Constructions of Femininity in Medieval Romance and the Jim Crow South by Morgan Leigh Connor B.A. in English, December 2016, Ar

Constructions of Femininity in Medieval Romance and the Jim Crow South

by Morgan Leigh Connor

B.A. in English, December 2016, Armstrong State University

A Thesis submitted to

The Faculty of The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts

May 19, 2019

Thesis directed by

Jonathan Hsy Associate Professor of English

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to acknowledge Rachael Lynch and Emma Cassabaum, without whose unending enthusiasm and support this project would not exist. Also, to my father,

Douglas Connor, whose endless love, support, and dad jokes keep me going on even the most difficult days. And last but most certainly not least, the sincerest thanks and appreciation is due to Dr. Jonathan Hsy, Dr. Holly Dugan, Dr. Alexa Joubin, and the faculty and staff of the Department of English at the George Washington University, whose guidance and loving support fostered the growth of this and countless other projects throughout my time in the MA Program.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ……………………………………………………………………..iii

Introduction: White Supremacy and Chivalric Romance…………………………………1

Chapter I: The Appropriation of Chivalric Femininity by the Ku

Klux Klan and its Role in the Jim Crow South……………………………………….....14

Chapter II: Guinevere, Chretien de Troyes, and the Construction of

Lower-Class White Femininity in Chivalric Romance…………………………………..25

Chapter III: Castles and Confining Spaces: Female Imprisonment and the Construction of “Feminine Spaces” in Marie de France’s Lais…………………41

Conclusion: The Road So Far……………………………………………………………59

Works Cited

Introduction: White Supremacy and Chivalric Romance

Thursday, September 12th, 1912 was a day that started out like many others before it for the residents of Forsyth County, Georgia. However, the events that would conspire on that day and for the next month would forever change the residents and the county as a whole. That day, Ellen Grice, a white woman known well throughout the community, claimed that she had been “awakened by the presence of a negro man in her bed,”1 who sexually assaulted her and then fled.2 When local residents heard about Grice’s assault, they didn’t waste any time asking questions or searching for legitimate answers. Instead, by the morning of Saturday, September 7th, just two days after Grice’s assault, Forsyth

County Sheriff Bill Reid and his Deputy Gay Lummus had arrested a local black teenager named Toney Howell, as well as four other black men who were being held as accomplices: Isaiah Pirkle, Joe Rogers, Fate Chester, and Johnny Bates. With the four men in prison, by lunchtime on Saturday all locals could talk about while making their weekly trips to the market was Ellen Grice. However, this chatter was nothing compared to the excitement that would arise when Grice’s father, Joseph Brooks, arrived with news that his daughter was in critical condition after her alleged attack.

1 This quote, taken directly from Patrick Phillips’ Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America, comes from the September 7, 1912 issue of the Atlanta Journal. It remains unclear as to whether this quote came from Grice herself or a family member after her assault. 2 Phillips, Patrick. Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2017), 1.

The result of this news was harsh and swift, with local white men forming a mob outside of the courthouse, one that required the response of the local militias sent by the then-Governor Joseph Mackey Brown from Atlanta. For these men, the tale of Ellen

Grice’s rape represented one of their most vivid fantasies—the vision of “crazed” black men rising up and taking vengeance on their former masters, and as the fantasy goes,

“without sparing women and children.”3 However, Grice’s assault was only the beginning for Forsyth County, because just a few days later as the harsh anger that followed Grice’s attack was beginning to wane and the town was returning to business as usual, on September 10th, 1912, the beaten, barely-alive body of a local white girl named

Mae Crow was found in the woods, where she was reportedly attacked, raped, and left for dead. A young black man, Ernest Knox, was then blamed for the attack, to which he confessed to under suspicious circumstances, was arrested and, with the clear and present danger to his life well established at this point, placed in the then-impenetrable Fulton county jail until he could be arraigned. Along with Knox was a local field hand named

“Big Rob” Edwards, who was seen with Knox on the day of the assault. Unlike Knox,

Edwards was kept in the Forsyth county courthouse.

If the response to the first attack on Ellen Grice was harsh and swift, this new attack prompted an even more crazed response. Once word of Crow’s assault traveled throughout town, a new mob of angry, armed white local men formed, and this time they were not so easily dispersed. The crowd was eventually able to break into the jail, tossing aside Deputy Lummus and forcing the now-terrified Edwards from his cell. In the events that followed, Edwards was beaten and hung by a light pole in front of the courthouse.

3 Phillips, 14.

His body was left hanging for the rest of the night, throughout which locals shot at him, releasing some of the righteous anger that had been building throughout the community since the day of Grice’s assault on September 5th. These men were not just responding to the anger that they felt at these assaults, however. These men were participating in a long, time-honored ritual that existed throughout the South and across generations. Many of them were aware of previous lynchings that had been done by their fathers and grandfathers. So, when Ernest Knox and Rob Edwards were arrested, and Knox taken away to safety outside of the reach of the lynch mob that formed, leaving Rob Edwards behind, these men saw their chance to “finally join that grand tradition: to show that they, too were men of honor, and no less committed to the defense of white womanhood.”4

As a result of the assaults of Grice and Crow, the white men of Forsyth county would enact a reign of terror that would eventually force out all of the county’s black residents, who often had to leave behind everything and cross over to the next county in order to keep their lives. For decades after 1912, as a result of this reign of terror, Forsyth county would remain a whites-only county. Today, that area of Georgia is home to some of the most lucrative real estate in the state, and remains predominantly white, with only

29.1% of the population of the entire county listed as being non-white.5 Though the events surrounding the Grice and Crow cases are unique in their severity and geographical impact, they were far from unusual in the state of Georgia, and the rest of the South from the end of Reconstruction until the 1980s.6 This violence, and the

4 Phillips, 49. 5 “QuickFacts: Forsyth County, Georgia.” United States Census Bureau, https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/forsythcountygeorgia. Last updated July 1, 2018. 6 The last recorded lynching in America took place in Mobile, Alabama in 1981, in which 19-year-old Michael Donald was murdered by two members of the Ku Klux Klan.

emphasis on protecting Southern white womanhood was not new, but in the years after the 1905 publication of Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman, it took on a new energy.

Dixon’s book “imagines Reconstruction as a kind of living hell for white people in which former slaves destroy the government, banks, and police force, driving the

South into violent chaos. The last straw for the novel’s protagonist, Ben Cameron, is the rape of a young white woman by a freed slave.”7 Cameron, who in Dixon’s book would become the Klan’s fictional first Grand Dragon, uses the rape of the young white woman and her resulting suicide to mobilize the other white men around him to mobilize, forming an “Institution of Chivalry”8 for the single purpose of protecting white women’s virtue. Dixon “medievalizes many aspects of the KKK, including the burning cross of white terrorism in the twentieth century…call[ing] it ‘The Fiery Cross of old Scotland’s

Hills’,” an allusion to the supposed Scottish heritage of the group’s members. Dixon’s book was initially popular but would have eventually faded into obscurity if it weren’t for

D.W. Griffith, who adapted it into the breakout film success, The Birth of a Nation, a film so popular that it was screened for President Woodrow Wilson at the White House and inspired the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan, to which millions of Americans joined by 1925.

In this second wave, mostly influenced by Griffith’s film, the Klan began to appropriate images, symbols, and language that bled with a faux chivalry and an emphasis on the idea of the frail white woman. This myth of white female frailty and white male chivalry not

Koppel, Ted. “The ‘Last Lynching’: How Far Have We Come?” Talk of the Nation, NPR, October 13, 2008. 7 Kaufman, Amy S. “The Birth of a National Disgrace: Medievalism and the KKK” Race, Racism, and the Middle Ages, The Public Medievalist, Published November 21, 2017, https://www.publicmedievalist.com/birth-national-disgrace/. 8 Dixon, Thomas. The Clansman (New York: Grosset & Dunlap Publishers, 1905), 528.

only “obscured rampant existing white violence against black women, but neomedieval fantasies about protecting white female bodies also led to a new epidemic of violence against black Americans.” Whites with delusions of heroism formed lynch mobs in Omaha, Nebraska, massacred families in Rosewood, Florida, and decimated an entire black business district in Tulsa, among many, many other tragedies. Although this second wave of the Ku Klux Klan, as well as it’s descendants in the third wave towards the end of the Jim Crow period used the myth of the frail white woman in order to defend the violence they enacted on African Americans, many white women were complicit in Klan violence. In fact, the women of the Ku Klux Klan often defied this myth. These women had political power, and even formed their own sub-branch of the group, called the

Women of the Ku Klux Klan, just after women gained voting rights in 1920. In order to understand this dynamic, however, it is important to take a step back and explore the history and origins of the group itself.

The History of the Ku Klux Klan

The Ku Klux Klan was first organized in 1866 by a group of Confederate veterans in Pulaski, Tennessee.9 Their name is derived from the Greek word kyklos, from which comes the English word “circle.” The word “Klan” in their name, not only included for the sake of alliteration and a reference to the fraternity-type nature of the organization, hearkens back to their medievalist impulse, in which they assume a noble Scottish ancestry. The group was originally organized as a social club for disconsolate white male southerners and quickly became a vehicle for Southern white underground resistance to

9 “Ku Klux Klan”, Encyclopedia Britannica, Accessed 5 February 2019, https://academic.eb.com/levels/collegiate/article/Ku-Klux-Klan/46315.

Radical Reconstruction. Members sought the restoration of white supremacy that they had enjoyed in the years prior to the Civil War, doing so through intimidation and violence aimed at black freedmen across the Southeast.10 In the summer of 1867, the

Klan was officially sanctioned as the “Invisible Empire of the South,” at a convention in

Nashville that was attended by a select group of delegates from former Confederate

States and presided over by a grand wizard, former Confederate cavalry general Nathan

Bedford Forrest. Outfitted in white robes and sheets designed to frighten superstitious freedmen, whom Klansmen terrorized by posing as the ghosts or zombies of Confederate war dead11, as well as to hide their identities from the Federal troops occupying much of the postwar South, Klansmen whipped and killed freedmen and their white supporters in nighttime raids.

