Tennyson and Browning’s Tragic Ladies “The curse is come upon me,” the Lady of Shalott says in Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem, “The Lady of Shallot” (Tennyson, 26-27). Tennyson, along with his contemporary, Robert Browning, were Victorian poets whose work romanticized the distant past. Their works “Porphyria’s Lover” and “The Lady of Shalott,” feature female subjects who seem cursed with sudden, tragic deaths. Although their writing styles and subject matter were different, the poems “The Lady of Shallot” and “Porphyria’s Lover” tell us that these poets were concerned with the treatment of women and used the tragic endings to their lives in these poems to challenge the idea that the past was an era of romance and happiness.
For example, in “The …show more content…
In summary, Tennyson set “The Lady of Shallot” in the past to cause an emotional response and Browning set “Porphyria’s Lover” in the past to make the sexual language more plausible.
In both “Porphyria’s Lover” and “The Lady of Shallot”, the subjects of the poems are female. Both poems offer commentary on the Victorian expectation that women be silent, and the importance of women’s beauty. The poems are narrated by someone who is not the female subject: “Porphyria’s Lover” is narrated by her lover, and “The Lady of Shallot” is narrated by a third person speaker. These narrative choices remove the direct relationship between the reader and the female subject, and serve to further victimize her in the story because she has less of a …show more content…
However, what she says is always a repetition of the fact that she is cursed to die if she sees Sir Lancelot in her magic mirror. Like Porphyria, the Lady of Shallot remains beautiful after her death. Although Tennyson writes that the Lady of Shallot’s “blood was frozen slowly” and her “eyes were darkened wholly,” after her death, Sir Lancelot remarks that “She has a lovely face,” when he sees her body in the boat (Tennyson, 147-148, 169). Porphyria and the Lady of Shallot’s tragic deaths are also related to the general theme of romance, although not in the way that one would expect, considering the era the poems are set in. For example, one would expect that the Lady of Shallot would be paired off with a brave and handsome knight. However, because she “hath no loyal knight and true,” she is affected by the curse of her magic mirror, which kills her when she sees Sir Lancelot. One would expect that Porphyria and her lover would have a healthy affair in secret, but Porphyria is suddenly and meaninglessly