Afterlives of the Lady of Shalott and Elaine of Astolat 3030476898, 9783030476892

Table of contents :
Acknowledgments
Praise for Afterlives of the Lady of Shalott and Elaine of Astolat
Contents
Abbreviations and Spellings
List of Figures
List of Tables
1 Introduction
1.1 The Topic
1.2 Death and the Maiden
1.3 King Arthur Returns
1.4 Medievalism(s), Neomedievalism
1.5 Adaptation and Allusion
1.6 Texts and Trends
1.7 Afterlives
References
2 The Lady and Elaine: Medieval Literature and Victorian Adaptation
2.1 Introduction
2.2 Before Tennyson
2.3 Tennyson’s Lady, Tennyson’s Elaine
2.4 Responses
References
3 Singing Her Own Song: The Lady/Elaine in Music
3.1 Introduction
3.2 The Lady and Elaine in Music
3.3 Nineteenth-Century Music: Material Conditions and Interpretations
3.3.1 Sweet Is True Love
3.4 Twentieth-Century Music: Material Conditions and Interpretations
3.4.1 Adapting the Lady to Music
3.4.2 Speaking for Her Own Self
3.5 The Power of the Voice
References
4 “She Hath a Lovely Face”: The Lady/Elaine in Art
4.1 Introduction
4.2 The Victorian Context
4.3 “Who Hath Seen Her …?”
4.4 Book Illustrations
4.4.1 Doré
4.4.2 Cameron
4.4.3 Rhead
4.5 Paintings
4.5.1 Rosenthal’s Elaine (1874)
4.5.2 Hunt’s Lady
4.5.3 Waterhouse’s Ladies (1888, 1894, 1915)
4.6 “Out Flew the Web …”: The Lady/Elaine Online
4.7 Another Kind of Lady
4.8 The Power of the Image
References
5 Patterns and Parody: The Lady/Elaine in Literature
5.1 Introduction
5.2 Patterns
5.2.1 Conflation of Lady/Elaine
5.2.2 Non-Arthurian Intertexts
5.2.3 Strategies of Adaptation
5.2.4 Images: Tower (Entrapment and Isolation)
5.2.5 Images: Mirror (Reality and Self)
5.2.6 Images: Weaving/Embroidery (Creativity and Art)
5.2.7 Images: Lancelot (Life-Altering Desire, Loss, and Rejection)
5.2.8 Images: Curse and Boat (Inevitability of Fate/Doom)
5.3 Parody
5.3.1 The Lady on South Street
5.3.2 Floating Down to Cambridge
5.4 Conclusion
References
6 Reading and Resisting: The Lady/Elaine in Young People’s Literature
6.1 Introduction
6.2 Retelling the Story
6.3 Responding to the Story
6.4 Richardson’s Heroic Lily Maid
6.5 Montgomery’s Unfortunate Lily Maid
6.6 Pulman’s Virtual Lady
6.7 Cabot’s Anti-Elaine
6.8 Conclusion
References
7 Desire and Art: The Lady/Elaine in Historical Fiction and Fantasy
7.1 Introduction
7.2 A Woman’s Place
7.3 Romancing Elaine
7.4 Changing the Material
7.5 Rewriting the Knight and Empowering the Lady
7.6 Conclusion
References
8 Postscript
References
Index

Citation preview

ARTHURIAN AND COURTLY CULTURES

Afterlives of the Lady of Shalott and Elaine of Astolat Ann F. Howey

Arthurian and Courtly Cultures

Series Editor Bonnie Wheeler English & Medieval Studies Southern Methodist University Dallas, TX, USA

The dynamic expressions of medieval courtly cultures, many with Arthurian themes, are the focus of this book series, Arthurian and Courtly Cultures, which explores topics related to the lore and literature of medieval European courts, and the various cultural expressions they have inspired to our present day. In forms that range from medieval chronicles to popular films, from chivalric romances to contemporary comics, from magic realism to feminist fantasy—and from the sixth through the twenty-first centuries—few literary subjects provide such fertile ground for cultural elaboration. Arthurian and Courtly Cultures highlights works of literary criticism, mythic and cultural studies, and of social and political history.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14778

Ann F. Howey

Afterlives of the Lady of Shalott and Elaine of Astolat

Ann F. Howey Brock University St. Catharines, Canada

Arthurian and Courtly Cultures ISBN 978-3-030-47689-2 ISBN 978-3-030-47690-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47690-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Jacobs Stock Photography Ltd/Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

This book is dedicated in memory of Sam.

Acknowledgments

When a project takes years to complete, debts of gratitude accumulate— For financial support, I gratefully acknowledge the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for a Standard Research Grant (2009–2012), and the Humanities Research Institute at Brock University for funding (2007), both of which supported research in the early stages of this project. Brock University also supported this project in granting me sabbatical leaves for research and writing. For constructive comments, I would like to acknowledge the two anonymous readers of my manuscript, whose suggestions were most helpful during final revisions. Thanks as well to Palgrave’s editorial team for their help through the publication process. I am also grateful to the following for their generosity in granting permissions: Heather Dale, Trevor Neal, Lisa Ann Sandell, and Teresa Wentzler/Leisure Arts. For assistance with my research, I would like to thank the staff at the British Library’s Rare Books and Music Reading Room, who answered questions and retrieved many “Elaine” scores for me. Thanks to Grace Timmons, of the Tennyson Research Centre in Lincoln, for assistance during my visit there. Staff at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, NY, were also very helpful in facilitating my viewing of C. J. Williams’ silent film. Thanks as well to Justine Cotton, a librarian at Brock University, for drawing my attention to various resources related to this project. I am also grateful for technical help provided by Carol McIntosh and Dennis Ceci of Brock’s Printing Services.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I have also been aided by a number of Research Assistants over the years: Gary Forbes and Erika Sitko allowed me to hear Victorian songs long forgotten; Lindsay Osmun, Katherine Whitehurst, Athena Armstrong, Mimi Okabe, Tanya Rohrmoser, Olivia King, Cambria Huff, and Elizabeth Pereira compiled long lists of potential Lady/Elaine texts and checked sources for me. Thanks to all of you for your work, and thanks as well to the students in two graduate seminars at Brock (2010 and 2016), for lively discussion of some of the texts that I analyze in this book and for introducing me to The Band Perry. I am also grateful to all of my colleagues in the Department of English Language & Literature at Brock University, who listened to “works in progress” talks from this project on multiple occasions and asked helpful questions. I would particularly like to acknowledge Janet Sackfie’s support and Liz Keenan’s help with technical matters when I was stressed. And for encouragement and excellent advice when it was most needed, thanks especially to Barbara Seeber, Elizabeth Sauer, James Allard, Leah Knight, Martin Danahay, and Neta Gordon. I would also like to recognize Elisabeth Sklar for being willing to listen and advise, and for her enthusiasm for the project. I am also deeply grateful to Stephen Reimer: first a supervisor, then a co-author, and now a mentor and friend. His insight, challenging questions, and support have made me a better scholar. This project has also benefitted greatly from my many hours of discussion of the topic with Lisa LaFramboise. Thanks for all your help and encouragement, and of course, for the amazing cross-stitch. These individuals and others have contributed to the development of this project over many years. Mistakes remaining are my own. To my family–Doug, Diana, Nancy, George, Susan, Kevin, Jason, Joanne, Donovan, Joseph, Matthew, and Andrew—your love makes it possible for me to do so much. And to Mom and Dad, with love, always, and with gratitude for all you have given me over the years.

