This week, our focus was Lord Alfred Tennyson's 'Lady of Shalott' which is includes aspects of Arthurian legend. I learned that the poem was in print for 25 years before the 1857 version was published with its illustrations by William Holman Hunt and Daniel Gabriel Rossetti. Our focus today was to make meaning between the originally published poem and its accompanying illustrations. Naturally, my mind gravitated towards understanding women in the cultural moment of the Victorian era; which delegated them to their homes to protect their chastity and sensibilities. However, it wasn't enough to create meaning. Professor Janzen mentioned crinolines or hoop skirts, skeletal garments that women wore under their dresses to make them voluminous and keep their shape. Connecting this idea that while women took up physical space in public, through poems like 'Lady of Shallot', women were being confined within the bounds of these poems as passive, chaste figures whose deaths depict them as beautiful women, worthy of being immortalized through art. In our own cultural moment, I think that the idea that women trying to take up physical space but failing to be heard (similarly to the women's suffrage in the Victorian era) or are confined to certain archaic ideologies that people want to force on them.
Submitted by Anjali Jaikarran on