Guenevere Burning.

Guenevere Burning AMY S. KAUFMAN Reading for Guenevere's desires within both historical and theoretical frameworks can reawaken the pleasures of Malory's Morte Darthur for feminist critics. (ASK) Ma s'a conoscer la prima radice del nostro amor tu hai cotanto afFecto, dirö come colui che piange e dice. —Francesca, Dante's Inferno M etacritical endeavors in which scholars explore their own pleasure have coaxed medieval studies into a delightful and perpetual swoon as of late.' But pleasure is tricky business for the feminist reader of medieval Arthutian literature, mostly because we are always told that we are not supposed to be having any.^ Our time period is considered inaccessibly patriarchal, our writers deemed misogynistic, and the characters on whom we focus rendered marginal, artificially constructed, or worse yet, abstracted into the nebulous 'feminine.'' Guenevere is oftentimes the victim of this view of the literary Middle Ages in readings that position her relationally to Lancelot, either as his destroyer or his redeemer.'' Yet whether we are asked to choose between Guenevere read as Mary or Guenevere read as Eve, we are still no closer to Guenevere herself' She is always a 'false' Guenevere, always shifting, always beyond our reach. I am therefore delighted that this issue of ARTHURIANA takes the radical position that Guenevere is a character with a story, a dynamic heroine who explores both worldly and spiritual power, not an obstacle or accolade on someone else's journey. The writers within interrogate a number of long-held myths about what Guenevere means, myths that relegate her to symbolic or ancillary roles, and they do so by analyzing her character during her most intensely spiritual moments. For instance, Leah Haught explains the visitation of the ghost of Guenevere's mother m Awntyrs of Arthure within the medieval memento mori tradition (8), shifting the target of the ghost's accusation from Guenevere's future sin to an implication of the entire Arthurian court and even the patriarchal system that silences or redirects the voices of both ARTHURIANA 20.1 (2OI0) 76 GUENEVERE BURNING 77 Guenevere and her mother (13). Haught subtly reminds us that though the literary and critical backgrounds we bring to the Awntyrs seem to facilitate a reading of the ghost's words as a warning of Guenevere's 'dangerously disruptive sexuality,' such a reading may be 'a biased, almost anachronistic expectation to place on individual characters' (12). Virginia Blanton and Sue Ellen Holbrook turn their focus to Guenevere's spiritual conversion at the end of Malory's Morte Darthur. Blanton disputes suggestions that the converted queen's portrait is 'cynical' by situating its description within 'conventional expectations of aristocratic widowhood' while also foregrounding her 'exemplary ascetic behavior' to illuminate both Guenevere's character and her agency (53). Sue Ellen Holbrook tises the history of Fontevraultine Amesbury in order to contextualize Malory's 'hopeful portrait of a feminine rtiler who knows how to heal a sinful soul' (24). In addition, she compares Guenevere's healing process to the steps provided by John Gassian's theory of repentance, revealing that Guenevere's language of penance and identification of herself as a sinner 'crystallize the sense of sinflilness entailed in healing a soul' (34). These sophisticated analyses take careful note of Guenevere's positionality, the ways in which the queen's subjectivity lies at the nexus of the forces that shape her—both textual and extratextual forces —and thus they offer us one way out of a difficult critical problem: how to read women without either essentializing female experience or dissolving it into the symbolic* In other words, the writers in this issue think through Guenevere rather than 'with' her and take pleasure in her perspective by imagining her possibilities. Haught, Blanton, and Holbrook write Guenevere back into existence, providing us with a heroine who teaches us about human love, spiritual insight, and holy redemption. Blanton, Haught, and Holbrook illuminate Guenevere through an historical lens, but spirituality has other contexts, ones that transcend time and place. Perhaps some pleasure is to be found, too, in imagining Guenevere's interiority, her love and desires, and their implication in her most transcendent moments. After all, for all our talk of pleasure, we rarely permit ourselves to indulge in Guenevere's passions, and in our consternated analyses of her character we forget that her erotic tension with Lancelot may have been a deeply sensual experience for the medieval reader. Our neglect, however, may be a symptom of a larger problem, which is that contemporary discussions of pleasure suffer from the deficit of a notion of female desire; not an essentially feminine desire, but desire instigated by a subject positioned as female. FINDING GUENEVERE The recent resurrection of transhistorical theories of subject .formation are accompanied by' the unfortunate tendency to cast 'Woman' as the 'Other.' 78 ARTHURIANA For instance, Jeffrey Cohen's work on Lancelot in Medieval Identity Machines serves up a masterful reading of Chretien's Lancelot as a masochist, but that reading frequently hinges upon the dissolution of Guenevere into Lancelot's imagined construction of her.^ Cohen conscientiously registers what is unsettling about thinking 'with' the queen in this way, adding in a footnote, 'The disappearance of the woman's body (in this case, the queen's) is disturbingly easy to theorize,' and he cites extensive theoretical precedents for such an exercise, including Freud, Lacan, Girard, Sedgwick, and Zizek.* Perhaps, however, what the ease of erasing the woman's body from a reading may indicate, rather than the inevitability of medieval women's invisibility, is that the woman's body, the erotic feminine, is a locus of crisis for certain ontologies of self-signification; they cannot imagine it, they cannot endorse it, and hence, they render it invisible. Reintroducing pleasure into the vocabulary of feminist theory does not necessarily entail discarding these frustrating formulations of desire, but it does require opening them up to make space for women's desire within them. Finding feminist pleasure in theorizing interiority means drawing on discourses of female subjectivity and desire generated within the trenches, as it were, from the imaginary position of the Other. Fortunately, this work has been done for us in the expanded theories of interiority created by feminist writers. To avoid the impossible task of conjuring 'the' feminist lens, I will make use of one theory in particular, with the caveat that it is one among many possible ways of imagining Guenevere's