"Ulysses" as an expression of the Victorian spirit of going forward in life

Ulysses as a Victorian poem or Elements of escapism

Ulysses on a voyage, image from Wikipedia

A remarkable aspect of Tennyson's Ulysses is the fact that it can be interpreted in widely varying ways. The most common interpretation of the poem is that it represents an indefatigable attitude to life and urge to go forward and seek new experiences. In other words, it represents the urge of expanding human capability beyond the limits of mortality. Thus, in this way, Ulysses comes close to the spirit of the age in which it was written. The Victorian age with all its achievement, its colonial expansionism and its urge for confronting the newer realities that underlie experience is considered to be the age that epitomizes the spirit of going forward and meeting new challenges in life. Thus, on an ostensible reading, the poem appears to be a representative, and even a supporter of the Victorian way of life, national and domestic. Tennyson himself said that Ulysses which was written shortly after the death of his friend and fellow Arthur Hallam, (September 1832) gave his “feeling about the need of going forward, and braving the struggle of life, perhaps more simply than anything in In Memoriam (1850)”. Ulysses as a Victorian poem clearly exhibits the Victorian spirit and echoes the political exposition.

               This claim is further supported by the fact that Tennyson was the poet laureate of English when this poem was written. As a poet laureate, he is expected to support the Victorian national agenda; and through this poem has never been branded as a propagandist, yet, on a cursory reading, it appears to bare a kind of vindication for the sort of expansionism in the areas of knowledge and experience that the Victorian age intentionally witnessed. The age not only experienced a growth in the intellectual field, but it is also a fact that most of the colonies of England including that of Indians were established in the Victorian age. The age also witnessed new discoveries in the sphere of geographical explorations, astronomical findings and topographical measurements both out of national and personal enterprise. Thus, when Ulysses remark:

All experience is an arch where thro'

Gleams that untravell'd world whose

margin fades

For ever and for ever when I move.

He is voicing the spirit that infused through this optimistic aspect of Victorianism.

          If this geographical expansionism is an eternal aspect of this age, the period is also characterized inwardly by the author iconoclastic that happened with the progress of natural sciences in this period. Though Darwinism as a specific scientific-cultural movement was yet to come by when Ulysses was written the age has already experienced an unleash of intense materialism and its reactions in the intellectual world. Natural Sciences sought to establish a materialistic universe in which nature is "red in tooth and claws" and human life is a precious product of survival strife. This sense of urgency of human life and the value of human aspiration is reflected almost throughout Ulysses. Though there are occasional references to the afterlife in the poem, Ulysses stresses the utilization of life at its fullest as "...every hour is saved/ From that eternal silence".

          However, this is not the only way of reading Ulysses. Being written in an age of "conflict between doubt and faith", Ulysses can be taken as a representation of escapism that is inherent in such a dynamic life. Particularly read in an age dominated by the Development Paradigm, Ulysses in his character appears to be oblivious of the duties of kingship and domesticity. He finds his wife "aged", his subjects are incommunicable and his household Gods (representing domestic values). While on the surface, he is eager for new experiences, he is reluctant to use this experience on the "barren crags" of Ithaca, his real home. Thus, while Tennyson the poet laureate advocates the Victorian urge to go forward, Tennyson the private and secular poet can not doubt the positivity of such a stance.