On Tennyson’s ‘Moral Darwinism’ in the "The Marriage of Geraint,"

From Idylls of the King

                In the year 1859, when works like Darwin’s The Origin of Species and Tennyson’s Idylls of the King as well as Dickens’

Tale of two Cities were being published; the entire moral and social aspects of culture in England were being challenged.  These publications

                   came on the heels of the new 1858 divorce law, where citizens no longer needed a resolution from Parliament to obtain a divorce, as well as a

                   change in the moral aspects of the culture concerning creationism, Genesis, and the beginnings of our world.  Darwin had been at work twenty

                   years, and was only now indulged enough to publish his Origin of Species, a rather large volume he only considered an ‘abstract’ of his ideas. 

                   However, it’s through Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, that readers get an insight into the temperature of the culture, and to further thoughts of

                   the English population of the time.

                             It seems almost ironic, first of all, that Tennyson could call his work Idylls of the King, so soon after a divorce decree from Parliament. 

                   Idyll, a homonym of Idle, could suggest the idleness in the creation of the Church of England by Henry the Eighth, and his abuse of Parliament

as a divorce court centuries before.  Despite the fact that the Idylls are concerned with Arthurian legends, through the plot and story of   “Geraint”, the idea of an allegory, or at least the title as a reference, is entirely possible.

          “The Marriage of Geraint” has a narrative form starting at the characters’ present-day, with an object of clothing—an old dress of Enid’s in this case—starting a flashback that lasts through to the last paragraph, setting readers up for further reading in the next Idyll, “Geraint and Enid.”  Enid hears talk on the street of her husband losing his “manliness”, he seems to no longer care about being a Knight of the Round Table, his days are concerned with sitting at home, watching Enid to be sure she is a ‘true wife’.  As it was, Geraint just brought her back from

Camelot, where she had become Queen Guinevere’s favorite, and as Arthurian legend goes, Guinevere had a “guilty love” (i.e. Illicit afternoons)

with her husband’s Knight and Servant, Lancelot.