By 1870, the Ku Klux Klan extended into almost every southern state, and throughout the 1870s the Klan saw its goal of reestablishing white supremacy fulfilled as

Democratic candidates won spots in state legislatures across the South, cementing their place in southern institutions for generations to come. However, following pressure from the federal government in the midst of excessive violence, Nathan Forrest ordered the

Klan disbanded in 1869, though local branches remained active for some time, prompting

Congress to pass the Force Act in 1879 and the Ku Klux Act in 1871.12 These bills authorized the President to suspend habeas corpus, suppress disturbances by force, and impose penalties on terrorist organizations. As the result of these laws and the disbanding

10 Ku Klux Klan 11 Newton, Michael. “A Brief History of the Ku Klux Klan” The Ku Klux Klan (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2007). 12 “Ku Klux Klan”

of the Klan by its leaders, as well as the fact that the goal of restoring white supremacy had been largely effective across the South, Klan activity had severely decreased by the close of the 19th century, and the organization practically disappeared.

However, in 1915, the Klan was revived when William Joseph Simmons, the son of a poor Alabama country physician and member of the original Klan, channeled the growing sense of nostalgia for the Old South that was sweeping the southeast, a nostalgia only increased by the release of D.W. Griffiths’ film The Birth of a Nation (1915).13 After unveiling his plans for a new Ku Klux Klan to his friends in October of 1915, Simmons and his supporters petitioned for a charter from the state of Georgia. Then, on

Thanksgiving night, the group met atop Stone Mountain—an 823-foot quartz monzonite butte just outside of Atlanta, Georgia—with a flag beside them, a Bible open to the twelfth chapter of Romans, and a flaming cross, to proclaim themselves the new Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.14

After that night, membership grew slowly, resting at only a few thousand members until, in 1921, Simmons and his partners signed a contract with Mary Elizabeth

Tyler and Edward Young Clarke, partners in the Southern Publicity Association who helped to transform the organization amidst several scandals—including an expose in the

New York World that documented over a hundred and fifty separate cases of vigilante violence associated with the Klan which ended up being so damning that it prompted a congressional investigation—eventually allowing the Klan to charter over two hundred

13 “Ku Klux Klan” 14 MacLean, Nancy. Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 5.

new chapters and growing membership to over one million people. At its peak in the

1920s, Klan membership soared to over 4 million people nationwide.15

This new Ku Klux Klan was different from the organization of Simmons’

Confederate predecessors. While it continued the original Klan’s emphasis on white supremacy, defending Christianity, and male-bonding rituals of fraternalism, this new

Klan added many elements geared towards the fears of many white Americans following the First World War. The new Klan declared itself to be the country’s “most militant defender of ‘pure Americanism.’ It stood for patriotism, ‘old time religion,’ and conventional morality, and pledged to fend off challenges from any quarter of the rights and privileges of men from the stock of the nation’s founders.”16 The organization declaimed against organized black Americans, Catholics, and Jews, along with the

“insidious encroachments of Bolshevism.”17 Simmons also added new practices to the second Klan. First, Simmons introduced the practice of burning crosses on a much wider scale than did the first iteration of the group. Second, this organization admitted women and formed a women’s auxiliary, with chapters in many areas. These women participated in parades, cross lightings, lectures, rallies, and boycotts of local businesses owned by

Catholics and Jews.18 The Women’s Klan actively promoted prohibition, worked in public schools to distribute Bibles and prevent the hiring of and promote the dismissal of

Catholic teachers. It is also in this second iteration of the Klan that the organization’s

15 “Ku Klux Klan” 16 MacLean, 6. 17 MacLean, 5. 18 Blee, Kathleen M. Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2009) 42.

interest in the concept of chivalry first came to the surface.19 However, as a result of many scandals that shook the Klan and ruined its reputation throughout the South, one of which being the 1925 murder trial of Grand Dragon D.C. Stephenson, a trial that ruined the Klan’s reputation for law and order, and the Great Depression in 1930, Klan membership declined drastically, and the organization was temporarily disbanded in

1944.

For the next 20 years, the Klan was more or less dormant, but it experienced one last large resurgence in the 1960s during the height of the Civil Rights movement as civil rights workers attempted to force Southern communities’ compliance with the Civil

Rights Act of 1964. It was in this third wave of the Ku Klux Klan that the group’s obsession with chivalry reached its peak. This obsession with chivalry is seen primarily in the Klan’s original documents, such as the Kloran,20 the Constitution and Laws of the

UKA, The Seven Symbols of the Klan, and the various prescripts written in the mid- to late 60s. In these documents, the male Klan members task themselves with the defense of

“the sanctity of the home and the chastity of womanhood.”21 In each of these documents, throughout the statements of intent to protect women, is the underlying belief that, in defending white womanhood, the Klan is defending the male ownership of women.

Chivalric Romance and the Myth of the Fragile White Woman

19 There are many scholars who have taken on the task of exploring the Ku Klux Klan’s obsession with chivalry, most notably Nancy MacLean’s book Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan, a text I reference throughout this project. 20 It is interesting to note here that the name of the Kloran, intended to be a play on the name of the Muslim Koran (Qur’an), establishes it as not only a guidebook for new members of the KKK, but also as a pseudo-religious text in the eyes of KKK members. 21 “Article II: Objects and Purpose,” The Kloran. This copy of the Kloran comes from the appendix in Michael Newton’s The Ku Klux Klan.

Though the Ku Klux Klan perfected the use of chivalric ideas for their own racial persecution, precursors to the archetype of the fragile or vulnerable white woman can be found in medieval chivalric literature itself. In Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum

Britanniae, Arthur, shortly after landing at Barfleur, learns that a giant has made its way to France from “certain regions in Spain”22, and has kidnapped the niece of Duke Hoel and fled to Mont-Saint-Michel. The racial implications of this kidnapping are not difficult to see.23 For a large part of the history of the Iberian Peninsula, Islam was the prevailing religion, a religion that was often heavily associated with Middle Eastern and African ethnicities, and as a consequence brought with it certain racialized context—a context famously seen in France’s Chanson de Geste, in which Charlemagne’s army defeats the

“Saracen,” Muslim army of the Spanish King Marsile at Roncevaux Pass. With this context in mind, the giant in this story becomes immediately racialized. This racialized,

“inhuman monster,” then, kidnaps an innocent white girl with the purpose of “befoul[ing] with his filthy lust,” who then, with “fear flood[ing] her tender breast…ended a life which was worthy of a longer span…” lest she be raped by the monster that has taken her.24 This narrative places the white female victim on a pedestal upon which she becomes representative of innocence, virginity, and holiness—the foil to her dark,

Muslim, inhuman attacker, a representation only furthered by the fact that she is never

22 Monmouth, Geoffrey. History of the Kings of Britain (London: Penguin Books, 1966), 237. 23 For more information on the racial implications of the depiction of “saracens” in this and other medieval texts, Jeffrey Cohen’s “On Saracen Enjoyment: Fantasies of Race in Late Medieval France and England” as well as Geraldine Heng’s “The Romance of England: Richard Coeur de Lyon, Jews, Saracens and the Politics of Race and Nation” (edited by Jeffrey Cohen) are both highly recommended places to start. 24 Monmouth, 238.

given a name, and therefore a solid identity. This narrative continues as Arthur discovers that the giant has repeatedly raped an old woman, who served as the nurse to Duke

Hoel’s niece and was kidnapped along with her, in place of the girl after she killed herself.

The primary goals of this project are trans-historical, and attempt to bridge the literary world of medieval Britain with that of the 19th and 20th century American South, in order to understand how the study of medieval literature has influenced the ways in which white supremacist movements, specifically the Ku Klux Klan, interact with and understand the world around them, as well as in order to reclaim the literature, and the women in the literature, that have until this point been so carelessly misrepresented and misunderstood. As such, this project will look to examine the existence of the frail white woman in chivalric romance, as well as explore the other roles that chivalric women occupy, with a particular emphasis on roles that circumvent or outright defy the trope of the frail white woman, and will then look at the ways in which the role of women was appropriated by white supremacist movements in order to fuel violent and racist rhetoric in the Jim Crow South. Primary sources for this project will be the lais of Marie de

France, the Arthurian romances of Chretien de Troyes, with special attention being paid to the ways in which the women of those texts are portrayed and how their femininity is constructed in the hopes of better understanding the ways in which chivalric romance portrays femininity.

The first chapter, “The Appropriation of Chivalric Femininity by the Ku Klux

Klan and its Role in the Jim Crow South,” will look at the ways in which the Ku Klux

Klan, inspired by adaptations of chivalric romance by Sir Walter Scott, Mark Twain,

Thomas Dixon, and others as well as previously established ideas about upper-class white women developed during the height of slavery, used medievalized constructions of femininity in order to justify violence towards African Americans throughout the first half of the 20th century during the height of the Jim Crow period. This chapter will also look at the women of the Ku Klux Klan, and how they simultaneously reinforced ideas about white femininity while enacting a progressive movement to give themselves political autonomy.

The second chapter, “Guinevere, Chretien de Troyes, and the Construction of

White Femininity in Chivalric Romance,” will begin with an analysis of Guinevere as a woman, a wife, and a peacekeeper in the romances of Chretien de Troyes. By analyzing

Guinevere, a primary female character throughout chivalric romance, I will establish a foundation of femininity and its construction in the texts of Chretien de Troyes. After exploring Guinevere’s portrayal in Troyes’ romances, I will move to the other women he depicts, using the foundation established in Guinevere’s analysis in order to better understand femininity in other women. This will be especially important because Troyes portrays different women in different ways, so it is extremely important to explore all of the different portrayals of women in order to better understand how Troyes conceptualizes femininity in his texts, as well as the social implications of that portrayal.

Exploring Chretien’s work is of particular importance because of its popularity throughout the later middle ages and its formative influence on Arthurian literature for centuries.

The third and final chapter, “Castles and Confining Spaces: Female Imprisonment and the Construction of ‘Feminine Spaces’ in Marie de France’s Lais”, I will look at the

ways in which women are portrayed throughout the lais of Marie de France, with a specific focus on traditionally feminine spaces such as castles and bedchambers. In this analysis I will also explore the ways in which women are confined in de France’s text, both in the traditional sense as an extension of my analysis of traditionally feminine spaces as well as in the less traditional, more metaphorical sense by looking at the ways in which female bodies are constricted and defined, such as through marriage itself, and what each of these types of confined existences say about femininity in de France’s texts.

This chapter will then look at the dynamics of marriage in de France’s lais as an extension of its attempt to define femininity through confinement, as conflicts in the relationship between husband and wife is often the reason behind female confinement in these stories. This chapter will also incorporate analysis of de France’s lais in context with 20th century ideals of femininity and motherhood, and the violation of feminine spaces. Through this analysis, I hope to further my understanding of women and femininity in chivalric romance, romances written by a female writer who is all too familiar with the ways in which women of the later middle ages were confined and portrayed.

