The Once and Future Queen

by Nicole Evelina

  But out of her failings comes something good. Several critics see Guinevere as a savior figure both to herself and those in her world, especially Lancelot—through her penance and embracing of Christianity.247 Indeed, in becoming a nun, she takes on the role of repentant sinner like Mary Magdalene, one who has given up earthly sensuality for the joys of heavenly holiness. Fries sees deep meaning in this symbolism.

  In both the stanzaic Morte and Malory, Guinevere’s taking of the veil emerges even more specifically than in Geoffrey of Monmouth as a rejection of the worldly heroine’s role: Guinevere refuses Lancelot’s love in an attempt at salvation for them both. Her spurning of his offer of marriage and even of a final kiss casts her into a heroic mold, but it is a male-inspired one: that of the repentant worldly woman, on the model of Mary Magdalene, Mary of Egypt and other formerly sexual females.248

  In her sin and repentance, Guinevere acts as the guardian of morality for both the female sex and the court of Camelot, and by extension, as a warning for the women of the Malory’s time. “[In the Middle Ages] woman exists to bring man to perfection,” writes Walters. “[The] underlying message for woman is that for civilization to flower, she must keep tight hold on her sexual proclivities.”249 And if she is weak and sins, she must repent; by doing so, she can save not only herself, but those around her. Wyatt notes that while Lancelot’s sin may have deprived him of the Grail, Guinevere “tries to repair Lancelot’s flaws, and that is an important distinction in Malory’s work.”250 Moreover, as Comer points out, by refusing the final kiss with Lancelot, Guinevere is in effect ensuring salvation for them both. “In a society of almost constant competition, where battle determines rank, wealth, and even guilt, Guinevere’s refusal of Lancelot and a worldly outlook is her effort to ensure salvation for both her and her lover. Yet Malory makes the claim that it is the fact that she was faithful to Lancelot that ensured her salvation…. That is the great irony of Malory’s work and more importantly of Guinevere’s role: she is simultaneously condemned and praised by all those around her,”251 just like women in the Middle Ages, who were problematic in a masculine world. And just as medieval men would have liked to have locked away all women—and by extension their polluted sinfulness and temptation—in a nunnery, Guinevere’s only choice was seclusion. Elizabeth Edwards eloquently shows how for Malory sadness, tragedy, and pity are part and parcel of being a woman. “Pathos is the condition of the individual isolated from community, and it has also become, for Malory, the new condition of femininity.”252

  For Guinevere, the Middle Ages weren’t so much a straight march through time, as a gradual and continuous decline. She began as a minor, perhaps even throwaway, character in Gildas and Geoffrey of Monmouth, and then was branded a traitor by Wace. Chrétien de Troyes tried to redeem her, but the insistence of his patroness on including Guinevere’s affair with Lancelot negated his attempts. The monks and clerics who got hold of her in the twelfth century seized on the affair to turn her into an example intended to encourage women to be chaste, and a warning to men against the evils of the female sex. The Alliterative Morte Arthure abandoned all pretense of making Guinevere a likable character, once again reducing her character to a pittance of a role who symbolized grief and treason. Drawing on this source, Malory then turned her into a repentant sinner, which in some ways was a positive step—she gave sinful people hope for salvation—but it also reinforced the negative light in which she has been seen for centuries. And so Guinevere was destined to remain in the state of shame for several hundred years while the Arthurian legend fell out of favor.

  * * *

  211 Krishna, Valerie, The Alliterative Morte Arthure: A New Verse Translation (Washington, D.C.: UP of America, 1983), lines 4196-4208.

  212 Tichelaar, Tyler, “While King Arthur was Away,” accessed June 12, 2017.

  213 Ibid., and Benson, C. David, “The Ending of the Morte Darthur,” in A Companion to Malory, ed. Elizabeth Archibald (Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer, 2000), 221-222.

