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Gender Politics in Alfred, Lord

Tennyson's THE LADY OF SHALOTT
a
Ellen J. Stockstill
a
Georgia State University
Published online: 21 Mar 2012.

To cite this article: Ellen J. Stockstill (2012) Gender Politics in Alfred, Lord Tennyson's THE LADY OF
SHALOTT, The Explicator, 70:1, 13-16, DOI: 10.1080/00144940.2012.656737

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 The Explicator, Vol. 70, No. 1, 13–16, 2012
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ISSN: 0014-4940 print / 1939-926X online
DOI: 10.1080/00144940.2012.656737

ELLEN J. STOCKSTILL
Georgia State University

Gender Politics in Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s

THE LADY OF SHALOTT
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Keywords: “The Lady of Shalott,” Alfred, Lord Tennyson, poetry, gender

By the end of the nineteenth century, Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem

“The Lady of Shalott” had inspired fifty portrayals by various artists—John
William Waterhouse alone painted three between 1887 and 1905 (O’Gorman
72; Saville 72). Because this poem prompted the creation of so many illus-
trations, it is odd that a particular interpretation of “The Lady of Shalott”
has dominated the criticism of Tennyson’s poem for so long. Much of
the criticism claims the poem is a narrative of artistic struggle, as the
weaver/artist/poet is separated from reality, producing a copy of the real
world’s reflections or shadows. In these readings, “real life,” or life outside
the artist’s workspace, stands in opposition to artistic employment. Thus,
when the Lady turns away from the loom to Camelot, both artist and art die.
Focusing their analyses on the plight of the artist and the binary of art/reality,
many of these critics also ignore the lady of “The Lady of Shalott,” often
appropriating the female character as male poet and ignoring the gender
politics of the poem.
Part 1 of the text introduces Tennyson’s heroine and her oppression. The
only name for this woman is her title and it is symbolic, as she is the woman
of she-lot or her-lot. This lady stands as an archetype for all women—a
woman with a woman’s lot in the world. Specifically, she lives in a tower,
and she is imprisoned or oppressed by her position as object. Carl Plasa
notes that the first two stanzas of the poem establish the Lady as an object
of the patriarchal gaze since she is “below” the “gazing” people (Tennyson
7, 8). The Lady is contained in an almost prison-like description:

13
 14 The Explicator

Four gray walls, and four gray towers,

Overlook a space of flowers,
And the silent isle imbowers
The Lady of Shalott. (lines 15–18)

Plasa highlights the duality of “overlook” in line 16 as the gaze not only
looks down on the Lady but also overlooks her in another sense, as it fails
to “recognize,” understand, or identify her (Plasa 256). The Lady’s position
is contained and constructed by the phallic architecture surrounding her—a
patriarchal structure of power.
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The Lady’s anonymity to the outside world also emphasizes her “over-
looked” position:

But who hath seen her wave her hand?

Or at the casement seen her stand?
Or is she known in all the land,
The Lady of Shalott? (24–27)

Hidden inside phallic architecture, the Lady is invisible to the outside world.
The only people aware of her existence are the “reapers, reaping early” and
“by the moon” who hear her singing (28, 33). Perhaps these workers identify
her because they are tied to the land they work, similarly denied mobility
by their positions as working-class people. Only knowing her by her voice,
the reapers and, significantly, the readers, do not know her name; we know
her by where she lives. Her namelessness throughout the poem restricts us
as readers; we are made complicit in the patriarchal gaze’s overlooking of
the Lady, and maybe this is why so many interpretations of “The Lady of
Shalott” have been male centered. The repetition of her title in the narrative
forces us to similarly ignore the Lady’s identity beyond her constructed
position inside the tower.
In order to resist the position of patriarchal gazer and reader, we must
closely examine the Lady’s situation, her work, and her rebellion against
patriarchal identity constructions. Inside the tower, the Lady “weaves by
night and day” (37) what she sees of the outside world in her loom’s mir-
ror. Her status as a contained woman is her “curse” because, while she is
an artist, she must reproduce the patriarchal world she is separated from
(40). Forced to weave these images, the Lady participates in the “ideo-
logical re-presentation” of patriarchy (Plasa 252). It is important to note
the gendered images she sees and reproduces: “market girls,” “damsels,”
 Gender Politics in Tennyson’s THE LADY OF SHALOTT 15

