“The
lady of Shalott can be interpreted as alluding to contemporary woman question.”
Do you agree? Give reasons.
Tennyson’s poems more or less deal
with the question of women. The princess, Mariana, Maud
are all wearily circle around the same question. The lady of shallot is no
exception. The Lady of Shalott is the best creation by Tennyson. What The
God of Small Things is to Arundhuti Roy, Wuthering Heights to Emily
Bronte, The Lady of Shalott is to Tennyson. Almost all the traits which
we find in Tennyson as a poet are revealed in this poem. The poem has its
pictorial, musical and symbolic qualities. The first two qualities go to
contribute to the lyrical quality as a whole. The symbolic or allegorical
quality in The Lady of Shalott can be approached from two view points:
(a) traditional and (b) feminist. As far as traditional approach is concerned,
the poem may be taken as referring allegorically to the nature and dangers of
the creative imagination. From feminist point of view Tennyson’s The Lady of
Shalott was to be a seminal poem for the Victorian age, touching, perhaps
unwittingly, on the vexed question of the position and rights of women. In this
poem Tennyson reaches back to the earlier, more masculinist, and stage of
romance tradition in which authors found it difficult to sustain a focus on
women as sexually desiring subjects.
The tradition of medieval and
Renaissance courtly romance was to generally portray passion from the
perspective of the male lovers. The female was the desired objects, often distant
and enigmatic, and not the subject of (not the one who experience) passion. The
beautiful and desirable lady was described in great detail from her hair downwards,
a technique which suggested that she would be completely captured by the gaze
of the male describing her. Tennyson however, produces The Lady of Shalott
out of a tense situation in which the woman is being permitted even impelled to
have the opportunity to experience (to become the subject of) passion but in
which the means of its expression are difficult.
For the lady to be the subject of
passion, she needs an object. In The Lady of Shalott, the reflected
image of Sir Lancelot serves as the requisite object for the lady. The problem
is that Tennyson’s Sir Lancelot is devoid of both the heroic deeds of the epic
hero and the more domestic and courtly virtues of romance. As a result,
Tennyson’s Lancelot emerges as a flashy but depthless image. In him, there is
no substance of masculine idea. It shakes the lady out of her contented
self-sufficiency and prompts her to decisive and disastrous action. The lady is
afforded the opportunity for passion but fails to express it. From a feminine perspective,
her failure comes about because the romantic tradition in the 19th
century proves inadequate to furnish a profound enough object for female
passion.
The Lady of Shalott suffers
from a division of male and female pursuits into what were known as public and
private spheres. Traditionally the private sphere was through to be the proper
domain of women, whereas the public sphere to men. In The Lady of Shalott,
we would interpret the death of the lady and the fate that she finally has to
suffer, as the price she pays for emerging from the private sphere into the
public sphere, traditionally held to be masculine territory .
