The wicked and the divine : the influence of Alfred Tennyson's Vivien on literature and art, 1859-1951

Abstract

This thesis examines the legacy of Alfred Tennyson’s Vivien, the wicked enchantress of the Idylls of the King (1859), in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Anglo-American Arthurian literature and art. Chapter 1 details Tennyson’s lifelong development of Vivien and her transformation in the poet’s imagination from a static female evil to a dynamic feminine creative principle. Chapter 2 surveys the influence of Tennyson’s Vivien on British and American literature and art between 1859 and 1900 and covers the imitative Arthurian poetry produced in the decade after the Idylls first appeared, the satirical responses to the character of the 1870s and 1880s, W. B. Yeats’s first play Vivien and Time (1882), and Vivien’s poetic glorification at the end of the nineteenth century. Turning to the twentieth century, Chapter 3 begins with a survey of Vivien’s various adaptations in children’s Arthuriana and discusses how the character became a didactic tool for impressionable young readers. Vivien is then examined in the context of Arthurian drama, which was part of a wider Anglo-American dramatic revival that occurred around the turn of the century. The chapter’s final section considers Vivien’s presence in the Modernist poetry of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt and Edwin Arlington Robinson, both of whom were significantly affected by the First World War and identified within Vivien a transcendent, and hopeful, feminine essence. Chapter 4 examines the work of the occultist Dion Fortune and the prolific writer and philosopher John Cowper Powys. Vivien le Fay Morgan stars in Fortune’s two novels—The Sea Priestess (1938) and Moon Magic (1956)—as a magical adept, a priestess of the goddess Isis, and a universal symbol of feminine enlightenment. In Powys’s sweeping novel Porius, the sorceress Nineue is depicted as “Tennyson’s Vivien”, a clever and fatal woman who also has the potential to bring about a new Golden Age of humanity.