  214 Tichelaar, “While King Arthur was Away,” accessed June 12, 2017.

  215 Beal, Rebecca S., “Guenevere’s Tears in the Alliterative Morte Arthure: Doubly Wife, Doubly Mother, Doubly Damned,” in On Arthurian Women, ed. Bonnie Wheeler and Fiona Tolhurst (Dallas: Scriptorium Press, 2001,), 1.

  216 Fries, “The Poem,” 40.

  217 Beal, "Guenevere's Tears," 2.

  218 Krishna, A New Verse Translation, 19, lines 697-702.

  219 Beal, "Guenevere's Tears," 2, 4.

  220 Ibid., 1, 2.

  221 Fries, “The Poem,” 40.

  222 Beal, "Guenevere's Tears," 4.

  223 Ibid., 6.

  224 Stone, Brian, trans., “Alliterative Morte Arthure,” in King Arthur’s Death (London: Penguin Books, 1988), line 3918.

  225 Tichelaar, “While King Arthur was Away,” accessed June 12, 2017.

  226 Malory, Thomas, The Morte Darthur, Parts Seven and Eight, ed. Derek Brewer (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1987, 1968), 47.

  227 MorgauseofOrkney, “‘The Poisoned Apple’- Thoughts,” In My Defens (2014).

  228 Ibid.

  229 Hodges, Kenneth, “Guinevere's Politics in Malory's ‘Morte Darthur,’” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 104, no. 1, (2005): 54.

  230 Benson, "The Ending," 222.

  231 Day, David, The Quest for King Arthur (London: Michael O'Mara, 1999), 112.

  232 Benson, "The Ending," 226.

  233 Malory, Thomas, “Le Morte d’Arthur,” in The King Arthur Collection (Rochester: Maplewood Books, 2014), 301, lines 3566-3573.

  234 Howey, Ann, “Once and Future Women: Popular Fiction, Feminism and Four Arthurian Rewritings,” (PhD thesis, University of Alberta, 1997), 28.

  235 His sin was not having an affair but loving her, rather than God.

  236 Bonner, "Guinevere as Heroine," 47.

  237 Comer, "Behold Thy Doom," 72.

  238 Ross, "The Sublime to the Ridiculous," 193.

  239 Ibid., 35.

  240 Walters, “Introduction,” xxx.

  241 Hodges, "Guinevere's Politics," 54.

  242 Wyatt, Siobhan, Women of Words in Le Morte Darthur: The Autonomy of Speech in Malory’s Female Characters (London: Springer International Publishing, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.), 134-135.

  243 Benson, "The Ending," 223.

  244 Lacy, The New Arthurian Encyclopedia: New Edition, 215.

  245 Ross, "The Sublime to the Ridiculous," 162.

  246 Jillings, L. G., “The Ideal of Queenship in Hartman’s Erec,” in The Legend of Arthur in the Middle Ages : studies presented to A.H. Diverres by colleagues, pupils, and friends, eds. P. B. Grout et al. (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer; Torowa N.J., U.S.A.: Biblio Distribution Services, 1983) 123.

  247 Bonner, "Guinevere as Heroine," 7.

  248 Fries, “ Female Heroes, Heroines,” 11.

  249 Walters, “Introduction,” xxxi.

  250 Wyatt, "Women of Words," 135.

  251 Comer, "Behold Thy Doom is Mine," 49-50.

  252 Edwards, Elizabeth, “The Place of Women in the Morte Darthur,” in A Companion to Malory, ed. Elizabeth Archibald (Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer, 2000), 54.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Renaissance to The Nineteenth Century

  After Malory, the Arthurian world—especially when it came to Guinevere—went into something of a drought until the nineteenth century. As Peter Korell notes, the queen was virtually written out of the legend at this point in history. “In spite of Malory’s partial whitewashing of Guinevere, she could not find favor with many later authors dealing with the Arthurian legend. I
n the first three centuries following Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur, she is almost completely ignored.”253 One of the few Arthurian plays of the Elizabethan age, Thomas Hughes’s The Misfortunes of Arthur (1587), was based on the work of Geoffrey of Monmouth and concentrated on the revenge Arthur takes on Mordred for seducing Guinevere, rather than on the possible culpability of Guinevere herself. Even Edmund Spenser’s famous The Faerie Queen (1590-1596) made Arthur a bachelor, eliminating Guinevere altogether.

