Realism versus Romance: The War of Cultural Codes in Tennyson's "Maud"

Recent readings of Tennyson's "Maud" treat the poem as a realistic narrative in which an unreliable narrator's romantic delusions are ultimately unmasked. This essay argues that the poem puts into question any such valorization of realism over romance. Instead of determining the significance of the narrator's monologue by reference to what is happening outside of his mind-which forces us to reconstruct the "real" events of a fictive narrative-this reading makes reference to the significance of the motifs in the poem of chivalry, war, and love in the Victorian imagination. Popular attitudes toward the Crimean war, in particular, parallel those of the narrator and shed light on his general attitude toward society.