interiority. Jiilia Kristeva's essay 'Women's Time' imagines the formation of a specifically female subjectivity by describing a generational journey, a progression from one frame of feminist consciousness to another in a kind of awakening into and out of the patriarchal symbolic order.' Her use of the word 'generation,' which she qualifies carefully, implies 'less chronology than a signifying space, a both corporeal and desiring mental space.''" Her framework is also insistent on maintaining individuality, on not disappearing women's various experiences into the essentialized category of Woman's Experience." Ifindthis a particularly usefiil lens through which to read Guenevere's own awakening. Formulated as 'Other' by virtue of both her gender and her medieval alterity, Guenevere is an ideal model for imagining the pleasure of those positioned as object (or even abject). After all, rendering Guenevere a 'mere' object of desire misses the point, which is that Guenevere is an object who is both desired and desires back, passionately and fervently. Indeed, Guenevere has always been such a dangerous and destabilizing character because of her desire.'^ Her emotion and her passion can seduce us throughout time and space—just ask Patilo and Francesca. When Virginia Blanton remarks, 'Despite my annoyance at the level of melodrama in this scene, I am moved by Guinevere's emotional renunciation of her lover and of the secular world' (64), it may be because GUENEVERE BURNING 7^ Guenevere's very passion, the desire that makes her so dangerous, is what becomes the reader's own emotional connection to the text. My focus, then, will be on Malory's Guenevere in particular, in part because of his reputation for creating emotionally complex characters.'^ I take tentative steps toward imagining Guenevere's interiority by tracing her path through what Kristeva calls 'the symbolic question' and into her own system of signification, reading her spiritual conversion in Malory's Morte Darthur as the logical conclusion of the queen's journey to subjectivity, a journey traveled on the path of love and desire."^ I read her desire as waxing rather than waning as she transitions from object to subject, for although I am thoroughly persuaded by Blanton's suggestion that critical resistance to Guenevere's late-blooming faith is a 'gendered response to a female sinner,' I would suggest that Malory's queen's dedication to God is not necessarily 'an unexpected character shift' (51-52). In fact, Guenevere's desire to see Ghrist's face is not at all inconsistent with her characterization as a 'trew lover' (3.1120.12)." There is a Sanskrit word, svadharma, which means something like the soul's true calling. Guenevere's svadharma is love. She commits herself to it entirely. One might argue that she merely moves up the food chain in terms of the object of her desire, from devoting herself to Arthur, to loving the best knight in the world, to settling in at the right side of God on Judgement Day. But there is also something powerfully transgressive about both the love and the God Guenevere seeks, something that allows the queen, in her final moments, to transcend the limitations of both the physical and the metaphysical. FLAMING GUENEVERE Malory's Guenevere is brought before the fire 'to be brente' a total of three times. Each time, the queen escapes, and each time, she casts something into the fire, shedding some part of the law imposed upon her that restricts her subjectivity.'^ Her multiple possible immolations symbolize her growing identity, the trials by fire that mark moments in the development of her consciousness, her journey toward redefining herself. For nearly the first two thirds of Malory's Morte Darthur, Guenevere is more often talked about than a speaker herself; her voice fades in and out of the text—a line here, a word there. When she does speak, though, we see glimmers of her character. Arthur treats her as his position and his privilege dictate: an extension of himself At first, Guenevere is greatly conscientious of her prescribed role in the symbolic order as Arthur's wife, aware that she is a symbol of his power.'^ In 'The War with the Five Kings,' when she and Arthur are confronted with a treasonous attack, she declares, 'Yet were me lever to dey in this watir than to falle in youre enemyes handis.. .and there 8o ARTHURIANA to be slayne' (1.128.25—26). She is willing to die in order to spare Arthur the humiliation of having his queen murdered by his enemies.'* Yet it is Sir Kay who intervenes to rescue her from both unpleasant fates, and she praises the knight robustly, declaring, 'What lady that ye love and she love you nat agayne, she were gretly to blame' (1.129.19-20). Guenevere defines love as something to be earned by brave demonstrations of affection, honor, and loyalty, sparked by the devotion of a beloved who is capable of self-sacrifice.'' This is precisely the same sacrifice that Guenevere herself has offered Arthur, a sacrifice Guenevere is not only willing to make, but is compelled to make by virtue of her position.^" Yet there are lacunae in Guenevere's praises of Kay, silences in her declarations about how deserving Kay is of love that say something more about how Arthur may not be. The moment in which Kay rescues Guenevere is a moment in which Arthur is othered for Guenevere. She realizes with shock that the king can never reciprocate her own sacrifices. Nor should he, of course, given the necessity of protecting the king's body.^' Yet one wonders whether Guenevere had realized before now that though sacrifice is required of her, it simply is not in her husband's job description. This lack of reciprocity, the difference in their roles, creates a distance between the king and queen that will only continue to grow, and a fissure in Guenevere's understanding of love that creeps through her weighty silence in the first portion of Malory's works. Her words in this episode—both the words she utters and the words she does not—foreshadow what will eventually drive the queen into Christ's arms, for who, to the medieval mind, could be more noble, more altruistic, more perfect in his devotion? At first, however, it is Lancelot who offers Guenevere a simulacrum of her own brand of love, the ability to be both lover and beloved. He strengthens her subjectivity through mutuality, and as her love for Lancelot grows, Guenevere begins to be defined within the text precisely for her capacity to love. Isode declares, at one point, that 'there be within this londe but foure lovers, and that is sir Launcelot and dame Gwenyver, and sir Trystrames and quene Isode' (1.425.29—31), but even Isode must turn to Guenevere as an authority on love, writing to complain of Tristram's betrayal when he marries