I found the process of annotating "The Lady of Shalott" very interesting for two main reasons. The first was seeing how our various groups missed a particular reading of the poem. Many of us understood the poem to highlight the restraint and restrictions placed upon women of the Victorian Era, and their desire to escape it. However, as mentioned both in lecture and in one of the research resources provided, another common reading of the poem is through the eyes of an artist, who questions whether isolation is necessary for their art.

For today’s class we looked at Alfred Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” and two illustrations for the poem. We were tasked with annotating the poem in the same way we annotated A Christmas Carol last week. The challenge that came after was looking at the two illustrations and try to make meaning of it using the image/text/context method. Since the poem was published about 25 years before the illustrations were made, the artists already had some previous exposure to the text before making their drawings. There was a lot happening in 1857 when the illustrations were published.