46 The Tragedy of Victorian Artists: “The Lady of Shalott” and Dorian Gray – Katie Ahrens

In Portnoy’s article, he writes that a comparison of Sibyl and the Lady reveals “striking parallels in the characterization, narrative line, and thematic substance of the two works” (Portnoy 259). He argues that Wilde has intentionally pulled from Tennyson’s writing and in doing so owes Tennyson a “debt”—this debt being the idea for Sibyl’s arc and for the established theme used for Wilde’s later established commentary on society’s view of artists.

The Lady of Shalott and Sibyl are both portrayed as artists, although of different arts—The Lady weaves tapestries while Sibyl acts in a theater. They both enjoy their work—the Lady delighting in her weaving and Sibyl finding joy in acting. This enjoyment of their work eases, and perhaps even obscures, the pain of being trapped within their chosen art. The Lady of Shalott would have a curse put on her if she left her weaving on her “silent isle” to “look down at Camelot” (Tennyson 17; 41). The situation of Sibyl’s entrapment is not as mystical—she is bound by debt and contract to the Jew that owns the theater “for three years … from the present time” of the novel (Wilde 55). Each woman is trapped not only away from the world but trapped within their art. Sibyl must act in order to fulfill her contract, and the Lady weaves to keep the curse from coming upon her.

However, as Portnoy writes in his article, each woman “is enticed by her love for a handsome man to abandon her art for the world of actuality, a transition which leads to her ultimate self-destruction” (259). The Lady glimpses Sir Lancelot in her mirror as Sibyl sees Dorian in the crowd, and they each feel an instant attraction, which leads them to abandon their cage. The Lady leaves her weaving and looks upon Lancelot with her own eyes rather than through the mirror. In doing so, she brings the curse upon herself. Sibyl, knowing real love, cannot stand to be a hypocrite and “fake” love anymore. She acts very poorly, committing to making herself useless as an actor so she can leave the Jew’s service.

Both women seem to be drawn to these men without any true reason; they are both handsome, but that is hardly a reason to abandon one’s entire way of life. While Wilde uses these lines to describe Dorian’s attraction to Sibyl, they can be used in reverse as well: “There was no doubt that curiosity had much to do with it, curiosity and the desire for new experiences” (Wilde 58). The Lady and Sibyl desire something new, something real, and Lancelot and Dorian seem to them the keys to reality. There is no small joy in this new means of escape, for as Sibyl tells her mother of her new love, “[t]he joy of a caged bird was in her voice” (Wilde 60). She feels she is finally free. In “The Lady of Shalott,” almost all of Part III of the poem is used to describe Lancelot as he “flashed into the crystal mirror” (Tennyson 106). This amount of detail seems to allude to how rapt the Lady is, observing his every move and detail. As Lancelot stops by the river and sings, the Lady rises, leaving her weaving and pacing about the room before “[s]he looked down to Camelot,” finally seeing the world and Lancelot with her own eyes (Tennyson 113). As soon as she looks down, however, “[o]ut flew the web and floated wide; / The mirror cracked from side to side; / “The curse has come upon me,” cried / The Lady of Shalott” (Tennyson 114-117). While the curse coming upon the Lady is made clear, the curse coming upon Sibyl is not. This curse, whether the narrative announces it or not, wreaks havoc upon each woman, causing her to lose her life for her newfound freedom in love.

There are more subtle nods to Tennyson’s writing in Wilde’s, using matching imagery and dialogue. When the Lady turns to look at Lancelot—the first thing in the outside world she has ever truly seen—Tennyson tells us what she sees of him: “She saw the water-lily bloom / She saw the helmet and the plume” (Tennyson 111-112). The helmet and the plume, to her, “Burned like one burning flame together” (Tennyson 93-94). As Lord Henry is describing Dorian as he pines after Sibyl, he remarks that his “nature had developed like a flower, had borne blossoms of scarlet flame” (Wilde 54). They are both described with flowers and brilliant flames. These bright flames draw in the women, who have known nothing but shadows.

