“The Lady of Shalott”

Tennyson’s poem clearly portrays, I think, the conditions of the Victorian female. The image of the ideal woman during much of the Nineteenth Century was the virginal, the spiritual, the mysterious woman dedicated to her feminine tasks, meaning the care of her husband, family and household.

Tennyson’s Lady is enclosed in a room in a medieval castle: “Four gray walls, and four gray towers/…And the silent isle imbowers” her. (I think it’s interesting that “imbower”—embower—is derived from the Old English bur and that “bound,” “husband” and “boudoir” are all related. The French “boudoir” literally means a place to sulk. I also find it interesting that she is encased in “gray” rather than being surrounded by color…or life?) She sits weaving all day and has been told that she will be cursed if she pauses in her work. “She knows not what the curse may be,/And so she weaveth steadily.” I’d suggest that this curse represents her indoctrination: She has been brainwashed by religious tradition and the social mores to believe that it is the Order of Nature that woman be passive.

The Lady cannot participate in the world but looks at it through a mirror “That hangs before her all the year,” and “Shadows of the world appear.” Her place is the domestic sphere—in the shadows rather than in the world which is the male sphere. Those spheres are separate and, according to the Victorian ideology, they were created for the female’s safety. At first she is content to weave these shadows while remaining passive and silent. Then Sir Lancelot “flashed into the crystal mirror” and she “left the web, she left the loom” and looks out of the window and sees Camelot, not the shadow. “The mirror cracked from side to side;/’The curse is come upon me’ cried The Lady of Shalott.” Even so, she leaves her bower and gets into a boat to go to Camelot. The boat becomes her funeral barge and she dies before reaching her destination.

There are, of course, many ways that the symbols could be interpreted: Seeing Lancelot arouses her longing for love and/or makes her aware of her loneliness and isolation; when she looks out the window and sees “the water lily bloom” she awakens sexually; her loss of innocence represents guilt which leads to death—the ultimate silence. All of these could be viewed as warnings to the Nineteenth Century woman. However, it seems to me that her “protection” is really a means of control. I think that her leaving her loom symbolizes woman’s dissatisfaction with the limits placed upon her. Her rebellion means that she can no longer be controlled and she is, therefore, feared. As she comes “Silent into Camelot” the people “crossed themselves for fear.”  What do they fear?

In one of the many conduct books she wrote, Mrs. Sarah Stickney Ellis (1799-1872) observes, “A woman’s highest duty is so often to suffer and be still.” Perhaps that says it all.