Maud critical nuggets

    Cards (38)

    • Ackerman: Maud is a 'poorly concealed _____________'
      autobiography
    • Tucker: 'The poem represents the most complete fusion of private with public _____ anywhere in Tennyson'
      codes
    • Rader: The suicide of the father in Maud is a 'melodramatic ____________ of the essential truth'
      exaggeration
    • Smith: Victorian authors 'peopled their works with mad speakers who served as metaphors for the ______ of the entire period gone mad with new scientific information and technological changes, as well as a trampling of love in the rush towards material ______'
      lunacy, wealth
    • Tennyson: Maud is 'a little ______, the history of a morbid, poetical soul, under the blighting influence of a recklessly __________ age'
      Hamlet, speculative
    • Thackeray: Tennyson 'reads all sorts of things, swallows them, and digests then like a great poetical ___-___________'

      boa-constrictor
    • Rawnsley: Rosa Baring of Harrington Hall was four years younger than Tennyson and remarkably beautiful but the match had 'probably been __________ by Rosa's parents'
      discouraged
    • Smith: 'In Maud, isolation gives birth to a speaker much like Tennyson himself, one who vacillates between _____ and deepest depression and despair'
      mania
    • Smith: 'The speaker, with his paranoia, perceives anyone as conspirators who threaten to rob him of his possessions. He is confident that the world and society will fulfil his worst ____________. He continually builds ________ between himself and the society in which he lives.
      expectations, barriers
    • Stott: 'Britannia, Nightingale, Victoria- like all these saving female graces, Maud is a true ________ and lends lyrical charm to war in the most natural of surroundings'
      patriot
    • Stott: In Maud, 'fairy tale and ____________ cannot be distinguished, reality is uncheckable'

      recollection
    • Stott: 'The speaker finds it difficult to decide whether Maud is truly a noble lady or a woman who has lamentably ___________ herself to the formidable lure of the middle-class economism. The virgin/wh*re _________- tediously intersecting through so much Victorian writing- often emerges in the narrative.'
      prostituted, dichotomy
    • Tennyson: The narrator is 'the ____ of madness, an egoist with the makings of a cynic'
      heir
    • Bristow: 'Maud presents a case for women as emotional _______ of men and seeks to prove poetry provides full expression of the maddening emotions which constitute proper masculinity'
      healers
    • Kincaid: The narrator's 'war with himself, it turns out, is quite different from- and infinitely more important than- his mock ______ with the "wretched race" of man'
      battle
    • Edel: The poem reflects Tennyson's 'search for some exit from the __________ of the imprisoned and despairing self.'
      labyrinth
    • Colley: 'Tennyson's lovers and their single-minded preoccupations with the objects of their affections conformed to the numerous descriptions of ___________, or chronically depressed people, that crowded the treatises on insanity.'
      monomaniacs
    • Shaw: Maud is 'a complex psychological portrait of an __________ narrator'
      unreliable
    • Shires: 'For all the intense beauty of the love lyrics, they are fuelled by illusions rather than ________'
      reality
    • Shires: Maud is 'one of the ________ poems in Tennyson's corpus.'

      angriest
    • Kincaid: 'Romantic love is not a solution in the poem, but a ________ to be overcome.'
      problem
    • Smith: The narrator associated Maud with 'a happier ____'
      past
    • Mermin: 'The love itself is guilty: is is an attempt to recapture the irrevocable past, a _______ to accept the fact of loss.'
      refusal
    • Armstrong: 'The named, "entitled" woman is ______ for by the unnamed, unentitled protagonist'
      spoken
    • Smith: Upon the return of Maud's brother, 'the speaker is plunged into depression and ________'
      paranoia
    • Drummond: 'At this crux in his story, the narrator's emotions have been _________ down to one basic desire: for his beloved Maud to turn her back on wealth, status and family by committing herself to him.'
      distilled
    • Drummond: In Section XXII, the speaker is 'no longer raging in all directions, but ______ in one.'
      hoping
    • Ricks: The poem is permeated with 'the pity and ______ Tennyson had felt for his father's plight'
      terror
    • Dever: In Victorian fiction, 'the only good mother is a ____ mother'
      dead
    • Dever: Absent mothers 'necessitate the character's __________ from the mother as a move towards adulthood'
      separation
    • Thaden: 'In Victorian society married women were not ________ and children born in wedlock were the inalienable property of their fathers.'
      entities
    • Perry: The poem '___________ Maud and turns her into an object'
      dehumanises
    • Drummond: 'Maud may be a most disorientating poem, but it has a moment of absolute _______ at it's heart'

      clarity
    • Inglesfield: This conflation of flowers with bruises on a body 'reinforces the suggestion of insane, sexually charged ________, and anticipated the physical violence and his collapse into insanity in Part II'
      fantasy
    • Swafford:Maud's garden is a hortus conclusus and 'be extension, the speaker's presence in her garden becomes a violation, especially since he let himself in, incorrectly interpreting the flower as a symbolic ___________.'
      invitation
    • Swafford: 'Instead of an innocent troubadour pledging his love, he becomes at best a stalker and at worst, a metaphorical ______.'
      rapist
    • Swafford: 'His spying into the garden also alludes to _________'s illict examination of Eden before he jumps over it's walls in 'Paradise Lost.''
      Satan
    • Swafford: section XXII 'appears to be a sentimental love song while actually critiquing that ______________: it shows the speaker's dangerous obsession with Maud and the symbolic significance with which he imbues their relationship.'
      categorisation
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