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

The gentlewoman of Shalott and The chick in the Looking Glass     Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote The Lady of Shalott around 1830, during what is known 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 whole shebang of art both deal with women who have burning(prenominal) relationships with mirrors. The light in these stories has a great and different effect and meaning for each of these women. The grandeur and meaning of light are contrasted in these two tales, representing a permute in writers attitudes toward light portrayal.   In Tennysons poem, the woman known as The Lady of Shalott, has been placed in a tower and told if she ever timbers directly onto Camelot, she pull up stakes be cursed. A curse is on her if she stay / To look pop out to Camelot(lines 40-41). She relies upon a mirror to reflect to her what happens outside her tower. Light is v ery important to her, as without the light there can be no reflections. It is done the use of this mirror that she glimpses Lancelot riding by, in the sunlight, His broad clear forehead in sunlight glowd(line 100). She falls in love with him, and watches him ride out-of-door causing her eye to wander from the mirror to the road and on to Camelot. The light, which onward 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 close often friendly for The Lady of Shalott, but it does not prove to be friendly to Isabella Tyson, the main character in Woolfs The Lady in the Looking-Glass A Reflection. After returning from the garden, At once the looking-glass began to pour over her a light that seemed to fix her that seemed like some acid to bite dark the unessential and superficial and to leave only the truth(2 456).