Lady Of Shalott Research Articles

Distorting Reality through the Crystal Mirror: Dialogue Between Literature and Painting in Waterhouse’s Representations of the Lady of Shalott

“The Lady of Shalott” is a lyrical ballad written by the English Victorian poet Alfred Tennyson. There have been a wide variety of interpretations of this poem. It has also been a source of inspiration for various artistic expressions, such as art, literature, and music. The purpose of this paper is to examine the process of reverse ekphrasis in two paintings produced by the painter John William Waterhouse: The Lady of Shalott and I Am Half-Sick of Shadows, Said the Lady of Shalott. On the other hand, Nicole (Nick) Loven’s film adaptation of the poem incorporates a circular intertextuality process that revolves around the interaction between images and words. Thus, the narrated text becomes a visual image. The conversion stage of the process of reverse ekphrasis, in which Tennyson’s source text is transformed into Waterhouse’s target text, depends on a specific moment depicted in the poem “The Lady of Shalott,” as conveyed through the lady’s words. Waterhouse’s intertextual dialogue with Tennyson’s poem involves a process of reverse ekphrasis. This interaction between image and word is later transformed into another visual representation. The word transformed into an image is then converted back into an image using a film version.

ALFRED LORD TENNYSON’IN MARIANA VE SHALOTT LEYDİSİ ŞİİRLERİNDE EV SEMBOLÜNÜN KAPANA KISILMIŞ KADINI TEMSİLİ

The representation of home has remained in the forefront of studies from different periods in Western literature. When Victorian literature is considered, the poetry of Alfred Lord Tennyson stands out as it provides a fertile ground for the exploration of meanings home takes on to a serious extent. Two of his well-known poems, Mariana and The Lady of Shalott, can be regarded as illustrative of Victorian attitude toward women ensnarement through the symbol of home. More specifically, what makes the study of these poems somewhat special is that they enable contemporary readers to think critically about the ways in which home bears witness to traumatization of women by patriarchal restrictions. Therefore, this article will mainly show that home symbol in the selected poems is an essential component of a realistic representation of the status of women of the poet’s time thereby positing patriarchy as an unfair configuration of Victorian society.

Queer for Art: Tennyson’s Poetic Autonomy as Female Same-Sex Desire

Abstract This article argues that in ‘The Lady of Shalott’, and later, to lesser degree, in In Memoriam, Alfred Tennyson expresses artistic autonomy by a Renaissance poetic trope of female same-sex desire. He does so to do away with the aesthetic closure and separation from the world implied by lesbianism in the Renaissance poetic imaginary. Via readings of these two poems, as well as historical and biographical examination of Tennyson’s writings and contemporaries’ writings about Tennyson – including later sexological writings – this article suggests that Tennyson’s choice of early modern aestheticized lesbianism as figure over the Hellenistic, intellectualized, male homoeroticism newly available in his Oxbridge milieu was personally as well as poetically motivated. Tennyson’s letters and biographies show that the poet was steeped in the tradition of erotic similitude. His poetry suggests that he anticipated the negative association between aestheticism and male homosexuality that would mark the end of his own century, so he portrayed solipsistic artistic production as linked to a female homoeroticism verging on autoeroticism. This article then offers a history of the strategic revival of a specific cultural-imaginary arrangement of female same-sex desire, and re-evaluates Tennyson’s place in the history of nineteenth-century homosexuality. Finally, in tracing erotic similitude’s relationship to autoeroticism, this article articulates the poetic and political stakes of historical morphologies of male homosexuality constructed as social, productive, and active, versus persistent constructions of female homosexuality as sterile, heretical, and anachronistic.

“The Curse is come upon me”: Subversive language in “The Lady of Shalott”

“The Curse is come upon me”: Subversive language in “The Lady of Shalott”

Embedding Life Course Interventions in Longitudinal Cohort Studies: Australia's GenV Opportunity.

Embedding Life Course Interventions in Longitudinal Cohort Studies: Australia's GenV Opportunity.

