ABSTRACT
Enoch Arden' has recently been the subject of some critical reassessment which has made manifest the text's patriarchal and imperial overtones, offering a new frame of reference for this enigmatically transparent text. Enoch Arden's life-experience re-enacts and embodies the full contradictions of the market, since he both exploits its liberating dynamism and suffers under its baleful implacability. Annie's bigamous scheme is carried out to the letter, sustained by the containment, disguise and quasi-Tractarian policy of 'Reserve' which Enoch's return from the desert island entails. 'Enoch Arden', like other poems by Tennyson, involves 'the use of women by men as exchangeable objects, as counters of value, for the primary purpose of cementing relationships with other men'. As Bob Watts has remarked: Through his imperial adventure, Enoch has been completely marginalised, reduced to non-human status in order to provide stability in the domestic centre. When he returns to England, he is still excluded, his place usurped, the domestic redrawn to exclude him.