a “shepherd lad,” and “knights” (Tennyson, lines 53, 55, 57, 61). Her re-
presentation of patriarchy thus consists of weaving individuals that carry
gendered titles or inscriptions. She copies the gendered images she sees in
her mirror—creating a copy of a copy. In this sense, her weaving represents
gender (re)construction.
At the conclusion of part 2, she sees “two lovers lately wed” and de-
jectedly responds, “I am half sick of shadows” (70–71). Many critics have
seen this reaction as the Lady’s loneliness and desire for a romantic or sex-
ual relationship of her own. They defend this claim by assuming that the
appearance of Lancelot in her mirror arouses her heterosexual desire and
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causes her to turn away from the mirror and her weaving. While this is a
tempting interpretation, I think it is just as likely that the Lady’s reaction
to the newlyweds is repulsion toward a heterosexual imperative constructed
by patriarchically assigned gender roles. Perhaps the Lady sees her sexual
desires or readiness and does not want to enter into a relationship like the
newlyweds she lamented over in part 2. In other words, maybe the lady’s de-
sires do not match those of the newlyweds, do not fit into a heteronormative
relationship.
Leaving her site of production, the Lady rebels against the propagation of
patriarchically assigned gender roles and constructions. She will no longer
reproduce the gendered images in the mirror; she will stop proliferating the
knowledge and power of patriarchy through her discursive production of
weaving. Within a patriarchal society, like that of the nineteenth century or
today, this resistance comes at a cost:

Out flew the web and floated wide;

The mirror cracked from side to side;
“The curse is come upon me,” cried
The Lady of Shalott. (114–117)

If the mirror contains the ideologies of patriarchy through the images of het-
erosexual normativity, its cracking represents the Lady’s attempt to escape
the copies or reflections of these images and her subsequent reproduction
of them. Even when the mirror breaks, however, the Lady cannot entirely
escape patriarchal rule. She turns away from the patriarchal mirror only to
enter the patriarchal society that mirror had reflected.
Thus, the curse the Lady bears is the ultimate inescapable nature of
assigned gender roles and sexualities in patriarchal power structures. Part 4
of the poem illustrates her defeat. Out of the tower, the Lady finds a boat,
 16 The Explicator

“And round about the prow she wrote / The Lady of Shallot (125–26). In this
act of discursive production, the Lady essentially says, “Overlook me. I am
the Lady of Shalott. I cannot escape what you have called me and where your
language has placed me.” Even though her writing could elevate her again
to exist as artist and object, she knows the curse, the binaries imposed by the
patriarchy, is inescapable. While the Lady does not survive, her handwriting
etched into the boat—The Lady of Shalott—stands as a representation of
this possible union between subject and object, masculine and feminine, or
at least challenges the notion that they should remain separate.
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Works Cited
O’Gorman, Francis. “The Lady of Shalott.” Victorian Poetry: An Annotated Anthology. Ed. Francis
O’Gorman. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004. Print.
Plasa, Carl. “‘Cracked from Side to Side’: Sexual Politics in ‘The Lady of Shalott.”’ Victorian Poetry
30.3/4 (1992): 247–63. JSTOR. Web. 10 Apr. 2010.
Saville, Julia. “‘The Lady of Shalott’: A Lacanian Romance.” Word & Image 8.1 (1992): 71–87. Print.
Tennyson, Alfred Lord. “The Lady of Shalott.” The Poems of Tennyson. 2nd ed. Vol. 2. Ed. Christopher
Ricks. London: Longman, 1987. 387–95. Print.