Praise for Afterlives of the Lady of Shalott and Elaine of Astolat

“In this exhaustive, well-written, and thoroughly researched volume, Professor Ann Howey provides what will surely prove to be the definitive study of the appearances of the Lady of Shalott and Elaine of Astolat from the medieval to the post-modern periods across multiple disciplines including music, art, literature, young adult literature, historical fiction, and fantasy. The theoretical perspectives that shape this study are equally clearly-delineated and multifaceted, as they encompass feminist theories of death and representation, agency studies, the historical development of the Arthuriad, medievalism, neo-Victorianism, and adaptation theory.” —Kevin J. Harty, Professor of English, La Salle University, USA, and Past President of the International Arthurian Society, North American Branch “Afterlives is remarkable for both its breadth and its depth. Engaging with historical context, cultural studies, feminism, and adaptation theory, Howey provides insightful readings of Elaine and the Lady across poetry, art, needlework, popular music, short stories, young adult literature, historical fiction, and fantasy. Her examination of these reimagined Elaine/Lady tales, from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century, powerfully contributes to a number of fields: Arthuriana, medievalism, Victorianism, children’s literature, and popular culture.” —Susan Aronstein, Professor of English, University of Wyoming, USA, and co-author of The Road to Wicked: The Marketing and Consumption of Oz from Baum to Broadway (2018) ix

Contents

1

Introduction 1.1 The Topic 1.2 Death and the Maiden 1.3 King Arthur Returns 1.4 Medievalism(s), Neomedievalism 1.5 Adaptation and Allusion 1.6 Texts and Trends 1.7 Afterlives References

1 1 3 8 11 14 18 41 46

2

The Lady and Elaine: Medieval Literature and Victorian Adaptation 2.1 Introduction 2.2 Before Tennyson 2.3 Tennyson’s Lady, Tennyson’s Elaine 2.4 Responses References

51 51 52 64 77 84

3

Singing Her Own Song: The Lady/Elaine in Music 3.1 Introduction 3.2 The Lady and Elaine in Music 3.3 Nineteenth-Century Music: Material Conditions and Interpretations

91 91 95 98 xi

xii

CONTENTS

3.3.1 Sweet Is True Love Twentieth-Century Music: Material Conditions and Interpretations 3.4.1 Adapting the Lady to Music 3.4.2 Speaking for Her Own Self 3.5 The Power of the Voice References

103

4

“She Hath a Lovely Face”: The Lady/Elaine in Art 4.1 Introduction 4.2 The Victorian Context 4.3 “Who Hath Seen Her …?” 4.4 Book Illustrations 4.4.1 Doré 4.4.2 Cameron 4.4.3 Rhead 4.5 Paintings 4.5.1 Rosenthal’s Elaine (1874) 4.5.2 Hunt’s Lady 4.5.3 Waterhouse’s Ladies (1888, 1894, 1915) 4.6 “Out Flew the Web …”: The Lady/Elaine Online 4.7 Another Kind of Lady 4.8 The Power of the Image References

129 129 130 133 137 139 141 147 152 153 157 160 163 165 167 175

5

Patterns and Parody: The Lady/Elaine in Literature 5.1 Introduction 5.2 Patterns 5.2.1 Conflation of Lady/Elaine 5.2.2 Non-Arthurian Intertexts 5.2.3 Strategies of Adaptation 5.2.4 Images: Tower (Entrapment and Isolation) 5.2.5 Images: Mirror (Reality and Self) 5.2.6 Images: Weaving/Embroidery (Creativity and Art) 5.2.7 Images: Lancelot (Life-Altering Desire, Loss, and Rejection)

183 183 183 184 187 189 194 197

3.4

108 110 111 119 122

198 201

CONTENTS

5.2.8

Images: Curse and Boat (Inevitability of Fate/Doom)

Parody 5.3.1 The Lady on South Street 5.3.2 Floating Down to Cambridge 5.4 Conclusion References

204 206 214 220 223 229

Reading and Resisting: The Lady/Elaine in Young People’s Literature 6.1 Introduction 6.2 Retelling the Story 6.3 Responding to the Story 6.4 Richardson’s Heroic Lily Maid 6.5 Montgomery’s Unfortunate Lily Maid 6.6 Pulman’s Virtual Lady 6.7 Cabot’s Anti-Elaine 6.8 Conclusion References

235 235 237 244 246 250 255 261 267 271

Desire and Art: The Lady/Elaine in Historical Fiction and Fantasy 7.1 Introduction 7.2 A Woman’s Place 7.3 Romancing Elaine 7.4 Changing the Material 7.5 Rewriting the Knight and Empowering the Lady 7.6 Conclusion References

275 275 277 284 289 292 302 306

Postscript References

309 315

5.3

6

7

8

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Index

317

Abbreviations and Spellings

The following short forms are used in parenthetical references to designate Tennyson’s poems: BB CA Ep G GE GL HG LE LS LT MG MV PA PE TQ

“Balin and Balan” “The Coming of Arthur” “The Epic” “Guinevere” “Geraint and Enid” “Gareth and Lynette” “The Holy Grail” “Lancelot and Elaine” “The Lady of Shalott” “The Last Tournament” “The Marriage of Geraint” “Merlin and Vivien” “The Passing of Arthur” “Pelleas and Ettarre” “To the Queen”

Numbers that follow these abbreviations refer to line numbers. Spellings of Arthurian characters’ names vary widely from text to text. I follow Tennyson’s spelling for any characters he includes. Below is the list of spellings, with variations indicated in brackets. xv

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ABBREVIATIONS AND SPELLINGS

The Lady of Shalott (also Shallott, or Shallot) Elaine of Astolat (also Ascolat) Arthur Lancelot (also Launcelot, Lance, Launce) Guinevere (also Guenever, Gwenhwyfar, Gwynivere) Elaine of Corbenic (also Carbonek) Barnarde (also Bernard) Tristan (also Tristram)

List of Figures

Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2

Fig. 4.3

Fig. 4.4 Fig. 4.5

Fig. 5.1

Fig. 5.2

Julia Margaret Cameron. Elaine, c. 1874. Art Institute of Chicago George Wooliscroft Rhead. “Elaine, the lily maid of Astolat, high in her chamber up a tower to the east—” 1898 George Wooliscroft Rhead. “Saying which she seized, and, thro’ the casement standing wide for heat, flung them” 1898 Toby Edward Rosenthal. Elaine, 1874. Art Institute of Chicago The Lady of Shalott. Original artwork designed by Teresa Wentzler and published by Leisure Arts. Cross-stitched by Lisa LaFramboise Ivy Skinner attempting to be the Lady. Still from C. J. Williams’ The Lady of Shalott, Vitamax, 1915 (Courtesy The George Eastman Museum) Artist Trevor Neal. The Lady of Detroit, 1992 (Courtesy of the artist)

