UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA

REPRESENTATIONS OF IDENTITY IN THE MIDDLE ENGLISH ROMANCES

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial Mllment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

Edmonton, Alberta Spring 1997 Acquisitions and Acquisitions et BibliOgraphic sentics . services bibliogmphiques

The author has gramed a non- L'auteur a accordé une licence non exclusive licence dowing the exclusive pennettant à la Natiod Library of Canada to Bibliothèque nationaie du Canada de reproduce, loan, distn'bute or seii reprodwre,p&er, àïsûibuaou copies of hismer thesis by any means vendre des copies de sa thèse de and in any form or format, making quelqpe manière et sous quelque this thesis adable to interested forme que ce soit pour mettre des persons. exemplaires de cette thèse à la disposition des personnes intéressées.

The author retains ownership of the L'auteur conserve la propriété du copyright in merthesis. Neither &oit d'auteur qui protège sa thèse. Ni the thesis nor substantial extracts la ihèse ni des extraits substantiels de fiom it may be printed or otherwike celle-ci ne doivent être imprimés ou reproduced wïth the author's autrement reproduits sans son permission- autorisation. For my parents, with gratitude Scholars have long recognid that identity is a crucial issue in the Middle

English verse romances. Most studies of identity in the romances, however, have essumed a mode1 of identity based on an autonomous, psychologized, individualized self separate fiom and opposecl to an extdworld; the few recent studies to have posited other models for identity have tended to focus on single te-, such as sir

GreenKniphtin this study 1explore representations of identity in a broad swey of the

Middle English romances of the thirteenth ind fourteenth centuries, defining identity as a

within larger ideological spaces, or "recognitionsystems," rather than as an extension of personality. The basic narrative pattern of these te- can then be understood as a displacement of a central character or characters fiom a position of identity, and the eventual recovery of that position. The three narrative structures of displacement, disguise, and recognition, while atnmiiag the identities constructed by the recognition systems of each te- also foreground the paradoxes, tensions, and discontinuities involved in these recognition systems. Fioally, the Middle English romances, foregrouding their fictionality, dso imply that narrative itself is a recognition system, and that the patterns and structures of the romances are involved not only in the identities of their characteis but also in the identities of their readers. 1 have always found the Department of Engiish at the University of Alberta-faculty, staff?feiiow graduate students-tremendously supportive. in particular, 1 wodd like to th& the members of my supmrisory wmmittee for theu help with this pject: Gle~ Burger, whose comments challengecl me to diinL both wm bmadly and more carefully; Jim Marino, who guided me thugh the ~oriaipro@ that inspireci this thesis; and especiaiiy my supervisor, Stephen Reimer, whose advice, encouragement, reliability, and patience dethe writing of this dissertation a pleasue.

Less obviously, thÏs project owes a great deai to the kindness of the many nonacadernic friends and associates who fed me, rescued me kmobscure backcountry locations, allowed me to drive large decrepit vehicles, remembend me in their prayers, and generally helped me not to take myseiftoo seriously. They know who they are. TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 1

The Voice in the Chapel: Issues ...... -1

Chapter 2

The Arming of the Knight: Definitions ...... 3 1

Chapter 3

The Woman in the Boat: Structures ...... -56

Chapter 4

The King on the Shore: Displacement...... 74

Chapter 5

The Homed Horse: Disguise ...... 94

Chapter 6

The Man in Red Armour: Recognition ...... 1 1 1

Chapter 7

The Knight of the Lion: Implications ...... 130 Cbapter 1

Tbe Voice in the Chapel: Issues

"But I1m a serpent, 1tell you!" said Alice. "I'm a- Pm a-" "Weii! are you?" said the Pigeon. "1 cmsee youlre trying to invent something !"'

In the fourteenth-century Middle English verse romance Yw-d Gawathe knight Ywain, despairing and alone, enters a secluded chapel in the wildemess. There he is unexpectedly questioned:

Als Sir Ywayn made his maw In be chapel ay was me And herd his murnyng hdy al1 Thorgh a crevice of be wall, And sone it said with simepel chere, "What ertoy bat murnes here?" "A man," he sayd, "sumtyme 1 was. What ertow? Tel me or 1 pas." "1am," it sayd, "pe sariest wight, bat ever Wed by &y or nyght." 'Way," he said, "by Saynt Martyne, bare es na sorow mete to myne, Ne no wight so wil of wane. 1 was a man, now am 1naw." (2103-1Q2

This little exchange is one of a number of interrogations in Ywain andthat revolve around the question "What ertow?" The impetus for Ywain's adventures cornes fiom a story told by Colgrevance-iike Ywain, a knight of Arthur's court; Colgrevance

' Lewis Carroll, Alic_e's Adventures in Wonderm in The AmedAlice, ed. Martin Gardner, 2nd ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970) 76.

Al1 quotations from YwudGawa are fiom YwabdGawaia ed. Albert B. Friedman and Norman T. Harrington, EETS 254 (London: Mord UP,1964). 2 describes his meeting with a huge and hideous churl, with whom he exchanges the question "What ertow?" Later, aAcr Ywain defeats the Knight of the Fountain, takes bis place, and defeats his compatriot Kay, mur asks Ywain the same question: "What man ertow?" (1341). Finaliy, when Ywain in disguise meets his fiiend Gawain in single combat, Gad,astonished by the fortitude of his anonymous adversary, pauses to ask

"What man ertou?" (3655). The merto that question is of insistent importance in the world of -m the poem is full of mysterious threatening figures inched to fight first and ask-or answer-questions later. In Ywain's case, tw, the question

"Matertow?" is sometimes difficult to mer: fbt a knight of Arthur's court, he becomes the Knight of the Fountain, returns to Arthur's court, goes mad, regains his sanity, and takes on the alias "the Knight of the Lion." Evidently identity, specifically

Ywain's identity, is a fiindamentai concem of the narrative; evidently also, as Ywain's pecuiiar answer in the chapei shows, identity in Ywain ug~is not a predetennined quantity but is more oftm represented as ambiguous, indeterminate, hidden, or nonexistent.

This study explores the ways in which the Middle English romances interrogate and represent identity. These te- contiaually foregromd matters of identity; aliases, disguises, recognitions, and misrecognitions form a Dgniscant portion of the apparatus of the romances. Indeeà, a preoccupation with "identity" is often cited as a primary characteristic of the medieval romances. Lee C. Ramsey's book on the Middle English romances claims that "their subject is the search for individual identity within an already established society." Edmund Reiss suggests that "the search for identity, the attempt to fhd one's self, may be what romance is actually about" Franco Carcüni disthe

romance knight "a human type in search of an identity and ~e~awarenessthat elude

hi~n."~These scholars, however, while insisting on the importance of "identity"to the

medieval romances, nevertheless faii to explain what they mean by "identity," 0th- than

connecting it with the terms "individuai" and "seif"-equaiiy problernatic terms that

deserve closer scmtiny.

A venerable scholarly tradition considers emphasis on "the individuai"-

specifically, the pnvileging of the individual over the social-to be one of the demg

characteristics of medievai romance. The mots of this tradition lie in the critical

distinction between "Epic"and "Romance,"a distinction inauentidly articulated by W. P.

Ker in his 1896 study Epic Rom.Epic, writes Ker, "implies some weight and

solidity"; romance, on the other hand, involves "mystery and fanta~y."~Ker's association

of "romance"with "mystery and fantasyN-an association perhaps more appropriate m

Keats than to Malory-has been developed by later scholars to involve a distinction

between epic as concerned with social, "objective"realities and romance as concemed

with individual, "subjective"experience. Thus Erich Auerbach, in Mimesis. foiiows a

chapter on Le Ch- de with a chapter on the chivairic romance Yvain by

Chrétien de Troyes, arguing that the whist~rid-politicalelement" of the Old French epic

. . Lee C. Ramsey, (Bloomington: Indiana OP, 1983) 3; Edmund Reiss, "Romance," P- of &@val E- ed. Thomas J. Heffeman (Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1985) 119; Franco Cardini, "nieWarrior and the Knight," ed. Jacques Le Goff, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane condon: Collins, 1990) 9 1.

W.P. Ker, wndRow (1896, rev. 1908; New York: Dover, 1957) 4. "is abandonecl by the courtly noveln and replaceci by "apersonal and absolute ideaY5 R.

W. Southem follows Ker in associating this Jhift in literary sensibility with "the growth

of seLf~onsciousness"and "the discovery ofthe individuai" in tweuth-century Europe;

Southern surnmarizes changes in politicai thought, social organbtion, the structure of

the Church, theology, education, and literature in the tweifb century in the last chapter of

of the entitling that chapter "From Epic to Romance.'" . One extensive argument for this position is ROMW. Hanningts .

Twm.Hanning's book concentrates on French romance,

especiaiiy on the romances of Cbrétien de Troyes, and so has limited applicability to the

English works; Hanning himseif takes care to note the specificity of the "cultural moment" oftwelflli-century French romance.' But his analysis is worth at least some consideration, for it articulates assumptions and categories that underlie much critical comment on subjectivity and identity in the Engiish romances. For Hanning, "chivalric romance, as it emerged in tweifth-century coiinly society, offered a literary form in which to work out the implications of individuality-implications which tweLAh-century

Erich Auerbach, Mimesis. trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1953) 122, 134.

R. W. Southmi, 9(New Haven: Yale üP, 1953). See Ker 322-23. Marc Bloch entities one section of ml Se"The Growth of Self- Consciousness": see Bloch, vol. 1, mwthof Ties of trans. L. A. Manyon (Chicago: U of Chicago- P, 1961) 10608. See also Colin Moms,- miscovery of vidu 1050-1 3.00 (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1972), and Southern, "Medieval Humanism," (and_Qtberord:Blackwell, 1970) 29-60. . . 'Robert W. Hanning, The- Twe@h-C-~omance (New Haven: Yale UP, 1977) 6. theology and philosophy were beginning to confront."' In another passage, which 1 quote at length because it raises a number of issues pertinent to this study, Hanning represents chivalric romance as

the story, nay the celebration, of the messity of men (and women) to faw the fact of their private destiny, and to attempt to anain that vision which, bom within the messes of the self, &es of life a pmcess of dynamic se~cealization.The great adventure ofchivalric romance is the adventure of becoming what (and who) you think you can be, of transforming the of an inner self into an which impresses upon an external world the fiict of personal, selfchosen destiny, and therefore of an innetdetermineci identity. Thus the chivalric romance urges the centrality of berawareness on its audience as the key to happiness, and in the process effectively defines man as the prodisct of inner vision shaping extemal experience. Since each person's inner experience wiii be different and unique, subjective, and marked by crises and nuning points vaüd for him alone; and since in the romance plot there is no larger social or providentiai system giving meaning-the same meaningrnt0 all huma.Lives operating within it; it follows that these courtly narratives are making a strong and persuasive statement for the centrality of individual experience in our understanding of IXe and its meaning?

Thus the romance bas ken defined against the epic as a narrative about the self-assertive, questing, self-SUfficient hem: John Stevens claims, rather grandiosely, that medieval romances "ask the question-What is Man? What is Man None?--and try to give an

This mode1 of medieval romance as an individual's quest for "dynamic self- realization" luis long dominated scholarship on the English medieval romances. Thus A.

a Hanning 3.

Hanning 4-5.

'O John Stevens, JMedjgval R- (London: Hutchinson, 1973) 80. 6 C. Gibbs, discussing the "Romance qualitiesnof Homer's in an introduction to an anthology of Middle English romances, identifies as one of those quaiities the idea that

"the hem is acting, comparatively speaking, as an individuai hem rather than as the representative of bis society"; later, quoting Auerbach's Mimesis. Gibbs claims that "The great theme of the chivalric romance is se~realization-inthe best work, the adventures are not there for thet own sake, but to cal1 foah the very essence of the knight's ideal of rnanh~oct"~~John Finlayson shdarly in&& on the isolation of the knight, defining

"romance" as "atale in which a knight achieves great feats of anris, almost solely for his own bs et in a series of adventures which have no social, political, or religious motivation and little or no cormection with medieval actuality."I2 Even a brief survey of recent scholarsfiip reveals that this paradigm is stiU strongly influentid. Andrea Hopkins, who quotes Auerbach, invokes the opposition of epic and romance, claiming that in romance "the hero is essentidy solitary, and typically does not engage in combat with an enemy for the purpose of protecting his society and lord, w> much as seek adventure with a view to proving himseK"'3 In a ment collection of critical essays, Frans Diekstra asseris that the medieval romances "are for the greater part quests or tests in which the

l1 A. C. Gibbs, ed., (London: Arnold, 1966) 4,8. See Auerbach 135. Sigaificantly, while Auerbach wurites of the "self-realizatbn" of the Gibbs writes of the "self-realization"of the ka.

l2 John Finlayson, "Definitions of Middk English Romance," -view 15 (1980): 55.

l3 Andm Hopkins, ne Sinful (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990) 7. 7

hero stnves after ~e~fealisationtlwugh the exercise of exemplary vime."I4 Elsewhere

in the same volwne, Bart Veldhoen, again appeahg to the epic/mmance opposition,

writes that romances exhibit "patterns of se~di~covey."'~Anne Rooney, discussing &

GaGwrites that Gawain's "confÎontationwith his own mortality

. .. is a psychologid acceptance and maturing process which involves coming to terms

with his uitimate inescapable destiny" and appeais to "the realism we see in the portraya1

of Ga~ain."'~Ad Putter writes of l'psychologicai depth" in the heroes of Chrétien's poems and in the hero of Sir Ga- ûrggggof their "need for continuous

self-evaluation"and their restoration to "~e~awareness."~~And Velma Bourgeois

Richmond mentions "self-knowledge"as one of the "essential experiences" of romance.18

It is certainly difficdt to deny that a concen with what might be cailed

"individuality"is at some level basic to medieval romance. Paul Strohm, attempthg to

l4 Frans Diekstra, "Narrative Mode and Interpretation of Gawwdthe Green -" to ed. Henk Aerîsen and Alasdair A. MacDonald (Amsterdam: VU UP,1990) 59.

Is Bart Veldhoen, "Psychologyand the Middle English Romances," Aertsen and MacDonald 1 14.

l7 Ad Putter, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 0(Mord: Clarendon, 1995) 246. To do Putter credit, the book argues that Chrétien and the Gawain-pet were of the romance tradition; in this study, however, 1 wish to emphasize the continuities between Sir Gawuthe Cl- and the English romance tradition of which it was also a part.

l8 Velma Bourgeois Richmond, nie of G~~,v_ofWarwick(New York: Garland, 1 996) 6. recover medieval definitions of Old French and Middle English romance. cites

the yyaip of Chtétien de Troyes:

Et mes sire Yvains lors s'en antre el vergier, après ii sa rote voit apoié desor son cote .i. riche home qui se gisoit sor .i. drap de soie; et lisoit une pucele devant lui en .i. romans, ne sai de cui. (5365-70)19

Yvain and his companions enter the orcharci of the cade of Pesme Avanture, where they hda rich man iistening to his daughter reading "a romance about 1 know not whom."

Here, argues Strohm, Chrétien iiidicates that a romance is about someone. "a narrative of the deeds of a single pmtag~nia."~~Romances, where titled in manuscript, are known by theu principal characters; Dieter MehI in his survey of the Middle Engüsh romances finds that poem after poem "centresaround the hero" or is chiefly concerned with "the glorification of the her~."~'

But the issue is not so much "thecentrality of individual experience" in the romances as the assumptions that underlie the rhetoric of "individual experience."

l9 Chrétien de Troyes, The the mn.or YvwCm au Lion). ed. and tram William W. Kibler (New York: Garland, 1985): "My lord Yvain and his Company enter the @en. There he sees, reclining upon his elbow upon a silken mg, a gentleman, to whom a maiden was readiag hma romance about I hownot whom" [Chrétien de Troyes, trans, W. W. Comfort (London: Dent, 1914) 2501.

*O Paul Strohm, *The Ongin and Meaning of Middle English -" 10 (1977): 4.

21 Dieter Mehl, Mi-ces of the Fou- Cen- (London: Routledge, 1968) payim. nie romances that Mehl discusses in this respect are && Hani. -sconus. Sir De- Perdand m. 9 Hanning tepresents "individual experience"as sharply distinct hm,and indeed opposed

to, "extemal experience"; the same distinction infonns his opposition of "inner vision"

and the inert materials of the extemai world that the individuai's "innerawareness"

shapes. The "individual," according to this view, is defineci against rather than defïned by the "extemal world." Thus Velma Bourgeois Richmond wrïtes of the Middle English romance hero that "typicaliyhis point of view is wt that of the world in which he must live; most fkquently it comes hma heightened perception, a sense of value that gives the human being a dignity and sipnincance which are denied or rejected by the world which challenges hirn."* Hanning indicates two coroliaries of this concept of the individual: the first that "inner experience" is unique to each individual, and thus essentiaiiy subjective; the second that meaning is generated by rather than imposed upon this inner awareness and is therefore determiwd by "the individual" rather than by any configuration of "extemal e~perience."~~The use of the word "individual"is significant in this context, for the word originally meant "indivisible"; Hanning represents the medieval subject according to the terms of liberal humanism, as "a self-identical entity defined through its difference fiom an externaiized reality designated as society, or

* Velma Bourgeois Richmond, P- of (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1975) 17.

Hanning 4-5. history, or the w~rld"~~-anautonomous, seIf-tealizing, seEwfEcient wholeness tratlscending the circumstatlces of history.

These assumptions are problernatic in a number of ways. First, the distinction between "epic"and "romance"is rather questionable- Ker, in claiming that BeoWYlf was an epic, was compelied to dismiss the three monster4ghts as peripheral to the action because they were not suitably epic material. D. M. Hill has also appealed to Beowulf in arguing for a continuity tather dian an opposition between epic and romatl~e.~Northrop

Frye subsumes epic into romance, calhg romance "the epic of the creature" (as opposed to myth, "the epic of the creator") and discussing BeoWDante's as

romance^.'^ More to the point, the Middle English romancers do not seem aware of any such distinction. Lists of romances or romance-heroes in Middle English conventionally include allusions to both the Matter of France and the Matter of Rome. Just after mentioning Arthur and Gawain, the author of &&rd Coer de writes

Off Turpyn, and of Oger Daneys; Off Troye men rede in ryme, What werre ber was in olde tyme; Off Ector, and off Achylles, What folke bey slowe in bat pres. (16-20)27

. . 24 Lee Patterson, (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1987) 24-25. For the history of the word "individual," see the entry for "individual"in Raymond Williams, Keywor&, rev. ed. (New York: Mord UP,1983) 161-65.

zs D. M. Hill, "Romance as Epic,"Enplish 44 (1963): 95- 107.

26 Northrop Frye, Sec& Sc (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1976) 15, and v of .a. (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957) 37,57.

27 Al1 quotations fkom wdCoer de J .vw are hm uS ber Law- ed. Karl Brumer (Vienna: Braumiiller, 1 9 13). II Gibbs may point to the Ilu as the prototype of epic and to the as the prototype

of romance, but, although several versions of the sîege of Troy exist in Middle English, the medieval English romancers do not seem at al1 intemted in the waaderings of

Odysseus.

Sweying the scholarship that followed Ker's W. \K. R. Barron concludes:

No absolute distinction betwem epic and tomance on grounds of form and theme has pmved possible; judgements which con- the thematic senoumess, solidity and realism of epic with the implied triviality and unreality of romance reflect modem prejudices or relate to the social conditions which produced them rather than to theu distinctive literary characterisfjc~?~

As Barron Mplies, the epidromance distinction involves a value judgement that typically privileges epic over romance; when Ker contrasts the "tragic strength" of epic with the

"lighterand fainter grace" of romance, he represents epic as worthy of serious study, and romance, by contrast, as fnvolou~.~~Auerbach argues that the characteristic attributes of chivalric romance, as typified by Chrétien, were "a hindrance to the full apprehension of reality,"a kind of tidai backwater in the gieat flow of the European literary consciousness toward fUy psychologized naMalistic representation? One anthologist apologizes for the romances' lack of "inner conttadictions, ethical standards based on elements other

Ker 32 I . Ker devotes five-sixths of to Epic and only one chapter to Romance.

30 Auerbach 13 8. 12

than convention and lip service, mie inner turmoil."" The rhetonc of "scErealization"

that has surrounded JO much Middle English romance scholarship may be, in part, an

attempt to validate the romances by reading into them a lchd of psychologicai and

spiritual education that recovers practical value in becoming an expression of self-

understanding and an assertion of (twentieth-century) individuality. HHanningls

vocabuiary, for example, attempts to establish that medieval romance is mything but

fiivolous: it is about the "necessity"of facing a fact, the attainment of a "visiont';it is

"dynamic," a "great adventure"; it is concemed with '.the key to bappiness"; it makes "a

strong and persuasive statement for the centraiity of individual experience in our

understanding of life and its rneanir~g."~~

Whether or not Ha~ing'sassertions can be profitably applied to French medievai romance," they can be applied only with considerable difEculty to the Middle English romances. The chanicters of the medieval English romances are, as Sands has cornplaineci, "flatl';uthey show a remarkable lack of sehiwarness, are not given to introspection, and, rather than king ~e~assertive,are more often passive and helpless

3L Donald B. Sands, cd., Middle (1966; Exeter: U of Exeter P, t 986) 7-

32 Hanning 4-5.

33 Tony Hunt suggests, indeed, that they cannot: "To insist that the idea of self- realization &et an 'identity crisis' is the constitutive element of the twelfbcentury romance is admittedly attractive, but it is also to neglect considerable expanses of the te- in question." See Tony Hunt, de Troves: YvwChevalim (London: Grant, 1986) 17-1 8. Hunt also notes that in most French romances "there is remarkably little explicit treatment of the inner life of the hem."

Sands 7. 13 figures, not obviously interested in vigorously impressing their pemnaiities onto the world. Even in a poem such as -val of in which the protagonist is forced to leam the subtieties of civilkition aAa having been brought up in the uncivilized forest, Perceval's "innerexperience" is not stresse& Frankenstein's monster, in Shelley's novel, is far more seKaware than is the young Perceval. Furthermore, the "self- realization" mode1 of romance does no justice to the diversity of the Middle English romance corpus. Finlayson, after defining the "basic paradigm" of the romance as "The knight rides out alone to seek adventure," proceeds to exclude hmthe genre, as Hopkins points out, "about haif the ciinent canon": the Alliterative Urte Arthiire. the Alexander poems, the Chademagne poems, the so-called "homiletic romances" (Finlayson uses

Amis as an example), and "romanticized folktales" such as Sir

Obviously, insistence on a such a ngorous definition of the genre cm be severely

ümiting. Leu obviously, the "~e~reaiization"model of romance tends to privüege certain texts over others, since some texts-for example, Sir Ga- -in which, as we have seen, scholars are apt to fïnd various shades of psychological realism-are more amenable to that denniaon than are the cornmon nui of

Middle English romances. Any aceount of the relationship between an admittedly idiosyncratic text such as Sir and the Literary tradition in which it positions itself nsts on a choice of pcesuppositions: we may look on Sir-

d the Ciien as an mode1 text, exemplifjhg a standard to which other texts

3s Finlayson 55, 168-79. Hopkins, 14-20, provides a fairly detailed criticism of Finlayson's definition. 14 aspile but which other texts Wyfail to reahas wmpletely, or we may consider the idiosyncracies of SU as anddence of the ways in which that text negotiates the conventions of medievai romance tradition and, perhaps, departs significantly hmthose conventions in some respects. Ifwe choose the latter course, as 1 wiil, we WUneed to examine the "run-of-the-mill"romances to understand properiy what those generic conventions are.

Part of the reluctance of scholars to investigate the more obscure romances, such as those of the Charlemagne cycle, perhaps stems fkom the idea, inherent in the epiclromance distinction, that the romances have very littie to do with social realities.

But the tenuousness of such a claim can be illustrateci by a glance at Morton Bloomfield's attempt to distinguish between epic and romance on the basis of "motivational structure":

The hem of the romance is then typicaliy cailed, has a vocation, uniilce the hero of the epic who acts because he wants fame or renown. The hero of romance fights for himseif; at a lady's mysterious command; at his kingrs order; because he has to. The hem of the epic fights for a rational object, a tangible retum?

It is difficult to see how "fame or renown" is any more rational or tangible than a "king's order." In any case, social realities occur with embarrassing fkequency in the Middle

English romances: we might consider, for example, the propagandistic account of the

Crusades in Richard Cow de Lrrpa or the profound concem of- with law and justice, or the anxiety over pmperty rights displayed in m.Discwing and the group of romances rrlated to it, Elizabeth Archibald *tes that there is "a

36 Morton Bloomfield, "Episodic Motivation and Marvels in Epic and Romance," in his (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1970) 1 12. 15

considerable degree of realism in these stories. 1do not mean that many medieval women

spent years drifting around the Meditenanean in tiny bats; but the isolation and

vulnerability of women, panicularly when mdedinto a foreign community or one far

fiom home, were no doubt very reai poblems as weU as traditionai literary therne~."~~

Underlyhg the rnarvels of ---the stonn-inducing stone, the fiiendiy

lion, the giants with which Ywain must fight-is a story concemed most cruciaiiy with

Ywalli's responsibilities as Arthurian knight, as husband, as feudal lord.

What alternatives exist, then, to the "self-realization"mode1 of the Middle English romances? A scholarly tradition at lest as old as Ker maintains that, in Jacob

Burkhardt's words, medieval man "was comcious of himself only as a member of a race, people, Party, family, or corporation-only through some general ~ategory."~~In this scheme, the "individuai"does not exist, but ody monolithic hierarchies that define the categones of humanity. Lee Paîterson has argued that such banishment of the Middle

Ages into the abyss of pre-consciouslless is a feature of Renaissance scholarship that attempts to define the Renaissance by setting it against, and privileging it over, an unexaLnitled Other; if modem consciousness came into king with the Renaissance, then history begins with the Renaissance, and whatever came before it need not be too closely considered. Patterson fin& that this school of thought, in the guise of Marxist historicism, is still strongly inauential among Renaissance scholars. The main probiem

'' EIizabeth Archibald, "Women and Romance," Aertsen and MacDonald 162.

* .- . '* Jacob Burckhardt, &2nd ed., tram. S. G. C. Middlemore, ed. L. Goldscheider (1 878; London: Phaidon, 1944) 8 1. 16

with this approach, Patterson points out, is tbat it implies "a hierarchicai Middle Ages in

which not only alternative modes of thought but thought per se is pmscribed-an accomt

that at one stroke wipes out not meteiy the complexity of medieval society but the

centuries of struggie by which medievai men and women sought to remake their

~ociety."~~Both these approaches, the humankt and the Burkhardtian, fk the medieval

subject as a stable, self-evident entity-either because of its transcendence of, or its

subjection to, an extdworld.

