Chapter 3 - Listening with the Mouth

Summary

The problem of voice and orality in Victorian poetry returns to the fore in Chapter Three, which maps the period’s strange conceptions of the speaking and listening body, using as a touchtone Tennyson’s early poem “Morte d’Arthur” (1842) as it evolves into “The Passing of Arthur” (1869, 1873). Victorian theories of speaking and listening depict the interaction between the body’s speaking apparatus (that is, the mouth) and its listening apparatus (the ear) as not productive but reproductive—phonographic, even. In doing so, Victorian physiological theory imagines voice as a surprisingly mechanical function. In 1842 Tennyson was invested in exploring the body’s ability to reproduce heard sound as spoken sound, and in reading aloud as a medium for transmitting and reproducing poetry; in the 1860s and 1870s, his interest turns toward phonography’s ability to reproduce sound without the body and its implications for poetry as a medium for preserving voice. As the century leans toward the impending invention of Edison’s phonograph, in other words, the problem of the disembodied and endlessly reproducible voice comes to figure prominently in Tennyson’s revisions to his Arthurian epic.