another. Guenevere, for her part, responds from the position of someone secure with her faith in love: 'the ende,' she proclaims, 'shulde be thus, that he shall hate her and love you bettir than ever he dud' (1.436.6—8). It makes sense, then, that Guenevere's legendary anger arises when Lancelot appears to betray the contract of love between them that lends her an identity. Her responses to his dalliances with other women, both real and imagined, are often read as unreasonable, erratic, and, wincingly, as expressions of irrational femininity. ^^ When we consider Malory's designation of Guenevere as a 'trew lover,' however, her repeated accusations that Lancelot is being 'false' take on GUENEVERE BURNING 8l new meaning. For instance, when Guenevere discovers that Elaine of Corbin is pregnant with her lover's child, she 'gaff many rebukes to sir Launcelot and called hym^/ff knyght' (2.802.18-19, emphasis mine). Another confrontation ensues when she feels Lancelot withdrawing from her, and she warns, 'I se and fele dayly that youre love begynnyth to slake, for ye have no joy to he in my presence, but ever ye ar oute of thys courte, and quarels and maters ye have nowadayes for ladyes, madyns and jantillwomen, [more] than ever ye were wonte to have beforehande' (2.1045.32-1046.1-2). When Lancelot confesses that he has hidden himself from her for fear of 'shame and sclaundir,' wanting to create the image ofa ladies' man so that, in his words, 'men sholde undirstonde my joy and my delite ys my plesure to have ado for damesels and maydyns' (2.1046.26-31), Guenevere bursts into tears. When she can finally speak, she once again accuses him of being both 'false' and 'comon': now I well understonde that thou arte a false, recrayed knyght and a comon lechourere, and lovyste and holdiste othir ladyes, and of me thou haste dysdayne and scorne. For wyte thou well, now I undirstonde thy falsehede I shall never love the more... (2.1047.1-5) Guenevere's words ('false,' 'comon,' 'falsehede') position the reader with the queen, contrasting her devotion to the truth of love to Lancelot's duplicitous construction of himself What Guenevere objects to is his public façade, the one that rejects the love between them. This situation forces Guenevere to confront what Kristeva calls 'the symbolic question.'^' What is her role in the order of things, after all, if she is not defined as Lancelot's beloved? How will Guenevere identify herself? When Guenevere attempts to adopt Lancelot's identity, one that hides passion in order to maintain a proper courtly exterior, she rapidly ruptures. She dismisses Lancelot from her sight, and Malory's own language tears back and forth, hardly able to bridge the gap between her inner sorrow and her outward repression, shielding himself from her pain by thrusting 'the booke' between himself and the queen: So whan Sir Launcelot was departed the quene outewarde made no maner of sorow in shewing to none of his bloode nor to none other, but wyte ye well, inwardely, as the booke seythe, she toke grete thought; but she bare hit oute with a proude countenaunce, as thoughe she felte no thought nother daungere. (2.1048.5-11) Guenevere's identity ruptures again in one of our most shockingly intimate moments with the queen: when she hears her lover in another woman's bed. When Lancelot fails to respond to Guenevere's invitation to her chambers because he has been ensorcelled into Elaine's bed instead, the queen is 'nyghe 82 ARTHURIANA oute of her wytte, and than she wrythed and waltred as a madde woman, and myght nat slepe a fout;e or a fyve owres' (2.805.8-10). Her breaking point takes place when she hears Lancelot chattering in his sleep: 'And whan she harde hym so clattir she was wrothe oute of mesure, [and for anger and payne wist not what to do], and then she cowghed so lowde that sir Launcelot awaked' (2.805.18—21). Guenevere's stifled outburst, combined with the claustrophobic setting and suffocatingly familiar details of their intimacy—Lancelot's instant recognition of her 'hemyng,' her deep familiarity with his 'clattir'—transport us into the horror of betrayal.^ We are meant to feel the queen's frustrated desire and repressed anger, the shock of her pain, and the passion of her love. We, and Guenevere, suddenly understand that she is so stifled, she must compress the whole of her being into wordless noise, a cough.^' Perhaps this is why, though Elaine of Gorbin's love for Lancelot is reasonable in many ways, as are the words she uses to defend it when she confronts the queen, her rationale for loving Lancelot leaves us (and Lancelot) cold. Elaine's logical arguments simply fail to carry the same heat, passion, or power as Guenevere's cough. She scolds Guenevere: madame, ye have done grete synne and yourselfFgrete dyshonoute, for ye have a lorde royall of youre owne, and therefore hit were youre parte for to love hym; for there ys no quene in this worlde that hath suche another kynge as ye have. And yf ye were nat, I myght have getyn the love of my lorde sir Launcelot; and a grete cause I have to love hym, for he hadde my maydynhode and by hym I have borne a fayte sonne whose [name] ys sir Galahad. (2.806.13-23) Elaine's descriptions of love position her squarely within the symbolic order that Guenevere is on the way to rejecting.^* She speaks as if lovers are exchangeable, and as if love is rational and duty-bound ('youre parte,' 'a grete cause I have to love hym,') rather than passionately transcendent. Even Elaine's remarks about Arthur are not about his person, but his station: Arthur deserves love because he is a 'lorde royall.' Elaine's love of Lancelot, too, is based on the claims to her love that he has according to social codes: her 'maydynhood' and her son. In other words, she is in pragmatic accord with the rationale of arranged marriages between nobles, a rationale in which both partners are rendered objects, collateral. This differs so drastically from Guenevere's pronouncement that women should love sir BCay for his nobility, bravery, and devotion that Elaine and Guenevere might as well be speaking different languages. Guenevere's second attempt to be 'false,' to suppress her interiority and drape herself in social façade—and, like Elaine, embrace her designated role—fails so miserably that it endangers her life. She throws a dinner party to show that she 'had as grete joy in all other knyghtes of the Rounde Table as she had in sir Launcelot' (2.1048.14-15). The thanks she gets is that Sir Madore accuses her of poisoning his cousin. Sir Patryse. (2.1049.28—29). No GUENEVERE BURNING 83 one will defend her in the ensuing trial by combat, not even Arthur, who is required by his position to be her judge, not her savior (2.1050.6). Indeed, Arthur reinforces