Waterhouse’s The Lady of Shalott: Gendered Captivity and Sexualization
Lucy Elliott
Lucy Elliott will be going into her last year at the University of British Columbia. She is majoring in Visual Arts with a minor in Urban Studies. Classic literature, art history, and architecture are all areas of great interest to Lucy. She also maintains a multimedia studio practice, in and out of school, where she experiments in drawing, painting, pottery, and textiles. She grew up on Vancouver Island, Canada.
Introduction
Lord Alfred Tennyson’s poem, “The Lady of Shalott,” follows an unnamed lady as she tries to break the curse of isolation upon her. She stays inside her house creating tapestries, unable to take an active part in the world. She can only look through her mirror’s reflection to see the world through her window. When she looks outside to Lancelot, she becomes mad from her lust and loneliness and decides to leave for Camelot. Here she realizes her curse and chooses to leave the safety of her house anyway. She drifts down the river to Lancelot and dies along the way. The Lady of Shalott’s remoteness is the tragedy of her life, never able to connect with anybody. She lives her life understanding the world through a distorted reflection. Tennyson’s poetry is descriptive and romantic. He writes the Lady as a mysterious figure, without explaining why she is cursed or how she came to be here.
This character has been a fascination for artists who hope to elaborate on who the Lady of Shalott is (Trippi 96). John William Waterhouse’s 1888 painting, The Lady of Shalott, places her as a sexual object, stripping any agency away, while highlighting the Victorian expectations of womanhood.
Now, in 2021, I understood this character in a way inconceivable to Tennyson or Waterhouse. After COVID and the self-isolation that was necessary to stay healthy, the safety in domesticity and the mix of fear and desire towards intimacy found in the outside world became a reality. By using Waterhouse’s painting, I intersect sexuality, agency, illness, and remoteness to think about how we see ourselves and others while forced into isolation.
The Gaze
The public criticized the painting for its neutrality, preferring that it would have focussed on the romantic and supernatural elements of the story (Trippi 96). Waterhouse’s use of realism emphasizes the Lady’s physical deterioration, leaving her vulnerable. Her story becomes a tragedy of self-sacrifice to Lancelot, emphasizing her role as the unrequited lover. Tennyson’s choice to leave her vague only creates the idea of a woman within a fairy tale. Waterhouse’s naturalistic depiction allows the audience to identify and admire her (Howey 152). Without access to her visualization, the Lady maintained some of her power over the reader. Waterhouse strips her of that agency, inverting her gaze upon the world through the mirror, and places the woman as image.
Her mouth parts slightly to start singing, or just as an erotic suggestion from Waterhouse. Her unruly, long hair and medieval full-sleeved gown follow the earlier Pre-Raphaelite illustrations of women. In contrast to his other paintings of the Lady of Shalott, she is complacent to her fate and to the viewer’s gaze upon her, sitting contained within her boat. Her face and body are towards the front, ready to embrace her death. By opening her body towards Lancelot, the Lady subjects herself to him. Yet, under hollow, drooping eyelids, she looks at us. The Lady’s gaze is not direct. Instead, she submits herself as the object, demure and open for us to look upon her (Howey 162). Her eye contact with the viewer makes our objectification important. Is she looking at us for salvation, or is she looking to blame us for her anguish? Ann Howey’s essay looks at Waterhouse’s The Lady of Shalott as an illustration of the fixed position of the woman, available for the male gaze (160-3). Howey accentuates the focus on sight as a destructive yet erotic force, which is the devastation of the Lady within the poem (162). Looking at Lancelot through the window leads to her awakening and disrupts her orderly life, thus commencing her downfall (162). Tennyson’s narrative of the female gaze is as a self-destructive force when used upon the hypermasculine; this shifts into Waterhouse’s male gaze upon vulnerable femininity in the painting, leaving little power left with the Lady.
