ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author examines what happens when later writers exploit the ‘semantic depths’ of the Middle Ages. She focuses on the Lady of Shalott figure as represented in four texts: Elayne in Sir Thomas Malory’s ‘Fair Maid of Ascolat’, the Lady in Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s ‘The Lady of Shalott’, Eileen Shallot in Roger Zelazny’s fantasy novella ‘He Who Shapes’ and Oedipa Maas in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. The author provides a description of one particular search for ‘else-wheres’ that informs her reading of the Lady of Shalott and her many avatars. Tennyson said that he wrote ‘The Lady of Shalot before he had read Malory’s ‘The Fair Maid of Ascolat’, naming instead a fourteenth-century Italian novella, ‘La Damigella di Scalot’ as his ‘source’. The mirror Tennyson provides for the Lady of Shalott is designed expressly to buffer and insulate her, to refract real emotions, to keep her confined in her tower.
