Sovereign Fantasies by Ingham Patricia Clare;

Author:Ingham, Patricia Clare;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2019-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Tragedy of Romance: Gender, Genre, and Agency

If, as de Rougemont implies, Arthurian romance gives us a satisfying narrative of our powerlessness over our own passionate attachments, that powerlessness has remained invested in images of women as either dangerous or deadened. And while the story de Rougemont tells about passion and culture gives us a glimpse of the strictures that interior drives and desires demand of us, he fails, as we have seen, to view those desires in relation to the cultural and social horizon that helps to produce them. For if agency is always in relation, the relations within which it operates frequently deploy desire to promote the privilege of those whose bodies are thought to matter.

In Part II we have seen how a male heterosexual subjectivity purchases the fantasy of its autonomous agency through a gendered splitting. Male heroism, invested in loss, gains a rough and ready agency, a tarnished heroism by displaying its separation from women. In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Gawain’s disillusioned autonomy gains its claim to agency by distancing itself from the complications of relationship and by denigrating power in relationship as a problem with females. That version of male heroic agency helps to manage the dependencies that a government like Richard II’s will have upon its Palatine states by showing a centralized knight like Gawain to be a bastion of self-conscious agency despite the flaws and weaknesses of the centralized court from whence he takes direction. Gawain deploys female desire so as to display the complications of a male frontier agency while splitting it from the apparent dangers of relationship and accommodation. It depicts the fantasy of a borderland subject during a period of increasingly intense intimacy between aristocrats from a central court and those from the provinces. It shows the anxieties that intercultural union and desire pose to autonomous agency at a time when English subjects are engaged in monitoring and governing the outlying regions.

While Gawain takes on the troubles of the subject as a figure in-between various communities, the Stanzaic Morte Arthur imagines relational troubles within a community as a single domestic fellowship. Along the way this text displays how the foreign exploits of war gain a coherent, if also fragile, sense of union in masculine and military terms. And in the midst of a war with France and increasing acts of colonial resistance, the Stanzaic Morte Arthur genders agency and desire in a culture at war: women’s desire for knightly valor and strength is seen to propel masculine virility, and knights are protected from realizing the extent to which their bodies do not matter to the sovereign powers who are willing always to risk losing them in battle.

These uses of gender remind us of the fantasmatic character of tales of dangerous Arthurian liaisons. Arthurian romance offers a late medieval audience of men and women imaginative access to the affections and disaffections of community; it provides a place to explore the delights and horrors of group identity, of uniting and dividing, of the violence and pleasure of incorporation and accommodation.

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