The codes of domesticity and chivalry reveal the way in which images of sexuality and nationality are deployed as mutually reinforcing deconstructive forces of value and virtue. "Dedication" and the Guinevere idyll were written around the time of the Divorce Act debates of the late 1850s, when woman's rivalrous competitive acts against masculine interests were emphasized, and just after the Indian Mutiny of 1857, which was perceived in violent and racist terms as a threat to English colonial interests. As Mary Poovey astutely comments on the intersection of the discourses of sexuality and nationality in the nineteenth century, "nationalistic campaigns appropriated the terms of the domestic ideology that underwrote the separation of spheres, male identity, and female nature"; thus the ideology of the separate spheres, in which virtue was linked with woman by placing her outside the realm of self-interest and activity enabling, at least rhetorically and theoretically, the preservation of morality without hindering production, continued to hold sway over the Victorian imagination even as that ideal included the aggressive, carnal Magdalen.
Source: Sexuality and Nationality in Tennyson's Idylls of the King by MARGARET LINLEY
Source: Sexuality and Nationality in Tennyson's Idylls of the King by MARGARET LINLEY