Maud and the Unmeaning of Names: Geology, Language Theory and Dialogism

Abstract

The final chapter continues the focus on Maud, reading it as the climactic finale of Tennyson’s experimentation with geology and a ‘uniformitarian’ poetics. The poem’s oddness, it suggests, is the result of Tennyson’s tacit engagement with dialogic perceptions. Using Bakhtinian critical theory, the chapter reads the poem as enacting the confrontation of the speaker’s monologic mindset with what he sees as a geologically and linguistically unstable dialogic world. Quite remarkably, Maud, assuming Lyell’s geologic vision, brings into relief the dialogic condition of language, and in doing so, the poem pre-empts the later appropriation of Lyell’s uniformitarian methodology by linguists in the 1860s, an appropriation that profoundly disrupted conventional mid-nineteenth century perceptions of language as Adamic and led the way to the development of twentieth-century linguistics.