Tennyson's Figures of Repetition

This thesis argues that Tennyson’s uses of repetition can be seen not merely as a manifestation of his sometimes alleged ‘stupidity’ but as an embodiment of his continual self-questioning and self-criticism. To do this, I focus on five figures of repetition: memory/Memory (Chapter 1), mirror-images (Chapter 2), simile (Chapter 3), antithesis (Chapter 4), fama/Fama (Chapter 5). My first chapter begins by considering the way in which Tennyson’s act of recollection is accompanied by the idealisation of the past and the denigration of the present. It then sees the reverse of a recollection within Tennyson’s representation of Memory, and in his use of memory. My second chapter examines Tennyson’s descriptions of mirror-image, showing how this shadowy existence is not simply presented as an inferior reproduction of the original, but comes to assume its own substantiality. My third chapter shows how In Memoriam’s conflicting processes of unity and division are encapsulated in the relationship between the words in the rhetorical figure of the simile. It shows how the poem’s use of simile reveals the tension between the unitive and disjunctive tendencies of language itself, presenting the poem as a critique of the Romantic, metaphorical view of language. My fourth chapter shows how in Maud the speaker’s doubts about his control over the action are communicated through the antithetical repetition of the same verb in the two grammatical voices. My fifth chapter examines how in Idylls of the King Arthur’s authority, which is connected to Tennyson’s authority, is dependent upon repetitive and diffusive speech. It argues that such a derivation of authority from the diffusion of speech is registered in the semantic duplexities of the Latin word fama/Fama. My conclusion considers Tennyson’s posthumous fame as a kind of repetition in itself, examining the way T. S. Eliot remodels Tennyson’s homes in ‘East Coker’.