Chapter I: The Appropriation of Chivalric Femininity by the Ku

Klux Klan and its Role in the Jim Crow South

By the time the Ku Klux Klan reached its peak membership in the 1920s, during which time the organization became obsessed with the concept of chivalry and the defense of white womanhood, the South had already established a social hierarchy in which white women existed at the top. This was, in large part, the result of slavery, and the social structures that were established prior to the Civil War, as is described in A

History of Women in America by Carol Hymowitz and Michaele Weissman. In “Black

Bondage/White Pedestal,” Hymowitz and Weissman write that, in the South in particular, when men cheated on their wives by assaulting slave women, their white wives were left angry and humiliated. The effect of this humiliation was twofold—first, it was in part the reason for the senseless violence enacted on slave women by white upper-class plantation mistresses, violence enacted as a result of the fact that the wives of unfaithful men “‘were not allowed to criticize them for their behavior,’ and instead were forced to remain silent in the face of their continued humiliation.”25 Second, it caused a social phenomenon to occur, one in which these women were compensated “with chivalrous veneration which not only satisfied the women’s need to feel valued, but also assuaged men’s guilt about their promiscuity.”26 As this behavior continued, “the more they praised the upper-class

25 Hymowitz, Carol; Weissman, Michaele. “Black Bondage/White Pedestal,” A History of Women in America (New York: Bantam Books, 1984), 61. 26 Hymowitz & Weissman, 62.

white women and proclaimed them the most morally superior females ever to walk the earth.”27 As a result of this previously-established social hierarchy, it is not a surprise that when the Klan adopted chivalry as their ideological base, they placed white women above all else. In fact, this idolization of white women was a natural fit for the social hierarchy that was already in place. By the 1960s, the idea of white female superiority had fully indoctrinated itself into Klan ideology, as seen in much of their propaganda from that time.

The pamphlet The Seven Symbols of The Klan is intended to serve as an informational guide to the language of symbolism used by the Ku Klux Klan for new recruits and was published in 1960 just before the peak of the Civil Rights movement. In the introductory section, the author writes that this pamphlet is intended to “help every

Klansman who reads it be a better Klansman.” In the section of this pamphlet titled “The

Cross,” it states that, for the purposes of the Klan and its agenda, the cross serves as a reminder of the sacrifices made by the “Crusaders of the Middle Ages in their perilous efforts to rescue the Holy Land from the heathern Turks; and is today being used to rally the forces of Christianity against the ever increasing hordes of anti-Christ and the principles of pure Americanism.”28 This statement does several things—first, it shows how Klan members viewed themselves as a trans historical continuation of the soldiers that fought in the Crusades during the middle ages. Second, this statement reframes their mission, making it an issue of religion instead of simple racial persecution. In this statement, and by extension in the larger framework of Klan ideology, African

27 Hymowitz & Weissman, 62. 28 Newton, 461.

Americans, Jewish Americans, and other people of color represent not just a threat to whiteness and white supremacy in America, but a direct threat to Christianity.

As the section on the cross ends, a new section begins, called “The Flag.” In this section, as the name portends, the importance of the flag in Klan symbolism is explained.

Part of that symbolism rests in the colors of the flag. It is at this point that the importance of women is introduced to the ideology being expressed in this pamphlet. As the Klan writes, “Its RED is the BLOOD of American heroes that stained a hundred battlefields.

Its WHITE symbolizes the PURITY of AMERICAN WOMANHOOD and the sanctity of

AMERICAN HOMES…”29 This explanation of the flag’s symbolism makes several thematic connections, connections that are extremely important to understand when looking at the way that the Klan views women and the ways in which chivalric romance influenced ideas surrounding gender and the myth of the frail white woman in the Klan.

First, associating the white of the flag with womanhood makes a clear distinction that the type of American womanhood the Klan is interested in protecting is a white womanhood.

The rest of the phrase then goes on to define this white womanhood as one that is inherently “pure” and relative to the home sphere. Understanding white womanhood as inherently pure is a concept that relates back to the idealization of the white woman in chivalric romance. Specifically, Guinevere and her relationship with Lancelot was so idealized that Guinevere was made to resemble a religious figure. However, the Klan’s understanding of womanhood, though highly influenced by chivalric romance, fails to acknowledge the points throughout the romances in which women are portrayed in a less- than-positive light, such as at the end of the stanzaic Morte D’Arthur, in which

29 Newton, The Ku Klux Klan, 461. Capitalization is from original document, not mine.

Guinevere, as penance for her affair with Lancelot, retires to a convent to live the rest of her life in religious devotion. With this in mind, then, it is important to figure out where the Klan’s understanding of chivalry and womanhood come from, if not solely from the texts themselves. In searching for the answer to that question, we must turn to the other writings of the mid-19th and early 20th century, a time period in which, like many other periods of change, the public interest in the Middle Ages was high.

The 19th and 20th Centuries and the American Medievalist Impulse

Like many periods throughout American history, the mid-19th century was one of radical, violent change. During this period, a large number of Americans began turning towards an unexpected era and culture in history: that of the European Middle Ages.

Particularly in New England amongst Anglo-American intellectuals and in the Southern aristocracy, “medieval architecture, literature, and history became topics of interest, the cultural authority of these two groups influencing contemporary and subsequent

American popular culture.”30 In architecture, architects like Andrew Downing and

Alexander Davis popularized the Gothic Revival style, and in the stained-glass industry flourished.31 In literature, a new interest in medieval authors developed, an interest signaled by the Anglo-American translation and adaptation of medieval French, Italian, and Middle English texts.32 Popularized biographies of medieval saints, translations of the writings of medieval mystics, and popularized biographies of chivalric knights

30 Moreland, Kim. The Medievalist Impulse in American Literature: Twain, Adams, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996), 3. 31 Moreland, 3. 32 Moreland, 3-4.

appeared, as well as scholarly studies of Arthurian legends and adaptations of medieval romances.33 In short, the literature of the Middle Ages flourished, likely as the result of

“deeply felt needs and concerns…experienced by Americans during this period” with the

Middle Ages serving an important role in grounding the cultural conscience of a country in the middle of the biggest internal conflict in its history.34 Unlike the puritan colonists of early America, who saw themselves as analogues of the ancient Israelites and sought to build a “New Jerusalem,” 19th century Americans turned to the Cavaliers of 17th century England, and through them the knights of the Middle Ages.

Anglo-American Southerners in particular saw themselves as continuations of the

“conquerors, crusaders, and cavaliers” of the Middle Ages, often suggesting direct descendance from medieval knights, with Southern writers invoking the myth of this heritage in order to push the South to secede and begin a war of secession. There was also a particular focus on medieval chivalry and courtly love during the 19th century, particularly in the South, which “came to function as a standard against which modern

American life was judged and found wanting.” These stories, in which the figure of the knight was the primary point of departure, offered a standard against which the modern

American man could be measured, as well as a standard against which modern American women could be judged. In particular, the modern woman represented the fact that

33 Moreland, 4. 34 Moreland, 4. Also important to note, or rather stress, here is the fact that I am referencing American adaptations of the Middle Ages in the context of white Anglophone Americans. African Americans, Jewish Americans, and other non-white/non-Protestant Americans engage with these texts and the Middle Ages as a whole in very different ways. For more information on this in the context of African Americans, reference Matthew Vernon’s The Black Middle Ages: Race and the Construction of the Middle Ages, Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.

American man could not measure up in the romantic realm in comparison to the medieval man, as the modern woman no longer “served as satisfying loci for masculine aspiration and achievement.”35 Implicit in these understandings of medieval people vs. modern

Americans was an ideal of men, women, and America as a whole to which Americans could aspire; a model upon which America could rebuild itself.

This common, modern Anglo-American man found himself represented in Mark

Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court, In this tale, Hank, a 19th century

Connecticut man, finds himself in 6th century England. In Connecticut Yankee, Hank takes a wife, a medieval lady named Alisande, whom he immediately renames “Sandy,” who, instead of being responsible for satisfying sexual demands, is required to help Hank meet the demands of middle-class morality, a morality that doesn’t exist in medieval

England.36 Interestingly, however, Hank’s relationship with Alisande becomes one of sentimentality, with no marked sexuality, with Hank calling himself “her worshipper.”

This aspect of their relationship may be a 19th century presentation of the sexless, or desexualized woman, something Twain would be expected to do as a 19th century apologist, it also aligns itself with the idealized courtly love represented in chivalric romance, as in between Lancelot and Guinevere in the Arthurian romances of Chretien de

Troyes which, though not sexless, does have an element of worship and friendship.

Whereas most of Twain’s work in medievalist literature was intended to be ambivalent, or even humorous, towards medieval culture, Henry Adams presented the time period as an ideal to strive towards. Whereas Twain worshipped the desexualized

35 Moreland, 6. 36 Moreland, 33.

woman, Adams viewed her, and the “sexless” American woman, as a failure.37 Adams, in fact, celebrated the passionate energy and productive impact of courtly love and sexuality on literature and culture, going so far as to praise Heloise as “the immortal and eternal woman” who “unites the ages” by her intense passion, and to praise the passionate courtly love that existed between Heloise and Abelard.38

Constructions of Femininity in the Ku Klux Klan

Despite the obsession of 19th and 20th century authors and readers with the Middle

Ages and chivalric romance, women of the Ku Klux Klan were remarkably different from the constructions of femininity that they were sworn to uphold. In fact, in the early years of the Klan, the male members held two contrasting views of femininity and womanhood.

In the abstract, white protestant women, to whom femininity exclusively applied, “were innocent, virtuous beings who existed to sustain and serve men.”39 The role of actual wives and mothers, however, was much more ambiguous. As symbols, white Protestant women were the subjects of massive amounts of propaganda in which Klansmen pledged respect and adoration for white womanhood. In the Klansman’s Manual, womanhood was defined as “all that is best, and noblest, and highest in life.” The Manual insisted that no race, society, or country “can rise higher than its womanhood.”40 The Klan’s most sacred and essential duty was to protect womanhood, and degradation of a woman was considered “a violation of the sacredness of human personality, a sin against the race, a crime against society, a menace to our country, and a prostitution.” For the Klan,

37 Moreland, 77. 38 Adams, Henry. Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, 221-287. 39 Blee, 45. 40 Blee, 46.

however, the highest embodiment of white women’s virtues was motherhood. In his address to the first meeting of the Grand Dragons, James Comer affirmed that good mothers were essential to men’s accomplishments, and officers and kleagles throughout the KKK across history have emphasized the critical role of motherhood in sustaining a white Protestant male-directed nation. This aspect of the KKK’s understanding of femininity is particularly interesting because it does not reflect the reality of what women represent in chivalric romances. Instead, the idea of motherhood is something that the

KKK themselves added, and in doing so adapted chivalric constructions of femininity to

20th century ideals, in which motherhood was non-negotiable.

