But the river does not reflect the mirror the reflective trajectory is only one way. 105, 107) this Joseph considers to set up 'a perpetual maze in which the putative original image of Lancelot bounces endlessly and without grounding between river and glass, a simulacrum multiplying variety in a wilderness of mirrors' (p. Some critics have complicated the reflective patterns of the poem, to the point that the Lady is ' out of sight.' 3 Gerhard Joseph, like David Martin earlier, notes the moment at which Lancelot's image flashes 'from the river' into the mirror to create what he calls a 'third-order reflection' (Joseph, pp. If the Lady copies directly from her mirror and produces an image of an inverted (reflected) reality on the back of her web, what is actually created on the front (though the Lady, even with the aid of her mirror, cannot see it aright) is, effectively, a copy of the real (seemingly unreflected) view from her tower window. 2 The weaver worked from what would become the back of the finished item. In a footnote Christopher Ricks points out that the mirror is not there simply for the sake of the fairy tale, but because it was a necessary part of a real loom, enabling the worker to see the effect from the right side.

The assumption that because the Lady works from mirrored images her art is 'removed from reality' is itself problematic. But the line from which this latter sense has been taken does not mention destruction-simply a movement in space: the web flies 'Out' and floats 'wide.' Attention to this detail, I suggest, will enable significant reconsiderations of Tennyson's inscription of the workings of mimesis and the nature of poetic identity in this poem. It also asserts that her web is as transient as the Lady is herself once she enters the real world (it is 'apparently destroyed'). 1 The Lady's curse, according to such criticism, dooms her to produce an art object that is an inversion of a dim unreality (copied from 'shadows' in a 'mirror'). Much criticism of 'The Lady of Shalott' has seen it as a critique of early nineteenth-century perceptions of the artist/poet, and rested this idea upon the assumption that the Lady's tapestry is 'an art three times removed from reality, is apparently destroyed' when the Lady turns away from it. In line 114 of 'The Lady of Shalott' (1842) we are told 'Out flew the web and floated wide.' Tennyson's references to space and spatial relations are sometimes subtle, but prove highly significant for new interpretations of even his best-loved and most discussed poems.

A Reflection on Fiction and Art in 'The Lady of Shalott' Jane Wright In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

The lady of shalott pdf