[fantasyfan]

Here are a few random thoughts that your excellent posts have inspired.

In the poem, Launcelot is the heroic image of a reality that destroys false values and illusionary goals. He bursts into the Lady's life and the world changes:

She left the web, she left the loom,
She made three paces thro' the room,
She saw the water-lily bloom,
She saw the helmet and the plume,
She look'd down to Camelot.
Out flew the web and floated wide;
The mirror crack'd from side to side;
"The curse is come upon me," cried
The Lady of Shalott.

The "curse" is that the Lady of Shalott has been so long in a self-contained prison that she cannot now adapt; she can only die. In the novel Dorothy dies--but not in the passive sorrowing way of Tennyson's Lady, but in a savage doomed assault on the "Four gray walls, and four gray towers" of her life.
Nora lives but like the Lady is unable to find a new and powerful meaning to her life and like her she drifts drifts helplessly away into the future.

Tennyson closes the poem with Launcelot.

Who is this? and what is here?
And in the lighted palace near
Died the sound of royal cheer;
And they cross'd themselves for fear,
All the knights at Camelot:
But Lancelot mused a little space;
He said, "She has a lovely face;
God in his mercy lend her grace,
The Lady of Shalott"

Does anyone mourn Dorothy or Nora?