Douris the Reach of the River

8/2/2019 Douris the Reach of the River

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Anne Douris

Winning Essay of the 2010 W. C. Chau Essay Prize

Ryerson University

Toronto, Ontario

All rights reserved to the author.

The Reach of the River:The Nature of Desire inJ.W. Waterhouses Depictions of Tennysons Lady of Shalott

In terms of romantic longing, not many lovers have tasted the sweet without the

accompanying sour. Desire is double-sided and severe, calling on the senses to describe

its extremes a practice of many enamored poets. Hot and cold, melting and frigid,

sweet and bitter, desire has the ability to elate you or collapse you. The notion of desire is

divided, or double, in nature, and likewise it divides the lover into two opposing

conditions. Alfred Tennyson's ballad "The Lady of Shalott" depicts such a divided

individual, positioned in an environment that mirrors her inner conflict. In his artistic

renderings of the piece, John William Waterhouse aligns the Lady of Shallots division

specifically with the notion of romantic longing, emphasizing her sensuality and her role

as half of a whole. J.W. Waterhouse's visual interpretations of "The Lady of Shalott"

bring into focus the dualities present in the poem by illustrating the Lady in two inverted

states. The two paintings, together, present the paradox of desire as expressed in the text:

both pleasurable and painful. It is also irresolvable in the sense that fulfilling a desire

means ending desire.

"On either side the river lie" (Tennyson 1) the poem begins, immediately splitting it

in two. Already our landscape is established into two sides for the reader to swing

between. "Many tower'd Camelot," populated and bustling, sits at one pole, while the

"silent isle" and solitary tower of Shalott sits at the other. The poem continues to express


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polarity as a means to reflect the Lady's condition, not only through the broad strokes of

setting and mood, but also its rhyme scheme, its structure, its paradoxical diction and its

frequent allusion to doubles.

Before approaching the effects of the actual language, the reader is subject to the

effects of the rhyme scheme. Set in iambic tetrameter, the poem when spoken reflects

polarity in two ways. The first lies in the function of "iambs." An iamb (or iambic foot) is

a measurement of rhythm consisting of two sounds an unstressed syllable followed by

a stressed one (Construction, par. 4). Reciting, the voice flutters between weak and

forceful, nothing and something, pole to pole. It also suggests the "lub-dub" of a beating

heart, where the "lub" is soft and the "dub" is strong. This might point to why theiamb is

so popular in ballads and other lyrical poetry, as romance naturally rises out of it.

Secondly, the "tetrameter," where four iambs comprise each line, lends itself to the idea

of pairs. Split down the centre, you have two couples of iambs, and each couple can be

split into single iambs, which are, in effect, still couples themselves. We can see duplicity

in the poem at a molecular level.

Stepping back, duality can be seen on each level of the poems structure. Two

rounds of rhyming couplets make up a stanza, divided by another, recurring couplet

"Camelot" or "Lancelot" paired with "Shalott" at the end. The pattern is consistent

throughout: AAAABCCCB. Contrasts present themselves between "A" rhymes and "C"

rhymes, as they switch between crisp, agitating sounds and soft, subdued ones. The use of

these sounds is directly linked to what is happening in the lines.

She left the web, she left the loom

She made three paces thro' the room,

She saw the water-lily bloom,


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She saw the helmet and the plume

She look'd down to Camelot.

Out flew the web and floated wide;

The mirror crack'd from side to side;

The curse is come upon me, cried

The Lady of Shalott. (Tennyson 5)

This passage connects soothing "oo" sounds to the image of safety and solitude in the

Lady's tower, and then unnerves the reader with anguished "aye" sounds to reflect the

Lady's sudden onset of distress. Other stanzas are more or less in keeping, where

soothing sounds denote the Lady of Shalott's peaceful surroundings, and their opposing

counterparts describe life in Camelot.

Once again widening our lens, we see that the first four stanzas make up "Part I" of

the poem, and the following four create "Part II." Beyond providing an example of the

divisibility of the poem, the first two parts offer another contrast, as they are at odds, both

in structure and mood, with the second half of the poem. Structurally, the difference lies

in the number of stanzas to each part: "Part III" contains five, and "Part IV" contains six.

This addition of stanzas is not arbitrary it points to a change of mood in the poem that

is itself paradoxical.

The paradox is clearest looking at the big picture of the poem, where the

locations are immediately divided with the first line, "On either side the river lie. The

poem is split between two locations, a split that leads to many other divisions within the

poem itself. The first two parts come from the perspective of the Lady's tower, while the

second two parts occur out in the open air of Camelot. Given that the Lady is cursed and

imprisoned between four grey walls, forced to work endlessly in isolation, cheerful


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description would not seem appropriate for her circumstances. However, her static and

confined state is described contrarily with a quick-paced, song-like quality, we see

that the Lady "delights" in endless toil, as she "weaves by night and day/ A magic web of

colours gay" (Tennyson 2). She does not resent the world that she has been denied, as

Camelot is described romantically as a happy, animated place ripe with pastoral imagery.

