The Victorian concept of masculinity is overtaken by a series of interrelated metaphors relating to empire and national identity. In the Victorian corpus, we find a certain number of texts which create a metaphorical relationship between femininity and the colonized. In Lord Alfred Tennyson's "The Princess," the poem represents the social conquest of marginal feminist politics through a metaphor of military conquest. Sexual and social domination then becomes metaphorically linked to the colonial enterprise. Similarly, Froude's report on colonial Trinidad serves to feminize the natives by describing their passivity and connection to the domestic sphere; the direction of the metaphorical relationship is reversed but the effect is similar: the representational practice of the two categories becomes confused and the two become almost symbolically interchangeable. On the other hand, the feminization of the homeland meets a completely different objective. The motherland is depicted as a nurturing domestic space that must be protected and maintained by the colonizing male. Embodied by Queen Victoria, the image of Mother England is an enabling and validating, but ultimately passive, force. This contrasts with the Victorian conception of colonizing masculinity. This masculinity is active and prescriptive, proving its bodily and mental mastery through a colonial exercise. As in the examples above, the process of colonization and the acquisition of masculinity become metaphorically indistinct, such that one is analogous to and part of the other. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”? Get an original essay The representation of woman and the colony in Victorian literature functions through a system of mutually reinforcing metaphors: the woman is the colony and the colony is the woman. Lord Alfred Tennyson's poem, “The Princess,” attempts to articulate a distinction between masculinity and femininity. Ultimately, the poem rejects Princess Ida's feminist separatism and King Gama's chauvinism. Nevertheless, the poem implicitly supports a patriarchal power dynamic. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick goes so far as to say that "the prince's erotic perceptions are entirely shaped by the structure of the male traffic in women - the use of women by men as exchangeable objects, as countervalues, with the primary aim of cementing relationships with others. men." Women thus become peripheral to homosocial power relations. One of the most interesting aspects of this poem is that this exploration of gender politics is executed through a colonial metaphor; the question of feminism/chauvinism is projected into a colonial landscape. The woman is represented as an "other" landscape, in need of colonization. The novel confuses Victorian anxieties regarding the session of colonial dependencies (as in "Opening of the Indian and Colonial Exhibition). by the Queen", another poem by Tennyson) and radical feminism Princess Ida states that her aim is to "rip their necks from custom and assert that none are more lordly than themselves..." – here the princess simultaneously draws on images of the separatist advocates of the colonial states and the radical feminist philosophers of the Victorian period.# The poem also accentuates the cultural differences between the two. kingdoms: “It seemed to me that I was living in a world of ghosts; The princess with her monstrous female guard, Jest and seriousness working side by side Cataract and tumult and kings were shadows; and the long fantastic night With allhis deeds and had not been, And all things were and were not. metaphorically, the woman becomes the colonized. This contrasts with James Anthony Froude's "The English in the West Indies", which retains all of the individual elements of the aforementioned woman/colonized metaphor but inverts them for a similar purpose. That is, Froude takes techniques evident in the Victorian representation of women and uses them to feminize (and therefore disempower) the “natives.” Throughout the text, Froude systematically indexes the native to a domestic sphere; that is, the traditional space of the Victorian woman. He says: “…the plantains cast their cool shade on the doors; oranges, limes and lemons perfume the air and sag their branches under the weight of their golden burdens [...] The children played en masse, in happy idleness and abundance. Like the English domestic space, Froude's West Indies is a place marked by simplicity and abundance bestowed (as opposed to abundance directly earned). Moreover, the West Indies (again, like the English domestic sphere) are depicted as being in a precarious political position. The prelapsarian innocence described by Froude is only maintained “as long as English domination continues…”. In his view, England was not motivated by mere altruism, but declared that allowing West Indian self-government would be "an evasion of responsibility."