In doing a close reading of a passage, I’d like to look at a stanza in part two of The Lady of Shalott:
“There she weaves by night and day, a magic web with colours gay. She has heard a whisper say, a curse is on her if she stay to look down to Camelot. She knows not what the curse may be, and so she weaveth steadily, and little other care hath she, the Lady of Shalott.”
This section to me is a brilliant description of the ideal Victorian wife; she is focused on her duties (in this case weaving, in other cases childbearing) and she does not know much about her own circumstances. This is a romanticized example, showing a woman cursed, forced to stay inside, and eventually dying when she breaks the proscribed rules. The message, however, is quite clear: stick to the rules, whether you know them or not, and nobody gets hurt.
I think this can relate well back to The Woman in White looking at the role of Countess Fosco. She is often idly working away at rolling countless cigarettes for her husband, keeping her distracted with busy work, so she is doing something rather than focusing on the main plot.
The artwork depicting the Lady of Shalott seems to disagree with my theory that she is merely a demure, controlled Victorian woman; the piece by William Holman Hunt depicts the Lady as larger than life as does the piece by John William Waterhouse. These images, too, appear romanticizations, as were popular with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
The basic idea I’m seeing here is that The Lady of Shalott relates perfectly to the idea of a weakened, docile Victorian woman with little to know knowledge of her own purpose outside of her immediate task, such as weaving, or bearing children.