This glorification of white womanhood and by extension motherhood was tied inextricably to another idealized symbol in Klan propaganda: the home. According to the

Klan, the American home is fundamental “to all that is best in life, in society, in church, and in the nation.” The Klansman’s Manual commands Klansmen to “protect the home by promoting whatever would make for its stability, its betterment, its safety, and its inviolability.” Klan propaganda insisted that if homes were to fail, American wealth and material achievement would be reduced to poverty and trash. This is because, for the

Klan, the home symbolizes Americanism and the protection of American values from alien influence. If the home is broken down, “all pretext of government vanishes.” The home also represents women’s dreams and identity. In protecting the home, the Klan was also protecting white womanhood, and vice versa. Moreover, white Protestant homes

symbolize the future of both the Klan and the nation, with the home life operating as critical to developing patriotic and klannish values in the next generation.41

However, despite the glorification of home, white womanhood, and motherhood that is embodied in Klan ideology and practice, its treatment and understanding of actual white Protestant women was vastly different. It was common for Klansmen to trade songs and tales about the perils of marriage at meetings, and women as wives had almost unlimited influence over their husbands and were charged with maintaining their moral character. And, despite their glorification of motherhood, actual mothers were given very little actual authority, as it was believed that, if left unchecked, their monopolization of child rearing would undermine “the ‘building of manly character’” essential for

Klansman.42 And lastly, despite their pledge to defend American womanhood, that pledge was conditional, only covering womanhood that was monogamous and premaritally chaste. By romanticizing home, womanhood, and motherhood, while simultaneously emphasizing the untrustworthiness of women, the Klan created an environment of ambiguity surrounding gender, specifically femininity, and in that ambiguous gap, the women of the Klan had to forge their own way.

Women of the Ku Klux Klan

In proposing the idea that women join the Ku Klux Klan, male members were faced with a problem: the Ku Klux Klan held itself up as an institution of and for masculine white Protestant men, with women viewed as inherently subordinate to the

41 It is important to note here that, though the KKK viewed motherhood as an essential part of the idealized woman, chivalric romance itself is largely ambivalent to the idea, and when motherhood is present it is almost never glorified in the same way as it is in 20th century discourse. 42 Blee, 48.

desires of men, so how could it freely admit women without compromising that masculine environment and hierarchy? In order to solve this problem, the Women of the

Ku Klux Klan (WKKK) was created. The WKKK is a distinct organization for women, in which women could be enlisted in the Klan’s efforts without confronting any actual men and therefore compromising the masculinity of the fraternity. This organization, alongside the main organization, advocated for female suffrage and paid employment, as well as for the spread of Protestantism across America. Viewing women as idealistic, inherently good and pure beings as the Klan did, their argument was that bringing white

Protestant women into the electoral arena would result in less corruption in politics. As such, the WKKK actively campaigned for women’s suffrage.43 However, with more freedom and equality came differences in opinions. Klanswomen approached the question of their status differently from the way their male counterparts did. While always asserting the central nature of home life to women and to America, the WKKK dissented from the idealized view of home and family that was such a powerful symbol for their male counterparts. Instead, the women of the Klan viewed the life of a homemaker as inherently monotonous and full of “grinding toil and sacrifice.”44

Homemaking was held in low esteem by the WKKK, as they viewed that women received too little credit for their efforts. The WKKK also viewed marriage as a double- edged sword for women, simultaneously a glorious aspect of life for women and a burden. And, while the male organization described motherhood as women’s “glorious mission,” the WKKK called it “women’s work,” with many women referring to it as

43 It should be noted that this suffrage movement only applied to white Protestant women, and spurned Jewish women, Catholic women, and women of color. 44 Blee, 51.

“women’s ‘burden’,” and actively campaigned for an eight-hour workday for the job of mothering.45

As an extension of the push for voting rights and fair, paid labor, the WKKK pushed for autonomy instead of continuing its existence as an auxiliary of the KKK. The

WKKK stated emphatically in its statement at the beginning of their initial gathering in

Indiana that they were not to be treated as an auxiliary of the Klan. No Klansmen were permitted to attend WKKK meetings and no joint meetings between the KKK and

WKKK were allowed, as was female attendance at KKK meetings. However, in 1925 the

KKK reversed some of their rules, creating an official women’s organization committee that functioned in the men’s Klan. With all of this political friction and activity in mind, it is clear that, though the Klan prided itself on the defense of idealized versions of white womanhood and motherhood, the actual reality within the organization was much more complex and dynamic. As such, much like in their understanding of the original literature, the Ku Klux Klan’s understanding of the fundamental makings of white womanhood cannot even apply to the women within the organization itself, the women that the organization bases its entire existence upon. Furthermore, the women of the

WKKK worked to separate themselves from this ideology, in both their push for paid labor and their push for suffrage, and in doing so worked to dismantle ideas of femininity that formed the ideological basis of the KKK while still upholding the fundamental understanding of race that allowed them the freedom to push for white women’s rights in the first place.

45Blee, 51-52. Italics from original text, not mine.

Chapter II: Guinevere, Chretien de Troyes, and the Construction of

Lower-Class White Femininity in Arthurian Romance

In attempting to explore the ways in which the Ku Klux Klan used the myth of the frail white woman in order to persecute black Americans, it is important to look back at the origins of the myth of the frail white woman and its adaptations. In doing this, it is best to start from the very beginning, and look at the women in the world of King Arthur and works of chivalric romance. As such, this chapter will focus on the women of

Arthurian romance and their portrayal, with a specific focus on female imprisonment, and how by imprisoning wealthy women, medieval writers constructed certain ideas about femininity that were very influential in the construction of white southern femininity, specifically the myth of the frail white woman.

It is also important, however, that if we are to approach the subject of whiteness, specifically white femininity, in the Middle Ages, it is paramount that we first understand the way that race operated in medieval society and literature. For that, it is only natural that we turn to Geraldine Heng’s landmark text, The Invention of Race in the Middle

Ages. In this text, Heng defines race as “a structural relationship for the articulation and management of human differences, rather than a substantive content.”46 For the Middle

Ages, as Heng goes on to explain, these differences are often determined by religion, place of origin, and class. But nowhere was the distinction more apparent than in regard to race, with particular emphasis on white and black Europeans.47 As she states in the

46 Heng, 19. 47 It should be noted that medieval ideas of race are very different from contemporary American understandings of the subject, which often separate people based solely on the

first chapter of her book, “Inventions/Reinventions: Race Studies, Modernity, and the

Middle Ages,” “cultural practices across a range of registers…disclose historical thinking that pronounces decisively on the ethical, ontological, and moral value of black and white.”48 For example, in the thirteenth-century encyclopedia De Proprietatibus Rerum

(On the Properties of Things),49 Bartholomeus Anglicus offers the theory that “cold lands produce white folk and hot lands produce black: white is…a visual marker of inner courage, while the men of Africa, possessing black faces, short bodies, and crisp hair, are

‘cowards of heart’ and ‘guileful’.”50 Black bodies are often depicted as being damned to hell for their indiscretions, while white bodies, especially those of white women, are saved for the same indiscretions. Black is “the color of devils and demons, a color that sometimes extends to bodies demonically possessed…” whereas white bodies are often associated with purity of spirit, as in the case described in the fourteenth century Cursor

Mundi, when four Saracens, who are originally people of color, are given three rods blessed by Moses to kiss, and after doing so transform from black to white, “thus taking on, we are told, the hue of those of noble blood.” The emphasis on nobility and whiteness emphasizes the direct relationship between race and class that existed (and still does to some extent today) throughout English history. This connection is inherent in English understandings of themselves and the rest of the world, and is a direct result of British imperialist activity throughout the Early Modern period and throughout the 18th, 19th, and

color of their skin. For medieval populations, references to non-white, or “black” people could refer to people not just of African descent, but Jews, Muslims, people of Middle Eastern descent, certain populations of Eastern Europeans such as gypsies, and people of Iberian descent, who were often Muslim and were commonly referred to as “Saracens.” 48 Heng, 16. 49 Translation is that of Geraldine Heng, 16. 50 Heng, 16.

20th centuries, an understanding that has also extended to the United States of America and is seen in its own imperialist exploits throughout the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries.

With this understanding of how race operated in the Middle Ages, it is important that we now turn to chivalry, and form a basic understanding of the concept, in order to merge the two and come to an understanding of how they are tied together in chivalric romance and in contemporary American fantasies of race. As Maurice Keen writes,

“chivalry is an evocative word, conjuring up images in the mind—of the knight fully armed, perhaps with the crusaders’ red cross sewn upon his surcoat; of martial adventures in strange lands; of castles with tall towers and of the fair women who dwelt in them.”51

As a result of this contextual history, however, it is notoriously difficult to define. The word chivalry itself is derived from the French word chevalier, which was most often used in reference to “a man of aristocratic standing and probably of noble ancestry, who is capable if called upon, of equipping himself with a war horse and the arms of a heavy cavalryman, who has been through certain rituals that make him…’dubbed’ to knighthood.”52 In the realm of literature, chivalry exists primarily in the works of romance writers. As a literary genre, chivalric romance was the principal kind of romance found in medieval Europe starting in the 12th century, a genre that, from a very early stage associated “together certain qualities which [were]…clearly regarded as the classic virtues of good knighthood: prouesse, loyauté, largesse (generosity), courtoisie, and franchise.”53 The genre describes (usually in verse) the adventures of legendary knights, most often those of King Arthur’s court, and which celebrates an idealized code of

51 Keen, Maurice. Chivalry (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press), 1. 52 Chivalry, 1-2. 53 Chivalry, 2.

civilized behavior that combines loyalty, honor, and courtly love.54 Courtly love, one of the most important ideas found in chivalric romance in regard to the idealized Middle

Ages propagated by the Ku Klux Klan, is a term that refers to the cult of heterosexual love that emerged during the 11th century among the French aristocracy that then spread to the literature of the time, and typifies an elaborate code of behavior in which the tormented male lover’s abject obedience to a disdainful, idealized lady, who was usually his social superior.55 This form of love converted sexual desire from what was before determined to be a “degrading necessity of physical life” into a spiritual experience, almost a religious vocation.56 This type of love is seen in such works as those by the southern French troubadors, who were followed closely by the northern French trouveres, then by Dante, Petrarch, and many others including Marie de France and Chretien de

Troyes, who established the trope in Arthurian tradition with Lancelot. In courtly love, the woman was valued above the man, and she was placed on a pedestal upon which she was viewed as being noble, wise, beautiful, and most importantly, perfect. Also evident in courtly love is the overwhelming presence of whiteness as the default and the preferred, with people of color often depicted as giants, dwarfs, and other “monstrous” creatures.57 As such, it is in chivalric romance, and in the idea of courtly love, that we will find the idealization of women that was then appropriated across history and location, and on which the Ku Klux Klan based their views of white women, and

54 “Chivalric Romance,” The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Oxford Reference 55 “Courtly Love,” The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Oxford Reference 56 “Courtly Love” 57 Much scholarship has been done on the language surrounding monstrosity, race, and humanity in medieval literature. Specifically, Jeffrey Cohen’s Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages explores this idea in great detail and is a landmark in the understanding of monsters in medieval romances.

consequently was able to use them as a point from which they could enact their wave of violence against black Americans throughout the Jim Crow period. With this commentary and history in mind, it is with the character of Guinevere 58in the romances of Chretien de

Troyes that the exploration of women in chivalric romance must begin.

