Course Blog

“There lay the Count, but looking as if his youth had been half renewed, for the white hair and moustache were changed to dark iron-grey; the cheeks were fuller, and the white skin seemed ruby-red underneath; the mouth was redder than ever, for on the lips were gouts of fresh blood, which trickled from the corners of the mouth and ran over the chin and neck.”

I think that this passage describing Dracula and his physical appearance, after a blood sucking episode, encapsulates the essence of Dracula being more than a typical vampire but also a symbol for the significance of blood, as the source of life and power. Blood is a huge theme in the novel, and this passage illuminates the rejuvenating effect that the consumption of blood has on Dracula. Dracula’s facial features have altered, with fuller cheeks and now a ruby-red undertone in his skin, this change is a visual representation of the liveliness and life force he gains from consuming blood. Most organisms rely on blood-flow through their bodies to stay alive because of it’s important qualities like carrying oxygen and nutrients, and removing waste products. That being said, blood is life’s vital fluid. In the context of vampirism he is able to sustain youthful looks, life and power when he feeds on blood, it is an exchange of life energy. It allows him to replenish youthful physical features along with his supernatural powers. Dracula is obviously no saint, as he is constantly presented to the audience with things that highlight his dark and malicious intentions. The gruesome description of blood that runs from his mouth down his chin and neck highlight the corruption, of his own actions, and the violation of life. Now that we can interpret blood as the source of life and power, I think it is safe to say that Dracula’s desire for blood is parasitic, like a leech. I think the character of Dracula has many layers that contribute to his complexity in the novel. The connection between Dracula and blood, is more than a typical vampire. Through blood, Dracula represents darkness and malice, and the consumption of life and power.

 

The Lady of Shalott is doomed from the start. The existential dread of her circumstances is tangible, isolation without a foreseeable end and endless work that can produce only reflections of truth making this apparent. The poem’s own structure reinforces her entrapment, sealing her fate before it is said plainly. When she breaks from her inescapable circumstances, her life is taken from her, and as she floats down the river, she dies with grace and beauty. The Lady of Shalott does not scream or cry, only sings mournfully as the curse graphically freezes her blood. She does not make a scene of herself or make an attempt to alert others to her condition, only lies down in a boat and accepts her fate idly. The Lady of Shalott is not given humanity by the people of Camelot, only shunned out of fear—that is, except for Lancelot. He takes the opportunity to admire her physical beauty while the others cower. On the surface level, Lancelot’s compliment is merely that; but underscoring Tennyson’s literary decision is a fascination that has existed for centuries involving the beautiful dead woman.

Images of women whose beauty defies the absence of life have persisted for a long time, and “The Lady of Shalott” is no exception. Tennyson details the Lady’s journey that ends in her death gorgeously, as she “[lies], robed in snowy white / that loosely [flows] to left and right.” The image is almost ghostly and otherworldly, calling to mind spectral figures robed in their own snowy white sheets. She sings as she floats, invoking tropes reflective of characters like Hamlet’s Ophelia, who herself floats down a river, singing eerily in her madness before she drowns. Unlike Ophelia, however, the Lady chooses to pass in such a dramatic manner. She paints the perfect picture to be found within, a beautiful maiden clad in innocent white floating peacefully toward Camelot. 

Once the Lady has passed, one can hope that she will be able to achieve the freedom and peace she was denied in life. The one trait that is noted about the Lady once she is found by others, besides their own anxiety regarding her origins, is her appearance: “But Lancelot mused a little space; / He said, ‘She has a lovely face.’” Before Lancelot even wonders about the Lady’s circumstances or history, he thinks to point out her beauty. She cannot exist, even in death, without being viewed for her looks over all else. The reader is not told exactly what is done with the Lady after Lancelot’s comment, but it is all too clear that Tennyson’s construction of the story around the Lady’s beautiful death suggests larger themes at play.