SUFFERING OF WOMAN IN THE POETRY OF ALFRED TENNYSON

Woman was and stills the center of any family; consequently she is the center of the whole society. The social suffering of women was of different forms which varied from suppression in education to isolation, deprivation of love and market-marriage. Woman in all societies lived in hard circumstances and was yoked to enslavement to man's prejudice and proud feeling of superiority. Alfred Tennyson highlighted woman's torture and problems trying to get his people acquainted with such suffering and open his people's eyes and minds to the tragedy of woman's maltreatment. He used his poetry to exhibit his beliefs in such plights. This paper deals mainly with Tennyson's treatment of woman's issues. First, it gives a biographical sketch of Tennyson's life, emphasizing those incidents and situations that affected his outlook towards woman which he depicts in his poems that defend her issues in society. Of those poems are “The Princess”, “, “Mariana” and “The Lady of Shalott”. The paper casts a light on one of these poems which is "The Princess" and ends with a conclusion that brings the final findings of the study out where the reader can make use of Tennyson's ways of understanding and presenting woman's problems.

Tennyson Echoing Wordsworth, by Jayne Thomas

Reviewed by: Tennyson Echoing Wordsworth by Jayne Thomas Andrew Elfenbein (bio) Tennyson Echoing Wordsworth, by Jayne Thomas; pp. vi + 210. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019, $100.00. Scholars have often recognized William Wordsworth's importance for Alfred Tennyson. In Tennyson Echoing Wordsworth, Jayne Thomas addresses major issues in this relationship by focusing on familiar works: "The Lady of Shalott" (1832, 1842), "Ulysses" (1842), In Memoriam A. H. H. (1850), Maud (1855), and "Tithonus" (1860). Her general approach [End Page 295] balances Harold Bloom's antagonistic understanding of influence against Christopher Ricks's more cooperative understanding of poetic allusion. Chapter 1 examines the 1832 "The Lady of Shalott" and its 1842 revision to describe Tennyson's impatience with what Arthur Henry Hallam called the poetry of sensation and Tennyson's revision of Wordsworth's "Elegiac Stanzas" (1807) and "The Green Linnet" (1807), among others. In Thomas's view, Wordsworth enables Tennyson's "concerns between the demands of a poetry concerned purely with private experience and poetry that moves away from the self and engages with life, politics, and generalised humanity" (40). Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood" (1807) is perhaps the inevitable focus for a chapter on "Ulysses," stressing the lack in Tennyson's work of the compensations and recovery found in Wordsworth. In Memoriam A. H. H. may represent Tennyson at his most Wordsworthian, and Thomas argues that "echoes and allusions" in the poem "create a pattern of both independence from and dependence on Wordsworth, a desire for unity and filiation with the older poet, alongside a desire to re-engender and reinvent" (82). I found the chapter on Maud the least convincing, mostly because Tennyson's engagement with other authors in the poem seems so much more salient. "Tintern Abbey" (1798) (again, among others) is appropriately at the core of the discussion of "Tithonus," which "draws from the language of reflection" and "employs the language of sensation, thereby dissolving the arbitrary separation of the two forms of poetry" (166). Discussing influence in such poems, some of which are not obviously Wordsworthian, requires guidelines for understanding and evaluating it. As Thomas's title reveals, "echoing" is her core concept. Usually, for a piece of language to be the source of an echo, that language must be so distinctive as to have no other possible source. In the jargon of linguistics, such language is a low-frequency collocation, or a rare grouping of words. The echo of an earlier author in the work of a later author may appear at the level of just a single word. Yet the existence of the same word in two authors' works is not enough to prove an echo. Thomas claims that the Lady of Shalott's "glassy countenance" (24) echoes Wordsworth's "glassy sea" in his "Elegiac Stanzas" (25). Such a claim has to contend against other possible uses of "glassy" by Tennyson's precursors, such as Percy Bysshe Shelley's "glassy quiet" in Alastor (1816) (393), Lord Byron's "glassy gaze" in Parisina (1816) (334), or Felicia Hemans's frequent uses of the word glassy to describe bodies of water. Without acknowledging such competing possibilities or providing reasons for why a Wordsworth poem might be especially relevant to a given Tennyson poem, Thomas's treatment of echo sometimes feels murky. It also restricts her argument by hiding the broader intellectual and poetic stakes in Tennyson's originality: while he is indebted to so many other writers, he sounds like nobody else. The phrase "glassy countenance" is striking not because it revises Wordsworth but because it renovates a formulaic adjective by extending its reach. Before Tennyson, "glassy" described poetic bodies of water or, less often, the watery organ of the eyes. Tennyson unforgettably, and even creepily, extends what "glassy" and "countenance" might mean by turning the Lady's face into metaphoric glass, thereby stressing both its link to her magic mirror and its frozen fragility. I was also unsure that Thomas's opposition between Bloom's antagonistic theory of influence and Ricks's cooperative one worked successfully. Such an opposition is too likely to produce the conclusion that we see a little of both. A deeper engagement both [End...