Guinevere

Beginning this project by looking at Guinevere is important for many reasons.

First, Guinevere has a troubled history throughout medieval literature. Guinevere as a literary character is first seen in early Welsh literature, but she became much more well- known thanks to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Brittainiae, which brought the legend of King Arthur into European, and more specifically, English, literature. A tradition of abduction and infidelity surrounds Guinevere, starting in the 11th or early 12th century Vita Gildae, in which she was abducted by King Melwas, to be later rescued by

King Arthur and his army, and continuing throughout Part Seven of Monmouth’s

Historia, in which Guinevere, initially portrayed as a holy figure during the feast at

Whitsun, breaks her vow of fidelity to Arthur with Mordred.59 In Chretien de Troyes’ 12th century romance, with which we begin our examination of the women of Troyes’ romances, she is kidnapped by Meleagant only to later be rescued by Lancelot. By beginning an examination of the women of chivalric romance with her, we are able to create a framework through which other portrayals of women in chivalric romance can be better understood.

58 Guinevere’s name has been spelled numerous different ways throughout history. For the purposes of this project, with the exception of direct quotations, I will be using the spelling “Guinevere.” 59 “Guinevere: Legendary Queen of Britain,” Encyclopedia Brittanica.

The first mention of Queen Guinevere in Lancelot occurs during the challenge given to Arthur by the unknown knight. In this challenge, the knight tells Arthur that he has “imprisoned knights, ladies, and maidens from your land and household” and that the only way Arthur will be able to free them is by sending a knight “whom you have faith enough to dare entrust the queen to accompany her into these woods where I am going…I will await him there and will deliver all the prisoners who are captive in my land – if he is able to win the queen from me and bring her back to you.”60 In this first mention of her, Guinevere’s status in the eyes of the challenger and King Arthur’s court is immediately that of object to be gained and/or lost—a bargaining chip. This continues throughout the rest of the story, as Guinevere is given to Kay, lost to the custody of the challenger, fought over, won back to the custody of Lancelot, and brought back to King

Arthur. Each time she is passed from man to man, in a seemingly endless chain of custody. In objectifying her in this way, the text does a couple of things. First, in placing

Guinevere in the role of object, it strips her of her autonomy, reducing her to a “weak, sad, and sighing” woman, fulfilling the image seen throughout the courtly love trope.

Second, by objectifying her in the way this text does, as an object to constantly be fought over and attained by the men around her, Guinevere is placed on a pedestal, one in which she becomes the most desirable thing at King Arthur’s court.

This idea of women as objects to be won, lost, and manipulated, is not restricted to Guinevere alone. In Lancelot, as Lancelot is leaving once more to go after Guinevere,

60 “The Knight of the Cart (Lancelot),” Chretien de Troyes: Arthurian Romances (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 208. Hereafter, Lancelot

the girl that lives in the castle from which Lancelot is departing, Troyes describes the customs and practices for traveling knights at the time of Lancelot’s travels as,

“such that if a knight encountered a damsel or girl alone – be she lady or maidservant – he would as soon cut his own throat as treat her dishonorably, if he prized his good name. And should he assault her, he would be for ever disgraced at every court. But if she were being escorted by another, and the knight chose to do battle with her defender and defeated him at arms, then he might do with her as he pleased without incurring dishonor or disgrace”

So, women, regardless of class or status, were much like property in the sense that, if found alone they were to be transported safely from one place to the next, but if they were with the company of a man, who would presumably be the person that owned said woman, she could be fought over and whoever was victorious would have complete rights and ownership of her, regardless of the desires of the woman herself. This idea that women need protecting is certainly reminiscent of the constructions of femininity that the

Klan promotes, and yet it doesn’t quite go far enough. The idea that men could fight over the ownership of a woman isn’t reflected in the ideology of the Klan. Instead, they seem to have appropriated the concept of protecting vulnerable women without the idea of ownership, at least not in the same sense as it is understood in this and other chivalric texts. Instead, whereas they happily accepted the idea of protecting women, they flipped the other half of the custom, instead not allowing the disrespect of a woman under any circumstances, and instead of seeing other white men as a threat they focused entirely on the threat of an assault by a black man.

This portrayal of Guinevere is only then reinforced by the nature of Lancelot’s love for her. Throughout Lancelot, Lancelot is overwhelmed with his need to save

Guinevere, so much so that he “was uncertain whether or not he truly existed; he was unable to recall his own name…he remembered nothing at all save one creature, for

whom he forgot all others; he was so intent upon her alone that he did not hear, see, or pay attention to anything.”61 During his weakest point in his battle with Meleagant,

Lancelot is able to pull strength from Guinevere’s presence much in the same way that

Charlemagne pulls strength from God in the face of disastrous odds in the epic poem

Chanson de Geste. In Lancelot’s case, as soon as he hears his name come from

Guinevere’s mouth, he turns to look at her, and “from the moment he beheld her, he began to defend himself from behind his back so he would not have to turn or divert his face or eyes from her,” as seeing the tower in which Guinevere is being held “will bring

[you] strength and help.”62 The battle between Lancelot and Meleagant only ends as a result of Guinevere’s wish that Lancelot restrain himself, which, upon hearing it causes

Lancelot to immediately cease fighting so that “nothing could have made Lancelot touch

Meleagant or make any move towards him, even if he had been about to kill him.”63 In all of these instances, the control and influence that Guinevere has over Lancelot, as well as the clear and unwavering devotion Lancelot expresses towards Guinevere, the relationship between the two lovers is elevated from romance to a religious adoration, a fact only reinforced by the scene in which Lancelot and Guinevere sleep together.

After Lancelot’s return to King Bademagu’s kingdom, he and Guinevere reconcile and make plans for Lancelot to sneak into the tower in which Guinevere is still being held. That night, once Lancelot reaches the tower, he sees Guinevere, who approaches her barred window wearing “a spotless white shift…[with] a mantle of scarlet

61 Lancelot, 216. 62 Lancelot, 252. 63 Lancelot, 254.

and marmot fur.”64 Finding themselves separated by iron bars, Lancelot bends them until he was able to remove them, and once they are removed he is able to climb in to join

Guinevere. During the process of removing the bars, however, Lancelot injures himself— cutting his little finger to the quick and severing the first joint of the next finger.

However, in his excitement to be with Guinevere he does not notice his injury until the next morning. This detail, though minor in the overall plot of the text itself, is extremely important to the understanding of Guinevere’s portrayal in this text. First, the injury that

Lancelot sustains as a result of his and Guinevere’s love takes on a metaphorical nature, in which his injury becomes a symbol of sacrifice—one Lancelot makes in order to have the ability to consummate his love for Guinevere despite its taboo nature due to the fact that Guinevere is married to Lancelot’s King. This sacrificial element to their love is important because it connects thematically with Lancelot’s portrayal as a Christ figure in this text.65 As a result, Lancelot and Guinevere’s relationship once again becomes equated with religious worship, one that requires sacrifice, which in this case manifests itself through Lancelot’s injury. By equating Lancelot and Guinevere’s love here with religious worship, along with Troyes’ tendency to portray their love as a type of religious devotion, he conflates the ideas of worshipping and sex, connecting the two and adding an additional layer of religious subtext to this relationship, and to the characters

64 Lancelot, 263. 65 Lancelot’s portrayal as a Christ figure is apparent in Troyes’ romances, but especially so in Lancelot. Allusions to Christ can be seen in Lancelot’s journey to save Guinevere, in which he is humiliated and forced to ride in a cart driven by a dwarf that is then paraded for everyone to see, as well as in the injuries that Lancelot sustains while crossing the sword bridge into Maleagant’s kingdom, which are reminiscent of the injuries Christ sustains during his crucifixion.

themselves. As a result of this setup, Lancelot is once again in the position of worshipper and Guinevere becomes the worshipped—a pseudo-religious figure.

In this moment, and throughout chivalric romance, Guinevere becomes a version of the idealized, upper-class white woman that white supremacists would look to as their baseline understanding of traditional white femininity. However, Guinevere as an ideal woman is inherently problematic when considered in regard to the values that the Klan associates with their idealized version of what a woman should be, in that she falls short as a wife and mother. In fact, it is as a wife that Guinevere fails the most, both in regard to the fact that she is seemingly unable to have Arthur’s children, a detriment to her as both a wife and a queen, and most obviously in the fact that she carries on an affair with

Lancelot, her husband’s best and most loyal knight, for most of her adult life. For the

Klan, a woman’s ability to remain faithful to her husband, as well as her ability to reproduce, is paramount to anything else. In this case, Guinevere has failed on both fronts and as such her existence defies 19th and 20th century ideals. In this way, femininity as a chivalric ideal in the KKK is completely misrepresented, and in some cases flattened, with more traditional binary gender roles being applied to women like Guinevere, who, much like the women of the WKKK, never actually fit the idea to begin with. Whereas the KKK emphasizes virginity, fidelity, and motherhood as essential to their idea of the ideal Protestant white woman, the women of chivalric romance are not held to nearly the same standard as the result of the importance of courtly love, and as such are much more complex and dynamic.