145

148

150 154

166

214 224

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List of Tables

Table 1.1 Table 3.1 Table 6.1

Timeline of Lady/Elaine Texts Numbers of compositions using Tennyson’s Arthurian poems Character parallels in Avalon High

20 97 263

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

1.1

The Topic

When Ellie Harrison, the first-person narrator of Meg Cabot’s teen novel Avalon High (2006), explains that her parents have named her after the legendary Elaine of Astolat, she complains, “It’s not exactly cool to be named after someone who killed herself over a guy.” She has apparently argued this point with her “parents, but they still don’t get it” (p. 7). I open Afterlives of the Lady of Shalott and Elaine of Astolat with Cabot’s novel and Ellie’s complaint because they demonstrate three important features of the Lady of Shalott and Elaine of Astolat figures. First, these characters are often conflated, as in Cabot’s novel, which foregrounds a possible connection between Elaine of Astolat’s circumstances and Ellie’s own while quoting repeatedly from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem “The Lady of Shalott” (1842). Second, they remain a cultural presence in the twenty-first century, as witnessed by their 2006 appearance in the work of a bestselling author for teens. Third, their interpretation shifts: Ellie’s parents by virtue of naming her Elaine would seem to have a different view of that character than Ellie herself does; at issue in these differing interpretations, Ellie’s complaint suggests, is the way we are to read the female figure’s death. Although fictional characters hold differing views of the Lady and Elaine in Cabot’s novel, adaptations of and allusions to the Lady of Shalott and Elaine of Astolat in Victorian and post-Victorian

© The Author(s) 2020 A. F. Howey, Afterlives of the Lady of Shalott and Elaine of Astolat, Arthurian and Courtly Cultures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47690-8_1

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popular culture reveal that Ellie and her parents are not alone in their debate over the significance of these women and their stories. Afterlives treats the Lady and Elaine as both individual and conflated characters because of their production and reception history. Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott”—a ballad of nineteen nine-line stanzas divided into four parts—appeared first in 1832; its final form, substantially revised, appeared in 1842.1 Over a decade later, Tennyson once again represented a woman dying for love of Lancelot in the idyll “Elaine,” which was published in 1859 along with “Enid,” “Vivien,” and “Guinevere” as Idylls of the King. 1418 lines in its final version, the Elaine idyll (which took on its title of “Lancelot and Elaine” in 1870) is the story not just of the “Lily Maid” of Astolat, but also of the knight Lancelot and his relationships with King Arthur and Queen Guinevere. As Chapter 2 argues, the Lady and Elaine differ most significantly in the isolation they experience and the degree to which the art they practice constitutes their identities. Despite significant variations between them, the Lady of Shalott and Elaine of Astolat have often been treated as identical figures, and I will thus use the short-form “Lady/Elaine” throughout this study. Bibliographies, which often combine the two in their indexing, reflect the reality that authors, critics, and reviewers have previously conflated the characters, as Cabot’s novel does. The two women’s greatest similarity is the iconic feature of their narratives that makes identification of a Lady/Elaine text possible: both are women whose unrecognized or unrequited love for Lancelot is followed by death, and whose bodies thereafter travel by boat to King Arthur’s court at Camelot. Afterlives analyzes representations of the Lady/Elaine in Victorian and post-Victorian popular culture in order to trace the extent to which audiences, past and present, accept or reject these characters and narratives about them as romantic, tragic, somehow ideal representations of female passion, will, and fidelity, and to explore the implications of linking these qualities to the image of the dead woman. Producers of texts that adapt or allude to the Lady/Elaine inevitably and sometimes explicitly engage with these issues, and their responses range from confirmation of the inherent beauty of the narratives and of the logic of their ideologies of femininity to outright rejection of them. As a result, whether literary, musical, or visual, representations of the Lady of Shalott and Elaine of Astolat act as sites where conflicting social constructions of gender and art can be productively negotiated, particularly since Tennyson’s canonical articulation of their stories.

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INTRODUCTION

3

Studying the Lady/Elaine happens at the intersection of a number of theoretical perspectives. My overall approach is feminist, broadly defined: a primary concern in my analyses of texts is the way characters’ gender affects their representation and the meanings made available by these representations. Because the iconic moment of these female characters’ lives tends to be their death scene, this introduction first outlines feminist theories of death and representation. The apparent celebration of femininity as passivity (the dead body) in Lady/ Elaine texts demands consideration of agency, particularly since that death follows active expression of will and desire; this introduction defines agency, while later chapters consider its manifestations (such as voice, vision, or action) in individual texts. The female characters whose agency is at issue, however, originate within a literary tradition, so the introduction surveys the Arthurian legend’s historical development as it affects the Lady/Elaine and situates the legend’s Victorian revival in the context of medievalism. Medievalism constructs a relationship between past and present, and Lady/Elaine texts often foreground continuities, disjunctions, or both between women’s and artists’ roles in the past and the present. Moreover, because of their origin in earlier Arthurian legend and in later medievalism that revives that legend, Lady/Elaine texts are productively studied as adaptations; this introduction provides a brief overview of key concepts of adaptation theory and similarities between adaptation and allusion, for my analyses of individual works assumes that each Lady/Elaine text, if perceived as such by its audience, will always be “multilaminated” (Hutcheon 2013, p. 6), working its effects in part through echoing and challenging previous representations of the characters. And the number of representations is substantial; the introduction ends with a Timeline that lists Lady/Elaine texts and uses this Timeline to identify three trends in this subfield of Arthuriana.

1.2

Death and the Maiden

Combining love/desire and death is not exclusive to the Lady/Elaine. It appears in narratives of star-crossed lovers, such as Romeo and Juliet, or in narratives of supernaturally influenced love, such as that of Tristan and Iseult with their love potion. Death in such narratives unites the lovers: Romeo and Juliet die in the same tomb in an attempt to remain together, in death if not in life; in some versions of the Tristan and Iseult story,

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they too are buried near one another. The Lady/Elaine’s love, however, is unrequited, so death signals her eternal separation from her object of desire. Her love also occurs in the context of other characters’ complicated political and social agendas (see discussion in Chapter 2), and in that way is similar to Shakespeare’s Ophelia, whose madness after Hamlet’s rejection ends with her death by drowning.2 Because of this context for her desire and death, Lady/Elaine texts disclose attitudes to love, death, femininity, and art that are part of larger cultural patterns and tendencies; they thus reveal the cultural fascination with the figure of the beautiful dead woman to be related to patriarchal metanarratives3 that associate passivity and femininity. Love and death were linked in the cultural imagination before Tennyson wrote. In the eighteenth century, as Elisabeth Bronfen observes, “the aggressivity of death and the violence of love” were both seen “as part of that dark nature which fundamentally disturbs the autonomy and rationality of the self”; furthermore, “By the nineteenth century, ‘love’ and ‘death’ were culturally constructed as the two realms where savage nature could break into ‘man’s’ city” (1992, p. 86). The irrationality of love or death threatens the rational subject and stable social order; at the same time, however, their association allows the familiarity of the one (love) to make the other (death) less alien, as shown by personifications of Death as Lover. Karl S. Guthke, in his cultural history of personifications of death, notes that images of Death as a lover first become prominent in the Renaissance and Baroque periods, reflecting a general domestication of Death (1999, p. 93), but such images appear most frequently in the nineteenth century.4 Guthke observes of his examples that “This fusion of death and love, inherited, in a sense, from the Renaissance, takes many forms …” (p. 186), but “What all the forms have in common is the interchangeability of love and death, to the point where one may be mistaken for the other” (p. 187). Tennyson’s Elaine sings a “Song of Love and Death” (2007, LE 1000–1011) that enacts this confusion: “I know not which is sweeter,” Elaine claims in her song (LE 1002), thus confirming her earlier perception that she has a choice between “Him [Lancelot] or death” (LE 897). Death as a consequence of love elides into Death as (substitute) lover. If death for love evokes Death as lover, it follows that the woman in question is Death’s bride.5 Images of the dead young woman, the bride of Death, have the “ability to signify perfection and unity” (Bronfen 1992,

