The critical fortunes of Victorian poetrymean - these are all questions that Victorian poetry poses long before
literary criticism does. It is not just that Victorian poetry invents the
categories of poetry and society, literature and other writing, representation
and reality, masculine and feminine and sets these categories in opposition
to each other. Victorian poetry also articulates these categories as problems,
as the problems of modernity.
Tennyson's "The Lady of Shalott" directly engages with all of the issues
that I have just outlined. One of the best known and most widely
anthologized Victorian poems, it is frequently taken as representative of its
age. First published in 1832 and substantially revised for publication in
1842, the poem tells the story of a Lady mysteriously consigned to an
island tower from which the "whisper" (AT 39) of "a curse" (40) prevents
her from looking out directly. Instead, she sees the world outside her
window "through a mirror clear" (46) and weaves the reflected "shadows
of the world" (48) into "a magic web with colours gay" (38). When the
glittering figure of "bold Sir Lancelot" (JJ) flashes into her mirror, the
Lady, grown "half sick of shadows" (71) and without her own "loyal
knight and true" (62) leaves her weaving to look out of the window
directly:
She left the web, she left the loom,
She made three paces through the room,
She saw the water-lily bloom,
She saw the helmet and the plume,
She looked down to Camelot.
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. (109-17)The Lady leaves her bower, finds a boat, writes her name on it, lies down in
it, and floats down to Camelot, "singing her last song" (143) as she dies.
When her dead body, "a gleaming shape" (156), appears in Camelot, it
mystifies the assembled crowd. But Lancelot, in the 1842 version of the
poem, comments on its beauty: "She has a lovely face; / God in his mercy
lend her grace, / The Lady of Shalott" (169-71). 6
Even from this brief synopsis, we can see how the poem opposes the
Lady's private artistic activity to the real world outside her tower and
constructs that opposition as a problem. Through the imagery of windows,
mirrors, weaving, and writing, it figures the processes of representation and
interpretation as difficult and complicated. By making Lancelot, the
representative of the outside world, into a figure composed of fragments of
other texts - Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur (composed 1470, published
27