Instability in Maud Anonymous College

Instability, in its most basic sense, is something not likely to change or fail, this is a feeling or fear explored across various themes in Maud. Across the private and public spheres, instability is recognized in the mind, politics, existence, gender and class. Even the form of the poem itself is persistently unstable with a predominant trend of trimeter with the incorporation of tetrameter at irregular intervals. These serve to ‘disrupt the established order’ and echoes the narrators own mental and personal instability as it is manifested in the rhythm of his dramatic monologue. The form of the extremely personal first person narrative allows the reader to explore the instability of the narrator’s mind fully. The reader is absorbed into the unstable mind of the narrator who’s mind, from the beginning, is morbidly and determinedly obsessed with death. It is hard not to observe the instability of a man who’s opening discourse is fueled by the semantic field of death - ‘hate’, ‘blood-red’, ‘death’ - as he mourns the death of his father. The inferred suicide of the narrators father gives scientific weight to the instability of Tennyson’s narrator as Victorian psychological advances stressed the force of heritage and genetics on...