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INTRODUCTION

5

p. 10), and Edgar Allen Poe went so far as to claim that the death of a beautiful woman is “the most poetical topic” (1850, p. 120).6 That state of perfection and purity, in reality only momentary, becomes eternal in literature and art. The “beauty [of the image of the dead woman] marks the purification and distance from two moments of insecurity– female sexuality and decay” (Bronfen 1992, p. 11), but as a result such images construct ideal femininity as pure, innocent, and passive. While the pathos of the young woman’s death comes in part from her unrealized potential due to a life cut short, death contains the threat of her potential corruption through desire and sexual knowledge. Bronfen’s description of Eva’s death in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) equally applies to the Lady/Elaine in Tennyson’s poems: “So that her sexual purity can be assured the narrative requires her death” (Bronfen 1992, p. 91). For the Lady/Elaine, as Chapter 2 discusses in more detail, death follows expression of desire, so to say that “the narrative requires her death” is not just to comment on the fidelity of Tennyson’s poems to Arthurian tradition; it also suggests the demands of the metanarrative that enables (but does not guarantee) readings of the Lady’s and Elaine’s deaths as “beautiful” or “poetic.” In summarizing the theories about death and representation that appear in their edited collection, Bronfen and Sarah Webster Goodwin note, “That which aligns with death in any given representation is Other, dangerous, enigmatic, magnetic: culturally, globally, sexually, racially, historically, economically. To study representations of death is to study how … groups have defined themselves against what they are not but wish to control” (1993, p. 20, italics in original). To picture the Lady/Elaine as dead imagines the potential threat of transgressive female desire as controlled—by narrative destiny, if nothing else. That control is hard-won, however, for the Lady/Elaine’s corpse shocks and disrupts the normative community she enters: Camelot. Discussing death and memorialization in a real-life context (Sweden in the early twenty-first century), Eva Reimers comments that “death and the awareness of everybody’s mortality pose existential threats not only for individuals, but for society at large” and can “endanger the conception of the nation as a stable entity” (2012, p. 29). Although fictional, the world of Camelot is depicted as experiencing the kind of crisis that Reimers describes when the Lady/Elaine arrives in the death barge. Fear and wonder are expressed in both poems; in the idyll, these emotions are followed by long explanations by Lancelot and memorial rituals by

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the whole community. Reimers cites Elizabeth Hallam and Jenny Hockey in asserting that “different forms of memorialization can be understood as a means of safeguard against threats of annihilation and meaninglessness” (2012, p. 29), and she goes on to suggest that memorialization can even reconstitute the “imagination of a coherent nation” (p. 30). Closing comments by Lancelot in “The Lady of Shalott” and the funeral rituals decreed by King Arthur for Elaine in “Lancelot and Elaine” both contain the dismay that the dead woman causes, writing her (however briefly, in the case of the Lady) into a coherent narrative of the community, and giving her a place within it (quite literally in the case of Elaine’s grave).7 Instead of disruption, then, the dead woman becomes art—an example of beauty—for the characters within the poems and potentially for readers of them; indeed, casting her as beautiful object to be contemplated facilitates closure in “The Lady of Shalott,” where Lancelot’s comment on the Lady’s “lovely face” (Tennyson 2007, LS 169) occurs in the poem’s final lines. Tennyson and his Lancelot are not alone in this linking of death and beauty, as Poe’s choice of most poetical topic indicates; Tennyson wrote during a period fascinated by images of dead women. Bronfen comments specifically on “[t]he pictorial representation of dead women [that] became so prevalent in eighteenth and nineteenth century European culture that by the middle of the latter century this topos was already dangerously hovering on the periphery of cliché” (1992, p. 3). Some of these representations “are sentimentalized,” revealing with Bronfen and Goodwin call “a congealed configuration of cultural meanings” that may include “a conception of femininity that draws on death’s connotations” (1993, p. 7); passivity and vulnerability are two of those possible connotations. Representations of the dead Lady/Elaine (whether textual, visual, or musical) model not just a specific instance of (fictional) death but more general constructions of femininity as ideally the beautiful object available to the gaze: the object of art. The representation of death thus also lends itself to literature’s and art’s reflections on their own practices. For nineteenth-century writers and artists in particular, the dead woman as the art-object becomes symbolic of art in general and even of the artist; Carol Christ argues that “nineteenth-century artists [her examples are Poe, Tennyson, Robert Browning, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti] frequently use a portrait of a lady to reflect not only on feminine sexuality but on a feminized literary culture” (1993, p. 150), expressing anxieties of the (male) poet’s or

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artist’s place and “the increasing marginalization of the poet from the masculine ethos and power of his society” (p. 146). The use of the dead woman as the male poet/artist’s art-object, however, has consequences for female writers and artists (p. 147), as does the appropriation of the female artist-figure (such as the Lady of Shalott) to represent the (male) poet/artist (see discussion in Chapter 2). Representations of the Lady/Elaine since Tennyson’s time have participated in this metafictional activity, for the Lady and to a lesser extent Elaine are artist-figures who become artworks: the dead body artfully staged for a mystified, wondering, and appreciative audience. If Death can be personified as the masculine lover carrying off the feminized body, then death and gender connect to issues of agency. Bronfen and Goodwin argue that “in Western culture, representations of death bring into play the binary tensions of gender constructs, as life/death engages permutations with masculinity/femininity and with fantasies of power” (1993, p. 20). Life, associated with action and movement, opposes death, associated with passivity and stasis; masculine/feminine maps onto these other binaries, as Joseph Chadwick’s (1986) reading of Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” demonstrates. Bronfen notes that these gendered associations do not depend on the biological sex of the body: “an anatomically ‘male’ corpse may be gendered ‘feminine’ in a given cultural construction” (1992, p. 65), for example, in the image of the fallen or wounded warrior (p. 74, n. 27).8 Binaries generalize about access to power (actual or desired); the active masculine is constructed as having greater agency (and thus greater access to power) than its feminine opposite. Agency, as I am using it, denotes the individual’s negotiation of what Albert Bandura calls a “triadic interaction”: “a reciprocal interplay of intrapersonal, behavioral, and environmental determinants” (2006, p. 165). By displaying intentionality, forethought, self-reactiveness, and self-reflectiveness (Bandura 2006, pp. 164–65), an individual “makes causal contributions to the course of events” (p. 165) affecting the trajectory of his/her life. Individuals’ different resources—affected by factors such as gender, class, age, and race—influence their ability to make these causal contributions, which leads to “considerable personal variation in the interpretation of, adoption of, enforcement of, circumvention of, and opposition to, societal prescriptions and sanctions” (p. 165). Bandura’s discussion is of human beings as opposed to fictional characters, but while creators of fiction determine the path of characters’ stories, within the

