V.

The Artist's Conflict

The Lady of Shalott was an attractive subject to the Pre-Raphaelites also because she could
represent the artist, and her fate could represent the destruction of the artist by the necessity of
interacting directly with the world (Nelson 5). The poem places the Lady in a state of
isolation, torn between the outside world and her necessary confinement, lost in a world of
shadows. In fact, this world of shadows in which the Lady lives highlights her role as an artist
figure, as it affirms her distance from the reality of nature. She weaves images from
reflections, not even from any actual life she might see outside her window. The conflicts
between the Lady's interior and exterior worlds exemplify the tension between the artist's
function of creating his or her own interpretation of nature and the simultaneous necessity of
directly experiencing the natural world. The Pre-Raphaelites' explorations of these conflicts
appear in their illustrations through their use of symbols, particularly the Lady's mirror.

For example, Hunt's painting emphasizes the large mirror in the background, upon which the
image of Lancelot riding away in the fields appears somewhat faded compared to the vibrant
colors elsewhere in the painting, asserting the reflection's place as a mere shadow of life. Hunt
also portrays the Lady in darkness, while sunlight from the window, the world outside, falls
across the floor and her legs, representing her first steps into this livelier world. Hunt further
clarifies the Lady's position as an artist figure by tangling her in her own creation, the threads
of her tapestry.

Meteyard's illustration, which details the moment at which the Lady declares her
dissatisfaction with the world of shadows, places emphasis on the Lady's internal state. The
mirror behind her does not actually reflect the outside world at all. It appears mostly dark,
except for the small image of two lovers at its center. Here, the mirror seems to reflect the
Lady's thoughts and dreams. The flowers, symbols of fleeting, fragile life, contrast the Lady's
creation, her tapestry, which is long-lasting but not alive in the same way. Instead, her tapestry
diminishes to a shadow of a shadow, woven from a reflection. The Lady even turns her head
away from the flowers, representing her rejection of, or inability to join, the natural world.
She instead remains a part of her isolated, interior world.

The illustrations by Warry and Siddal emphasize the Lady's situation as an isolated, conflicted
artist to a lesser extent than Hunt's and Meteyard's illustrations do. Warry's illustration, for
example, does not reflect a deep interest in defining or illustrating the role of the artist.
Perhaps because Warry's version did not attempt to achieve any deep artistic goal, but rather
attempted to present a respectable Victorian woman, Warry gives no sign of the Lady's
isolation and represents no tension between creating an inner artistic vision and experiencing
life outside directly.

Siddal's illustration does depict the Lady's isolation and the conflict between the interior and
exterior worlds, but Siddal does not stress these themes. Although Siddal portrays the Lady
cut off from the outside world, and her stark, cramped room contrasts with the open field on
the other side of her window, these details come from the poem itself. The crucifix before the
window is the only embellishment Siddal includes in her drawing. The crucifix punctuates the
Lady's dilemma, for in order to see the crucifix, she must look out the window. Reinforcing
the concept of shadows, Siddal places the crucifix so that the Lady may, however, glimpse the
crucifix's shadow without raising her eyes to look out the window. This conspicuous
placement of the crucifix alludes to a certain inevitability of the Lady's situation, suggesting
that she has no choice but to look at the world directly. Nevertheless, Siddal's drawing does
not focus on the crucifix in the way that Hunt's and Meteyard's paintings assert the artist's
conflict. Siddal's crucifix, at least at first glance, appears a minor detail added to her faithful,
simple illustration of the poem.

Rutland makes a more blatant connection between the Lady's situation and that of an artist,
wrapping the threads of the Lady's tapestry around her body. The mirror in this illustration
also figures prominently, large and in the center of the picture, framed by empty black space
that highlights its significance even more. However, Rutland does not contain the Lady's
reality to the space within the illustration. Instead, the Lady faces directly outward at the
viewers. In contrast to the tapestry's usual function as the shadow of a shadow, it seems as
though Rutland's Lady may directly glimpse the viewer's reality, removing one layer of
obstruction. This added level may be interpreted as an inventive way of handling the artistic
conflict posed by the poem, or it may be that by de-emphasizing the window, de-emphasizing
the Lady's removal from the natural world, Rutland de-emphasizes the Lady's position as an
artist figure.

Conclusion

Tennyson's "The Lady of Shalott" inspired and intrigued many Pre-Raphaelite artists because
of its tragic subject matter and treatment of the conflicted role of the artist. As a whole,
however, male artists and female artists approached certain aspects of its illustration
differently. Artists such as Hunt, Waterhouse, Rossetti, and Meteyard emphasized the tragic
aspects of the Lady's love and her place as an object of desire, while artists such as Siddal and
Warry focused more on the Lady's position in relation to her surroundings and status.
Rutland's illustration overlapped these differing methods, presenting the Lady's sensuality and
emotional turmoil, but to a lesser extent than did illustrations by male artists.

paintings such as The Lady of Shalott illustrate the tension between their private desires and
the reality of their social responsibilities as well as the artists' position on the matter.

