Shashank Joshi
Discuss Tennyson’s presentation of the Lady of Shallot
With The Lady of Shallot, Tennyson explores various themes within the structure of a conventional Romantic poem; the poem may be interpreted as a story representing the plight of the artist, or even as a comment on the female roles in Victorian society, but the imagery and language remain flowing and powerful either way.
The social context is, of course, significant; Tennyson wrote the poem during a period of social and intellectual change, where people began to question accepted wisdom, and pursue their own line of questioning. Thus the poem may represent Tennyson’s desire as an artist to shatter the barrier that held him back from reality, but it is also a comment on the very nature of the artist, who strives to perfect his art and may only achieve perfection in death. Tennyson, from the first stanza, presents us with two distinct and separated areas: nature, and the Lady’s walled tower. The tower, a phallic image in itself, conveys the manner in which masculine dominance in the Victorian era led to creative and intellectual suffocation for women. Alternatively, considering Freudian theory, one could consider the image of a female imprisoned by a phallic structure to represent the emasculation that Tennyson feels as a poet, because outside, the “[w]illows whiten, aspens quiver,/Little breezes dusk and shiver/ Thro’ the wave that runs for ever.” The language clearly emphasizes the magnitude of nature’s creativity, and its freedom, yet the Lady cannot even look on jealously because she has been cursed. Observing this beauty through a mirror, she tries in vain to recreate it on her tapestry, but the sheer futility of this is demonstrated through the images of perpetuity and passivity in the fifth stanza. She weaves “night and day” and “She has heard a whisper say,/ A curse is on her if she stay/ to Look down to Camelot.” Firstly, the enjambment conveys the sense of continuity, and crucially, it tells us that despite Romantic poetry’s fixation with the individual, Tennyson accepts the ultimate insignificance of the individual, or perhaps the artist.