Recently some have attempted to provide alternative approaches, both by

attempting to place Middle English romance texts more fMywithin their historiai and

social conte-, and by radicaily challenging static models of subjectivity. Stephen

Knight's 1986 article, "The Social Function of the Middle English Romances," for example, examines ways in which various Middle English romances can be read as

"central to," "peripheral to," or "critical of' feudalism? David Aen in . Gender.. attempts to break down the "static dualismtlof

"individuai" and "society": "The generation of meanùig and individd experience cannot be understood apatt from the social relations of a specific community, its organi7ations of power manifest in the ptevailing arrangements of class, gendcr, political mie, religion,

39 Lee Patterson, "On the Margin: Postmodernism, Ironic Wistory, and Medieval Studies," 65 (1990): 97.

Stephen Knight, "The Social Function of the Middle English Romances," &dieval Literatiite, ed. David Aers (Brighton: Harvester, 1986) 99-122. arrned force, and, not inficquently, race.'"' The last chapter of Am's book discusses &

a- a- C-. More recently, a 1993 antbology of scholarship on medieval Engiish poetry includes a number of articies that situate medieval poems

"amidsta number of coaflicting cultumi and textuai milieux, not just the dominant traditions of orthodoxy," and trace the ways in which a medieval text "negotiates a range of ideological demands and generic or intertextual aff?liation~.'"~FinaiIy, we may tum to

H. Marshall Leicester's study of Chaucer, SSelf, or to Carolyn

Dinshaw's 1994 article on Sireandi. Leicester deliberately rejects "the essentialist or so-caiied humanist view of the self as a substance, something permanent and fiindamentaliy unchanging," proposing iDstead a view of the subject as the construction of "various forces" : "unconsciousdesire, concealed or mystified material and social power, the structures of laquage, and of course consciousness itself." The distinction between "individuaIWand "extemal experience" so fiindamental to Hanning's conception of individuality is here obiiterated; instead of an autonomous "inner

. . " David Aers, 9(London: Routledge, 1988) 3-4.

42 Stephanie Trigg, ed,, Poetry (London: Longman, 1993) 6. See especially Jill Mana, "Priceand Value in SY. Gaw&It 1 19-37; Sheila Fisher, "Leaving Morgan Aside: Women, History and Revisionkm in B"138-55; Sheila Delany, "The Romance of Kingship: -" 172-85; and Lee Pattemon, 'The Romance of History and the Alliterative me*" 2 17-49. All of these papers had been previously published. See also Marina S. Brownlee, Kevin Bmwnlee, and Stephen G. Nichols, eds., ne New M- (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 199 l), especially the introduction, "The New Medievalism: Tradition and Discontinuity in Medieval Culture," by Nichols, and Richard C. Trexier, ed., -Q in Groyp~(Birmingham, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Te- and Studies, 1985), especially pp. 4 and 16 of Trexler's introduction. awareness" shaping the extemal world, Leicester's "subject"is an intersection of

institutions and desires, inseparable hmthe forces that dehe itd3 DiaShaw sees

medieval subjectivity, in the romances, represented as performative; the chivairic world is

"a world in which identity is constituted by the performance of acts precisely coded

according to the normative configurations of gender and desire." Both these approaches

envision subjectivity as unstable, as potentially and actually evading definition; Dinshaw

mentions that & Ga* "unfixes" Gawain's identity?

On the one han& then, we have "the individual" or "the self' conceived of as

autonomous, unique, coherent in time, essentiaiiy stable, subject to or subjecting a

distinct extemal world; 1have dwelt at melength upon this concept because it seems to

be assumed consciously or otherwise, by most critics who see "self-realization" or the celebration of the individual as the driving power of the Middle English romances. On the other band we have various views of the "subject" (the difference in terminology is deliberaîe) as indeterminate, didiscontinuous, and unstable, as radidy and uitimateiy contexnialized in the interplay of bistoncal, psychological, and ideological forces; the scholarly work that takes this approach to English medieval romance is still relatively scanty, and tends to focus on Chaucer and on Sir Ga- then-. 1 will approach this debate rather obliquely, investigating what 1 will cd"identity"-which is, if nothing else, the fiontier through which subjectivity enters the realm of challenge and

43 H. Marshall Leicester, Jr., The(Berkeley: U of Cal ifornia P, 1 990) 14.

" Carolyn Dinshaw, "A Kiss is Just a Kiss: Heterosexuaiity and its Consolations in the Gm" 24 (1994): 21 1-12. 19 interrogation and test. A recent article that perhaps cornes close to my approach is one by

John Plrnnmer on Sit in "Si@@ing the Self," Plummer argues that identity in that poem "is essentially a social constmct. Weare the 'person' (as opposed to the pmly biological object) th,simuitaneously, we daim to be and our contemporarïes accept us as being. The arena for the negotiation of this identity is a linguistic one."45in the Middle English romances identity also has the advaotage of king fairly easy to define in terms of narrative structures; the conventions of romance are remarkably stable. In the context of these conventions identity is, 1 suggest, configured by the romance protagonist's relations to, and transactions with, the instiîutions and structures, explicit and impiicit, involved in the narrative. In spite of the consistency of romance conventions that defhe identity, however, identity itself, as Plummer points out. is never a given in these texts; debates over whether subjectivity is essential or comtructed, whether a fonn of individual agency or a configuration of institutions, appear in these texts as tensions that we can explore but may wtbe able to resolve.

With these issues in mind, let us remto our distressed Ywain. The chape1 in which he "makes his moan" is in fact the site at which his adventures in this poem began and to which he continuaily rems; it is a geographical constant at which Ywain's situation is repeatedly measured. The mysterious voice is actually that of Lunet, Ywain's helper earlier in the poem, but we have not yet been informed of that fact. Again, this

John Plummer, "Signifyingthe SelE Lanpage and Identity in sir Gaw- meen B" and ed. Robert J. Blanch Miriam Youngerman Miller, and Julian N. Wasserrnan (Troy, NY:Whitston, 199 1) 195. exchange is one of a series of similar interrogations in Y- CmHpin, but the

answers that both parties give in this passage are curiously evasive. YwaiLlls answer is

particularly paradoxicai: "1 was a man, now am I nane" (21 16). In what sense has he loa

his manhood? What precisely is, to use Gibbs's phrase, "the knightls ided of manhood"?

Ywain, in a passage unique to the Middle English version of the poem, provides a few

Whilom 1 was a nobil knyght And a man of mekyl myght; 1 had byghtes of my men3e And of reches grete plente; 1 had a fbl f&e seignory, And ai 1lost for my foly. Mi maste sorow als sa1 bou here: I lost a lady bat was me den. (2 117-24)

We may note that Ywain's sense of hirnseif is somehow related to his past social status-

"Whilom 1 was a nobil knyght" (21 17)-marked by his ability to command others and by

his ownership of wealth and land, and also that a significant part of his los manhood was

his relationship with his "lady." We may note, finally, that Ywain's answer to "What

ertou?" (2 108) takes the form of a narrative, aibeit a short one. "1 was a man, now am 1

nane" (21 16) stresses the change in verb tense, in States of being; it con- past and

present, measws identity by its loss. Identity in the Middle English romances is a

fiinction of narrative; its complexities and operations corne moa strongly to the

foregrouad in the three nanative motifs of displacement, disguise, and recognition.

This study is primarily concemed with the generic conventions operative in the

Middle English romances rather than with the expression of those conventions in any single text-aithough, to be sure, the variety with which individuai texts repiicate,

reinforce, negotiate, cbailenge, and rework generïc conventions wiil become readily

apparent. 1use the tem "gdthere to mean the tacit wntract betwecn authot and audience that conditions the audience's expectations of the teeDespite the bewiidering variety of works designated in other Middle English texts as "romances"-including nich . . surprising candidates as Laurence Minot's poerns and the the

Passions7--- in the late fourteenth or early meenth century was a literary category with enough generic force to irnpel the author of the Trov Book to adapt his materials so that his poem would coaform more closely to romance expectatiom." As Fidayson points out, the fact that contemporary parodies of romance exist-the classic example being, of course, Chaucer's "Tate of Sir Thopas"-indicates that there existed a recognized array of "stock elements" which characterized the genre and which in tum could be parodiedo Further hints corne hmtexts that define themselves

the geme: for example, the and the

cbVh attributed to William of Nassyngtoa advdthemselves as alternatives

fi For this view of genre as institution, see FMcJarneson, "Magical Narratives: Romance as Genre," 7 (79754976): 135-36, and Leicester 24.

" Rehald. .Hoops, "Der Begriff 'Romance' in der mittetenglischen und fiiihneuenglischen Literatur," 68 (Heidelberg: Winter, 1926): 34-37, cited by Finlayson 61.

Paul Strohrn, "Origin" 12-1 3; see also his article "&&, Swlle. m:Generic Distinction in the Middle English Troy Narratives," 46 (1971): 348- 59.

49 Finlayson 47. to, or replacements for, the supposedly unedifying secular romances? "Middle English

romance" is nevertheless a notoriously difficuit category to delimit, and any sttempt to

inscribe boundaries around a definite number of characteristic texts is somewhat

arbitrary."' For the purposes of this dy1conceive of a romance as a narrative about an

exemplary secular individuai, understanding that definition as a tendency in these texts

rather uian as a boundary around them. Thus the edges of the genre shade off continually

into other medieval literary forms: chronicle, epic, saint's me, folktaie. In any case, most scholars, whatever definitions they formulate, start with the texts listed by Helaine . . Newstead in Volume 1 of the J. Burke Severs in v; and Newstead's List, useful primarily for its inclusiveness, delimits the corpus for this snidy .

Genre presupposes certain narrative structures, styles or modes of representation, narrative techniques, and ideologies. Romance in pdcular is fiindamentally an&

50 See J'he So*rn VerSiptlpf Cursor Mundi, Vol. 1, ed. Sarah M. Horrall (Ottawa: U ofOttawa P, 1978), lines 1-25; and me Sa- Vol- 1, ed. Charlotte D'Evelyn and Anna JOMill, EETS 235 (London: Oxford UP, 1956), lines 59-66 of the Prologue. For the Vwsee G.R. Owst, o. Me- 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackweli, 196 1) 13, and Ingrid J. Peterson, (New York: Lang, 1986) 79- 82,

fi Attempts to define "Middle English romance" include Domthy Everett, "A Characte~tionof the English Metrical Romances," ed. Patricia Kean (Oxford: Mord UP, 1955) 1-22; Gibbs 1-14; Helaine Newstead, "Romances," A of & 1 050- 1 500. e 1: Romances. ed. J. Burke Severs (New Haven: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1967) 1 1- 12; Bloomfield, "Episodic Motivation"; Swhm, "Chigin"; and Finlayson. "Romance"has ken altematively defined as a mode as well as a genre: see Frye, Am33-67; Gillian Beer, (London: Methuen, 1970); Pamela Chdon, (London: Methuen, 197 1) 2 12-72; and Barron, especially 1- 10. Jarneson subsumes both viewpoints under his inclusive defmition of "genre." 23 mimetic, strongly fomulaic, and to use Parnela Gradon's term, "mythicai"-that is, romance is a "way of wurithg in which the story is primary, and motivation is not demonstrated through analysis of individuai cbaracter, but people exia for acti~n."~

Characters tend to k sharply polarized, "presentedin black and white terms according as they oppose or forward the ideal to which the quest is dedicated."" They are also what

Walter J. Ong, foilowing E. M. Forster, calls "flat"rather than "round"characters: "the type of character that never suprises the reader but, rather, delights by fulnlliag expectations copio~sly."~Northrop Frye, in a book that draws most of its examples frorn classical and EIizabethan romance, observes that the conventions and structures of romance are remarkably persistent, the same motifs that appear in Greek romance reappearing, for example, in the novels of Walter Scott and in twentieth-century science fiction. One of the hndamental structures of romance Frye daims, is the loss and recovery of identity."

Recognition of the role played by genenc convention in the structure and techniques of the Middle English romances aiso demands acknowledgement of their place in a historical context; many of their characteristics may denve, Gradon suggests,

Walter J. Ong, fiondon: Routledge, 1982) 1 5 1. Ong associates the "flat"character with oral narrative, but this mode of characterization is ais0 typical of written romance narrative even in highly literate cultures. 24 nom their status as texts." In the fïrst place, we must recognize Middle English romance as a bianch of an essentially Euopean genre. Tée Middle English Yw-

for example, is a very fke translation of the twelfh-century French && of

Chrétien de Troyes; but Chrétien%poem also insphd versions in German, Norse,

Swedish, and Welsh? In the early fourieenth century Middle Engiish meant primarily a narrative in French or ~ngIo-N~nnan.~'Chrétien's poems, classic and fûily mature examples of theu genre, were written almost a hakentury before the earliest extant Middle English romances. Therefore the traditions idiormùlg the Middle English works are far-reachhg, not only geographically but also temporally-reaching, indeed, beyond the Middle Ages into later genres. For the purposes of this study the Middle

English romance tradition is assumed to have begun in the thirteenth century with

Hom; the endpoint is less clear, although Newstead's List ends with some sixteenth- century texts. (The Severs Elpplipl sets a somewhat arbitras, end date of 1500 for its material.) 1 will focus on texts of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, which display with sdcient variety the basic structures of the Middle English romance.

Despite the debt of the Middle English romances to French romance, it is possible to argue that the English texts represent a tradition in some respects distinct fiom the

French. Larry D. Benson credits this English tradition for "Malory'soccasional 'realism,'

" Albert B. Friedman and Nonnan T. Harrington, eds., introduction, -d G~W~ (London: Mord UP, 1964) xv. his apparent lack of interest in the psychological subtleties of love, his relative disinterest in the supernaturai, his preference for a simpIe plot line with Iess interweaving than in the

French W. R J- Barron notes that the English romances tend to the mimetic rather than the rnythi~.~Susail Crane ds?hem "accessible," firmly rooted in the vaiues

"domesticity,economy, and good they tend to show a strong interest in contempomy social conditions, especiaily in legal rnatted2 The vaiues of English romance tend to "prduce satisfaction and not c~nflict-"~~Love, for example, is represented as a socialuing rather than anti-social force, culminating in marriage, and the

English pets ofien go out of their way to emphasize the sexuai propriety of their protagonists." Perhaps most characteristically, the English romances insist on the dynamics of narrative more strongly than do their French counterparts, centring the concems of the poems in action rather than in debate? The result is a narrative usually

-. Lmy D. Benson, "Sir Thomas Malory's Le'' -1 Seproaches to Si% Worked. R. M. Lumiansky and Herschel Baker (Philadelphia: U of Pe~sylvaniaP, 1968) 110.

Barron 217.

6L Susari Crane, (Berkeley: U of California P, 1986) 139.

Crane 67; Friedman and Harrington, ywa- mi. JobGanim, . . (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1983) 48- . . Geraldine Barnes, ln in (Cambridge: Brewer, 1993) 16; and Crane 210, citing -va and The of Cu- mv of Fu.See also G. H. V. Bunt, cd., introduction, William of Pale= (Groningen: Bouma's Bwkhuis, 1985) 35-36. Quotations fiom WilbofPalenieare fiom this edition. 26 less cornplex, less elaborate, less detaiied, and faster-paced than the in which the chanrtas are less finely drawm, the centrai characters more strongly emphaskd, and intemal monologues and debates, especiaiiy those about the anguished niceties of Love, are articdated publicly as social concems or omitted alt~gether.~~Lancelot's infamous hesitation in Chrétien's Le Cwde la Cm his anxïety-ridden pause before, tom between the conflicting demands of his social code and his love, he steps into the ignominious cart, is as c-stic of French romance as it is foreign to English romance; an EngIish hero, one feels, would have commandeered the cart immediately, without considerhg such action in any way extraordinary, and an English pet, unWre

Chrétien, would probably not have considemi it a matter for debate. Indeed, Maiory's version of the story obliterates completely Chrétien's crucial moment of hesitation;

Maiory's Lancelot leaps into the cart without a second thought, whacks a recalcitrant carter so hard that he fdsout of the cart dead, and forces the other carter to drive on.

Malory's Guenevere, far hmmaking a as,accepts the necessities of cùcumstance with similar ease. These differences between French and English styles of romance suggest that attempts to evaluate the Middle English romances by the standards of French romance, especially by cornparison with Chrétien, shouid be hedged about with caution.

67 Barnes 16,3. . 1; Mehl 17. For differences between French and English romances see especially Bunt, -Pale 30-36,and Friedman and Harri'ngton, YwuGawais mi-xxxiv. More often tban not the Middle English tomances Mer in the cornparison.' But such

valuetions fd to consider that the English romances ma.have been meanired agallrst their own goals and standards, according to which character and ethics are represented not as occasions for debate and analysis but primarily as firnctions of nanative movement.

These features of the Middle English romances, as weîl as their concems and values, may well represent the interests and ethics of their audience, which wouid have been signifïcantly merent than the courtly audience of Chrétien. The eariy view of the minstrel reciting the English romances to a mob of unlettered nistics in the village square or tavem having been largely discrediteù, critical consensus has shifted toward seehg the audience of the romances as consisting mainly of the gentry, the Iesser baronid households and minor landowners somewhat distanceci £kom the royal courdg William gf Pawas cornmissioned by "pe hend Er1 of Herford Sir Humfiay de Bowne" (165), but its audience probably included not only the Earl but alm les distinguished members of his household, "knights, gentlemen and clerks in his se~ce."'~The author of

68 See David Matthews's =marks in his "Translation and Ideology: The Case of 76 (1 992): 62-63. " Albert C. Baugh, "The Middle English Romance: Some Questions of Creation, Presentation, and Preservation," 42 (1967): 2-5; Harriet E. Hudson, "Construction of Class, Family, and Gender in Some Middle English Popular Romances," Enplish. Britton J. Harwood and Gillian R Overing (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994) 77-78; Barron 87-88; Crane 10; Knight 10 1. For the argument that the English romances were written for a plebeian audience, see Finlayson 5 1, and Bruce A. Rosenberg, "Medieval Popular Literattue," The of ofMedievaled. Thomas J. Heffernan (Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1985) 66.

. * 'O Bunt, WPalefne19. and specïfïes that the poem is in English for the knefit of nobles who know no

French:

Freynsche vse bis gentil man Ac euench Ingüsche Ingiische can; Mani noble ich haue ysei3e Bat no Freynsche coub seye. (23-26)"

The Middle English romances cm be considemi "popular"not because they were aimed

at a plebeian audience-they almost certainly were not-but because their audience was

what Harriet E. Hudson dsa "low-context"rather than a "high-context"group; that is!

the romances "reacheda varied audience and were attractive to more than a single socio- economic gr~up."~ne SeewfTroYe. for example, exists in four manuscripts that reflect the variety of its appeal, ranging nom the iilumlliated Anindel MS 22 to the unadomed and obviously more cheaply produced Lincoin's h MS 150, which may have been a minstrel's pocket-book? Thus the values reflected in the structures of many of the

Middle English romances are basically those of the English landowners and their households, but the romances are always vuinerable to the introduction of other values that obscure, eansform, challenge, adapt, and replace the ideologies of the gentry.

Al1 quotations hm are Merlmm OfOf of of ed. O. D. Macrae-Gibson, 2 vols., EETS 268 (London: Mord üP, 1973).

'Z Harriet E. Hudson, "Toward a Theory of Popular Literature: The Case of the Middle English Romances," Jaurnal of C* 23 (1989): 37. See also Barron 87-88 and Rarnsey 209-10.

'3 Bamn 1 1% 18. See Mary Elizabeth Bamicie, ed., nie or Rwle of Trow EETS 172 (1927) ix-xviii; the frontispiece of this edition also nproduces facsimiles of the fint few Iines of The S- of Trove fiom each of the four manuscripts. 29

In focussing on the gdcaspeçts aMi larger stmctures of the Middle Engiish

romances, 1will generally reserve comment on the more weii-homi authors who have

worked within and against the genre: Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, Malory. Even the

anonymous Sn Ga- r- participates in this study oniy insofar as it

is representative of its genre, although in many respects it is as unique, as seK

consciously idiosyncratic, as the best of Chaucer. These Middle English verse romances, . . of whose authorship we know so iittie-only the authors of Sir and Williamof

Egleme respectively "Thomas Chestre" and an unidentified "Wiam,"refer to

themselves by name-fonn a tradition that the more weU-known authors used, celebrated,

parodied, reworked, aligned themselves with and defined themselves against. As, indeed,

do the anonymous romances themselves: in locating themselves within the genre they

both reinforce and revise the conventions by which the genre is deked.

Lee Patterson has suggested that a late medieval reader would have read a

medieval te* for example Chaucer's -vde, in ternis of its use of literary

conventions;" understanding these conventions and traditions is, then, a critical priority.

Wben we examine the representation of identity in these poems, this principle is especidy important in the context of critical attention to "seIf-realization" and

"individuai awareness" in the romances: what is this self that is reaiized, and this

individuaiity of which we are made aware-if, indeed, identity can be understood in ternis of selfhood and individuality at aii? In exploring the operations of identity in the Middle

- --- - . . 74 Patterson, 150. 30 English romances, we can recover some of the options open to the medieval Engiish romancer in the creation, revision, translation, and transmission of romance narrative, and some of the ways in which a medieval literary tradition represented itseLf and its relations with the world. Cbapter 2

The Arming of the Knight: Definitions

Jeg har dtid prmet at v;rxe mig selv. For dgter her mît pas.

I've always tried to be myself. For the rest, here is my ass sport.^

At the begianing of the Fillingham MS romance Otuei and Roland. the emperor

Charles, keeping Childermass at St Denis with his court, is unexpectedly challenged by a

Saracen knight: Otuel, a messenger fiom King Garcy. Otuel delivers Garcy's challenge

insultingly, trading boasts with Charles and Roland, and ends by challenging Roland to a duel. Charles arranges the formalities; the next day, after Mass, the two knights prepare for combat.

The romance contains an elaborate scene in which the Twelve Peers ann Roland, and Charles's daughter Belisant, with her maidem, arms Otuel. The amiing is described in detail. We are told that Roland, for example, is given a haketon and a hauberk; Estre of Langares brings him a helm; he is girded with his sword Durendal; Reyner brings him a shield, Oliver a spear, Terry his spurs, Ogier bis horse. Chuel's arming is equally carefiiuy described, and the poem makes note of the appearance, and often the history, of the knights' accoutrements. The meticulous attention given to this scene, the ritualistic quality of the activity it describes, suggest that the arming of Roland and Chel is a

' Henrik Ibsen, Peer Cr- (1867; Oslo: Gyldendal Norsk Forlag, 1928) 92. The translation is mine. signincant act; the dgof Roland in particular consûucts Roland's identity as laiight,

as one of the Twelve Peers of France, as Christian champioe

The anning of a knight is an especiaiiy resonant narrative convention in the

medieval romances; Derek Brewer discusses instances of its use in, for example,

Geoniey of Monmouth, the AUiterative

I(nioht, puv of WarwiEk, OctaVian, and Chaucer's of Sir Thprrps? An arming scene. such as this one hm describes not merely the equipping of a man but aiso, and more importantly, the assembly of an ideal? This highly fonnaüzed passage, therefore, may strike the twentieth-cenniry reader as somewhat stZf and impersonal.

More attention is paid, we might say, to the amour than to the man beneath it; Roland is not described with any individuality, but is represented, rather, in terms of a collectivity. the community of Carolingian warriors to which he belongs. Moreover, if we view

ûtuel's challenge as an interrogation of identity, in the same way in which the conversation in the chape1 in is an interrogation of identity, Roland's reply is, we might say, rather unspecific: far fiom seizing this opportunity for "self- redization," he goes forth to combat as a representative of larger causes, so that the duel that follows is not so much a duel between RoIand and ûtuel as it is a duel between

Derek Brewer, "The Anning of the Warrior in European Literature and Chaucer," ed. Edward Vasta and Zacharias P. Thundy (Notre. . Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 1979) 22 1-43, rpt. in Derek Brewer, 3 Chaucer (London: Macmillan, 1982) 142-60.

See Elizabeth Porges Watson, "The Anning of Gawain: Y!and &&," s in EPplish 18 (1 987): 32. On the anning of Gawain in & Gawuthe Gre- Watson comments that Gawain, "piece by piece," is "built up as a chivalric embtem." France and the Saracesu, Christian@ and paganism, Charlemagne and ûarcy. In what sense, then, is the arming of Roland a definition ofidentity?

1 would iike to kgin this investigation by considering a suggestion put forth by

Evelyn Birge Vitz in her Mai-. Discussing the

Historiaof Abelard, Vitz nnds a signifiant diffetence betw- medieval and modem methods of representing character. Vitz distinguishes between a horizontal

"axis of differentiation," wbich describes character quaiitativefy-by what characteristics someone possesses-and a vertical "hicmuchical or evaluative axis," which describes character quantitatively-by bow yçh someow possesses certain characteristics She claims that medieval individuaiity was represented almost exclusively in terms of the vertical axis; in other words, an individual was marked as such not by personai peculiarities but by the degree to which he or she possessed qualities supposed to be common to ali humanity or at least to the relevant categories of humanity.'

Although Vitz's scheme is rather too simplistic to account for the variety of ways in which medieval people understood and described character, it foregrounds some presuppositions worth articulating. Chanicterization almg the axis of dinerentiation- what we might cal1 "personal identityN-identifies the individual as unique, emphasizing an amibute or configuration of attributes that distinguishes a person fkom all others. Such a fom of identification therefore creates an entity akin to the humanist subject, a self- realinng, seif-nifncient, self-aware protagonist whose individuality is set against an

Evelyn Birge Vitz, Medieval Ndve (New York: New York UP, 1989) 15- 16. extemal worfd. On the other hanci, characterization dong Vies vertical axis depends on supraindividuai structures and categoneJ. It presupposes, first, that a cbaracter belongs to certain pre-established categories; Roland, for example, is a koight. It fLrther supposes that certain attributes adhere to those categories; a knigât, for example, mut be proficient in combat and in W.Only derthese categories have been identified cm a character be distinguished as king superior or Merior than others accordiag to a common system of values.

Vitz's vertical characterization is a speciai case of what 1 would iike to cd

"positionalidentity." This terminology recaiis Paul Smith's idea of "subjectpositions" in his book and H. Marshall Leicester's comment in

that "in modem theory the subject is not conceived of as a substantid thûig, Iike a rock, but as position in a larger structure, a site through which various forces pass? The version of subjectivity inherent in this lcind of approach Unplies that identity is not a quaiity that a character carries about, but a position that a character occupies in various ideological spaces or, as 1 will cdthem, "recognitionsystems." These "larger structures" form the tems of reference by whicb a character, or the author, answers the question "What ertow?" The identity of a character, therefore, raîher than king defined

Paul Smith, -e Suu(Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988). Smith's teminology differs slightly hmmine; for him what 1 have called the "humanistsubject" is the "individual,"which corresponds to a fiction of "an entire 'subject'"-"either in the sense of being entirely submitted to the domination of the ideological, or of king entirely capable of choosing hidher place in the social by dint of possessing full consciousness or some such version of what can be cailed sovereign subjectivity" (24).

