The Lady of Shalott in the Victorian Novel (review)

The Henry James Review Fall, 1985 and Aggie in light of such New Women as Olive Schreiner's Lyndall, Eliza Lynn Linton's Phoebe Barrington, Sarah Brand's Evadne Frayling, and Violet Hunt's Moderna, Jacobson can explain the special Jamesian power with which The Awkward Age ends. "Lyndall, Phoebe, Evadne, and Moderna are what they are because they have chosen to be so. Nanda, luce Aggie, is a passive victim of society and specifically of her mother" (135-36). Unlike most other portrayers of new women, James will not espouse marriage as the goal and die cure. Aggie's marriage is an obscenity, and Nanda's fate is not wedlock, but the deadlock of adoption . For James, the good are always orphans. AU in all, Henry James and the Mass Market accomplishes its general task of redefining James's career by succeeding in its specific analyses of texts. Readers will differ on which chapters work most effectively, but I suspect most readers will share my overall sense that we see James's career more coherently after reading Jacobson's book. Instead of three disjunct phases, Naturalist, theatrical, and experimental, we see a consistent motion—James's attempting to realize in a new era his early desire to be "popular ." That "popular" meant, in the mass market epoch, something different from what it meant in James's High Victorian apprenticeship spelled agony but not defeat for the Master who splendidly survived contemporaries of "short-lived acclaim." William Veeder The University of Chicago Jennifer Gribble. The Lady of Shalott in the Victorian Novel. Salem, NH: Salem House, 1983. viii + 222 pp. $24.00. Dr. Gribble suggests that Tennyson's mysterious damsel is but one manifestation (though an influential one) of a key Victorian myth, one that centers upon "the social position and the rights of women," but also upon the place of the isolated consciousness in society and the nature of the creative imagination. These and related issues are explored in a series of essays centered upon "representative" novels: Villette, Little Dorrit, Middlemarch, Jude the Obscure , and The Wings of the Dove. Despite the title's (perhaps unintentional?) echoes of recent feminist studies of symbolic figures lüce "the madwoman in die attic" and "die maniac in the cellar," the plight of women is not the principal focus here: rather it is the transition from romantic to modern, explored mainly through the (quite familiar) problematic of romantic subjectivism. Nonetheless, Gribble is fully aware that the ' 'woman question" was increasingly in the public mind throughout the nineteenth century, and in her introductory chapter she discusses the peculiar double nature of the emergent Angel in the House. Women were idealized and eulogized as "delicate vessels [who bear] onward through the ages the treasure of human affections" (thus wrote George Eliot without irony); they were also kept imprisoned within the distaff circle and cut off from most "serious" business in life. So, too, the Lady of Shalott, who looks at the world only through the mirror in her well appointed chamber. But if this is emblematic of the condition of woman, it is emblematic as well of the condition of the artist. While the Lady is forbidden to enter the world, she can and does fix its reflected image in her tapestry. Such isolation may not be deprivation but the necessary condition for art. (Mrs. Gaskell queried Charlotte Brontë about the opium trance in Villette, astonished by its fidelity; die author told her she had never tried the drug, only imagined its effects.) As Gribble writes: "To be shut away from the world beyond the window is to be denied die fullest realisation of the self, but the state of enclosure fosters remarkable imaginative energies." Yet in some respects Tennyson's Lady functions more as anti-type than type. Perhaps the most famUiar romantic trope is the journey from the quotidien world to a realm of pure subjectivity. The Lady of Shalott (unlike, let us say, the Ancient Mariner) is seen first in a world of imagination and shadow and then journeys into the ordinary —where she is destroyed. This is hardly die fate of most heroines: Gribble knows that the Victorian sensibility was...