Character Analysis (OCR A-Level English Literature): Revision Notes
Character Analysis
Introduction to Maud
Maud is a monodrama written by Alfred, Lord Tennyson in 1855. A monodrama is a dramatic poem performed by a single speaker, and in this case, the entire work unfolds through the voice of an unnamed protagonist. Understanding the characters in Maud is essential for grasping the poem's exploration of love, madness, social criticism, and redemption. Because the work is presented through one person's perspective, all other characters are filtered through the protagonist's unstable and biased viewpoint, making character analysis particularly complex and rewarding.
The monodrama form means that every character, event, and description in the poem is filtered through the narrator's subjective consciousness. This creates a fundamental challenge for readers: we must constantly question whether what the narrator tells us reflects reality or merely his distorted perception. This interpretive uncertainty is central to the poem's power and complexity.
The protagonist (unnamed narrator)
Psychological profile and self-perception
The narrator is a 25-year-old man who embodies the characteristics of a Byronic anti-hero. This means he is a dark, brooding figure who stands apart from society. He is deeply misanthropic (hating or distrusting humanity), grief-stricken, and psychologically unstable. His mental state has been shaped by profound personal trauma: his father committed suicide after being betrayed in a business deal by the Squire. This traumatic event creates the foundation for the narrator's intense class resentment and paranoid worldview.
The narrator describes the society around him as faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null (I.i.5). This paradoxical phrase reveals his perception of Victorian society as superficially perfect but emotionally cold and morally empty. He sees himself surrounded by corruption and hypocrisy, which he calls the cannibal old age of Victorian commerce. His use of industrial carrion imagery, such as the many-wintered crow that leads the clanging rookery home (I.vi), reflects how he views the wealthy classes as scavengers feeding off the misfortunes of others.
The narrator is fundamentally unreliable. His psychological instability, class resentment, and paranoid worldview mean that his descriptions of other characters and events cannot be taken at face value. When analyzing any character in Maud, always consider: "Is this how the character actually is, or is this simply how the disturbed narrator perceives them?"
Character arc and transformation
The protagonist undergoes a dramatic psychological journey across the poem's three parts:
Character Arc Breakdown
Part I: Despair and social nihilism - The narrator begins as a social nihilist, someone who rejects all religious and moral principles in relation to society. He denounces the cannibal old age of Victorian commerce and expresses deep cynicism about the world around him.
Part II: Erotic rapture and obsessive love - His encounter with Maud transforms his despair into passionate love. The famous line Come into the garden, Maud (I.xxii) captures this moment of romantic intensity. However, his love is obsessive rather than healthy, showing how his unstable psychology affects all his relationships.
Part III: Guilty violence leading to madness and then redemption - After killing Maud's brother in a duel, the narrator flees into exile. His guilt drives him into complete madness, but eventually he finds redemption through martial purpose. He resolves to fight in the Crimean War, describing it as the blood-red blossom of war (III.vi.76). This military engagement offers him a sense of expiation (atonement) for his crimes and a way to channel his violence into what he perceives as a noble cause.
Key character traits
The narrator displays several defining characteristics:
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Narcissistic paranoia: He frequently sees persecution where none exists, referring to those around him as smooth-faced snobs. His worldview centres on his own suffering and grievances.
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Homicidal jealousy: His jealousy over Maud leads him to kill her brother in a duel, demonstrating how his unstable emotions can explode into violence.
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Visionary madness: In his madness, he experiences visions and hallucinations, including hearing Maud's voice as an angelic presence guiding him.
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Martial conversion: His turn toward military service in the Crimean War represents his final transformation, where he seeks redemption through warfare.
The narrator's traits form a coherent psychological profile of someone suffering from what we might today recognize as severe mental illness, possibly including paranoid personality disorder, depression, and psychotic episodes. However, Tennyson presents these symptoms through the Romantic lens of the mad genius, complicating our judgment of the character's moral responsibility.
Historical and biographical context (AO3)
Understanding the context behind the narrator helps illuminate Tennyson's intentions. The character was shaped by two major influences:
Firstly, Tennyson's own grief over the death of his close friend Arthur Hallam deeply influenced the poem's exploration of loss and mourning. The intensity of the narrator's emotions reflects Tennyson's personal experience of devastating loss.
