ABSTRACT
The earliest Victorian work to return Nimue or Vivien to prominence in Arthurian literature, Matthew Arnold's 1852 "Tristram and Iseult," fuses the language of Malory's Morte Darthur with the imagery of the Vulgate Merlin. "Passing weary" of Merlin's unwanted sexual attentions, Arnold's Vivian imprisons the wizard in a flowering bush (Arnold 3:224). Like both medieval antecedents, which delineate her as a benevolent though ambiguous protector of Arthur and his order, Arnold presents her power as essentially positive. Paralleled to the foregoing story of Tristram's destructive passion (a linking of the stories made nowhere in earlier Arthurian literature), the poem's concluding coda depicts Vivian not as a sexual predator, but as a victor over Merlin's desmesure. 1 Despite Arnold's positive association of his female character with imagination, art, and control of unlicensed libido and the medieval precedents representing her as a benign supernatural figure, Vivien/Nimuë rapidly became a Victorian icon of transgressive sexuality.
