Weaving and the Tarot as Apollonian Repressive Mechanisms in Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” and Carter’s “The Lady of the House of Love”

Abstract

Storytelling and its most common emblem weaving have a significant place in the history of ideas and literature, and women weaving stories on their web is a recurrent image in mythology, fairy tale and folklore. According to Foucault, weaving stories also has the role of repressing desire and cancelling death. In Lord Alfred Tennyson’s poem “The Lady of Shalott” and Angela Carter’s short story “The Lady of the House of Love,” the female figures repress desire and cancel death by habitual conciliatory actions emblematic of storytelling, which are weaving in Tennyson’s poem and the Tarot play in Carter’s story that has the same function as weaving. In both works abandoning this action, that is, giving up spinning shadows/stories of life, and deciding to get involved in actual human experience results in self-annihilation and death. The present article handles weaving in “The Lady of Shalott” and the Tarot in “The Lady of the House of Love” as two similar forms of repressing desire and studies in these works the repression of desire and fulfilment of desire and the consequential death of the female characters. The article bases its theoretical framework on a synthesis of Foucault’s idea that narrative is a form of cancelling death with Nietzsche’s idea of the binary opposition of the Apollonian and Dionysian states in the human soul, identifying desire and death with the Dionysian and the repressive mechanisms of narrative with the Apollonian.