English 83

We noted in discussion the ethical quandary surrounding the ‘poisoned fruit’ episode in the Death of KA, and the very complicated and contradictory figure of Lancelot, and the relationships he has with KA and QG.
I mentioned in class that this text seems to be offering up several critiques at once: of courtly adulterous love as being inferior to homosocial male-male bonds in the liege/lord relationship, which is in turn still more inferior to the homosocial bonds engendered in monastic religious societies (as shown in the Quest of the Holy Grail).

It would be hard to miss Bors’ antifeminist outburst as he consults with the Queen over what to do about her fractured relationship to Lancelot:

“No man ever became deeply involved with love who did not die as a result . . . you would be doing something worse than all the other women, because you would be destroying in the body of a single knight all the virtues through which a man can rise in worldly honor and be called noble” (78).

Is Bors’ saying that the Queen’s abjuration of Lancelot is a threat not only to chivalry, but masculinity itself? In her “destruction” of Lancelot she plays a dual role: she inspires him to deeds of prowess and courtesy, and his prowess and courtesy displayed at the tournament (where he wore the sleeve of the Lady of Escalot) was what got him on the Queen’s bad side, and causes him to pine and waste away for love’s sake. The counter-intuitive logic of Bors seems to indicate that he wishes for a system of chivalry and courtesy without women, which is definitionally impossible.

The text does seem to punish both L and the Q for their love. The Q’s “punishment” seems to be the random bad luck (though nothing is random in romance) of the poisoned fruit. Immediately after this episode gets underway L is struck (”in the thigh”) by the random arrow of the hunters. Note that in medieval romance (Perceval, e.g.) whenever a man is wounded in the thigh, it connotes sexuality/castration. When we learn that the fisher king is so wounded, we are not surprised to find that his land is a waste, or infertile.

We get another sense of the role of women that this text imagines in the death of the Lady of Escalot, who dies of her virginal, pure love for Lancelot (the greatest and cruelest knight). The Lady of Escalot’s dead body “exonerates” L of his supposed betrayal of the Q. Again, this is somewhat telling – the (virginal dead) female body is there to represent something about L’s apparent (im)morality – he is being “true” to the queen within the morally inverted confines of this adulterous affair – this is her only real function in the story. It perhaps relates back to saint’s lives and cults of martyrs – women are holy when they die in preservation of their virginity . . . she is a kind of martyr for courtly love, but interestingly, she assumes the expected “male” position – dying and pining away, as Lancelot once did for the Q. Does her death “expiate” L’s sin?

Finally, there was much discussion of whether the problem was the affair (which is expected, according to the courtly love rulebook), or the lack of discretion they evince. Not only do L and Q show a lack of discretion, L actually seems to go to great lengths to ensure that there will be universal knowledge of the love affair as he painted the whole thing in a kind of pornographic record while in the captivity of Morgan. It’s not unlike “accidentally” leaving scandalous emails or images of an affair where you know the wronged party will find them. The question is: did he want Arthur to know? And if so, why?

Similar is L’s insistence on leaving his shield behind in Logres, where all will see it as a record of his deeds of prowess. For KA this shield can only signify Lancelot’s infidelity to him (not necessarily Q’s infidelity, which is apparently less of an issue). For Gawain it can only signify the death of his brother. It ensures there will be no end to the conflict without the destruction of the Arthurian world.