The Once and Future Queen
Page 18
Every Woman a Goddess
For only the second time in Arthurian legend we have a non-Christian Guinevere, 508 this one from the Summer Country, “the last of the British lands not to become Christian.”509 Johnson shows Miles to be part of an emerging tradition among female Arthurian authors: “Like Bradley, Rosalind Miles also sets her Arthurian legend trilogy in a Great Britain that is leaving behind the Goddess and moving toward the patriarchal belief systems of the Christian church.”510
This religious shift is not surprising when one looks at the culture of the time period the book was written. “Successful literature often reflects the times in which it is created and frequently mirrors changing societal belief systems and behaviors,” writes Johnson. “During the second half of the twentieth century, an unprecedented upheaval in gender roles occurred as well as a youthful yearning to return to a simpler time which focused on community and the land. A result of this popular back-to-the-land movement was the rise of neo-paganism which, with its affirmation of women, enhanced the strengthening female persona.”511
The rise of paganism was reflected in popular culture as well. Thanks in part to the success of films like The Craft and TV shows like Charmed in the mid-to-late 1990s, all things Wicca and witchcraft were in demand, especially among those in their teens and twenties. Large bookstores such as Borders and Barnes and Noble had entire sections dedicated to neo-paganism; journalists declared that embracing paganism was the newest form of adolescent rebellion. It was inevitable that these social changes would be reflected in contemporary reimaginings of Camelot as well. Johnson agrees. “As the world was evolving, so too did the Arthurian legend evolve as feminist writers set the legend in a changing pagan world that would now be told through a female voice.”512
As goddess worship and “girl power” went hand-in-hand in pop culture, so too were they intertwined in the period’s Arthurian legend. Johnson elaborates: “Traditionally, Arthurian legend was set in a Christian land inhabited by knights and kings whose good intentions were often thwarted by the evil doings of female characters. To circumvent this negative bias toward the legend’s women, both Bradley and Miles initially provide a pre-Christian backdrop to the legend which automatically establishes the Goddess worship as an accepted way of life that is being negatively impacted by the arriving patriarchal Christians who seek to undermine the power of women.”513
Strong, not Feminist
In a 1999 interview with The Independent, Miles was asked about her motivation behind re-thinking Guinevere. “I wanted to recapture the active, regal women of this period,” she said. “The only one we all know is Boadicea and we remember her because of her failure.”514 But in the same interview, she shies away from calling her retelling “feminist:”
I think feminism’s time has passed. It’s not passé, just passed. Thirty years ago we were fighting for equal pay, equal opportunities, free contraception, and we still haven’t got them all. But, because of feminism, those issues have been addressed, progress has been made, prejudices shifted, the struggle diffused. And in the sense that society now accepts that what we used to call women’s rights are human rights—equal pay and equal access to work, for example—then we are all feminists now.515
Miles’ dismissal of feminism as a movement whose time had come and gone was also consistent with the time period in which she wrote. In the late 1990s and early years of the 2000s, feminism was waning. In a 2001 article, Barbara Epstein reported, “Feminist theory, once provocative and freewheeling, has lost concern with the conditions of women’s lives and has become pretentious and tired,”516 echoing many of her contemporaries’ thoughts.
Fewer women reported being feminists. Many still supported the causes it stood for, but they no longer wanted to be associated with the word or the movement. Some saw the word as “limiting and exclusionary,”517 while others didn’t like the association it had taken on with so-called “feminazis,” the radical faction of feminists. According to Martha Rampton, “Feminism’s perceived silence in the 1990s was a response to the successful backlash campaign by the conservative press and media, especially against the word feminism and its purported association with male-bashing and extremism.”518
Feminist or not, for all of her revisionist efforts, was Miles successful in reshaping readers’ conception of the character of Guinevere? It depends on whom you ask. Bonner writes about Miles and others of her mid-1980s to late 1990s generation, “At the hands of these contemporary [female] authors, Guinevere becomes a heroine, a figure that girls and women can read about and admire, not just for her well-documented external beauty, but for her integral strength and dynamics.”519 Miles’ Guinevere is certainly a radical departure from previous versions, one who shows the potential of a female ruler in a non-Christian world, going against all the conventions that cast a bad light on Guinevere to begin with.
