A Reflection on Fiction and Art in "The Lady of Shalott"

Jane Wright

Victorian Poetry, Volume 41, Number 2, Summer 2003, pp. 287-290 (Article)

Published by West Virginia University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/vp.2003.0026

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/44231

[ Access provided at 3 Oct 2020 22:46 GMT from University of Canberra ]

Brief Article
A Reflection on Fiction and Art in “The Lady of
Shalott”
Jane Wright

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 rela-
tions are sometimes subtle, but prove highly significant for new interpreta-
tions 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 de-
stroyed”). But the line from which this latter sense has been taken does
not mention destruction—simply a movement in space: the web flies “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 Chris-
topher 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 di-
rectly 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, effec-
tively, a copy of the real (seemingly unreflected) view from her tower win-
dow. 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 “third-order re-

287
288 / VICTORIAN POETRY

flection” (Joseph, pp. 105, 107); this Joseph considers to set up “a per-
petual maze in which the putative original image of Lancelot bounces end-
lessly and without grounding between river and glass, a simulacrum multi-
plying 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 po-
etry 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 soli-
tude 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 distinc-
tions between poetry and eloquence in the following passage, 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 emo-
tions, is tinged also by that purpose, by that desire of making an
impression upon another mind, then it ceases to be poetry, and be-
comes 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
 JANE WRIGHT / 289

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 real 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, J. W.
Waterhouse’s painting The Lady of Shalott (1885)—one of very few depic-
tions 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 sepa-
rated 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 died:
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 Califor-
nia Press, 1987), 1:390 n46. Gerhard Joseph, in “Victorian Weaving: The Alien-
ation of Work into Text in The Lady of Shalott” in Tennyson, ed. Rebecca Stott
(London: Longman, 1996), pp. 24-32, makes interesting use of this note too, but
does not consider the following points I make or the simplicity of the mirror’s impli-
290 / VICTORIAN POETRY

cations for realism, poetry, and fiction.

3 Gerhard Joseph, Tennyson and the Text: The Weaver’s Shuttle (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge Univ. Press, 1992), p. 107.
4 John Stuart Mill, ‘What is Poetry?’ in The Broadview 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 (Cam-
bridge: Riverside Press, 1956), who claim, with regard to “The Lady of Shalott,”
that “once the artist attempts to lead the life of ordinary men his poetic gift, it
would seem, dies” (p. 16).