Renelyn R.
Sugarol
BSED-ENGLISH 3D
TASK 4 | GENDER ROLES VIS-A-VIS ARTHURIAN LEGEND |
Chroniclers have endeavored to decipher the milieu of medieval era to
provide an explanation for how this time period viewed the gender aspects
which subsequently placed people into specific roles. Life in the medieval age
is often stamped as a patriarchal society because of the unalterable roles that
assigned men to the public sphere, and women to the private granting them
little to no power. Males dominated feudal society and they were expected to
emanate supremacy in order to be considered masculine, in terms of women,
war, and jurisdiction. Women, on the other hand, were undoubtedly cramped
to the private sphere and left out of the hierarchy and were confined to the
roles of mother, widow, or virgin. These things are often reflected in Arthurian
legend.
When people think of Arthurian literature, the first characters that they
might think of would be Lancelot, Galahad, Gawain, Merlin, and of course,
King Arthur himself. Within this tale, almost all of the main characters are men
and almost all of the people who held power were men, such as it would be in
real life during this period. Male characters in Arthurian legends exhibit the
practical side of chivalry — they are men of action. When turning our focus on
the roles of the knights, the building of masculine knightly identity comes
about at the crisscrossing of knightly intrepidness and romantic love. On any
incursion into the forest of adventure, a knight is sure to come up against
other knights—with whom he may affirm his masculine sameness through an
exhibition of martial adeptness—and a knight is sure also to come across
women—against whom he may enunciate his masculine distinctness through
courteous behavior. These two types of encounter are crucial to the continual
process of establishing and maintaining identity in the Arthurian community.
Equally important is that the knight’s role is to return to the court to relate
those adventures he has in the forests of adventure. He in effect performs his
gender identity twice: once in the quest, and again in the telling of the quest.
Women in medieval literature played an integral part in the medieval
period. They were important fixtures of the time. Female characters
represented the intellectual side of chivalry — they are women of reflection.
Throughout the tale of King Arthur, the feminine operates as either instigator
of quest, mediator of quest, or witness to completion (and thereby validation)
of the quest. The ubiquitous and seemingly necessary presence of female
characters who ask favors, bestow gifts, intercede for, and pass judgment on
knights, points to the importance of the feminine in establishing, shaping, and
confirming masculine knightly identity. The feminine materializes in order to be
inducted into providing the enabling conditions of the chivalric enterprise: to
prop, justify and facilitate the masculine drama of chivalry, the feminine is
drawn in, allowed a point of access. Moreover, women in Arthurian Mythology
are often portrayed as a helpless damsel in distress that must be saved by the
knights and also as temptresses over men. The knights looked up to them as
vulnerable, helpless, and ever in need of the services of a knight—in short,
the object through and against which a knight affirms his masculine identity.
As such, the notion of emotional control is a hefty one, based on the enigma
that the susceptibility of the female characters places women in a position
where they are subject to men, yet because of this perceived frailty, they keep
hold a great deal of power and effect in chivalric society, where knights are
bound to protect. This is utilized to the harm of several knights throughout the
tale, including Lancelot, who is driven to complete madness as a result of
feminine manipulation. Even Merlin, who is in ownership of an occult
knowledge, capitulates to the impulses of lust to the extent that his obsession
leads him to be thwarted by the woman who is the recipient of his unwelcome
attentions. While the chivalric world demands the utmost respect for the
protection of the female, in doing so it allows a woman with suspicious
aspirations a realm in which to manipulate and mislead, to suit her own ends.
It is suffice to say that men in Arthurian tale would have very little
adventure if the women have no part in it. In other words, men would be
incomplete without women. Despite the inferiority of women and the
superiority of men in terms of gender roles during the middle ages, each party
is integral to the other. In this way, male and female characters of Arthurian
romance bestow much-needed balance within the literature of chivalry — a
dynamic which today would be elucidated by the concept of “yin and yang.”
