Thursday, March 26, 2020
How much mirror is too much mirror?
This poem left me with lots of questions surrounding her curse and her situation. The line is very grey with how she is allowed to look down on Camelot. She glances and sees different reflections out of the corner of her eye in the mirror. Would it break the curse if she blatantly used the mirror to stare down over the land? Lots of other questions remain as well. How did she receive the curse originally? How did she find out that she had the curse? Who decided that it was in her best interest to live in a tower all her life? Still, the poem was very intriguing to me. It was different to anything else we have read thus far because Lady of Shalott has a very artistic mind and the majority of the poem we as readers are tapped into this mind. It really makes me put myself into her shoes and think about what life would be like if I was to only be in one place, and to not be able to look at the only outside world I physically can.
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I also had a lot of the same questions as you while I was reading the story. The only thing that I could think of for why her story exists with all of the questions unanswered is because I believe we are supposed to think like the upper class. They might not have cared about her backstory, but rather how is she supposed to get her Prince. That was the only thing that I could come up with to try and make sense why more information on her is not given.
ReplyDeleteI know that I definitely wonder about these kinds of things too, because we're naturally curious about stuff like curses! But I think Tennyson left all of this out because the lady is a more interesting symbol if we DON'T know her backstory or the details of her daily life.
ReplyDeleteShe's trapped by her circumstances, but she doesn't let that trap define her. She refuses to accept the limits that she has been given and is willing to break out of those limits, even if it kills her. She's tired of being told what she can and can't do. I think a lot of people - and especially a lot of women! - living in this time would have been inspired by her. The fact that she doesn't have a specific past makes her easier to identify with - a kind of "Mary Sue" whose shoes are easy for us as readers to step into.
Does that make sense?
Surprisingly I just accepted that she was in the tower and did not think much of it. But now that I look back it is strange. Like how did she get there? What I think about though is that sometimes we just cannot question things. We just have to accept what the writer says because if we dwell on it too much we will miss the rest of the story.
ReplyDeleteI think the lack of information or details makes us acccept the poem as it is (like the Lady is forced to accept her reality as it is) !! I actually want to give the poet credit here for this one, very meta
ReplyDeleteI like your thought that he purposely left the information out so that we had to accept her reality just like she had to accept her own. That is such an interesting and in depth thought that I had never exploredl
DeleteYes, this is very interesting. Why MAKE us accept her situation? Why MAKE us believe her only option is to live in the tower and feel distraught under the pressure of her curse? Very interesting purpose behind the way the author wrote this...
ReplyDeleteI agree there are a lot of unanswered questions. I thought it was interesting how it was kind of vague. we don't entirely know how the curse works. I wondered if there was any way to get rid of the curse but did not see information about that.It seemed like she was doomed from the start.
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