Leicester 14. as a location on Vitz's genedhed "verticai axis," is a position in any number of different and complementary-somees contradictory-recognition systems. Indeed, "personal identity," rather uian king an alternative to "positional identity," is (meVies verticai characterination) itselfa special case of positional identity, depending as it does on what has been ded"the ideology of the subje~t"-arecognition system that constructs, for whatever social, historical, or psychological Rasons, a mode1 of a continuous, self.

One form of recognition system that has ken extemively studied is the honow shame system of certain Meditemean societies, in which honour "isthe value of a person in his own eyes, but also in the eyes of his society"; it "providesa nexus between the ideals of a society and their reproduction in the individuai through his aspiration to persone them." Julian Pitt-Rivers, whose article 1am quoting, links honour very strongly to "acertain social identity": 'When the English girl claims to be hot that kind of a girl' she is talking about her honour, and in Calderh's plays the heroes invoke their honour with a standard phrase, SOY sov3 1 am who 1 am."' The individual's identity, in this kind of ideological space, is denved fiom rather thaa defined against the recognition of others; the Partidas, a "thirteenth century Castilian legal code," equates slander with murder, "for a man once he is defualthough he be innocent, is dead to

'Julian Pitt-Rivers, "Honour and Social Status," ed- J. G. Peristiany (London: Weidenfeld, 1965) 2 1-22. Compare the quotation fiom muixnt~that 1 use as an epigraph to chapter 6: "Yosi quién soy," says Don Quixote-"1 know who 1 am." the good and to the honour of the ~orld."~On the one hand, there exists a concept of honour as individual integrity, as a very personai status; on the other hand, the honom- shame systems that Pitt-Rivers and others describe show an acute conscioumess of the social values on which that sense of personai honour rests. In an article that applies these concepts of honour and shame to Sir Ga- Loretta Wasserman notes that honour "does not rest on sekstimation of worth, but must be, so to speak, transacted-claimed, or asserted, and then approved, or at least accepted by other~."~

Again, 1 would Uce to suggest that honour is a special case of positional identity, which can also be thought of, in a general sense, as a transaction between the person who is identified, the social groups that identify, and the recognition systems within which the act of identification takes place.

When Otuel first arrives at St. Denis to deliver his challenge, he calls aside one of the French knights, Gauter of Amoun, and asks him to point out Charies and Roland.

Charles is, repiies Gauter, "he with the hore berde" (70);'' the Twelve Peers, including

Roland, are sitting next to Charles. Gauter's act of identification illustrates two ways in which identification can happen. Charles is identified by a distinctive physical trait, a personal idiosyncrasy; this type of personal identification is based on a recognition

Qauoted by Julio Cam Baroja, "Honour and Shame," tram. R. Johnson, in Periniany 84- 85.

Loretta Wasserman, "Honor and Shame in Sir Gawai- - IV mvalnc* .- ed. Larry D. Benson and John LRyerle (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1980) 78.

'O Quofafions fiom Otu-j are hm -d Otuel Romed. Mary Isabelle OISullivan,EETS 198 (London: Oxford UP,1935). 37 system that attaches identity to specificphysid traits, and is reiatively uncornmon in the

Middle English romances. On the other hanci, the Twelve Peers, and Roland in psrticdar, are identified by their position in relation to Charles-not just in terms of physical position but also by theV position relative to Charles within certain ideological spaces.

ûtuel is already a- of these positions when he enta; his request to Gauter is that the

French knight

woldyst me teche To lcyng Charlyoim, And to Roulond, hys nevewe, That hath many a vertu, And grete of renom. (64-68)

Underlying ûtuel's request is the acknowledgement of a number of recognition systems: the political systems that iden- Charles as king; the systems of fadyrelationships that ident* Roland as Charlemagne's nephew; the standards of chivaky, interpreted by

Charles's court, that identi& the Twelve Peers as the pre-eminent knights of France.

Roland's physical position in relation to Charles therefore indiates his position within these recognition systems. In particular, Roland represents French chivalry and its king; although ûtuel's chailenge is primarily directed agairist Charles, it is more often Roland who replies, speaking on behalf of Charles.

nie anning of Roland, then, invokes the recognition systerns by which Roland's identiîy is defined. It is done at Charles's command and accomplished by the Twelve

Peers; thus it enacts explicitly the relatiomhips between Roland and his feudal lord, who is dso his uncle, between the Twelve Peers and Charles, and between Roland and the

Twelve Peers. More generally, it marks Roland as a member of an elite rnilitary 38 fiatetnity, itself representative of the highest values of French chivairy, distinguished by a tradition of militaq prowess. We are told the histories of some of the pieces of armour.

The hehet, for example, was formerly owned by "galyas"and "kyng barbatyan" ((292-

931," the home "was wonne in hongeryf'(3 14); Roland is king attired in the visible signs of a history of French victory. Thus the arming of Roland is not merely a matter of putting bits of metal on a man's body; it is a symbolic act, declaring Roland the representative of France, of Charles, of the Twelve Peers, of Christendom, of knighthood itself. AU the Twelve Peers participate in the arming and, after it is finished, Charles lifts his hand and gives Roland his blessing.

In the romances, identity is represented not only as position, but also as a certain type of position. The central character or characters of these texts tend to be distinguished nom common humanity by king pre-eminent in the categories to which they belong; identity is represented not in terms of seeing someone as unique but in terms of seeing someone as exemplary. Thus the arming of Roland is described in terms of superlatives: there is no fainr shield thm Roland's (298); his spear is as good as any man's (304), as is his steed (3 13); his saddle is "The beste a-bouen erthe" (3 19). The exceilence of Roland's amis is clearly meant to reflect the pre-eminence of the man who bears them. We might compare ,) which also begins with a chailenge-albeit a more undone-and contains a similarly elaborate and significant amiing scene. Gawain is identified repeatedly as the exernplar of courtesy;

O'Sullivan, mdotÿelênd ROMnotes that "galyas" is probably Goliath (p. 180). even the cognhnce on his shield, a sign of his identity, qxesents not his idio~ynmcies,

for he has none, but his status as most faithftl hwnan embodiment of the chivalric

Fort>y pentangel nwe He ber in scheIde and cote, As tulk of tale most trwe And gentylest knys of lote. (636-39)12

Sir Cimmsays John Stevens, is "concemedwith the individual,"

but not in the sense of representing Gawain as unique and inimitable. "The Gawain-poet is concemed with the nature of the Christian knight, with what goes to make up the perfect, single specimen. He must have known tbat ali men are different; his pwm implies that ail men should be the sa~ne."'~We can compare Gradon's account of the description of Carnilia fiom the twelfih-century French Roman:

Even where we seem to bave a detaiied inventory of her charms, the details are typical and serve not to individualise her, but to indicate her pafection. The whole passage is a sustained superlative. . . . The passage has cham but its genetality removes it fiom the sphere of the immediate to the sphere of the e~emplary.'~

We can see the results of this hdof characterization in and in other Middle English romances. One consequence of identity defined positionally is a certain uniformity about characters who are aii exemplary according to the same

'*Quotations fiom Ga=- are hmfiGa wmGm aniohf, edJ. R. R Tokien and E. V. Gordon, 2nd ed. rev. by Noman Davis (Mord: Oxford üP, 1967).

I3 Stevens 174. 40

recognition system. does not pause to dBerentiate, to "individualize~"

the Twelve Peers. Roland acts as any chivalsic hem wouid-one thinks ofGawain's

similar intervention on behaifof his uncie the king when Arthur is challengecl by the

Green Knight. Evidently, if every romance hero is describeâ as the best knight of the world aii these Best Kaights become kvitably somewhat repetitive. The two protagonists of- are so much alike when they traie places, no one. not even Amiloun's wife, notices the switch. Descriptions of Middle English romance protagonists are therefore strongly formuiaic, servkig as markers to identify their subject as the central figure of the narrative rather than as descriptions of physicai detail or of distinguishing characteristics. The excellence of Roland's m,as I have mentioned, reflects his excellence as chivairic hero; his shield, spear, horse, and saddle are described in superlative tems. But &el's amour is sllnilarly praised: "no better myft be wrou3t"

(370). In any event, the quaiity (or equaiity) of their amour makes no physical difference, since it is won hacked to pieces on the field of combat. Roland and ûtuel turn out to be so evenly matched that only divine intervention cm resolve the conflict.

Identity iepresented as dependent on rather than opposed to the categories of common humanity allows, paradoxicaliy, the audience's identification the romance protagonist, who is, in Frye's words, superior to othm in degree but not in kind.I5 The world of the medieval romances, says Gradon, "isa world in which people are magnined

I5 Frye, A- 33. Frye is distinpishing the romance hero hmthe hero of myth, who is a godlike being and so different fiom others in ki,& and not merely in degree. 41

and formalid so that they are at once nuniliat and UIlfamiliar.f'16 fii-

Greenrelates how Gawain, surprised by the lady's fkst entry Uito his bedroom,

sneaks a puzzled glance under "A corner of cortyn" (1 185) aromd his bed, sees the

lady, and reacts by pretending to be asleep when she approaches him. Gradon calls the

incident "particuiarrather than individuai":

It marks no progress in the development of Gawain's character; nor does it mark bim off hmthe generality of other laiights about to undergo trials. The derdoes not exclaim "But only Gawain could have done that!" but rather, "But 1 might have done that!"l7

This congruence of audience and protagonia is the basis for criticai comment, much of it condemning or condescending, on the romances as "wish-fulfillment." That the identity of the romance protagonist somehow involves the audience's construction of its own identity indicates the power as weli as the nature of these representational methods; the protagonist is exemplary not only because he or she is the ideal embodiment of values assumed by the text, but also because he or she serves as an example, an imperative, to the audience.

What, then, are we to make of hel? In a recognition system where the basis of value is rnilitary prowess, he is Roland's equal. Their only difference, that of religion, is marked primarily by the fact that, where a Christian knight rnight swear "by Ihesu crist, my lorde" (185), ûtuel swears "by Mahoun swete name" (206); the theologicai, culturai, and political reasom for the opposition of Christian and Saracen are so much taken for granted that they are submerged to the point of near-invisibility in this tes. In conduct and in combat, Roland and ONel are practicaily identical. Jarneson calls attention to romance's "positional concept of cd, . . .where the person standing opposite me is marked as the villain, not by virtue of any particular characteristics of his own, but simply in hction of his relationship to my own place." A problem then arises in

the question of how rny enemy cm be thought of as king that is, as other tban myselfand marked by some absolute diffennce. when what is responsible for his being so characterized is simply the identity of his own conduct with mine, wbich-challenges, points of honor, tests of strength- he reflects as in a minor image.18

In Roldthis problem is resolved when belis converted to Christianity-not because he is defeated in combat but because the Holy Ghost in the form of a dove alights on his helmet during his duel with Roland; he then joins Charlemagne's anny and is prornised mdgewith Belisant. Tàe two duels in the nrst part of the poem set up a system of neat parallels: the first duel pits a Christian Roland against a Pagan Otuel, the second a Christian Otuel against a pagan Clarel. The elaborate scene before the fht duel in which Roland is medby the Twelve Peers of France is echoed before the second duel, when Otuel is similarly amed by the Twelve Peers; ûtuel has become, üke Roland, a representative of the Carolingian cause.

However, identity may be represented not ody as a positive exemplary position but also as a negative exemplary position. Sir Kay in most Artburian romances is the ernbodiment of all that is apt courteq: boa,mastic, insulting, tactless, he is 43 correspondingly easy to defeat in amed combat. Extremes of another order are provided

in Sir- the story of "a warlocke greytt" (Z),19 son of the duchess of Estryke ad

a ded, who at first lives up to his Mdpatemity but is converted and becomes a

mode1 of Christi011chivairy. In his youth he is a prodigy of terror, kihghis wet-nurses

and persecuting churcbmen. After his conversion, however, he is renowaed for his

wtue; the Royal MS classifies the poem as a -. Whether devil or saint, at both

extremes, Gowther is extraorrdiaary. His early career as a son of a devil is very lïterally

what F~yemight cda demonic parody of chivalryy a paradigrn of strength without

principle. His later career as son of God is also expressed by the use of unsurpassed

strength, this tirne represented as positive because directed not against his fdyand against the Church but against the unchristened Saracen. Again, as with Roland and

Otuel, one effect of positional identity is a kbd of minoring; Gowther as devil is not really very differeat, in some respects, fiom Gowther as saint. The two Gowthers occupy opposite poles of a specific moral universe, and so reflect and imply each other in spite otor because of, their exact opposition.

The uncanny likeness of devil and saint is involved, somewhat more disturbingly, in the Richard of Bifhafd Co- whose mother, the poem implies, is a devil.

Richard's larger-than-life career bars out his supematural origin; "Pis is a deuyl and no man" (1 1 12), the fhstmted emperor of Gennany exclaims at one point. Having earned

I9 Quotations hmSir Gowtha are fiom Sir Gowthed. Karl Breul (Oppeln, 1886).

20 See Frye, especially 147-50, 187. 44 his sobriquet by thgout and eating the hart of a lion sent to kiii him, Richard mer

indulges his rather alarming tastes by eating the heads of Saraccns during his cnisade-at

nrst inadvenently, latter deliberately, as a astrategy for intimidating the enemy. For a

champion of Christianity his moral standards are pecuiiar* When Richard is told that

Modard, the emperor of Germany, wishes to küi him, he refuses to attempt escape

because he does not wish to offend Modard (1030)-a point of honour somewhat undercut

by the fact that he has alnady kiiled the emperor's son and siept with the empor's

daughter. Nevertheless Richard is consistently represented as "Goddys owne palmere"

(1430), a heroic man on a holy mission. Rarnsey's claim that Richard is "more complex,

more human, capable of en~r"~~than romance protagonists such as Guy of Warwick fails to recognize that the complexities lie not in Richard but in the code of ethics by which he is measured, and according to which he is justified and celebrated as an agent of God and exemplar of Christian knighthood. The ideology underlying mdCoer de Im encodes any opposition to Richard as that of an enemy-even when it cornes nom the

Gennans or the French, who, king Christians, might be expected to be dies. Ultimaiely the &tus of characters in mdCoer de is determined not by their relation to

God but by their relation to Richard.

Thus the representation of identity as position rather than as personality, and especialiy the romance representation of identity as position, implies that the tensions within romance characters lie not in tùe characten themselves but in the ways in 45 which they represent the values underlying the narrative. At the most basic level the

value-system is simple: whoever supports the protagonist's interests is classified as a positive character, whoever hinders or opposes those hterests as negative. But the protagonist himseifor herseifhas an identity only by Whie of his or her location in an array of recognition systems. Mg'sarguments for his view of "individuaiity"in the medieval romances thus seem somewhat suspect when applied to tex& such as the Middle

English romances, especiaiiy his clai.that "individualexperience" is the arbiter of meaning because "no larger social or providentid system" exists. If identity is positional, then it depends upon, is constituted by, the existence of larger systems; but Hanning is right iiisofm as no one system dtimately determines identity in the Middle English romances. The ambiguities of the Charlemagne romances, Sir Go- and ficm

Coer de indicate that the systems that locate and define identity in these texts are not only mdtiple, varying nom text to text, but also complex, varying in uneasy disjunction within each texi. Richard's pecuüar morality in mdCoer de LyM recafls the troublesorne congruence between heaven and hell in Sir Go*: Gowther's mother the duchess prays "to god and Mare mylde" (64) but is answered by a fiend, which the duchess later reports to ber husband as "A nangell corn fio hevon bryghtfl(84). Positional identity, far fiom king simple, is more ofien ambiguous, uncertain, or paradoxicai.

For example, the sudden conversion of &el, its suddenness not atypical of

Middle English romance, ïndicates that positional identity does not adhere to any concept of psychological continuity. The modem imagination tends to consider temporal continuity or consistency a prerequisite of identity; when David Hume in the eighteenth 46 century sought to disprove the existence of personal identity he did so by questioning the ontological validity of identity through the* But if identity is represented positiondiy, and not in tenns of personal chatacteristics, then psy~hol~gicaicontinuity becomes gratuitous. Via remarks on the "cornparcmentaüzation"of Abelard's Historia calamitatum. on the apparent contradiction between Abelard the impassioned lover and

Abelard the "pure abbot, . . .scandaîïzed by the turpitude of his monk~."~A similar discontinuity of character is cornmon in the Middle English romances: one thinks not ody of (hue1 and of Gowther but also of Guy of Warwick, of Bertilak in Gaw-

e of Alundyne's marriage in Y- Cmw& to the man who killed her husband, of the conversion of the father in M.If such shifb and conversions seem to us "unre&stic"-that is, psychologically improbable-it is because we are assuming a mode1 of subjectivity in which personality is essential and predetermined. If. however, identity is not synonymous with an essential personality, then consistency through time is not a given but an accidental quality.

In this scheme motivation becomes expressed in terms of what Vitz calls

"commonplaces":"to under~tatldwhy sorneone behaved a certain way, one defined the category to which he belonged, and that provided the e~planation."~~In Ywai-

GawhColgrevance's explanation for Kay's mde behaviour is that objectionable people,

See David Hume, Tre&ie of (1739; London: Dent, 1964), especially the section "OfPersonal Identity" in Book 1, Part N (VOL 1, pp. 238-49 of this edition).

a Vitz 29. 47

Wre objectionable animais, act their nature: "It es ful semeli, ais me think, / A brok omang men fort0 stynk," is his epigrammatic and grimly resigeed comment (97-98). If one characterizes people in temis of a fûndamental, universal human nature, then some theory of psychological motivation is necessary to explain why different people act in different ways; but if one characterizes people in tenns of theV desand categories within larger recognition systems, it then becomes a natural consequence of this viewpoint diat Metent people inhabithg dincrent positions in those recognition systems will, necesdy, act in d.erentways.

This absence of psychological continuity accounts in part for the lack of depth and the discontinuity often remarked in the Middle English romances and in much other medieval writing. Gradon, comparing Virgil to the d'Fmnotes that the French poem descnbes Camilla not in tenns of motion and context, as Vugil does, but in a senes of "static and detachable" vignettes: "Whereas in Vugil we see Camilla riding swifüy by, as she might have appeared to the bystanders, the Camilla of the French author waits for us to take an inventory."* Vitz, like Gradon, fin& the most fitting parallels for medieval narrative in visual art: a medieval story "is stnictured less by narrative techniques-by transformation, unfolding, process-than by in al1 the visuality and static character of that tend The result is "unity of not of pro ces^."^^ Medieval narrative tends to be, as ûng has remarked of ody-based narrative, "additive rather than

* Gradon 243.

26 Vitz 1 19-20. subordinative": composed of events or instants ordeml without explicitly causal links?

Jarneson sees this mode of narration as charactenstic of romance in general, describing

romance narrative as "a sequence of events which are closer to states of king than to

acts, or bener stiii, in which even human acts and deeds are apprehended in relatively

static, pictoral, contemplative fashion, as being themselves ~sultsand attributes, rather

than causes in their own righteW2#He therefore calis for a move

to replace the older category of "chanictet,,"as it dominates such psychology-oriented forms as the with that, more appropriate to romance, of "states" or world configurations: charactea would then be understood as so many properties in the complex mechanism which effectuate a transition fiom one state to the next; while romance as a whole would be seen as a seqwnce of what, following Wagnerian opera, we may dl"transformation scenes," in which, in some ultimate and unimaginably rapid pass between higher and lower realms, ail the valences are suddenly changed, negative and positive poles revened, and new complex or inverted or neutralized conditions make an unexpected appearan~e.~~

It is easy to see how such a shifi away fiom categories and structures predicated on psychological conceptions of subjectivity toward a system of what Jameson calis "states

of being" and "transformation scenes" provides us with more power to understand texts

such as Roland ande1 or -0- with their dramatic reversais and transformations,

Finally, positional identity is in a very strong sense a public value, grounded on reference to pesons and structures outside of the individuai, challenged and asserted and

Ong 37. See also Bloomfield, "Episodic Motivation."

28 Jarneson 139.

" Jameson 148-49. defmed in public contem. It is perhaps worthwhiie to remember that pnvacy was, in my case, somewhat of an anomaly in an age that took for mtedthe presence of other household members-servants and retainers if the household was aristocratie--at what we might consider the most intimate activities." As for Malory, Gradon points out kt, in spite of critical efforts to demonsîrate character development in Le Mo-

Malory's "interest in people is social rather than psy~hological."~~The duel between

Roland and ûtuel is not merely a personal queml; &el's challenge is directed toward

Charles, toward France, toward Christendom. The arming of Roland is, as we have seen, a public ceremony, investing Roland with the authority of France, of the Tme Faith, and of knighthood, clothing Roland with tokens of French chivairy's victories over its enemies. Roland's honour is inextricably bound up with the honour of his king, his country, and his faith.

Even love, ofien credited with contribu~gsignifïcantly to the supposed interiorizing drive of tweLAb-century individualism, is primarily celebrated, in the romances, in social rather than psychological terms. The mcted lover, tossing and tuming alone in bed in agonies of introspection, wvertheless joins the honourable community of "Love's servants"-a comrnunity pictured as no les organized and real as

. . . . 'O Bloch, vol. 2, && Cc302; for evidence that this state of flairs continued well into the sixteenth century, see David Starkey, 'The Age ofthe Household: Politics, Society and the Arts 6 1530 - S. 1550," ed. Stephen Medcalf (London: Methuen, 198 1) 250-5 1.

31 Gradon 260. This tendency in Malory toward public interests redis Anne Middleton's daim that a distinctive quality of Ricardian poetry is its concem with the "common good." See Anne Middleton, "The Idea of Public Poetry in the Reign of Richard II," mm 53 (1 978): 94-1 14. 50 the military htemity bound to a feudal lord. The pahmkhgiy analfical soliloquies of

Alexander and Sotedamors in Cbrétienls Guy's tortured yearnings in

Warwick. Troilus's love-sickness in Chaucer's poem are epitomes of conventionality,

enactments of common knowledge. Significantly, lovers are motivated not so much by

"theu" love, that is by a love that belongs to and is peculiar to them, as by a universal

Love to which belong and of which they have becorne vassais; love is represented, in other words, not as an interior but as an exterior fo~ce.'~In the English romances love tends to find expression in social codes, for example tbat of marriage; what we might be tempted to consider a private ernotion is thus represented in tems of a public action. In

Sir D- Melidor's room, where Degrevant and Melidor meet clandestinely, is described at great length: derails of the intenor decorating include fifty golden archangels paintings of the Apocalypse of John, the Pauline epistles, "The Parabylls of

Salomone" (Thomton MS 1455);)' "lx foure Gospellonis / Syttyng on pyllonis"

(Cambridge MS 1457-58); Saints Augustine, Gregory, Jerome, and Ambrose; statues of all the philosophers; the story of Absalom; Charlemagne, Godfiey of Bouillon, and mur;and, on the bed-hangings, the story of Amadas and Ydoine. ?lie secret rendezvous of Degrevant and Melidor is thus symbolically circumscribed by the entire ideological apparatus of the medieval West: the codes of Scripture, of scholastic theology, of philosophy, of history, of xcular romance. The lovers go to bed together

32 See Vitz's discussion of the Raman in her Udieyal Narrative 64-95.

33 Quotations fiom Sir De- are from -ce of Sir mevanted. L. F. Casson, EETS 22 1 (Mord: Oxford UP, 1949). 5 1 but, the poet assures us, "or Bi wer wed / Dei synnyd nat pare" (Cambridge MS 1559-

60);pethaps aii those apodes and theologians glaring domhm the waiis had a somewhat inhibitory effect.

Still, representations of private spaces do occur in the Middle English romances.

The amiing of ûtuel takes place in Belisant's chamber and is a much more private ceremony than the arming of Roland; it is, moreover, accomplished by Belisant and her two ladies, rather than by the fiatemity of waniors that amis Roland. And Belisant's ioyalties seem rexnarkably ambivalent She wams ûtuel not to underestimate Roland, and she commends him to the care of whatever god can best protect him: "thykelorde that best may" (402). Later, during the duel, she prays on behalf of ûtuel-without acknowledging that in doing so she is also praying against Roland, her father, France, and presumably the true God himself. Belisant's prayer creates, however briefly, the possibility of a space outside of the structures and loydities in which Roland and ûtuel are enmeshed, in which they act, and of which they are consti~ed.When &el is converted and is promised Belisant's hand in marriage, Belisant expresses her willingness in tenns that, again, place one purely personal relationship above family and social

Obligatious :

y loue the more in hert myn thanne y do my fadyr and al my kyn that me to womman bere. (61 1- 13)

This tension between private and public concems is perhaps best illustrated by

-. -. The very structure of the Exchange of Winnings ensures that no action of Gawain's, not even any action perfomed in the enclosed Wace of the 52

bedchamber, can rcmain private or hidden, since by the desof the game it wu

necessariiy k transfikrred to Bdakin a public seaing. The Green Knight's challenge is

issued in the public context of Arthur's corn Gawain therefore expects the other halfof

the ordeal to take place in a similar setting and is unprepiued for the test in the moming

stillness of the bedchamber. Only for the audience of the poan the hunt scenes, intervals

of aoisy, open, comrnd activity culnwiating in elaborate descriptions of death and

dismembement, provide an uneasy counterpoint to the intimate temptation scenes in the castle. But even in the quiet bedchamber, where Gawain dodges with wary dexterity the words of the lady, conversation tums on Gawain's public reputation; the lady is delighted, she teils him, to have caught Sir Gawain, "Pat debe worlde worchipez quere-so se ride"

(1227). Gawain's test at the deserted Green Chape1 is, for ail its isolated setthg, no Iess a test of the vimies displayed publicly on Gawain's shield; there also Gawain discovers that the girdle he had thought to keep secret has been a ploy of the Green Knight's, even as

Bertilak himself has been playing a part in Morgan le Fay's larger strategy "to assay be surquiclré, 3ifhit soth were I bat rennes of fe grete renom of be Rounde Table" (2457-

58). The test of Gawainls chivalry is therefore simultaneously a test of the chivalry of the

Round Table; since Gawain is the preeminent representative of Arthurian knighthood and the Round Table the apex of knighthood, as conceived by Artburian romance, the testing of Gawain is at some level also the testhg of the chivalric ideai itself. Thus Gawain takes the incrirninating girdle back with him to the public world of Arthur's court, where it becomes a heraldic emblem, an emblem also of the fact that there are no purely pnvate 53 transactions in a world whm identity is descri'bed in tcmrs of, and consistently deflected toward, social codes.

But sir opens up, as does uneqectedly disturbing abysses of interiority, spaces in which the private threatem to undemiiw the public; David Aers, for example, claims tbat the introduction of private spaces creates rifts in the world of the poem, and in Gawain's identity, that the poem is finally unable to resolve? Such rifts may occm in other Middle English te-; Stephen

Knight and Terence McCaahy have argued, for example, that Malory indkectly amibutes the dodiof Arthur's kingdom to the intrusion of the private on the public sphere?

