KATHY ALEXIS PSOMIADESphical inquiries of Jacques Derrida, deconstruction sees language as self-
referential, rather than referring to an external world of objects. To a
deconstructionist the word "boat" has meaning not because it refers to a
hollow wooden structure but because it is not "coat" or "moat" or even
"albatross." Language, in other words, is a system in which the component
parts have meaning as part of a system: it does not refer to some external
truth nor is it grounded in any external reality. Lacanian psychoanalysis in
turn ties this unstable language to the question of identity: we only know
ourselves as selves in language, and thus the notion of a stable self is just
another illusion about the belief in a truth beyond language to which
language refers. Read from this perspective, "The Lady of Shalott"
becomes for Sinfield a poem about the construction of the bourgeois self
and the anxieties attendant on this construction. The Lady's web fails to
give her "a coherent sense of herself in the world" (68). When she acknowl-
edges the web as illusion and sets out for Camelot with a sign bearing her
name, she tries "to enter language and social identity." But her death shows
the impossibility of her project.
We can see how literary criticism's conception of the political has
widened here: no longer is the Lady of Shalott a merely decorative poem,
or even a poem about the irreconcilability of poetry and politics. Rather the
poem's political content lies in those areas - desire, subject formation,
gender - formerly thought to lie outside of politics in the subject's personal
life. This critical inquiry into the private/public split in part is a legacy of
the influential claim of feminism in the 1960s and 1970s that "the personal
is political." The net result is to allow critics to talk about even the most
seemingly apolitical Victorian poetry in the context of politics and
economics.
The culmination of this more historical approach to Victorian poetry is
Isobel Armstrong's Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (1993),
an imposing study that returns to the question of the relationship between
Victorian poetry and the larger culture that critics of the 1950s found so
pressing. Drawing on insights from Marxism, deconstruction, psychoana-
lysis, and feminist criticism, Armstrong seeks to develop "the political
implications of Johnson's work and the epistemological implications of
Langbaum." 16 Like Johnson and Langbaum, she sees the Victorian poets as
responding to and intervening in the specificity of their historical moment:
"post-revolutionary, post-industrial, post-teleological, post-Kantian" (4).
Like Johnson, she sees doubleness as the defining characteristic of Victorian
poetry, where a single poem may be thought almost always to contain two
different and contradictory poems. Like Langbaum, Armstrong is interested
in how poetic form evolves in response to cultural change. She sees
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