The Princess Part I - Analysis

Introduction

The Princess — Part I opens in a dreamlike, courtly register that shifts between wonder, irritation, and bemused satire. The narrative voice moves from introspective and prophetic—haunted by shadows and seizures—to active and impatient as the prince pursues his betrothed. Toward the end there is a surprising domestic lyric about reconciliation that changes the mood to tenderness and intimacy.

Authorial and social context

Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote in Victorian England, an era preoccupied with duty, gender roles, and social reform. The poem engages contemporary debates about women’s education and autonomy (the Princess’s female-only university) and frames them against dynastic expectation and masculine authority, reflecting tensions in mid-19th-century society.

Main themes

Duty versus desire: the prince’s engagement is arranged, his father demands force, and the prince alternately accepts and resists—evident when he pleads to go himself and later flees in disguise. Gender and power: the Princess’s refusal to wed, her founding of an all-female university, and the king’s embarrassed account of intellectual women foreground the challenge to patriarchal norms. Reality and illusion: recurring talk of shadows, seizures, and dreams (the sorcerer’s prophecy, the prince feeling like a “shadow of a dream,” and the masquerade in female dress) problematize identity and truth.

Recurring images and symbols

The motif of shadow recurs as prophecy and psychic disturbance; it suggests an inability to distinguish truth from appearance and foreshadows conflict between ideal and real. The university and the “ladies” (Psyche, Blanche) symbolize female intellectual autonomy and social experiment, while the king’s description reduces emancipation to a gossipworthy eccentricity. The masque and cross-dressing scene function as a double symbol: playful transgression of gender roles and an experiment in perspective—the prince literally assumes a feminine guise, testing the boundaries between appearance and essence. The sudden, tender stanza about kissing at a child’s grave introduces home and reconciliation as a counterimage to public power and ideological fight, complicating a single moral reading.

Final insight

Tennyson’s part I stages a conflict between inherited obligations and emerging ideas about women’s roles, using dreamlike imagery and comic disguise to probe identity and belief. The poem resists simple judgment: it satirizes male authority, sympathetically records female intellectual aspiration, and leaves open the emotional, human costs that underlie public disputes.