The coincidence of public and pnvate worlds that positional identity rPpresents is always open to disniption and hgmentation; dthough the EngIish romances tend to deflect coacern toward public and social matters, and to see the creation of private spaces as undesirable, disturbing, disruptive, and subversive, they dlallow the creation of such spaces.

It is no accident, therefore, that issues of subjectivity are, in these texts, so insistently formulated in terms of identity. For, again, identity presupposes apparatuses of Iegitimation, of recognition; identification is a transitive action, an interaction between identified and others that identify. It is, therefore, a public action-or, rather, it is an action in which private aspirations receive public recognition, and public expectations

Aers 163-78.

3s See Knigh~also Terence McCarthy, "Le Morte D* and Romance," w* eval ed. Derek Brewer (Cambridge: Brewer, 1988) 148-75. 54

shape private aspirations. It destabiiizes the hurnauist opposition between the individual

and the worid, precisely because it draws no defhite and unwavering Line of demarcation

behveen those two entities. What we thkk of as "the individual"-and the word itself

carries associations of indivisibility, of autonomy-becomes, in the act of identification, a

construct ofthe structures and values of larger forces. When 1am asked to show

identification and 1 pull out a driver's license or a credit card, I am acknowledging not

only the act of interrogation but also the institutions of state and finance-what 1 am

calling recognition systems-that provide the context of that interrogation. The

conversation between Ywain and Lunet in the chapel, the duel between Roland and

-1, are also acts of interrogation, presupposing similar recognition systems. Identity is

necessarily dependent on these supraindividual systems; in the world of the Middle

English romances,one cannot meaningfully defie without the participation and

recognition of others.

That the medieval subject is represented as nonautonomous, however, does not

mean that it is ais0 represented as nonessential, or that it disappears in a diagram of social

and historicai forces. To use Vitz's temiinology, medieval subjectivity is bared not on the personaiity but on the so~l~~-andthe soui hex is certainly conceived of as an essence, but one whose essential is not itself but its relationsbip to God, a relation that defines it and upon which it depends absolutely. In secular configurations the essential may be nobility, beauty, authonty, or virtue. One of the centrai challenges of the Middle English

36 Vitz 85. -cc romances, then, is the problem of how qualities can be represented as dependent upon

extraneou relationships and, simultaneously, preexistent or predetermiaed. Another,

familiar to twentieth-century theory, is the problem of repnsenting the agency of a

subject dependent for its existence upon, indeed constituted by, structures greater than

itseIf. Positionai identity, therefore, fin from behg simplistic, produces an amyof paradoxes and tensions. The twcFdimensionaiity of the Middle English romances-

Gradon caiis their world "a world without depth"37-does not preclude their complexity, as long as we seek that complexity not in the characters themselves but in the ideological and narrative structures that make them possible. Cbapter 3

The Woman in the Boat= Structures

Mr Thompson, oniy just out of hospital-his Korsakov's had exploded just three weeks before, when he developed a hi& fever, raved, and ceased to recognise di his family-was stiU on the boa, was stiii in an almost fienzied confabulatory delirium (of the sort sometimes called "Korsakov's psychosis," though it is not really a psychosis at a),continually creatuig a world and self, to replace what was beuig continually forgotten and lost. Such a knzy may cdforth quite brilliant powers of invention and fancy- -a veritable confabulatory genius-for such a patient elf [and his wor- everv mom- We have, each of us, a life- story, an inner narrative-whose continuity, whose sense, our lives. It rnight be said that each of us constmcts and lives, a "narrative," and that this narrative us, our identities.'

Emgré composed ç. 1400, is a fairly late Middle English romance, and is not

considered one of the more illustrious examples of the genre. It is relatively short (1035

Luies), notable for a density of verbal formulas and of structurai repetitions.' The

characters are typical, differentiated primarily by narrative hction: the incestuous father, the beautiful and victimized heroiw, the good king, the faiW steward, the wicked mother-in-law. Some of the main characters, such as the king of Galys and his conniving mother, do not even have names. Critical appreciation for the poem has been equally sparing. Edith Rickert says, a Meapologetically, that 'twcannot be ranked high

. . *. ' Oliver Sacks, Man Who mkHis Wife for a mdmer Clh Tales (New York: Harper, 1987) 1 f O.

Edith Rickert, ed., introduction, -ce of Emaré, EETS ES 99 (London: Kegan Paul, 1908), mi. Quotations tiom are fkom this edition. See also Susan Wittig, Stvlistiç -ve Smîures in the Middle E- (Austin: U of Texas P, 1978) 18: Wittig's "fonnuiaiccountl' of twenty-five Middle English romances shows as having the highest percentage (42%) of "lines which contain formulas." 57 among the venions of this talen and that "itis interrstiiig chiefly fiom the point of view of ongins."' Mehl claims that "theauthor was not interested in a sophisticated and dramaticaily effective presentation of his story," rem& on "the rather Llnimaginative and often monotonous style of the poem," and fin& the value of the poem in its supposedly homiletic elements? Gibbs more! scathingiy declares that "millustrates the depths of ineptitude to which English medieval romance could

One reason for such harsh judgement may be a somewhat nanow expectation of what a Middle English romance should be. Gibbs's definition of "romance"foilows

Auerbach, for whom the epitome of medieval romance is a Chrbtien de Troyes poem in which a knight sets out to seek adventure and thereby to attain "self-realization." But

does not fit this mode1 at dl. Its protagonia is a woman, and she does not set out on a quest but is cast adrift for refunng to mary her father. Her chief anribute is her beauty, her principal accomplishment sewing. Her enemies are her father in the nrst half', and, in the second half, her mother-in-law, who engin- Exnad's second exile but whom

Emaré never dkctly co&onts. The adventures in this poem consist of an indecent proposal, some malicious forgery, and a lot of drifthg about in boats. It is difficult to see how Gibbs, foliowing Auerbach's definition of romance, could even admit as a romance in the htplace.

Rickert, Romeof Fexiviii.

' Mehl 138-39. Gibbs 37. 58

There is a strong case, however, for arguing that Emarç is, in many respects,

typicai ofthe genre. The closing hesofthe poem identify its source as "on of Brytayne

layes" (1030), locating it within a tradition to which, for example, GO* of and are connecteci. The pairs of loven on the robe Emaré wears--

Amadas and Ydoine, Tristan and Isolde, Floris and Blancheflour-allude to other, weli- bwnromances. The story itseIf-that of a woman exiled &er slander or the threat of incest-foliows a narrative pattern cornmonly known as the "Constance saga," and is thus related to a complex of similar Middle English romances: Octavian. -ur Qf

sir To-0- Sir T- Leeof ofRome. The

Constance saga in particuiar is aiso the basis for Chaucer's Mpg of Law's T& and

Gower's version in the Conf-; there are echoes of it k Charles Dickens's

Dombey andSon.The narrative conventions of incest and shipwreck recai1 Bp0110ni~ pf TE one of the oldea and most persistent romance narratives in Western literanire, a story with classical mots but a strong iegacy hmGower and Shakespeare to Pirandello in the twentieth century! The spare style of its heavy reliance on conventions both on the lever of verbai formulas and on the level of narrative structures, make it useful for a study of the operations of identity in narrative.

If the Middle English romances are, as 1have claimed, narratives in which character is describeci in temof action rather than action in te- of character, then a starhg point for an understaridhg of identity is its role in the structures of the narrative

See Frye, 44. There also survives a fiagrnent of an anonymous founeenth- century English verse m. itseIf. In talring identity as a structural principle 1am in part foiiowing Frye, who, in

describes the structure of romance narrative as a cyclical movement between "dty" and "illusion," or, in other words, between "identity" and "aiienation" :

Identity means a good many things, but d its meanhgs in romance have sow connection with a state of existence in which there is nothing to write about. It is existence before "once upon a the," and subsequent to "and they iived happily ever after." What happens in between are adventures, or collisions with extedcircumstmces, and the retum to identity is a release hmthe tyranay of circum~tances.Illusion for romance, then, is an order of existence that is best cailed aiienation. Most romances end bappily, with a return to the state of identity, and begin with a departure nom it7

Frye's "state of existence" is what Jameson calls a "state of being" and what 1 have been calling a "position." In Frye's account identity is a specific of position, associated with serenity and freedom, a state in which one harmonizes with or controls circumstances rather than king controlled by them. It is thus constituted as a configuration of stable relations with various forces of Iegitimation or recognition-a configuration that is, at the same tirne, potentialiy unstable, since a change in or loss of any of its ternis results in the disintegration of identiîy.

Frye identifies two main movements in romance narrative, a "descending" movement characterized by loss of identity, and au "ascendingt'movement characterized by recognition; to those two 1 wodd iike to add another narrative convention for close investigation-that of disguise, which, although not a form of narrative movement in

Fryets schema, is a motif of particultu interest to any study of identity in these texts.

' Frye, 54. "Lossofidentity" 1 wiii cail "displacement," foiiowing Carol Fewd(Frye uses the

tenn "displacement" with a different meaning altogether); recognition then impiies

recovery or reconfiguration of a position of identity- Displacement and recognition are

remarkably insistent structures, presented in a Iimited variety offomis, and

provides a fdyclear example of their fùnction.

The poem is easily read as a narrative of los and recovered identity. Emaré's

initiai identity as the daughter of the emperor Artyus is destabilized by his marxiage proposal; the emperofs infatuation with his daughter is a denial w subversion of what, in the ideological space of the poem, are presupposed to be proper social relations. When

Emaré refbses her fathers proposai and is cast adrift, therefore, her physical displacement parallels and represents her displacement with respect to the recognition systems that previously fixed her identity. When she washes up in Galys, she changes her name and obscures her liwage; Su Kadore, who finds her, knows her only as Egaré, "an erles bowpr of ferre londe" (422)- She maintains this incognito mtil the end of the poem; when she persuades the king of Gays to meet the emperor, she does not tell her husband that Artyus is her father. Emaré's second exile, the second physical displacement, is a further social displacement; she reads the forged letter as evidence that her royal husband is ashamed to have "weddede sa poreiy" to "a sympue lady" (63 1-32), and she ends up not in "a kastelle of mylqdle pryde" (341) but in a merchant's house. The two displacements are resolved by the recognition scenes at the end of the poem, scenes that

. . Carol Fewster, md- in Mid- (Cambridge: Brewer, 1987). involve reconciüation as weii as recognition. Emaréts identity is restored by the reaiignment of her relatioaships to ha husband ami her father. It is represented, therefom, in temu of a recognition system based primarily on fdyrelationships and secondarily on the social status that those relationships confer.

It is worth malOng a note of two extensions, as it were, of Ernaré's identity. The nrst is her robe, made at the emperor's command hmthe jewelled cloth given to him by the King of Sicily. The detail with which the cloth is described is strikiiig, especialiy in a text that is ordinarily sparse in descriptive detail. Explmations of the significance of the robe =nge nom French and Hale's reading of it as a "rationalized .. . love charm- originally given to the fairy Ematé by super~turalwell-wisher~,"~ to Mehi's claim, following Hanspeter Schelp, that the robe is "an inseparabIe attribute" of Emaré, "in many ways symbolic of her inner perfections": "The portraits of famous lovers can be seen as an ailegorical representation of fath, just as the unicorn (11. 163-5) embodies chastity."'* But surely both interpretations are misleading. There is no supernaturai intervention in the poem, except for the grace of God; but neither is Em& primarily meant to exemplifjr "the glorious siiMval of Chnaian Whie in ail affli~tion."~

Commentators who read the robe as an allegorical representation of Emari's specificdly

Walter Hoyt French and Charles Brockway Hale, eds., Middle Mew Romances (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1930) 428.

Io Mehl 139. Mercommentaty on Emaré's robe can be found in Maldwyn Mills, ed., Six Mi- (London: Dent, 1973) 197-98; and Ross G. Arthur, "Emaré's Cloak and Audience Response," SiPn.Se. Julian N. Wassennan and Lois Roney (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 1989) 80-92. Christian *es ignare the fact that the robe is of heathen ongin, that the figures on its corners celebrate not chastity but the loves of secular romance, and that the robe itself is a gift fiom Emds incestuous father*a token of an illicit and thmatenhg obsession.

Like Melidor's mom L or Gawain's shield in -WUthe

Emaré's robe is what we might cail an iconographie object: one that explicitly alludes to the narratives, codes, and systems that the text negotiates, to the ideological spaces within and against which the poem defines identity.I2 Mehl is right to cal1 the robe "an inseparable attribute" of Emaré, but it reveals and intensifies not the vimies of chastity and faith (which the poem does not mention at ail) but, rather, Emaré's beauty. The figures on the robe indicate that such beauty is at least pdyunderstood as sexual attractiveness. The poem aiso indicates that beauty ïncludes wisie,manud dexerity, and the recognition and approval of others:

She was curtays in alle thynge, Bothe to olde and to Wge, And whythe as lylye flowre; Of her hondes she was slye, Ail her loued bat her sye, Wyth menske and mychyl honour. (6469)

l2 Compare Philosuphy's robe in Boahius, see Boethius, of Phüpgpphy, bans. V. E. Watts (London: Penguùi, 1969) 36. See also Chaucer's translation, "Boece,"ed. Ralph Hama iIi and Traugott Lawkr, Riv- Qauca 3rd ed., gen ed. Lamy D. Benson (Boston: Houghton, 1987) 398:

In the nethereste hem or bordure of thise cIothes, men redden ywoven in a Grekissch P (that signifieth the lif actif); and aboven that lettre, in the heieste bordure, a Grekyssh T (that signifieth the lif contemplatif). And byhuixen thise two lettres ther wete seyn degrees nobly ywrought in manere of laddres, by whiche degrees men myghten clyrnben fio the nethereste lemto the uppereste. It is in SUEb beauty, therefore, that EMis exanplaiy; th: robe thus objectifies her identity. But it also rerninds us of the ambivalent, even ciangemus, power of E&s beauty. Before the robe, Emar6 is already "lx fayrest creature borne, / That yn lond was bo" (50-Sl), "the fairest creature in the land" or perhaps "the fairest on earth"; &er she puts on the robe, "She semed non erbly wommon, I That marked was of molde"

(245-46), surpassing even superlative. Emaré's beauty, so extreme as to seem unnaturai, provokes an unnatural tespolise hmher father; her mother-in-law, shocked by the same beauty, accuses Ernaré of being a fiend. Nevertheless, Emaré does not seem able to hide her beauty, even as she cm never rid herself of the robe; she is wearing it when she is put into the boat alone, when Kadore the steward of Galys kcis her, when the king of Galys falls in love with her, when she leaves Galys with her infant son Segramour, when Jurdan fmds her washed up near Rome, and when she is reunited with her husband. When

Kadore discovers Emaré's boat on the shores of Galys, he sees first the robe, "a glysteryng pyng" (350; cf. 699), before he sees the woman wearing it.

We can see Emaré's son Segramour as another extension of Emaré's identity. As he grows up in Rome he, too, becomes "@ fayrest chyld onlyfe" (728) and "worf>yvnbur wede" (736). When the king of Gdys lodges in Jurdan's house, Emaré sends Segmmour into the hall to serve the king, "ina kuaylie of ryche palle" (848), even as Emaré once did in Kadore's cade. The king's response to Segramour indicates what his response to

Emaré wül be; only after Emaré hears that her husband responded favourably to

Segramou does she reved herselt In the same way, Emaré sen& Segramour to test

Artyus: When empereur kysseth by fadur so fie, Loke 3Yfhe wylle kysse the, A-bowe to hym sone; And bydde hym corne speke wyth Ed.. .. (979-82)

Segramour acts, in effit, as a recognition token; he represents Emaré where Emaré is

unsure of her own standing, and JO effects the final reconciliations of the story, restoring

Emaré to a position of identity within fiunily relatiouships.

Segramour's part in is a weak case of a feature common to the structure of

the Middle English romances, what Susan Crane has called "doubling"and Fewster

"diptychstructure." Doubling can be either sirnultanmus or successive; that is, it can produce either two parallel structures focussed on two different characters or two successive structures usually focussed on the same character. Segramour is an example of simdtaneous doubling; his service to the king of Galys in lurdanls houe parallels and recds his mothefs service before the king in Kadore's castle. He stands for Emaré; to some extent they shthe same identityythe same position in the recognition systems of the poem-the system of çourt- in which beauty and grace are the most admirable qualities, and the system of farnily relationships that defines, at the same the, the social stam of characters. Octavjah another romance baseci on the Constance saga, foliows the simuitaneous and separate adventures of OctaMan's twin sons, both of whom are kidnapped by wild animals, are raised by fioster fathers, demonstrate their natumi nobility in conventional chivalric activity, and are finaily =United with their parents. The classic example of sirnultaneous doubling in Middle Engiish verse romance is dose two pmtagoaists are not oniy swom fiends, but practically

indïstuiguishable, and who, at one point, even exchange identities.

More obvious in Em& is successive doubling, which becornes the major structurai principle of the poem. Twice Emaré is threatened, p in an unprovisioned boat to die, and is discovered on a foreign shore by a subsidiary character, who shelters her while she provides for hcnelf by sewing. The paraiiel structures are reinforced by close verbal paraliels: Rickert lists, for example, repetitions in descriptions of the love of

Artyus and the king of Galys for Emaré, of the emperor's and the king's expressions of grief der Emaré is sent away, of the sea-passages, of Kadore's and Jurdan's discoveries of the woman in the boat, of the emperor's and the king's decisions to do peoan~e.'~As

Maldwyn Milis points out, such insistent repetition tends to submerge differences into a general uniformity of structure, so that, for example, both the "ageing Iecher" Artyus and the gracious and good-hearted king of Gdys "seem curiousiy alil~e."'~

Many other Middle English romances feature successive doubling. In for example, Hom makes two joumeys out fiom and back to Suddene, both times rescuing Rymenhild fiom undesirable marriages; the fktjoumey out fkom Suddene acwyconsists of two successive exiles, the first to Westernesse and the second to

Ireland. Successive doubling occurs also in &vis of where Bevis, &ter marrying Josian and king made marshal of England, is exiled again when his home kills

- -- -

Rickert, -Romance of xxvi-xxvii. " Mills xiv. the king's son; in Yw- where Ywain achieves the fint adventure and

marries Alundyne, but then breaks a promise to haand goes mad; and in Guv of

Wewhere Guy's second career as pilgrim both recapituiates and revises his fht

Frye has noted the significance in romance narrative of minois and clocks, which

he sees as "objectifying images,"rs but which can be understood dtematively as images of

repetition (a dock marks the linear passage of time, but does so by cyclical movement).

In the Middle English romances the equivalent devices are, respectivey, simultaneous

doubling, which is repetition in space, or successive doubhg, which is repetition in tirne.

The function of doubling in the Middle English romances is not really "objectifj4ng," in

Frye's sense; doubling is not simply associated with what Frye calls the "night world," a state of non-identity or confused identity, but is integral to the basic structures of the narrative and to thei.construction of identity itself. On the one hand, doubling, Iike al1 fonns of fomiulaic or conventional repetition, reinforces or validates certain values or structures: "the validity of Hom's pr~wess,"~~or "an envisioned consonance between lineai descent and perperual nghts to land."I7 Mills finds that, in Em&,

the careful patternhg of the events of the tale is curiously reassiiring. In a dangerous world of unjust sentences and alarming sea-voyages it provides a reassuring sense of orderliness. Everything that goes wmng for the

- . ------

Is Frye, Scril>turr 117.

l6 Fewster 1S.

l7 Crane 27. For repetition as essentially conservative see Wittig and Ong. herohe in the first half of the story is bomd to find its benevolent mirror- image in the se~ond.'~

On the other han& doubling not ody replicates but also iwises, and its implications are

potentidy paradoXical: "Doubhg involves dinerence, but also echoing or equation. Its

ciifference connotes extension or progression, while its sameness connotes assunuice and

~tability."'~When Amis and Amilou11 exchange identities to clear Amis's name, their tactic is hdarnentally paradoXical; it depends both on the fiiends' (they are so much alike as to be interchangeable) and on their (Amis is guilty of the crime, but AmiIoun is not and therefore wins in the trial by combat). Thus the doubiing of Amis and Amiloun problematiw as much as it reinforces idcntity; similarly, Guy of Warwick's second career both confinns and destabilizes Guy's identity.

As Fewster observes, doubling, or "diptychstructure," is self-reflexive and self- validating, leferring for its values to the text itself or to other related te~ts,~and therefore a narrative such as Em& or Guv of Wa- comments on itself even as it repeats or reflects itself. Hence, also, the potential of these narrative structures to be both conservative and revolutiomry, to reinforce ideologies or to subvert them. That Emaré,

Ywain, Bevis, or Guy attain or mcover a desired identity not once but twice implies stability, the fûEUment of expectations, destiny, continuity; convenely, the necessary

l8 Mills xiv-xv. 1 am not sure, however, that the second half of the story is any more "benevolent"than the fust.

l9 Crane 88-

20 Fewster 20-2 1. 68 corollary that they lose their identities not once but twice points to the hgiiity of those identities, to their ~11cerfajnty~discontinuty, and instability.

That very instability, the reversibility of fortunes, is a tecuming theme of the

Middle English romances; the repetitive circular movement of their nanative structure hds its most vivid expression in the fdarmedieval topos of the wheel of Fortune, that inexorable instrument by which the poor and suppressed are exaited and the proud cast down to destruction and oblivion. Whether Fortune's activity appears beneficent or destructive depends, of course, on one's place on the wheel. professes to be a story "Ofmykylle myrght . . .f And mornyng bra-monge" (20-21)-of great joy and sonow. The reunion of Octavian's family demonstrates, according to the Southem version, that "God kan turne wrong to ry3t' (Cotton MS 1949), but the execution by fïre of Octavian's mother illustrates, 5y contras& "Pat fdsnesse cornet, to eue1 endynge"

(Cotton MS 1958)? BRlaunchefiur is professedly a story about the reversed fortunes of the protagonists, "How after bale hem corne bote" (1308).~At the end of

Wmof Pw William and Melior tell their story "ofmeschef and of murthe, and ho hem most heiped, / and how bei brouft were of bale to here bote pere" (49 19-20). The protagonist of Sir defends his spending habits by invoking "God bat is bote of

21 Quotations fiom the Southem version of are fiom Qctov- ed. Frances McSparran (Heidelberg: Winter, 1979).

* Quotations fkom are fiom Floris apd Rl~cheflo~ed. A. B. Taylor (Oxford: Oxford W,1927). bde" (201)? Lam, when he has spent the last of his money, he is comforted rather

than condemned by the White Knight, who cira- attention to the univefsality of

Thowe schild noste mowme no suche wise, For Gd may bothe mon fde and rise, For his helpe is euymiore nere. For gud his butte a laute lone, Sumtyme men haue hit, symtyme none, Pu hast fbii mony a pere. (45 1-56)

The opposite movement, fkom success to defeat, is less common in the Middle

Engiish romances but no less conventional. The classic example is the story of the downfall and death of Arthur, the quintessential romance monarch. In the AUiterative

Morte Arthur, at the height of his success, dreams of Fortune's wheel and is thus warned of his impending defeat, an event as inevitable as his exaltation on the wheel. h the St-c Morte Bors's comment to Lancelot, acknowledging the impending disintegration of the Round Table, is resigned:

Bors then spake with drery mode, "Syr," he sayd, "sitheit is so, We shalle be of heais good, Aftyr the wele to take the wo." (1887-90)24

One of Arthur's predecessors on the Wheel is Alexander the Great, in his tum the centrai figure of aaother Middle English romance that describes superlative success ending in

Y Quotations fiom Sit are fiom SirAmadace&,&&ed. Christopher Brookhouse (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde, 1968).

z4 Quotations fiom the Stanzaic are fiom Leed. P. F. Hissiger (The Hague: Mouton, 1975). disintegration and death. emphashesizes the instability of the world, the

Swiche chaunce @ werlde kepeb- Now man Ieiaeb, wwman wepep! Now man is hool, now man is seek; Nys no day ohylyk. Noman bat lyues hahap borowe From euene iibbe forto arnorowe. (6982-87)=

"Wrong"and "ry3t,""bale" and "bote," "meschef"and "murthe," "wonand

"welet8-theMiddle English romances understand narrative in temis of antitheses, of extremes. Their worfd presents strong contrasts, sudden transformations, insistent paradoxes. Even the movement of the duchess Fortune's wheel in the Miterative Morte

is not a slow grind but an abrupt tum, a quick reversal that spins the hapless mortal into the mud: "Abowte scho whules the whele and whirles me miire" (3388).26

Identity is not process but position. It is lost by a sudden collapse of the conditions of existence, recoveced in fortuitous and eqdyunexpected recognition. More often than not these losses and recovenes are causeless and unpredictable except in tenns of literary convention; they happen, Kyllp Alisaunderpiies, because the world operates by

"chaunce,"or, as the French romancers would say, m.An image such as that of Fortune's wheel thus points to two simuitaneous and opposite meanings: one that the tuming of the wheel is inexorable and predictable, the other that it govemed by chance

* Quotations hmKvnp are fiom 2 vols., ed. G. V. Srnithers, EETS 227,237 (London: Oxford UP, 1952, 1957).

26 Quofafions fiom the Alliterative Morte Amare fiom pufsmed- Mary Hamel (New York: Garland, 1984). 71 and unpredictability and random change, the proverbial fickleness of Fortune. ïhe same pdoxruas throughout the Middle English romances, insisting on both the inevitable fulfillment ofdestiny and the unreliabiiity of the world.

The inesapability of Fortune imposes a certain air of passivity or helplessness upon the romance pmtagonist Bioomfield, cornparhg romance to epic, sees the romance protagonist as "naked and exposed": "he is in a liminal situation where the unknown hovers threateningly over him. . . . He cannot rely on his own strength or on the rationality of the ~orld."~'Bloomfield's words recall Gawain's tests in S-ir Gawain a the whkh corne not when he is riding about in his wonderful mour but when he is lying naked in bed, and when he bares his neck in prepmtion for the Green

Knight's axe-blow?* Vitz, writing about the Roman de la Rose of Guillaume de Loms, notes that "the events of this story consist primarily of tbgs done tp the hero-acts that he undergoes and to which he reacts-rather than actions that k perfor~ns-"~~"If the improbable happens, it happens to the hero of romance rather than because ofhi~n."~~

Jameson, criticizing Frye's method of classiQing narrative modes by the degree of power exercised by the hero, observes that, in romance, "the hero's dominant trait is naiveté or

" Bloomfield, "EpidicMotivation" 1 12.

On "passive heroism" in Sir Gawwsee Jill Mann, "SirGawain and the Romance Hero," I.ln MM ed. Leo Carruthers (Cam bridge: Brewer, 1994) 105- 17.

Viîz 67. inexperience, and that his most characteristic posture is that of be~ilderment."~~Emzé

shares her helplessness with the mad Ywain, the dispossessed Hom, the poverty-stricken

Amadace, the separated fdyof OctaVian.

But Emaré is not completely helpless. It is, after dl, her initial mistance to

Artyus that precipitates her expulsion. And she spends the seven years in Rome sewing, an activity that recalls the Emir's daugbter who spent seven years making the cloth that became Emaré's robe, who sewed onto the cloth not only the figures of famous romance lovers but also figures representing herself and her lover, for whom the cloth was made.

