Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s ‘The Lady of Shalott’1 creates an anachronistic medieval ambience by borrowing the mythical figures of Dame Elaine of Astolat and Lancelot, the feudal settings of Camelot, and the manorial island of Shalott. As a complex blend of medieval and Victorian motifs, it also creates an interesting intersection between medieval and Victorian affects. This essay brings to the fore the constructedness of affects as social artefacts in the poem, which become embedded in a network of material or cultural practices at particular moments in history.
Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg, in ‘An Inventory of Shimmers’, describe affect as those ‘vital’ forces that can serve to drive the body ‘toward movement’, ‘suspend’ it ‘across a barely registering accretion of force-relations’, or leave it ‘overwhelmed by the world’s apparent intractability’ (1). Affect comprises the ‘troughs and sieves of sensation’, the intense or fugitive betokening of a body’s ‘belonging to a world of encounters’ (2). In Tennyson’s poem, a number of such affective registers continually seem to work upon the titular Lady of Shalott. Hers is a story of affective discernment as she is made to encounter visceral intensities of feeling at once physical and spiritual, affecting both her soul and her body.
In the first two parts of Tennyson’s poem, the Lady is exoticised: cloistered in a neutral, silent space surrounded by four ‘gray walls, and four gray towers’, like an ‘angel, singing’ (1832; Part I). Affected by intense isolation and privation, she appears to be an outwardly mythical creature. This treatment of the Lady is directly in line with the characterisation of the beloved by male troubadours, according to the conventions of courtly love. Nancy Frelick observes that Jacques Lacan stressed that courtly love is an exercise in sublimation. The lady who is the object of the love lyric is sublimed and elevated to the status of an ethereal being as courtly love is animated by the ‘desire to evoke through artistic creation something beyond the realm of representation’ (109). Thus, in tandem with conventional courtly love, the affects of isolation, frigidity, and privation control the Lady’s lifestyle in the first two parts of the poem. However, with the glamorous debut of Lancelot and the Lady’s sighting of him from her castle, a paradox arises. The lady is overwhelmed by the affect of love. Although not narrated in the poem, the Lady falls in a swoon. The Lady, possessed by the affect of love, becomes an instance of the overwhelming objective reality of ‘interpsychic relations’ and of their ‘devastating effect on normality’ (Gilbert 18). Expunging reason, she brings upon herself her own doom. Jane Gilbert draws upon Sartre’s comparison of emotion with magic: Sartre argues that magic is not ‘solipsistic withdrawals from the real world, but an engagement with human being in its most proper and intimate form’ (17). The affect of love is magical and incantatory in ‘The Lady of Shalott’: it instantaneously transfixes and enchants the lady. Gilbert also argues that such magic-turned-emotions ‘remain at odds with society as such: spontaneous, disruptive and disorderly…’ (17).
Canonical readings of the lady-as-artist have tended to focus on the lady’s tapestry weaving. However, her creative faculty is also manifested through singing. In the first part of the poem, the Lady’s song appears to be a disembodied murmur. Her airy voice, stripped from the materiality of her body, wavers across the geographies of the island of Shalott like a sonic mist. The affect of isolation relegates her to the position of the quarantined artist, denying her visibility. By the end of the poem, when the Lady boards her barge to sail towards Camelot, she again breaks out in song. However, this time, the lady’s presence is very corporeal. With every note of the death song, life seems to slowly leave her body, darkening her eyes. The frigid, fairy-like creature is finally given visibility and is also given agency to decide her own fate. She, in fact, appears to be very similar to the medieval trobaritz. The trobaritz employed language that was ‘direct…and personal’ (Bogin 67). They had a ‘sense of urgency’ that made them resemble confessionals or ‘journals’ (Bogin 68). The lady of Shalott’s swansong is affectively charged with grief. It has the clamour of urgency, is emotionally devastating, and signifies the lady’s strenuous outpouring of her personal feelings, her soul and the very breath of life. Her carol is ‘longdrawn’ and ‘mournful’ (1832; Part IV), suggesting a new reading of her as not an empty, fictive product scripted by fin amor but as a subject who is part of the emotional community of the medieval trobaritz.
Audrey Jaffe observes that class can be represented ‘as an affective category’ (717). Class is precisely what is shown with the ‘help of metonymic cues’ of sights and smells (716). The aristocratic status of both the Lady – whose character is drawn from the Arthurian figure of Elaine, the ‘fair’ maiden of Astolat – and Lancelot is emphasised by the play of affects. The lady’s ‘pearl garland’, ‘velvet bed’, ‘royal’ apparels and Lancelot’s ‘gemmy bridle’, its comparison with the stars studded in the ‘golden galaxy’, the helmet and its feather that burned ‘like one burning flame together’ create very vivid visual images that touch upon the affects of luxury, decadence and exquisiteness; components of the lifestyle of high nobility (1832; Part I, Part III). Sustan Sontag, in Illness as a Metaphor, analysed the impact created by tuberculosis in cultural and literary imagination. The ailment was conceived as the lover’s disease, whereby the affect of love ‘consumed’ the lover’s body and caused the sufferer to literally waste away. The disease was also seen as a class marker and a gendered ailment as it was thought to afflict mostly excessively sensitive upper-class young women. Katherine Byrne argues that the pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti deliberately constructed the portraiture of Elizabeth Siddal as the consumptive type rather than the manic or hysteric type just to cash on the marketability of the popular tubercular sensations. Similarly, Tennyson’s attribution of a snowy-white pallor, excessive passion, and aristocratic status to the Lady seems to mark her character as the consumptive type. Thus, following the arguments put forth by Sontag and Byrne, a tubercular aesthetic and affect can be perceived in ‘The Lady of Shalott’.