Becoming a Name

Becoming a Name Seamus Perry (bio) Michael O'Neill has shown how closely Tennyson read Shelley, and that Alastor in particular possessed a special "centrality" to Tennyson's "poetic vision and practice."1 The poem certainly anticipates a recurrent theme in many of Tennyson's most powerfully unresolved poems, which is what sort of duty the imagination might (or might not) owe to the world outside imagination—the kind of question you see explored in "The Poet's Mind" and "The Palace of Art," and, in more oblique ways, "The Lady of Shalott" and several others. For it is in Alastor that Shelley's passionate commitment to the truth of the imagination is most strikingly wrapped up with something almost exactly the opposite: the "powerful sub-theme," as O'Neill calls it, which is "the sense that idealistic quest may be fated only to find images of its own longing" (p. 186). The poem presents its readers with two contradictory attitudes toward the figure of the Poet-protagonist, who seems all set up to be criticized for his "selfcentred seclusion" (as Shelley puts it in the preface) but who ends the poem acclaimed as "some surpassing Spirit, / Whose light adorned the world around it."2 Some of the allusions in the poem might suggest that these contested attitudes stem from the way Shelley felt about Wordsworth: he quotes admiringly from The Excursion in the preface, and identifies "natural piety" as a virtue in the invocation; but the Poet's loss of powers is also unmistakably Wordsworthian in its cast ("Whither have fled / The hues of heaven").3 Whatever the truth about Wordsworth's role, Alastor clearly portrays a figure who is both heroic and admirable and yet, no less possibly, is a warning example of precisely what not to do with one's gifts. That sort of poised rhetorical indecisiveness was a phenomenon that seems to have interested Tennyson very much: as O'Neill says, many poems by Shelley and Tennyson "convey duplicity of intent through adroit formal manoeuvres" (p. 185). "Duplicity" is a striking and characteristically astute word for him to use: for to bring in the idea of duplicity acknowledges a tradition of more simply negative responses to Shelley, which sees in him a man altogether too ready to take the wish for the deed. Thomas Jefferson Hogg, for instance, considered him "altogether incapable of rendering an account of any transaction whatsoever, according to the strict and precise truth, and the bare naked realities of actual life," not because of an inclination to falsehood as such but because of his "irresistible [End Page 127] imagination." Thomas Love Peacock quotes Hogg to agree that their friend was disposed to "narrating, as real, events which had never occurred": analogously, the only thing wrong with his poetry, Peacock said, was "the want of reality in the characters."4 When he uses the word "duplicity," Michael O'Neill has uppermost in mind Shelley's "England in 1819," a poem at once full of revolutionary hope and vivid despair, a mixture of feelings caught in what O'Neill calls the poem's "calculatedly dithering firmness" (p. 185): the analogy he draws is with Tennyson's speaker at the end of Maud, passionately full of a conviction of God's purpose and yet really still adrift in the neurosis that has stymied him throughout. Shelley's duplicity of intent is a well-meant attempt to feel better about things pour encourager les autres; Tennyson's is a more selfconsciously dramatic interest in the predicament of one who is badly at odds with himself. Peacock reports in his Memoir that Shelley "was at a loss for a title" for Alastor, and that it was he, Peacock, who suggested what it should be called: "The Greek word 'Aλάστωρ is an evil genius, κακοδαίμων, though the sense of the two words is somewhat different, as in the Φανεὶς ἀλάστωρ ἢ κακὸς δαίμων ποθέν, of Aeschylus." The Greek phrase comes in a speech from Aeschylus's Persians in which a messenger is trying to explain Xerxes's defeat at Salamis: it must have been owing to "some destructive power [alastor] or evil spirit [daimon]," he says, which are indeed not the same thing. Peacock goes...