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constraints of genre conventions they often represent those characters’ negotiations of the three determinants Bandura identifies. Audiences may thus read characters like the Lady/Elaine as illustrating different kinds of agency, interpreting fictional characters’ lives as negotiations of “societal prescriptions and sanctions” (p. 165) that reveal the gender-proscribed limits of agency. In analyzing the Lady and Elaine as icons of cultural constructions of femininity, I assume that textual representations have some relation to material, lived reality. That relationship is complex; because analysis necessarily isolates only a few of the textual and historical factors at work in order to study them, it tends to simplify. I take seriously Bronfen’s warning that “any theoretical insistence on a direct, unambiguous and stable analogy between cultural images and experienced reality defuses both the real violence of political domination and the power of representations” (1992, p. 59), yet I believe that texts perform important work in the world. Janice Radway’s concept of “narrative gleaning” usefully describes this relationship of text to reality; narratives, like other experiences and social activities, offer their audiences “an enormous attic filled with the cast-offs and hand-me-downs of others” and from these, a person selects the most relevant, “gleaning from that miscellaneous collection those … that might be adapted for use in one’s own bedroom, in one’s own ordinary life” (2002, p. 194). Tennyson’s Lady/Elaine poems make available multiple readings; such varied, even contradictory meanings may be responsible for the attractiveness of the poems to later writers, musicians, and artists, whose adaptations likewise make available a range of interpretations. The texts analyzed in this book are never final statements on femininity or art, nor are they proscriptions of actual women’s behaviors; nevertheless, they usefully reveal attitudes to femininity, death, and art that are part of larger cultural patterns and tendencies and thus productively demonstrate ongoing negotiations of ideologies of femininity and art from the medieval era to the present.

1.3

King Arthur Returns

Part of the appeal of the Lady/Elaine—for creators and consumers from the nineteenth century to the present—is the setting of a temporally unspecific but generally distant past and in places (Camelot, Shalott, and Astolat) whose locations are geographically flexible because of competing historical, archeological, folkloric, and literary claims. Besides the creative

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9

freedom such settings allow, they carry with them associations of adventure and chivalry through their connection to the legendary King Arthur, associations emphasized through figures such as Lancelot. Lady/Elaine texts, therefore, work within a specific literary tradition (the development of the Arthurian legend) and conceptions of the medieval past. The Arthurian world was a popular subject for medieval authors. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain, ca. 1138), a chronicle written in Latin, marks King Arthur’s transition from a predominantly oral tradition to a literary one; the number of extant copies suggests it was in great demand (Hammer 1951, p. 3). Stories of Arthur and his court thereafter spread in various languages and dialects, and in different genres such as romances and ballads. Like the legendary king himself was supposed to have done, the legend traveled to many regions, among them Wales, France, Germany, Italy, as well as England. Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, written in English ca. 1470 and published by William Caxton in 1485, uses multiple sources to create a still significant compendium of Arthurian tales, since his text continues to influence new versions of Arthur’s story (Thompson 1985, p. 12). Malory ended his account of King Arthur’s death with reference to oral tradition: “Yet som men say in many partys of Inglonde that Kynge Arthure ys nat dede … and men say that he shall com agayne” (2013, p. 928). It is now a scholarly commonplace to see Arthur’s “return” as occurring, metaphorically, in nineteenth-century culture’s renewed fascination with the legend,9 which ended the decline in the legend’s popularity after Malory. Between 1500 and 1800, only Edmund Spenser produced a major Arthurian work, and this text—The Faerie Queene (1599)—was incomplete at his death. A number of dramas, poems, and chapbooks appeared, but these tend to use Arthur’s court as a setting for un-Arthurian adventures (Jack the Giant-Killer or Tom Thumb), or to treat Arthurian characters in isolation and often as figures of fun (Aaron Hill’s “Merlin in Love; or, Youth against Magic: A Pantomime Opera” [1760]), or to apply Arthurian names, such as Merlin, to contemporary “prophecies” (for example, in almanacs). By the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, conditions favored renewed exploration of the Arthurian legend. The antiquarian impulse to collect past texts, such as Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) that contains some Arthurian ballads, builds in the later part of the eighteenth century; institutions were established “to improve the collection, classification, and

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use of national archives” (Bryden 2005, p. 21); and clubs or societies were formed whose interests were historical or archeological (p. 22). Malory’s text was “rediscovered,” and the appearance of three editions of Malory’s text in two years (1816–1817) marked a new interest in the legend as part of interest in the medieval period as a whole. In addition to the recovery, and in some cases the translation,10 of medieval Arthurian texts, nineteenth-century authors adapted and alluded to the legend in novels, poetry, and short fiction. From Thomas Love Peacock’s The Misfortunes of Elphin (1829) to Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), the century witnessed myriad versions of the legend, including multiple Arthurian poems by Tennyson. Tennyson’s Arthurian poems begin to appear early in his career, and the Idylls of the King itself takes up a significant portion of it: “Morte d’Arthur” (published 1842, but written likely in 1833– 1834) was incorporated into “The Passing of Arthur” (1869), and titles of idylls were finalized in 1886, so in one way or another, Tennyson was working on his Arthurian “epic” for 53 years—longer if one considers the 1832 “Lady of Shalott” (begun as early as 1831) as a precursor of “Elaine” and if one includes Tennyson’s 1891 correction in “To the Queen” that appears at the end of the Idylls.11 The publication of idylls in small groups or singly over time meant that Tennyson revisited the poems published earlier, revising them to create consistency, but also renaming and in some cases dividing them. As a result, David Staines observes, Tennyson “created a large reading public which awaited his further forays into the realm of Camelot” (1975, p. 287), and this audience was continually reminded of his version of the legend as new editions appeared and as new poems made reference to earlier ones in paratextual information about the revised reading order of the idylls. To say that Tennyson caused the “Arthurian revival” would be an overstatement given the number of authors who participated in it (including such notables as William Morris, Matthew Arnold, and Algernon Charles Swinburne), but he was a significant factor in its development and momentum, and his poetic treatments of the Lady of Shalott and Elaine of Astolat gave these characters new prominence within the legend.