his distance and diflference from Guenevere, and by default, her proximity to Lancelot, when he discovers that her would-be protector has gone missing: '"What aylith you," seyde the kynge, "that ye can nat kepe sir Launcelot uppon youre syde?"' (2.1051.29-30). Hence, abandoned by Arthur a second time, Guenevere is once again confronted with the 'symbolic question' when she is forced to kneel before Bors to beg for his protection, and Bors responds by humiliating her for the loss of Lancelot with words even more cutting than the king's: 'I mervayle how ye dare for shame to requyre me to do onythynge for you, insomuche ye have enchaced oute of your courte by whom we were up borne and honoured' (2.1052.12-15). What, Guenevere must wonder, is the point of being queen if the protection supposedly offered by the marriage contract fails her so drastically? What possibly can be gained by assuming a perpetually sacrificed position? The murder charge brings Guenevere to her first confrontation with the fire. The 'grete fyre made aboute an iron stake' is visceral enough that we feel its heat (2.1055.9-10).^^ Although Lancelot eventually rescues her, however, something of Guenevere is cast into the fiâmes. What she chooses to discard is her role in the sacrificial sociosymbolic contract, the one in which Bors, the king, and Lancelot define her identity and desires. Between this fire and the next, Guenvere struggles to redefine herself within language, what Kristeva calls 'the dynamic of signs,' and transcend the role that confines her expression of love to a dolorous, echoing cough, a stifled sound.^' Her quest for language manifests in seemingly contradictory reactions to Lancelot's attentions to Elaine of Ascolot. When she hears that Lancelot wears Elaine's sleeve as his token, she is too angry to speak to Lancelot at all. But perhaps Guenevere begins to understand the commonality between Elaine of Ascolat and herself when she sees the result of the Maid's thwarted love: the horrors of silenced female desire. As Elaine's corpse floats by, it is Guenevere who spies the suicide letter in her hand. Without her eye for the woman's words, Elaine's death would have remained a mystery, her passions invisible, her interiority unarticulated. Guenevere reads the silent woman, hearing what is hidden, translating what is 'Othered' and mystified (2.1096.17). This may be what drives the queen to trade jealousy for compassion, and she chides Lancelot, 'ye myght have shewed hir som bownté and jantilnes whych myght have preserved hir lyff' (2.1097.14-15).^' Guenevere's efforts to articulate desire are advanced when she is kidnapped by Mellyagaunt. As Lancelot waits outside the window of the room in which she is imprisoned, and their access to one another is separated by iron bars, the queen is forced to speak her desires in order to have the company of her lover: 84 ARTHURIANA 'Wyte you well,' seyde the quene, 'I wolde as fayne as ye that ye myght com in to me.' 'Wolde ye so, madame,' seyde sir Launcelot, 'wyth youre harte that I were with you?' 'Ye, truly,' seyde the quene. 'Than shall I prove my myght,' seyde sir Launcelot, 'for youre love.' (3.1131.14-20) It may be no accident that this exchange has the feel of ritual about it. Guenevere's confession rescues her from both a physical and a metaphorical prison—her prison of silence, the prison from which, before the fire, she could utter only a cough. When she speaks her desire into existence, her words make both lovers more powerful. They give Lancelot the strength to tear open the iron bars of her prison window, and they transport Guenevere herself from object to subject with Lancelot's facilitation. Still, the queen must sacrifice something else to the fires of transformation when she is faced with a second burning after Mellyagaunt finds Lancelot's blood on her sheets. Guenevere is 'brought tyll a fyre to be brente' while Arthur and his court are helpless, 'full sore abaysshed and shamed that the quene shulde have be brente in the defaute of sir Launcelot' (3.1137.5-13). Once again, Lancelot appears at the last minute to rescue her, and once again, Guenevere frees herself from something while she waits. This time, it is the symbolic order itself that she discards, rejecting both the language that constructs her and her position within society as a merciful queen, the balance to Arthur's violent justice. Guenevere shows how she has changed when Mellyagaunt yields himself to Lancelot and asks him for mercy: Than sir Launcelot wyst nat what to do, for he had lever than all the good in the worlde that he myght be revenged uppon hym. So sir Launcelot loked uppon the quene, gyfFhe myght aspye by ony sygne or countenaunce what she wolde have done. And anone the quene wagged hir hede uppon sir Launcelot, as ho seyth "sie hym". And full well knew sir Launcelot by her sygnys that she wolde have hym dede. (3.1138.27-31—3.1139.1-3) Guenevere delivers a wordless command, and Lancelot becomes her agent, ventriloquizing her passionate rage. If she has been a symbol of mercy by granting reprieve to the penitent knights Lancelot sends her way in Malory's 'Noble Tale of Sir Launcelot du Lake,' now she will take on the guise of destroyer. And if she has been 'burned' by voicing Elaine's confession and her own desires to Lancelot, Guenevere will abandon words for the language of the body. She and her lover have now entered into a contract beyond language, beyond speech: she 'wagged hir hede,' knowing he would enact her desire.'" A rejection of any language, any order, is far too precarious a position to maintain, and Guenevere soon has another fire to face. Though her third GUENEVERE BURNING 85 confrontation with the flames is the most prominent one, the one that occurs when Lancelot and Guenevere are caught in flagrante delicto by Mordred and Aggravayne, it is differently realized. It figures, in fact, as an interrogation of the sacrificial contract en masse, in which the contract's dangers and deceptions are repeatedly rendered explicit by multiple characters. Arthur announces his need to sacrifice Guenevere in order to maintain his honor: 'I may nat with my worshyp but my quene muste suffir dethe' (3.1174.16-18).'' Lancelot makes plain that this is the role of all of Guenevere's multiple possible burnings, immolations at the altar of Arthur's own identity: 'oftyntymes, my lorde, ye have concented that she sholde have be hrente and destroyed in youre hete,' (3.1188.19-21, emphasis mine).'