Title: Tennyson's Lady of Shalott: The Art of Perspective
slowly thudding drum beats along to a solemn tune, keeping time with the euphony of lilting lyric, the voice low and feminine. Images of hewn field, vast sky, turbulent water, and chilled stone mingle with the sound of swinging scythe, rustling wind, laughing water, and lady's song. Somehow, the eye is drawn again and again to distant Camelot by an unknown urge, and yet it is denied a satisfying look. Whose eye is this anyhow? The beady eye of a bird, sweeping high above the countryside, the unblinking eye of a river trout, the patient brown eye of a barge horse, the shining eye of an embowered Lady, or just her mirror...while I wonder at this curiosity of perspective, my ear is still enraptured by the enchanting circles of sound. To experience poetry in its complete sensation is to purchase admittance into the poet's microcosm at the momentary price of reality. It is the price any attentive reader will readily pay, and Tennyson's Lady of Shalott is prepared to give us a run for our money.In the course of reading any literary work, we assume alternate selves with perspectives allowed us by the author. Tennyson's The Lady of Shalott is no exception, constructing a mirrorlike perspective that points to a subtle crack in the fortress of the written word as the Lady's curse cracks her round glass. The crack will widen in this exploration of the nexus of the parallel worlds of Victorian man and woman, the external and internal, respectively.
Tennyson constructs the world around Shalott in a careful, inward spiral towards his Lady. Part one reveals the lands around the island from four distinct angles, creating a three-dimensional cube of space when added together. The first stanza shows us the bird's eye view, looking down upon the land. The second stanza complements the first, as we look up from the river like a fish. The third stanza follows the edge of the river, where horses pull the barges, the best vantage point for anyone to see the Lady from the outside. Yet none of these angles profess to have revealed the Lady and the questions are put forth, who is she? The fourth stanza gives us the first evidence of her existence, in which we hear her song in the barley field with the reapers. She is indeed mysterious.
At the moment Tennyson reveals his Lady to us, he enshrouds her yet again with a curse of isolation. She cannot participate in or interact with the life that bustles just beyond her little island, which leaves her strangely incomplete. Her mirror becomes a replacement for her eyes, showing her what she cannot look upon herself in part two. Her only statement, "I am half sick of shadows," (71) unfolds the sad effects of living on mere reflections of life, for she is a mere half of a person, knowing only the domestic, the embowered, the womanly, and she cannot even gaze out of her window (which would run the risk of her being seen). She is the ideal Victorian woman, utterly domestic and pure, and yet she might as well not exist; for all her perfection she is not known to or desired by anyone.
As readers, we are subjected to a multitude of identities; we are tossed into the perspective of the invisible and omniscient bystander often enough, sometimes we are invited to be the actors, rarely the acted upon. Each identity is established by perspective, which is artfully toyed with in the constructed world of Shalott. Though the poem is largely focused upon the Lady's mirror (throughout parts two and three), we are placed in her reflection-reliant position even longer than the Lady herself. We pity her inability to gaze on the real scenery, and yet we find ourselves gazing into perhaps a less perfect medium of text - who is hindered more? The Lady can turn her head away from the two-dimensional, though it be death, while we can only look closer to scrutinize depth that may prove shallow or abysmal.
Mirrors are notorious for their capacity to deceive just as convincingly as show the plain truth, as any modern magician knows. If text is equivalent to a mirror, showing us the world of Shalott just as the Lady's mirror shows it to her, the curse extends from the page to the reader. Only in the mirror can Lancelot and the Lady be found together on the same plane, only there can the greenness of the man's world be juxtaposed with the gray walls that surround the Lady's interior world. The colors, gray and green, are important in themselves, and we'll take a closer look at them shortly. Just as the mirror achieves the impossible merging of opposites, the poet orchestrates the merging of opposing forces in the very text of the poem. Temporal escapism is molded into tetrametric iambs and trochees. Every stanza is yoked together by linking chains of "Camelot" and "Shalott," these two words representing the ideal realms of man and woman, respectively. The appearance of Lancelot on line 77, at which point his name replaces Camelot, is the moment of symbolic confrontation between these two realms. The next two stanzas effectively show us the conquering of Shalott: Lancelot rides "Beside remote Shalott," (90) and "Moves over still Shalott," (99) finally announcing his victory with a song, but more importantly replacing Shalott with his own name in line 108. The Lady's heart is vanquished, she turns to break the barrier between them, and the mirror "crack'd from side to side" (115). Woman has broken the rules, plucked the apple, discarded passivity for action, dared to look beyond her realm of domesticity, and the deadly curse is upon her.
