The Lady of Shalott & Ophelia

     As I was reading through Tennyson's "The Lady of Shalott" for the first time I couldn't stop thinking about how much she reminded me of the character of Ophelia from Shakespeare's Hamlet. I think that the first thing that caused me to draw parallels between them is the way the Lady of Shalott is so persistently described as an ethereal, fairy figure, much in the way that Ophelia is described and portrayed in many adaptations of Shakespeare's classic play. There is also the fact that both women have such an otherworldly quality about them that they seem to inhabit their own reality; the Lady of Shalott has an isolated existence in her tower which is juxtaposed with the commonplace activity in the surrounding countryside, while Ophelia occupies an alternate reality within the confines of her own mind. Lastly, there is the fact that both women come to their ruin through the agency of men.
     It is when the Lady first glimpses Lancelot that she truly realizes for the first time the limitations and loneliness imposed upon her by the curse that confines her to the tower, contemplating the activity of life through a mirror while weaving in her solitary prison. Of course, the statement she makes before his appearance about being "half-sick of shadows" indicates that she was restive before he happened by her tower, but there is a substantial difference between restlessness and deliberately invoking a fatal curse. When the Lady looks towards Camelot and purposely brings the curse upon herself it is apparent that she chose to do so out of her hopeless love for Lancelot. Essentially, she knew she could not have him and chose to end her suffering rather than pine away for him in her lonely chamber.
     Ophelia does not choose her fate in as active a manner as the Lady, yet she most definitely descends into madness following Hamlet's contradictory treatment of her. Hamlet goes from longing for her intensely, to the point that he urges her to escape to a nunnery to guard her virtue from him, to dismissing her presence callously. He becomes so wrapped up in the drama of his uncle and mother, as well as his philosophical musings, that he neglects her feelings. As a result, Ophelia retreats into the confines of her mind and begins to act erratically and childishly. For example, she prances around and hands out flowers to members of the Danish court, which seems superficially harmless yet is foreshadowing her own funeral after she dies by drowning.
     It is the combination of flowers, death, and water which is perhaps the most striking similarity between the fates of the Lady of Shalott and Ophelia. The Lady is described in a prophetic way as living in "a space of flowers" which "the silent isle imbowers," both of which seem to refer to her flower-surrounded chamber yet also evoke images of the Lady lying inside the flower-filled boat that becomes her casket. Ophelia, like the lady, dies in the water with her strands of "crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples" enclosing her in a last embrace. It is this very image of Ophelia that the Pre-Raphaelite painters chose to represent during the Victorian era, just as they chose to depict the Lady of Shalott and her tragic end. It is fitting that these two tragic literary figures should be not only joined together by their similar aspects and fates, but also by artists who understood that the striking similarities between the women would resound all the more when immortalized on canvas.