SOURCE: "Elaine the Unfair, Elaine the Unlovable: The Socially Destructive Artist/Woman in Idylls of the King," in Modern Philology, Vol. 89, No. 3, February, 1992, pp. 341-62.

In the following essay, Simpson contends that "Elaine presents the personally and socially destructive effects of the wrong kind of artistic life and the wrong kinds of attitudes toward, behavior by, and treatment of women. "

As "Guinevere" opens, Tennyson's narrator recalls Modred's spying on a provocative cameo scene displaying the range of feminine virtue and vice: Guinevere seated in her garden between Enid and Vivien—between the best and the wiliest and worst. If Elaine had come down to Camelot something other than a pale cold corpse (as had her two older sisters, the Ladies of Shalott of the first and second versions of that poem), it is interesting to speculate about where she might have been placed in the cameo. I suggest...