As the Lady abandons the mirror, she also becomes it. "With a glassy countenance," she seeks to become the complement of Lancelot and succeeds on a few levels. She dressed in snowy white, floating in the rain, seeing all...he with his "coal-black curls," riding in brilliant sun, he sees her not. The Lady becomes the "mirror blue" in contrast with the red flames of red-cross knight Lancelot, and he reflects the heat of the sun which shines "in the blue unclouded weather" of that mirror's surface. The two colors combine in the "purple night," (96) with a pun on night/knight quite appropriate, considering this stanza is the last stand of embowered Shalott. Part one paints for the picture of Shalott's environment, where "Willows whiten, aspens quiver," (10) aspens being known for their white tree-trunks. The woods are as pure as the Lady, in her walls of neutral gray. In part four, the woods become "pale yellow," a color denoting power, intelligence...instead of blissful, breezy weather, we have stormy, blowing rain. The pathetic fallacy is colorfully woven into the Lady of Shalott, nature mirroring her mental state as her magical web mirrors the life beyond her bower.
With so much imagery, perspective, and color laid out in the lines of The Lady of Shalott, it is no surprise that artists have felt the need to express their interpretations on canvas. I have selected two that are readily available electronically, for the purpose of examining these themes in artistic interpretations. William Holman Hunt's last painting of the Lady of Shalott (picture 1) demonstrates the intriguing mirror perspective of juxtaposed bower and field. The painting itself is four-sided, enclosing a multitude of circular objects at various angles - a physical representation of the poetic circles of repetition with which Tennyson chains his stanzas together. The image of Hercules and Hesperides' golden-apple tree that parallels the scenery of the mirror suggests impossible labors that were put upon him to absolve his crimes. The sunlight of the painting shows her dress to be pink, the color linking the divine to the earthly. The role of the Victorian woman as the spiritual guide pervades Hunt's painting. John William Waterhouse selects the Lady at her last moments (picture 2), drifting down the river with her tapestry. The tapestry is colorful but dominantly red, and the Lady's wispy hair appears like a bright flame against her dress, reminiscent of Lancelot's bright flaming plumage and helmet. She prepares to loose the chain, to give herself up to the external world of man, where the whiteness of her gleams brighter than the flame of a candle. The yellowish hue of the woods presses around the Lady, enveloping her with the masculine world, while the broken reeds in the foreground whisper of broken mirrors, broken boundaries, and the break in her life which is soon to come.
The last stanzas are the first moments that Lancelot's masculine world recognizes the Lady, after the struggle has already been won. The efforts of the conquesting knight bring him honor and fame in Camelot, while the Lady embraces death in her quest for love. Her eyes have "darken'd wholly," filled with death-bringing knowledge, while her body gleams, "Dead-pale between the houses high" (157). She appears to contain an inner light in death, as if she were the source of luminescence "in the lighted palace near" (164). As the white light of the corpse inspires the knights to cross themselves for fear, the Lady fulfills the Victorian woman's duty of spiritual keeper, reminding the men of their own mortality. Could Tennyson be personifying the life of the Victorian woman's soul in the Lady of Shalott? Is the soul of man so dark that the soul of his woman should be stainless as new paper, to be burned in sacrifice for the salvation of both of them? The poem affirms the martyrdom of the domestic realm for the sake of the masculine, which gleams brightly with shiny ornaments that reflect not inner light but the rays of the sun.