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영어

This paper examines Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Maud (1855) through the lens of Victorian geological epistemology, arguing that the poem’s unstable lyric subject reflects a uniformitarian conception of language and knowledge. Drawing on Charles Lyell’s theory in Principles of Geology that natural change is slow, imperceptible, and resistant to final interpretation, the study contends that Maud’s themes of indeterminacy enact a performative linguistic field in which meaning is constantly deferred. The paper argues that such instability of signification blurs the boundary between external perception and internal concept. Consequently, this blurring turns the lyric male speaker’s acts of observation into mere projections of desire, thereby estranging the male-biased gender discourse of the age. In the analysis of the second half of Maud, the paper shows how, in the absence of the conventional system of signification, a surplus of metaphorical images and the cacophonous performativity of colloquial utterances create a discursive space relatively free from established gender norms. This paper thus aims to read Maud not simply as a reflection of its historical context or a psychological case study, but rather to illuminate problems of language, subjectivity, and narrative instability through its engagement with geological epistemology.