ABSTRACT
Whereas Arthurian writers of the 1830s and 1840s, in the context of cultural discourses shaping the modern hero, were primarily concerned with the role of an historical and national Arthur, the stories of Tristram and Iseult and Lancelot and Guinevere were the focus of Arthurian texts produced from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. By the 1850s the Arthurian legends were familiar material to Victorian audiences, though now the stories took on 'a more tragic, doom-laden atmosphere' (Simpson, 225). It is possible to interpret Simpson's claim in relation to the theme of 'guilty love' since a number of major contributions to the Victorian Arthurian corpus, post-1850, rework the stories of Tristram and Iseult and Lancelot and Guinevere in response to concern over the social and personal dimensions of purity and adultery. Poets such as 'Owen Meredith' (Robert Lytton, son of Edward Bulwer-Lytton), William Morris, Matthew Arnold and Algernon Swinburne, among others, were interested in the domestic ideologies at work in Arthur's kingdom. 1 Intrigued by the contradictions in Malory' s text between social and private conceptions of adultery, the poets investigated social debate concerning the claims of state-legitimated marriage and romantic love. 2
Furthermore, as Brewer and Taylor have argued, 'one of the great discoveries of the nineteenth-century writers on these themes' was 'the possibility of analysing and dramatising the Arthurian stories from a psychological point of view' (134), although they do not elaborate. Frequently, this meant dramatizing the individual character's 'unconscious' through using a variety of literary techniques. The texts discussed in this chapter share some or all of the following characteristics: a concentration on a particular dramatic moment (sometimes invented) from
Arthurian legend; pathetic fallacy to concretize a character's emotional state; experimental narrative techniques such as flashbacks; first-person narrative and medieval literary devices, such as colour-symbolism to represent emotional states.3
