Tennyson and the Troubled Manliness of Victorian Doubt

Abstract: This paper examines the Victorian belief in the manliness of religious doubt and the ways in which female novelists used that belief, paradoxically, to gain a foothold in male-dominated religious debates. The Victorians often worried that religious doubt was eroding manly character, turning enterprising and earnest young men into weaklings and wafflers. One of Tennyson’s achievements as laureate was to masculinize doubt. He did this by allegorizing the doubter as a knight-errant, embarking from the comfortable shelter of orthodoxy in pursuit of higher truth. But for doubt to be manly, women, by definition, couldn’t be doubters themselves. For Tennyson, their role was to support the quest for truth, either as lodestars, inspiring the male doubter by their own radiant goodness, or as sympathetic confidantes, pitying his sufferings. Tennyson’s manly model of doubt contributed to the Victorians’ sense that women doubted less than men. But it also created new cultural space for women in the larger discourse of doubt. In the realist novel, this space expanded as Tennyson’s allegorical pictures of doubt gave way to literal conversations between doubting men and their female confidantes on evolution, higher criticism, and other controversial subjects. In novels by women (the paper examines works by Elizabeth Rundle Charles, Felicia Skene, and Dinah Craik), the female confidante often emerges as the protagonist, arguing frankly and confidently as she seeks to restore the faith of a doubting man. These writers thus gained access to masculine religious debates not by rejecting Tennyson’s gender roles, but by co-opting them.