Secondly, the social unrest of 1848 Chartism (a working-class movement demanding political reform) shaped the narrator's radical critique of Victorian society. The narrator's class resentment and attacks on commercial greed reflect broader anxieties about industrialisation and social inequality in mid-Victorian England.
Hallam Tennyson (the poet's son) described the protagonist as an heir of madness who is elevated by love but ultimately shattered by loss. This interpretation emphasizes how the narrator's hereditary instability (suggested by his father's suicide) makes him vulnerable to psychological breakdown.
Maud (muse, lover, angel)
The ambiguous nature of Maud's character
Maud is one of the most intriguing aspects of the poem precisely because of her ambiguity. She exists primarily through the protagonist's projections rather than as a fully independent character. The narrator knew her as a childhood acquaintance, but she transforms in his mind into an erotic fantasy, then a dead lover, and finally a guardian angel. This means we never truly know Maud as she actually is; we only see her through the distorting lens of the narrator's obsessive and unstable perception.
The narrator describes her as Queen rose of the rosebud garden (I.vi.11), which exemplifies Pre-Raphaelite idealisation. The Pre-Raphaelites were Victorian artists who idealized medieval aesthetics and portrayed women as ethereal, beautiful figures connected to nature. This description reveals more about how the narrator views Maud than about Maud herself—she becomes a symbol of natural beauty and perfection rather than a real woman with her own agency and personality.
Maud's lack of independent voice or perspective is not an oversight but a deliberate artistic choice. By presenting her entirely through the narrator's consciousness, Tennyson explores how idealized femininity in Victorian culture often erased real women, replacing them with projections of male desire and need. Maud exists as what the narrator needs her to be, not as who she is.
Three phases of Maud's presentation
Maud's character evolves significantly across the poem's three parts, though these transformations happen entirely within the narrator's mind:
Phase 1 (Part I): The cold temptress - Initially, the narrator perceives Maud as having a cold and clear-cut face (I.iii). She appears as a hostile temptress haunting the ruined garden. This cold, distant quality makes her both attractive and threatening to the narrator, who is drawn to her despite feeling rejected by her.
Phase 2 (Part II): The sensual garden queen - Maud becomes associated with sensuality and natural beauty. The narrator describes her coming to the village church... six tall men (I.iv), and he celebrates her as a sensual garden queen. She embodies both eroticism and pastoral innocence, with the famous declaration Maud has a garden of roses (I.vi) linking her identity to the cultivated natural world.
Phase 3 (Part III): The redemptive angel - After her death, Maud transforms into the Angel of the night (III.vi). She becomes a redemptive vision urging the narrator toward his Crimean duty. Her angelic voice calls to him: Come into the side of the Morning (III.vi.127), summoning him to war as a form of spiritual salvation. In death, she gains the power to guide and redeem him.
Notice how each phase serves the narrator's psychological needs at that moment. When he feels rejected, Maud is cold; when he desires passion, she becomes sensual; when he needs redemption, she transforms into an angel. This pattern reinforces that Maud's character reveals more about the narrator's state of mind than about any real woman.
Symbolic significance (AO2)
Maud functions as a protean symbol—meaning she takes multiple forms and meanings simultaneously. She embodies nature (through garden and rose imagery), femininity (as idealized woman), and salvation (as redemptive angel). This multiplicity makes her character rich for analysis but also emphasizes her lack of independent existence. She becomes whatever the narrator needs her to be at each stage of his psychological journey.
Context: Victorian femininity (AO3)
Maud both reflects and subverts the Victorian ideal of the Angel in the House—the perfect, submissive, morally pure woman who exists to support and inspire men. Initially, Maud seems to fit this pattern, serving as the narrator's muse and moral guide. However, Tennyson subverts this convention by having the dead woman spur martial masculinity rather than domestic peace. Instead of calling the narrator to home and family, Maud's ghostly voice urges him to war and violence, complicating Victorian expectations of feminine influence.
This subversion of the Angel in the House ideal is significant for understanding Tennyson's social commentary. By having Maud promote warfare rather than domesticity, Tennyson questions whether Victorian ideals of femininity truly promoted peace and morality, or whether they merely redirected masculine violence toward imperial conquest.