The Awakening
In the bottom left corner of Waterhouse’s The Lady of Shalott (1888), he paints two birds with twigs in their mouth, possibly making a nest together. Elaine Shefer’s article examines how the bird and the cage were used throughout Victorian symbolism as the young woman’s love and the loss her of virginity and innocence (464). The Pre-Raphaelite William Holman Hunt’s Awakening Conscience (1853) uses a bird chased by a cat to reference the young woman in the painting, chased by threatening masculine sexuality (Shefer 462). Waterhouse’s use of the bird is reminiscent of Hunt, showing the Lady’s sexual awakening through the bird’s interaction. Instead of being threatened, however, she is tempted by the prospects of partnership, metaphorically flying away from her cage.
By the birds’ act of nest-making the scene gives the viewer vague assertions about the Lady’s desires to both return to a domestic lifestyle while having the freedom of the flying bird. The viewer can interpret this as a symbolic remaking of the Lady’s home within the real world with Lancelot, as an alternate ending. From comparing these birds in the final painting to his sketches we see the birds were originally much more prominent, flying in the foreground above the Lady (Waterhouse, Sketchbook). The Lady looks up at the birds, envious of their freedom to experience the world and find partnership.
Victorian imagery further reflects this notion of sheltered womanhood through the popularity of the crinoline (Weathers 96). The crinoline replicates the birdcage onto the young woman directly, symbolically trapping her (Weathers 96). It also became a physical obstacle for intimacy, surrounding the young woman’s body (Weathers 97). Alternatively, sheer and flowing dresses were used by the Pre-Raphaelites to insinuate sexual availability (Weathers 96). While this promiscuity was still portrayed as morally sinful, this besets most of their romanticized heroines (Weathers 96). Waterhouse’s choice of dress was to allow him to paint a contour of her body and natural, uncorseted breasts (Weathers 98). This helps focus the Lady as a sexual object as her sheer dress could be read as a symbolic statement of lust towards Lancelot (Howey 163, Weathers 98). Her death, thus, comes consequently from her sexuality and desire for love; inversely, Lancelot’s objectification of her after death is read as compassion for her, proving his virtue.
This romanticization of the Lady of Shalott’s death shows Waterhouse’s regret for the Lady as a waste of beauty, sharing Lancelot’s sentiment of her “lovely face.” Waterhouse uses the birds and her exposed body to show her sexual potential while fetishizing her death. This illustrates the paradox of the poem, both celebrating woman as a sexual object and punishing her for fulfilling that role.
Invalidism
This cultural anxiety of the woman’s awakening is reflective of the Victorian infatuation with the young virgin and the need to protect a woman’s chastity (Shefer 473). To ensure that the woman is incapable of being physically or mentally exertive, weakness became fetishized and sought after (Dijkstra 25). Bram Dijkstra’s chapter “Cult of Invalidism” illustrates how the sickly or weak demeanor of a woman was portrayed as feminine and a desirable quality in Victorian society and imagery, while vigour and strength were seen as masculine traits (25). In Abba Goold Woolson’s book Woman in American Society from 1873, she writes that women pursued bad health by keeping indoors, “shun[ning] the outer air and the sunlight as if they would harm us” (208). The Lady’s curse can be compared to the women Woolson speaks of, prematuring and dying from childbirth or other illnesses, due to their idle lifestyle (192). The physical traits of illness (thin body, dark, hollowed eyes, pale skin) were associated with the woman’s mental and sexual purity, conforming to the submissive expectations of womanhood (Dijkstra 26). Invalidism is evident through stories and paintings of the insane and dying heroine, like the Lady of Shalott (Dijkstra 26, Howey 152). When the woman’s self-sacrificial debilitation lacks a man to submit to, she becomes mad and an expendable character (Dijkstra 38). By fully surrendering her body she ultimately combines death and sensuality (Dijkstra 38, Howey 152). Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” perfectly illustrates this domestic expectation as both an entrapment for women and the ultimate ambition. She is the ideal body and character, one who is happy to remain inside without exercise and whose solitude enforces her status as a virgin. Waterhouse’s 1888 painting of the Lady chooses to capture the haunting beauty of her death over the Lady’s internal trauma, prioritizing her body’s potential over anything else.
