KATHY ALEXIS PSOMIADESShuttle (1992), Gerhard Joseph claims that "The Lady of Shalott" is "the
Victorian poem that has most readily lent itself to the insinuation of
'theory' - especially of the Derridean and Lacanian variety." 25 He shows
how the poem can be read as a "parable concerning the problematics of
mimesis" (106), as a fable about "the radically attenuated 'emergence' of
the self, driven by a naive belief in unmediated presence, into the world"
(107), as "an allegory charting the signifier's drift though the abyss, isolated
from its signified, its audience, and the intention of its sender" (108), and
even as "a parable of recent literary history charting the drift from a New
critical analysis of authored 'works' to a post-structuralist reading of
authorially-unbounded 'texts'" (122). We can see how all of these readings
refer directly to the poem's treatment of issues of representation. Mimesis is
a problem because the Lady cannot see the world directly to imitate it in
her tapestry. The idea that one can experience reality directly, rather than
through the mediation of the mirror, proves illusory, since the Lady does
not survive her journey. The Lady's body itself becomes a sign in death but
what it means, who it is for, and what the Lady intended it to say remain
unknowable. Finally, the Lady's tapestry stands as a work with an author
but her dead body figures as a text cut loose from its author, a text placed
in the hands of readers like Lancelot, whose appreciation of it as an
aesthetic object depends on their not knowing its author's story.
Like Sinfield, Joseph draws upon the work of Geoffrey Hartman,
perhaps the most famous deconstructive critic to discuss Tennyson's poem.
In Saving the Text: Literature I Derrida I Philosophy (1981), Hartman
mentions Tennyson's poem in passing in a chapter on Derrida and Lacan.
He locates in the Lady's claim to be "half-sick of shadows" "the wish to put
ourselves in an unmediated relation to whatever 'really' is, to know some-
thing absolutely... to be defined totally." 26 But of course to be fixed by a
word in this way proves impossible: the Lady dies as she sails down the
river labeled with her name. "She becomes in death what she was without
knowing it in life: a floating signifier" 27 - a sign without any stable referent.
The poem thus exposes the desire to own one's own name - that is, to have
a fixed identity, or write a poem that is somehow connected to a stable
ground of meaning - as an impossible desire. It does so with the doubleness
associated with the fetish in psychoanalysis - it knows that completeness i s
an illusion but it produces that illusion all the same. Hartman's brief
elliptical discussion of how representation works in "The Lady of Shalott"
went a long way toward demonstrating how sophisticated Victorian poetry
can be when it considers issues of representation.
Psychoanalytic criticism, too, places a special emphasis on intricate
structures of language and representation. Matthew Rowlinson argues for
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