‘The Lady of Shalott’ in Illustration

Major part of Victorian poetry was illustrated. Illustrations are art but they are also

interpretations. It can tell us a lot about how the contemporary readers perceived and looked

at poems in your syllabus. When a single poem is illustrated by a number of different

illustrators, it is possible to follow a particularized history of responses to an unchanging set

of words whose ‘meaning’ none the less is always in the process of production by new sets of

collaborators and co-producers (readers, illustrators, publishers, critics) in changing

circumstances. For today’s class we are going to look at Illustrations of ‘The Lady of

Shalott’. It was illustrated by multiple artists, notable of them were D.G. Rossetti and Holman

Hunt.

In their illustrations, Hunt and Rossetti followed good illustrative practice by seizing

on significant moments in Tennyson’s poem to visualize and interpret for the reader, who

had, as a result, two texts to decipher: the poet’s verbal one and the artists’ visual ones. Hunt

depicts the Lady when the ‘curse’ comes upon her after she defies the prohibition against

looking out her window, and the mirror cracks and the web unravels in consequence. Rossetti

focuses on the poem’s ironic ending, when Lancelot, looking into the dead face of the

mysterious Lady, is briefly attracted to her beauty, unaware that her story intersects in any

way with his own. Each artist packs an enormous amount of detail into the confines of a

small frame, introducing, in the process, personal interpretative symbols as they ‘allegorize

on their own hooks’.

Holman Hunt: The Lady of Shalot

In addition to the wildly tossing hair and encircling threads objected to by the poet as

lacking direct textual referents, Hunt introduces an even more specific and significant symbol

of his personal interpretation of the poem, curiously not recorded as being offensive to the

laureate: the image of the crucified Christ in the roundel on the right (plate 2). The Christian

symbolism has little to do with the immediate world of the poem. It does, however, embody

Hunt’s personal position as an artist who took art’s task of moral elevation very seriously. He

later claimed that Tennyson’s poem was an allegory representing the soul’s failure to accept
faithfully the high purpose of life. Some of the iconography, however, specifically evokes the

images of the ‘fallen woman’ so ubiquitous in Victorian literature and painting, thus

introducing a more secular hermeneutics (see Leng 1991: 323, 320). Hunt’s illustration,

positioned at the opening of Tennyson’s poem (In Maxon edition of the poem) and

functioning as a preface or abstract of the whole, invites the reader to consider ‘The Lady of

Shalott’ allegorically. The reader is offered the option of receiving the poem as a general

spiritual allegory showing the inevitable downfall of those who follow an earthly rather than

a spiritual path in life; or as a specific social allegory expressing anxiety about unlicensed

female sexuality. The two readings are not, of course, incompatible.

D.G. Rossetti’s illustration of ‘The Lady of Shalott’

 D.G. Rossetti’s illustration of the poem provides a summation or ‘end note’ to the

verbal text. By focusing on Sir Lancelot and his response the artist provides an accessible

subject position for the reader of the poem, removed from the action and yet subtly drawn

into its charm. The knight is trying to ‘read’ the Lady’s inscrutable face, needing to find

meaning in her silence. Around him Camelot’s active life teems and swells, but his placement

in the picture plane separates him from the bustle. Looking down into the beautiful face of

the dead woman, her face turned aside from his gaze, Lancelot remains supremely unaware

that it was her looking upon him that brought her to this pass. Rossetti’s illustration thus

responds to the scopic and sexual themes of a text concerned with desire and its limits. His

image makes the Lady herself – rather than Hunt’s crucified Christ – the icon and spiritual

centre of the poem. As visual ‘readings’ framing Tennyson’s poem, Hunt’s headpiece and

Rossetti’s tailpiece (In the Maxon edition) offer varied and complex interpretations to guide

readers in their own understanding of the poem. It is no wonder that the laureate felt his

control of meaning and ‘intention’ challenged by such a bold pictorial partnership.

(Source: Lorraine Janzen Kooistra)