Belonging
In Waterhouse’s painting, the Lady of Shalott is still separated from the outside world in her remoteness on the river. Tennyson’s poem directly tells the reader that the outside world is dangerous for a young woman. Waterhouse expands this idea to show that the Lady is never able to find the fulfillment she desperately craves externally. She cannot engage with the forest and river as she sits in her boat. Her eyes remain on us. Her home becomes the only place the Lady is able to work or live. Even amongst the natural world she is surrounded by her own imagery. We see her life diminishing as her tapestry dips into the river. The water’s unpredictable force contrasts her own manipulation of the threads in her weavings, symbolizing her succumbing to her more irrational desires. Waterhouse’s treatment of her tapestry shows how he disregards the Lady’s life work. We, as a viewer, understand the perceived futility in the Lady’s life without external gratification and connection.
In the water the Lady is subject to nature’s push and pull, allowing her fate to happen upon her. The chain might easily slip out of her hands, the wind will push her, and the sky will darken around her. This passivity is only represented in Waterhouse’s first painting of the Lady. In his other paintings, she is shown as more assertive, glaring the viewer in the eye, jutting out of the frame. Perhaps the reason for this apathy is because we see the woman outside of her home, finally believing that her life is meaningless without Lancelot and the outside world.
This is the crossroads Waterhouse chose to paint, not quite able to connect with the outside world, and away from the safety of her house. Throughout his sketches we see his fascination with the Lady as she dies, realising her fate (Waterhouse, Sketchbook). The Lady has a soft clasp on the chain which tethers her to the dock and her old home; her grip is weak, and we see no real desire to either stay or leave (Howey 162). At the front of her boat, we see three candles, two of which have gone out and the third blows downstream, towards Lancelot. The wind pushes her towards him, but like the burning candle, we can see her straining and starting to succumb to the curse (Trippi 94). The wind and the chain create a push and pull within the painting.
The visualization of the painting tells us that the Lady does not belong. Her hair and tapestry shine bright orange like the last open candle against the dull, muted colours of the forest (Trippi 96). The trees have started to turn browns and dark reds and beside her boat are fallen leaves on the water. The autumnal atmosphere reflects her fall. Her sexual awakening, “the water-lily bloom,” is past its season, now expiring in the chill (Tennyson 72, Trippi 94). Rather than the world becoming her paradise, providing all the excitement she lacked, the atmosphere itself creates an uninhabitable space as the sky darkens from sunset and her light goes out. On the river the Lady is in a new environment where she can finally experience the world through more than sight, and yet she is pained by it.
Conclusion
Waterhouse's 1888 painting of "The Lady of Shalott" can help us understand the Victorian fetishization of the sickly woman, and what that implies about gendered domesticity and entrapment. This idea of the domestic and isolated woman is still pervasive in the way we think about gender, labour and sexuality. Through my research, I could better understand why attributes of poor health are often found attractive in women, and how that connected to the remoteness and loneliness reported of by women at the time (Dijkstra 25, Woolson 208).
This painting is particularly interesting now, during the Covid-19 pandemic, because of our new fear of the outside. We desire what we know would be devastating to our communities and ourselves. This contradiction materializes in guilt as we gather, either with loved ones or with strangers on a bus to work. The curse of the Lady of Shalott strips her of her agency, forcing her to choose between her safety and ability to love others and act upon the world, a choice many have had to make this year. Further, as our reliance on social media and photography technologies increases, I often felt like the Lady of Shalott staring at the outside world through reflections and distortions, unable to touch or feel anything. Connected, yet only remotely.
Bibliography
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Howey, Ann F. “‘She Hath a Lovely Face’: The Lady/Elaine in Art.” Afterlives of the Lady of Shalott and Elaine of Astolat, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, pp. 129–181. Arthurian and Courtly Cultures.
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