In his essay Why Are Women Redundant? William Rathbone Gregg discusses what he saw as a great problem facing the Victorian age: Single women. Single, working women were not fulfilling their womanly duties, (to be married to men and care for the home and children) and instead were wasting their lives working and remaining unmarried.
“There are hundreds of thousands of women…who, in place of completing, sweetening, and embellishing the existence of others, are compelled to lead an independent and incomplete existence of their own….In great cities, thousands, again, are toiling in the ill-paid métier of sempstresses and needlewomen, wasting life and soul, gathering the scantiest subsistence, and surrounded by the most overpowering and insidious temptations” (Gregg, 158).
This particular quote from Gregg’s article brought to mind the poem The Lady of Shalott by Lord Alfred Tennyson, specifically the first stanza of the second section of the poem.
In the first stanza we are told that, “No time hath she to sport and play:/ A charmed web she weaves alway.” (II. 37-38). Here we are introduced to the Lady of Shalott in a similar manner to how Gregg describes the single women; She is alone (single) and spends her days working with no time to do anything else for her own enjoyment and with little in return. Similar to these single, working women, the Lady of Shalott is also surrounded by temptation. “A curse is on her, if she stay/ Her weaving, either night or day,/ To look down to Camelot” (II. 39-41). I believe that this line takes what Gregg is saying a step further, and that while the temptations are present, it is indulging in them that would lead to a single woman’s end, (and similarly the Lady of Shalott). Additionally, because later in the poem the Lady of Shalott does give into temptation, single women cannot be trusted to have the strength of will to stay away from such dangerous temptations.
What I interpreted the repercussions to be for giving into these temptations is that the woman becomes unmarriable, and just like the Lady of Shalott they are doomed to die alone as a single woman. In a way, this poem can be viewed as a warning to single women, that they must marry to avoid this terrible fate the Lady of Shalott was left to.