1

1.4

INTRODUCTION

11

Medievalism(s), Neomedievalism

The conditions outlined above—antiquarian collecting, institutionalizing of such collecting, and greater emphasis on national history and archeology—mark the development of medievalism, and it is productive to consider Tennyson’s Lady/Elaine poems as well as later versions in the context of this fascination with the past. By the nineteenth century, “the Middle Ages were perceived to have been something in the past, something it was necessary to revive or desirable to imitate” (Leslie Workman quoted in Verduin 2009, p. 9), and although medievalism did not begin with the Victorians (p. 14), that period was important for its development of linguistic labels (see Simmons 2009), and certain images of the Middle Ages. Lorretta Holloway and Jennifer Palmgren acknowledge that there were “various competing (and often blatantly contradictory) visions of the Middle Ages prevalent in the Victorian period” (2005, p. 5), but certain images (particularly those with a tendency to idealize) gained more cultural currency than others: “Instead of pestilence and peasant revolts, the Victorians found glorious knights and fair ladies more interesting and more marketable” (p. 4). Tennyson’s Arthurian poems, including “The Lady of Shalott” and “Lancelot and Elaine,” help create this Victorian vision of the medieval, as his preindustrial settings establish an imaginary medieval world for the events of his poems, events in which “glorious knights and fair ladies” feature prominently. “Medievalism” thus describes cultural products created after the end of the Middle Ages that engage in some way with the medieval, where “medieval” signifies a period of history in Western Europe (roughly 500 to 1500)12 ; the nature of medievalism’s engagement with the medieval varies greatly, however. Variations in medievalism occur in part because “‘the Middle Ages’ … is an idea rather than an internally unified entity” (Davis and Altschul 2009, p. 1); the scope of the period and our relationship to it prevents unity. Any statement about a thousand-year span necessarily generalizes, leading to contradictory images circulating as representations of the medieval. Furthermore, regardless of documents or artifacts that provide “facts” about the period, interpretation of those facts creates (or as Tom Shippey says, “re-imagines” [2009, p. 45]) the “medieval,” and that process of interpretation is ongoing in academic settings as well as in creative works.13 Engaging with the medieval, therefore, is not necessarily about facts: Holloway and Palmgren comment “that the historic Middle Ages became, in many ways, of secondary

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importance to the majority of Victorians” (2005, p. 1), and both Angela Jane Weisl and Elizabeth Emery have noted that this trend continues in post-Victorian popular culture (Weisl 2003, p. 29; Emery 2009, p. 77). Such permutations of fact and fiction led Umberto Eco to caution, “we have the moral and cultural duty of spelling out what kind of Middle Ages we are talking about” (1986, p. 72), and, in the case of Lady/Elaine texts, their Middle Ages may be Victorian- rather than medieval-based. Although terminology is one way of “spelling out … the kind of Middle Ages” we identify in texts, scholarly debate continues about whether (or when) the layers of intervening texts create a different mode of engagement with the past. Some scholars prefer “medievalisms ” to encompass the diversity of relationships among post-medieval texts and the medieval past; others prefer to distinguish between “medievalism” and “neomedievalism.”14 Carol L. Robinson and Pamela Clements, in one of their formative definitions of the latter term, assert that “neomedievalism does not look to the Middle Ages to use, to study, to copy, or even to learn; the perception of the Middle Ages is more filtered, perceptions of perceptions (and of distortions), done without a concern for facts of [sic] reality” (2010, p. 62); Amy Kaufmann refers to neomedievalism as “not a dream of the Middle Ages, but a dream of someone else’s medievalism” (2010, p. 4). Many post-Victorian Lady/Elaine texts’ engagement with the medieval is likely to be a “dream” of Tennyson’s medievalism, yet in this book I use “medievalism” as the umbrella term, in part because of the scholarly tendency to apply the category of “neomedievalism” to texts in “new” media, which makes it less relevant to my examples, and in part because I conceive of medievalism as a continuum of available strategies. One textual strategy to note is register, for although it is not exclusive to medievalism, it is significant in many texts’ engagement with the medieval. John Stephens and Robyn McCallum identify three possible registers for retold stories, but epic and demotic registers (or some combination thereof) are most common for versions of the Arthurian legend. Epic register includes “language choices [that] will move between everyday discourse and less usual forms, such as archaisms, or forms of overwording” (1998, p. 11); in contrast, demotic register is “grounded in the mundane” with consistent use of “everyday discourse” (p. 11). Archaisms seek to reproduce medieval language use (or what is imagined to be medieval use). Registers and their varying combinations thus help texts signal their attitude and relationship to the medieval past.

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As noted above, the relationship between medievalist texts and the medieval past may be less about fact than about literary conventions.15 Tennyson’s Arthurian poems illustrate the way that medievalism creates a past that never was: fantastic elements—the mysterious curse that keeps the Lady in a tower weaving steadily (2007, LS 40, 43), or Merlin’s apparently supernatural abilities and spells (particularly in “The Coming of Arthur,” “Gareth and Lynette,” and “Merlin and Vivien”)—signal the imaginary rather than historical nature of Tennyson’s “medieval” worlds. They are an “authentic fantasy” (Holloway and Palmgren 2005, p. 1) of the medieval, since many of those supernatural elements appear in Malory or other medieval romances. Thus Arthurian medievalism’s past is both remote in time and immediate to the imagination, and if scant on verifiable facts, it is rich in fictional details of powers—as well as genealogies, landscapes, and relationships—introduced by medieval texts. Fact- or fiction-based, the past is relevant. In “The Epic,” the poem that frames his “Morte d’Arthur,” Tennyson’s character, the poet Everard Hall, asks, “Why take the style of those heroic times?” (2007, Ep 35). The answer is that in reimagining the Middle Ages, we also imagine ourselves. Tison Pugh and Angela Jane Weisl, in defining medievalism, note texts that “turn to the Middle Ages for their subject matter or inspiration … explicitly or implicitly, by comparison or by contrast, comment on the artist’s contemporary sociocultural milieu” (2013, p. 1). The (re)creation of the medieval past allows texts to address social issues and anxieties whose roots may or may not be in that medieval past, but whose articulation and understanding of them reflect the moment of the text’s production. Tennyson, for example, treats the medieval Arthurian material seriously and expects it to provide models relevant to his era. In “To the Queen,” a dedication of the Idylls to his monarch, the poet articulated his belief in the poem’s relevance by referring to “this old imperfect tale, / New-old, and shadowing Sense at war with Soul, / Ideal manhood closed in real man” (2007, TQ 36–38). The point is not whether Tennyson succeeds in portraying “ideal manhood” or whether his contemporaries agreed with the supposed ideal presented, but rather that the poet’s assertion of the possibility expresses a particular attitude toward his medieval materials. This attitude is not exactly reverence, since he changes the legend freely, and not entirely nostalgia for a perfect society, since he depicts Camelot as failing; it suggests, nevertheless, that these medieval tales, “old” and “imperfect” as they are, contain worthwhile subjects for a national poetry and ideals useful to his own era.

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Victorian and post-Victorian Lady/Elaine texts, therefore, may explicitly engage with ideas of a medieval past, celebrating and commenting on the perceived attributes of that time period; post-Victorian texts, however, may equally celebrate and comment on the perceived attributes of the Victorian past, and in doing so, they are part of a larger literary trend. The Victorian period became popular in the late twentieth century through reprints and film adaptations of its literature as well as through some dissemination of more academic-oriented discussions of that literature to a not-exclusively academic audience (see Jenkins and John 2000); fiction set in the Victorian period and self-consciously addressing preconceptions of that setting also gained in prominence. Robin Gilmour identifies a number of uses of the Victorian in such fiction, including the “modern reworking” and the “research novel,” for which she uses A. S. Byatt’s 1991 novel Possession as an example (2000, p. 190; see my discussion of Possession in Chapter 5). The relationship between such fiction and the Victorian past is equally the relationship between medievalism and the Middle Ages: the past “exists in dynamic relation to the present, which it both interprets and is interpreted by” (p. 200). Gilmour continues, “Evoking the Victorians and their world has not been an antiquarian activity but a means of getting a fresh perspective on the present” (p. 200). By engaging with Tennyson’s medievalism, post-Victorian Lady/Elaine texts enable a fresh perspective on Victorian medievalizing and on the present’s relationship to both its medieval and Victorian ancestors.