But Howey cautions heaping too much praise on Miles and the advancements she may have made. “While Miles’ book presents itself as a feminist version of the legend, Guinevere does very little to earn the reader’s respect and many other major female characters in the novel (such as Morgan) are demonized.”520 If Howey is correct, perhaps there are shades of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s quandary in Miles’ work. Maybe she wrestled with creating a strong Guinevere without diminishing her other female characters, just as Bradley seems to have done when redeeming Morgaine. In an article in the journal Arthuriana, Roberta Davidson describes just this pattern of female portrayal in modern Arthurian literature:
The equation works with predictable regularity: when Guinevere is good, Morgan (et al.) is bad. When Guinevere is bad, Morgan (et al.) is good. Even the nature of “goodness” or “badness” in the characters is remarkably uniform. When Guinevere is bad, she presented as over-sexed and selfish, sometimes scheming, and always clearly unworthy of Arthur, who is more “truly” in love with the protagonist. She is usually blond. When the “Morgan” figure is bad, she is over-sexed, selfish, inevitably scheming, and out to use or destroy Arthur. However, creative license is not entirely dead—in Morgan’s case her hair is neither uniformly blond nor black, but “of what color it shall please God.” Conversely, the favored protagonist is seldom depicted in a hyper-sexualized way. Indeed, she is more often described as “boyish” and, in fact sometimes appears disguised as a boy. She is unconcerned with her own appearance, despite her beauty;…she is independent, unconventional, and uncertain if she wants to be a wife…. She is the mirror image, in other words, of the “bad” woman, a pattern which may not be entirely accidental.521
As we’ve seen, this is a pattern that held true throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Luckily, after the turn of the century, authors would reject this “either/or” way of thinking and allow multiple Arthurian women to be strong at the same time.
* * *
494 McKenzie, Nancy, Queen of Camelot (New York: Random House, 2002, 1994, 1995), 7.
495 Noble, James, “Guinevere, the Superwoman," 205. The unified version contains a new prologue that takes place while Guinevere is in the convent.
496 Lacy, 599.
497 Thompson, Women in Celtic Law, 467.
498 McKenzie, Queen of Camelot, 622.
499 Miles, Rosalind, Guenevere, Queen of the Summer Country (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1998), 452-453.
500 Lacy, The New Arthurian Encyclopedia: New Edition, 526.
501 Johnson, “Guenevere's Conflict," 28.
502 Ibid., 37.
503 Ibid., 34.
504 Johnson, “Guenevere's Conflict," 39.
505 Ibid., 64.
506 Ibid.,65.
507 Ibid., 68.
508 The first time being the Guinevere created by Persia Woolley, who was the subject of Chapter Sixteen.
509 Ibid., 9.
51
0 Ibid., 8.
511 Johnson, “Guenevere's Conflict," 5.
512 Ibid.
513 Ibid., 14.
514 Stanford, Peter, “The Books Interview: Rosalind Miles - A Feminist in Camelot,” The Independent (1999).
515 Ibid.
516 Epstein, Barbara, “What Happened to the Women’s Movement?” Monthly Review:
An Independent Socialist Magazine 53, Issue 01 (May 2001).
517 Rampton, Martha, “Four Waves of Feminism,” Pacific Magazine (Fall 2008).
518 Ibid.
519 Bonner, "Guinevere as Heroine," 100.
520 Howey, "Once and Future Women," 277.
521 Davidson, Roberta, "When King Arthur Is OG 13," in Arthuriana 22, no.3 (2012): 13.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Guinevere Post-2000 and Lavinia Collins
The Arthurian Market Slows
With the dawning of the twenty-first century—a full thousand years after Guinevere first graced Arthurian legend with her written presence—one would think Guinevere’s time might have finally come. Perhaps, but it wasn’t through new work championed by the traditional publishing industry. In her thesis, Sara Cooley cites a study showing “no fewer than forty books on Arthurian themes were published in the United States in the year 2000 alone,’ [but] only a handful of these have been written through the perspectives of female characters.”522
Why? She blames the post-feminist movement, which caused “the freshest story, the most creative spin [to] no longer include the feminist politics that have been declared outdated and irrelevant to women today.”523 And that is a real possibility. As mentioned in the last chapter, during the early 2000s, the feminist movement suffered from a severe slowdown, that continues to this day524 in parts of the world. Many women from all walks of life, in the United States, Britain, and other countries, have argued that the fight is no longer relevant, with some even claiming feminism has harmed gender relations or made men’s hatred of women worse.525 “Many though believe this kind of thinking [feminism] belongs in the past. Today, western women have achieved much, though not all, of what they set out to. They now often stand above men in terms of personal achievement,” cites a 1999 BBC article questioning whether or not feminism was still relevant at the turn of the millennium.526
While there was a post-feminist movement527 and it could have influenced interest (or lack thereof) in Guinevere, the lack of recent novels about her has more to do with the publishing industry than it does with culture. As an author who had a Guinevere book on submission to all the major publishers in the late 2000s, I can attest to a perplexity regarding that type of book. While I had several editors very keen to work on my book and we went to acquisitions twice at a Big Five publishing house (and once at a top ten house), the publishing houses expressed reticence. Some had been burned by previous underperforming Arthurian books, others were already reissuing older works and didn’t want the competition, and there were a few that simply didn’t know how to market that type of book.
While traditional publishing houses were busy ignoring the potential in Guinevere, independent (a.k.a. self-published) authors looked at the market, realized it had been more than a decade since a Guinevere book was published, and took up the call to arms. Looking at the top twenty fictional books for adults528 about Guinevere published since 2000 that are available on Amazon as of this writing, the most visible—based on number of reviews, star rating level, search placement, and awards won—are those by Lavinia Collins and myself.529 Therefore, the Guinevere books by those two authors will be the last two discussed in this book.