^ And as Gawain protests the queen's execution, Arthur declares, 'she shall have the law' (3.1175.22-23). Thanks to Lacan, we hardly need ask which law Arthur means." But Guenevere is well beyond The Law; she abandoned it to the previous pyres. In her third confrontation with death, Guenevere is both externally and internally revealed. She is now stripped of everything, existing as a kind of anti-identity. There is no sight of the flames, nor is Guenevere brought to them. Instead, she is 'dispoyled into he[r] smokke. And than her gostely fadir was brought to her to be shryven of her myssededis' (3.1177.9-11). Shriven and disrobed, Guenevere casts off all falseness, both the instability of illicit love and the mutability of earthly lovers, and awakens into a new consciousness. She is no longer waiting for Lancelot; her heavenly father has been brought to her. For if Arthur is too political and detached a lover, and Lancelot's love is too earthly, too fragile, then Guenevere can only find the perfect love in Ghrist, the only partner who adequately can return her selfsacrificing passions, their union the only love aflfair in which she, herself, can be completely sovereign. GUENEVERE BURNING Lancelot does, eventually, rescue the queen again, and she is silent in the text for some time, perhaps busy formulating what Kristeva might call a 'third attitude' in her understanding of interiority, one that entails the 'demassification' of the binary of sexual différence.'"» Yet she is faced with the unpleasant prospect of another sacrificial contract, another husband, when she is given into Mordred's care and he means to make her his queen. Provoked by this threat, Guenevere's new identity emerges, burning with passionate subjectivity. First, she deftly negotiates the limitations of Mordred's imaginary version of her while remaining true to her 'harte.' Mordred trusts her when she speaks 'fayre,' convincing him to let her go shopping in London, nurturing the illusion that she will remain bound by the constraints of her role as queen (3.1227.15-18). Instead, Guenevere, suddenly and unexpectedly, seizes the tower of London and defends it from all intruders (3.1227.18-21). A tower—if 86 ARTHURIANA not a phallus, then at least a centralized locus of patriarchal rule—is here invaded, captured, and held hostage until the death of Guenvere's would-be oppressors frees her to create a symbolic order of her own. Once released, Guenevere takes off in pursuit, not of Lancelot's loving embrace, but of her new identity: 'she stale away with fyve ladyes with her, and so she wente to Amysbyry. And there she lete make herselff a nunne' (3.1243.3-5). Before long, she becomes 'abbas and rular, as reson w[o]lde' (3.1249.2-3). Virginia Blanton points out that 'Malory stresses Guinevere's agency by using a series of action verbs: 'she stale away,' 'she went to Amysbury,' 'she lete make herselffe a nunne,' she 'wered whyght clothys and blak,' she took 'great penaunce' upon herself, 'she lyved in fastynge, prayers, and almes-dedis'; thus, Blanton concludes, 'Guinevere has chosen a path of self-governance' (58-59). Indeed, though taking a nun's habit is often described as becoming the bride of Ghrist, the position of abbess appears to be one in which Guenevere finds the freedom and sovereignty of being no one's possession but her own. This ideal arrangement is disrupted, briefly, by the arrival of Lancelot, who has come to retrieve her. Guenevere is steadfast in her rejection of him, leading some critics to believe that her passion, if not her love, has withered in the face of her penance." Yet while she may here renounce Lancelot and worldly things, Guenevere's passions have far from disappeared. The moment in which she is confronted with Lancelot is the same moment at which she reaches out to Ghrist for his embrace. She announces: Therefore, sir Launcelot, wyte thou well I am sette in suche a plyght to get my soule hele. And yet I truste, thorow Goddis grace and thorow Hys Passion of Hys woundis wyde, that aft:ir my deth I may have a syght of the blyss[ed] face of Cryste Jesu, and on Doomesday to sytte on Hys ryght syde; [fo]r as synfuU as ever I was, now ar seyntes in hevyn. And there[f]ore, sir Launcelot, I requyre the and beseche the hartily, for all the lo[v]e that ever was betwyxt us, that thou never se me no more in the visayge. (3.1252.11-20) Holbrook reminds us that 'to "see God's face" was allegorical, not literal; the expression meant that the soul was in the formless spiritual presence of its Maker in contemplation or, as in Guenevere's speech, united with the Savior after the Last Judgment' (37).'* Yet in terms of her identity, Guenevere's desire to get her 'soule hele' is linked to two important factors. The first is denying the world her 'visage,' her face. She does not want to be seen, to be rendered, by the eyes of men, to be cast again into the role of desired object. The second is her desire to enter into a mutually sacrificial, and therefore ideally loving, relationship with Ghrist, one in which she will be able to confirm her own 'healed' identity at the sight of his face. Here Lacan interrupts my description of Guenevere's progress, asking 'why not interpret a face of the Other, the God face, as supported by feminine GUENEVERE BURNING 87 jouissanceV^'' He insists that Guenevere can be read like St. Teresa, both Woman and 'the term God' merging in the Other. Perhaps I could do well enough to leave both Guenevere and Ghrist here, 'beyond the phallus.''* But instead, before both Guenevere and Ghrist become frozen within Lacan's symbolic order, banished to the Infinite wasteland of Otherness, let me warm their union a little with the pleasures of history. The pre-modern imagination, particularly when expressed by women writers, frequently dreamed of God as an erotic partner. For me, Guenevere's longing to see Ghrist's face immediately calls to mind the poetic spirituality of Marguerite Porete, Julian of Norwich, and Margery Kempe, all of whom imagine Ghrist as God's love made flesh.'' Guenevere's specific longing for Ghrist's face—for the face of God's love, forgiveness, and compassion—is a longing for the manifestation of love that is both erotic and feminine. Guenevere's desire to see Ghrist's face also speaks to an intention to make both lover and beloved corporeal, to deliver them both from the Imaginary. Moreover the queen's spirituality could have served as a cathartic release of both forbidden lust and the daily oppression of women's existence much in the way her erotic passions could have fanned vicarious flames. Ghrist's face may therefore—for Guenevere, at least—register with the erotic in an alternate symbolic order created by women, one that obliterates the dichotomies of worshipper/worshipped, desirer/desired, seeker and truth, one that may well qualify as Kristeva's 'demassification of the problem of difference,' in which 'the struggle, the implacable difference, the violence be conceived in the very place where it operates with the maximum intransigence, in other words, in personal and sexual identity itself, so as to make it disintegrate in its very nucleus.''