"The Lady of Shalott" by William Holman Hunt: Fallen Woman to Feminist
- Date: November 14, 2006
- Level: University, Bachelor's
- Grade: A+
- Length: 11 pages (2783 words)
- Essay rating:
- Keywords:
lord alfred tennyson, william holman hunt, pre raphaelites, lady of shalott, fallen woman, illustration, ...sexual frustration, victorian magazine, inevitable demise, male counterparts, tapestry weaving, domestic sphere, mental distress, prime examples, new birth, satirical, victorian era
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Subject > Art Essays > Works of Art
The Pre-Raphaelites often characterized women destroyed by love, namely emphasizing the mental distress and sexual frustration of the fallen woman. The Lady of Shalott by Lord Alfred Tennyson is one of the prime examples of a fallen woman in the Victorian Era. Locked in a tower, cursed to carry out her life of tapestry-weaving, The Lady of Shalott meets her inevitable demise upon leaving her quarters in an effort to relieve her loneliness and lust. Marked by the death of Alfred Tennyson and the completion of the large scale, oil version of its main illustration by William Holman Hunt, the year of 1892 unleashed a new birth of women equality. The aftermath of Tennyson's poem and ...
... feminist, the realism of the piece conjures thoughts not about the lines of a poem but about a very real problem that existed in the Victorian culture: women were treated with extreme inequality and disregard. Despite which perspective the Victorian men and other opposing forces believed to be acceptable, three ground-breaking events had taken place by the end of the nineteenth century that not even the opposition could stop: the mirror had cracked; the threads were unraveled, and women left the isolation of their towers in order to define a new age of feminism.
Works Cited
----. "Punch 1892." Online. Project Gutenberg. 10 Nov 2006. .
Dillon, Karen. "'Who
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