A reflection on fiction and art in "The Lady of Shalott". (Brief Article).

Wright, Jane

In line 114 of "The Lady of Shalott" (1842) we are told "Out flew the web and floated wide." Tennyson's references to space and spatial relations are sometimes subtle, but prove highly significant for new interpretations of even his best-loved and most discussed poems. Much criticism of "The Lady of Shalott" has seen it as a critique of early nineteenth-century perceptions of the artist/poet, and rested this idea upon the assumption that the Lady's tapestry is "an art three [or one or two or many] times removed from reality, [and that it] is apparently destroyed" when the Lady turns away from it. (1) The Lady's curse, according to such criticism, dooms her to produce an art object that is an inversion of a dim unreality (copied from "shadows" in a "mirror"). It also asserts that her web is as transient as the Lady is herself once she enters the real world (it is "apparently destroyed"). But the line from which this latter sense has been taken does not mention destruction--simply a movement in space: the web f lies "Out" and floats "wide." Attention to this detail, I suggest, will enable significant reconsiderations of Tennyson's inscription of the workings of mimesis and the nature of poetic identity in this poem.

The assumption that because the Lady works from mirrored images her art is "removed from reality" is itself problematic. In a footnote Christopher Ricks points out that the mirror is not there simply for the sake of the fairy tale, but because it was a necessary part of a real loom, enabling the worker to see the effect from the right side. (2) The weaver worked from what would become the back of the finished item. If the Lady copies directly from her mirror and produces an image of an inverted (reflected) reality on the back of her web, what is actually created on the front (though the Lady, even with the aid of her mirror, cannot see it aright) is, effectively, a copy of the real (seemingly unreflected) view from her tower window. Some critics have complicated the reflective patterns of the poem, to the point that the Lady is "[teased] out of sight." (3) Gerhard Joseph, like David Martin earlier, notes the moment at which Lancelot's image flashes "from the river" into the mirror to create what he calls a "t hird-order reflection" (Joseph, pp. 105, 107); this Joseph considers to set up "a perpetual maze in which the putative original image of Lancelot bounces endlessly and without grounding between river and glass, a simulacrum multiplying variety in a wilderness of mirrors" (p. 107). But the river does not reflect the mirror; the reflective trajectory is only one way. The moment is significant instead because this "third-order reflection"--which is in fact no more than a reflection (in the mirror) of a reflection (from the river)--simply shows the Lady Lancelot's image, effectively, the right way round. Mediated by the mirror and the river, this is the closest visual experience of the "real" world outside the Lady has yet had. And such a link between a reflection inside the tower and one outside relates importantly to ideas about poetry and fiction, expressed earlier in the century, as they concern an understanding of the Lady's artistic production.

In "What is Poetry?" (1833), J. S. Mill wrote that "Descriptive poetry consists ... of things as they appear, not as they are; ... [things] seen through the medium ... and arranged in the colours of the imagination set in action by the feelings," and that poetry is "the natural fruit of solitude and meditation." (4) Some critics of the 1950s wrote of "The Lady of Shalott" as a comment on the problematic nature of the isolated artistic life, (5) and even those more recent and highly theoretical aesthetic readings do not consider the nature and place of the Lady's artistic product beyond the context of her immediate relation to it. Mill's descriptions of poetry and fiction bear interestingly upon the way we might perceive the context and function of the Lady's tapestry. Poets, he says, "are often proverbially ignorant of life," while the novelist requires broad knowledge, as "he has to describe outward things" (p. 1214). Mill summarizes one of his distinctions between poetry and eloquence in the following passa ge, asserting that when the creative mind

turns round and addresses himself to another person;... when the expression of his emotions, or of his thoughts tinged by his emotions, is tinged also by that purpose, by that desire of making an impression upon another mind, then it ceases to be poetry, and becomes eloquence. (p. 1216)

"The Lady of Shalott" is engaged with such a distinction, and the Lady herself turns poetry to fiction in a moment of eloquence. Her web (a poetic creation for as long as it is produced in solitude--the Lady literally "ignorant of life" in any active sense) flies "Out" and floats "wide" when she "turns round" with "that desire of making an impression upon another mind"--when she seeks to address Lancelot. As she makes this turn the web, now "Out" (in the world?) like the Lady, conforms far more to Mill's definition of fiction than it does to his definition of poetry. It is a description, as I have explained, of "outward things, not the inward man; actions and events, not feelings" (p. 1214). As I considered above, it is an art object that reproduces, two-dimensionally, a direct (not an inverted) copy of reality. The imaginative medium for perceiving the real world in poetic isolation is destroyed-- "The mirror crack[s] from side to side"--but the web has "floated wide" of the destruction and "Out" beyond the tower walls.

An historically teal element of this poem--the mirror--reconnects the Lady's art to the real world beyond her window. Though the artist is unable to see it during the process of production, her artistic web, once out in a wider space than the tower and freed from the loom, is a true copy of outward things: the actions and events of Camelot. Interestingly, 3. W. Waterhouse's painting The Lady of Shalott (1885 )--one of very few depictions of the story to show the Lady outside the tower--shows her sitting in the boat on a tapestry. Waterhouse too appears to suggest that the tapestry survived. Since it is in the boat, one might also be led to assume that the crowd at Camelot would see the tapestry when the boat arrives there.

When the artist dies her art remains, and is imagistically a closer representation of the real than previous thought has suggested. Here Tennyson writes that art, even beyond the perception of the artist, speaks of reality and both can and must exist in a real world. Typically multiple, not simply questioning (Romantic) artistic modes of production, he uses a subtle gesture towards realism in art to assert the fiction in poetry and the unexpectedly close relationships between artistry and the real that he makes analogous to the visual reproduction of the Lady's contemporary reality. Though in its conception it may seem an inversion or a shadow, Tennyson hints that the artist's product cannot but display a present beyond itself. He destroys the imaginative medium not to criticize it, but to prove its redundancy once the real and independent work that it enables is separated from it. The art object, I have argued, has changed its nature once released from the process of production; we only know that the Lady di ed: her art "flew."

Notes

I am grateful to Professor Paul Hammond and Dr. John Whale at The University of Leeds, England, for reading an earlier draft of this note.

(1.) Ward Hellstrom, On the Poems of Tennyson (Gainesville: Univ. of Florida Press, 1972), p. 13.

(2.) Christopher Ricks, ed., The Poems of Tennyson, 3 vols. (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1987), 1:390 n46. Gerhard Joseph, in "Victorian Weaving: The Alienation of Work into Text in The Lady of Shalott" in Tennyson, ed. Rebecca Stott (London: Longaman, 1996), pp. 24-32, makes interesting use of this note too, but does nor consider the following points I make or the simplicity of the mirror's implications for realism, poetry, and fiction.

(3.) Gerhard Joseph, Tennyson and the Text: The Weaver's Shuttle (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992), P. 107.

(4.) John Stuart Mill, 'What is Poetry?' in The Broad view Anthology of Victorian Poetry and Poetic Theory (New York: Broadview Press, 1999), pp. 1215, 1216. All page references hereafter in the text.

(5.) See Walter Houghton and G. Robert Stange, Victorian Poetry and Poetics (Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1956), who claim, with regard to "The Lady of Shalort," that "once the artist attempts to lead the life of ordinary men his poetic gift, it would seem, dies" (p. 16).

JANE WRIGHT is a doctoral student at the University of Cambridge working on "Vision and Sincerity in Victorian Poetry," with particular focus on Tennyson and Clough. She has published articles on both these writers.