Mariana Compared to Shallott

Mariana Compared to Shallott

  • Submitted By: Babarinde
  • Date Submitted: 03/13/2009 6:31 AM
  • Category: English
  • Words: 721
  • Page: 3
  • Views: 288

Mariana and Shallot

The Times that Tennyson was living in, during the time that these two poems where composed, was very different to society today. Women in Victorian times were poorly educated. It was unlikely that they would have formal schooling as it was expected that they would develop domestic skills to aid running their households. Their only academic skills that they may acquire would be basic understanding of a foreign language, like French. Women in Victorian times lived very restricted, unadorned lives. They were unable to express themselves sexually and this is reflected in their dress, as it was considered unacceptable to show an ankle or any part of the leg.

Therefore it is logical to suggest that Tennyson wrote these poems as a way to voice his views on the poor, inadequate treatment of women, expressing his unorthodox opinions through the poems that he wrote. In the two poems ‘Mariana and ‘Lady of Shallot’ there are many stark different factors that can explain this.

The setting of each of the poems are quite different, but the way the story is for both are quite similar. Mariana is set in what seems to be an extremely isolated countryside, the main setting being her home, it’s described as gloomy, dull, lifeless, and sort of dark, the evidence is in the text : “the night is dreary”, she said this her self, this contrasts to Lady of Shallot’s setting which is light and bright in most of the poem and has movement unlike Mariana’s world, In LOS’s world ; ‘Willows whiten, aspens quiver, Little breezes dusk and shiver’- These verbs allows us to picture a scene of life, the actual town of Shallot is full of active people, and a lot of the poem shows and describes this, she gets by through being surrounded the quilt or any clothing materials and while doing this watching people active in the beautiful, golden background through a mirror, the lady seems to like weaving, ‘a magic web with colours gay’. Tennyson used sound in both the poems to...

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