The Charm of Tennyson

The Charm of Tennyson Jane Wright (bio) Readers of Tennyson's poetry enter charmed lands—in "The Lady of Shalott," "The Palace of Art," "The Sleeping Beauty," the story world of The Princess, the entire kingdom of Camelot. They meet characters who have been charmed (as in "The Lotos-Eaters"), or wish to possess charm (such as the speaker of Maud), in poems that exert a distinctive stylistic charm of their own.1 Part of Tennyson's charm can be identified with his extraordinary facility with sound and repetition. But that is not, primarily, what charm meant to Tennyson; or rather, the long historical connection between charm and sound was only one component of his understanding, and it went hand in hand with another: an understanding of charm that he had learned from the Roman poet Horace. Critics discussing poetry and charm have long acknowledged the central relation of sound to "charm." Northrop Frye did so influentially in his Anatomy of Criticism, where he drew on the classical terms melos, lexis, and opsis (respectively, the sound element of poetry; the written word, with both aural and visual aspects; and poetry's visual element), before offering terms for what he called the "radicals" of the first and last of these: "charm" (melos) and "riddle" (opsis).2 Such linking of "charm" to melos (tune, melody, harmony) leads round in a circle slightly, because the etymology of "charm" (as Frye also noted) is carmen (song). This "charm" is sound cut free from linguistic sense, but still imparting affect. More recently, Herbert Tucker follows this line of thinking, but takes his own argument in a historical-theoretical direction to focus on what he calls the "irreference" of charm words (in literature and spellcasting) and the centrality of "irreference" to the history of charm and its nineteenth-century "survival" "after magic."3 Tucker's "irreference" is something of a semantic equivalent of the sound quality of Frye's "charm." Where, for Frye, "charm" in poetry describes "an independent rhythm equally distinct from meter and from prose," "an oracular, meditative, irregular, unpredictable, and essentially discontinuous rhythm, emerging from the coincidences of the sound-pattern" (pp. 272, 271), Tucker's "charm" is "a verbal formula whose irreference compels reality rather than reporting on it," an "empirical otherness [which] sustains the sort of ontological discreteness and solicits the sort of interactive encounter, that we impute … to the literary object" (pp. 103–104).4 [End Page 141] In one definition, "charm" is a quality of sound "distinct from meter and from prose"; in the other, it is sound distinct from meaning, yet still sound intended to make something happen: Tucker finds that, in the modern (nineteenthcentury) survival of charm, meaning and action are put asunder.5 I shall argue that for Tennyson "charm" is primarily neither of these—that the incantatory quality of his verse (so remarked upon by his contemporary hearers) is always tempered by rhetoric and the poet's responsibility.6 Tennyson, Tucker notes, does not always give us "premium grade charm" in the fully irreferent, sound-based sense (p. 111). But nor would he; for his understanding of charm is more in touch with the rhetorical tradition than (while toying with enchantments) it is with the idea of magic; certainly it is more drawn to rhetoric, a fine balancing of sound and meaning, than to "irreference." Here is an early poem, "The sun goes down in the dark blue main" (1827), published when the poet was just seventeen; its epigraph, from Virgil, is Irreparabile tempus (irretrievable time):7 The sun goes down in the dark blue main, To rise the brighter tomorrow;But oh! what charm can restore again Those days now consigned to sorrow? The moon goes down on the calm still night, To rise sweeter than when she parted;But oh! what charm can restore the light Of joy to the broken-hearted? The blossoms depart in the wintry hour, To rise in vernal glory;But oh! what charm can restore the flower Of youth to the old and hoary?8 Each of these stanzas has the structure: statement, exclamation, question. This is a poem about a wished-for "charm" that could restore time...

Afterlives of the Lady of Shalott and Elaine of Astolat by Ann F. Howey

Afterlives of the Lady of Shalott and Elaine of Astolat by Ann F. Howey

“Harta de sombras estoy”. La Dama de Shalott de Alfred Tennyson como metáfora del ideal de feminidad victoriano y su reflejo en el imaginario pictórico decimonónico.

En un clima de revivalismo medieval y recuperación de la tradición artúrica, Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892) escribe en 1833 el que se convertiría en uno de sus poemas más célebres, La Dama de Shalott. En él, recuperaría la figura de la Doncella de Astolat creada por Sir Thomas Malory en La muerte de Arturo (1485). Pronto se convertiría en una de las heroínas paradigmáticas del poeta y uno de los motivos iconográficos preferidos de artistas prerrafaelitas y victorianos del siglo XIX y principios del XX. Tanto el poema como las imágenes, se tomaron como ilustraciones de actitudes victorianas hacia la reclusión de las mujeres en el área doméstica y la privación de su sexualidad.

