Getting It Wrong in "the Lady of Shalott" (Critical Essay‪)‬

Medea in Ovid's Metamorphoses famously declares, "Video meliora proboque,/ deteriora sequor"--I see what is better, and I approve of it; I pursue what is worse. (1) The passage is justly celebrated, because it transforms what could be a simple commonplace--people do wrong, even when they know better--into something far more paradoxical. Medea's three staccato transitive verbs emphasize the deliberateness of her declaration. She is not succumbing to a sudden temptation, or even to any temptation at all. The way the lines are phrased does not imply a choice of something sinful but desirable over an abstract but unappealing "good." Medea not only recognizes what is better, she relishes it; yet she actively pursues what is detrimental. The sense of deliberateness is reinforced by Ovid's use of first-person, present-tense discourse in this passage: at the very moment that she is getting it wrong, Medea is fully aware of what she is doing. Yet self-consciousness benefits her not at all. Without explanation--there is no conjunction between her preferring the better and pursuing the worse, only a dramatic line-break--Medea relinquishes her self-determination and her self-interest at once. Ovid's Medea finds a parallel in Tennyson's Lady of Shalott. Most fairytale curses are not brought on consciously or deliberately. Sleeping Beauty, for instance (the subject of a poem in Tennyson's 1830 volume that was then expanded into an entire sequence, "The Day-Dream," in 1842), falls under her spell when she pricks her finger--a mere accidental slip of the pin. The Lady of Shalott, by contrast, is aware of the curse that hangs over her, and she brings it upon herself with a series of decisive actions.