Martyr to Masculinity: Patriarchal Violence and Female Masculinity in “The Lady of Shalott”

Abstract

Recent criticism has viewed the female protagonist in Alfred Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” as an avatar of the male Romantic artist, who displaces his anxieties about his socially liminal position as an artist onto the tragic feminine figure. Instead of analyzing masculinity exclusively in relation to the male artist, this article situates “The Lady of Shalott” more broadly within the field of Victorian masculinity studies and considers the problematic of masculine self-fashioning in the poem in relation to Thomas Carlyle’s Past and Present, analyzing the relationship between the labor of weaving and the dandiacal body. Laboring under a mysterious “curse,” the Lady’s life at Shalott represents not only a critique of the effects of domestic ideology on the lives of women but, moreover, a reflection on the toxic expectations internalized within Victorian masculine subjects. The Lady’s death at the end of the poem reflects a double sense of martyrdom, suggesting both the ideological violence placed on female subjects by patriarchy and the pathological nature of masculine self-fashioning itself.