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”

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.

Parodies of the Past, Fears of the Future: The Failure and Triumph of Storyline in Don Delillo’s Trauma Narratives

Though Don Delillo’s writing spans the period before and after September 11, 2001, consistent themes emerge. Such themes unite an early novel, White Noise, and The Falling Man, one of the definitive American novels about the events and aftermath of 9-11. In each, the characters experience a loss of connection with other people and with the real settings and circumstances of their lives. This leads to a breakdown of journey and storyline, where past and present merge and resolution cannot be reached. The fact that this mentality exists in both narratives, written before and after 9-11, suggests that the tragic events of that day did not create the mental devastation that followed, but that it was pre-existing. In an effort to characterise that state, comparisons are drawn to literary antecedents including Tennyson’s poem “The Lady of Shalott” and the story of the Fall of Man (suggested by the title of Delillo’s novel). In addition, concepts from psychology and philosophy are utilized, including but not limited to psychological and philosophical concepts of repetition, modern ‘simulation theory’ and Gilles Delueze’s observations regarding non-linear time. This paper concludes that the lack of connection with the human, physical and historical worlds brings about an alienation that causes one to predict and even pre-experience trauma, and this ‘pre-traumatic’ state, in turn, prevents connection and perpetuates the very loss that one dreads.

МОТИВ ПОТОПЕЛЬНИКА В ХУДОЖНІХ ТВОРАХ ДОБИ FIN DE SIECLE

Мета статті – проаналізувати особливості вираження мотиву потопельника в художніх творах доби fin de siècle. Методи дослідження складаються з мистецтвознавчих та загальнонаукових. Застосовано компаративний метод для виявлення образно-тематичних паралелей у творах митців різних країн Європи на межі XIX–XX ст.; історико-культурний – для визначення міфопоетичних джерел інспірацій тем та образів; семіотичний метод – для розкриття символіки творів. Наукова новизна полягає у з’ясуванні специфіки художньо-образних рішень жанрового мотиву потопельника та виявленні образно-тематичних паралелей у творах митців країн Європи доби fin de siècle. Висновки. Мотив потопельників у мистецтві fin de siècle сформувався на тлі занепадницьких настроїв, які панували в Європі того часу. Атмосфера розгубленості й розчарування, спричинена руйнуванням сталих світоглядних настанов, викликала в митців загострену меланхолію, що втілювалась на їхніх полотнах у вигляді естетизації смерті як порятунку від буденності світу. Мотив потопельників у мистецтві зазначеного періоду має три ключові іконографічні ізводи: образ Офелії – героїні шекспірівської драми «Гамлет»; образ Леді Шалотт з однойменної поеми А. Теннісона; образ Елейн з Астолату – героїні роману Т. Мелорі «Смерть Артура». Приналежність названих образів до англійської культури свідчить про особливий вплив на мистецтво різних країн доби fin de siècle творчості художників-прерафаелітів. Зіставлення робіт прерафаеліта Дж. Е. Мілле, американського майстра Т. Е. Розенталя та українського художника В. Котарбінського засвідчило, що образ потопельниці з картини останнього знаходиться на межі двох іконографічних ізводів, а саме: Офелії та Елейн з Астолату. Виокремлення сталих іконографічних мотивів у мистецтві «кінця століття», зокрема декадансу й символізму, дало змогу виявити певні взаємозв’язки в мистецтві України, Англії, Франції, Бельгії, Німеччини та США, раніше мало вивчені. Перспективи подальших досліджень пов’язуються з декадансом і символізмом в образотворчому мистецтві України та Європи.