Like the craft of the Emir's daughter, Emaré's sewing hints at her ability ultimately to fashion her own ideal nanative, to be the author of her own story. For those seven years are also spent in mising Segramour, who becomes the chief instrument in the reunion of

Emaré with the husband and her father; Emaré waits until the two men come to her, but when they do come she takes the initiative to constnict their reconciliation.

The agency of the Middle English romance protagonist can, thenfore, be a rather subtle and elusive quality; where identity is dependent on recognition systems rather than on "~e~reaiization,"in narratives in which the protagonist is more often in a state of displacement than of identity, the movery of identity seems, more often than not, the result of fortuitous circumstance, of fantastic coincidence. The king-light in mveu shines fiom Havelok's mouth when he is asleep; it is a quality beyond his conscious

31 Jameson 139. For this reason Diana T. Childress's atternpt to differentiate between romance and saint's legend on the basis of the protagonids "power of action" is problematic; see her "Between Romance and Legend: 'Secular Hagiography' in Middle English Literature," Philological Ouarterk 57 (1978): 3 1 1-22. 73 control, even when he is conscious of it. But the romance protagonist is often able, also, to master the tyranny of citcumstances, to manipulate codes and systems so that recognition happem. In the next two chapters I tum to an investigation of displacement and dis*, narrative conventions indicating, respectively, control by cucumstances and control over them. Cbapter 4

The King on the Shore: Disphcement

On close inspection., aii literature is probably a version of the apocalypse that seems to me rooted, no matter what its socio-historical conditions migbt be, on the !?agile border (borderiine case) where identities (subject'object, etc.) do not exist or only barely so-double, fuzLy, heterogenous, animai, metamorphosed, altered, abject.'

The action of bebegins "vpona someres &y" (29): when the king of

Suddene, Miirry, is riding dong the shore of his kingdom with two companions, "Ase he

was woned ride" (34). They meet meen shiploads of invading Saracens and challenge

them, but, hopelessly outnumbered, are killed. The Saracens ovemm the country and set

Murry's son Hom and his twelve companions adrift in a boat The rest of the poem is

about Hom: his exiles, his batties with Saracen marauders and non-Saracen traitors, his

recovery of Suddene.

It is an opening in many ways typical of the Middle English romances, and

especially of the modes by which they represent identity lost Displacement in the

Middle English romances takes any of a number of limited and often interrelated fonns,

indicative of the recognition systems in which the authors and audiences of these texts positioned and understood identity. Most of these foms of displacement opemte, at

Merent points of the narrative, in jQg Hom: the death of the father, dispossession and

. . ' Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Esqgy on Ab~ectioq,trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia UP,1982) 207.

Quotations from Hpm are corn Kinp Hom. ed. Rosamund Allen (New York: Garland, 1984). 75 exile, the slanderous accusation, the separaiion of lovers or fiiends, the impact of love.

As varied as they are, these events al1 deny or recoafigwe the romance protagonids initial position in ideological space; thus they operate as dissolutions of identity, at the same tirne defining, by their loss, what the text represents as the elements of an ideal identity.

Susan Wittigyin her study of the namative structures in the Middle English romances, sees the opening episode of Kirinas an example of the common convention "death of the father." The fùnction of this structure within the narrative is to deny the protagonist's patrimony? In the narratives that use this convention the father is of signiscant social stature: king of Suddene in KirinHom.1 of Hampton in Bevis of

Hanlpf~l~king of Denmark in Havelok, a knight in &.r* Perceval of G&s and m.

The father therefore represents and legithates the (usually male) protagonist's nobility; the death of the father creates a potential rupture in the continuity of the Iineage, a continuity that uitimately cails into question the protagonist's right to his father's title.

Functionaily equivalent to the dead father is the disappearing or unknown father in Sir

&g& and -; there the recovery of the father and the father's recognition of the son play a sigdicant role in the recovery of the protagonist's identity.

The fatber's identity, in other words, is necessary to the son's. Sir Go* is an extreme example of the topos that the son's nature reflects the fathers. The behavioural change that accompanies Gowther's conversion is not so much a psychological change as

Wittig 106-34. it is a change in patrimony; Gowther is a son of the devü who becomes a son of God. In tlavelok. the Denish nobleman Ubk recognizes Havelok not only by the luminiferous signs of nobility shining fiom HaveIoYs body but ais0 by Havelok's resemblance to his father Birkabeyn:

Panne bihelden he him faste, So bat he kwwen at laste Pat he was BUkabeynes sone, Pat was here king, bat was hem wone Wel to yeme and wel were Ageynes uten-laddes hem- "For it was neuere yet a brob Jn ai Denemark so lich anokr, So pis man, bat is so fayr, Als Bitkabeyn; he is hise eyr!" (2 149-58)4

It is significant that Perceval in Sir Perceval of Galles has the sarne name as his father, and that the sons in Octaaare named after their parents. Crane notes that in the meof Horn. the twelfth-century Anglo-Nom version of the Hom story, Hom's career is a recapitulation and reafhnation of his fatheis, that Hom is, in effect, a double of his father.' The Middle English dso stresses the continuity of identity between Murry and Hom; Hom's defence of Westernesse against a Saracen invasion parallels and revises Murryls failure to defend Suddene against a similar invasion. The comection between the two incidents is reinforced by the repetition of specifk lines. In

Westernesse Hom, like Murry, "Rod vpon his pleing" (32; cf. 635) when he meets

Quotations fiom are from J-iavelok ed. G.V. Srnithers (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987).

Crane 26. 77 kene" (40; cf. 640) on the beach. The exchange between Hom and the Saracens

foîîows the same pattern as the exchange between Muny and Saracens: "He axede

what hi so3te I Obr to londe brofte" (41-42,605-06), and a Saracen replies that they

intend to kiil everyone in the land. The si@cant difference, of course, is that Hom repels the invasion, succeeduig where his father failed, and so surpassing, and later avenging, his father.

That the son's identity is a.extension of his fatheis, and that the fathefs identity legitimates the son's, explain in part why a romance called is about Octavian's sons; the narrative about the emperor Octavian in so far as Florent and Octavian junior are extensions of their father, and the dispersion of Octavian's family is a dissolution of

Octavian's identity. The identity of father and son also explains why Kine calls itself a song "Of Mlnry be kinge" (4), although it is about Hom. Not only is the son's identity constituted by the father's, but the continuity of the fathers identity depends on the success of the son-success in this case king rneanued by the extent to which the protagonia lives up to or surpasses his father's reputation. The re-establishment of identity that marks closure in many of the Middle Engiish romances involves the continuity of the protagonids family. The sons of Bevis of Hampton become kings of . . Grnienia and of England, and William and Melior in

. . .haden tvo sones samen, ful semliche childeren, bat sepbn Purth Goddes grace were grete lordes after. bat on was emperour of Rome and regned after his fader, bat ober was a kud king of Calabre and Poyle; and mi3ti men and rnenskfid were bi in here tirne, and feiPW as here fader to fie and to Dewe. (5509-14) Havelok and Goldeborw in have

Sones and douthes rith fiuetene, Hwar-of sones were kinges de, So wolde God it sholde bif'e, And Be douhtns alle quenes. Him sondes wel bat god chiid strenes! (2980-84)

One element of identity in the Middle English romances is therefore patrilinear

continuity, and a break or threatened break in that continuity represents a loss of identity.

The death of Murry in takes place when the Samcens invade Suddene,

so that the young Hom loses not oniy his father but also the kingdom to which he is heir.

Indeed, loss of identity by loss of land or other property is an even stronger narrative convention in the Middle English romances than the death or disappearance of the father.

There was, no doubt, a socioeconomic basis for this close connection between land and identity; in a predominaotly agrarian society, as M. M. Postan notes,

land was not ody a "factor of production," the means towards higher output and incorne, but also a "good" worth possession for its own sake and enjoyed as a measure of social statu, a foundation of famiiy fortunes, and a Mfihent and extension of the owner's pef~onality.~

The ownenhip of land in medieval English society was closely tied to the concept of nobility. Marc Bloch in &&l Seclaims that the distinguishing characteristic of the medieval nobility as a class was that they lived off the labour of other men. In the twelfth century the Euopean nobility began to consdidate into a legal and hereditary class,

in England, where knighthood depended rather upon landed wealth; Henry LII of

England issued ordinances in 1224 and 1234 that required every fke man who possessed

M. M. Pos~n,me -val EconuSociety (London: Weidenfeld, 1972) 135. a certain level of landed wealth to become a knight. In practical terms this arrangement meant that, although knighthood was pgssed on with the property to the eldest son and so was hereditary, the system was much more flexible in England than on the continent?

The Middle English romaaces express the comection between nobiiity and property in ternis of the identification of the protagonist and his property*so that the loss of property fûnctions as a los of identity.

The prevalence of this narrative convention in the Middle English romances indicates its significance. The action of Sir Dqpevm begins when Degrevant's neighbour poaches on his lands. Hom and Haveiok lose their kingdoms; the young

Arthur of must fight to establish his. Bevis and GameLyn are cheated out of their inheritances; Ladal, Amadace, and Cleges spend too Liberally and are reduced to abject poverty. When Cleges, a knight of the Round Table, arrives at Arthur's corn as a "pore mmy"the king, failing to recognize his knight, asks a harper who the visitor is:

He seyd: "My lege, withsuten les, Som-tyrne men dydhym cleges; He was a knyght of 3oure. Y may thinke, when bat he was nul1 of fortone and of grace, A man of hye stature." The kyng seyd: "Pis is not he in-dede; Yt is Long gon bat he was dede. . . ." (493-500)8

. . . * Marc Bl~~fiyEg&l Society, vol. 2, Social Pand288,329- 3 1. On the hereditary system in France see R. Howard Bloch, mole- (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983).

~uotationsfiom Sir Cl- are fiom vusTab in Verse, ed. George H. Mchight (1 9 13; New York: Gordian, 197 1). Loss of property also usually means miai isolation for the pmtagonin; as the

English author of Devis of notes, glumly, "whan a man is in powae falle, I He hab fewe fiendes alle" (3593-94)? Weaith means authority over others, power over circumstances; ownership of land meam an ideai autonorny. Hom aud Havelok are kings, and other male romance protagonists attain kingdoms; even when the protagonist is not a king, as Bevis of Hampton is not, he acts with defiant independence and on his own authority. When the protagonist loses his pro- he loses with it freedom hmthe

"tyranny of circumstances" and becomes, as Cleges does, isolated and unrecognized.

When Go* in &avelok forces Goldeborw to marry Havelok, the dispossessed Havelok protests that he cannot marry because he canwt provide for a wife. He owns nothing, not even hself:

Hwat sholde Ich with wif do? 1 ne may hire fede ne clobe ne sho. Wider sholde Ich wimman bringe? I ne haue none kines binge- 1 ne haue hws, Y ne haue cote, Ne 1ne haue stikke, Y ne haue sprote, J ne haue neyper bred ne sowel, Ne cloth but of an hold with couel. Pis clobes bat Ich onne-bue kenpe kokes and Ich his knave! (1 138-47)

Social displacement is merreinforced by the protagonist's physical displacement, in the forms of exile or imprisonment. In many of these cases the protagonist is otiginaüy intended to die, but the death sentence is mitigated to a sentence

Quotations hmBevis of are fiom -e of Sir Beves of mtoun, ed. Eugen Kolbing, EETS Extra Senes 46,48,65 (London: Mord UP, 1885-86, 1894). 8 1 that dows the protagonist to live but isolates hlln or her hmthe community on which

identity depends. The Saracens set Horn adrift with the intent that he and his companioos should drown: "To schupe schuiie 3e fhde I And Sinice to grunde, / k se Schal3ou adrenche" (105-07). When Emart is put in the mpn,visioned and steerless boat, both

ümes she is expected to starve or drown, and her persecutors assume that she is dead.

Havelok is first imprisoned with his sisten and then, afknarrowly escaphg king murdered with them, is given to Grim to be drowned; he escapes &g untimely end only when Grim and Leue see the hg-light coming out of his rnouth and recognize hini as the friture king of Denmark and England. Bevis is similarly condemned to death and is saved by the intervention of Saber. Florence and her sons in Qctaware to be bumt to death but Octavian mercifully sends them into the wildemess instead. In the Çhevalwe Assw

Enyas and his siblings are taken off to be drowned but instead are lei3 in a forest. There is even a rather ridiculous episode in Quv of Warw-ck in which Guy's enemies throw the peacefully sleeping Guy, bed and ali, into the sea, and Guy has to be rescued by a surprised fisherman who sees the bed, with the helpless knight on if floating past his boat. These narrow escapes imply a fiutional equivalence benveen death and displacement; by removing the protagonist fkom the social context that defines his or her identity, the evil usurper of romance effectuaUy removes the protagonist nom the world of significant existence.

The protagonist is usually displaced into a threatening or hostile temtory. There the threats are tbreats not because they are directed against the protagonist but because they are impersonal; the moa temfjing nighhnare in the romances is the nightmare of beingunknown. A foreign country, whm no one knows or cares about the protagonist's

name or station, is such a space. But a more tbtening tenitory is the inhuman territory

of the wiidemess, where name and station do not even potentiaily matter. The wilderness

of eçtaviêp, into which Florence and her mas are exileci, serves such a fiuiction; it is fidi

of "wylde bestys" (Cambridge MS 290) whose actions aie unpredictable and who are

(except for the lioness) unsympathetic to the plight of the exiies. It is a disorienthg space; entering it, they go "Ynto a wode was veryly thykk, / There cleuys were and weyes wyck, I And heor wey fonde sche noghtt' (Cambridge MS 304-06).10 We 6nd in fi

the epitome of these oppressive wildemesses, through which Gawain rides alone in his quest for the Green Chapel:

Mony klyf he ouerclambe in contrayez straunge, Fer floten fÎo bis firendez fkmedly he rydez. At vche warbe aber water ber be wy3e passed He fonde a foo hym byfore, bot ferly hit were, And bat so fouie and so feue bat feshym byhode. So mony meruayl bi mount brlx mon fjmdez, Hit were to tore for to telie of tenh dole. Sumwhyle wyth womez he werrez, and with wolues als, Sumwhyle wyth wodwos, bat woned in knarrez, Bobe wyth buliez and berez, and borez obrquyle, And etaynez, bat hym anelede of he3e felle; Nade he ben dwand dryse, and Drym had serued, Douteles he hade ben ded and dreped ful ofte. (7 13-25)

Here are ali the elements of a typical wilderness: the sense of king "far nom fiiends," the inhuman enemies popping up at regular intervals, the uncouth wonders, the wild beasts

'O This is the Northern version ofOctavian. preserved in Lincoln, Dean and Chapter Libnvy MS 9 1, and in Cambridge University Library MS Ff.2.38. Quotations fiom the Northern Qlare fiom Qctovh ed. Frances McSparran, EETS 289 (London: Oxford UP, 1986). 83 and assorteci monsters. At the other extreme is the wüdemess of Percevai of Galles, where Perceval's mother takes her son ahthe death of her husband Compared to

Gawain's wilderness it is quite a tame place, but it is nonetheless isolated hmthe social context that would establish Perceval's identity as Arthurian knight. It still bctions, therefore, as an amnesiac territory, a world in which Perceval loses himself in ignorance as profoundiy as Florence in the wilderness of octaVian loses herself in confusion. In

Ga& the mad Ywain nios awy to the forest:

An evyl toke bim als he stode; For wa he wex ai wilde and wode. Unto be wod way he nome; No man wist whore he bynome. (1649-52)

"Here,"notes Corinne J. Saunders, "the pun on 'wod,' forest, and 'wode,' mad, is

The most evocative of the wild spaces in the Middle English romances is the sea.

The "ship ai steerlees"of Chaucer's Ma of Law's Talc (4390), the conventional rudderless boat of the romances, is an image of ulàmate vuinerability, of lack of control, of human powerlessness in an impersonal and dangerous environment. Hom's displacements are marked by voyages acnws the sea; in many other romances sea passages also serve as transitions, espefidy as moves that isolate the protagonia fkom his or her accustomed recognition systems and thus serve as the removais into amnesia

IL Saunders, neForest of MeQieval Romance (Cambridge: Brewer, 1993) 137. See also Putter 18-27. Putter maintains that Gawain and Chrétien's Yvain "maintain their identity" in the forest (27), but I would argue that the forest, as a threatening and isolating environment, registen their & of identity. It is, &et dl, Yvainfs home aftet he goes mad and forgets who he is. 84

that Frye associates with "descent" or ioss of identity. Such moves include the

kidnapping of Tristrem by pirates in Sir or of Guy of Warwick's son Reinbrun

by marine merchants, or the sebgof Bevis to foreign merchants in Devis of.

(The kidnapping of Reinbnm is a particuiarly dramatic, if unlikely, removal; the ship in question is blown by a stonn aU the way hmRussia to Afiica) At the other end of a sea passage the protagonist &en conceals, fails to mention, or even seems to forget his or her identity; Horn dishimself "Cutbad" in Ireland, Emaré changes her name to Egaré,

Trîstrem in [refand cails himeif Tramtris. The imagery of sea and shipwieck even fhds its way into Sir a the impoverished Amadace equips himself with clothing and a horse salvaged fiom a rich shipwreck and identifies himself at a tournament as a shipwrecked prince.

Hom's second exile fiom Westernesse to Ireland involves two more mechanisms of displacement: slander and sepdon. Hom's tceacherous cornpanion, Fikenhild, claims that Hom means to kill Ayimar, the king of Westernesse, in order to marry

Aylrnar's daughter RymenhiId, and that Horn's presence in Rymenhild's chamber is proof of Hom's duplicity. Hom later repudiates the accusation (1299-1305) but not ali similar accusations in the Middle English romances are fdse. Desoneli in

Po- is set adrift when she gives birth to Torrents twin sons, der their maniage is . delayed; Amis in andYsondeinsirTm. mort to underhanded stnitegy to avoid king proven guilty. Florence in Qctahis, on the other hand, unjustly accused and punished, as is her namesalce in Le Flo~nceofRome-or the Knight in

e where the love &air is Platonic. 85

Emaré hints at this fear of slander when she tells her father that the disclosure of incest

wouid shame them both:

Pe worde shuîde sprynge fer and wyde, In aile @ worlde on euery syde, De wotde shuide be borne- 3e ben a lorde of gret pryce, Lorde, lette neuur such sorow a-ryce, Take God sou be-fome! (25641)

Later, in Galys, she becomes the victim of her mother-in-lads slander. The consequences of slander, as of other forms of displacement, typicaily include exile or some other form of isolation. In Egelond and his family are hcarcerated on a false accusation of treason, and before Egelond undergoes his triai by ordeal he is stripped of the clothes that mark his social position: "From hym bey token be rede scarlet.

/ Bobe hosyn and schoon bat weren hym met, / bat fel al for a kny3t" (582-84).12

MQis in fact muSual among Middle English romances in that its case of slander involves only political intrigue, while most slander in these texts is based on allegations of sexual misconduct. Certainly even these are ofien represented as instances of politicai misconduct as weli; Fikenhild accuses Hom not only of sleeping with

Rymenbild but ais0 of planning to assassinate Ayhar. ûther cases of slander in the

Middle English romances sidarly involve a situation in which a father or husband feels threatened by a younger and sociaily inferior male, and the perceived misconduct in these cases lies not so much in the extramarital relation as in its political repercussions; a

l2Quofafions fiom Atmare fiom ed. A. M. Trounce, EETS 224 (London: Oxford UP, 195 1). 86 woman of privileged stanis has offered her favours to a subordinate, who has taken advantage of that oEiand so disturbed the structures of power.

Tht slanderous accusation, especiaiLy when it is directed against the protagonistts sexuai conduct, is an attack on identity because it is a.attack on integrity. "Integrity" here impiîes not only loyalty to a system of values or to people whose relation to the protagonist are defined by a systern of values-the kind of loyalty known to the Middle

English authors as "tmwPe"-but also wholeness, completeness, autonomy. In that sense, writes Frye, "virginity is an appropriate image for anaining original identity: what is objectively untouched symbolizes what is subjectively ~ontained."'~Vuginity is, Frye suggests, especiaiiy relevant to romance representations of female identity:

In the social conditions assumed, Wginity is to a woman what honor is to a man, the symbol of the fact that she is not a slave. Behind ail the "fate worse thao death" situations that romance delights in, there nuis the seme that a woman deprived of her virginity, by any means except a marriage she has at least consented to, is, to put it vulgarly, in an impossible bargainhg position. l4

The comection between virginity and autonomy cornes out most clearly in a narrative such as LLwhere, as Ramsey observes, "Florence's life, property, and identity itself are king threatened dong with her virginity. " 'V would say rather that Florence's Me, property, and virginity fonn a complex of interrelated ideals that 1have been caüing identity. The point of the confession scene at the end of Le Ra

I3 Frye, 153. '' Frye, 73.

L5 Ramsey 180. 87 of Rome is not to absolve the offending males but to clear Florence, to prove that through aii het trials she "kept hur chaste and claie" (2163),16 *ce ail the viïiains are forced to admit that theu evil designs, including the attempted rapes, failed. The scene restores, becaw it vindicates, Florence's identity, particulatly in giving Florence power over her former oppressors.

Somewhat related to the loss of identity by slander is the motif of challenge, which threatens the knight's identification with the values that define him. ûtuel tirst cornes to Charlemagne's court, in bearhg a chailenge to Charles from

King Garcy. The young protagonist of Sir Percevai of Gwresponds to the Red

Knightls challenge not only to prove himself worthy of knîghthood but also to represent the honour and interests of Arthur's court. The Green Knight in Sir Gawwdthe

een also tests both Arthur's court against its reputation and Gawaids worthiness as a representative of that court's ideais. These challenges disrupt the ritualized order of the court and isolate one member hmthat community, necessitating the return and re- establishment of that individual before the honour, not only of the individual but also of the community, is restored. As David Aers has pointed out, the discourteous challenger interrogates and threatens "the very identity of the courtly communityyits virtues, and goals"; in a society that judges conduct by public standards, honour is identity ."

I6 Quotations fiom --ce of Rome are hm Bone Fbeof Rome. ed. Carol Falvo Heffeman (New York: Manchester UP, t 976).

'' Aers 158. Fikenhiid's slander in Kirinleds to yet another form of displacement: the

separation of fnends, lovas, or family. This narrative convention is very common

because of the social isolation that usually accompanies the protagonist's displacement,

but in texts such as Flan'sor the separation itseif is the initid

displacement. In Kirinthe partuig of Hom and Rymenhild is associated with a violent image brnRymenhild's dream, that of the fish tearing the net. The separation of

Orfeo and Heurodis is similady represented as a rupture so profound that it borders on the impossible:

Po lay sche stilie atte last, & gan to wepe swib fast, & seyd bus king to: "Alias, mi lord Sir Orfeo! Sebben we nrst to-gider were Ones wrob neuer we were, Bot euer ich haue y-loued be As mi Lüf, & so bou me; Ac now we mot delen ato -Do De best, for y mot go." "Ailas!"qu* he, "For-lom icham! Whider wiitow go, & to wham? Whider pou gost ichil wil, be, & whider y go buschalt wib me." (1 17-30)18

If we allow Bloomfield's clah that the beloved "is, in the medieval physiology of love,

~neself,"'~it is easy to see the separaton of Orfeo and Heurodis as a disjunction of

I8 Quotations kmsir Orfm are hm O&Q, ed. A. J. Bliss, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1966).

l9 Morton W.Bloomfield, "The Problem of the Hero in the Later Middle Ages," the Renaissanc& ed. Norman T. Burns and Christopher Reagan (Albany: State U of New York P, 1975) 44. 89 identity, so great that Orfeo leaves his kingdom to wander unrecognized adalone in the

In @yofWe the initial displacement happens not when Guy leaves Felice

but when he falls in love. Love becomes displacement when its object is tulattainable.

Guy cannot many Felice because he is only the stedsson; his love for her thetefore

places hirn in a position of insu£ficiency. Felice's response to Guy's first declaration of

love puts him Wyin bis place: "Artow bis, Gij, so mot f>ou go, / k steward sone

Su-, 1 Ich wene bou art a fole musard!" (Auchinieck MS 378-80):' As interrogation?

love forces the protagonist to define his position in terms of another's position, and Guy describes the resulthg emotional distress in the language of alienatioa and annihilation:

Loue, bring me of bis wodenisse, & bring me in to sum lisse, For to reste me abrowe, Pat y mi3t meseluen knowe. (Auchinieck MS 429-32)

"Worbi ich were ded to be: / Y loue bing bat Ioueb nowme' (Auchinleck MS 449-50).

When Melior in W~of.E)alerne. . fds in love 4thWilliam, she describes her emotional state with the familia.displacement image of the ruddedess boat: "1 sayle now in be seas schip boute mast, 1boute anker or ore or ani semlyche sayle" (567-68).

Love is hardly ever, in these texts, a matter of a merely pnvate relationship; female characters are ofien closely connected to property or social standing. After Guy's

" Quotations fiom Guv of Warwick are fkom The off p- ed. Julius Zupitze, EETS Extra Senes 42,49,59 (London: T'bner, 1883, l887,189I), rpt. in one vol. 1966. Quotations fiom the first part of the Auchinleck are cited by line nurnber, quotations from the second part of the Auchinleck Guy are cited by stanza and line numbea. 90 marriage to Felice, he is "holdenlord of mani a tom" (Auchinleck MS 20.2); in the same way, Haveloks marriage to Goldeborw makes him king not just of Denmark but &O of

England, William of Paleme becomes emperor of Rome through his marriage to Meiior, and Ywain becomes lord of Alundyne's lands when he marries Aiundyne. Throughout &

the womao Christabelle and the land of Artois are continually associated; Eglamour engages in various feats of amis in order to win bpth "be maydyn clere" and "aileArtasse bothe fcne and nere" (226-27). When Egiamour leaves to accomplish his ordeai, he wanis Pryncesamour: "Kepe wele my lady and my lande"

(244)? The neatness of the alliterative formula hints at a social trend, the ticreasingly common practice of acquuing property through mamage-" In the separation and reunion of lovers, therefore, more is often at stake than the love-relationship itseif; the protagonist's identity as defhed by his or her personal relationships may dso be connected to his or her identity as defined by various socioeconomic recognition systems.