*" Kristeva asks, 'What discourse, if not that of religion, would be able to support this adventure?''*' Fortunately for medievalists, we have the pleasure of not having to speculate, at least when it comes to the past. Janet Jesmok has argued that 'No one in the Morte demonstrates a more profound understanding of Ghristian belief than Guinevere,' and she describes Guenevere's conversion as a profound transition in Malory, one that moves 'full circle from the masculine world of chivalric action to the feminine one of spiritual subjugation.'''^ Such passion for God is foreign and far-fetched to us—it connotes madness, fanaticism, danger, and worst of all, submission.'*' What compels us to shut Guenevere's potential subjectivity down in her conversion, to render it unimaginable, is its taint of femininity. In fact, the irony of my reading is that even Kristeva's own later work categorizes medieval women who turn to the church as engaging in an 'exacerbated masochism.''*'* Perhaps the way that we must blend history and theory in order to make a reading 'fit' should teach us not to marry ourselves to one notion of interiority within medieval literature, not tofixit in a stultifying framework, a pleasure- ARTHURIANA killing ontology, but to explore instead the pleasures of the possible. And it is possible that for Guenevere, Julian, Margery, and even Marguerite, union with Ghrist is not imagined as weakness but is, instead, dreamed as the power to become impenetrable, undefiled, and pure.'" Thus, these writers can be said to reject, appropriate, and redefine both the symbolic feminine and the symbol of God so as to make the gendered binary in which each one normally figures completely meaningless. Negotiating a text from the position of the Other (the medieval or the 'feminine,' take your pick) may bring us closer to understanding medieval women. Removed as we are from the spiritual and erotic passions of the Middle Ages, we may be embarrassed by Guenevere's excesses of love, anger, and faith. Yet even if we are more comfortable when she isflingingflaming arrows in her leather bikini than flinging herself at men and God, with Guenevere as our lens, we might see and feel the medieval reader's experience in all of its unsettling complexity. Following the thread of desire that connects us to Guenevere's erotic longing, we immerse ourselves in the alterity of what, for many of us, is her difference: her silenced desire and her spiritual passion. The decadence of that immersion is where feminist critics might find our long-lost pleasure lurking. As readers, we are drawn to literature because of what is transcendent within it, the moments that we experience as a journey, not as a symptom. We want to commit ourselves to our stories as fully as Guenevere commits herself to her own objects of desire. Perhaps our svadharma is not so different from the queen's. We, too, have embarked on a path of self-sacrificing, indulgent love, even if our object of devotion is the past. WESLEYAN COLLEGE, GEORGIA Amy S. Kaufman is Assistant Professor of English and Womens Studies at Wesleyan College, Georgia. Her work includes articles on gender in medieval Arthurian literature and medievalism in contemporary culture, including advertising and video games. She is area chair of Arthurian legend for the National Popular Culture Association, is editing The Year's Work in Medievalism 2009. and is currently finishing a monograph on Malory's women. NOTES A version of this essay was presented at the 44th International Congress on Medieval Studies, May 2009, Kalamazoo, Michigan. The epigraph is translated by Mark Musa, The Portable Dante (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), p. 31, as follows: 'But if your great desire is to learn / The very root of such a love as ours / I shall tell you, but in words offlowingtears.' See, for instance, Louise Olga Fradenburg, '"So That We May Speak of Them": Enjoying the Middle Ages,' New Literary History 28.2 (1997): 205-30; Patricia GUENEVERE BURNING 89 Clare Ingham, 'The Pleasures of Arthur,' ARTHURIANA 17.4 (2007): 96-100; and the BABEL Working Group's panels at the 35th Annual Southeast Medieval Association Meeting in 2009, 'Knowing and Unknowing Pleasures,' and at the 44th International Congress on Medieval Studies in 2009, 'Are We Enjoying Ourselves? The Place of Pleasure in Medieval Scholarship.' According to Roberta L. Krueger in Women Readers and the Ideology of Gender in Old French Verse Romance (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. xiii, 'The female reader who projects herself into romance is often entrapped by her literary encounter. If she identifies with the feminine identity created by the text, she becomes an object of male desire or of exchange between men.' On the complex relationship among medieval romance, contemporary feminism, and pleasure, see Sarah Stanbury, 'The Embarrassments of Romance,' ARTHURIANA 17.4 (2007): 114-16. Examples are too numerous to rehearse in full, but some of these include Mary Etta Scott, 'The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly: A Study of Malory's Women,' Mid-Hudson Language Studies 5 (1982): 21-29; Elizabeth Archibald, 'Women and Romance,' in Companion to Middle English Romance, ed. Hank Aertsen and Alasdair A. MacDonald (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1990), pp. 153-69; Marian MacCurdy, 'Bitch or Goddess: Polarized Images of Women in Arthurian Literature and Eilms,' The Platte Valley Review 18 (1990): 3-24; Maureen Fries, 'Female Heroes, Heroines, and Counter-Heroes: Images of Women in Arthurian Tradition,' in Popular Arthurian Traditions, ed. Sally K. Slocum (Bowling Green, O H : Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1992), pp. 5-17; Lisa Robeson, 'Pawns, Predators, and Parasites: Teaching the Roles of Women in Arthurian Literature Courses,' Medieval Feminist Newsletter r<, (1998): 32-36; Maud Burnett Mclrney, 'Malory's Lancelot and the Lady Huntress,' in On Arthurian Women: Essays in Memory of Maureen Fries, ed. Bonnie Wheeler and Fiona Tolhurst (Dallas: Scriptorium Press, 2001), p. 250 [pp. 245-57]; and James Noble, 'Gilding the Lily (Maid): Elaine of Astolat,' in On Arthurian Women: Essays in Memory of Maureen Fries, p. 45 [pp. 45-57]. For characterizations of romance as a realm in which masculine knights are imperiled by the threat of 'the feminine,' see, for instance, Simon Gaunt, Gender and Genre in Medieval French Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, 'Masoch/Lancelotism,' New Literary History 28. 