The carefree tone of the first half of the poem conflicts with her position of

imprisonment. After she frees herself of the tower in the second half, the reader would

expect an increased sense of liberation and movement, but instead is met with a drawn

out anguish and stillness. The sounds and images weigh on the reader and slow down the

reading experience: "Heavily the low sky" hangs over a much less romantic Camelot,

"leaves upon her falling light" as the Lady floats away, "chanting lowly" and "freezing

slowly." It could be that the extra stanzas in the latter two parts of the poem reflect this

slowing pace. Joy and pain are embodied in the two halves of the poem, contrary to their

surroundings of imprisonment and freedom, respectively. The Lady of Shalott is subject

to two polarized emotions and landscapes and what divides them (and her) comes in

the form of Lancelot, and the line of desire he burns across the landscape.

"I am half sick of shadows" is the first mark of the Lady of Shalott's discontent,

immediately followed by Lancelot's bow-shot flying across our view. The four stanzas

describing Lancelot, sealed on each end by the only two uses of his name as a rhyme,

burn a bright line of division in the poem. The sun comes "dazzling thro' the leaves"; a

horn hangs from his "blazon'd baldric slung"; "his helmet and helmet-feather/ Burn'd like

one burning flame together." Lancelot is "trailing [a] light" behind him, separating the

Lady's states of complacency and torment. There is no doubt that these images are also


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deeply erotic. In an examination of Arthurian legend in British art, Christine Poulson

describes these burning images as suggesting Lancelots sexual potency (Poulson 186).

Given that the Lady in a few brief lines sees newlyweds in her mirror, remarks on

her weariness, and is then introduced to the image of Lancelot, it seems that romantic

desire would be a reasonable explanation for her imminent switch to despair. The two

opposing states of the Lady of Shalott are the result of the realization of a desire, a

realization of a lack in her existence, a recognition that she is indeed just a "half" of a

whole. It is with these two opposing states that J.M. Waterhouse illustrates the

paradoxical effects romantic desire has on the lover. Using images of "halfness" and

"wholeness" to reinforce the reach for a desired object, he indicates the importance of the

space that must be kept between the lover and beloved in order for desire to exist.

"I Am Half Sick of Shadows Said the Lady of Shalott (Appendix 1) and The

Lady of Shalott (Appendix 2) are two of John William Waterhouse's oil paintings

depicting scenes from the Tennysons ballad. The first portrays the Lady in her tower, as

the newlyweds walk across a large round mirror that sits behind her. The second

illustrates the Lady after the curse is set upon her, and she has left the tower to sit in her

boat on the river. The pieces, completed in reverse-chronological order, are inversions of

each other in almost every respect. In Shadows, the woman is robed in bright red, is pale-

skinned, and has dark hair that she holds behind her head as she stretches. This position

"displays the female figure" and shows the "embowered woman's erotic appeal..."

(Nelson 4). In the other piece (for clarity's sake I will refer to this painting as "The Boat

Scene") we see a white-robed girl, somewhat yellow-skinned, with light, untied hair, one

arm limp on her lap, the other loosely grasping a chain. There appears to be a difference


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in the age of the models as well, the latter of the two being slightly less shapely, with a

childlike face. Other elements of the scenes are also inverted: where in Shadows the

Ladys tapestry is white, in "The Boat Scene" it is a deep red. The colour palettes also

contrast: where Shadows contains rich reds and other warm colours against a crisp, black

background, "The Boat Scene" is a haze of indistinct, desaturated greens and greys

against a patch of pale white sky. In her essay, The Embowered Woman: Pictorial

Interpretations of The Lady of Shalott. Elizabeth Nelson considers the two locations:

the contrast between her interior world and the exterior world, between stasis and

movement, between the active and the contemplative lives encourages the reader to

consider thoughtfully the differences between the two worlds" (Nelson 4). Visually this

contrast is there, except stasis and movement are attributed to the exteriorand interior,

respectively. This inversion reflects the contradicting language used to describe the tower

and the outdoors, as outlined above. By means of technique, Waterhouse emphasized the

distinction between the Lady's perspectives before and after realizing what she lacked in

terms of romance.