  Many scholars and critics believe this was due to shifting morality. As Walters points out, “The new moral consciousness that developed after the Reformation viewed Lancelot and Guinevere’s love with disfavor…. The historical tradition that had become increasingly popular typically depicted Guinevere as a woman of questionable virtue and had no knowledge of a character named Lancelot. Consequently, even though Malory had done much to improve Guinevere’s reputation, writers largely ignored her for three centuries after his epic.”254

  The country’s religious shift from Catholicism to Protestantism also had a heavy influence. “Protestantism itself recoiled from Arthur’s Catholic ambience, especially the Grail story, and Puritan moralism found the cheerful violence and sexual awareness of romance unappealing,”255 explain Rob Gossedge and Stephen Knight.

  According to Ross, politics can also be blamed. “In the seventeenth century, the legend became closely associated with the Royalist cause in the Civil Wars—James I claimed descent from Arthur and was even hailed as ‘Arthur’s self returned’—while the historical existence of Arthur was increasingly suspect.”256 James I was also associated with Arthur because he united England, Wales, and Scotland, which was prophesied to occur when Arthur returned. But his commonalities with the legendary king ended there, especially since he espoused the divine right of kings, whereas Arthur was a symbol of equanimity for all.257

  This sour mood reigned until the Victorians revived the interest in Arthuriana. As the Industrial Revolution choked the air with soot and changed the pace of life irrevocably, the Middle Ages began appearing to people as “an idyllic time when life was simpler and people lived in closer contact with the universe and their natural impulses.”258 So great was their longing for this time that Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur was republished three times in the 1820s alone. Walters believes this proliferation of Malory’s story had a positive effect on other writers. “Taking their primary inspiration from Malory, writers looked to the Middle Ages for models of ethical conduct to help improve the present.”259 Yet, as in all other time periods, they found it impossible to write about the past without consciously or unconsciously infusing it with a bit of their present views. “Ironically, it seems that although Tennyson, Arnold, Morris and other Victorian writes may have turned to chivalric romance to escape from the strains and drudgery of modern industrial society, they invariably injected a modern consciousness and modern concerns into their writing,” 260 writes Ross. But perhaps they shouldn’t shoulder too much blame, as this is a sin committed by every generation, as further analysis will show.

  * * *

  253 Korrel, An Arthurian Triangle, 274.

  254 Walters, “Introduction,” xxxviii.

  255 Gossedge, Rob and Stephen Knight, “The Arthur of the Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Arthurian Legend, eds. Elizabeth Archibald and Ad Putte (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009), 103.

  256 Ross, "The Sublime to the Ridiculous," 32.

  257 Merriman, The Flower of Kings, 35.

  258 Walters, “Introduction,” xxxix.

  259 Walters, “Introduction,” xxxix.

  260 Ross, "The Sublime to the Ridiculous," 64.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Tennyson, Idylls of the King

  She like a new disease, unknown to men,

  Creeps, no precaution used, among the crowd,

  Makes wicked lightnings of her eyes, and saps

  The fealty of our friends, and stirs the pulse

  With devil’s leaps, and poisons half the young. 261

  — “Guinevere,” Idylls of The King by Alfred Lord Tennyson

  About the Idylls

  Other than Malory, one of the best known, or at least easily recognized, works of Arthurian literature is Tennyson’s Idylls of the King.262 It rose to bestseller status in the midst of Victorian Arthurian mania and has retained its top status for more than a century. “It was Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who brought the Arthurian tradition to the forefront of literature and art in the form of his Idylls of the King,”263 asserts Comer.

  Idylls is a series of twelve poems about the court of Camelot. Guinevere either appears in or is mentioned in almost all of the poems, although she plays a significant role only in “The Coming of Arthur” (where she and Arthur marry), “Lancelot and Elaine” (which is Elaine of Astolat’s tragic story), and “Guinevere” (which is Guinevere and Arthur’s last meeting at the Amesbury convent).