I believe that the poem “The Lady of Shallot” is a cautionary tale that illustrates the dangers and sadness of living separate from life’s true experiences. Throughout the poem there are countless examples of the lady viewing the beauties of the world through her mirror as she is stuck observing but never interacting with the beauty that she is surrounded by. This can be seen in part two of the poem when Lady Shallot is contemplating the world outside her tower.

“And down the river’s dim expanse

Like some bold seër in a trance,

Seeing all his own mischance—

With glassy countenance

Did she look to Camelot.”

            This is a fantastic use of imagery by the author as the description of the Lady as a bold seer in a trance implies that she is simply an observer who is separated from the beauty and joy of what a real life is supposed to be. I also think that this sadness and separation from the outside world is what ultimately compels the Lady to break the curse and look directly at the Camelot leading to her unfortunate demise. Another quote that clearly showcases Lady Camelots displeasure with her current way of life comes in part three of the poem when she says “I am half-sick of shadows,” for me this continues to reinforce the idea of the incompleteness and dissatisfaction of Lady Camelots life and her desire to live a more complete life outside the confines of her tower.

In the end I believe that this poem was written in order to illustrate the dangers of living a life where you are unable to witness and participate in all of life and natures beauty. I also am of the view that Lady Camelot’s desperation to break out of this cycle sends a strong message about the importance of enjoying the many privileges that life provides for you.

Dear Reader,

There’s no such thing as a free lunch. From getting kicked out of Eden to spending 6 months out of every year with the king of the underground there is always a price to be paid. Forbidden fruit is always a warning. These stories tell us that no matter how sweet something may seem we must be wary and guard against “foul temptations”. This story is meant to teach women to guard their purity.

I would love to stop there as I feel my point makes itself even on a cursory glance but I’m told I need to “analyze the text.” So let’s do just that.

The goblins peddle their wares and Lizzie warns Laura against them “Their offers should not charm us, Their evil gifts would harm us.” (Rossetti) She is not explicit and yet she is very clear. These goblins are strange creatures and wish to do Laura harm. Laura disregards this very sound advice and lingers. She wants to buy some fruit but she has no money to which the goblins respond “You have much gold upon your head.” (Rossetti) Her hair is representative of her purity in its perfect whiteness. She doesn’t understand that she is selling more than a simple lock of hair but rather her purity for the sensual pleasures of the fruit that the goblins offer. “She sucked and sucked and sucked the more Fruits which that unknown orchard bore; She sucked until her lips were sore;
Then flung the emptied rinds away But gathered up one kernel stone, And knew not was it night or day As she turned home alone.” (Rossetti) Reader I love a good peach as much as the next girl but I’ve never liked a peach so much that I’ve had to do a walk of shame after I ate one. 

With her purity gone Laura wastes away. She is nothing without it. The seed of that wild night bears no fruit. Lizzie, distraught at Laura’s pain, goes to get back Laura’s purity. She pays for goblin fruit with coin which they refuse and instead try to take Lizzie’s purity as well. Lizzie refuses and even as the goblins become more and more aggressive she stands resolute. “White and golden Lizzie stood, Like a lily in a flood” (Rossetti) as the goblins “pinched her black as ink.” (Rossetti) A classic black and white, good vs evil, purity vs corruption.

In the end, their purity prevails and they both become wives. Married. The return to normal.

Yours at a time far too close to the witching hour,

Carmine “Red” Zingiber

The plot of Lady Shallot focuses on a woman who has been cursed with loneliness and is confined to an island. The first two stanzas describe an imaginary place in which nature runs wild, and is close to Camelot, where King Arthur reigns. Lady Shalott is forever confined to her tower, and cannot look in the direction of Camelot because it is rumored that it will cause her to be cursed. This leaves her to weave her tapestries, forever imagining what the road leading to Camelot beholds. She people watches constantly, weaving tapestries of the beautiful sights she sees. What I believe this poem is really about is the concept of wanting what you can’t have. When goals set are too lofty and unrealistic, it leads to dangerous situations where you or others can get hurt.