The Pre-Raphaelites’ Incongruous Ekphrastic Rewriting of Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott”

This essay examines the aesthetic value of the Pre-Raphaelites’ illustration of Moxon’s Tennyson in relation to the sister arts, an analogy within the context of the particular vicissitudes of visual culture of the second half of the nineteenth century. By paying special attention to Hunt’s and Rossetti’s incongruous ekphrastic performance of Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott,” this essay argues that the Pre-Raphaelites played a crucial role in launching a new style of illustration in the sixties with the possibilities of pictured poetry; they also proposed a radical new road for art and poetry in the modern world. First, by investigating the argument between Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelites’ mentor, Ruskin, this essay explores how Tennyson responded to the Pre-Raphaelites’ version of “The Lady of Shalott” in relation to the sister arts analogy. Subsequently, this essay focuses on what Hunt and Rossetti considered the intrinsic value of singular art forms, by exploring their unconventional ekphrastic performances of “The Lady of Shalott.” Although the Pre-Raphaelites’ bold attempt was unwelcome, it was not only the most mirrored aesthetic cultural work responding to the boom of the visual arts in the period, but also the most advanced art form to anticipate the emergence of new illustrative genres.

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

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.

테니슨의「 샬롯의 아가씨」 : 빅토리아조 시각의 정치학

The main purpose is to provide a clear view of Victorian gender ideology in relation to Victorian visual culture and highlight the gendered politics of vision wherein the female is positioned as an object of vision. This paper examines whether Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” and its pictorial interpretations of the Pre-Raphaelite artists can lead to a better understanding of Victorian visual culture and patriarchal ideology. I refer to Mulvey’s concept of ‘male gaze’ because it provides a resourceful structure in which one can analyze the positioning of women as passive objects to the male gaze. “The Lady of Shalott” establishes the Lady as an object of the ‘male gaze’ since Lancelot and the people gaze upon the deceased Lady. The poem thus appears to validate patriarchal structures by mapping the gaze/object relation in terms of an opposition between masculine and feminine. Tennyson’s poem and the paintings of the male dominated Pre-Raphaelite artists highlight a woman’s to-be-looked-at-ness. Visual politics within Victorian culture demonstrates that a mode of vision comparable to that of the ‘male gaze’ pervaded literary and artistic texts. Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelite artists ultimately reinforce the patriarchal gender ideology that permeated Victorian culture.

‘Impressions of Weird Fate’: Revision and Crisis in ‘The Lady of Shalott’

AbstractAlfred Tennyson disliked the engraving of ‘The Lady of Shalott’ produced by William Holman Hunt for the 1857 Moxon edition of Tennyson’s Poems, accusing the artist of taking too many liberties in depicting the Lady’s hair and the threads of her weaving as ‘wildly tossing’ around her. This essay traces the histories of both Hunt’s image and Tennyson’s text, arguing that the poet’s objection is grounded in the fact the engraving reproduces the fierce agency that characterizes the Lady in Tennyson’s 1832 original but not his 1842 revision. That pattern of revision, I suggest, reflects the poet’s distress over the 1833 death of his beloved friend Arthur Hallam and is motivated by his new ways of thinking, in the wake of that catastrophe, about the crisis of desire and the perpetual trauma of communication between the living and the dead.

‘The Lady of Shalott’: Insights gained from using visual methods and interviews exploring the lived experience of codependency

Codependency is a complex human experience with many meanings. The experiences of self-identified codependent individuals, who attend 12 steps groups are largely missing from the literature. In this article, we present how a combination of a visual method and interviews assisted deeper exploration and analysis of the experience of living with codependency, in an interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) study.A case example, titled ‘The Lady of Shalott’, is offered as an illustration of the data collection and multilevel interpretative analytical process, highlighting how the ambiguity in the meanings of the imagery aided the interpretation. The case study, demonstrates how the visual method enriched the data collection and analysis process assisting the researcher to reach deeper layers of meanings, capturing a better understanding of the lived experience portrayed by the participant.

“Singing in her song she died”: Form as Heterotopic Mirror in Tennyson and Byatt

This essay reads A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book in the context of Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” to argue for the sophistication of Byatt’s aesthetic in light of ongoing debates about Byatt’s status as a contemporary British author. The essay employs Foucault’s description of the mirror as heterotopia to discuss art’s “form” and art’s relationship to artist and reader in Tennyson and Byatt. In focusing on the creative act itself and its impact on the lives of many of the novel’s major characters, The Children’s Book illuminates the complexities and moral dimensions of Byatt’s own writer’s aesthetic, a subject Byatt has explored in previous works of fiction and nonfiction. In demonstrating narrative’s potential dangers, Byatt’s novel tacitly offers a response to poststructural and cultural criticism of her fiction as essentialist and reactionary, even as it admittedly leaves the contradictions of her aesthetic unresolved.