Maud's brother (aristocratic antagonist)
Character and social position
Maud's brother serves as the primary antagonist in the romantic plot, though like all characters, he appears only through the narrator's hostile perception. The narrator describes him as having Gorgonised me from head to foot / With a stony British stare (I.xvi). To be 'Gorgonised' means to be turned to stone, referencing the mythological Gorgon Medusa. This image suggests the brother's cold, petrifying effect on the narrator, who feels frozen out and looked down upon.
The mythological reference to being 'Gorgonised' is particularly revealing. In Greek mythology, anyone who looked at Medusa turned to stone—they became paralyzed and powerless. The narrator's choice of this image shows how he experiences the brother's social superiority as a form of paralysis, unable to act or assert himself in the face of aristocratic privilege.
The narrator calls him a babe-faced lord, suggesting he is young and perhaps immature, yet he wields significant social power as someone representing new money corruption. The protagonist perceives him as the Squire's heir, inheriting both wealth and the moral corruption that destroyed the narrator's father. The brother blocks the lovers' potential marriage and flaunts his wealth at a political banquet, intensifying the narrator's class resentment.
Role as catalyst for violence
The brother's most significant function in the plot is as the catalyst for the duel that destroys the narrator's happiness. After the narrator kills him, he reflects: One lies in darkness and the other in light (I.xx). This line captures the moral complexity of the situation—one man is dead (in darkness), while the other lives but in spiritual torment (in light, yet suffering). The murder triggers the narrator's exile and descent into madness, making the brother's death the pivotal turning point of the poem.
Historical context (AO3)
The brother represents anxieties surrounding the 1846 Corn Laws repeal, which changed the economic balance between landed gentry and industrial speculators. This historical context helps explain the class tensions that fuel the narrator's hatred. The conflict between old aristocratic money and new industrial wealth forms the backdrop for the personal animosity between the narrator and the brother.
The Squire (financial villain)
The unseen antagonist
The Squire never appears directly in the poem but casts a long shadow over the entire narrative. He remains unnamed but omnipresent in the narrator's consciousness. The protagonist's father shot himself after the Squire's business betrayal, making the Squire the root cause of the narrator's grief and psychological instability. This backstory of financial treachery and its fatal consequences shapes everything the narrator thinks and feels.
The Squire symbolises Victorian commercial greed in its most destructive form. Tennyson uses the image of the long-long-wingèd minnow (I.iv.49) as a polluted trout representing capitalism's corrupting influence. This natural imagery twisted by pollution reflects how the narrator sees commercial greed as contaminating what should be pure and natural.
The Squire's absence from the poem makes him even more powerful as a symbol. Unlike the brother, whom we see through the narrator's eyes, the Squire exists only as an idea—the embodiment of all that the narrator believes is wrong with Victorian society. His invisibility allows him to represent not just one corrupt individual, but an entire corrupt system.
The legacy of betrayal
The Squire's legacy pervades the poem through the ruined estate that frames the entire narrative. The red-ribbed hollow (I.ii) where the narrator's father committed suicide becomes a recurring image of loss and destruction. This physical space embodies the emotional and financial devastation the Squire caused. The ruined estate serves as a constant reminder of betrayal, keeping the narrator's resentment alive and fuelling his hatred for the class the Squire represents.
Supporting figures (collective shadows)
Society as antagonist
Rather than presenting many individual supporting characters, Tennyson creates a sense of collective antagonism. The narrator sees society itself as his enemy, populated by types rather than individuals:
- Smooth-faced snobs: Railway speculators who represent the new industrial wealth
- Many-wintered crow: Industrial profiteers who, like old crows, have survived many winters by feeding on carrion
- Political banquet guests: Whig hypocrites (members of the liberal political party) who pretend to care about social justice while maintaining their privilege
Function in the narrative
These collective shadows serve an important function: they reveal how the protagonist's paranoid worldview projects his personal grief onto a national crisis. He cannot see individual people with their own complexities; instead, he sees only types and symbols representing the corruption he believes has destroyed his life. This perspective shows the extent of his psychological instability—his inability to perceive nuance or individuality in others demonstrates how his trauma has distorted his entire worldview.
The flattening of individuals into types is a symptom of the narrator's mental illness, but it also reflects a broader Victorian anxiety about loss of individuality in an increasingly industrialized, commercialized society. The narrator's paranoia mirrors real social fears about dehumanization in the modern world.