In ‘Happy Objects’, Sara Ahmed argues that objects accrue affective value as they pass around in human networks and get sticky: affect ‘is what sticks, or sustains or preserves the connection between ideas, values, and objects’ (29). Sarah Salih also engages with the affective power of objects, and shows how medieval devotion can be seen as a set of practices that depended on the ‘activation of the power of beloved objects within an affective network’ (Burger and Crocker 17). Arthurian literature, drawing upon such medieval devotional practices, constantly exploits the affective power of relics and their ‘stickiness’. Salih analyses Hector’s body from Lydgate’s Troy Book as an ‘affect machine’, which functions almost like a medieval relic, as both seem to generate a circuit of affect. During an encounter with Hector’s dead body, every possibility of revulsion at the decaying body is evaded by an elaborate aestheticisation of it. The body is placed in a tabernacle and embalmed by incenses. A network of objects plays upon the affect of mourning and grief. In ‘The Lady of Shalott’, the lady’s dead body on the barge can also be seen as an affect machine or a relic. Adorned by a ‘cloud white crown of pearl’ and ‘snowy white’ raiment, she performs a beautiful death (1832; Part IV). Instead of being perceived as an open wound cankered by the curse and an object of shame, the lady’s body is encountered by the onlookers in the same way worshippers confront religious images; they cross themselves. By the logic of the Wycliffite polemic against medieval idolatry, ‘to vow, kneel to a specific image is to invest it with agency and personality, to allow it to control the bodies of its devotees’ (Salih 145). So, when the onlookers cross themselves at the sight of the lady’s body, they invest it with a kind of agency. It is precisely because her body is imagined as a relic, one that creates positive affective piety amongst the onlookers, that the lady gets to evade public shame and embrace the celestial in her death. The 1842 version of the poem ends with Lancelot marvelling at the Lady’s ‘lovely face’ and praying for her spiritual grace (1842; Part IV). In the same version, the lady’s body becomes almost contagious as the onlookers become deathlike themselves and cross themselves out of fear. They are overcome by a strong gothic affect that creates anxiety regarding the supernatural and the dead. Thus, just like the image of King Arthur’s passing into Avalon, the Lady of Shalott’s last rite of passage and the materiality of her body as a relic create one of the most memorable affective moments in the history of Arthuriana.
This essay shows affect to be an important critical marker in perceiving the reception of medievalism in the British Victorian age. It reveals culture as a process that materially produces affects and controls its circulation. It also brings out the interesting ways in which Victorian affects can overlap with medieval affects and hints at their underlying intersectionality vis-à-vis Arthuriana.
Anandi Kar (she/her) has pursued a Masters in English from Jadavpur University, Kolkata. Her academic essays have been published in journals including TUI, Indian Literature, and Littcrit. Her poems have been published in journals such as Scarlet Leaf Review, Indian Review, The Chakkar, Poems India, Ghudsavar Literary Magazine, and Muse India. She has reviewed works in translation for the Antonym Magazine and worked as a content writer for the popular Instagram page, “Chai and Feminism.” Her areas of interest include environmental humanities, postcolonialism, graphic narratives, memory studies, affect studies, and queer studies.
Notes & references
- This essay has made use of both the 1832 and 1842 versions of the poem. The in-text citations depict the versions from which the lines have been taken.
Ahmed, Sara. “Happy Objects.” The Affect Theory Reader, edited by Melissa
Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, Duke University Press, 2010, pp. 29-51.
Bogin, Meg. The Women Troubadours. Paggington Press Ltd, 1976.
Burger, Glenn D., and Holly A. Crocker. Introduction. Medieval Affect, Feeling, and Emotion, edited by Glenn D. Burger and Holly A. Crocker, Cambridge UP, 2019, pp. 1-24.
Frelick, Nancy. “Lacan, Courtly Love and Anamorphosis.” The Court Reconvenes: Courtly Literature across the Disciplines: Selected Papers from the Ninth Triennial Congress of the International Courtly Literature Society, University of British Columbia, edited by Barbara K. Altmann and Carleton W. Carroll, Boydell & Brewer, 2002. pp. 107–114.
Gilbert, Jane. “Being-in-the-Arthurian-World: Emotion, Affect and Magic in the Prose Lancelot, Sartre and Jay.” Emotions in Medieval Arthurian Literature: Body, Mind, Voice, edited by Frank Brandsma et al., NED-New edition, Boydell & Brewer, 2015, pp. 13–30.
Frykman, Jonas, and Maria Povrzanovic Frykman. Sensitive Objects: Affect and Material Culture. Nordic Academic Press, 2016.
Jaffe, Audrey. “Affect and the Victorian Novel.” The Palgrave Handbook of Affect Studies and Textual Criticism, edited by Donald R. Wehrs and Thomas Blake, Palgrave Macmillan 2017, pp.713-734.
kcascio@poetryfoundation.org. “The Lady of Shalott (1832) by Alfred, Lord… | Poetry Foundation.” Poetry Foundation, 1891.
—. “The Lady of Shalott (1842) by Alfred, Lord… | Poetry Foundation.” Poetry Foundation, 1842.
Salih, Sarah. “Affect Machines.” Medieval Affect, Feeling, and Emotion, edited by Glenn D. Burger and Holly A. Crocker, Cambridge University Press, 2019, pp. 139–157.
Seigworth, Gregory J., and Melissa Gregg. “An Inventory of Shimmers.” Duke University Press eBooks, 2020, pp. 1-26.