Interestingly enough, however, throughout this text Guinevere also performs a service that is common to women throughout medieval literature, and that is the service

of peacekeeping. Much like the women of the WKKK had political agendas and political autonomy, to some extent at least, Guinevere exercises some political autonomy of her own. Specifically, she acts as a peacekeeper in Arthur’s court, and is often the first one to intervene when there is conflict between King Arthur’s knights. In Lancelot, when Kay announces his decision to leave Arthur’s court, the first thing King Arthur does is turn to

Guinevere, instructing her “go to him, my dear lady; though he deign not stay for my sake, pray him to stay for yours and fall at your feet if necessary, for I would never again be happy if I were to lose his company.”66 In the face of conflict and stress on the Round

Table, Arthur’s first thought is to send Guinevere as a peacekeeper. And Guinevere succeeds in her efforts, too, convincing Kay to stay with the promise that she will grant him whatever request he wants of her and Arthur. This deal comes at a steep price, but it is a mark of Guinevere’s success as a peacemaker and politician in her husband’s court.

Later in the same romance, when Lancelot and Meleagant are battling for

Guinevere’s hand and it becomes clear that Meleagant is on the verge of losing the battle, and by extension his life, the King of Gorre turns to Guinevere and begs her to grant him a favor, to “tell Lancelot to refrain from slaying him.”67 Even in this moment, when

Guinevere is being held captive, she is the first person that the men around her turn to when they need a conflict resolved. In this case, it is only Guinevere that can solve this problem and command peace, whereas the King of Gorre seems to be unable to do so.

This is markedly different from the way in which Guinevere is idealized in the 20th century, specifically in the minds of white supremacists of the time. In their minds,

66 Lancelot, 208. 67 Lancelot, 254.

women cannot be trusted with much of anything on their own, and must be supervised, even in disciplines, like childcare, that are stereotypically feminine in nature. Here, instead of being supervised by the men around her, Guinevere exhibits a level of autonomy and political power characteristic of wealthy women in courtly love scenarios and yet opposite to that of the idealized chivalric woman that the KKK claims to support.

Constructions of Femininity in Chretien de Troyes’ Arthurian Romances

Though Guinevere is arguably one of the most important, not to mention interesting, women across Arthurian and chivalric romance of the 12th and 13th centuries, she is not the only woman that Chretien de Troyes writes about in his Arthurian

Romances. In fact, Troyes’ romances often include appearances from women of many different classes, from handmaidens to other Queens to noble women like the mysterious

Lady in Lancelot who stages her own rape as a test of Lancelot’s honor. For example, in

Erec and Enide, Guinevere’s handmaiden acts as a sort of representative, confronting unknown parties that approach the Queen to learn of their intentions. As a woman of a lower class, she is valuable enough to send as an envoy, yet not important enough to stay back in case of an attack. In this scenario she is important and deserving of a small level of political power. In this story, as in many others, femininity, specifically upper-class femininity equals power, politics, and intellect. In the case of Guinevere’s handmaiden, femininity equals beauty. In fact, her beauty transforms her from simply being a woman to being a symbol. In courtly romance in particular, women are often treated as a symbol—a confusion of “abstractions and abstractions personified as women.”68 In this

68 Ferrante, Joan. “Courtly Literature.” Women as Image in Medieval Literature, Durham, NC: The Labyrinth Press, 65.

case, this woman is a symbol of beauty, goodness, and on some levels, chivalry itself. So, when she is attacked, it is not only an assault on her body, but an assault on her femininity and the concept of chivalry.

Later in the same romance, however, we see a completely different type of woman. As Erec continues his plan of following the mysterious knight and his companion the dwarf, he eventually reaches a well-fortified town, where the knight, the dwarf, and Erec look for lodging. After following them until they find dwellings for the knight, Erec begins to look for his own place to sleep. In his search, he comes across an old man, who offers him a place to stay for the night. In doing so, he introduces Erec to his wife and daughter, the latter of whom, named Isolde, serves as a clear symbol for virginity and purity in this text. Upon being introduced to her, Erec remarks that the girl is dressed “in a flowing shift of fine cloth, white and pleated. Over it she wore a white dress; she had no other clothes.”69 The dress was clearly old and tattered, but the girl herself was beautiful, “for Nature in making her had turned all her attention to the task.”70

Erec describes her as a blonde woman, with

“[a] face and forehead…fairer and brighter than the lily-flower…her face was illuminated by a fresh, glowing colour that Nature had given her. Her eyes glowed with such brightness that they resembled two stars. Never had God made finer nose, mouth, nor eyes… She was truly one who was made to be looked at, for one might gaze at her just as one gazes into a mirror.”

After being introduced to Erec, Isolde then goes about feeding and otherwise taking care of his horse, leads Erec to where he will be staying, which she has prepared already, and is later lauded by her father as being wise and noble in spirit. All of these attributes, as

69 “Erec and Enide.” Chretien de Troyes: Arthurian Romances, trans. Carleton W. Carroll. (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 42. Hereafter, Erec and Enide. 70 Erec and Enide, 42.

well as the specific and seemingly random emphasis on Isolde’s ability to prepare the room for Erec’s arrival, which suggests her abilities as homemaker, combined with her beauty and the emphasis on her dress, both in its whiteness and its poorliness, cause

Isolde to not just represent femininity, but a kind of divine virginity and purity of spirit, and one that is clearly associated with the concept of whiteness. As such, this girl represents the kind of idyllic white femininity that groups like the KKK so righteously claim to defend.

What is interesting and unusual in the context of medieval constructions of race, specifically whiteness, however, is that Isolde is from a poor family. Erec makes a point to point this out to Isolde’s father when he comments on the shabbiness of Isolde’s dress, and how someone as perfect as her should be dressed in finery, not a worn shift. Though there were certainly poor white Europeans living in England and France in the Middle

Ages, the use of a poor woman instead of a noblewoman to signify ideals of femininity is significant and should not be overlooked. Traditionally, as Geraldine Heng writes, white is the color most commonly associated with “superior class and noble bloodlines.”71

Traditionally, this nobility is understood to be an economic and social one. However in this romance, Isolde’s nobility is a spiritual one, something her father readily points out to Erec. This lack of capital and economic and social nobility, though on the surface unusual for medieval society, only reinforces the spiritual purity of Isolde, and furthers her existence as the ideal white woman. In this case, Isolde, much like Guinevere’s handmaiden, becomes a symbol for the lower classes, the idealized white Christian peasant woman, something that white supremacists that associate with the KKK can

71 Heng, 16.

readily identify with, as membership of the Klan was primarily composed of middle- to lower-class white Protestant men.

The text supports this portrayal of Isolde, too. By making her the recipient of the sparrow-hawk, Erec furthers her symbolization, and now instead of just being symbolic for lower class whiteness, Isolde becomes a symbol for an idealized femininity, one based in beauty and “courtliness.”72 She is no longer an individual, but representative of a larger image, and one of beauty and femininity, as well as spiritual purity and whiteness.

In this depiction, Isolde the woman is flattened and deemed unimportant, and Isolde the symbol for white femininity is elevated. This is particularly interesting to consider alongside the portrayal of Guinevere across the chivalric romance genre. Though she is elevated to a pseudo-religious figure in Lancelot, and is viewed by all to be just, good, and spiritually pure, Guinevere remains a controversial figure throughout the rest of the body of chivalric romance. In the stanzaic Morte Arthur, Guinevere is largely despised by

King Arthur’s knights, who make a point to try and catch her in the act of sleeping with

Lancelot. Instead of her affair with Lancelot being a good thing, in this story it ends in disaster. And the disaster is where the importance of Isolde and the handmaiden from

Erec and Enide becomes paramount.

In the stanzaic Morte Arthur, an anonymous 14th century Middle English poem,

Lancelot’s love for Guinevere prevents him from marrying the maid of Astolat, the daughter of the Earl of Astolat, who takes care of him after he is injured while competing in a tournament, and his refusal of her as a partner results in her death. When King Arthur learns of her death and is forced to reckon with Lancelot and Guinevere’s affair, he

72 Erec and Enide, 46.

expels Lancelot and Guinevere from his court, and Guinevere spends the remainder of her life in religious devotion in an attempt to make up for her sins. In this story, it is the death of this girl, a girl of a lower class than Guinevere, that is inexcusable for the rest of the occupants of the Round Table. The maid of Astolat is, much like Isolde, flattened and after her death becomes representative of youth, beauty, and spiritual purity, and

Guinevere, the Queen and highest woman in the land, is lowered from pseudo-religious figure to a flawed, sinful individual. If the maid in this story is flattened, Guinevere is, in effect, expanded. She is no longer a symbol but an individual, one with flaws and one that has committed transgressions that are unforgivable. The elevation of a woman of a lower class than the queen, though it is important to note that she is still of a noble family, and the diminishing of the queen herself reflects the same kind of idealization we see in Erec and Enide in the idealization of the two women of lower class. This emphasis on the lower class idealized white woman is an idea that members of white supremacist groups like the KKK latch on to in the adaptations of medieval literature that they so readily consume, and therefore this flattening of women into symbols and idealizations is reflected in their own understanding of femininity, even when it fails to represent the actual women with whom they interact. Moreover, this emphasis on the idealized white woman establishes a precedent in chivalric romance itself for the types of racialized fantasies that continue to entrance white supremacist movements.