  Rumors about Lancelot and Guinevere’s alleged affair are part of the story even before the reader actually meets her. Therefore, Comer asserts, “the queen has negative connotations attached to her before she has appeared on the scene in any significant role.”264 This point is significant given the role that rumors play in the Arthurian legend and as a signal of the way Guinevere is later characterized.

  When Tennyson introduces Guinevere, she is already with the nuns at Amesbury, anonymously in hiding because of the affair with Lancelot and the ensuing war. The first part of the poem is her reflection upon the events that have led up to her disgrace at Camelot and in the eyes of her husband, the king. Unlike in other versions of the legend, she falls in love with Lancelot when he first escorts her from her home to marry Arthur, whom she is repelled by.265 Early in their relationship, she and Lancelot have many close calls that lead to fear and guilt. Interestingly, no actual details of the relationship between Lancelot and Guinevere are given in this poem. There is no indication or even implication that they may have engaged in sexual intercourse. The lovers try to swear that they will never see one another again, but their love is too great to resist, so they make secret plans to meet, and are caught by Mordred. This leads to war between Arthur and Lancelot, and Guinevere flees to the convent.

  When Arthur arrives at Amesbury, Guinevere is overcome by repentance and cries on her knees as Arthur tells her of his woes and eventually grants her his forgiveness. According to Comer, this harsh insertion is one of Tennyson’s additions to Arthurian lore. “The scene between Guinevere and Arthur at the nunnery is original to the Idylls… The king, in essence, berates her for destroying Camelot and his dreams, telling her, ‘For thou hast spoilt the purpose of my life.’”266 Afterwards, Arthur leaves, and Guinevere repents of all she has done. “At this point, the fallen woman has utterly accepted that she will remain shamed in the eyes of the world forever,”267 argues Bonner. There will be no public redemption for this queen.

  Guinevere as a Character

  It is significant that, as Gordon-Wises writes, “Tennyson is one of the first writers to acknowledge the significance of the Guinevere figure by allotting her an individual idyll.”268 Many scholars note how he built upon the tradition begun by Malory and Chrétien, from whom Guinevere received her core personality of a “self-absorbed, scheming manipulator.”269 It is Tennyson who “reveals the Queen’s own insecurities and, perhaps, the actual motivation behind her angry outburst”270 at Lancelot regarding his relationship with Elaine. But Bonner points out that knowing her motivation doesn’t mean the reader will sympathize with Guinevere. “This implication does not necessarily represent Guinevere in a more positive light than that of Chrétien or Malory, for she is still wrathful and scathing in her words. However, Tennyson does create a more believable reaction in his Guinevere”271 through her jealousy of the younger and more beautiful Elaine, with whom she is vying for attention.

&nbs
p; This possibly one-sided competition affects Guinevere’s relationship with Lancelot. Comer observes, “Tennyson’s Guinevere is never as exuberant or expressive in her love for Lancelot as either in Malory or Chrétien. Tennyson’s Guinevere mostly shows her love in fits of jealousy over his relationship with Elaine…Guinevere’s love for Lancelot is not pure but always tempered by another emotion—generally guilt or jealousy,”272 hinting at an immature nature that is “always just under the surface.”273

  In her dissertation, Comer notes that Tennyson’s additions to the character are significant, especially in that Guinevere is more well-rounded with clear internal conflicts that give a her life outside of the actions of men around her. “Tennyson may have consulted previous texts for the basis of Guinevere, but as David Staines says, she is a ‘creation, not a re-creation’… Guinevere is more consistent than in Malory but she is also a more pitiable character, continually chastised for living her life in a way antagonistic to Arthur’s idealistic plans for Camelot.”274 A few pages later, Comer continues, “Tennyson’s Guinevere is a character torn between her duties to a man she does not love and the love she feels for a man she cannot be with. Malory hints at this internal conflict, but it comes to fruition in Tennyson.”275