Poor Poor Lady of Shalott

So most people that know me well enough know that I have a very immature mind, I would love to blame it on my two sons; however, my mind was that way since I do not remember when.  From the very beginning of Lady of Shalott it mentions Camelot.  I instantly think, “Cool, there has got to be some sword fighting or something because it has to deal with chivalry and the Arthurian legends.”  But oh yeah, I need to refocus because I am reading for a class.  Okay, the young lady is in a tower surrounded by beautiful, natural scenery in an area of agricultural workers.  Then I find out that she is not allowed to look upon anything but a mirror and her weaving.  She has been told that there is a curse that will fall upon her if she looks upon anything else with her naked eye. 

So literally I try to think to myself maybe that is her curse, a curse to never look upon anything for its brilliance.  She will never see the true blue of the sky, the deepest red of a rose or the deep greens of Kentucky Blue grass.  She only gets to see the faded colors through a mirror, an image that will never show the true brilliance because of the constant glare.  She will probably never get to enjoy the smells either; if is not to look upon anything with her own eyes that means that she will never get the chance to lie on her back in the grass and next to the roses as she looks up to the sky.  She is cursed to stay in the tower for the rest of her days watching everyone else live their lives without her in it. 

So at that point I go back to being immature, I notice a similarity to the movie Tangled.  It is only through her evil, fake mother that she is told the world is a cruel place.  That she is never to step foot outside of her tower; it is only through her mother that says she is to look at the world from her window and never to experience the “dangers” of the world.   So within the mixture of logic and imaginative explanations we have the actual person that tells Lady of Shallot about the curse. 

Then after coming back from the silly detour I want to bring in Sir Lancelot.  It seems as though Lady of Shallot can tolerate her life without much, if any, human interaction.  However, when someone as “fiery” as Lancelot trots by with his horse things change.  Lady of Shalott seems to instantaneously be discontented with her life so much as to look at the young knight.  She figures that the curse will either be broken or turn out to be non-existent.  However, after the gleam of Lancelot’s horse, armor, and hair have gone away Lady of Shalott realizes the curse is upon her.  She no longer sees the brightness of any colors and everything seems to wither away to look like a dim, shadowy silhouette of their original form. 

I look at this as her virginity.  Most young girls set intercourse onto a pedestal of expectations.  They want to stay pure and a virgin, but constantly fantasize of how they will lose it and how perfect the entire experience will be.  They build up their own anticipation for this glorious moment and when it arrives they are sadly disappointed.  There is no instantaneous, deep connection and just left with a feeling of sadness because they could have either saved that moment for someone else or it was not what they made it up to be.  So many of the hopeful feelings are gone and all of the energy they spent thinking of that moment was all-in-all wasted. 

So I look at Lady of Shalott as horribly disappointed that the moment was not able to last forever and the connection was not established since Sir Lancelot was unable to return her love.  She was left feeling empty and regretful that she was not able to share the moment with her love.  Since that feeling of love or lust was so fleeting it left her unfulfilled and wanting more; however, she was unable to make to wonderful Camelot before she pours out all of her emotions.  So it leaves her dead as she floats down the river. 

Many others say that the moral of the story is keeping the women in the household and out of the streets, but I think that it would be closer to say it is about how women should be content with their lives and not so hopeful for something more than what they have been given in life. 

Collins: The Trickster

I will just say that this book has been interesting to read because it is a different set up from the usual American mystery novels.  There are so many pieces to the puzzle of a mystery and I have always had a hard time figuring out who was the perpetrator and who had just been wrongly accused because of being at the wrong place at the right time.  However, within this mystery it seemed to me so close to factual that I had a difficult time reminding myself that it is supposed to be fiction.  So it is my focus, not on a single or group of characters, but a focus on the author.  Collins seemed to know exactly what he was doing when he puts certain things in and keeping certain things out so that the reader must make their own interpretation.  He establishes the reader as both judge and detective.   The way he made it difficult for me was when he includes so many artifacts that are normally used to show facts like a compilation of letters, reports, newspaper clippings, notes, wills, several journal entries and even a receipt.  Franklin Blake organizes and submits as much evidence to his family as he can, while Collins, is thus submitting it to us as the reader/detective.  It seems as though that Collins is testing our own judgment and morals.  The reader is asked to evaluate not just a theft from an estate in England, but its earlier theft from a sacred Hindu shrine.  As the John Herncastle is the presumed thief in the legally sanctioned robbery of India by the British government.  But of course, I would hope others feel that the theft to the nation is a bigger injustice than the theft to the family because what is truly on trial in this novel is personal and national responsibility of those nations that choose to invade other nations.  The same is true about our country today as we may invade other areas that they must keep responsibility for all personal actions. 

The most difficult part for me was the beginning of the story because it seemed to only come from a small piece of a family document describing the events that took place in India.  It seems to open as the prologue and then as Franklin Blake wants to tell the story, but he decides to have Gabriel Betteredge write it out for him.  So the words are Blake’s, which I think you can hear, but as the events unfold it still feels like they are all from a distance.  Not only with Blake’s, but the rest of the novel it is interesting how the entire mystery intertwines personal interactions with political, then the private with the public, then the past with the present and finally gives the fiction a feeling of fact.  The problem really seemed to arise for me when the novel skipped around with narrators as it seemed to wrench the authority away from the typical first-person narrator.  This collection of contrasting voices serves Collins as both his evidence and possible archive to throw off the reader.    

Some of the other things that threw me off as the reader/detective were the thought of the curse.  I am not one to say that I would let an idea of a curse rule my life, but I will say that I am superstitious and feel that other powers in the world do exist.  So as a reader/detective I had a difficult time setting my superstitions to the side and think of the situation rationally.  The idea that had escaped me until I headed toward the end of the novel is just as I mentioned in the beginning that it was probably not a curse on the family, but on the nation.  In my mind the empire, not the moonstone, was the curse and the real problem.  The novel focuses on the spoils that the empire receives while the nation is overreaching its own authority over other nations.  I guess I could see the family history representing a nation’s history as each one tries to cover up any type of thieving or murderous act in the pursuit to preserve or protect itself.

So as the reader/detective that Collins had made me into, I had difficult time remembering that it was just a story.  Even though if we all were to look at it as I have in the previous paragraphs the story has many applications for many nations of today including our own