From “The Lady of Shalott” to “Rapunzel”: The Lady Weavers in British Aestheticism
Date Issued
2011
Date
2011
Author(s)
Lin, Tsen-En
Abstract
This thesis examines the trope of the “lady weaver” in two poems – Lord Alfred Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” and William Morris’s “Rapunzel” – in relation to mid-nineteenth-century British aestheticism. Both poems are composed at an early, anxious stage in the poets’ career. The weavers, as proxies of their creators, assist them to renegotiate their role as creator and its relation to the world. At its publication, the Lady of Shalott enthralls Victorian artists and audience alike, rendering itself a cultural icon which inspires numerous pictorial renditions as well as other poems and paintings that feature embowered weaving ladies. This recurrent image not only carries a collective cultural fantasy of the woman in the bower but also plays the medium via which poets and artists examine the creative enterprise; therefore I see “The Lady of Shalott” as the pioneering text in British aestheticism.
Suffering critical rebuff for his first collection, Tennyson had to renegotiate poetic autonomy at the composition of “The Lady of Shalott.” The curse he devises for the lady weaver figures the irreconcilable contradiction in creative enterprise: that between art’s claimed autonomy and its inevitable subjection to and reliance on the external world. The poet ultimately leaves the exclusive, privileging creative sphere in the tower for the world, leaving the curse of the creative paradox for his proxy weaver to bear. Her impenetrable corpse shields the purity of art and creation, while the poet moves on in compromise.
Frustrated as an apprentice painter and cultivated with radical political thinking, Morris disavows the narcissistic weavers portrayed by Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelites. Morris seeks to resolve the creative paradox by incorporating artistic creation and social production, thereby reintroducing aesthetic experience to everyday life. Rapunzel’s weaving is no longer a curse, but an empowering skill of self-help. This thesis bridges the two poems and Pre-Raphaelite paintings through the trope of the weaver, and presents the two poets’ respective aesthetics and view on creation.
Subjects
the lady weaver
Lord Alfred Tennyson
“The Lady of Shalott”
William Morris
“Rapunzel”
British aestheticism
Pre-Raphaelitism
Type
thesis
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