those of gender. It often tends, then, to collapse the very difference of gender that hymen putatively embodies and to construe the institutions of marriage—and heterosexuality in general—as the site of a self-replicating, unlocalizeable wound to the social body at large. Though such a claim would require a much longer study to sustain it, let me offer in closing not one name, but a list: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, William Morris, Algernon Swinburne, George Eliot, John Ruskin, Walter Pater, Thomas Hardy—and, of course, Bram Stoker.

I am grateful to the acls for a grant that funded the writing of this essay and, for comments, to Jonathan Crewe, Naomi Schor, and an anonymous reader.

matthew rowlinson teaches English and Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College. He is the author of Tennyson’s Fixations: Psychoanalysis and the Topics of the Early Poetry (University Press of Virginia, 1994). Besides other articles on Victorian literature, he has also written on monetary history. His current project is a book on literary allegory, paper money, and materiality in the long nineteenth century.

Notes 1 Giulia Sissa quotes Photius: “‘the hymenaios was sung at marriages to express regret and longing for Hymenaeus, son of Terpsichore, who is said to have disappeared on his wedding-day.’” She also summarizes other versions of the story: Pindar was the author of a threnody of which a scant fragment remains, in which Hymenaeus is cast as a poet unfortunate as Linus and Orpheus because he died before experiencing the joys of marriage. And the Orphics, according to

Apollodorus, credited Asclepius with having resurrected Hymenaeus. (106–07)Tennyson’s Maud is founded on this archaic incorporation in hymenaios of mourning for a dead youth.

2 Given the hymeneal symbolism of the Song of Songs, it would be valuable to know how Jewish medicine historically conceptualized the female body. The seventeenth-century English Protestant Robert Burton identi-fied the association of the hymen


with virginity as a Jewish error: “The Jews of old examined their maids as to the condition of the membrane called Hymen, which Laurentius in his Anatomy, and others, copiously confutes” (844). Burton’s claim belongs to the longstanding Christian tradition of representing Jewish religious practice as excessively carnal or embodied; on this tradition see Boyarin 1–10. Boyarin’s discussion of the embodiment of religious identity by sexual practice in Rabbinic Judaism unfortunately does not include any treatment of the symboliza-tion of female virginity.

3 On the typology of sexual partners in the ancient world see Foucault Sexuality 2:215 and Halperin 33–35.

4 For Derrida’s writing on hymen, see especially “The Law of Genre” 221–27 and “The Double Session” 212–22 and 261–62.

5 The question of hysteria is introduced as an example in a note of “The Double Session.” The example, Derrida writes, “is not insignificant”; it intro-duces “what is supposed to be found behind the hymen: the hystera, which exposes itself only by transference and simulacrum—by mimicry” (182n8). Hymen is thus the site, or occasion, of hysterical mime-sis, which is to say for Derrida of mimesis in general.

6 For an account of Lacan’s devel-opment of this understanding of the symptom, see Zizek 71–79.

7 In a letter written to Emily Tenny-son in 1832, when they had been engaged for over a year, Hallam described himself as having recognized his love for her in the spring of 1830. He was walk-ing in the wood behind Somersby

rectory, he says, when he met Emily and thought her “a being more like [the water-sprite] Undine than I had ever thought to see” (qtd. in Martin 103). It was within a few days of this encounter, during the same visit of Hallam’s to Somersby, that he went for another walk in the same wood, this time with another woman named Emily as his companion. On this walk, the two of them encountered Alfred, who “made his appearance wrapped in a cloak, and sportively said” to Hallam’s companion, “Are you a Dryad or a Naiad or what are you?” (Emily Tennyson 1, see also Martin 104). This was the encounter between Emily Sell-wood and Tennyson that she was to remember for the rest of her life as marking the beginning of their courtship and that led after twenty years to their marriage in 1850. The affinities between these two scenes—the repeated setting, the figuration of both women as nature spirits, their shared name—combine to suggest the mimetic character of Tenny-son’s heterosexuality.