She sits in her tower with bright, aware eyes and a romantic view of Camelot in her

mirror and in her work before being tempted by the delightful image of Lancelot. Once

she looks upon him and her notions of a satisfying life in the tower collapse, her

perception of the open air of Camelot is drastically different and much less pleasing. Her

liveliness seems to fade, her skin pales, her eyes cloud over and her tapestry (formerly

her only care in the world) is half-submerged in the water. That said, her sensuality is a

focus of both pieces. While comparing Waterhouses interpretation to that of William

Holman Hunts, Poulson asserts that Waterhouse made a point of communicating


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sensuality: Waterhouses picture is far more sensuous in feelingWith Waterhouse the

emphasis is on sexual awakening, seduction (Poulson 186). Waterhouse depicts the

one figure in two very different worlds, in two polar opposite personas and moods, but

ultimately it is the same world, the same woman. The images conflict just as the Ladys

emotions do and this reflects how ultimately it is part of the experience of desire to

maintain both pain and pleasure at once, or otherwise swing back and forth from pole to

pole.

In her exploratory novel on romantic love, Eros the Bittersweet, Anne Carson

declares that "...space must be maintained or desire ends" (Carson 26). Before turning to

see the window, the Lady of Shalott sees the world on the flat surface of a mirror.

Viewing Camelot in direct sight forces her to realize the actual space that separates her

from her Lancelot.

This space has two effects. The first is that it allows the Lady to experience the

sweet sensation of desire, which is realizing that a beloved exists, and the suspended hope

for possible union. The second is desire's negative counterpart, where the space acts as an

obstacle that cannot be overcome, as doing so would be to end desire. Space is a venue in

which desire operates; its unfortunate contradiction is that although there is a pleasure in

reaching across the space, actual attainment of what is being sought means that it ceases

to be an object of desire. Waterhouse creates images of flatness and space and aligns

them with concepts of wholeness and halfness. The mirror, which reflects flat,

romanticized ideals, is circular in Shadows. The circle encompasses Camelot, home to

Lancelot, suggesting that he is linked to wholeness. In front of the mirror, the Lady of

Shalott sits in a crescent shape, a half of a circle staring deliberately out at something we


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cannot see. This crescent shape is repeated throughout the piece in the shuttles of the

loom, which bear a particular resemblance to the boat in "The Boat Scene." Out in the

open space of "The Boat Scene," the Lady's halfness is even more pronounced as she

bends her body forward toward the edge of the painting. Though she is unable to see, she

points herself toward Camelot, where Lancelot, her possible other half, is waiting.

Poulson recounts Tennysons description of her expression in the piece as a "new born

love for something, for someone in the wide world from which she has been so long

secluded, takes her out of the region of shadows into that of realities" (Poulson, 184).

The trip down the river in the crescent boat is the Ladys reach for wholeness;

instead, it takes her to a harsh reality. The reach itself is at once pleasing and painful for

her, as she sings a "mournful carol," chanting "loudly" and "lowly." As soon as her reach

turns into contact with Camelot, on a final, paradoxical note, she dies in song. In a way,

she becomes the embodiment of desire, as she can either live with it, or die without it.

Carson defines this reaching as the action of desire, which is "beautiful (in its

object), foiled (it its attempt) and endless (in time)" (Carson 29). The Lady of Shalott

experiences the sweetness of a "new born love," of seeing that someone, and is located

at the pole of pleasure. Her comprehension of space and a reality that cannot allow her

hopes for wholeness to be fulfilled send her across the spectrum to a state of anguish. The

nature of romantic desire is two-fold and thus the Lady of Shalott is subject to two

conflicting states. As she tries to fulfill her desire, to collapse the space and turn herself

from crescent to a full circle, she comes to realize that there is no ending for desire that

can satisfy. If desire ends, then so too does she.


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Works Cited

Carson, Anne. Eros The Bittersweet. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986.

Construction: 'The Lady of Shalott' by Alfred, Lord Tennyson." Exploring Poetry. Gale

Research, 1998. March 16, 2010. Http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/SRC/

Nelson, Elizabeth. Tennyson and the Ladies of Shalott." Ladies of Shalott: A Victorian

Masterpiece and its Contexts. Ed. George P. Landow. Providence, R.I.:Brown U.:

1979.

Poulson, Christine. The Quest for the Grail: Arthurian Legend in British Art, 1840-1920.

Vancouver: UBC Press, 1999.

Tennyson, Alfred Lord. The Lady of Shalott. The Lady of Shalott. London, U.K: Orion

Books Ltd, 1996. Pages 1-8.

Appendix

1.Waterhouse, John William. I am Half Sick of Shadows Said the Lady of Shalott.

1915. Oil on Canvas. Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.

2.Waterhouse, John William. The Lady of Shalott. 1888. Oil on Canvas. Tate Gallery,London.


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Douris the Reach of the River