2 (Spring 1997): 231-60. As Sarah J. Hill points out, 'It has become critically commonplace to trivialize the role of Guenevere in Malory's work or even to condemn her as the object which prevents Lancelot from achieving the Grail.' See Hill, 'Recovering Malory's Guenevere,' in Lancelot and Guinevere: A Casebook (Routledge, 2002), p. 267 [pp. 267-89]. Repr. from Proceedings of the Medieval Association of the Midwest 1 (1991): 131-48; and Ann Dobyns, 'The Rhetoric of Character in Malory's Morte Darthur^ Texas Studies in Language and Literature x% (1986): 339 [339-52]. Among the rnany examples of the demonization or marginalization of Guenevere include Roberta L. BCrueger, 'Desire, Meaning, and the Female Reader: The Problem in Chretien's Charrete,' in The Passing of Arthur: New Essays in Arthurian Tradition, 90 5 6 7 8 9 ARTHURIANA ed. Christopher Baswell and William Sharpe (New York: Garland, 1988), pp. 31—51; Donald L. Hoffman, 'Guenevere the Enchantress,' ARTHURIANA 9.2 (1990): 32 [30—36]; John F. Plummer, 'Frenzy and Females: Suhject Formation in Opposition to the Other in the Prose Lancelot,' ARTHURIANA 6 (1996): 45-51; and Dorsey Armstrong, Gender and the Chivalric Community in Malory's Morte d'Arthur (Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 2003). Those who imagine Guenevere as Lancelot's redeemer include Edv^^ard Donald Kennedy, 'Malory's Guenevere: "A Woman Who Had Grovi^n a Soul,'" in On Arthurian Women: Essays in Memory of Maureen Fries, 35-43, p. 42; and Lori J. Walters, 'Introduction,' in Lancelot and Guinevere: A Casebook (Routledge, 2002), xiii-lxxx. p. xxxi. For more complex readings of the queen, see Hill, 'Recovering Malory's Guenevere,' in Lancelot and Guenevere, pp. 267—289; Dohyns,'The Rhetoric of Character,' 339—52; Martin B. Shichtman, 'Elaine and Guinevere: Gender and Historical Consciousness in the Middle Ages,' in New Images of Medieval Woman: Essays Toward a Cultural Anthropology, ed. Edelgard E. DuBruck (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1989): p. 258 [pp. 255-72]; Anne P. Longley, 'Guinevere as Lord,' ARTHURIANA 12.3 (Fall 2002): 49-62; Kenneth Hodges, Forging Chivalric Communities in Malory's Le Morte Darthur, The New Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2005); and Andrew Lynch, 'Guenevere and the Boys,' Presentation at the International Arthurian Society Congress, Rennes, France, July 2007. As Shichtman argues in 'Elaine and Guinevere,' in New Images of Medieval Woman, p. 255, 'Scholars have long viewed the women of medieval literature simply as being imitators of paradigms, daughters of Eve or Mary for instance. In fact, judgment of female characters has all too often been based on how well they fill their paradigmatic roles.' Linda Alcoff, 'Cultural Feminism Versus Post-Structuralism: The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory,' Signs 13.3 (1988): 431 [405-433] defines 'positionality' as 'a gendered subjectivity in relation to concrete habits, practices, and discourses' that also takes into account the 'fluidity' of these factors. This position is therefore 'a place from which meaning can be constructed rather than just discovered' (434)Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Medieval Identity Machines, Medieval Cultures 35 (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), pp. 78-115. The earlier article on which this chapter is based is even more explicit in this regard, declaring, 'Guenevere's body is not her own.. .she is a "social marker" rather than a "personality,"' (Cohen, 'Masoch/Lancelotism,' 251). See also Peggy McCracken, 'The Body Politic and the Queen's Adulterous Body in French Romance,' Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature, ed. Linda Lomperis and Sarah Stanbury (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993). McCracken's complex reading of the French queen details the specific political implications of Guenevere's 'loss of consent' (p. 35-36). Cohen, Medieval Identity Machines, p. 252 n.51. Julia Kristeva, 'Women's Time,' trans. Alice Jardine and Harry Blake, Signs 7.1 (1981): 13-35. GUENEVERE BURNING 91 10 Kristeva, 'Women's Time,' 33. 11 Kristeva, 'Women's Time,' 21, explains: 'The sharpest and most subtle point of feminist subversion brought about by the new generation will henceforth be situated on the terrain of the inseparable conjunction of the sexual and the symbolic, in order to try to discover, first, the specificity of the female, and then, in the end, that of each individual woman.' 12 Virginia Moran, 'Malory/Guenevere: Sexuality as Deconstruction,' Quondam et Euturus 1.2 (Summer 1991): 71 [70—77]. 13 The complex interiority of Malory's characters is a continuing theme in Arthurian criticism. For a few examples, see Peter R. Schroeder, 'Hidden Depths: Dialogue and Characterization in Chaucer and Malory,' PMLA 98.3 (May 1983): 374—387; C. David Benson, 'The Ending o(the Morte Darthur,' in A Companion to Malory, ed. Elizabeth Archibald and A.S.G. Edwards (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 1996). 221-38. p. 221; and K.S. Whetter, 'Characterization in Malory and Bonnie,' ARTHURIANA 19.3 (Fall 2009): 123-35. 14 Shichtman, 'Elaine and Cuenevere,' in New Images of Medieval Woman, pp. 267-8, also reads Cuenevere as a dynamic character, struggling to define herself, but his prognosis is grim: He argues that Cuenevere 'has, in most senses, failed completely, and she knows it.' He sees her conversion and retreat to a nunnery as 'an abdication, not only of authority but of responsibility as well' (p. 269). 15 All references to Malory are from The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, 3 vols., ed. Eugène Vinaver, rev. P.J.C. Field, 3d edn., 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). 16 See also Catherine Batt, Malory's Morte Darthur: Remaking Arthurian Tradition, The New Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave, 2002), p. 169, who notes that 'Cuenevere is three times threatened with burning' and 'repetition of this motif gains for it a quasi-symbolic resonance, an element of ritualization that asks us to ponder its function and meaning.' For Batt, however, that meaning is that the queen becomes 'a locus of Lancelot's interpretive memorializing' (p. 173). 17 Thomas A. Prendergast, 'The Invisible Spouse: Henry VT, Arthur, and the Fifteenth-Century Subject,' Joumal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 32.2 (2002): 306 [305-326], argues that 'Being the nexus of the king's public and private roles, [Cuenevere] is, at once, queen and marker of the king's sovereignty, spouse and symbolic representative of the people's marriage to the king.' See also Fiona Tolhurst, 'The Once and Future Queen: The Development of Cuenevere from Ceoffrey of Monmouth to Malory,' Bibliographical Bulletin of the Intemational Arthurian Society 50 (1998): 295—96 [272-308]. 