Chapter III: Castles and Confining Spaces: Female Imprisonment and the Construction of

“Feminine Spaces” in Marie de France’s Lais

When Ellen Grice stated that she awoke to ““the presence of a negro man in her bed’” on September 12, 1912, she invoked a longstanding cultural fantasy that has existed in Western culture for millennia, and that is the invasion of white spaces by

“alien” figures— i.e., people of color—who they viewed as being inherently monstrous, akin to the giant that kidnaps Duke Hoel’s daughter in Monmouth’s Historia regum

Britannica. Specifically, this supposed attack73 marked an invasion of white female spaces, which traditionally in white supremacist rhetoric are restricted to homes, and specifically bedrooms. This is also the case in chivalric romance, especially in the works of Marie de France, whose lais focus almost exclusively on women and events that take place in traditionally female spaces. Historically, however, this has not always been the case. On September 28, 1066, William of Normandy landed on the shores of Sussex,

England, where he immediately took over the dilapidated Roman fort of Anderida and built a castle on its grounds. He then traveled to Hastings, and on a cliff overlooking the sea he enlisted the Saxons present to build him another castle, the building of which was portrayed in the Bayeux tapestry. These actions on William of Normandy’s part reflect the fact that up until this point in history Normans had long established the castle as a source of pride and a symbol of wealth and power, a symbolization that reaches back to

73 In his book, Patrick Phillips suggests that there is some historical ambiguity as to whether or not Ellen Grice was actually assaulted due to inconsistencies in the stories surrounding her assault. For more information, see Phillips’ first chapter, titled “The Scream.”

their Norse ancestors. Therefore, in order to immediately assert his power in the foreign land he had come to conquer, as well as to provide himself a strong network of defense for the fighting to come, it was only natural for him to immediately begin constructing several castles as a next step. The necessary expansion from conquering to castle- building is explained by N. Pounds, who writes, “It is, indeed, surprising that the Norman state was able to survive the dangers which beset it. That it was able to do so was due, at least in part, to…the introduction of the castle as a fortified home and military base.”74

The interpretation of the castle as a symbol of defensive strength as well as its symbolization of power and wealth carried over and expanded in the medieval period, where it took hold during the Holy Land Crusades, and where castles eventually became a symbol of the monarchy and feudal society in England. The cultural significance of medieval castles also carried over into literature, with castles becoming a cultural staple of the stories surrounding the Middle Ages, specifically so in England in regard to the legend of King Arthur. Castles do not simply fill the role of an arbitrary object within medieval and Arthurian literature, however. These objects act as captor, checkpoint, and destination, acts that vary based on the gender of the person moving in and around them.

For the male characters in the lais of Marie de France, castles act as a checkpoint or a destination, as well as an extension of their will, in which major plot points occur, and without which the story would not be able to function. Their role in relation to men is one of a plot-centered nature, whereas in relation to women they act on the characters’ physical bodies, most often acting as captor and protector. These active roles are most seen in the lais “Yonec” and “Guigemar” by Marie de France in which the captivity of a

74 Pounds, 5.

woman or multiple women is central to the plot of the story. In these stories, the castles that the plot takes place within and around act as both captor to the women and an extension of the will of the men to dominate and assert their sexual, social, and economic authority. In Chretien de Troyes’ Lancelot, and in the case of Guinevere specifically, by imprisoning her in this castle, Meleagant is asserting his authority over her while simultaneously offering her protection from others who would presumably attempt to do the same thing. In this way, Meleagant both enacts violence against Guinevere and further asserts his ownership of her as an object, while also upholding the myth of the frail white woman in his assertion that she be confined away from those who would hurt her. By exploring the literary history surrounding castles, as well as the ways in which they operate in these texts, we can better understand how femininity is defined both in the eyes of de France and in society at large.

The History of Castles in England

Though previous historians claim that the English had “little or nothing in the way of castles” before the Norman invasion, the importance of the large defensive structures to English society was far from new in the 12th century when Marie de France composed her lais.75 They were at this point the “…result of a long evolution of defensive technique,” that began as far back as pre-Roman times with the massive hill fortresses and earthworks of the warring tribes of England, France, and Germany, some examples in

England specifically being the Bronze-Age structure at White Horse Hill in Berkshire,

England and Maiden Castle, Dorset, which is believed to date as far back as 2,000 B.C.76

75 Van Emden, 1. 76 Warner, 15-16.

After the establishment of the Roman empire in Europe and the British Isles, however, military tactics changed quickly and dramatically. Complex infrastructure such as roads and garrisons began popping up in Spain, France, Britain, and Germany, and instead of building the more formidable fortresses of their predecessors, the Romans favored local defenses, only relying on fixed fortifications, such as the wall and siege towers surrounding Rome and London and the forts at Pevensey and Caister.77 Soon after the

Roman withdrawal from England in 410, the island became home to the Anglo-Saxons, who used the Roman roads and forts to quickly dominate the island, and the rise of motte and bailey castles in the country began.

The motte and bailey castle began to appear throughout Europe in the late tenth century and became extremely popular in the eleventh century. However, the motte and bailey castle did not exist in a vacuum—it was, in fact, a development on the traditional

Anglo-Saxon fortification called the burh.78 Burhs were not castles in the traditional sense of the word. They were more of a position, which was usually strategically placed on hilltops, at river crossings, or overlooking harbors, that a group or tribe could use in a time of emergency as a place of refuge, and typically consisted of timber palisades and ditches.79 Building on the already beneficial aspects of the burh, motte and bailey castles were constructed through the excavation of a large mound of earth, on top of which stood a wooden tower. This mound stretched from fifty to one hundred and twenty feet high and from fifty to three hundred feet across at the top, the construction of which created a useful ditch around the base. When practicable these ditches were filled with water, but

77 Warner, 17. 78 Warner, 31. 79 Warner, 30.

some castle-builders filled them with spikes and other obstacles. On top of the ditch stood a bridge in times of peace, and in times of war lay open to happenstance, and surrounding it was another wall that enclosed the bailey. The mound, called the “motte” was named so after the Norman-French word for turf, which eventually transformed into the word

“moat” to describe the water-filled ditch at its base.80 This particular design was especially useful as a means of defense, which would have made it extremely valuable in a time of seemingly constant attacks by the Anglo-Saxons in England, and later the

Normans. Though their design may have been simple, the motte and bailey castle was not easy to capture. The Normans themselves were able to use their simple design to conquer

England, Ireland, Sicily, and parts of Italy.81 One particularly great advantage of their design was that the motte’s slopes were designed to be too steep for a horse to manage, forcing soldiers to dismount their horse and crawl up the side of the slope unaided, a task that was dangerous and often deadly.82 As the eleventh century closed and the Normans settle in England, however, the Normans needed “larger, more commodious, and more permanent structures,” something more than just a fortress, and as a result of this need the technology of castle-building advanced, and the use of stone as the foundational materials of the castle was developed, with stone becoming the primary material used to construct castles in England in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. When it comes to the role of the castle in society, the importance of it cannot be understated—this much being especially so to English feudal society. With the expansion of feudal England after the ascent of

William of Normandy, the castle became not just a symbol of domination in war but of

80 Warner, 30-32 81 Warner, 44. 82 Warner, 34.

domination in society, with those at the top of the feudal hierarchy building and occupying their own castles. The private ownership of castles introduced to England by

William of Normandy is a behavior that is highly unlike those of his ancestors, who used their earthworks and wooden structures primarily to defend their community. According to Richard Eales, “ancestors of the Normans’ planted towns rather than their castles…private and seigneurial fortification was unknown before 1066.”83 Therefore, the private ownership of castles physically expressed class differences which had become apparent in the previous century with the beginning of European feudalist society. In order to build their castles, which was often very expensive and time-intensive, especially after the development of stone-fortified castles, Lords and Kings had to rely on the labor of commoners and peasants, who often had no choice in the matter and did not receive recompense for their work, as is seen in this dramatic passage from the Anglo-Saxon

Chronicle for the year 1137, “…and they filled the land so full of castles. / They cruelly oppressed the wretched men of the land with castle-works; / and when the castles were made they filled them with devils and evil men… / and they said openly, that Christ slept, and His saints.”84 Though this account of events is heavily biased and exaggerated, it does reveal the continued development of the symbolic nature of castles in England, and its translation as a new economic hierarchy was being established. By physically capturing them, inflicting on them “unutterable tortures” and making them build his castles, William of Normandy asserted both his physical dominance and his economic dominance over the peoples of England and intermingled the threat of said dominance

83 Eales, Richard. 43. 84 The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

with the presence of large, imposing castles, creating the symbolic interpretation of castles as symbols of dominance both in terms of economy, having enough money to purchase the supplies for said castle, as well as societal dominance, having the authority and the power to control those around him for the means of accomplishing his goals, an authority and power that could only come from one destined to wield it. This idea of dominance when applied to gender would also lead to a different kind of domination that became present in the literature of the middle ages.

As feudal society settled in England, however, and the privatization of castle ownership was cemented in society, large stone castles such as the Tower of London were soon the norm. A consequence of the technological development of stone masonry was that war became more siege-focused and therefore expensive, the castle transformed from being simply a military defense or fortress to “serve[ing] as a home, a court, an administrative and judicial headquarters, a storehouse and perhaps a refuge” for the wealthy that occupied it, solidifying class divisions between the wealthy occupants and those who moved in and around the castle for them. As a result of this new way of living, courtly society developed, and castles became the meeting-place of “priests, monks, pilgrims, knights, prisoners on their way to trial within the castle, peasants with cartloads of provender for man and beast dog-keepers, merchants with their packs wine sellers with their casks, ad more infrequent visitors like strolling minstrels, men with dancing bears, and mere hangers-on and vagabonds.”85 This arrival of court culture found itself reflected in the literature of the time, with its highest influence being in works of Arthurian literature by Chretien de Troyes, Marie de France, and the Gawain poet.

85 Ault, 239.

Castles were also of vital importance to the Holy Land Crusades that occurred during the late Middle Ages. These crusades, which were the result of the explosion of

Islamic beliefs in the Holy Land in the centuries following the death of the prophet

Mohammed, were among the most significant forms of military mobilization to occur during the medieval period, mobilization which had large implications for European state formation.86 In regard to such state formation, the Crusades “impelled Western Europe to break from feudalism and move toward the creation of increasingly impersonal and consolidated states.”87 In these attempts at conquering and converting those of other faiths, castles played a particularly important role. By capturing the castles of their enemies, and often burning them to the ground as a further sign of their dominance,

Christian crusaders were able to express the power they felt towards their Islamic and pagan enemies, the expression of which furthered the perceived strength of their religion and their God. This furthered their ability to continue converting those of other faiths, whether through fear or awe. The presence of these crusades in Medieval thought did not go unexpressed, either, especially in regard to literature. Christian themes and motifs began to insinuate themselves into the literature of the time—especially Arthurian literature, which was transformed from the initial works of Geoffrey of Monmouth into the more religion-influenced works of Sir Thomas Malory and the Gawain poet, and from which the story of the Holy Grail developed. The presence of Christian ideology in the works of these literary figures did not just present in larger themes such as the quest for the Grail, but in smaller, more personal ways. For example, in his essay “The Male

86 Blaydes & Paik, 551. 87 Blaydes & Paik, 552.

Psyche and the Female Sacred Body in Marie de France and Christine de Pizan,”

Benjamin Semple explores the idea of the sacred and profane body in medieval literature of the time, an idea that was highly influenced by Christianity and particularly gendered, running “between the male and the female for ‘the worst of the body and of sexuality was the female body’.”88 This theory was a prominent one during the time, and was behind such rules as why women were excluded from the priesthood, with women existing as a threat as far back as the fall of Adam and Eve. As an extension of the idea of women existing as the profane body, the chief focus of men who wrote about women was the effect women had on male sexuality, and their value became hinged on their ability to either arouse or quiet male desire.89 Another interpretation of Christian doctrine in medieval literature is the idea surrounding the healing female body, an idea that actually extended from the belief that women were inherently sexual beings.90 The healing female body was one that had all of the implications of the sexualized woman, but had a different interpretation. In regard to the healing body, the female body becomes not a sexual object to be disgraced, but one around which healing can occur, both through sexual knowledge as well as knowledge of love.91 This motif is one that redefines the female body as a body that can exist as transformative instead of corruptive, and can be seen in “Guigemar,” in which the main character, the wounded knight Guigemar, is only healed due to his assumed sexual affiliation with and undying love for his Lady.