The imagery of shadows is one of the strongest correlations between the Lady of Shallot and Sibyl. Shadows are how the world appears to the women before the brilliant flame of their would-be lover appears in their lives. As the Lady weaves, she uses a mirror to view both her work and the outside world: “And moving through a mirror clear / That hangs before her all the year, / Shadows of the world appear” (Tennyson 46-48). She sees the land of Camelot, but it is vague and shadowy—shown reflected in a mirror from the height of her tower. Wilde uses similar language in Sibyl’s speech proclaiming her love for Dorian: “before I knew you, acting was the reality of my life. It was only in the theater that I lived … The painted scenes were my world. I knew nothing but shadows, and I thought them real” (Wilde 84). Sibyl is apart from the world, only being able to see it from the stage and through the eyes of the characters she portrays. Through this lens, she views only a shadowy glimpse of the world, and she believes that is all there is. The novel and poem both “depict a young woman who lives exclusively within the domain of her art” (Portnoy 259). Sibyl and the Lady only see the world as a shadow of what it truly is, and they are only able to experience the shadowy world through their art. Despite their skewed view of the world, they believe this to be enough to satisfy them.

However, as the wheel of time grinds on, these shadows begin to no longer satisfy them. While each woman realizes it differently, they each come to the same conclusion. As the Lady sees two newlywed lovers, she proclaims, “I am half-sick of shadows” (Tennyson 71). She is tired of only seeing the world second-hand but does not have enough reason to bring the curse upon her until she sees Sir Lancelot. There is no indication that Sibyl was growing sick of the shadows before meeting Dorian, but he opens her eyes and makes her proclaim, in an echo of the Lady of Shalott, that “I have grown sick of shadows” (Wilde 84). While this shows Wilde’s very clear and intentional connection between the two women, it also presents the idea that artists who are only caught up in their work can only view the world as shadows of what it really is—being forced to see it as a subject for artistic interpretation rather than for the wonder it truly is.

Both the Lady of Shalott and Sibyl lived in false versions of reality, and they believed them to be real. Their art reflects this, and although it is beautiful, it lacks true meaning. Their art is so beautiful because it, like they, are untouched by the ugly of the world, and they only see the objective, detached beauty without the realism of reality—the ideal of the aesthetic movement. It lacks meaning because they can only observe and replicate what they see in the shadows, detached from its true depth and beauty. Their view of the world was in shadow, but the bright glow of their prospective lovers jolts them into reality. Both find they cannot reconcile their meaningless art—art that aligns with the aesthetic movement’s “art for art’s sake”—with the new meaning they find in their own lives. They abandon their old, idealized aesthetic art and reach out into the new, real, and complex world they have discovered. In Sybil’s proclamation to Dorian, she related these ideas: “I saw through the hollowness, the sham, the silliness of this empty pageant in which I always played … the words I had to speak were unreal, were not my words” (Wilde 84). When compared to her love for Dorian, her acting is revealed to her as the mimicry that it is; “I might mimic a passion that I do not feel, but I cannot mimic one that burns me like fire … it would be profanation for me to play at being in love” (Wilde 84). Before the Lady saw Lancelot, she still delighted to “weave the mirror’s magic sights”—the world in shadow is as magic to her, incomprehensible and strange (Tennyson 65). After viewing Lancelot, she is no longer content to weave, and she “left the web, she left the loom,” looking out at Lancelot and bringing the curse down upon her (Tennyson 109). As she abandons the tower and makes her way down the river to find Lancelot, she is “[l]ike some bold seer in a trance, / Seeing all his own mischance” (Tennyson 128-129). She realizes all she has missed out on in this world, and what a mistake—mischance—it was to have never looked out at Camelot before.

