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The Portrayal of the Cloistered Victorian Woman

Shabnam Yusufzai and Sue Chun

When Tennyson had disapproved of Hunt’s illustration he also mentions his disapproval with the Lady being physically entangled in the threads of her tapestry by asking why the web “winds around her like the threads of a cocoon”.@ This concept existed since Hunt’s earliest version of the image - in his 1850 sketch - and therefore is evident that the subversive nature of Hunt’s Lady had existed since his conception of her image. The tapestry symbolizes the redundant domestic role of the Victorian woman. Her unceasing act of this domestic role of weaving keeps her occupied within a confined space thus causing her to remain passive and docile – detached from the outside world. According to Griselda Pollock,

“Patriarchy does not refer to the static, oppressive domination by one sex over another, but to a web of psycho-social relationships which institute a socially significant difference on the axis of sex which is so deeply located in our very sense of lived, sexual, identity that it appears to us as natural and unalterable."@

The Lady’s tapestry is also referred to as a “web” in Tennyson’s poem and therefore can allude to Pollock’s analysis of the patriarchal web. Hunt’s portrayal of the Lady trying to free herself from the threads that entangle her in his 1850, 1857, and final 1905 versions, symbolizes the Lady’s “unthreading of the web of patriarchal ideology”.@ It is interesting to note Tennyson’s choice of words when he compares the physical entanglement of the Lady to be like the “threads of a cocoon”.@ The Lady’s act of trying to free herself from the threads can be directly compared to the development process of a butterfly. When in the cocoon, the creature is confined within its threads that are anchored to its pupation site – incapable of movement. Upon maturation, the creature emerges from the cocoon, transformed, and free from its static site. The Lady’s forbidden act of looking outside the window is the deciding factor that transforms her into a fallen, subversive woman from her old passive, docile self. As she realizes her inevitable fate, she frees herself from the confinement of her tower, and floats down the river to Camelot as her doomed fate overcomes her.
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