The various fonns of displacement in the Middle English romances cluster arouud and support one another; even a relatively straightforward narrative such as contaios most of them. Furthemore, the episodic structure of romance narrative allows displacements throughout the narrative, each of which must be reversed before the protagonist is restored to a position of identity- The protagonist's movement away hm

'' Quotations fkom Sit off are hmmur of Artois, ed. Frances E. Richardson, EETS 256 (London: Mord UP, 1965)-

Postan 33; Postan connects this trend to a "land hunger" in the late thirteenth century. Hudson, "Constmction"8 1-82, connects this increasing preoccupation in late fourteenth- and fifieenth-century English romances to "an obsessive concern for the preservation and extension of property and the advancement of family through marriagen in the English gentry of that time. 91 identity registers not only in physical displacement-the exile or quest that takes the

protagonist across the sea or into the wildemess-but ais0 in the protagonist's mersto

an insistent interrogation, a tepeated demand that the pmtagonist identify himseifor

hmelf. Hom's answers to the question of bis identity are Wghtfomard at first but

become increasingly indirect and evasive as the narrative progresses and as he moves deeper into a worid of indeteiminacy and subtedùge, where the ordinary recognition systems set up by society are confhsed or impotent?

Appropnately, therefore, many signincant encounters in KirinHome place "Bi be se side" (33,137,974)-011 the shom, the border region between property and landlessness, stability and chaos, comunity and isolation, civilization and wildemess, safety and danger, authority and helplessness, identity and anonymity. The seaside encounters in Hom form an index of interrogations, a succession of challenges that register the status of Hom's identity at various points in the poem: Murry's defeat by the

Saracens on the shores of Suddene, Hom's landiag in Westemesse, Horn's defence of

Westemesse against the Saracens, Horn's landing in Ireland, Hom's defence of Ireland against the Saracens, Horn's landing in Suddene. With almost obsessive insinence, Hom reverses the fate of his father on the kach, twice defending a land against invading

Saracens, inadvertently killing his father's killer in the defence of Ireland, and fioally retakirig Suddene and becomuig its king. But the repetitiveness of the poem's structure also hints at its underlying instability; the kingdoms of Kirinare al1 bordered by a

See Ganirn 39-40. troubled sea, and repeatedy the sea -es to hgforeign invaders to Hom or to separate him fiom his rights and his loves, challenging and undemùning identity.

We can understand in these tcmis, then, Ywaiiis answer to the voice in the chapel, in the episode kmy&&& Cmwpin widi which this study opened. He answers the question "What ertou?" not by saying what he is, but by describing what he now is not: "a man." The Middle Engiish text descnks this manhood as an ideal feudal autowmy:

Ywain was a man with othea under his command, the lord of "a fid faire seignory"

(2 121), the husband of a noble lady. (The marriage to the noble lady, it is worth noting, was the means by which the retainers and the property were attained.) The position by which all Ywain's other positions are measured-in this case Ywain recalls his former position in order to emphasize the distance at which he is now removed from it-is precisely that position of autonomy and stability that Frye cails identity. The interrogation in the chapel reveals Ywain's loss of identity, and is itself surrounded by structures and images associated with that loss: Ywain's estrangement nom Alundyne, his madness, his isolation in the forest, his insistence on auonymity. The chapel itself, associated with Alundyne and with Ywain's victory over the first Knight of the Fountain, recalls the more poignantly the magnitude of Ywain's loss. Ywain has retwned to the same position in physical space, but in ideological space, so to speak, he occupies a wholly different position, failiDg to recognize the voice in the chapel even as the unseen questioner fds to recognize him.

As Frye has obsewed, most of the action of romance takes place not at but away from the state of identity, in an uncertain world whose vagaries and indifferences threaten 93 to ovcnvhelm the protagonist- There the tbreaî is wt so much physicai annihilation as it is the annihilation of identity, of which physical death is ody one form. Isolated hmthe structures that mate recognition, the protagonist moves hapkdly, disinherited, dispossessed, dishonound, VULllerable, alone, unrrcognized. Ln contrast to the state of identity, where aii variables are stable and known, the state of alienation or displacement is characterized by ambiguity, duplicity, and uncertainty. It is to one of these ambiguous but persistent narrative structures that 1next tum. Chaphr 5

The Homeà Hone: Disguhe

Lying, the telling of beautifid untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.'

Octa* contains a peculiar Little episode in which Florent's foster-father,

Clement, hearing of a marveiious horned horse owned by the Sultan, determines to steal

it. He disguises himself as a nondescript Saracen in the Northern version, as a palmer in the Southem version, and travels to the Sultan's court, where he passes himself off as an expert horseman and so gains access to the horned home. This episode is not stnctly necessary to the development of the narrative, but both English versions maintain it. The

Southem version especidy shows the influence of conventions common in other Middle

English romance^.^ The Northem Clement captures the horse for Florent, but the

Southem Clernent seems to do it simply for amusement; he presents the home to the King of France and nothhg mercomes of the incident. The purpose of the episode itself seems to be, as the purpose of the act is for Clement, mete entertainment; there is a certain satisfaction in seeing Clement's daring plan, his conventional disguise, his outrageous lies succeed so neatiy. Although Clement is a subordinate character, his little

.*. Oscar Wilde, "The Decay of Lying," 1889, Cnmism of Oscar Wil &, ed. Stanley Weintraub (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1968) 195.

See McSparran's comments in her edition of the Southem Octavia 0- 49, 107. 95 escapade in disguise links him to the protagonist of many a Middle Engiish romance, where disguise is a persistent narrative convention.

One standard reading of the disguise motif in the Middle English romances is that it operates as a device for investigating the contrasts bctween appearance and reality?

But any attempt to devclop such a reaU-;ug demonstrates its ~cuitiesand hadequacies.

The opposition of appearance and maiity is very seldom an issue in the Middle English romances; it is not really appropriate to ask, for example, which of the Green Knight or

Bertiiak is real and which a mere appearance. Even a passing cornparison of the Middle

English romances and, say, Qu- or FaeCryeepe reveals in the Middle

English romances no ontological cnsis of the same scope and kind as appears in the later texts. What issues, then, does disguise raise in the Middle English romances?

A survey of the Middle English romances shows a range of situations in which characters are engaged in disguise. Occasionally characters disguise themselves as others: Clement in the Southem claims to be the keeper of Arthur's hone;

Neptanabus in disguises himselfas Jupiter Ammon; in mour

MeI.lin, Merlin disguises Vter Pendragon as Tintagel so that they can gain access to

Ygerne; Amis and Amiloun trade places for the trial by combat. More often, however, the disguise involves non-identity rather than alternate identity. In Child, an early- fourteenth-century version of the Horn story, Horn's alias in Ireland is "Godebounde";

See, for exarnple, Ramsey 56, and Richmond, "Popularity," 165-66. For an alternative reading, based on the Anglo-Nonnan . . of Hue de Rotelande, see Michel Stanesco, "Le Secret de i'- chevalier," m-e COU%ed. Glyn S. Burgess and Robert A. Taylor (Cambridge: Brewer, 1985) 339-49. 96 Mills in his edition of suggests that the element +amay signe "vassal" or "retaiaer,"4reflectiag Hom's displacement kmpotential king to unrecognized bondsman. Tristrem reverses his name and calls himseif Tramtris, hinting at the reversal of his fortunes. bechanges her name to Egd, which Rickert in her edition of derives fiom the French "out~ast";~the hennit in Sir explains the related name "Degaré"as meaning "Ping bat not neuer whar it is I Or bing bat is neg3 forlom dso" (256-57): A change of amour also confers anonymity; a common convention involves the knight who participates incognito in a tournament, wearing amour of different colours (the S*inzaic Morte Ric)iatd Qer de Lypn.

Iwmadon.Mal0ry)-

The most common disguises are, indeed, representations of displacement.

Identity being most commody represented by figures of authonty and location, its antithesis is most cornmonly represented by figures of powerlessness and dislocation: beggars and pügrims. The figure of the piigrim is particularly resonant, associated in the

Middle English romances not so much with the geographical and spiritual goals of pilgrimage as with dispossession, isolation, anonymity, and homelessness; hence the

Maldwyn Mills, ed., 1(Heidelberg: Winter, 1988) 117.

Rickert, The Rowof xxix.

Quotafions fiom Sir De& are fiom aeD- ed. Gustav Schleich (Heidelberg: W inter, 1929). ubiquity in these tem of the paher, the "professional pilgrh," indefinitely displaced.'

In Florence, exilesi and alone, decides to becorne a pilgh; the Southeni

version has Clement, bis wife, and the sultan's daughter fleeing to Gascony "In slaueynys.

as by palmers wed' (1547), afier the Saraceas take Paris and capture the emperor

Octavian and Florent. Arthur in the Alliterative Marie Arthure. after his dream of

Fortune's wheel, puts on rich clothes and goes out alone into the fields. There he meets

A renke in a mdecloke 4th righte mwmme clothes With hatte and with heyghe schone, homely and mwnde; With flatte ferthynges the fkke was floreschede ali ouer, Manye schredys and schragges at his skyrttes hynnges, With hppeande with slawyn and skalopis inewe, Both pyke and palme, alls pilgram hym scholde. (3470-75)

The con- between "the riche kyngel' (3456) in his gem-studded clothes and the fantastic stranger with his "schredys and schragges" is pointed; the king still sees himself at the top of the wheel, master of many lands, and fiom this perspective the pilgrim is his opposite, a homeless and helpless wanderer. murcondescendingly remuids the stranger of a pilgrim's vulnerability and of the king's control:

Whedire wilnez thowe, wye, wakande thyn onne? Qwhylls Pis werlde es O werre, a wathe 1 it holde. Here es ane enmye with oste, vndire 3one vynes; And they see the, forsothe sorowe the betyddes! Bot 3i.f thow hafe condethe of be kynge selfen,

'On palmers set James A. Bnmdage, mevalWw . .rand the . Cly~ade~ . (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1969) 18, 124-25; Sidney Heath, I~fe. in. aeMi- (Boston: Houghton, 19 12) 99; J. J. Jusserand, E&& W-e in the Mid& & 4th ed., 1950, ûms. Lucy Toulmin Smith (London: Methuen, 1961) 2 1 1; Christian K. . . . * Zacher, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP,1 976) 55. On instances of the pilgrim-disguise motif see Francis P. Magoun Jr., "Hymselven Lik a Pilgrym to Desgise: Troilu~V, 1577," 59 (1 944): 176-78. Knaues wiU kill the and keppe at thow haues; And ifbu halde hey mye, they hente the also, Bot if thow hastyly Me helpe of bis hende knyghttes. (3479-86)

As it happem, however, the pilgrh is Sir Craddoke, "Kepare of klyon" (35 12), the

king's own hiight, on the way to Rome to bring news of Modredersusurpation of the

English throne. The pilgrim, in fact, is no remote stranger, but herald and emblem of

Arthur's own loss.

Our investigation of disguise, therefore, is somewhat compiicated by the fact that

in many cases disguise takes the form of displacement. Hom, Trisirem, and Emaré do not change their names to hide theu "real identities" but to reflect their Ioss of identity; their aiiases are not, therefore, properly disguises. The distinction is subtle, perhaps not always possible to maintain. Barnes says of Meothat "When he announces bimself to the fajr king as 'bot a pover minstrel' (l.430), he is giving an accurate account of his circumstances; but when he retums to the 'ceal' world of Winchester, Meo's pose as a

'minsacl of pover 1%' 0.486) becomes a caiculated disgui~e."~The ody difterence between Orfeo in Faery and Orfeo in Winchester is that in Winchester he borrows a beggar's clothing. Clement, disguiseci as a palmer when he steals the sultan's home in the

Southem Octavirin. is a genuine palmer when he purchases Florent, and in the Southem version becomes a palmer again when he escapes afler the capture of Paris. In a world in which beggars were kings and pilgrims are knighîs, in which disguise often takes the forrn of displacement, what value is there in distinguishing between displacement and

disguise?

Disguise tends to be empioyed for a specific purpose, that of gainhg access to a

space that is nodyinaccessible. Disguise as a beggar or pilgrim therefore has a

strategic advantage relateci to the historical privileges of these vagrants; pilgrims, for

example, could claim the right to personal protection and the right to hospitality? As a

pilgrim or a beggar, the romance pmtagonist is not easily noticed and gains ready

admittance to the courts of generously inciined nobles, or at least of nobles who wish to

appear generously inciined. But the fiirthe~aims of disguise remain genedy foggy.

Orfeo says specificdy that his disguise was a plan to test the faithfbhess of his steward;

Richard's disguise in colour-coded amour, in wdCoer de is meant to test the

prowess of his knights. Clement's disguise is obviously a strategem for gaining

privileged access to the sultan's horse. But Hom's disguise in Honi seems oddly

irrelevant at a practicai lcvel. The disguise is not a militaxy tactic for penetrating the

enemy stronghold, because the conquest of the cade is accomplished later by sheer force.

That the disguise is meant solely to test Rymenhild's faithfiilness is not entirely

convincing either; the palmer has already told Hom of Rymenhild's obvious distress at

the upcoming wedding. And why, when in disguise, does Hom keep gÏving Rymenhild

hints about his identity? As Ganim points out, the episode raises more questions than it answers:

Brundage 12-15. Why does he put off his revelation and so torture hm? To test her fath? To protect ha? Why does he wait mtil she is on the brink of suicide? . . . At the center of the poem is this remadcable recognition scene, but a recognition obscdby a disguise, a drem, the long forgotten details of that dm,and by the evocative symbolism of the ring and the CU~.~O

To begin to merthese questions, 1 wish to observe first that disguise is almost always represented in the Middle English romances as a positive, or at least morally indifferent, activity. In a PetSian knight disguises himself in a Greek knight's amour and manages by this strategem to attack Alexander in battle. Mer the

Persian knight is captureci, the Greek nobles debate his proper punishment, the majority condemning hirn to death for treason. Tholomeus the marshal protests, arguing that

"Euery man to den his foo / Dyuers gynne so shal do" (40 10- 11). Alexander foiiows

Tholomeus's advice, praising the Persian for his "hardy dede in grete queyntise" (4047) and generously honourllig the enemy knight with rich new clothing, a horse, other wealth. and a safe-conduct back to the Persian camp. The episode is exceptional, in that it involves an enemy capable of disguise; gendyromance enemies lack the intelligence necessary for such trickery, and disguise is usuaily an activity of the protagonist or the protagonist's allies. But this incident of the Persian knight demonstrates that, even when disguise an enemy activity, it is heartily commended and genuinely admired.

Frye claims that the two fonns of sin Dante recognizes in the ''farza and aviolence and hud," becorne in romance the two primary -es, and that gpdp

'O Ganim 38-39. 101 often takes the form of disguise." Far hmking condemned, it is celebrated. In the

MiMle Engiish romances it is an expression of agency, and is oha sign that the

displaced protagonist is headed back toward idmtity. Ha,then, is the différence that

Bames observes between the Orfi who enters the court of the fairy king as a poor

minml and the Orfeo who enters the court at Winchester as a pot minstrei.

Orfeo's act of borrowing the beggar's clothes arguably makes no difference in his

appeatance. The citizens of Winchester see the ragged man whose hair and bard have

grown long and unkempt in the wildemess:

"Lo!" bai seyd, "Swichea man! Hou long be here hongeb him opan! Lo! Hou bis berd hongel, to his kne! He is y-clongen al-ço a tre!" (505-08)

His persona1 appearaace, quite apart fiom his clothing, has not changed much since the

fairy king's description of him as "lene, rowe & blac" (459). But Orfeo's use of the

beggar's clothes does indicate his new ability to manipulate the conditions of his

dispossession and exileuin effect, the conditions of his anonymity-so that they become

the preconditions for recognition. The sirategy underlyhg the familiar convention of the

knight fighting in unrnarked or exchauged annow is the same; Jeanne Drewes, in an

article on Malory, notes that a romance knight fights anonymously, paradoxically, to raise

his own status and thereby to gain merrecognitiod2 Disguise, in other words,

" Frye, 65,68.

l2 Jeanne Drewes, "The Sense of Hidden Identity in Malory's Morte De,"Sif Thomas Malued. D. Thomas Hanks Jr. (New York: AMS, 1992) 1 7-25. 102 involves the strategic use of fomis of displacement for the ptnpose of achieving or regaining identity.

This conscious and crafty manipulation of circumstances gives the protagonist the unexpected power of secret knowiedge, in a kind of metaphysical one-upmanship played agaiast the bewildering world. Fortune has made the king a beggar and is outwitted by the beggar who claims to be the king in disguise. The medieval romances delight in such epistemic mastery, as the episode of Clement and the homed home in the Southern

Octa* demonstrates. Wisdom in romance, Frye notes, "means practicai sense, and includes, on the human plane, the ability to get out of a tight spot."13 In the Middle

English romances this wisdom also includes the ability to get intp the tight spot, as welI as safely out of it, and is cdled -; it is through gmthat Clement sneaks into the hostile territory of the sultan's court and safely out again. means wisdom, cunning, skiil, strategy, ingenuity; as Frye points out, it derives dtimately fiom the Latin copnitus and therefore indicates knowiedge as weil as king associated with guile." The Persian knight in we recalI, is praised for his "grete queyntise." In &Çaaûawain leams that he had ken deceived "Pur3 my3t of Morgne la Faye, . .. / And koyntyse of clergye, bi craftes wel lemed, I De maystrcs of Merlyn" (244648). The word clusters extraordinady densely around the homed horse episode in the Southern Octa*. Clernent takes Flomt to the

l3 Frye, Sfriaturr 69.

Frye, 74. 1O3

sultan's daughter "For greet queynteys" (1326) and then asks her for "Som queyntyse"

(1329), information to enable him to embarrass hafather without damage to his own

skin. Upon being told of the wondrous home, Clement declares that he will steal it "Wyth

Som queyntys" (1354), and accordingly disguises himself "as palmer quent of 3yn1'

(1 3 S8), deceiving the suitan with "Qwynte lesynges" (1 388). Clement the bungler

becomes in this episode a practitioner of the craft of deceit, celebrant of the cunning m,

master of secret knowledge.

Another adept at as Bertilakts words in Sir Ga-e Cineen

indicate, is Meriin. The master magician of Arthurian romance is, writes R

Howard Bloch, "the representation of that which cmotbe said and of everything that

can be said-a shifter, trickster, joker, arbiter of value and of meaning." He "personifies

the figure of the paradox"; "he represents the skilled rhetoncian, master of juridical

discourse, guardian of technology, and engineer of the physicaiiy impos~ible."'~In

he appears in a bewilderhg variety of disguises: as a beggar, as various rustics, as a "chapman,"as an old man, as a "garsoun," as a knight. in these

guises he conveys information and directs the action, a ubiquitous and powerful background presence. To Vter's messengers, sent to search for him, he appears as an old beggar. When they insult him, he scoffs at their ignorance:

Jk barouns ben witles and Wilde bat senten men hirn seche Pat no- no COU~knoweleche, Today be hab sou oft men

l5 R. Howard Bloch 2. 1 O4 No hewe 3e him neuer be bet. . . . (Auchinleck MS 194448)

Knowledge here is a form of recognition; MerIin knows the messengers and their

business, but they fail to recognk him. Meriin's knowledge is also power; the

messengers motfind him even when he waiks among hem, and he reveals himself to

whom he chooses, at the times and places of his choice. It is, writes Bloch, "the kind of

power afforded by know-how, technid compaence, mastery of the signs of a ~uiture."'~

The apparent mperfluity of Merlin's disguises points, as does the horned horse episode in

Octa- to an enjoyment of a delight in the crafi of manipulation and in the

artistry, the (wrecognition) inherent in the use of knowledge.

Thus Meriin is, as Bloch points out, "an image of the miter. . .and, indeed, an

embodiment of the principle of writing itself." '' In the Middle English romances the

artifice of disguise is associated with the artifice of narration, which takes the forms not only of written but also of oral performance, including the performance of music. The horned hone episode in the Southeni &ta* reminds us of another quality associated with pilgrims: being well-travelled, they are also rich sources of information and misinformation. Chaucer's pilgrims evidentiy lived up to expectations; in P- the "Pilgrymes and palmeres" (F9ologue 46) that Wi sees in the Field of Foik "Wenten

l6 R. Howard Bloch 3.

l7 R. Howard Bloch 2. forth in hire wey with many wise tales, / And Wden leve to lyen al hire lifafter"

(Prologue 48-49).'%s Clement travels mund Europe in his palmer's disguise,

Of ober palmers he gan me Lesynges quaynte, As ech man behouyd, bat YS yn payne Hys tale paynte. (1365-68)

in the sultan's court Clement gives a fdse account of himself: "For to blere be soudanes

ye / Queynte lespges he gan to lye" (1 387-88). Clement disguised as a palmer is a

dealer in tales, "tale" in this case bearing not only its primary meaning of "narrative" but

&O its cornotation of "falsehood" or "fiction." The crafi of nartative is therefore itself a

manifestation of- of of manipulative and secret knowledge, of deceit and

smtegy; the sarne power that expresses itselfin disguise also underlies the artistry of the

storyteller.

It is no accident, then, that some romance protagonists who show themselves adept at disguise are also adept at storytelling and music, bot.forms of demonstrating the mastery of codes, and both also usually associated with each other.

The Middle English Tristrem creates fdse or altemate identities, including false personal histories, when asked his identity; he is a master of the languages of games and of hunting as weli as of music.19 These discourses-ofgames, hunting, narrative, music-are

William Langland, Vw. . of PbPlo- ed. A. V. C. Schmidt (London: Dent, 1978). See also V.532-36, XIII.178, and Jusserand 206, quoting William Thorpe: "if these men and wornen be a month out in their pilgrimage, many of them shall be, a half-year after, great janglers, tale-teliea, and iian."

l9 For similar observations on another version of the Tristan story, see E. D. Blodgett, "Music and Subjectivity in GottFriedts -" ed. Marianne Henn and Christoph Lorey (Edmonton, AB: Marianne Henn and Christoph Lorey, 1994) 1- 18. cultural codes insofar as they demonstrate familiarity with the culaire itseIf, with the

structures of order and meaning that distinguish a culture and its recognition systems

fiom the randomness of non-cuiture. Orfeo, memorably, is a harper as weii as a king.

This detail is, of course, continued from the classical story of Orpheus, but it is also

strongly developed in the Middle English romance. The opening of Sir Orfeo calls

attention to the process of forming a narrative:

When kinges our y-here Of ani meniailes bat were, Dai token an harp in gle & game & maked a lay & laf it name. (1 7-20)

The story of Orfeo is therefore singularly appropriate, king the story of a harper-kùig

who uses his skill to recover both his wife and his kingdom. The poem is a celebration of

the power of this semiotic mastery in several respects. Orfeo's musical ability persuades

the faUy king to grant him a request; his disguise, his harpïng, and his story test the

faithfiiiness of his steward. Finaliy, the poem declares itseifau artifice of the same order, concluding with another refmcice to the crafi of making lays and to the musical art of

whkh Orfeo is the paragon:

Harpours in Bretaine der pan Herd hou bis meniaile bigan, & made her-of a lay of gode likeing, & nempned it after king. Bat lay "Orfeo" is y-hote: Gode is l~ lay, swete is tx note. (597602)

The act of identwg the lay by naming if given such prominence at the begllioing and end of the poem, links the identity of the lay with the identity of its main character. The 107

ski11 with which ûrféo finaiiy crafts his own narrative therefore images the skill with

which the poet retells that same narrative.

Honi, too, is a m,in he leams the & "ofharpe and songew(244)

at Aylmar's court. At the end of the poem he and his men gain access to Fikenhîld's

castie by disguising themselves as "harpins, / Fikleres and gigom"(1505-06). Like

Tristrem's and Orfeo's Hom's ability to manipulate semiotic systems to fuaher

his own ends extends beyond purely musicai ski11 and includes the ability to play with appearances and the ability to play with words. When Hom,disguised as a palmer, alludes to RymeMà's dream of fishing and puns on his name, he is, as Ganim suggests,

"playing a game with lang~age,"'~testing its possibilities and powers. His arriva1 at the cade in disguise, his allusive and elusive conversation with Rymenhild, his revelation of the ring, his fiction of the death of Hom-these details may seem to have some psychological or narrative hction, for example of reminding Rymenhild of her previous cornmitment or of testing her fai-ess, but actually they are as superfluous, or as significant, as Clement's theft of the homed horse in -. They demonstrate Hom's agency, his

20 Ganim 38. 1O8 preeminently admirable; in his exercise of these quaiities Hom represents the author of

the romance as he would iike to be regardeci and the audience of the romance as they

would like to be?

Disguise, therefore, is an image of the mmance narrative itself. Identity in these

te- king positionai and largely situated in the recognition structures that underlie

human relations in the romances, details of clothing and appearance also represent and

constitute identity: the purse and staff of the pilgrim, the rags of the beggar, the heraldic

insignia of the knight, the "hosyn and schoon" that mark Egelond's social status in

a(583). These material details define identity because they recail conventions

and co~otationsthat position characters accordhg to certain assumed classes of

humanity: pilgrims, beggars, knights, noblemen. These fonns of identity are themselves

conventional. The types of people represented in the Middle English romances are of

very limited variety and almost always express either a state of identity or a state of displacement Disguise shows a character's abiiity to manipulate these conventions rather than to be manipulated by them, whether the conventions are those of appearance, of social identity, or of narrative. This power over culturai codes represented within the narrative by the use of disguise is also represented at a ciifferent level by the pet's mastery of the narrative itself.

Thus disguise in the Middle English romances exemplifies the potential of these texts to be shultaneously and patadoxically consemative and subversive. Disguise, like

--

21 Ganim 40. the romance narrative, is conservative iasofat as it depends necessarily on given

structures of signification and recognition; it is subversive, again iike the romance

narrative, iasofar as it aattily manipulates and reverses the terms of those structures. In

these te- kings disguise theaiselves as beggars and thus regain their kingdoms-not

because any beggar has the potential to be king but because the beggar who becomes hg is actually already a king in disguise. On the other hand, the ease with which kings become beggars and beggars kuigs suggests an accessibility to priviiege; identity king determined not by any innate virtues but by the coincidence of circumstances, it foliows that any beggar a potentialiy be king. The noble birth of the protagonist is an insistent feature of these thirteenth- and fourteenthsentury texts-what Ramsey in

Romcalls "social climbing" in texts such as Bevis of or Guv of Warwick may not have been perceived by a medieval English audience as tembly revolutionary, since mobility between Iandowning classes was quite cornmon." Nevertheles, the promotion of Guy hmsteward's son to Earl of Warwick contains the impetus for the more dramatic movement of the late meenth- to early sixteenth-century romance

in which the squh manies the daughter of the King of Hungary.

Disguise in the Middle English romances is therefore not so much an exploration of appeanuice versus reality as an exercise of athe quaiity of lmowledgeable cunning that, together with the use of force and the coincidences of good fortune, helps the romance protagonist to achieve or recover identity. Ultimately issues of appearance 110

versus reality, as of truth vanis falsehood, do not arise with particular urgency in these

self-~onsciouslyfictional tem. Clement's "queynte lesynges," his represeatation of

himseifas Arthur's master of horse, are Myno less artificial than the namtive in

which they take place-the object of CIementvsdeceit is, afkaii, a marvellous creatute

apparently fathered by a unicom. hdeed the primary marker of fictionaiity is Clement's

use of the name of the quintessentid monarch of romance, but Arthur is no more fatastic

in this world than the Sultan or than Clement himself. The sigdicance of the episode

does not Lie in the Sultan's failme to see the "duParis butcher under the "apparent"

palmer, for Clement can be and has been a palmer in earnest. It lies rather in Clementvs

ability to use, for his own amusement, various systems of signification: the codes of

clothing that mark hM as a palmer, for example, or the codes of fiction that provide the material for his wild stories. in these romances any character who uses disguise reflects the activity of the pet, not so rnuch in creating a false identity as in demonstrating control over the conditions that make identity possible. Chapter 6

The Man in Red Armour: Recognition

-Yo si quién soy-respondi0 don Quijote-; y sé que puedo ser no solo los que he dicho, sino todos los doce pares de Francia, y amtodos los nueve de la Fama, pues a todos las hazaîias que ellos todos juntos y cada uno por si hicieron, se aventajh las mias.

