Although the Lady remains nameless, the male object of her affection is identified by name. Lancelot epitomizes the idea of chivalry and can easily be compared to the ideal Victorian gentleman as outlined in John Henry Cardinal Newman’s 1852 text The Idea of a University.@John Henry Cardinal Newman, The Idea of a University (New York: Image Books, 1959): 217-219.
Lancelot appreciates beauty as he remarks upon the Lady’s attractiveness and he is brave as the only onlooker of the Lady’s corpse who ponders rather than exhibiting fear. Lancelot also "acknowledges the being of God,"@Newman 219.
as he asks the Divine to "lend her grace."@Alfred Tennyson,"The Lady of Shalott," ENG 633: 19th Century Literature and Culture II Course Reader, ed. Lorraine Janzen (Toronto: Ryerson University, 2011) 162. Although in many respects Lancelot does exhibit the traits of a Victorian gentleman, he fails to fulfill Newman’s chief requirement of a gentleman who "is mainly occupied in merely removing the obstacles which hinder the free and unembarrassed action of those about him."@Newman 217.
Lancelot is not concerned with the Lady’s circumstances and is wholly ignorant of her and her despair, although she is certainly "about him" as he travels "beside remote Shalott."@Tennyson 161.

While Newman’s The Idea of a University is void of female consideration, Waterhouse’s painting physically depicts only femininity.  The Lady of Shalott is alone which illustrates vulnerability.  She is also clutching to a chain that connects her to the shore.  The chain is symbolic of her imprisonment in the tower and the fact that Waterhouse paints the Lady still holding the chain insinuates a reluctance to completely rid herself of her former controlled existence.  Although Waterhouse’s painting shows only the Lady, Lancelot is still present in the visual image.  Although not physically represented, an impression is established in the viewer that he is existent in the Lady’s mind.  Waterhouse depicts the Lady in her trance-like state, yet her pained expression insinuates that she is yearning for her knight of Camelot.  The Victorian male viewer would have received great pleasure from being able to penetrate the Lady’s thoughts and to find a revered member of his own sex preoccupying the mind of the fragile female.

The Lady of Shalott is idealized by the male reader because she is subservient.  She is content with her weaving and does not question her role as an entrapped female with no agency or power.  She is controlled and compelled by an abstract containment (the curse) as Victorian females are under the control of the abstract concept of the male dominated society of the nineteenth century.  However, when the Lady of Shalott subverts the situation in which she has been compelled to comply with, she dies.  This reflects the idea of dying a "social death" for Victorian women who balked patriarchal norms.  After witnessing the shadows of two young lovers, the Lady is no longer compliant with her isolation and entrapment and longs to see the world as it is and not through shadowy reproductions.  The fact that she becomes disillusioned after she sees a sexual act between a man and a woman, illustrates that she herself is a sexual being and yearns for a male partner.  This breaks with the male construction of an idealized female who is sexually ignorant and repressed and the remainder of the poem demonstrates the consequences for a sexually self aware woman.  She is a "fallen" woman, no longer figuratively and literally elevated in her tower, who is cast down physically and socially in the eyes of the male reader.