“Always to do ladies, damosels, and gentlewomen succour”: The Instrumental Presence of Women in Le Morte Darthur as the Motifs of the Damsel in Distress, the Enchantress and The Seductress (original) (raw)
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Overtones Ege Journal of English Studies , 2023
In popular understanding, Arthurian literature is often remembered for its remarkable pairs (Lancelot and Guenevere, Tristan and Isolde, Arthur and Guenevere etc.) which have been the main subject of various romances within this literary tradition. However, both sides of such romantic pairings do not possess equal agency within these romances where the role of the ladies become relegated to being tools for or against (male) heroes' quest for self-realization in the chivalric social order that dominates the narratives. This article inquires into this instrumentalization of female characters for the advancement of the narrative progress of male characters in Sir Thomas Malory's fifteenth century compilation prose narrative of Arthurian romances Le Morte Darthur (1483). This article claims that this process of utilizing female characters is achieved through the portrayal of female characters through varying combinations of tropes it lists as the damsel in distress, the enchantress and the seductress in a way that determines the degree of adversity they pose to the chivalric order and the individual agency they possess. In order to illustrate this, various characters who embody these roles and among whom well-known characters such as Morgan le Fay, Guenevere, Isolde, Elaine of Astolat and other minor characters can be found are analyzed in light of this claim.
The Role of Women in the Arthurian Material
To Maureen Fries, women in Arthurian legends are "contrapuntal rather than independent" of the male characters 1 . Though the Arthurian world depicts a male-dominated society, this universe would not function without the very powerful women in key positions. In this essay, the depiction of women in Malory's Morte Darthur is compared to works both predating and following it. Lynett and Lyonesse's roles in the "Tale of Gareth" are compared to that of Olwen in the earlier Welsh version of the Arthurian legend. Malory's original depiction of Elaine of Ascolat is presented as a radically different, individual character that points forward to later literary traditions. Finally, it is argued that the presentation of women in earlier Arthurian legends is in some respect less restrictive than in the 1983 feminist re-working of the legend, Marion Zimmer-Bradley's Mists of Avalon. This modern version belittles and reduces the significance of women in the male-dominated Arthurian world despite claims to the opposite. The dominant characters of Guinevere and Morgan le Fay 2 are used to exemplify this claim. In the conclusion, the need to read texts in their historical and cultural context is underlined and the significance of re-imaginings as a mirror of contemporary cultural mores is highlighted. While this paper agrees that Arthurian women may be seen as contrapuntal, it also highlights these women's role as active agents.
The evolution of Arthurian female characters - from patriarchy to women empowerment
Repozytorium Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, 2020
The main aim of this thesis is to demonstrate how the patriarchal models rooted in Middle Ages influenced the portrayals of female characters in modern Arthurian literature.The task will be performed using close analysis of cultural content such as gender roles, social attitudes, models of male-female relations and approaches towards sexuality. The primary critical tools employed will be the theory of “écriture féminine” developed by Hélène Cixous (in particular the theory of “woman as a reader”) and the theory of “sceptical feminism” developed by Marleen Barr.In the first chapter, the works of two Victorian poets – A. Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and A. Ch. Swinburne’s Tristram of Lyonesse – will be analysed. Second chapter will be devoted to the analysis of a late 20th-c. novel by M. Z. Bradley, The Mists of Avalon.By comparing and contrasting these three works, the author will point out not only the patriarchal structures underlying those works, but also draw the reader’s attention to the progressive takes on certain issues and characters. The author would want this dissertation to serve as a contribution to the discussion on feminism in literature and modern Arthurian literature in general.
