ACTS OF WRITING
Task one + portfolio
MAY 7, 2021
SASHA CAMPBELL
,Shadows (creative component)
Do it for me darling, he said, his face a starless night, make an old man happy. The air quivered as he
spoke, too fitful for breathing, and when she tried to whisper no the word turned to clay in her
throat.
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I see her now, a chandelier of bones, and long to cradle her like a babe. If I were allowed to touch
her, I’d take her hand in mine, and squeeze it tight. I’d breathe warmth into her beryl-blue lips and
smooth the pain from her frown lines. But that would be unprofessional. So, I don’t. Instead, I must
wear a porcelain façade, cold smile painted over cold cheeks, and ask whether she’s been taking her
medication.
She doesn’t answer. She never does. I’ve never heard her utter a sound – none of the day staff have.
Although Robert, who works nights, insists that the girl sings for hours every morning, stopping only
when the sun pushes purples from the sky. But during the day she is silent and still. A dead-girl
breathing.
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Today she’s in the corner, feeling sick sick sick, so sick of shadows. Shadows of truth, shadows of
emotion, shadows of self. Sick of the way they demand to be known, while refusing to be seen.
She’s lost years chasing her own. Tracing and retracing the gossamer outlines of who she’d been and
still longs to be. Squeezing her former self tight like a blood-pressure cuff, not daring to let go. Not
daring to grieve for the girl that she’d loved. That she loves. The girl who poured colour and zest into
the world; softening stone with a smile and growing daffodils from the palms of her hands. That girl
was gone.
The curse had made sure of it. He had made sure of it.
She can still hear his voice now, rising softly, slowly, rich as perfume; and for a second that spans an
eternity, she considers telling the nurse about him. The words are right there. She can see them
glittering behind his onyx eyes. Only, when she opens her mouth to speak, the words claw down her
throat and tear it open, spilling crimson shame down her neck like wine.
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Her lips had quivered. I saw it. Quivered for an instant that stretched and slowed and stilled, a little
stream of almost-words flowing into a lake of silence. I scan her face but it has sealed over, the
ripples of possibility disappearing and gone.
I’m supposed to leave her now. She isn’t working with me and I have other patients. But Rob says
that if she doesn’t engage with the programme, she’ll be sent to a secure unit. The kind with
towering fences and powerful sedatives and no way out. It’s where all the hopeless cases end up. I
picture the girl, head bowed like a bent-neck rose, vertebrae slicing through her t-shirt like thorns,
being forced into a cage in the back of a secure ambulance and driven to one of these places. This
girl, distressed and alone, in a cage.
I can’t let that happen. So, I try a different approach.
,This time, I ask no questions. I answer them.
Woman, 19, psychosis. I read aloud. Anorexia, mutism, section 3. No response. Miss Shalott reports
having had sexual intercourse with ‘the Devil’. I glance at the girl. Still nothing. She claims that ‘the
Devil’ stole her soul and placed a curse upon her family. She is still as doll, a look of permanent
vacancy sleeping behind her eyes.
Miss Shalott does not know the nature of this ‘curse’, but ‘heard a whisper say’ that it could only … I
falter, wondering if there’s any point in going on… It could only be broken if she married ‘the Devil’, I
continue, whom she refers to in her diary as ‘the Father of Lies’.
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The Father of lies.
He ripples before her, a half-remembered face from a half-forgotten dream. She lifts her gaze, softly,
slowly, and sips at the sunlight that glows on his brow. He tips back his curls and chuckles lowly. Do it
for me darling, he says, his face a starless night. The air trembles, making her breath catch. She taps
her head against the wall. Make an old man happy. Her forehead meets the wall harder this time;
the rhythmic thud of skull on concrete silencing his voice.
When the latex hands seize her, she makes no sound. She barely notices as they drag her from the
wall, now wet with scarlet tears, and restrain her into the de-escalation suite. Barely notices when,
without warning, they stab a needle into the wasted flesh of her buttock. Barely notices when the
alarm stops sounding and she’s left alone in the dark. It hurts too much. Everything hurts too much.
Her weeping forehead, unfed stomach, aching bones. The feeling of his fingers on her thighs. The
sound of her father’s sobs as he pulls her, dead-pale, from the river.
She curls up on the floor, a pained particle of dust, and watches as the walls of herself cave in.
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Three hours pass before I’m allowed to re-enter de-esc, although I ask to go back sooner. It seems
cruel, to leave someone alone in their pain. As I unlock the door, an irresistible nectar of sound
greets me from the darkened room. My heart breaks against the bars of my ribs. The girl is singing.
Singing with a voice sweeter than peppermint creams. Stunned, I watch from a world away. Feelings,
like sun-rent clouds, sail across her gaunt face, and with each intricate trill and swelling crescendo
grief outpours.