18 Peter Korrel, An Arthurian Triangle: A Study of the Origin, Development and Characterization ofArthur, Guinevere and Mordred {Luàen: E.J. Brill, 1984), p. 78. 19 However, compare Hill, 'Recovering Malory's Cuenevere,' in Lancelot and Guinevere, p. 268, who sees Cuenevere's statement as exposing the way ' [w]ar and love are bound up together into the social construct of honor.' 92 ARTHURIANA 20 That is, what Kristeva might call her role in the 'sociosymbolic contract' as a 'sactificial contract,' 'Women's Time,' 25. 21 Armstrong, Gender and the Chivalric Community, p. 180. 22 Alan Gaylord, 'Back from the Queste: Maloty's Launcelot Enrages Gwenyvere,' ARTHURIANA 16.2 (Summer 2006): 80-82 [78-83], categorizes Lancelot as using 'masculine logic' and being 'very male,' whereas Guenevere is described as vulnerable and 'terribly touched'; irrational and feminine, by default. See also John Michael Walsh, 'Malory's "Very Mater of Le Chevalier du Charyot": Chatacterization and Sttucture,' in Studies in Malory, ed. James W. Spisak (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1985), p. 205-206 [pp. 199-226], who calls her 'difficult,' 'changeable,' and 'temperamental'; C. David Benson, 'The Ending of the Morte Darthur,' in A Companion to Malory p. 223; and Peter R. Schroeder, 'Hidden Depths,' 374-75. For defenses of Guenevere, see Hill, 'Recovering Malory's Guenevere,' in Lancelot and Guinevere, p. 273-75; and Tolhurst, 'The Once and Future Queen,' 299. 23 Kristeva, 'Women's Time,' 21. 24 Beverly Kennedy, 'Malory's Guinevere: A "Trew Lover,"' in On Arthurian Women: Essays in Memory of Maureen Eries, p. 27 [pp. 11-34], argues that Lancelot and Guenevere are still chaste at this point, and that their erotic encounter in Mellyagaunt's castle is their one 'regrettable lapse from chastity.' This seems to me at odds, howevet, with their profoundly intimate knowledge of one another's nocturnal quirks. 25 She is, as Leah Haught says of the Awntyrs' Guenevere, 'confined by her femininity' (17)26 Elizabeth Sklar calls Elaine 'a remarkably successful manipulator' of the patriarchal system in 'Malory's Other(ed) Elaine,' On Arthurian Women: Essays in Memory of Maureen Eries, p. 59 [pp. 59-70]. My categorization of her character is not intended to be as negative as it sounds—I agree with Sklar's assessment of Elaine as a dynamic charactet—but I suggest that her positionality differs greatly from Guenevere's as queen and wife, thereby requiring altered negotiations of selfhood and concepts of love. Katen Ghetewatuk, in Marriage, Adultery, and Lnheritance in Malory's Morte Darthur (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2006), p. 70, also notes Elaine's attention to pragmatic wifely duty in this speech. Likewise, see Joseph D. Parry, 'Following Malory out of Arthut's World,' Modern Philology 95.2 (Nov. 1997): 147-69, who argues for the purity andfidelity,if not the passion, of Elaine's love for Lancelot. 27 On Malory's sympathy for Guenevere in this episode, see Kenneth Hodges, 'Haunting Pieties: Malory's Use of Chivalric Christian Exempla Afi:er the Grail,' ARTHURIANA 17.2 (2007): 35-36 [28-48]. 28 Kristeva, 'Women's Time,' 19. 29 Others intetptet this episode as a divide between Guenevete's public and private personas. See Dobyns, 'The Rhetotic of Character,' 347. Hodges, Eorging Chivalric Communities, p. 140, also believes that Guenevere is 'changing more deeply. She began the episode, añer all, by telling Lancelot not to stay with her; and it is not GUENEVERE BURNING 93 too much larer that, after Arthur's death, she will refiise Lancelot's proposal in favor of a nunnery.' 30 For Lancelot as Guenevere's agent, see Armstrong, Gender and the Chivalric Community, p. 191. 31 For Arthur's own internal predicament here, see Prendergast, 'The Invisible Spouse,' 313-15. 32 See Roberr L. Kelly, 'Malory and the Common Law: Hasty Jougement in the "Tale of the Death of King Arthur,'" Medievalia et Humanistica 22 (1995): 111-40. Kelly deconstructs the charge of treason to suggest the king's rashness and inappropriate behavior in ways that accord with Lancelot's accusation that the queen was to burn 'in your heat.' 33 For a description of Lacan's Law as symbolic pact that 'superimposes the reign of culture over the reign of nature,' signified in the Name of the Father and solidifying kinship relations, see Ecrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York and London: Norton, 2002), p. GG. 34 According to Kristeva, 'Women's Time,' 34, 'demassification of the problem of difference' implies shattering constructions of sexual difference in order to rebuild personal identity. The expanded version of her description can be' found on p. 86 of this article. 35 Moran, 'Sexuality as Deconstruction,' 75, and Cherewatuk, Marriage, Adultery, and Lnheritance, p. 128, see this spiritual transformation as a renunciation of passion and desire. 36 Cf. Mickey Sweeney, 'Divine Love or Loving Divinely?: The Ending of Malory's Morte Darthur^ ARTHURIANA 16.2 (2006): j^jjG {7^-77), who sees Guenevere's harsh words as punishment for Lancelot's sins and an abandonment of the love for which he sacrificed everything. 37 Lacan, Le Séminaire, LivreXX: Encore (Paris: Seuil, 1975), p. 71. Translations from On Feminine Sexuality the Limits of Love and Knowledge: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX, Encore ip/2-ip/j, ed. Bruce Fink, trans. Jacques Alain-Miller (New York: Norton, 1988), pp. 64-77. 38 Lacan, Le Séminaire, LivreXX, ç.77. 39 Marguerite Poret, The Mirror of Simple Souls, trans. J.C. Marier and Judith Grant (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999); Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Lynn Staley (Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University, 1996); Julian of Norwich, A Book of Showings to the Anchoress Julian of Norwich, ed. Edmund CoUedge and James Walsh, 2. vols (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1978). 40 Kristeva, 'Women's Time,' 34. 41 Kristeva, 'Women's Time,' 34. 42 Janet Jesmok,'Guiding Lights: Feminine Judgement and Wisdom in Malory's Morte Darthur,' ARTHURIANA 19.3 (2009): 39-40 [34-42]. 43 For Porete's concept of the Annihilated Soul as specifically feminine, see Jane Chance, The Literary Subversions of Medieval Women, The New Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 7G. 94 ARTHURIANA 44 Kristeva, 'Stabat Mater,' in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p.i8i (pp.160-86). 45 Cohen, Medieval Identity Machines, pp.154-87, provides a compelling reading of Margery Kempe in particular as having composed a text that violates proscribed boundaries. Copyright of Arthuriana is the property of Arthuriana and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.