Her Secret Identity: Female Fair Unknowns in Malory’s Le Morte Darthur
“All of our images of the adolescent – the restless, searching teen; the Hamlet figure; the sower of wild oats and tester of growing powers ... are masculine figures.” – Barbara Hudson In the world of medieval romance, women run the risk of being misidentified, ignored, over-looked, confused with or suffused into the identities of men. Perhaps especially studies of Sir Thomas Malory’s Arthurian epic Le Morte Darthur, women frequently fall through the cracks of analysis, often only examined in terms of their importance in relation to Arthurian men or assumed to be “outside the chivalric code” (Kenneth Hodges 86). And yet, throughout the Morte, women not only aid knights on countless occasions but partake in adventures alongside them. In both of Malory’s “Fair Unknown” narratives, “The Tale of Gareth” and “La Cote Male Tayle,” the damsels who first issue the quest remain with the young knights for the entire story. The Fair Unknown tales are exemplary of a genre which is primarily read in terms of masculine identity formation, following the trajectory of a hero whose identity is at first unknown, who passes from youth to manhood and becomes a knight. However, Fair Unknown tales have the potential to be read as stories of not just male but female identity formation. In Malory, bold young maidens – Lyonet in “Gareth” and Maledysaunte in “La Cote” – actively initiate and participate in the quests alongside the two young heroes, Gareth and Brunor. In a male-dominated Arthurian world in which girls are frequently ignored or seen as peripheral functionaries in male-focused stories, these two narratives may be read as examples of overlooked female identity. The two young women can be considered “Fair Unknowns” in their own right, for they are adolescent girls whose identities are initially unclear, who – like their male counterparts – partake in rites of passage leading to experiences of self-discovery and communal reintegration. The power that female Fair Unknowns yield is in large part a power of words, which – like a knight’s skill with the sword – must be properly developed. Lyonet and Maledysaunte use their speech in transformative ways – to motivate, to heal, to restore, and overall to instill a greater sense of chivalric purpose and community in their young companion knights. At the same time, their speech also undergoes an essential transformation; notably, each woman has a reputation of her own to uphold which is linked to the quality of her speech and, ultimately, to her communal identity. Over the course of each story, the two women provide strong support for the Round Table fellowship. Their presence and the bearing they have on events and those around them demonstrates not only that in Malory’s Arthurian world men and women are dependent on one another, but that women are essential not only to the quest but to the maintenance of chivalric ideals.
The Reading Medievalist, 3 ("On the Edge"), 2016
This paper considers how violence and retribution against women are described in literature from the early thirteenth century, how they function in that classical age of courtly literature, and what it means for the allowed modalities of female behaviour. It shows how the socio-literary category “female” functions as the usual representative of “otherness” in relation with "chivalry" and its literary idealisation, the Arthurian knight. While using Gerbert de Montreuil's 'Continuation' of Chrétien de Troyes' 'Conte du Graal' as leading text, it also refers to further French Arthurian romances from around 1200, and to the German 'Nibelungenlied' and 'Tristan und Isolde'. From the selected and peer-reviewed proceedings from the conference ‘On the Edge’ (March 2015, University of Reading), in 'The Reading Medievalist', vol. 3, ed. by H. Mahood, October 2016, pp.40-60: http://blogs.reading.ac.uk/trm/
Multi and Interculturality In This Tale of Arthur the Women Do Shine
This paper aims at analyzing the role of some Arthurian feminine characters in contemporary Arthurian literature. Whilst their medieval counterparts had a mainly passive role and they did seldom take part in the action of the text, current Arthurian literature has turned this idea upside down. The first hints at this change could be observed in a few Victorian poems, but it has been in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that this trend has shown more popular, not only in texts written by women, as the popular The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley, but also in those written by male authors, as it is the case of Bernard Cornwell's trilogy "The Warlord Chronicles", on which this papers focuses. The study deals with the four most important feminine characters of the trilogy and how they interact in the political and religious upheavals of the time.
Subversive Images of Women In Medieval English Literature: a Selective Reading
Brac University Journal, 2008
It is commonly assumed that medieval society is hostile to women’s power. Women are continuously contained and constrained by the patriarchal society of medieval Europe to strengthen the heroic ideals of masculinity, while maintaining the domestic private sphere. This study shows that even within the domestic private sphere, women exert considerable amount of power to influence men’s actions. In fact, what we see are models of powerful women capable of damaging the heroic ideals of men. Hence there is a tendency to control women’s power. This essay explores how far this tendency to control is actually successful. If not then we are witnessing a tension between dominant patriarchal ideology and the subversive images of women. The resistance that women characters in medieval literatures pose to the hegemonic ideology is a matter of particular interest of this paper. At the same time, the nature of their containment and appropriation is also something that this paper wishes to examine.
Image And Narrative: Gender Theme In The Iconography Of Medieval Courtly Literature
2017
Gothic illumination, which embraced a wide range of topics and plots, was, on the one hand, focused on visualizing<br> a Utopian world as reflected in the texts, and, on the other hand, in illustrations to the novels regarding King Arthur's court parallel narration appears. The images of women take on greater significance in this world. Heroines of novels are active, not passive characters, and they perform the role of encouragers, which in turn influences the development of story lines, hence the plots<br> of these novels, with their bright visual imagery, came to be tools for the reconstruction of ideas about courtly femininity in its various manifestations. In this paper, I will explore these ideas through examining the illustrations from the Lancelot-Grail cycle as manifested in such manuscripts as BN MS Français 95, BN MS Français 117, Arsenal 3479, Arsenal 3477, BN MS Français 112 (1), 112 (2), 112 (3), BN MS Français 226, BN MS Français 9123, BN MS Français 99...