Lavinia Collins
“Tell me you want me,” he murmured, kissing me once more, gently pulling on my lip with his teeth, leaning away as I leaned towards him, trying to kiss him deeper. So, this is what he wanted. After my resistance last night, he wanted to feel that he had won me round. I was not sure that he had not, but I was not going to yield a position of even the slightest power if I did not have to.” 530
— Guinevere: A Medieval Romance by Lavinia Collins
Lavinia Collins is a feminist scholar who has a degree in medieval literature from Oxford and has written three fictional series on famous Arthurian women, including Guinevere, Morgan, and Morgause. Her Guinevere trilogy was published in mid-2014 as Warrior Queen (Book 1), A Champion’s Duty (Book 2), and Day of Destiny (Book 3), and then later the same year as a boxed set titled Guinevere: A Medieval Romance.
According to a 2014 interview,531 Collins’ Guinevere trilogy is based off her reading of Malory. Her Guinevere is a Breton532 sent from her home to marry the younger Arthur after he conquered her homeland, resulting in the deaths of her mother, brothers, and the man she was supposed to marry. Arthur wants her, sight unseen, because she is descended from Maeve, the warrior queen of the Breton, who, it is claimed, has Otherworldly blood. He believes Guinevere may be able to save him from the destiny Merlin tells him awaits him. Guinevere unwillingly leaves her kingdom and elderly father behind and goes to Camelot to marry Arthur, whom she has never met but hates with obvious reason.
At first, being a Queen is a whole new experience for Guinevere because although she was a princess in her kingdom, she never had to act like one. Eventually, she learns to enjoy her new role and even falls in love with Arthur. He initially welcomes her in his war council and as a warrior, allowing her to fight alongside him against an enemy threatening to take his lands in France. But when Guinevere is wounded in battle and a mysterious French knight saves her life, Arthur is so upset by her injury that he decides he can’t bear to worry about her anymore. He bans her from war and sends her home to Britain.
As one might expect, the knight is Lancelot. When Lancelot comes to court at Camelot, Guinevere tries to snub him, but finds herself attracted to him. She initiates the affair, pressuring Lancelot when he resists.533 Their affair is based in mutual passion, but also in Guinevere’s need to exert control of her life, which she lost when Arthur banned her from war.
Some suspect what is going on between Lancelot and Guinevere so the castle is fraught with gossip. Arthur doesn’t believe a word of it, but enemies are watching the two closely. Lancelot is forced to leave in search of the Holy Grail in an attempt to refute the rumors and keep Guinevere safe. With her champion and lover gone, Guinevere seeks solace in Arthur’s arms, but as time passes, she finds Lancelot’s absence growing heavier upon her heart and her enemies growing in numbers.
The Sexual Side of Guinevere
One of the things Collins’s Guinevere is well-known for is her sexual agency, which makes her a direct contradiction to Malory and other early portrayals of the character. The trilogy is more overtly sexual than previous versions – “bordering on erotica,”534 according to Leonide Martin, a retired California State University professor. But given the contemporary success of series like Fifty Shades of Gray, is that really very surprising? Collins is reacting directly to what her audience wants. As Brewer reminds us, “Modern Gueneveres…show how our images of the heroine and our expectations as to how she will behave have changed in the course of time. The authors are now much more explicit about, and make much more of sexual matters, and in this respect we can see a new race of liberated young Gueneveres has sprung up in the last few decades.”535
Some readers criticize Collins for including a Mists of Avalon-like ménage à trois between Guinevere, Arthur, and Kay (rather than with Guinevere, Arthur, and Lancelot as in The Mists of Avalon). A Goodreads536 user named Terric853 writes, “So why did I only give this three stars? See how the title says it’s ‘A Medieval Romance?’ I’m no prude, but 50% of the book was graphic sex—between Guinevere and Arthur; between Guinevere and Lancelot; and a three-way between Guinevere, Lancelot and someone else (not named due to spoiler issues).”537 An Amazon reader named Jillian wrote, “[I]t reads like the sex scenes
were written first, then they decided to add an Arthurian theme to make it sell and filled it in around the sex. I don’t mind sex scenes, but in this book many of the sex scenes don’t make sense, felt disingenuous, and they are used to carry the whole book. Which is probably why the world-building attempts failed for me entirely, like they were an afterthought, which made the story completely lack charm.”538 Readers such as this seem to yearn for the romance of the old tales, rather than graphic sex that can be readily obtained in non-Arthurian literature.
Others aren’t as bothered by it. Tricia Preston writes, “It was interesting to view the action through the perspective of one of the strong female characters of the legend. There is an incredible quantity of romance and racy sex, verging on the salacious at times…but the author does give us a splendid insight into the chivalry and camaraderie of the time.”539 Bex Lyons, late medievalist and research associate at the University College of London, doesn’t even give the sex a thought. “Lavinia Collins is a medievalist, and it shows. This trilogy of books is a lovely homage to the medieval Arthurian tradition—with Malory referenced and evoked throughout—as well as post-medieval feminist Arthuriana, as epitomized by Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon. Collins gives the leading lady of Arthurian literature a new voice, and some new and interesting motivations and associations, whilst sticking to the essentials of Malory’s plot structure.”540