# Like the traditional Victorian woman, the West Indian native is a creature innocent and delicate, incapable of maintaining their paradise state without the protection of the male imperial project. Ultimately, both Froude and Tennyson construct their texts through the conflation of the feminine and the colonial and, as an inevitable result, indexing masculinity to the imperial project. If Froude and Tennyson use representational practice to code the colonized as sexual conquest (and vice versa), contemporary English literature also shows a trend toward a feminization of another kind of England – the mother country. The colonizing man is coded as the provider and protector of an idealized domestic home. England therefore acts as a metaphor for the domestic mother figure: spiritually and emotionally nurturing but ultimately in need of protection by the active, colonial male. Eliza Cook, in her 1851 publication of "The Englishman," provides a unique example of a female voice describing the workings of the colonial mechanism.# Throughout the poem, Cook creates a space of domestic comfort in the form of a spiritual and emotional validation. She describes the titular Englishman as possessing "...a deep and honest love/The passions of faith and pride" and who "longs with the affection of a dove/To the light of his own fireside ". Moreover, in writing as a woman, Cook's evocation of national pride and solidarity becomes a test of true masculinity. If the English are "lion-spirits who walk the bridge [and who]/have borne the palm of the brave", then male subjects who do not conform to this image are, by implication of the poems, the politics of representation is emasculated and disowned; they are not real English.# In exchange for their conformism, the figure of the colonizing male is confirmed in his masculinity and is granted a privileged cultural status. Their masculinity excludes them from banal mortality. They are “the immortals who shine and live/In arms, in the arts or song,/The most brilliant that the whole world can give/To this little country belong”. The male subject is validated and immortalized as a reward for his demonstration of masculinity. He is able to claim the “glorious charter» that is to say to say “I am English”. This masculinity is of course directly linked to the male's capacity to colonize in the name of the domestic and feminized homeland. The Englishman is always described in terms of his activity (as opposed to his passivity): “The Briton can cross the pole or zone and boldly claim his right; for he calls his domain so vast that the sun never sets on his power. » Even The Englishman's morality is coded according to his activity. He “leaps with a burning glow,/The evil and the weak to defend;/And strikes at once for a trampled foe/As he does for a soul-bound friend.” In this way, the masculinity of the colonial man is delineated and reaffirmed by the female poetic voice, which in turn represents the validating domestic sphere that is England itself. Similar coding of homeland can be found in Tennyson's "Opening of the Indian and Colonial Exhibition by the Queen." The very title of the poem (and indeed the act it describes) testifies to the power of the domestic woman, embodied by Queen Victoria to validate the colonial activity of the male subject. Domestic family relationships are emphasized in the poem; the colonizing agents are not “others” to the homeland but “sons and brothers”. Tennyson evokes a sense of national solidarity through his continued warning to the reader: “Britons, hold on!” More importantly, Tennyson expresses his wish that "...as the ages advance,/the mother may figure in the son." In other words, Albert Edward, then Prince of Wales, would live up to the success of his mother, Queen Victoria. The politics of the nation thus become flattened to the domestic level: the mother enables the masculinity of her son, who in turn provides: “Product of your field and your flood,/Mountain and mine, and primary wood;/Subtle works of the brain and hand. ,/And the splendors of the earth in the morning. Thus, in both poems, the masculinity of England's son is indexed to his ability to provide – a metaphor that once again confounds domestic and colonial representations. The female voice (speaking from the homeland) may validate and enable this activity, but the activity itself is ultimately the domain of the male subject. These various appropriations of feminine metaphors act as a counterpoint to the development of a colonizing masculinity. In Tennyson's “Opening of the Indian and Colonial Exhibition by the Queen,” discussed above, the poet constructs the image of England's colonizing sons as a counterpoint to the domestic woman embodied by the image of Queen Victoria . Like Cook's Englishman, Tennyson's masculinity is an active and progressive force, rather than a passive or stagnant one. The masculinity of the male subject is not implicit but rather realized through colonizing action: “And may yours forever be This old strength and constancy Which made your fathers great In our ancient island state, And everywhere where its flag flies, Glorifying between sea and sky Makes the The power of Great Britain is known: "The capacity of man to achieve masculinity (through identification with the father) is acquired through conquest military/colonial. If the role of the domestic woman is to allow the conquest of the figure of the son, her form of fully realized father figure retains the capacity to order and control – the feminine space can only express a passive and matriarchal authority while that the male has active authority. power of the patriarch. Tennyson explores this construction through a reference to the United States. He states that previous rulers "left the mother's nest/This young eagle of the West/To feed alone." This is the domain (and the.