"1know who 1 am," said Don Quixote*"and who 1 may be, if1 choose: not only those 1 have mentioned but all the Twelve Peers of France and the Nine Worihies as well; for the exploits of ali of them togethet, or separately, cannot compare with mine."'

The loss and recovery of identity iîe at the very heart of the early-fourteenth- centiny romance Sir Perceval of Cilathe poem's young protagonist, cut off fiom his knightiy heritage afler his father's death and his mother's ~e~imposedexile, charges into the world of romance chivahy in enthusiastic ignorance and thereby discoven and recovers his identity as Arthurian knight. Mer killing the Red Knight, Perceval, having appropnated the Red Kaight's armour and home, responds to a plea for help fkom the queen of Maidenland. Arthur, having determined Perceval's identity (although Perceval himself is not yet aware of his own identity), rides out with three of his knights to look for his ambitious young nephew. They fkd Perceval in Maidenland; he has singlehandedly slaughtered the Sultan's entire army, and is riding about in semh of the

Sultan hirnself. When Perceval sees Anhuis party, he naturaliy assumes that they are

.. ' Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, -os0 Don Ouilote de la Maed. Florencio Sevilla Arroyo y Antonio Rey Hazas (Madrid: Centro de Estudios Cervantinos, 1993) 74. The English translation is fiom Don Owtede la tnuis. Samuel Putnam (New York: Modem Library* 1949) 49. 112 another installment of Saracens and he prepares to fight them. Arthur and his three

Imights, seeing a single knight in red amour riding against them, and not wishing to take

advantage of the &air odds, send Gawain out alone to meet the stranger.

Gawain, riding towards the unlmown knight, recognizes the "Horse and hemays"

(143 5)2 of the Red Knight and is forced to do some fêst thinking. He suspects that his

opponent may be Perceval, for he kiows that Perceval has killed the Red Knight and

taken his amour. Naturally, he does not wish to fight his cousin. On the other hand, he

realues that another knight may have defeated Percevai in tum and taken the horse and

amour. Unsure of his opponent's identity, Gawain decides to run a course with the

strange knight in the hope that the encounter itseff may supply some information. The

two knights break their spears on each other,

And pan bygane Percevaie For to tell a tale, Pat one his tonge laye. (1478-80)

Perceval's comment, characteristically combining astonishment, ignorance, and

boastfulness, gives Gawain the due he needs. He identifies himself and the two stop

fighting, but Gawain evidently thinks that Perceval needs more assunuice, because he

then reminds Perceval that they have met before; in fact, it was Gawain who helped

Perceval put on the Red KnightVsamour.

Bot bn was Perceveii fiee AIS blythe, als he myghte be, For ben wiste be wele, bat it was he,

Quotations fiom Perceval of Gmare fiom Sir Perceval of Ghed. J. Campion and F. Holthausen (Heidelberg: Winter, 19 13). By takens, bat he tolde. (1 517-20)

Thus the two cousins are remited and reconciled.

This iinie incident hmthe only surviving Engiish romance of Perceval illustrates

both the mechanisms and the problematics of recognition in the Middle English romances. Recognition is especiaîiy important in Sir Perceval of Gubecause of the

English poet's concentration on a relatively srnaii number of interrelated characters, so that Perceval continually meets other chatacters he has met before or meets relatives of such characters. The characters he meets also enable hùn to reconstruct his own heritage;

Arthur is both his father's lord and his mother's brother, and in killing the Red Knight

Perceval uwittingty revenges his Meras weii as disposing of the oppressor of his two uncles. Recognition is also closely associated with reconciliation, as the intempted duel between Perceval and Gawain shows; after the two opponents idenm themselves, they put up their vison, kiss, and talk.

Recognition in the Middle Engüsh romances implies a supraindividuai legitimation of identity. As bis "awnn modirs childe" (506) Perceval has no identity, according to the values presupposed by the text. His displaced state is marked not only by his physical removal hmthe recogaition systems of civilization but also by his own inability to identify features of the counly world; he asks the nrst knights he meets which one ofthem is God, he does not recognize Arthur the Ling when he arrives at the court, and he thinks that ail horses are mares. It is Gawain who patientiy identifies himself as a knight, identifies Arthur as king, and points out to Perceval that the Red Knightfshorse is not a mare; and it is Murwho tells Perceval the story of Perceval's own parentage. 114

Even in this romance, in which the protagonist moves nom ignorance to knowledge, the

process is not one of "dynamic ~e~reaiization,"to use Hanning's words; Perceval attains

an awareness of his identity, certainiy, but oniy because others teii him his own story.

Throughout the Middle English romance corpus, recognition is assofiated with the reunion or reconcilation of separated fiends or family members, and with the restoration of the protagonist's rights to property and to social status. In romances foiiowing the pattern of Octavian. in which a separated family is reunited, recognition can be one chance away from tragedy; in De& and in sir Fmourof 4rtpis, for example, recognition in the nick of time prevents the mother hmconsurnmating a marriage with, and the father from killing, their son. In mvelok, where the protagonist knows that he is the rightfd king of Denmark but bas promised to keep that knowledge secret, the various recognition scenes win him allies who help him and Goldeborw to regain their kingdoms. Again, some recognition systems in Middle English romance are remarkably constant: the kinship system that marks the protagonist's nobility by birth, the socioeconomic structures that define the protagonist's identity in ternis of wealth and social standing. In Sir identity is explicitly associated with courtly life, which is represented as the preeminent-and oniy-form of civilization; ail recognition systems in the poem are located in the court. The only alternative to courtly life is non-identity.

Two important questions, then, are "As whom is the charactet recognized?" and

"By what means does the recognition take place?" The first is important because names, as markers of identity, represent not so much individuals as their ideal positions in the 115 ideological spaces of the romances. Displacement, therefore, is often accompanied by a

Ioss or change of namc; Perceval does not at first know his own name, introducing bimself tautologidy and unspecificaiiy as his mother's child Arthur, however, recognitcs him as the son of Perceval senior and Acheflour, and that act of recognition confers on Perceval junior both a Dame (signifïcantiy, the same as his fatheis) and an identity within the context of courtiy society: he is now not a nondescript young rustic in goatskins but the son of a notable ArthUnan knight and of Arthur's own sister. In

Hav- Goldebods recognition of HaveloVs identity does not happen untïl she discovers that Havelok the apparent commoner is in fact Havelok, "kinges sone and kinges eyr" (1268).

D. H. Green, in a study of the of Wolfram von Eschenbach, suggests four means of recognition in the medieval romances: physical appearance, gestures,

"appurtenances,"and word~.~Whea we observe how these devices are employed in the

Middle English romances, some trends become apparent. Recognition of characters by their physical appeatance or gestures hardly ever happens in the Middle English romances; identification by means of what Green cds "appurtenances"-clothing, amour, other objects-is much more cornmon. The use of these objects, however, is very problematic, and therefore recognition in the Middle English romances is accomplished most often by verbal acts, and especiaily by acts of narration.

.. . D. H.Green, of in WoIftam'sParzival (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,1982) 275. 116

There are a number ofreasons thet physical appearance and gestuce are so rarely

used as a means of recognition in the Middle English romances. On a prosaic level, the

conditions under which recognition takes place, or fails to take place, themselves may

hinder recognition. Children, for example, are separateci hmtheir parents when very

young and are not immediately recognized when they appear years later. Amour when it

does not bear any identity marker or when it is taken nom its onginai owner is, as our

little episode nom m~evalof shows, a reai barrier to recognition. The

English author of Perceval of Cililis acutely conscious of the fûnction of armour as

a physical obstacle. Merali, Perceval's father dies when his armour fails; later, young

Perceval, confounded by the task of unarmïng the Red Knight, is about to bum the dead man "Out of his ken" (779) when Gawain rides up and shows the inexperienced youth how to unlace armour. Even the detail of Percevai and Gawain putthg up their visors to kiss and talk reminds us of the artificiality and awkwardness as weil as of the utility of armour-of its fiuiction of hiding, even wbile protectting, the body within.

Even after taking these factors into account, however, we are still left with a number of cases in which a character fails to recognize another even in circumstances where the cognition might reasonabiy be expected to succeed. There is no indication that Perceval recognizes the lady tied to the ûee as the lady with whom he had earlier exchanged rings, until she tells him her story. At the end of Sir of

Cristabelle does not recognize her husband even after unarming him and accompanying him to the feast. In E;inn Hom Abulfs father, even though he professes to be waiting for

Hom's remfails to recognize either Hom or Apdf when they achmily do corne back to 117 Suddene. If the instances of recognition in the Middle Engiish romances are remarkable,

the instances offailm of recognition are no less so.

In the Middle English romances, individuaiizing details of physical appearance are not ordinady given. The charactea in the romances, like the authors of the romances, tend to identify other characters in terms of social contexts or mtive conventions. The equivalent in the Middle English romances of a description of physical amcetends to be expressed in wholiy generic tenns, which themselves serve as markers of the of person a character is. Nobility, for example, is often represented as an innate quality and becomes itselfa means of recognition-"nobility" here including al1 the permutations and connotations of or ço- in Middle English. Arthur recognizes Perceval because the young man resembles the senior Perceval, Aufieus in

Genearecognhs his son because Genendes resembles his mother-the implication that nobility is a quality carried in the blood, so to speak, is very strong. In W* of

the Emperor of Rome meets the young William in the forest and is struck by his appearance and bearing, immediately suspecthg that the child is no ordinary peasant:

But banne biheld he aboute and Mt barn ofseye, hou fair, how fetys it was and neliche schapen; so fair a sift of seg ne sawe he nevet are, of lere ne of lykame lik him nas none, ne of so sad a semblant bat ever he say wib eisyen. Pemperour wend witerly, for wonder of bat cbiid, bat fei3kly it were of feyrye for fairenes bat it welt and for curteys cuntenamce bat it kudde kre. (224-3 1)

As a description of physical appearance, the passage is strikingly abstract; we are told three times that the child is "fair," but we are not told of what "fairenes" consists. The 118

very appearance of the child has social overtcmes; he is "nelifhe schapn" and has a

"- cuntenaunce." The shape and face of the young Wfiam relate not to his identity

as a physicai kg,but to his identity as a social king within the ideologicai structures

of the romance.

The most striking instance of the "innate wbility" motif is that, in f.Iaveiok. of the

extraordinary light that shines fiom Haveloks mouth when he sleeps-"Al so brith, al so

shir, / So it were a blase of fir" (1254-55)-and the "kynemerk' (605) on his right

shoulder. It is the "kpemerk," a bright golden cross, that convinces observers that

Havelok is the rightfuî king of Denmark, but the light fbm his mouth is also a sign of his

nobility. Goldeborw, seeing it for the fht tirne, reaiizes that her husband is no commoner: "He beth heyman yet, als Y wene- I He beth heyman er he be ded!" (126 1-

62). Like the physicai manifestation of William's nobility, the physicai manifestation of

Havelok's is described in tems of its effect on others.

ïhis nobility, expressed in the "curteys cuntenauuce" of the young Wiiam and in the light that shines from the sleeping Havelok, is, while understood as innate, still understood in tems of identity as position. Rather than being a self-conscious construction, it is a quality of which the chanicters in question are entirely unconscious.

Perceval, Genendes, and William are wholiy ignorant of their noble parentage; Havelok's illuminatory quaiities seem only to rnaDifest themseives when he is sleeping, and he himself seems unaware of either light or birtbmark. Furthemore, this distinctive quality of visible nobility distinguishes its bearer not as an individual but as a member of a social group; it marks, we might Say again, not person but position. It is because of Perceval's resemblaace to a long-dead knight of the Round Table that Arthur even considers the

uncouth, skin-ciad youth's outrageous request to be knighted. Because of Msual signs

beyond their conscious control, William and Havelok are identified as incongruous with

theu circumstances: as "curteys" as opposed to ignoble, "hepan" as opposed to

commoner. Finally, these signs of nobility become meaningful oniy in the act of

recognition, ody in the act of king properly read. Because the bearers of these signs are

themselves unconscious of the si-, their identities are established not so much by their

own acts as by the responses of those who recognize those identities. Recognition,

therefore, operates in these texts not as a private epiphany but as a social event.

When Havelok begins work as a porter, poor, unknown, and "almest naked

(963), he acquires a reputation for his good qualities:

Of him ful wide be word sprong, Hw he was mike, hw he was strong, Hw fayr man God hlln hauede maked. . .. (960-62)

In spite of being reduced to the basic level of humanity, perhaps by virtue of that humanity, Havelok still shows dignity and nobility. When he is clothed, however, that nobility takes on sociopolitical overtones:

Hwan he was clobd, osed, and shod, Was non so fayr under God bat euere yete in were, Non bat euae moder bnr. It was neuere man bat yemede Jn kinoeriche bat so wel semede King or cayser for to be, ban he was shod, so semede he. (972-79) 120

Here is the familiar language of superlatives associateci with the protagonist's fitness ta

become "King or cayser"; Havelok is not oniy a "fâyr man" as "God him hauede maked,"

but superlatively weli-favomâ, disthguished explicitly by his supenority to al1 othen,

not just a "fayrman" but the fairest under God. It is not the naked Havelok who shows

his identity, but Havelok clothed.

Thus what Green calls "appurtenancesf'-ciotbhg, amour, objects such as cups or

rings, even cornpanion animals-take on extraordbry importance in the Middle English

romances. The nobility visible in the appeanince and bearing of the romance protagonist

is oflen signalled instead by articles of clothing or other objects associated with the protagonist. The young William of Paleme, discovered in the werewolfs den by the cowherd, is

clobed fid komly for ani kinges sone, in gode clopes of gold agrebed fûl riche, wip perrey and pellure pertelyche to mes. (5 1-53)

In Sir of the King of Israel recognizes that the infant DegrebeIie is

"comen of gentil1 blode" (863) because of the rich mantel and golden girdle with which the child is wrapped. The most elabmte instance of this motif occurs, as we have seen, in W. At birth already "be fayrest creature borne' @O), Emaré has her beauty enhanced by the golden robe; already remarkable for her beauiy, she reaches a new level of superlative, so that, while she is wearing the robe, she is repeatedly described as looking like no earthly woman.

"Appurtenances"also include objects used as individualking signs, or recognition tokens. Unlike the markers of social station, these supposedly distinguish their bearers as 121 individuais. Recognition tokens ofthis type include herddic emblems on barmers or

amour; objects such as Orfds harp, the gloves and broken mord in Sir or the

golden cups in Amis and the rings given and exchanged in various

romances. They range, therefore, from very public symbols, such as armorial bea~gs,to very private symbois, such as rings. Theu operation as signs, in any case, depends on some kind of social or relational context, whether the political relations that unite Arthur's army under the flag of the dragon in or the more private relations that underiie Rymenhildls gift of her ring to Hom. These tokens' status as physical objects, however, has a furtber consequence. They are detachable; that is, they are not tied to their bearers by any physical necessity. Therefore the use of these objects as recognition tokens is, in the Middle English romances, very often problematic.

Sir Percdof Cl?foregrounds two of these objects: the Red Knight's armour and Acheflour's ring. Amour, or rather clothing, is in this romance emblematic of a character's position relative to the various social spaces in the story. Perceval in the forest, "Be fole one be fiide, I . . .comen oute of pe woddez wildel' (289-go), is dressed in goatskins; the three knights whom he meets are, by contrast, wearing "riche robes" (265).

His mother Achefiour tells him that he can recognize a lmight by his "menevaire," an item made of squirrel fur and apparently used, in this case, for the lining of a helmet!

The 4*. lists the primary meaning of meniver as "the ftr of some kind of squiml, used in gannents, etc., esp. as a trimming." Its secondary meaning of "a helmet liner of meniver" seems applicable only to the two instances in Percevd. In any case, it serves as a marker of knightly status in Perceval because of both its military function (it is part of the knight's armour) and its ornamental fbnction (as "trimmiag,"t implies the culture of civilization, which is concerned not primarily with the basic mechanics of survival but with, among other things, the aesthetics of ornament). J. M. W. Bean in b- (LJ of 122

When Perceval first appears before Arthur, the kgnotes that the young man in

goatskins would resemble Perceval sr. if he "wne wele dighte" (544,545). A cenain

kiad of clothiog, or rather clothing itseifas opposed to the young Perceval's goatskin ou@ marks a character's position within civibtion, and specincally within the courtly society envisioned as the ideal fonn of civilization. When Perceval returns to the forest to look for his mother, who has gone mad and is wandering wild and naked in the woods, he takes off his armour and pins on a goatskin again; when he brings Acheflour back to civilization she is properly clothed and restored to sanity and to identity.

ir P- of CI& also emphasizes, as we have seen, the of clothing and armour, whether in descnbing thf details of Perceval's goatskin outfit

-"His hode was juste to his chyn, / De flesche-Me tourwd within" (273-74)-or in descnbing Perceval's ignorance of the intricacies of amour. Thus clothing, and meciwarmour, is represented not ody as a meam of recognition-after all, the Red

Knight is identifid solely by and with the colour of his armour-but also as a physical barrier to recognition. Gawaids predicament, in which he mut fight Perceval because he does not know if the stranger in red amour is a fiiend or an enemy, is very common in the romances. The duel between fneads happens also in Sir Depari. -ou of

in in Roland.- de de in Ywai- and, most tragically, in Malory's story of Balin and Balan; in many cases the combat takes place because one party is not wearing his darmour.

Pennsylvania P, 1989) notes that fur trimmings on liveries of the fourteenth century often marked the social station of the wearer (19-20). This problematic detachability is a feahae of other standard recognition tokens,

including the ubiquitous rings, of which Achefloufs in -val of CrôUI;S is an

example. When Perceval leaves his mother, she

gaffe hPa And bad, he solde agayne it bryng: "Sone, pis sall be oure takynyng, For hm1 sali byde." (425-28)

The ring is a token of identity insofar as it signifies the relationship between Perceval and

his mother. As a sign, however, it fails conspic~ously~for it is twice misread. The Black

Knight, seeing it on his lady's hand, reads it as a sign that she has been Ullfaithfiil to him;

Percevai's mother, offered the ring by Goirotherame's brorher, rads it as a sign that

Perceval has ken killed. In this last instance the ring is stilf called a "tolqmyng" (2 15 l), but its meaning is ambiguous; originally the ring is a token of Acheflour's love for her son, but the giant offers it to Acheflour as a token of his love, a request "Pat scho wolde his leman be" (2146), and she reads it as a token of Perceval's death. Although the sight of the ring reminds Perceval of his mother and motivates him to search for her, the ring itselfplays no part in their remion or in her recognition of Perceval.

Indeed, rings and other recognition tokens are striking not for their success in aiding recognition but for their failure. When Rymenhild in recognizes the ring that the ragged palmer thmws into the cup, she takes it to mean, not that the palmer is Hom, but that Hom is dead-and, as Horn's fdse story about his death implies, he expects her to misread the sign. In Amis Amis, hearing that a leper outside his gate has a gold cup identicai to his own, thrashes the leper for stealing Amiloun's cup before discovering tbat the udortuaate man is Amiloun himseif. In Genendes. a text

Ramsey cas "almostan encyclopedia of conventional romance motifs,"s three rings

operate as "tokens," and all of them are problematic- At one point, Clarionas recognizes

her ring but not Generides, who is disguised: "On his finger she knew the ring, / Of him

had she noo knowleching" (6895-96): At another point, Muabel urges Clarionas not to

read the ring, retutlled to ber by a messenger, as sign of Generides's infidelity; she argues

that Generides could eady and unwittingiy lose a snall object through treason,

especially since he once lost "a betre thing" (8486), Clarionas herself. A right reading of

the "token,"Mirabel says, presupposes Generides's integrity:

She seid, "trow it neuer 1 shal- For no0 token grete ne mal- That he wold his trouth breke, Ti1 that 1 here him self speke. For the Ring, no more ne les, For thurgh treason right wel I gesse; The ring 1deme right wel he hath lore; Fals ye fond him neuer before; Ma dame, ye shuld not bi right Neuer mystrust so gentil a knight For loue of a litle ring!" (8475-85)

Again, it is the ring's status as physical object-inarticulate, easily 10% "the Ring, no

more ne les"-that problematizes its status as sign.

Thus recognition in the Middle English romances is accomplished most often, and

most successfbily, not by appurtenances but by verbai acts: not by "tokens" such as rings

. - Quotations hm are fiom Aeof the beri&, ed. Frederick J. Fumivall (Roxburghe Club, 1865; New York: Franklin, 197 1). or other material objects but, as Sir Perceval of Ci* puts if "By takens, bat he tolde"

(1 520). Mirabel in Grnaides insists that she wili accept as a diable source of tmth not

Clarionas's reading of the ring but the verbal testimony of Generides himself. Afier puns,

equivocations, aiiegories, and intentiondy m*sleaduig signs, Hom revds his identity to

Rymeahild simpiy by wiping the dirt off his fme and tehgRymeddd who he is:

Schurte lappe he gan take And wipede awey bat blake bat was vpon his swere And sede, "Lef so dm, Ne cansni me no3t knowe? Ihc am Horn of Westernesse In mespu me kesse." (1229-36)

The steward in Sir O&Q (with encouragement nom Orfeo himself) misreads Orfeo's harp in the han& of a beggar as a sign of his master's death, and recognition occurs only when

Orfeo identifies himself. A swey of the Midde English romances will reveal that in most cases recognition is accomplished by the same means: by a verbal act, even when other means of recognition may be involved.

OAen the verbal act that accomplishes recognition involves more than a simple statement; again, a name in itselfis often significant only insofar as it signifies a position in a given relationship. To Rymenhild, Hom identifies himself not simply as "Horn" or even as "Homof Westernesse," but as "Horn binowe. . . . In mesbu me kesse." When

Gawain identifies himself to Perceval, after theu bnef passage of amis, he seems to think it necessary not only to name himseif but also to remind Perceval of their previous encounters. Therefore, these verbal acts that accomplish recognition are moa ofien acts of narration. Arthur reveals Perceval's identity to Perceval himself by telling Perceval Perceval's story, which includes the stories of Perceval sr. and of Achefiour. The

. * conclusion of ofPaleniecIudes a series of retehgs of the intemlated stories

of Alphouos and William. The story is retold by the Spanish hg,by Alphouns, by the

messengers to the emperor, by Wiam and Melior, by the queen of Paleme, and by

Partenedon; even the cowheid gives his version. The elaborate and repetitive closing

section of WliamPfPalemp. . seems tedious to a modern reader,' but the repeated

iterations of the story serve to fi Wiam's identity as meticulously as do the ceremonials that recognize him as king and empemr.

Recognition tokens that operate most successfuly in the Middle English romances, then, are those that sigr@ not so much relationships as narratives: the gloves and broken word in Sir De- the unusual coats of amis in Sir ofArtois that are emblerns of the story of Eglamour's family. Even Arthur's banner of the dragon, in

dudes to the prophetic incident of the two fighting dragons under . . Fortiger's cade, earlier in the story. The werewolf in William becomes an emblem of William's identity, a symbol by which he is recognized, when he takes a werewolf as his amis; but, of course, the value of this heraldic symbol is particularly strong. William is not only identified hy the werewov, but the werewolf:

De king of Spayne gan crie keneli and schilie, "War be he bat lx wolf weldes in his scheld, bat hab murmd mi men and swiche hamÙ wo-! Mift 1 now have hap him ones to sene, 1 wold him hunte as hard as ever hounde in erthe

See the editor's comments, Bunt, of Pd!1 10. Bunt notes that the French version of this closing section is even longer than the English. 127

honted eny werwoif?" (3831-36)

The werewolf guards and provides for Wfiam and Melior during their escape, and the werewoifreminds the queen of Paterne of her lost son. But the werewoif is, even more directly, the carrier of William's identity, for only the werewoIfknows that Wiam is the righthil heir to the throne of Paleme; it is therefore necessary to the revelation of

Wiiam's identity that the werewolf be disenchanted, that his power of speech be restored, si that he can teil his story-his own story and Wiarn's.

Certainly, recognition by verbal act is as hazardous an &iur as recognition by any other token. Hom and Orfm provide false narratives, obscuring their identities, before they reveal themselves. Potential namitors, such as the werewolf in Wmof Pal- may be silenced. As Edmund Reiss has shown, fourteenth-century writing fiequently represents language as fiindamentaily arnbigwus, deceptive, capable of being misread.8

The beginning of Sir Perceval of Cruis much concemed with the young, uncdtured

Perceval leaniing by trial and enor the pmper names of unfamiliar things; untii he learns the proper use of cenain verbal signs, he is confused and confusing. For the most part, however, the Middle Engiish romances represent language as reliable, as the recognition token that works when al1 other tokens fd. Perceval's education in language parallels his education as courtier and man of arms, and his progress in all these areas indicates the eventual mastery of circumStaLlce that the poem celebrates. In the worid of the poem al1

Edmund Reiss, "Ambiguous Sips and Authorid Deceptions in FourteenBCenniry Fictions," m.-) Disco- ed. Julian N. Wassennan and Lois Roney (Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1989) 1 13-37. 12% that is awnymous nnds a name, d that is scattered is gathered together, al1 that is lost is found, aU that is threateniag is conquetecl, aIi who are wronged are revenged, all that is wild is brought back to civilization, aii that is obscure is Wyunderstd The Middle

English romances, speaking the power of language to create identity, tend to insist upon that power.

The encounter between Gawain and Perceval in Sir P- of is a form of interrogation, iike the chape1 scene in Y- Cm-. The moments before the encounter, when Gawaui sees a suit of red amour riding a red home towards him and canwt know who his adversary is, iilustnite the problematics of recognition in the Middle

English romances. Recognition is not usually understood in terms of personal idiosyncrasies but is understood in terms of social codes: symbolic clothing and objects.

Identity is represented not as the result of stripping a character of those codes, but as a result of assuming the codes. Acheflour takes her clothes offwhen she loses her sanity and forgets herseif; she renirns to sauity and to identity when she is clothed. But the romances, at the same tirne, hint at a troubling disjunction between identity and identity- token; a ring is recognized but not its beaier, the armour of an enemy hides the face of a fnend. Recognition in romance is a hazardous &air, so improbable that, Terence Cave suggests, a recognition scene is in itseif a marker of fictionaiity? The man in the red amour couid be anyone; in the romance he tunis out to be, coincidentaliy, the man

Terence Cave, peco- (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988) 4. 129

Gawain has been lookhg for all dong. But it is also characteristic of romance that, if recognition had not taken place, Gawain might have Wed, or been kiiied by, his fiiend.

