The Lady of Shalott and The Lady in the Looking Glass :: Lady of Shalott Essays

The maam of Shalott and The Lady in the Looking glass     Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote The Lady of Shalott around 1830, during what is cognize as the Victorian Age. Virginia Woolf published The Lady in the Looking Glass A Reflection in 1929, during what is referred to as the Modernist Age. These works of art twain deal with women who have important relationships with reverberates. The take fire in these stories has a vast and different effect and meaning for each of these women. The importance and meaning of perch are contrasted in these two tales, representing a change in writers attitudes toward wispy portrayal.   In Tennysons poem, the woman known as The Lady of Shalott, has been placed in a tower and told if she ever looks directly onto Camelot, she will be maledictd. A curse is on her if she stay / To look down to Camelot(lines 40-41). She relies upon a mirror to reflect to her what happens outside her tower. Light is very important to her, as without the light there can be no reflections. It is through the use of this mirror that she glimpses Lancelot riding by, in the sunlight, His broad clear brow in sunlight glowd(line 100). She falls in love with him, and watches him ride away causing her spunk to wander from the mirror to the road and on to Camelot. The light, which beforehand had allowed her glimpses of the world, is her undoing and the curse is upon her. Up until the point when the Lady decided to look toward Camelot, the light had been a positive aspect in her life.   The light was most often amicable for The Lady of Shalott, but it does not prove to be friendly to Isabella Tyson, the of import character in Woolfs The Lady in the Looking-Glass A Reflection. After go from the garden, At once the looking-glass began to pour over her a light that seemed to pay back her that seemed like some acid to bite off the unessential and little and to leave only the truth(2456).