“A longdrawn carol, mournful, holy,
She chanted loudly, chanted lowly,
Till her eyes were darken’d wholly,
And her face sharpen’d slowly,
Turn’d to tower’d Camelot:
For ere she reach’d upon the tide
The first house by the water- side,
Singing in her song she died,
The Lady of Shalott.”


As shown towards the end of the poem , curiosity killed the cat in Lady Shallott’s case. This is a tale of warning, as Lady Shallot fell victim to temptation. She flew too close to the sun, and burnt up. It’s important to stay grounded in desires, wishes, and wants, especially when you know what you want could potentially hurt you.

The Lady of Shalott described a young woman who is locked away in a tower and must weave a blanket every day with the fear that if she doesn’t something horrible will happen. She may not know what will happen but the fear of the unknown keeps “her weaving, either night or day” (Tennyson). She also has no access to the outside world and only has “a mirror clear Reflecting tower’d Camelot” (Tennyson). This poem has very straight forward language which enables the reader an easy read, but the complex aspect of the theme is where readers are allowed to form their own line of thinking. The reason The Lady of Shalott is so popular is because everyone can find a way to relate to the young lady who has found herself trapped in the tower.

I believe this poem is the perfect read for college students who are trying to figure out what their path is going to be for their future. There is so much unknown about the future regarding career choice and finding a partner. The young woman in the poem looks out this mirror to the real world and sees “two young lovers lately wed” and “knights come riding two and two” (Tennyson). She is watching the lives of others go by while she sits and does the same task of weaving each day. Feeling like you are living the same day everyday while watching other people live their lives is a very common notion. Changing you pattern is a scary thing and in the case of the poem looking into the real world and experience it for herself not just through the mirror resulted in her death. This idea of taking a chance would result in the worst possible outcome reminds me of overthinking. The beauty and complexity of the human mind goes far beyond this poem but it brings up many challenges faced every day and giving it a fairytale twist.

For most of human history, women were expected to be stay-at-home mothers, and their job was to care for the children they were expected to have. Lucy represents the dangers of stepping outside the box of what women are expected. This is because she is a femme fatale. She has too much power over men and that is why she is killed while Mina is saved. When Lucy becomes a vampire, she always goes for children. Johnathan does not believe she could ever hurt anyone because of the dangerous effect the book is showing Lucy having over him. Van Helsin talked to Seward about it when he said, “ ‘You think then that those small holes in the children’s throats were made by the same that made the hole in Miss Lucy?’ ‘I suppose so’ … ‘then you are wrong’… He threw himself with a despairing gesture into a chair and placed his elbows on the table, covering his face with hands as he spoke: ‘ They were made by Miss Lucy!’ ” (206 Stoker) Lucy being a femme fatal already goes against the number one prospect women should not have, this being power over men. To continue on with this theme her chosen victims are children. Since it was a woman’s job to care for children, and she represented what women should not be, her chosen victims were the people women were allowed to have power over. This part goes along with the rampant idea in the Victorian age in relation to eugenics that if you give someone an inch they’re going to go a mile. She already has the worst characteristic that it was believed women could have at the time, so therefore, it was necessary to also take away the only good characteristics women could have. Due to the fact that Lucy is a femme fatale, she is seen as a very sexual being. At this time women being seen as sexual was immediately blamed on her and not the men believing this. Even though in almost every aspect of life she is the perfect lady, due to her being a femme fatale, she needs to be used as an example of what women should never be. She had too much power, and needed to lose control over everything, which means death including what women were typically allowed to have control over.

The literary concept of repeating the same task over and over is not unique to “The Lady of Shalott.” As we discussed in class, the Lady of Shalott’s weaving closely resembles that of Penelope in the Iliad. It also parallels Scheherazade’s storytelling and Plato’s allegory of the cave. In the Lady of Shalott, the lady’s routine comes to an abrupt halt when she looks out of her window for the first time. She has clearly made up her mind to leave to Camelot, and her spontaneity is rewarded with catastrophe: “She look’d down to Camelot. Out flew the web and floated wide; The mirror crack’d from side to side; “The curse is come upon me,” cried The Lady of Shalott” (Tennyson Part III). The room in which the lady has been rotting now self-destructs in a very theatrical and magical sense. What is this saying about the reality she lived in and the reality she wished to discover? 

