“Ut Pictora Poesis”: Teaching “The Lady of Shalott” and Victorian Visual Culture

Alfred Lord Tennyson’s 1842 version of “The Lady of Shalott” is a poem that many students find accessible and easy to comprehend. The tragic story of the lovelorn artist forced to choose between her life and her work is straightforward, and the structure of the narrative, divided as it is into four clear sections, makes understanding the general outline of the poem an uncomplicated task. However, despite—or perhaps because of this ready accessibility—students frequently struggle to make more than superficial observations about the meaning or significance of the poem and often have trouble articulating its more significant themes or its relationship to the social and aesthetic concerns of the period. As a consequence, without any advanced preparation, in-class discussions can devolve into mere summary or become easily derailed by extraneous or too-literal discussions of the inevitability of the lady’s death, her seemingly supernatural being, or her one-sided love for Lancelot. These problems are especially troubling precisely because Tennyson’s poem is such a rich, complex, and highly ambiguous work.

One of the best ways I have found to help students get a better sense of this complexity and move beyond the surface of the poem’s narrative is to situate the work within the bourgeoning visual culture of the middle and late Victorian period. By incorporating some of the many visual responses to the poem from several pre-Raphaelite and Victorian painters into our discussions, students are given the chance literally to see the many themes and contexts that might arise from an informed and interpretive response to the work, including the role of women in Victorian culture and society and the tensions between artistic and sexual creation. Furthermore, Tennyson was one of the premiere “word painters” of his time, and “The Lady of Shalott” is a remarkably pictorial poem, full of carefully crafted visual details. Looking closely at the paintings of John William Waterhouse and William Holman Hunt, both of whom employed meticulous symbolic details in their work, can help students to understand better the importance and power of the image as a poetic device.

The lesson outlined below was developed as part of the second half of a British literature survey course for college sophomores and can be taught as a stand-alone lecture and discussion of about 75 minutes or, depending on the nature of the course and the instructor’s prerogatives, could be the basis for a more elaborate series of group work and discussion stretched out over two or three shorter class periods. This approach could also easily be employed in a lower-division introduction to literature or an upper-division Victorian literature course. Likewise, the methods used could be applied to other literary and visual texts from the period, including illustrations of Tennyson’s “Marianna,” Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market,” and Oscar Wilde’s Salome. This discussion is especially successful if paired with short excerpts from John Ruskin’s Modern Painters and Chapter One of Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy: “Sweetness and Light,” both of which are usually available in the Norton Anthology of Literature. Read in advance, these excerpts help students further understand and appreciate the aesthetic concerns of the period and the reciprocal influence between literature and painting.

“Ut Pictora Poesis” and the Context of Victorian Visual Culture

Just as I do with most of the literature I teach, I begin discussions of “The Lady of Shalott,”—a text which I often use to introduce students to Victorian literature—by offering a brief account of the social and technological developments of the period. In the case of Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelites, one of the most compelling of these changes was the massive explosion of visual culture that preceded and followed the publication of the poem in 1832. As more and more visual works were made available to wider and wider audiences, the image as a medium for the transmission of ideas became a powerful force in Victorian culture. New technologies and improvements in existing technologies for the production of visual texts (including the daguerreotype and...