However, once the art they were celebrated for is removed from their identities—Lady from her loom, Sybil from her stage—they are harshly judged by the world. This judgment has a dual meaning to it. The first meaning is a statement on the treatment of Victorian female artists. When the Lady and Sibyl’s identities were synonymous with their art, they are celebrated without concern for their gender. Dorian cannot help but be enamored with Sibyl, but he only speaks of her beauty and her art. In a way, Sibyl could hide behind her art and be celebrated as an actress despite her gender. The Lady is known only as a sort of myth—the magic woman in the tower who weaves all day: “But who hath seen her weave her hand? / Or at the casement seen her stand? / Or is she known in all the land, / The Lady of Shalott” (24-27). However, once they abandon their art, they are discarded and destroyed by the world they hope to enter. This discarding of an artist without art perhaps speaks not only to female artists but to the fear of the very artists who wrote about them—that if they did not have their art, they would be rejected. Wilde voices this through Dorian. After Sibyl discards her acting for the sake of love, Dorian rejects her, telling her unequivocally, “[w]ithout your art you are nothing” (Wilde 85). For the Lady of Shalott, however, she is only known through myth and legend as the woman who weaves in the tower. When she leaves her weaving and her tower, coming down to the boat, “round the prow she wrote / The Lady of Shalott” (Tennyson 125-126). Even when she has abandoned her art, she cannot escape this title the world has given her. While these male artists have portrayed female artists in their plight of being unable to be seen apart from their art—and this may be seen as sexist commentary—Wilde and Tennyson are perhaps representing their personal fear that, without their art, they would become nothing.

After they “become nothing” to the world and are rejected, both women die. The Lady of Shalott is killed by her curse: “her blood was frozen slowly, / And her eyes were darkened wholly” (Tennyson 147-148) while “[s]inging in her song she died” (Tennyson 152). Sibyl, meanwhile, kills herself due to the curse of a broken heart. In the poem “The Lady of Shalott,” after the Lady dies, her corpse floats down the river where the knights of Camelot find her; “And they crossed themselves for fear, / All the knights at Camelot: / But Lancelot mused a little space; / He said ‘She has a lovely face; / God in his mercy lend her grace’” (Tennyson 166-170). Lancelot only observes her outward beauty, not giving thought to the reason why she is dead or being fearful, as the other knights were, at finding a corpse floating down the river. He appreciates her almost as a piece of art herself; however, he does so from the aesthetic view— “she has a lovely face”—appreciating only her beauty without meaning (Tennyson 169). Dorian mimics this in his conversation with Basil, as Portnoy identifies how “the contrast between Basil’s and Dorian’s reactions nearly parallels that between those of the knights and Lancelot in the poem” (260). Basil, like the knights, is fearful at the news of Sibyl’s death. Dorian’s reply to this fear is similar to Lancelot’s, as Henry’s influence causes him “to view the actress’ death almost exclusively in aesthetic terms” (Portnoy 260).  Dorian remarks that “[h]er death has all the pathetic uselessness of martyrdom, all its wasted beauty” (Wilde 106). He, like Lancelot, sees her only as art, appreciating only her beauty. This seems to have pulled the women into a pointless circle as they become the meaningless art that they wanted to escape.

For two male artists to write about other female artists only ever being seen as art seems quite morbid. It does, however, make a strong commentary on the view of artists in society—their lives a spectacle for viewing as “art.” There is another, more hidden meaning, however. Each woman, before she died, was able to create a final piece of art that had meaning and was truly them. The Lady of Shalott makes one final and true piece of art as “[s]inging in her song she died” (Tennyson 152). Rather than mimicking what she sees in her weaving, this art truly comes from her—singing is an outward art, showing the world part of herself rather than simply copying the world. Sibyl, who is tired of acting with fake emotions, truly “dies, as Juliet might have died” (Wilde 106). Wilde, through the voice of Dorian, writes that “[s]he lived her finest tragedy” and, in this way, “passed again into the sphere of art” (Wilde 106). They were at first only able to reflect others, but their final “art” is truly their inmost soul—creating a beautiful tragedy. Perhaps Wilde and Tennyson are reprimanding society, telling them to perhaps allow artists to truly express themselves before their lives become a tragedy.

If one takes the “resurrection” of the Lady of Shalott in Sibyl as the aesthetic movement would, as art without meaning, one will miss the true depth of meaning behind their beautiful tragedies. Wilde and Tennyson both weave intricate commentaries on the treatment of all artists, even expressing their own fears. While each woman’s story is tragic, they serve as a beautiful representation of the tragedy many artists face when they try to imbue their own personal meaning into their work and break away from the shadows.

​​Works Cited

​Portnoy, William. “Wilde’s Debt to Tennyson in Dorian Gray.” English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920 (1974): 259-261. PDF.

​Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. London: Penguin Classics, 2003.

​Tennyson, Lord Alfred “The Lady of Shalott.” Greenblatt, Stephen and Catherine Robson. The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Victorian Age. W.W. Norton, 2018. 147-152.​