1.5

Adaptation and Allusion

Like “medievalism,” “adaptation” has been theorized and defined in multiple ways. Although in common usage it generally brings to mind film versions of novels, adaptation studies investigates a wide range of transpositions between and within genres and media. Moreover, although the field has been characterized by an emphasis on fidelity criticism— that is, evaluating an adaptation by its faithfulness to a “source”—recent work in the field by Linda Hutcheon (A Theory of Adaptation, 2006, rev ed. 2013), Julie Sanders (Adaptation and Appropriation, 2006), Thomas Leitch (“Adaptation Studies at a Crossroads,” 2008), and others, has challenged that approach. For example, in theorizing adaptation as a process of creation and of reception, as well as a product, Hutcheon has emphasized that “Multiple versions exist laterally, not vertically” (2013, p. xv);

1

INTRODUCTION

15

questioning the notion of vertical descent also questions the stigma that attaches to being “second” instead of “original.” Adaptation studies now invoke, as Leitch phrases it, “Bakhtinian intertextuality–with each text … afloat upon a sea of countless earlier texts from which it could not help borrowing” (2008, p. 63). How to describe this “sea” and one text’s particular relationship to others has generated multiple categories, however.16 Hutcheon attributes the “many typologies of adaptation processes” to fidelity criticism and its concern “over degrees of proximity to the ‘original’” (2013, p. 7), but even scholars not interested in judging adaptations on fidelity criteria have delineated categories to describe relationships among texts. Sanders refers to three types of adaptation (transposition, commentary, and analogue) and also suggests two types of appropriation (embedded and sustained). Leitch develops ten categories, many with subcategories, in his Film Adaptation and Its Discontents (2007): (1) celebrations, (2) adjustment, (3) neoclassic imitation, (4) revisions, (5) colonization, (6) metacommentary, (7) analogue, (8) parody and pastiche, (9) secondary (or tertiary or quaternary) imitations, and (10) allusion.17 The problem is, as Leitch observes, that all such categories “are embarassingly fluid” (p. 123)—so fluid that he can use one film to exemplify each category in turn. If categories of adaptation are not useful as boxes in which to place individual texts, they can help identify strategies that texts deploy in isolation or in combination as they engage with one or more “pre-texts,”18 with genre or media conventions, and with their moment of cultural production. That every adaptation is always negotiating the demands of previous texts, genre/media, and audience context indicates one of the problems with fidelity criticism, since it tends to concentrate on a limited number of pre-texts in evaluating the adaptation’s success. Furthermore, as Gary Bortolotti and Hutcheon suggest, exact copying fidelity does not mean success in biological adaptation; they remind their readers that “mutation is not a negative term in biology where it is judged as beneficial, neutral or deleterious in the context of its environment” (2007, p. 449). In applying the biological term to cultural texts, they argue that “what have survived are mutations that allow the story to better fit (adapt to) its culture or environment” (p. 449). If adaptations are “mutations,” then texts that have become canonical in the Arthurian legend have introduced—or reinforced in particularly powerful ways—changes to characterization, events, and themes that fit the cultural moment of production and have resonated since. Tennyson’s adaptations of medieval

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romances in “The Lady of Shalott” and “Lancelot and Elaine” are just such “mutations” that have, in their turn, mutated into various other incarnations, some of which have become nearly as powerful in the cultural lexicon as Tennyson’s: L. M. Montgomery’s dripping wet lily maid (1908), for example, is embodied by Megan Follows in Kevin Sullivan’s telefilm Anne of Green Gables (1985), and then reappears in The Band Perry’s video for their song “If I Die Young” (2010).19 Adam Atkinson, Tricia Hopton, Jane Stadler, and Peta Mitchell make this idea of “adapting to” central to their definition of adaptation; they see adaptation as involving “overlapping, if not simultaneous, creative processes,” one of which is “purposeful adjustment and evolution of creative practices in response to external factors, including but not limited to other creative works–in other words, the process of adapting to” (2011, p. xvii, italics in original). Defining adaptation in this way risks making the term too large to be meaningful, for every text could be seen as adjusting to other texts (within the same genre or medium, for example) and to other external factors; nonetheless, thinking of adaptation as “adapting to” and not just “adapting from” recognizes the role of cultural environments (textual, social, and political) in textual transpositions. Stephens and McCallum, speaking about the field of retold stories for young people, argue that “any particular retelling … always discloses … some aspect of the attitudes and ideologies pertaining at the cultural moment in which that retelling is produced” (1998, p. ix). The disclosure Stephens and McCallum mention is no doubt only partial, revealing only “some aspect” of what in society are complex, interrelated, and even competing attitudes and ideologies. Nevertheless, if to adapt a narrative is to “take a position on it,” as Hutcheon says (2013, p. 92), then an adaptation suggests something of both the adaptation’s and its pre-texts’ ideological positioning. Because of this relationship between adaptation and cultural moment of production, Lady/Elaine texts provide useful indicators of varied (even contradictory) ways in which Western culture has constructed “femininity,” the “medieval,” the “Victorian,” and “art” from the nineteenth century to today. So far, I have primarily discussed what Hutcheon refers to as adaptation as a “formal entity or product ” (2013, p. 7) or as “a process of creation” (p. 8), but adaptation, she argues, can also be “seen from the perspective of its process of reception” (p. 8, italics in original), and reception is key not just to adaptation but to allusion. Theorists tend to distinguish between

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adaptation and allusion; although Leitch (2007) includes allusion as his tenth category of adaptation, it is the one furthest on a continuum from fidelity to a source, while Hutcheon, in contrast, excludes “allusions to and brief echoes of other works” from her definition of adaptations (2013, p. 9). Both Hutcheon and Sanders define adaptation, in part, by its degree of engagement with pre-text(s), Hutcheon requiring an “extended engagement” (p. 9) and Sanders talking of a “sustained engagement” (2006, p. 4). In contrast, allusion is brief, or as Sanders characterizes it, a “more glancing act” (p. 4). Nevertheless, even if adaptation and allusion are seen as distinct, the two share the requirement of a knowledgeable reader: just as adaptations need their pre-texts recognized in order to be received as adaptations rather than simply “autonomous works” (Hutcheon 2013, p. 6), so too do allusions require readers’ knowledge for the intertextual play to develop additional layers of meaning for the text.20 In talking about the pleasure of recognizing intertextual connections, Sanders argues for the role of readers in “tracing and activating the networks of association” (2006, p. 7) an adaptation makes available. Allusions also invite readers to trace and activate such “networks of association.” Those networks may be seen as more or less sizeable, and of greater or lesser significance to the text being read, depending on the reader. In some cases, the significance of an allusion may be developed by the reader beyond what an author intended; for example, Christopher Ricks notes Tennyson’s frustration with readers who identified allusions in his poetry to texts that were not known to him and in some cases texts he could not read because of the language in which they were written (2002, “Tennyson” p. 179–80). Despite their brevity, allusions recognized as such by readers suggest parallels between the text alluded to and the text being read. Repeated allusions emphasize the pre-text’s importance, nudging readers to recognize the parallels. In this way, “allusion is one form that metaphor may take,” Ricks notes, since it implies a comparison between two texts (2002, Prefatory Note p. 1). The ways in which allusions are created, whether subtly and indirectly or more directly through explicit quotation, affect the weight given to the connection between the previous and present text. In making such connections, readers need to be aware of the difficulties inherent in allusions to popular works. John Morton, speaking of the line “ring out, wild bells” from Tennyson’s In Memoriam, notes that such “passages of Tennyson’s poem had become common currency by the 1900s, so much so that they were deployed in pieces of writing which

