SOURCE: "Idling in Gardens of the Queen: Tennyson's Boys, Princes, and Kings," in Victorian Poetry, Vol. 30, Nos. 3-4, Autumn-Winter, 1992, pp. 343-64.

In the essay that follows, Knoepflmacher explores Tennyson's treatment of gender in the Idylls.

The child is the link through the parts.

—Tennyson on The Princess

'Since the good mother holds me still a child!
 Good mother is bad mother unto me!
 A worse were better; yet no worse would I.'

—"Gareth and Lynette," 11. 15-17

Tennyson's completed Idylls of the King offers a significant revision of the self-understanding he had reached in The Princess, almost three decades earlier, about the psychosexual foundations of his art. In his analysis of Tennyson's movement from female to male self-projections and his reading of The Princess as "a complex, ingenious parable," Gerhard Joseph was the first to show the sophistication of the poet's manipulations of gender.¹ More recent gender critics...