Alfred Tennyson's "The Lady of Shalott" expresses the struggle of a young, forlorn woman who longs so desperately for the affection of a romanticized, ideal male companion that this longing ultimately leads to her death. This exhibits an overarching theme in many of Tennyson's poems: "the tension between the artist’s desire for aesthetic withdrawal and the recognition of the need for responsible commitment to society."@Jon C. Stott, Raymond E. Jones, and Rick Bowers. The Harbrace Anthology of Literature 2nd ed. (Toronto: Harcourt Brace Canada, 1997): 179. She becomes so enslaved by her desire for Lancelot that she loses all social value, thereby sacrificing her role as a "good" and obedient female. The idea of sacrifice is also evident in Waterhouse’s painting as the artist includes candles in his depiction of the Lady of Shalott. Burning candles are often elements in a sacrificial ceremony and in this sense Waterhouse uses the three candles, two of which are extinguished, to illustrate the self sacrifice of the Lady’s status and ultimately her forfeiture of life. She abandons her daily obligations and instead resorts to live in a far-off idea of chivalrous fulfillment in order to transcend her current condition. She desires an Arthurian knight in shining armour, who will act as her enabler and who will inject meaning into her otherwise fragmented and incomplete existence. In this portrayal of gender, femininity is endowed with fragility and powerlessness, while masculinity is embodied with strength and decisive action. The female character, in this regard, becomes the slave whose emancipation can only be enabled by the male (the master).

The fact that the Lady is not named plays a significant role in establishing her identity, or lack thereof. Names signify identity to the external world and are internalized by the bearer.@Barton 135.  In Tennyson’s poem, the title character is known as 'The Lady of Shalott' and her given name is never revealed. She is named after the physical space in which she is imprisoned. She is identified by her circumstance of captivity rather than as an individual. The negation of the Lady’s name illustrates that her position as a woman in need of a male rescuer is valued above her own identity. The Lady also illustrates the power of naming and its internalizing effect as she identifies herself as 'The Lady of Shalott,' inscribing the moniker on the side of her boat.

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.

The depiction of the Lady of Shalott in both Tennyson's poem and Waterhouse's painting are derived from a patriarchal idealization of an idealization. That is, the Lady herself idealizes precisely what a patriarchal male would want her to idealize, in order to fulfill his own idea of the perfect female. This plays into a perverse pleasure that the stereotypical Victorian male reader would have derived from the protagonist’s suffering.  John William Waterhouse was at the tail end of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, which was a response to the more posed, formulaic styles of the Renaissance-inspired Mannerists, like Raphael and Caravaggio. Pre-Raphaelites are known for taking inspiration from Romanticism and Medievalism, which they believed enabled the strongest emotional response from their viewers. This is part of what makes Waterhouse's The Lady of the Shalott so appealing to the Victorian man; like a modern Hollywood film, the characters are designed to be extra-ordinary, the product of fantasy rather than reality. This is precisely the intention of both Waterhouse and Tennyson, to mythologize a female character who is the visible personification of absolute perfection, and then to add the heart-wrenching twist of impending tragedy. Waterhouse painted The Lady of Shalott with idealized proportions, using colours accentuated to 'pop', in order to establish the impression of an uncanny, dream-like state.  

Between Tennyson’s poetry and Waterhouse’s painting is an interesting inter-textual communication that is alluded to in a series of satirical sketches that were published in the same year the painting was first unveiled to the public. Pictures at Play, or Dialogues of the Galleries,@Andrew Lang, William Ernest Henley and Harry Furniss, Pictures at Play, or Dialogues of the Galleries (New York: AMS Press, 1970) Print. written by art critics Andrew Lang and W.E. Henley, and illustrated by Harry Furniss, brings Waterhouse’s The Lady of Shalott to life as a speaking character who interacts with other paintings in an art gallery and sings reflectively about her own conception and depiction as a piece of art. In Act V of the play, she mentions a connection between her and Victorian realist painter Jules Bastien-Lepage,@Lang, Henley and Furniss Act V. whom Waterhouse took stylistic inspiration from, painting the Lady with similar blocks of colour and thick brush strokes characteristic of Lepage's style. The Lady communicates with another female character in a Sir Frank Dicksee painting, whom the Lady calls "Little Dicksee," envying her for having been depicted in an "age of innocence."@Lang, Henley and Furniss Act V. This character of purity incarnate tells the Lady of Shalott that she is deceived; she expresses that there is a secret sadness in herself as well. Similarly, the Lady points out that she has been dismissed by some critics as simply the work of "an excessively rising young Associate"@Lang, Henley and Furniss Act V. instead of as the victim of unrequited love, posing shortly before her death. This further explains the necessity of a context within the painting; without an understanding of Tennyson's poem, Waterhouse's Lady becomes an entirely different character. It is the viewer of the painting who enables it, through his/her own subjectivity. In this way, inter-textuality plays an essential role in establishing the Lady's character in Waterhouse's work. The more these paintings and poems communicate with each other, the greater their meaning and aesthetic response becomes.The satirical verses of Pictures at Play demonstrate the self-awareness of the Lady as an icon of female objectification. She recognizes that she has been doomed both by Tennyson and Waterhouse, to be immortalized in a state of glorified despair. This is because the painting is a response to the aesthetic ideals prescribed by the poem. Therefore, it is the background knowledge of the viewer that enables them to derive that the Lady is the product of patriarchal social values which expect women to be subservient and everlastingly faithful to their male counterpart, even when he is unattainable. And in Pictures at Play, it is this implied understanding that personifies the Lady into a talking character.

Although Tennyson and Waterhouse's works were created over half a century apart, the objective of both poem and painting was to express a fundamental disconnect between the facts of reality and the transcendence of idealization. The Lady herself seems to stem from the perverse male idealization of an entirely faithful female admirer, who literally submits herself as his romantic slave. Despite the artistic and literary advancement throughout the Victorian era, it is clear through the examination of both Tennyson and Waterhouse's works that the portrayal of femininity remained relativity static.  Both text and painting depict womanhood as something to be idealized, but also something to be punished if an attempt is made to subvert male dominated, societal norms. The initial emotional response of serenity and idyllic beauty is fundamentally deceptive. In order to fully appreciate the Lady of the Shalott, the viewer/reader has to experience disappointment at some level, to realize the Lady's sadness peaking through the otherwise perfect scene. This creates an interesting parallel between viewer/reader and subject matter - just as the Lady experiences the misery of an intrinsic lack of fulfillment, so must the textual and visual audience, who must accept the imperfection of the scene. This is part of what makes the Lady of the Shalott so endearing - that above all, the emotional effectiveness of her character relies on an aesthetic response of empathy between her and the audience.