Gawain recognizes Perceval by Perceval's mannet of speech, but Perceval recognizes ûawain when Gawain rerninds Perceval of the didgof the Red Knight- in other words, when Gawain telis Perceval part of Percevai's own story. Merthe encounter, Gawain leads Perceval to Arthur, who completes Percevai's story for him, allowing Perceval to recognize himseIf. In the final analysis, identity in these texts is understood in tenns of institutions, what I have called "recognition structures," that fix identity according to conventional social relationsbips. But the most significant recognition structure in these texts is narrative itself. ûver and over again, the characters of the Middle English romances teil their own stories and each other's stones, even stories outside of their own narrative: the Middle English romances, iike Melidor's chamber in

vant, or like Emaré's robe, refer insistently to other texts and especially to other texts of the same genre. Romance figures a their stories; when, for example, a medieval writer refm to the romance of Octavian, it is difficult to tell whether he means romance of Octavian or p romance of Octavian-mr is the distinction important. By representing identity as a fûnction of narrative, the romance pet draws attention to the artinciality, the self-consciousness, of the romance itseIf, and implies that narrative, like any other institution, is another meam of coll~t~ctingidentity. Chapter 7

Tbe Knight of the Lion: Implications

We wiU never understand anyihùig until we have found some contradictions.'

The primary disadvantage of reading a self-realizitlg subject into the Middle

English romances is that such a reading suppresses the complexities of these tem.

Presupposing that the ideai Middle Engiish romance is a quest of "seIf-discovery," where the self to be discovered is the self-contained, dways-present humanist subject, not only imposes a simplistic definition of the genre on these poems, but also posits a single standard of judgement, ignoring the various and often contradictory ways in which the romances negotiate their generic conventions. Middle English romance is certainiy a highly formulait genre; its primary narrative pattern-the loss and recovery of identity- and its set of stock characters, episodes, and devices are remarkably consistent throughout the corpus. In spite of this conventionality, however, the Middle English romances display a wide range of variation in structure, style, and ideology. This variation is possible because identity, and the narrative structures that define it, depend ultimately on the recognition systems that underlie each text-the ideological spaces, overt or submerged, in which identity operates. The central question in ail the Middle English romances may be "What ertow?" but that question is askeci in a multiplicity of contexts and receives a multiplicity of responses.

Attributed to Niels Bohr. - * i3r

We have seen, for example, how the encounter between Roland and %el in

andRoland defines and inteirogates their identities; the combatants, who share

a common code of chivairy, fight on dBerent sides because one is a Christian and the

other a Satacen. But the Christianity for which Roland fights is so much a part of the background of the poem that it is almost invisible; we might contrast the related English

Charlemagne romance Roland V- in which Roland interrrupts his duel with the

Satacen Tkmaguto deliver a theologicai lecture. It is perhaps no accident that Vemagu is killed, whereas Chuel is converted; Roland Vyemami emphasizes the difference between Christian and Saracen, Ohiel.and their simüanty. There is, indeed no uniform version of Christianity celebrated by ali the Middle English romances.

Coer de Lv- Sir Gowther, UVof WWanvick, and Lr: meFl-e of ail claim pre-eminent Christian heroism for their protagonists, but there are worlds of difference between the varieties of Christian heroism that they celebrate: the very muscular Christianity of Richard, the dramatic conversion of Gowther, the troubled integrity of Gawain, the more subtle conversion of Guy, the independent dependence of Florence.

We have also seen how Belisant in seems to some extent to stand outside of the ideological spaces, the systems of loyaltyythat define Roland and

OtueI; her presence opens up, however brieflyythe possibilities of recognition systems other than those taken for granted by Charlemagne's court. The Middle English romances aliow these possibilities of alterity perhaps more often than is usually recognized. In

w- w- Ga- one of the interrogaton is the Churl. His meeting with Colgrevance 132

is, at first sight, a meeting of twa enthly dinerent worlds; Colgrevance does not even recogaize the Churl as humau at ht. When knight and chml declare th& identities to each other, however, we are impeîled to guess at the similarities and différences between the representatives of these two worIds. The Chud is not aliowed to become too troubling; this first detaiied meeting involves the minor character Colgrevance, not

Ywain, and the Churl soon drops out of the story. But his existence has the pote- to subvert the othemise selfknclosed, aristocratie world of the romance. The Churl's fonn of "manhood," consisting of his mastery over wild beasts, is both an analogue of and an alternative to Ywain's "manhood," which consists in large part of mastery over other men; bnefly we catch a glirnpse of another ideologicd space, another recognition system, before rehuning to the world of Arthurian chivalry.

We should expect, then, similar complexities in the nature of the identities that the romances represent. For example, the fkiendly lion-a conventional device that appears in -. Guv of Wh& and Malory, as well as in Ywu Gaw-jectifies one aspect of a character's identity, signifying his or her nobility. In

evis ofHamaton. two dangerous Lions leave losian unhedbecause they cannot by nature injure "A Sages douster, bat maide is, / Kinges dowet, quene and maide both"

(2392-93); in Qctavian the lioness cares for the infant Octavian "for it [meaning

Octavian] was a kynge sone" (Lincoln MS 349), and, after terrifyiag a shipload of sailors, meekly follows Florence to Jerusalem. In both cases the lion is a dangerous animal but is exceptionally courteous toward people of royal blood, the lomde; of the Lion recognizing the 4g& of the noble person. In Ciuv of Wanuick, YwpiapOd Gaw&, and Malory's account of Petceval's Grail quest, the empbasis is slightly dinerent. In these cases a

knight happens upon a hale between a lion and a dragon or serpent, and makes a choice

to aid the Lion-because, says Chrétien in Yv&, it is a "gentle and noble beast" ("la bene

gentil et hche," 3377), end Perceval in Malory's text similady recognizes it as "the

more naturall beste of the t~o."~The lion's ~sponseto the knight is then explained in

terms of gratitude rather than recognition, and the knight's action is represented as a

choice-in Malory, expïictiy a theological choice-ôetween two natures. In Guy &

Urarwick. Chrétien, and Malory, it is the bught who recognïzes and chooses the nobility

of the lion, rather than the Lion that recognizes the nobility of the knight The Merence

in emphasis between the Lions of && and Octa- and the lions of Yw& and Malory

demonstrates that identity can be represented as an internai quality, attached to the

character in question and recognked even by wiId beasts, or as an extemal qdty,

symbolized by the lion, with which the protagonist may choose to associate himself.

The Middle English romances thus imply that identity must be both recognized

and asserted, that it is both inherent and acquired. The king-light that issues nom

Havelok's mouth signifies his nobility in spite of his poverty and anonymity; it can

operate as a sign, however, only ûit is correctly read by others, and Havelok himself

must take action to regain his kingdom. On the one han& nobility and virtue are represented as essential attributes: Florent, fostered by a commoner in Octa- and

Perceval, growing up in the woods in Sir4_erceval of Chitake instinctively to the

Thomas Malory, J'he Works of Sir Thorn ed. Eugène Vinaver, 3rd ed. by P. J. C. Field (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990) 2: 9 12. 134 chivalric We; the young hem of Wiof lQPkS noble in spite of his common upbringing. On the other hauà, nobility and virtue are represented as quiities to be enacted: Florent, Perceval, and WiUam must, by coiirtly conduct and force of anns, prove their superiotity over others. The apparent paradox is easier to handle if we think of identity, not as a quality that a chanicter must have, but as a transaction between the individual and an array of recognition systems. On the one hand, only Havelok carries the sign of his kùigship; on the other, the sign means nothing dessHavelok can prove bis fimess to be king by his subsequent accomplishments. The tenuoumess of the relationship between the individual and the recognition systems that define that individual's identity indicates the instability of identity itselt Identity may be represented as a position of ideal autonomy and stability, but there is nothing assured about that position.

These tensions in the heart of romance explain in part why romance has been reganied both as essentially consewative and as essentially subversive.) Its structures tend to defend the status quo. The propriety of fighting for king and faith is taken for granted; the man made king at the end of the story is the man who was supposed to be bgin the first place; even when the romance protagonist raises his or her status, he or she does it accordhg to the temof the accepted social structures. Guy the steward's son may have becorne earl of Wawick, but the romance hardly implies that ail stewards' sons should have the same rights and privüeges as earls; Guy moves into a different social

Sec, for example, Frye, especially the last chapter. category, but the categories themselves are not ovdyquestioned. On the 0th- hand, an undercurrent of questionhg does nm through these te-; the ease by which identity is

10% the use of disguise to foreground and subvert recognition systems, and the haphazard nature of recognition ail hint that identity is not as seKevident as the structures of power might wish.

The narratives that contain these tensions inciude themselves among the recognition systems that they both assert and question. As 1have argued, one of the most powerfûl recognition systems invoked in these texts is that of narrative itseLf, specincaily the structures and conventions of medieval romance. In Ywaiaapd GaweYwain's reply to the question "What ertow?" is conventionai, ifcryptic. "1was a man, now am 1 nane" (21 16) introduces a story about the reversai of fortunes; YwWs loss of his property, of his cornmand over others, and of his lady is represented as the loss of his manhood and therefore, by extension, as the loss of his identity. Ywain has moved, as a medieval Engiish writer might say, fiom "boote"to "bale." Ywain understands himself not only as a specific type of person but also as a person in a specific type of story.

A central concern of Y-w& is the truth of words. The introduction to the Engiish romance contrasts Arthur's ideal kingdom and the treacberous world in which the text is iocated, emphasizing "trowth," especiaily "trowthtvin speech, in a way that

Chrétien's poem daes net! In Arthur's tirne, says the English author,

Tony Hunt, Ends: Sorne in * See "Begi~ings,MiddIes, and . Interpretive. Problems Chrétien's Yvain and its Medieval Adaptations," me Cr& of Ftction, ed. Leigh A. Arrathoon (Rochester, MI: Solaris, 1984) 83-1 17, and Bames 33-41. bai taid of more trewth bitwene ban now omang men hem a sene, For tlowth and Mes al bylatt; Men uses now snob craR With worde men makes it trew and stabil, Bot Ïn baise faith es noght bot fabil; With lx mowth men makes ît hale, Bit trew trowth es nane in tale. (33-40)

Although the introduction asserts the exemplary "trowth"of the Arthurian social order,

the story that foiiows is much more ambiguous. Ywaul's loss, after aii, is the result of his

lack of "trowth," of his faiiure to keep an oath to his lady; he becomes a "Traytur untrew

and trowthles" (1626). He has betrayed not only Alundyne but also his own identity: "It es ful mekyl ogains right / To cal so fals a man a biight" (1 6 1 1-12). In his grief

Ywain &ers a furthet loss of identity; he goes mad and nms off to the woods, to live as a wild man until a passing maiden recognizes him and cures his madness. Even after his cure he preserves his anonymity, preferring to cal1 hirnself "The Knight of the Lion." We may consider this alias a disguise, but it is a rather compiicated disguise. First, it is, like many other disguises in the romances, an expression of displacement; Ywain is the

Knight of the Lion because he is no longer the Knight of the Foutain. Second, the disguise becomes îtself a form of identity; Ywain becomes as the Knight of the Lion. The originai titie of Chrétien's romance, on which the Middle English poem is based, is Le C.huralieraulipn; Lunet, recognizing Ywain, "Imew him wele by his lioun"

(3929). When the inhabitants of a cenain cade refuse entry to Ywain unless he leaves his lion outside, he prote-:

Mi lyoun and 1 sal noght twp; 1 luf him als wele, 1 30w hete, 137

As my self at ane mete. (2220-22)

The bon is an emblem of Ywam's nobility. Cenainly the inhabitants of the same castle

"read"the Lion in uiis way: "Dai said, 'He es ofgrete renowne, I For with hym dwels pe

iyoun'" (23 39-40).

Ywains identity as Knight of the Lion plays a crucial role in the recovery of his identity as Knight of the Fountain. Lunet's strategeai for reinstating Ywain involves playing with the systems of signification that coastitute identity; she tells Alundyne

Ywaids story, without tehgher that the Knight of the Lion is Ywain. Thus the recognition scene that restores Ywain to his identity depends, paradoxically, on both the failure and the success of recognition; only by failing to recognize the Knight of the Lion as Ywah does Alundyne agree, in effect, to recognize Ywain as Knight of the Foutain once again. Thus the recognition scene depends both on the treachery and the mith of words. Lunet in "desait"(3873) tells a tnie story that she intends Alundyne to misread.

When Aiundyne discovers the ruse, she is momentarily fiirious, but her insistence on keeping her own oath-"Pst 1 have said, 1sa1 fulfill" (3992)-overturns the effects of

Ywain's broken promise. In reasserhg the validity of the acts of language that establish human relationships, Alundyne restores Ywain's identity:

Dus be knyght with iiown Es turmd now to Syr Ywayn And has his lordship al ogayn. (4020-22)

The paradoxical recognition scene that ends Yw- G- is emblematic of a paradox that underlies ail of the Middle English romance: king so insistently concerned with the possibilities of recognition, basing that recognition ultimately on verbal am,these texts both assert a?id question the reliabiiity of signincation. Tmnce

Cave bas remarked tbat

.. .recognition scenes in lïterary works are by their nature "problem" moments rather than moments of satisfaction and cornpletion. Anagnonsis seems at first sight to be a paradigm of narrative satisfaction: it answers questions, restores identity and symrnetry, and rnakes a whole hidden structure of relations intelligible. Yet the satisfaction is also somehow excessive, the reassurance too easy; the stnichue is visibly prone to collapse.'

When recognition depends on detachable and ambiguous signs, it becomes necessarily problematic, and we have seen that the Middle Engiish romances consistently represent recognition as uittolateIy dependent not on recognition tokens such as cIoUliog or rings, but rather, as in mm1of on "takens, bat he tolde" (1520)-in other words, not on physical but on verbal signs. But verbal signs are themselves detachable and ambiguous. Clement in the Southem Qcta- deceives the sultan with "Queynte lesynges" (1388); indeed, disguise often involves the use of false verbal signs. Susan

Crane's fine reading of shows that the problematics of language, far fkom king confined to isolated episodes, cmbecome a centrai concem of an entire text. The action of is judicial and, therefore, fundamentally verbal; a sqrisingly prominent figure in the poem is Athelston the messenger, who, Crane notes, enacts "the unreliability of languageW-anunreüability that ultimately tbreatens the possibiiity of j~stice.~

Although Crane suggests tbat &~&$QQ is atypid among Middle English romances in its

-- - -

Cave 489.

Crane 71-73. 139 emphasis on the frillibility of language, 1 suspect that te- so preoccupied with verbal action, so insistent on th& OW~statu as verbal acts, do not subscribe easily to a doche of the Infible Word. The Middle English romances, even as they assert the power of language to mate identity, indicate just as strongly the power of language to misrepresent identity and the propensity of language to fdand to disintepte.

What, then, do representations of identity in the Middle English romances tell us about medieval models of subjectivity? In one sense, their information is of limited value. îhe subjectivity represented in the Middle English romances is a literary convention, a technique of comprehemion, and for that raison it would be presumptuous to assume that the representation of identity in the Middle English romances is an uncomplicated image of the ways in wfüch medieval people understood themselves. But the romances are, nevertheless, relevant to an understanding of the people who produced and read them-not because these texts represent completely the lives of medieval people, but because the romances pmvided a system of images and values by which medieval people could interpret themselves. Medieval genres that we might classify as "histoncai" narrative, such as chronicie or biography, ofien use the language and narrative conventions of romance; Sumner Ferris notes that the Chandos Herald's of the Black

Prince "fwusseson the person as knight, wt on the knight as person."'

Sumner Fems,. "Chronicle,.. Chivalric Biography, and Family Tradition in Fourteenth- Century England," ChiwcLuerature. ed. Larry D. Bençon and John Leyerle (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1980) 35. For a fifteenth-century example of life imitating art, see Jennifer R. Goodman, "Display, Self-Definition, and the Frontiers of Romance in the 1463 Bruges Pas du perron f6~"Trexler 47-54. I4O

One excellent example of the translation of romance into history is providecl by

the Beauchamp family, earls of Warwick, who seern to have consistently and consciously

appropriatecl the Guy of Warwick legend to reidorce their own identity. In 127 1 William

Beauchamp named his son Guy; Wüliarn's grandson Thomas named three eldest sons

Guy, Thomas, and Reynbron. A lia of books giwn to Bordesley Abbey in 1305 by Earl

Guy includes a "Romance of Guy," whether an Anglo-Norman or a Middle English version is unknown. An early-fourteenth-century driaLing bowl shows a knight in the

Beauchamp amis killing a dragon in the presence of a lion. John Lydgate wrote for

Margaret Talbot, Richard Beauchamp's daughter, a vmion of the prologue surviving in two of the six manuscripts claims that the subject of the poem is "the lyf of bat moste worthy knyght Guy of wanvike of whos bloode shee is lyneaily descendid." In the late fifieenth century John Rous, a priest associated with the Beauchamps, was comrnissioned to produce the RoU, which names Rohaud Earl of Warwick, Felice,

"SirGy of Warrwyk," and Reynbron as Beauchamp ancestord Althou& there is no evidence for a single historical figure correspondhg to the legendary Guy of Warwickt the appropriation of the legend as family history provided the historical earls of Warwick with an iiiusrrious ancestry that both validateci their status and idealized their aspirations.

* Fewster 106-2 1; see also Richmond, for adaptations and appropriations of the Guy of Warwick legend. Emma Mason, "Legends of the Beauchamps' Ancestors: The Use of Baroniai Propaganda in Medieval England," Jounial of Medieval 10 (1984): 25-40, discusses in detail the roles of Quv ofWe and of the busRoll in consolidating the political identity of the Beauchamps. 141

Frank Kamode has suggested a distinction between fictions in which narrative

generates character and fictions in which chanrter generates Frye makes

essentially the same distinction between the romance and the n0ve1.'~ Obviously, the

Middle English vene romances belong to the fktcategory. Leu obviously, however,

they hint at the second alternative, prccisely because they are narratives of identity in

which identity itself is often established through narrative. The verbal signs that trigger

recognition are often narratives. Ywain and Lunet, in the context of their munial

interrogation in the chapel, constnict their answers as narratives, using familiar romance

@: the greatesî misfortune, the catastrophe of displacement, the loss of property, the

betrayal of love, the false accusation. In this conversation with Lunet, Ywain does not disclose the reason for his loss, which is his own wifsiithfiilness; in his nnal reconciliation with Alundyne, however, he recasts his story specificaily in terms of his own guilt, and is then forgiven. On a more elaborate scale, the stories of the principal characters in &

&g&, told at the critical moment, play a crucial dein averthg disaster, the stories represented on the shields in provide the context for recognition . . and reunion; and the mtives-within-the-nmtive at the end of of Paiemc hint at the importance of narrative in legitimating identity in a public context. Aiso significantly, the protagonists of the Middle English verse romances are often storytellers, using tnie and fdse stories, respectively, to reveal and to conceal their identities. Identity

Frank Kermode, ne Gmsis of Secrecy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1979) 75-78.

Io Frye, 304.05. 142 in these texts is a ftnction of narrative, to be sure, but the tex& alw reptesent their characters producing narratives of their own in order to establish their identities.

Thus, as in ywain the Middie Engiish romances themselves depend on what 1have dedthe treachery and the mnh of words. SeIf-consciously fictionai, preferring to depend on their own romance tradition than on history for their materials, the romances construct idealized identities that neither author nor audience could have hoped to attain. But the very act of narrative is itself a recognition system, articulating assumptions about what it means to Be Someone in specific historicd and social contexts. The romances, in other words, are involved not only in representing but also in creating and defining identities. The poet locates Y- Ga- in a world of uncertahties and falsehood, a world in which "trowth and Mes al bylaft." In protest against an unreliable "now," the pet aligm his text with the ideal world of Arthurian romance, an alternative world that sustains itself, rather ~e~referentiaiiy,by the telling of romances:

Fast bai carped and curtaysly Of dedes of armes and of veneri And of gude knightes bat lyfed bn, And how men might barn kyndeli ken By doghtines of paire gude ded On ilka syde, wharesum bai sede; For bai war stif in ilka stowre, And barfore gat bai grete honowre. (25-32)

Trapped in the dortunate world of "now," where faith "es noght bot fabil," the pet turns to fable in order to find faith. 143

The Middle English verse romances are worth mer study, I believe, for a

number of reasons. The first is that they have been relatively neglected; Ker's distinction

between the "weightand soiidity"of Epic and the "mystery and fmtasy" (and, by

implication, the ûivolity) of Romance has haunted scholarship, as we have seen, for the

last hundred years. Frye, in bis account of the relations between romance and other

modes of literature in Sec- Sc- notes a tendency for romance texts to be

pushed under canonical texts, to be consistently rnargiaalipd, suppressed, and labelied

subversive, escapist, infierior, u~lsophisticated,and wasteful. Defenders of romance have

found a cause in the clah that the romances promoted the cause of individual autonomy,

but, as we have seen, such a claim is problematic at best In a critical climate that declares

us fiee fiom "the ideology of the subject," the Middle English romances are receiving

somewhat better press, although slight in cornparison to the vast apparatus of Chaucer

scholarship that is still king produced. The only Middle English romance text to receive

even comparable treatment is -; its scarred (and therefore

flawed) knight has ken an appeaiing ~bjectfor critics lookhg for a humanistic representation of character, while its compiexities, its very indetermînacy, appeals to postmodem susceptibilities. But if we see the Middle English romances, even such unremarkable texts as or OcQctaviah as interrogations of identity, we cm open them up to the exploration of specific identities and of the ideological structures that define those identities.

It is obvious that 1have not been able, witbin the scope of this study, to explore to any great depth any of the recognition systems to which 1 have alluded, nor have 1 been 144

able to examine closely any of the cuituraUy, histo&dly, and socidy bounded identities

that those recognition systems imply. The social and cuitmi categones that fom

recognition systems-categones of gender, race, social station, politicai position, or

reiigion, to cite a few examples-need fiirther study, especiaiiy of the ways in which these

categories affect representatiom of identity in these romances. In offering an approach to

the Middle English romances in tenns of identity, and especially in defining identity as position within an array of recognition systems, I hope to have hinted at ways of opening up some neglected texts not only to closer and more carefiil reading but also to explorations of the historical and culaval contexts in which those texts were involved.

Firially, the concems and issues raised in this study obviously extend beyond the

Middle Engüsh romances hto postmedieval genres: Elizabethan romance, the Victonan novel, Gothic romance, detective fiction, twentieth-centwy speculative fiction. The epigraphs attached to the chapters in this study also demoastrate the scope of these concems, hinting at a preoccupation with matters of identity that extends beyond the

English literary tradition and, indeed, beyond iiterature itself: Lewis Carroll's rnetaphysical fantasy; Ibsen's dnima of a man in search of his Self; neurologist Oliver

Sacks's account of the "codabulatory delirium" of a patient with Korsakov's amnesia;

Julia Kristeva's study of abjection; Oscar Wilde's imverent defence of the priority of art over life; Cervantes's celebrationkondemnation of medieval romance; physicist Niels

Bohr's exposition of his "p~cipleof complementarity."

This study has, 1 hope, demo-ted that the Middle English romances, in spite of and even by virtue of their ~on~entionality,can hold complexities of their own. The key 145

to such this approach has been to read the romances primady as narratives representing

identity, and to see that identity as king interrogated and recognized by the institutional

context of a character's worùs and actions. When we read the choices in these texts as

behg not pharily the choices of characters on a mission of "seWrealizationflbut, rather,

the choices of a pet creating and molving tensions tbugh a judicious use of narrative

conventions, the romances can be read not as ifthey were Gustrated novels but, instead,

as te- demonstrating a necessary awareness of their own Iiterary and culturai conte-.

Nor does such a reading preclude the accessibility of the romances, for a basic premise of that awareness is the recogniticn that narrative itself is one of the institutions by which we intenogate and fabricate and define identity. The uitimate act of recognition that the romance generates is the recognition that the romance narrative potentiaily participates in the identity of the reader. EETS: Early English Text Society (OS: Onginal Series; ES: Extra Series)

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[Sir Amadace.] Sir Avo-. Ed. Christopher Brookhow. Anglistica 15. Copenhagen: Rosenkilde, 1968.

[Arthour and Merlin]. Of.2 vols. Ed. O. D. Macrae-Gibson. EETS OS 268. London: Oxford UP,1973.

[Athelston.] m.Ed. A. M. Trounce. EETS OS 224. London: Oxford UP, 195 1.

[Bevis of Hampton.] -e of SirBevesEd. Eugen Kolbing. EETS ES 46,48,65. London: Oxford UP, 1885-86,1894. Rpt in one vol.

[Le Bone Florence of Rome.] neRone F1- of m.Ed. Carol Fdvo Heffeman. New York: Manchester UP, 1976.

[Ematé.] -e of m. Ed. Edith Rickert. EETS ES 99. London: Kegan Paul, 1908.

Floris and Blauncheflur.] *. Ed. A. B. Taylor. Oxfôrd: Oxford UP,1927. .. [Generides.] A Roval Histone of 0.Ed. Fredenck J. Fdvall. Roxburghe Club, 1865. Burt Franldin Research and Source Works Set. 727. New York: Ftanklin, 1971.

[Guy of Wacwick.] Romeof Guv of Wamy&. Ed. Julius Zupitza. EETS Extra Series 42,49,59. London: Trtïbner, 1 883,1887,189 1. Rpt. in one vol.

[Havelok.] Hav*. Ed. G. V. Srnithers. Mord: Clarendon, 1987.

[Hom Child.] &m Cude and.Ed. Maldwyn MiiIs. Middle English Texts 20. Heidelberg: Winter, 1988. -. [King Hom] aC- hiv- LiW MS Gu m. Ed. Rosamund Ailen. Garland Medieval Texts 7. New York: Maiid, 1984.

[Kyng Aisaunder.] -. 2 vols. Ed. G. V. Srnithers. EETS OS 227,237. London: Oxford UP, 1952, 1957.

[OctaVian, Northem version*] Qctovian. Ed. Frances McSparran. EETS OS 289. London: Oxford UP, 1986.

[OctaVian, Southem version,] Otto-. Ed. Frances McSparran. Middle English Texts 1 1. Heidelberg: Whter, 1979.

[%el and Roland.] Firumbrap and Row. Ed. Mary Isabelle O'Sullivan. EETS OS 198. London: Mord UP, 1935.

" .. [Richard Coer de Lyon.] Der mmVe- uber Lowe- . Ed. Kas1 Brumer. Wiena Beitriige zur englischen Philologie 42. Vienna: Braumüiier, 1 9 13.

[The Seege of Troye]. n-e or Ravie of Troy?-A NdIe E- Metrical m.Ed. Mary Elizabeth Bamicle. EETS OS 172. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1927.

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