The Use of the Female Persona in Lady of Shalott and Mariana.

It is a curious fact that in most of the poems that talk about art, Tennyson uses the female figure. It may be because of the parallel drawn often between the privacy of the artist and the privacy of the middle class woman in Victorian culture. This was quite natural as the separate space occupied by the artist in society is similar to the private, domestic space in which a woman was enclosed. All through the poem a parallel is drawn between the ‘feminine’ nature of the Lady of Shalott and the poet’s isolation from the ‘masculine’ world outside. The fact that she has absolutely no connections or attachments to the world, either economic or marital, denies her substantiality.  In fact this almost makes her invisible which is reaffirmed by the fact that what she sees in the mirror is not a reflection of herself but of a world beyond her bounds.

Yet the parallel between the privacy of the poet and the privacy of the woman stops at a point. The fundamental difference between the nature of isolation of the poet and the woman is that for the former it is a matter of choice while for the latter, a lack thereof. For artists, privacy is a sign of autonomy, of independence whereas privacy for the middle class woman means separation from the public sphere, dependence upon male members of the family and a total loss of self identity. Therefore, the female persona is used by the male poet only as a technique to communicate and express feelings and insecurities that would otherwise be considered unmanly. Thus in The Lady of Shalott towards the end Tennyson too ceases to identify with the ‘feminine’ artist and replaces her with the masculine hero Lancelot.

The theme of the embowered woman is further explored in Mariana. The subject of this poem is drawn from a line in Shakespeare's play Measure for Measure: "Mariana in the moated grange." This line describes a young woman waiting for her lover Angelo, who has abandoned her upon the loss of her dowry. This poem begins with the description of an abandoned farmhouse, or grange, in which the flower-pots are covered in overgrown moss and an ornamental pear tree hangs from rusty nails on the wall. The sheds stand abandoned and broken, and the straw ("thatch") covering the roof of the farmhouse is worn and full of weeds. A woman, presumably standing in the vicinity of the farmhouse, is described in a four-line refrain that recurs--with slight modifications--as the last lines of each of the poem's stanzas: "She only said, 'My life is dreary / He cometh not,' she said; / She said, 'I am aweary, aweary, / I would that I were dead!’”. The woman's tears fall with the dew in the evening and then fall again in the morning, before the dew has dispersed.  In both the morning and the evening, she is unable to look to the "sweet heaven." At night, when the bats have come and gone, and the sky is dark, she opens her window curtain and looks out at the expanse of land. She comments that "The night is dreary" and repeats her death-wish refrain. In the middle of the night, the woman wakes up to the sound of the crow, and stays up until the cock calls out an hour before dawn. She hears the lowing of the oxen and seemingly walks in her sleep until the cold winds of the morning come. She repeats the death-wish refrain exactly as in the first stanza, except that this time it is "the day" and not "my life" that is dreary. Within a stone's throw from the wall lies an artificial passage for water filled with black waters and lumps of moss. A silver-green poplar tree shakes back and forth and serves as the only break in an otherwise flat, level, gray landscape. The woman repeats the refrain of the first stanza. When the moon lies low at night, the woman looks to her white window curtain, where she sees the shadow of the poplar swaying in the wind. But when the moon is very low and the winds exceptionally strong, the shadow of the poplar falls not on the curtain but on her bed and across her forehead. The woman says that "the night is dreary" and wishes once again that she were dead. During the day, the doors creak on their hinges, the fly sings in the window pane, and the mouse cries out or peers from behind the lining of the wall. The farmhouse is haunted by old faces, old footsteps, and old voices, and the woman repeats the refrain exactly as it appears in the first and fourth stanzas. The woman is confused and disturbed by the sounds of the sparrow chirping on the roof, the clock ticking slowly, and the wind blowing through the poplar. Most of all, she hates the early evening hour when the sun begins to set and a sunbeam lies across her bed chamber. The woman recites an emphatic variation on the death-wish refrain; now it is not "the day," or even her "life" that is dreary; rather, we read: "Then said she, 'I am very dreary, / He will not come,' she said; / She wept, "I am aweary, aweary, / Oh God, that I were dead!'".

Mariana awaits her love with no other occupation but to stare out of her window and watch the horizon for him. Her whole existence seems to revolve around waiting and pining, and even in rest she dreams of him. Sleep is not even an escape for her. Mariana actively searches in her dreams without leaving the solitary safety of her bower, for to leave and search for her love by herself never seems to be an option. "In sleep she seem'd to walk forlorn, till cold winds woke the gray-eyed morn about the lonely moated grange", showing that in sleep she is able to search for her love, but that search is only a dream, not reality. Mariana cannot go out and actively seek what she searches for. Instead, she dreams and pines, wishing that death would come and end her suffering because her lover will not. The female persona in this poem too, like The Lady of Shalott, can hope to attain freedom only in death that implies the dissolution of her personality.

Mariana and the Lady of Shalott are both exceedingly sad characters. They are both confined and despairing because their lives are dreary, but to change it would be to give up the place that is their own safe haven, and to venture out into a perilous world-which was not something the women of the Victorian era, the very readers of such poems, were encouraged to do.