Character relationships
Understanding how the protagonist views other characters reveals the structure of his psychology:
| Character | Protagonist's view | Key quote | Symbolic role |
|---|---|---|---|
| Maud | Muse evolving into Angel | Come into the garden | Feminine salvation |
| Brother | Class enemy | Stony British stare | Aristocratic corruption |
| Squire | Father-killer | Long-long-wingèd minnow | Commercial greed |
| Society | Cannibalistic | Faultily faultless | Victorian hypocrisy |
This table illustrates how each character serves a symbolic function in the narrator's mental landscape, representing different aspects of the Victorian society he rejects. None of these characters exists primarily as a realistic individual—they are all aspects of the narrator's psychological drama, personifications of his internal conflicts and social resentments.
Critical interpretations (AO5)
Literary critics have offered diverse interpretations of the characters in Maud:
T.S. Eliot described the protagonist as mad, bad, dangerous to know, emphasizing his destructive and morally questionable nature. This phrase (borrowed from Lady Caroline Lamb's description of Lord Byron) reinforces the character's Byronic qualities.
F.R. Leavis took a harsher view, characterizing the work as psychotic self-pity. This interpretation suggests the narrator lacks genuine insight and simply wallows in his own suffering without taking responsibility for his actions.
Modern critics have explored queer-coded homoeroticism in the poem, suggesting Maud might function as a projection of Tennyson's grief for Arthur Hallam. This reading proposes that the intense, obsessive love for Maud masks or redirects homoerotic feelings that couldn't be openly expressed in Victorian society.
Different Critical Perspectives
These varying interpretations demonstrate how character analysis in Maud depends heavily on critical perspective. Eliot focuses on the Romantic tradition of the dangerous hero; Leavis emphasizes moral judgment; modern critics apply queer theory. Each approach reveals different aspects of the characters while also reflecting the concerns and values of different critical eras.
Exam applications
Comparative analysis techniques
When comparing Maud to other texts in your OCR A-Level exam, focus on how character construction differs across periods and genres:
Comparing with The Duchess of Malfi: Tennyson's idealized Maud contrasts sharply with Webster's corporeal Duchess. While the Pre-Raphaelite muse elevates and idealizes femininity, the Jacobean tragedy exposes bodily corruption and mortality. Maud exists primarily as symbol and vision, whereas the Duchess is emphatically physical and embodied.
Comparing with Edward II: The protagonist's duel murder echoes the violence surrounding Edward's relationship with Gaveston, as both texts explore how passionate attachments lead to deadly conflict. However, Tennyson's narrative offers Crimean redemption, resolving the Victorian crisis in a way that Marlowe's tragic cycle cannot. Edward finds no redemption, only destruction, whereas the narrator of Maud finds purpose through military service.
Section A analysis (garden extract)
When analyzing garden imagery in Section A, note how the protagonist's horticultural hyperbole in phrases like Queen rose of the rosebud garden (I.vi) idealizes Maud. The sprung rhythm (a poetic meter with varied stress patterns) creates intensity and passion. This idealization contrasts sharply with his earlier social scorn expressed through faultily faultless, showing how love temporarily transforms his entire perspective.
OCR Band 6 Essentials
To achieve the highest marks, your character analysis must integrate:
- Quotation: Precise textual evidence embedded naturally in your argument
- Psychological state: Analysis of mental condition and motivation that explains character behavior
- Victorian context: Historical and social background (AO3) that illuminates character meaning
- Drama comparison: Links to pre-1900 dramatic texts showing sophisticated understanding of different theatrical traditions
Remember to demonstrate how characterization serves thematic purposes and reflects broader concerns about Victorian society, gender, class, and violence.
Key Points to Remember
- The unnamed narrator is an unreliable protagonist whose mental instability colours every character and event in the poem
- Maud exists primarily as projection and symbol rather than as an independent character, transforming from temptress to muse to angel
- All antagonists (the brother, the Squire, society) represent different facets of Victorian corruption and class conflict in the narrator's paranoid worldview
- The character arc moves from despair through erotic rapture and guilty violence to madness and finally imperial redemption through war
- Understanding how Tennyson's personal grief and contemporary social anxieties shaped these characters strengthens your contextual analysis (AO3) and helps you make sophisticated comparisons with other pre-1900 texts