The Lady of Shalott

Images of female entrapment and unhappiness appear in Joan’s poems and recall Alfred Tennyson’s “the Lady of Shalott,” who floats down a winding river in a boat and is ready to meet her death for trangressing the laws of her imprisonment. The Lady of Shalott is imprisoned in a tower, weaving her ornate tapestries, creating her art and watching the outside world through a mirror. Not until the reflection of a handsome knight appears does she leave the tower in search of love, only to encounter her death and little attention from the knight as she floats by in her death barge (Rigney 67). The irony of the poem is that “the Lady simply exchanges one kind of imprisonment for another; her presumed freedom is her death” (Barzilai 232). There seems to be no exit for the Lady of Shalott. Joan’s mother, Frances, acquires the tragic status of the Lady of Shalott. She is confined to the

middle-class household, isolated from the public sphere of action. As a housewife, Frances devotes her creative and organizational energy to a series of home furnishing projects. Her over-decorated house, which can be seen as her art- / craft-work, turns into a “tower” instead of an exploration of the world. Tennyson’s “the Lady of Shalott,” despite its feudal setting,

reflects his own social order. That is, the Lady’s isolation and gender define Shalott as a private, domestic domain which became increasingly important to the social structure of nineteenth-century England (Barzilai 236). In line with the idea of women’s confinement to the private sphere, Atwood’s Lady Oracle also exposes the predicament of the 1950s housewives, who live in a thick-walled “tower” on the outskirts of a town, remaining cut off from most useful social activities.

The loss of her mother motivates Joan to search for her mother. Joan realizes that her mother “had been the lady in the boat, the death barge, the tragic lady with flowing hair and stricken eyes, the lady in the tower. She couldn’t stand the view from her window, life was her curse” (LO 399). Frances is “the lady in the tower” because she is confined in a

middle-class housewife’s house consturcted by society, reinforced by her own conviction of women’s traditional roles. The loss / emptiness in Frances’s story derives not only from separation from her daughter but also from estrangement in the public sphere. The release from a disappointing marriage and meaningless life is a descent to death: “Down she came and found a boat. […] And at the closing of the day / She loosed the chain, and down she lay” (Tennyson 123, 132-3). In this sense, it is partly correct that Joan suspects that her mother may commit suicide by falling from the cellar stairs or be murdered by her father.

The central figure in “Lady Oracle” who displays female immobility and irreducible

multiplicity reveals Joan’s relation with her mother. Joan and her mother have been in the same boat all along (Barzilai 239).

Like Frances, Joan can be compared to the Lady of Shalott. At first, the teenage Joan is fascinated with the Lady of Shalott’s female vulnerability and beauty. The unhappy end of Tennyson’s poem does not deter Joan from wishing herself in the Lady’s place: “I wanted castles and princesses, the Lady of Shalott floating down a winding river in a boat… which I studies in Grade Nine,” says Joan, “I really wanted, then, to have someone, anyone, say that I had a lovely face, even if I had to turn into a corpse in a barge-bottom first” (LO 170-1).

Then the adult Joan experiences the Lady’s struggle behind the romantic tragedy.

Tennyson’s poem concerns a woman who cannot both weave and love, and whose

abandonment of her art for love ends in death. Joan also feels distressed at the delimma between traditionally feminine roles and her writing career. She used to keep her husband’s love by concealing her writing talent. After publishing “Lady Oracle” in the name of Joan Foster, their relationship becomes more and more intolerable. Joan finally escapes from her marriage. She depicts herself as the Lady of Shalott after running from Arthur’s home to Italy. She is “the lady in the death boat:”

I’d been shoved into the ranks of those other unhappy ladies. […] There I was, on the bottom of the death barge where I’d once longed to be, my name on the prow, winding my way down the river. Several of the articles drew morals: you could sing and dance or you could be happy, but not both. Maybe they were right, you could stay in the tower for years, weaving away, looking the mirror, but one glance out the window at real life and that was that. The curse, the doom. (LO 381) The Lady of Shalott can be treated as “a woman / artist imprisoned in a tower of mythology which is of her own construction” (Rigney 9). As Szalay argues, Joan, like the Lady of Shalott, also weaves into her verbal web of Gothic romances whatever she experiences of the outside world reflected through the distorting mirror of her Gothic thinking (230). The mirror and the web signify the problematic realtionships between art and life. Moreover,

“the Lady of Shalott” creates a tension between conflicting desires to face and shun reality.

Direct confrontation with reality, though necessary, can be very dangerous. According to Roberta Sciff-Zamaro, “women in general, and women-artists in particular, seem to be prisoners of a patriarchal tradition which prevents them from expressing themselves, from creating” (36). Joan’s (fake) death of drowning ensues as soon as she publishes her volume of visionary poems. The lines in “Lady Oracle” now look like her epitaph: Who is the one standing in the prow / Who is the one voyaging / under the sky’s arch, under the earth’s arch /

under the arch of arrows / in the death boat, why does she sing / She kneels, she is bent down / under the power /… / Under the water (LO 268). Joan used to deny any similarity between her mother and herself. Now she comes to realize that her mother’s life and marriage were no less difficult than her own.