8 René Girard’s Deceit, Desire, and the Novel and Eve Sedgwick’s Between Men are indispensable references here. Girard’s work demonstrates that narratives of male rivalry are transformations of mimetic desire; Sedgwick analyzes this transformation’s misogynist logic. My own aim is to link its operation in Tennyson’s poetry to the topics of mourning and embodiment.

9 In what follows, I quote Maud, drafts of Maud, and poems incorporated into Maud in texts established by Shatto’s edition—henceforth TM. Apart from Maud, Tennyson’s poetry is cited from the text of Christopher Ricks’s three-volume work, Tennyson’s Poems.


10 Derrida’s instance of such a gift is tobacco—see Given Time 109–15.

11 This possibility is a recurrent motif of In Memoriam itself. For its working-out in the context of sexuality and marriage, see especially sections 53 and 54.

12 The optative mood in English is normally governed by a pred-icate in the indicative, as, for instance: “I wish it were possible.” Only in certain relatively unusual constructions is this predicate displaced by a particle. The opening stanza of this poem is one example of such a construc-tion; another might be the form “if only it were possible . . . .” Tennyson’s interest in versions of the optative in late 1833 is also apparent in “Tirei-sias,” some of whose early drafts are contemporaneous with those of “O that ‘twere possible.” The two poems’ subsequent histories are similar in that both remained incomplete, only to be published many years later with the addition of supplementary material—in the case of “Tiresias,” publication only took place in 1885. The trajectory of Tire-sias’ monologue in the poem as it was eventually published is from the opening line, “I wish I were as in the days of old,” (1) to the beginning of the peroration “I would that I were gathered to my rest” (162). These utterances, announcing their own frus-tration, underscore the poem’s general concern with Tiresias’ wasted utterance, condemned as he is by Athena to speak truths that no one will believe. We may anticipate arguments to be developed below by observing that this curse falls on Tiresias because he sees Athena’s sublimely virginal body: a dreadful light Came from her golden hair, her golden helm

And all her goldenarmour on the grass, And from her virgin breast, and virgin eyes Remaining fixt on mine, till mine grew dark For ever, and I heard a voice that said “Henceforth be blind, for thou hast seen too much, And speak the truth that no man may believe.” (42–49) Athena’s virginity may not be seen; but once seen, it cannot be spoken of. Briefly, Tiresias’ discourse is founded on the ontological uncertainty of the hymen. “O that ‘twere possible,” and indeed the whole of Maud, skirt and veil this scene.

13 Until 1856, 2.146 read “land that gave me birth.”

14 What is a “female speaker” in a text with a putatively “male” author? A specter, whose unreal-ity is assumed by the distinction of “speaker” and “author” itself. What if grammatical or other traits failed to distinguish “author” from “speaker” or “speakers” from one another? Hymen engenders crossings of this kind, which is why in the Song of Songs, the confusion of tongues between male and female is in several passages irreducible. (See Pope 663, 681 for a discus-sion of the problems posed by chapter 8 of the Biblical text.) Crossing of gender is also an effect of the relation between “O that ‘twere possible” and two other sources, The Duch-ess of Malfi, and the anonymous lyric, “Westron winde” (noted by Shatto in TM 206). In the first case, Tennyson’s allusion identi-fies his speaker with the Duchess, in the second, with the absent object of the desire expressed in the lyric.


15 The allusion is noted in Chandler 99, with reference to Maud.

16 “Societies for the prevention of juvenile prostitution were formed in London and Edinburgh in 1834 in response to widely publicized instances of young teenaged girls being entrapped into brothels.” In 1839, a clause in the Metropolitan Police Acts introduced the notion of the “common prostitute,” who is newly distinguished from the general category of “loose, idle and disorderly persons” covered by the Vagrancy Acts (Clark 643).

17 For a discussion of the problems of agency posed by the mid-Victo-rian figure of the fallen woman, see Anderson 15–16 and 47–65.

18 On hymen and citation see Derrida, “The Double Session,” especially 202–08. For Derrida, the place of hymen is irreducibly liminal; it designates at once the border and the rupture of the border between subjects, between genders (genres), and between texts.