This time, I take her hand and give it a squeeze. She squeezes back, her hand inflating in mine, and
it’s as if we share a secret language. Why now? My hand asks. I’m sick of shadows, she replies. It
takes me a moment to realise that she’s spoken aloud.
, Lady of Shalott Essay (critical component)
Critical discussions of Alfred Tennyson’s remarkably ornate ballad The Lady of Shalott often focus on
the wealth of art,1 literature,2 and music3 the poem has inspired. Likewise, the inspiration behind
Tennyson’s ballad itself has garnered much attention from academics, with critics like Christopher
Ricks suggesting that The Lady of Shalott finds its roots in Boccaccio’s novella damigella di Scalot.4
This speculation is supported by Tennyson’s assertion that he “met the story first in some Italian
novelle”.5 In my adaptation of The Lady of Shalott, I return to the poem’s alleged roots, recasting
Tennyson’s ballad as a short story once more.
In order to creatively rewrite The Lady of Shalott, I had first to familiarise myself with its central plot.
Psychologically gripping and prosodically intricate, Tennyson’s ballad follows the cursed Lady of
Shalott, who has been confined to a tower and forbidden from looking upon the world directly.6
Instead, she views the world through ‘shadows’ in her mirror. When ‘bold Sir Lancelot’ appears in
‘the crystal mirror’, the Lady gazes straight at Camelot.7 She pays for this transgression with her life.
In my adaptation of Tennyson’s ballad, I reappropriate these key motifs (the curse, tower, and
shadows) for modern-day readers. After all, while a Victorian readership (being predominantly
Christian) might have accepted the Lady’s ‘curse’ as real, a contemporary readership (believing
increasingly less in the spiritual sphere) may view it as symptomatic of mental illness.8
Herein lies the premise of my adaptation. Miss Shalott is not under a traditional ‘curse’. Rather, she
is in the grips of a psychotic illness. One that leads to her detainment in a psychiatric hospital. In this
revised context, Tennyson’s imagery takes on new meaning. The ‘curse’ becomes a delusion
impairing Miss Shalott’s interpersonal functioning. The ‘tower’ becomes a symbol for both her
physical imprisonment in a psychiatric hospital and her psychological imprisonment within mental
illness; the tower’s ‘gray walls’, like bars of a skull, confining Miss Shalott to an existentially ‘liminal
space of nonbeing and inexpression.’9 Additionally, the shadowy world in the Lady’s mirror becomes
the shadowy world of mental illness; a dark and distant universe in which colours are dampened,
1
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Lady of Shalott, 1857, pen and ink on paper, 11.7 ꓫ 8.9 cm, Delaware Art
Museum, Delaware < The Lady of Shalott (Moxon Tennyson), 1857 - Dante Gabriel Rossetti - WikiArt.org >
[accessed 7 May 2021]; John William Waterhouse, The Lady of Shalott, 1888, oil paint on canvas, 153 X 200
cm, Tate Modern Art Gallery, London < ‘The Lady of Shalott’, John William Waterhouse, 1888 | Tate>
[accessed 7 May 2021].
2
Lisa Sandell, Song of the Sparrow (London: Scholastic Press, 2007); Patricia McKillip, The Tower at Stony
Wood (London: Ace Trade, 2001).
3
Oliver Messiaen, La dame de Shalotte, Piano Solo (1917); Atmosphera, Lady of Shalott, comp. by Moti
Fonseca and Yuval Rivlin (Mio Records, MIO 020-021, 2002); Loreena McKennitt, The Lady of Shalott (1991).
4
Naomi Levine, ‘Tirra-Lirrical Ballads: Source Hunting with the Lady of Shalott’, Victorian Poetry, 54.4 (2016),
439-454 (p. 439) < Tirra-Lirrical Ballads: Source Hunting with the Lady of Shalott.: EBSCOhost (sussex.ac.uk) >
[accessed 10 April 2021].
5
William Michael Rossetti, Rossetti Papers, 1862 - 1870 (London: Sands and Co., 1903), p. 341.
6
Levine, Tirra-Lirrical Ballads, 447.
7
Abigail Joseph, ‘Impressions of Weird Fate: Revision and Crisis in The Lady of Shalott’, Journal of Victorian
Culture, 22.2 (2017), 183-203 (p. 185) < ‘Impressions of Weird Fate’: Revision and Crisis in ‘The Lady of Shalott’
(silverchair.com) > [accessed 12 April 2021].
8
Maurice Cowling, Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1980), p. xi < preface.pdf (sussex.ac.uk) > [accessed 12 April 2021].
9
Ivy Poitras, ‘The Method in the Madwoman: Functions of Female Madness and Feminized Liminality in Jane
Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and The Yellow Wallpaper’, State University of New York at Albany (2020), 1-112 (p.
29) < The_Method_in_the_Madwoman_Fu.pdf > [accessed 12 April 2021].