In Plato’s cave allegory, the men in the cave are cursed to experience the world through shadows on the wall. When one prisoner escapes the cave, he is instantly met with blindness from the sun, leaving his fellow prisoners with the impression that leaving the cave will lead to harm. In the Lady of Shalott, the lady experiences the world not through shadows but through a mirror. When she yearns to experience her true reality and escape the monotony of her daily weaving, she is met not with blindness but with death. Why is it that curiosity is met with punishment in this text? Why should there not be a happy ending where these individuals reach an improved state of being? In the case of Scheherazade, her tenacity in her storytelling prompts Shahryar to spare her. Her telling of 1,000 intriguing stories leads the monarch to fall in love and marry her despite beheading a long line of women before her. In this text, the protagonist and the reader receive the happy ending that we feel is earned. 

The Lady of Shalott ends on a sad note. The curse is realized and the lady dies, experiencing the world, not through the intermediary of the mirror, only for a brief moment. The answer to the question “why does she die?” is a convoluted one. I would presume that Tennyson is making a commentary on the inherent isolation of the lady working on her weaving; though, more broadly speaking, on devoting one’s life to one task. Perhaps he is suggesting humans should branch out and strive for new experiences despite the risk/reward nature of it all.

Alfred Lord Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott gives a nod to fairy tales from the 17th and 18th centuries like Snow White and Sleeping Beauty. These stories tend to gravitate towards tropes like the damsel in distress and the knight in shining armor, which are rooted heavily in traditional gender roles, and have implications on what a woman’s role is within society. However, it is compelling how The Lady of Shalott deviates from this narrative: at the end of the poem, the Lady of Shallot dies because she has stopped weaving to look through her window at Sir Lancelot, who she thinks is “bold” (Tennyson, Part III). Her being distracted by the prospect of love, only for this love to lead to her death implies that the attention of a man was the only thing that was important enough for her to risk her life. “She left the web, she left the loom, She made three paces thro’ the room, She saw the water-lily bloom, She saw the helmet and the plume, She look’d down to Camelot.” (Tennyson, Part III). After years of sitting at the loom indoors, she gets up– for a man. This could have been due to Tennyson’s personal views that the only purpose women have in life is to be seen in the eyes of a man. Even in the final lines of the poem there are undertones of sexism. “He said, “She has a lovely face; God in his mercy lend her grace, The Lady of Shalott.” (Tennyson, Part IV). Tennyson implies that the only thing that matters is her looks– that is her legacy; that is what she will be remembered for.

As the book progresses, the group’s methods change with the prior knowledge they gained from their failed scientific attempts to stop Lucy’s transformation to more religious methods to stop Mina’s vampirism. When Lucy was turned into a vampire, she fell ill suddenly, and everyone else desperately tried to save her while lacking the knowledge to identify what was happening to her. This time, the group knew and could discover and then attempt to reverse Mina’s transformation. They do this with Van Helsing’s assistance, “As he had placed the Wafer on Mina’s forehead, it had seared it—had burned into the flesh as though it had been a piece of white-hot metal” ( Chapter 22). As prior experiences have influenced them, they used a Catholic method as their determinant, and the pain Mina is feeling is the confirmation to everyone that her transformation is in progress. Whereas with Lucy, they used a medical approach that failed spectacularly. Going back to Mina’s current fate in the second half of the quote, Jonathan states, “My poor darling’s brain had told her the significance of the fact as quickly as her nerves received the pain of it, and the two so overwhelmed her that her overwrought nature had its voice in that dreadful scream.” (Chapter 22). This further reinforces their suspicions and has them all accepting that Mina is becoming a vampire, and now they have to try new methods to save her from Lucy’s demise.