19 There is only one other utterance in Maud in which the speaker addresses or refers to other persons, if we can call the spectre that, while they are present. This one exception proves the rule. The speaker does refer to other persons, including the spectre, as standing beside him while he speaks in 2.5. But the dramatic situation of this section is one in which the speaker does not know where he is—in an asylum—or who he is referring to—the other inmates. They in turn do not know themselves who they are. The utterance recorded in Maud assumes a social dimension only on condition that it be unrecog-nizable as such to the speaker or to any possible hearer of his utterance.

20 The one exception to this pattern of prospect and retrospect is the ballad that Maud sings in 1.5, to which the speaker refers in the present tense, as she is singing. The exception, however, under-scores the poem’s organization around utterances that it does not include, since the ballad is mentioned but not cited or named except as “an air that is known to me” (1.164). The lyric ends, moreover, with an imperative expressing the speaker’s will to silence this recognized but unciteable air: “Silence beautiful voice! / Be still, for you only trou-ble the mind / With a joy in which I cannot rejoice, / A glory I shall not find” (1.180–84).

21 The poem can thus indifferently be described as lyric folded into drama, or drama folded into lyric. It enacts both the mutual exclusion that characterizes the relation between the genres it implies, and their union. For a historical account of Maud ’s place in the already hybrid genres of monodrama and melodrama, see Culler.

22 The lyric is organized around a pun on “courage,” from the Latin “cor,” heart. In bidding it take courage, the speaker instructs his heart to be a heart. Tautology is one way an utterance can circle back and cancel itself. Further, the historical evolution of lan-guage is a process of division and differentiation that the poem here at once stages and defen-sively cancels out. The Latin pun embodies this defense, pet-rifying into tautology what might have been an uttered proposition. References to the Latin roots of English words in Maud consistently have this petrifying, defensive character.

23 Compare the passage from “Tire-sias” quoted in note 14 above.


24 “The only thing one has to fear from the excuse is that it will indeed exculpate the confessor, thus making the confession (and the confessional text) redundant as it originates” (de Man 280).

25 Quoted speech in Maud always belongs to a character who has died—or at any rate, whose death the poem’s narrative seems to take for granted. Quotation thus epitomizes the spectral logic of the trace that governs represen-tation in the poem, where what is represented always assumes the status of a non-appropriable residue left behind by the dead, or more strictly by those whose death needs to be presumed.

26 The word “madman” in the last of these lines can grammatically refer either to the speaker or to the brother—the more so as the speaker’s madness (I “do accept my madness,” he says [1.642]) is the poem’s major topic, which was to have been signaled in its original title, Maud or the Mad-ness (Tennyson, Poems 2:514). Maud’s name notoriously incor-porates the word “mad,” and the adjective “madman” is at this point in the poem attached undecideably to the speaker and to the brother just as Maud her-self is. Ownership of Maud is the poem’s general allegory for prop-erty in the signifier—the crucial point being, however, that poised as she is between her brother and the speaker, she represents this property as unassignable.

27 For this account of Echo, see Brenkman and Hollander.

28 This pun certainly operates in Horace’s third Ode, beginning “Odi profanum vulgus” [I hate the profane mob].

29 Tennyson, Poems, 2:519. On the other hand, when the speaker says of Maud that “her feet

have touch’d the meadows / And left the daisies rosy” (1.434–35), Tennyson insists that his obser-vation of a floral trace is quite accurate—see Martin 397, and TM 191.

30 This instability has been a central topic in the criticism of Maud since its publication. For an excellent recent treatment see Slinn 75–84.

31 The patriarchal logic of this plot is signaled—and subjected to implicit critique—by the Oriental-ist association of the scene with the Arabian Nights. Desire in the poem will prove not to circulate in accordance with the father’s word but will, rather, attach to the trace where that word might have been.