Tennyson's poem of "The Lady of Shalott" (text) relates the story of a woman cursed to
remain inside a tower on Shalott, an island situated in the river which flows to Camelot. No
others know of her existence, as her curse forbids her to leave the tower or to even look
outside its windows. Instead, a large mirror within her chamber reflects the outside world, and
she weaves a tapestry illustrating its wonders by means of the mirror's reflection. As the poem
progresses, the Lady becomes increasingly aware of the love which abounds in the outside
world, and she tires of her lonely existence in her tower, saying she is "half sick of shadows"
(l. 71). Then seeing Sir Lancelot riding down to Camelot, the Lady leaves her loom to look
down on him directly from her window, which immediately fulfills the curse. Her tapestry
begins to unravel and the mirror cracks as she recognizes the consequences of her impulsive
action. She flees her tower and finds a boat in the river which she marks with her name and
loosens from its moorings. She dies before her boat reaches Camelot, where she would have
finally found life and love, and Lancelot muses over the beauty of this unknown woman when
the inhabitants find her body. The tragic love illustrated by Tennyson's poem appealed to the
Pre-Raphaelites and their followers as one of the themes they favored most, and over fifty
depictions of her story exist from the latter half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of
the twentieth (Poulson 173). The Lady of Shalott "had become, by the end of the nineteenth
century, a concept rather than even a narrative archetype; she is a romantic idiom, a quotable
catch-phrase" (Pearce 71). Many aspects of "The Lady of Shalott attracted Pre-Raphaelite
painters, including its emphasis on:

spiritual nobility and the melancholy of the more sorrowful aspects of love, such as
unrequited love, particularly the embowered or isolated and therefore unattainable woman;
the woman dying for love; the fallen woman who gives up everything for love; the special
"tainted" or "cursed" woman; and the dead woman of unique beauty" (Nelson, Victorian
Web)

The Lady of Shalott embodies the woman who abandons her social responsibility in her
pursuit of love. But different moments in the story evoke different visual implications, as
demonstrated by the many versions of the painting. For instance, Hunt chose to depict the
moment at which the mirror breaks and the curse descends; Waterhouse shows the Lady
loosing the chains of her boat; John La Farge's Lady has already died in her boat in his
version; and Lancelot finds Rossetti's Lady as she arrives in Camelot. Each of these individual
moments involve slightly different emotions which the artist then emphasizes. Despite the
various interpretations by Pre-Raphaelite artists, at its most basic level Tennyson's poem
describes the time old tale of dying for love, as the Lady of Shalott becomes a martyr for a
love she never actually experiences.

Notably, Tennyson's poem places much more emphasis on the Lady's surroundings, her tower
and the outside world, than he does on the Lady herself. He leaves the cause of the curse and
its meaning unknown, and only allows her to speak through her own voice twice in the poem:
once when she makes the conscious decision to look out of her window, and again when she
realizes what she has done. Tennyson makes her a passive figure, subsumed into her
surroundings and defined by her task. He focuses the reader's attention on the physical
situation of the Lady, and "the contrast between her interior world and the exterior world,
between stasis and movement, between the active and the contemplative lives encourages the
reader to consider thoughtfully the differences between the two worlds" (Nelson 4). This
emphasizes the Victorian belief in two separate private and public realms, with separate
genders assigned to each. The domestic interior belonged to women, while the active exterior
world belonged solely to men. The poem "replicates in a medieval setting the Victorian
ideology of separate spheres... woman's work is inside the home, while active work in the
outside world remains a male preserve" (Barringer 142). The principles in the poem apply to
Victorian society, although the medieval setting separates the story from the contemporary
day. The Lady of Shalott preserves her safety by staying within the confines of her tower and
not participating in any sort of active pursuit. This fits perfectly with the concept of the actual
Victorian woman, whom society expected to accept her role as protectress of the home. The
Lady of Shalott "perfectly embodies the Victorian image of the ideal woman: virginal,
embowered, spiritual and mysterious, dedicated to her womanly tasks" (Nelson 7). She exists
as unthreatening and proper, and therefore unable to harm herself or disrupt the realm of men,
as long as she remains within her tower, not only forbidden to exist within the outside world
but even forbidden to contemplate it directly. However, "in her look towards Camelot and the
outside world, the Lady has dared to seek the substantiation of her identity in a space which is
reserved for the male" (Pearce 73). Death becomes only acceptable consequence of the Lady's
impropriety. The changing social setting for women in the time period in which the majority
of these paintings were executed makes it seem "legitimate to conjecture that part of their
function was to suggest the vulnerability of women who step out of their appointed sphere,
and the judgment and punishment two which they are then exposed" (Poulson 183). The story
of the Lady of Shalott could either evoke sympathy for her tragic demise, or the sense that the
neglect of her duty justified her punishment. This provides further motivation for Pre-
Raphaelite artists to depict such a story, as they could then demonstrate their own opinions on
the situation of women in society through their artwork.

