Weekly Blog #4

This week's class was once again focused on the text-image relationship but it was also very much focused on the weekly reading which gave great historical context on illustrators and how they went about illustrating their images. For example, as mentioned in class, the poem itself was published 25 years before its illustrations were released which not only shows how popular the poem was 2 decades after its releas, but also how the ilustrators grew up reading the poem since childhood. Therefore, the poem's illustration is a mix of the illustrator's childhood envisionment of the poem, and their analetical perspective towards the poem 2 decades later. 

A striking point that really piqued my interest in teh first illustration was how giant the Lady of Shalott looked in her tower. I think that was a great way to symbolize how little space there is for her physically and mentally as she imagines the outside world and how it looks like. Furtheremore, understanding the historical context of the role of women in the Victorian era, and their internelized sexuality helps understand the text's relationship with the image. For example, the poem mentions Lady Shalott was "robed in a snowy white." The colour white is famous for symbolizing both purity and sexual innocence which the Lady Shalott was physically if not fully mentally. This discription of text is interpeted in the last image where the relationship between Lady Shalott's dead body and Lancelot is not sexual at all which is illustarted by how covered Lady Shalott's dead body is and the pure innocent look on her dead face. Lancelot's final words also show the on-sexual relationship between the him and Lady Shalott as he says "she has a lovely face" and therefore, is in fact adimiring her beauty and innocence instead of her physical body which I think is both ironic and beautifuly represented. 

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