32 A garden enclosed is my

sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed [. . .]. A fountain of gardens, a well of living waters, and streams from Lebanon. Awake, O north wind; and come thou south; blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out. Let my beloved come into his garden, and eat his pleasant fruits. I am come into my garden, my sister, my spouse: I have gathered my myrrh with my spice; I have eaten my hon-eycomb with my honey; I have drunk my wine with my milk: eat, O friends; drink, yea, drink abundantly O beloved. (Song Sol. 4.12–5.1)A great deal could be written on the allusions to this passage in the first part of Maud, especially sections 18 and 22—Robert Ingle-field’s recent note has provided a beginning. Suffice it to say that these allusions invariably incorporate in the poem the double—chiasmatic—crossing of a threshold.


33 The story of the bond descends to Maud from her mother, her father having apparently remained silent about it. The fantasy of the sweet fulfillment of the uncancelled bond can be aligned with another fantasy about what descends to Maud from her mother: Maud is as true as Maud is sweet: Though I fancy her sweetness only due To the sweeter blood by the other side [her mother’s]; Her mother has been a thing complete However she came to be so allied. And fair without, faithful within, Maud to him is nothing akin: Some peculiar mystic grace Made her only the child of her mother [. . .]. (1.475–83)The flow of utterance here, as always, follows that of blood; the wish that the speaker here explores, like that of the sweet bond from which the lie is excluded, is for reproduction without the trace of sexual difference—i.e., without hymen.

34 Such a reading, often hinted at, is made explicit by Jonathan Wordsworth, whose knowingness about the poem’s “clearly unin-tended symbolic level” derives from a “post-Freudian” (357) certainty that he can recognize “the act of love” when he sees it (362). When the speaker plucks a flower in the opening lyric of part 2, Wordsworth takes it as his painful duty to gloss: “The narrator’s relationship with Maud has come to the point where sex cannot be denied: adult love-making must violate the inno-cence of the past” (361). There

is a political stake in resisting this assurance that “adult love-making” can mean only one thing and in noticing the mobility of the symptom in the poem that Tennyson was actually led to write by his hysterical misrecognition of sexuality.

35 Like Lacan’s theory of the Real, Walter Benjamin’s account of “shock,” as he formulates it in “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” is founded on Freud’s discussion of traumatic failures of symbol-ization in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Benjamin reads the motif of shock in Baudelaire’s poetry, however, as the expression of a specific historical situation, characterized by urbanization, by the temporality of labor under capitalism, and by the new tech-nology of the photograph. A more historicist reading of Maud than I offer here would take the terms of Benjamin’s analysis as major points of reference.

36 “Gates” here is a metonymy for “valves” by way of its derivation from the Latin “valvae,” for gates or doors. The heart closes apo-tropaically against a “shrill-edged shriek” (1. 16) that is linked by assonance to the red-ribb’d ledges of the hollow described in the section’s opening stanza. The heart closes to close the ledges and to defend against the cutting edge that opened them. As Herbert Tucker notes (411), the speaker also longs to close the ledger that survives as a trace of the paternal debt—“only the ledger lives,” he complains later in this section (1.35).

37 On the relation of stars to the Thing, see Lacan 115–23.

38 “[S]he knows it not: O if she knew it / To know her beauty might half undo it” (1.554–55).


39 For a discussion of Maud ’s polit-ical argument in support of the Crimean war, see Bristow. Bris-tow’s findings are relevant here, since he shows how extensively the war party mobilized images of feminine purity. In this mobili-zation both the virginal heroine of chivalric romance and a more modern figure of the angelic mother were represented as arguing for war. Hymen and the feminine types of heterosexuality became things to die for. See also Bristow 106–09 for a reading of the “f lux of genders” in Maud.

40 Jeff Nunokawa reads the relation of marriage to homosexuality in In Memoriam as less ambig-uous than I do, but his essay remains the best work on the topic. In In Memoriam, he claims, the site of homosexual desire is constituted as the nega-tion of the heterosexual figure of marriage. To apprehend the homoerotic in In Memoriam as that which is defined against het-erosexuality is to gain a sense of it as part of the nineteenth-century formation of sexual abnormality that Michel Foucault points to, a formation which is constituted by, and in turn constitutes its opposite: sexual normality. (428)

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The Thing in the Poem: Maud's Hymen

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