Adapting Elaine: Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” and Feminist Young Adult Novels

Abstract

One of the hallmarks of young adult literature is its focus on adolescent protagonists who struggle to reconcile what they want with what they are supposed to want. Indeed, some of the most enduring works of young adult literature, from L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (2006) to Judy Blume’s Forever (1975), place their young characters at a crossroads between cultural convention and individual desire. Foundational scholarship in the field of young adult fiction has suggested a recurring conflict in novels for young readers in which a protagonist finds himself or herself directly at odds with social expectations (McCallum, 1999; Trites, 2004). Furthermore, critics such as Trites (1997), Wilkie-Stibbs (2003), and Mallan (2009) have noted that many of these works concern an adolescent search for identity that is complicated by issues of gender politics, in which a protagonist’s grappling with conventional notions of masculinity and/or femininity is fundamental to a completed coming of age. In Waking Sleeping Beauty: Feminist Voices in Children’s Literature, Roberta Seelinger Trites (1997) argues that this kind of novel “demonstrate[s] characters ‘turning inward’ in ‘a search for identity’ because some form of environmental pressure has made them aware that they are not upholding socially sanctioned gender roles” (p. 2). In turn, these novels can become cathartic for adolescent readers, who may be facing similar struggles in the throes of real-life adolescence. Relying on the definition of a feminist novel established by Elaine Showalter (1977), Trites (1997) defines a “feminist children’s novel” as one “in which the main character is empowered regardless of gender,” or a novel in which “the child’s sex does not provide a permanent obstacle to her/his development. Although s/he will likely experience some gender-related conflicts, s/he ultimately triumphs over them” (p. 4). Though many novels fit this description, two bestselling young adult novels distinguish their adolescent female protagonists’ search for identity as inspired by the legends of Arthurian literature. Meg Cabot’s Avalon High (2006) and Libba Bray’s A Great and Terrible Beauty (2003) each reference the Arthurian legend of the Lady of Shalott—specifically the version that was retold and adapted by Alfred, Lord Tennyson in his 1842 poem “The Lady of Shalott.” Both novels use the characters, language, and symbolism from Tennyson’s poem to provide their heroines—and by extension, their adolescent readers—with a template through which they can understand, examine, and potentially reject the social codes that attempt to determine their behavior. In capitalizing on the ways in which Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” enhanced and adapted the traditional Arthurian legend for a Victorian audience, Cabot and Bray access what Ann Howey (2007) calls the “constellation of association and meanings” (pp. 89–92) connected to the Lady of Shalott in the medieval and Victorian texts, many of which are distinctly feminist by Trites’s definition. In this article, I will argue that in drawing inspiration specifically from Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott,” Cabot’s and Bray’s novels develop their feminism through the framework of a Victorian narrative that is more thematically complex and more politically charged than any earlier, medieval version of the Lady of Shalott legend. Specifically, Cabot’s and Bray’s novels reflect the impact of feminist criticism of Tennyson’s poem found in the works of Victorian scholars Nina Auerbach (e.g., The Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth, 1982) and the team of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar (e.g., Madwoman in the Attic, 1984). This foundational work identifies in Tennyson’s adaptation of the Lady of Shalott a dualistic and subversive set of alternatives that is not present in the medieval sources: her status as both a docile, passive figure who is “powerless in the face of the male” (Gilbert & Gubar, 1984, p. 618) and, simultaneously, as an icon of deviant and potentially powerful feminine desire. To identify the ways in which Cabot’s and Bray’s novels revise the Lady of Shalott narrative and embrace this subversion of traditional gender roles, I will first examine the Lady of Shalott narrative in medieval Arthurian literature and in Tennyson’s poem, focusing on how Tennyson’s enhancements to the tale transformed the Lady of Shalott into an iconic image of Victorian femininity. I will then demonstrate how Cabot and Bray employ revisionist strategies to adapt the gender politics of Tennyson’s poem for a 21st-century young adult readership, creating heroines who reject the passive qualities of the Lady of Shalott in favor of a more autonomous alternative and who, in doing so, model for adolescent readers a search for identity that results in self-identification and empowerment.