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had little in common with the poet’s sentiments” (2010, p. 37).21 Some Lady/Elaine allusions exemplify this difficulty. Tracy Chevalier’s Falling Angels (2002) mentions J. W. Waterhouse’s Lady of Shalott (1888), but it functions mainly as art appreciation, and thus one of many ways to distinguish between two female characters. Alan Bradley’s I Am Half -Sick of Shadows (2011) quotes Tennyson in title and epigraph, yet who in the novel parallels the Lady is not clear, and the allusion may be as much to Agatha Christie’s The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side (1962; reprinted 2000), another murder mystery that like Bradley’s involves an aging female film star in a British country house (see discussion of Christie’s novel in Chapter 5). Texts that allude to the Lady/Elaine, because of the way they use the character as a kind of shorthand, can provide examples of the way the Lady/Elaine continues to be (re)interpreted, but sometimes these interpretations are more generic than specific.

1.6

Texts and Trends

Tennyson is not the first to write of the maiden who dies after falling in love with Lancelot, as Chapter 2’s discussion of medieval versions demonstrates. However, while the numbers of Lady/Elaine texts before Tennyson are limited, after the publication of his poems, the Lady/Elaine appear in multiple media and genres for different target audiences. The Timeline (see Table 1.1) demonstrates the immediacy, longevity, and diversity of creative responses to Tennyson’s poetry, by visually representing the relationship among Arthurian pre-texts, Tennyson’s poems, and Victorian and post-Victorian adaptations; it lists works by date, with a column for editions of Malory and other medieval texts, followed by columns for the Lady of Shalott and for Elaine. The Timeline lists all editions of Malory between 1816 and 1891 (though not all of their reprintings); the Malory editions listed thereafter are selected for their significance, either in illustrations (Beardsley 1893; Ferguson 2000), or in impact on Malory scholarship (Vinaver 1947; Spisak 1983; Field 1990), or in the popularization of Malory (Cowen’s 1969 Penguin edition, for example, still circulates as an inexpensive introduction). The scholarly debates surrounding Malory’s text are beyond the scope of this book, but since those debates have influenced how Malory is presented to the public, some of the key editions have been acknowledged here (see Gaines 1990 for a fuller list of editions). Since not everyone encounters Malory

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in scholarly editions, I have included in the list of Malory / Medieval Texts a few key versions of Malory for children (including those retellings discussed in Chapter 6). Also included are some of the nineteenth-century editions of other important Arthurian pre-texts or, in the case of La Mort le Roi Artu, first English translations (for fuller discussion of editions of these medieval texts see Norris J. Lacy [1991], Larry D. Benson [1994], and Fiona Tolhurst and K. S. Whetter [2018]). This column suggests the circulation of the Arthurian legends and the availability of Elaine’s narrative to Tennyson and his contemporaries. The texts included in the “Lady” and “Elaine” columns of the Timeline vary in media and genre, but they all fit one (or more) of the following criteria: • the text provides a new interpretation of the Lady/Elaine by rewriting her narrative, by setting part of Tennyson’s poetry to music, or by representing the Lady/Elaine visually; • the text’s allusions to the Lady/Elaine are substantial and significant for the development of the text, and/or unique in some way (titles are significant); • the text focusses on the Lady/Elaine, rather than the larger legend, so with the exception of Tennyson, versions of the entire legend that might include the Lady/Elaine narrative as a chapter are not included, unless that narrative is rewritten in a significant way. These criteria narrow the list of possibilities to texts that engage significantly with the Lady/Elaine. The list is also narrowed by including only formally “published” or curated works, but selected online works appear at the end, in order to provide a sense of the way the internet has facilitated the circulation of Lady/Elaine adaptations. Texts that conflate the characters of the Lady of Shalott and Elaine of Astolat appear under the character most relevant; so, for example, Cabot’s Avalon High is in the Elaine column, despite its quotations from “The Lady of Shalott,” since Elaine is the protagonist’s name. Although in most cases I have viewed the text (or a reproduction) myself, I have also drawn on bibliographies (see Howey and Reimer [2006], Edwards [1892], Gooch and Thatcher [1979], and Reel [2005]) (Table 1.1).

Editions of Malory/Medieval Texts

Specimens of Early English Metrical Romances, Ellis (includes Stanzaic Morte) Malory, The History of the Renowned Prince Arthur, King of Britain, ed. Chalmers, pub. Walker and Edwards, 2 vols. (owned by Tennyson) Malory, La Mort D’Arthur, ed. Haslewood, pub. Wilks, 3 vols. (bowdlerized) Malory, The Byrth, Lyf, and Actes of Kyng Arthur, ed. Southey, pub. Longman and Company, 2 vols. Le Morte Arthur, the Adventures of Sir Launcelot du Lake, ed. Ponton, pub. Bulmer (Stanzaic Morte) Cento Novelle Antiche, trans. Roscoe, pub. Frederick Warne

Year

1805

1832

1825

1819

1817

1816

Timeline of Lady/Elaine Texts

Table 1.1

The Lady of Shalott (Tennyson, poem)

The Lady of Shalott

Elaine

20 A. F. HOWEY

1855 1856

1853 1854

1852

1850

1849

1842 1848

Year

New edition of Ellis’ Specimens with Stanzaic Morte, rev. Halliwell, pub. Bohn The Mabinogion, trans. Guest (published between 1838 and 1849, then issued in 3 vols.)

Editions of Malory/Medieval Texts

The Lady of Shalott (Hunt, ink and black chalk drawing) The Lady of Shalott (By a Lady [anonymous], illustration) The Lady of Shalott (Siddal, drawing) The Lady of Shalott (Millais, drawing) The Lady of Shalott (Lauder, painting) Lady of Shalott (Darvell, painting) The Lady of Shalott (Burne-Jones, ink drawing) The Lady of Shalott (Hunt, brown ink drawing)

A Study: The Lady of Shalott (Paton, painting) The Lady of Shalott (Tennyson, poem)

The Lady of Shalott

(continued)

Elayne le Blanc (Meredith, poem)

Elaine

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1860s 1860