The key line, "I am half-sick of shadows", says the Lady's mind, and probably
the poet's mind, is divided about the right choice.
Each of the four stanzas ends with somebody saying something. Otherwise
nobody says anything

The Lady of Shalott" to be representative of the dilemma that faces artists, writers, and
musicians: to create work about and celebrating the world, or to enjoy the world by simply
living in it.
The tension Tennyson establishes between the interior room and the exterior world, between
the natural, material world and the shadow of that world reflected in the Lady's magic mirror,
gives expression to the Victorian preoccupation with the contrast between the exterior and the
interior worlds. The concomitant ambiguity of space and realities the realities of the
exterior world, the Lady's interior world, the reflections of both worlds in the mirror, and the
reality of the material work of art provided artists with an interesting aesthetic play of
space and reality.

"The Lady of Shalott"

Elizabeth Nelson

[Home > Authors > Alfred Tennyson > Works > Theme and Subject > Image,
Symbol, and Motif]

Adapted from the author's "Tennyson and the Ladies of Shalott," Ladies of Shalott: A
Victorian Masterpiece and its Contexts, Ed. George P. Landow, Brown U.: 1979.

Last modified 30 November 2004

http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/tennyson/losillus1.html

Yet, amidst her colorless environment, the Lady of Shalott weaves "A magic web with colors
gay" (38). How can we interpret this spontaneous production of magic, art and color? It
appears as though Tennyson is indicating that the production of art occurs in melancholy
isolation from the very world it mimics. Thus, in the first two parts of "The Lady of Shalott"
Tennyson constructs a representation of the artist as a solitary and confined figure,
inexplicably compelled to create, as if literally bound by a "curse".

The Confinement of the Artist in Tennyson's "The Lady of Shalot"

Alison Fanous '07, English/History of Art 151, Brown University, 2003

Last modified 1 October 2006

http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/tennyson/fanous5.html
The moment the
Lady sets her art
aside to look upon M E S S AG E BO AR DS
Tennyson's Poetry
Lancelot, she is
seized with death. S PA R K C H A R T S
The end of her Poetry

artistic isolation R E F E R E NC E T O O L S
thus leads to the Dictionary
end of creativity: Thesaurus
Search Widget
"Out flew her web
and floated wide" S PA RK CO LLE GE
Find a School
(line 114). She
College Admissions
also loses her Financial Aid
mirror, which had College Life
been her only
access to the
outside world:
"The mirror
cracked from side
to side" (line 115).
Her turn to the
outside world thus
leaves her bereft
both of her art
object and of the
instrument of her
craft--and of her
very life. Yet
perhaps the
greatest curse of
all is that although
she surrenders
herself to the sight
of Lancelot, she
dies completely
unappreciated by
him. The poem
ends with the
tragic triviality of
Lancelot's
response to her
tremendous
passion: all he has
to say about her is
that "she has a
lovely face" (line
169). Having
abandoned her
artistry, the Lady
of Shalott becomes
herself an art
object; no longer
can she offer her
creativity, but
merely a "dead-
pale" beauty (line
157).

Somewritersendupturninginwardduringthesubsequentsearchforidentity.IntheearlyhalfofFemale
phaseofwriting,it"carried...thedoublelegacyoffeminineselfhatredandfeministwithdrawal...[turning]
moreandmoretowardaseparatistliteratureofinnerspace."DorothyRichardson,KatherineMansfield,
andVirginiaWoolfworkedtowardsafemaleaesthetic,elevatingsexualitytoaworldpolarizing
determination.Moreover,thefemaleexperienceanditscreativeprocessesheldmysticimplicationsboth
transcendentalandselfdestructivevulnerability.Thesewomen"appliedtheculturalanalysisofthe
feminists[beforethem]towords,sentences,andstructuresoflanguageinthenovel."However,Showalter
criticizestheirworksfortheirandrogynisticnatures.Forallitsconcernwithsexualconnotationsand
sexuality,thewritingavoidsactualcontactwiththebody,disengagingfrompeopleinto"aroomofone's
own."

Women in Literature A Literary Overview

Elizabeth Lee '97, Brown University

[Victorian Web Home > Political History > Social History > Gender Matters]

Last modified 1996

http://www.victorianweb.org/gender/womlitov.html

Sooner or later he begins to wonder whether there is any such thing as a representative
Victorian writer, or at any rate, whether what makes him representative is not that very quality
of intransigeance as a result of which he repudiated his society and sought refuge from the
spirit of the times in the better ordered realm of interior consciousness. Since, however, any
tendency to exalt individual awareness at the expense of conventionally established attitudes
ran counter to the concept of the role of the artist which the Victorian age tried to impose on
its writers, there resulted a conflict which has been too often ignored, but which must be taken
into account in reaching any satisfactory evaluation of Victorian literature. This was a
conflict, demonstrable within the work of the writers themselves, between the public
conscience of the man of letters who comes forward as the accredited literary spokesman of
[ix/x] his world, and the private conscience of the artist who conceives that his highest
allegiance must be to his own aesthetic sensibilities.

E. D. H. Johnson, Holmes Professor of Belles Lettres, Princeton University

Last modified June 2000

http://www.victorianweb.org/books/alienvision/introduction.html