88 Semple, 164. 89 Semple, 166. 90 Semple, 170. 91 Semple, 178.

Because castles were such an important part of the feudal system that existed in

England in the tenth through thirteenth centuries, it was important that they be represented appropriately in the literature of the time. Though historically castles were the domains of men, one way writers such as Malory and Geoffrey of Monmouth attempted to represent them in the plot in an appealing way, all while making them just as important to the narrative as the castles would have been in real life and maintaining their entertainment value, was by representing the castles in feminine terms.92 In order to do so, however, as castles were, symbolically, a largely male domain, writers borrowed from a religious iconography that often paired women with convents and cells. Associating women with castles was a simple extension of this already prominent iconography of the time. The castle “…can be said to be a metaphor for the feminine with all the mysterious enclosed spaces implied by both women and castles,” suggesting the existence of a metaphoric relationship between the enclosed rooms and towers that compose a castle and the enclosed space of the womb that is implied by female presence.93 This association of castles with femininity was also not much of a stretch due to the fact that upper-class women spent most of their time in them already.94

Ladies Confined: Marie de France’s Ladies and Traditionally Feminine Spaces

The depiction of castles as being inherently feminine is especially interesting when considered in the context of white supremacy’s obsession with chivalry and white femininity in the lais “Guigemar” and “Yonec” by Marie de France. By metonymically

92 Murray, Susan. “Women and Castles in Geoffrey of Monmouth and Malory.” Arthuriana, vol. 13, no. 1, 2003, jstor.org/stable/27870505. 17. 93 Murray, 18. 94 Kemp-Welch, Alice. Of Six Medieval Women, with A Note on Medieval Gardens, ed. Maurice Filler. Cornerstown Publishers, 1972. xv.

connecting the castle with the womb as Murray does, she invites an interpretation of the literature of Marie de France that is expressly concerned with sexual violation. In

“Guigemar”, Guigemar’s female lover discovers him while walking in the garden off of her tower cell with her handmaiden. Until this point in the story she has been locked away by her jealous husband inside a tower with access to only a chapel and an enclosed garden, due to her husband’s fear that she will leave him for another man, or that a man will take her away from him. When Guigemar arrives, and enters the Lady’s chambers, he is not only violating the control the Lord has over his wife in this arrangement, he is violating the castle itself, and by extension the Lord’s power over his community. In this, wife and castle are metonyms for the Lord’s power, and by violating the one Guigemar violates the other, and vice versa. The violation of the castle is only then furthered by the removal of the one thing it has been tasked with containing and preserving, and that is the

Lady. When the Lady leaves her Lord in search of knowledge of what happened to

Guigemar after he was forced to leave her, she exits the castle without permission, further violating the confines of the castle that Guigemar himself previously violated, only in the reverse direction. This unplanned exit from her holding cell, with the connection between the womb and the enclosed chambers of a castle, then resembles a birth.

What is interesting and merits serious consideration about the violation that takes place in “Guigemar,” especially in comparison to Ellen Grice’s assault, is that the violation is of the husband, not the wife. When Guigemar violates the sanctity of the castle, he violates the sanctity of the Lady and her husband, whereas when the man accused in the Ellen Grice case supposedly enters her home, the violation is seen as being specifically of the female body and is as such coded in a way that associates the black

man with a monster. In the case of Guigemar, this violation is romanticized, and instead of being villainized Guigemar is portrayed in the same way as Lancelot, as a man overwhelmed with passion for his Lady. The concept of invading white female spaces is also particularly interesting when considered in the context of “Yonec,” in which a man disguised as an actual animal invades a woman’s space in order to become her lover. This situation is also romanticized, and instead of being portrayed as a monster, which would not be a stretch for medieval writers, considering the fact that Yonec is able to transform into an animal, he is also depicted as being in a relationship with her that is rooted in courtly love. Whereas medieval writers depict these situations as necessary for the continuation of courtly love, which they view as the most important part of these stories,

20th century Americans view the exact same situations as violations of the sanctity of white womanhood, specifically when they are carried out by black men, and instead of being seen as a romantic gesture, the mere thought of a black man invading a stereotypically white female space is enough to inspire righteous fury. In violating white women, and white female spaces, as the men of the KKK thought black men were doing, they violate the symbolism of these women, symbolism established in stories like Erec and Enide, in which women like Isolde and Guinevere’s handmaiden come to represent white femininity, a femininity that men of lower classes could identify with.

The connection between the castle and the womb as suggested by Murray’s work also allows for another reading of the commonality that is female imprisonment inside castles in Arthurian literature, and that is through the idea of preservation. The female womb is the place in which life is created, in which youth takes form, and much like the castles in which the women of Marie de France’s lais are held, and the purity of the

unborn child is preserved. The idea of the women existing within the castles as unborn children do in the womb is furthered by the fact that the only way the women themselves are able to have children is when the castle has been violated. In “Yonec” the Lady becomes pregnant only after several repeated violations of her bedchamber by her lover, and only finds out after Yonec himself tells her on his deathbed. The scene of his death only furthers the metaphor of sexual violation, because it is his physical violation of the boundaries of her bedchamber that causes his fatal wound, a wound which leaves blood all over the floor and window of the castle, trailing after him to where he eventually collapses and dies. The spilling of blood in a situation of violation resembles the loss of virginity, which is essential for the creation of the child. In this way, Yonec has violated the sanctity of the castle’s boundaries, and as a result broken the protection that keeps the woman inside preserved and safe, as well as childless. Thus, the metaphor of the castle as womb connection suggested by Murray comes full in “Yonec.” The idea of the castle as womb is also furthered by Semple’s exploration of the motif of the female sacred body.

In his essay, Semple argues that, specifically in the lais of Marie de France, the female body is transformed from a corrupting influence due to its inherent sexuality to a transformative, protective, and often purifying one which can only act on an individual through a sexual and loving connection. Taken with Murray’s theory that the female body and the castle are linked in their descriptive and thematic terms, it makes sense that the castle would then act as a purifying and protective force on the characters in the text.

The idea of castles, or more appropriately bedchambers, as representing the womb is deserving of much more serious consideration in the context of white supremacist ideals of femininity. For the Ku Klux Klan in particular, femininity is intrinsically tied to

the idea of motherhood. Neither can exist without the other in the ideology of the Klan.

With this context in mind, the violation of the castle takes on a new meaning other than sexual violation, and that is the attack on the womb, the center of all things feminine, and the home of fertility for women. In de France’s lais, though the castle is a signal of both masculinity and femininity, though in separate contexts, for white supremacists, and for the 19th and 20th century writers who are adapting these texts for consumption by the general public, the violation of the home takes on a new meaning, and that is the violation of the sanctity of motherhood, and therefore the violation of childhood.

Love, Marriage, and the Virgin/Whore Complex

In The Knight, the Lady, and the Priest, Georges Duby writes that “marriage…is at the center of any system of values, at the junction between the material and the spiritual.”95 Stephen Nichols picks up this statement, taking it further and introducing the link between “the disenfranchisement of women in [this] religio-political system of marriage.” In the opinion of religious leaders in the early middle ages, “sexual differentiation at the time of creation showed God’s wisdom in creating a weak, inferior being, woman…Woman’s sexual differentiation emphasized the body, the seat of sensuality and rationality, which qualities were said to characterize feminine discourse.”96

In regard to her sensuality, as Stephen Nichols writes in his “Intellectual Anthropology of

Marriage in the Middle Ages,” “the human capacity for libidinal behavior, while present

95 Duby, Georges. The Knight, the Lady, and the Priest: The Making of Modern Marriage in Medieval France. 96 Nichols, Stephen G. “An Intellectual Anthropology of Marriage in the Middle Ages.” The New Medievalism (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 72.

in both sexes, may be found in its most purest form in the female. This assumption became a cornerstone for misogynistic marriage laws.”97

Marriage, then, as a reflection of these Christian views on women, became the primary mode through which the domination of women could be enacted in the Middle

Ages. This domination, in turn, became reflected in literature. In Marie de France’s lais, this reflection of marriage and dominance in literature takes center stage as the primary mode through which women are imprisoned. In Guigemar, de France describes the “fine dame” to which the lord of the city Guigemar later finds himself in is married, “The city’s lord was of great age, / and he was joined in marriage / to a fine dame of high degree, / wise, noble, skilled in courtesy.”98 The lai goes on to explain that the lord was an insanely jealous man, “wild at the thought of cuckoldry,” and as a result he keeps his wife in a tower of green marble that only has one point of entry and is guarded night and day. On the other side of the keep is the ocean, intended to be a natural boundary through which she cannot escape. In Yonec, much like in Guigemar, we see a woman imprisoned in a tower by her jealous husband, “her beauty and nobility / made him guard her most carefully; / he’d shut her in his tower; her home / in that high place, a well-paved room.”

The text continues, describing how the wife is not allowed to speak without the permission of her guardian, her husband’s sister. In other lais, the imprisonment of women as a result of the institution of marriage is much more nefarious. In Bisclavret, the imprisonment of the Bisclavret’s wife ends in her permanent and hereditary physical mutilation.

97 Nichols, 76. 98 de France, Marie. “Guigemar.” Marie de France Poetry. Ed. Dorothy Gilbert: 209-212

Also at the junction between the material and the spiritual world is the concept of virginity, and by extension the female body as a whole. In both “Yonec” and

“Guigemar”, the text does not explicitly state on whose behalf both lords lock up their wives, only that each man is terrified of being cuckolded. By leaving the cause for the lord’s jealousy ambiguous, as de France here does, it suggests that the lord is both afraid of other men taking advantage of his wife—a thought supported by the fact that the only man he allows near his wife is a castrated priest—or that he fears she will seek out other men. This creates in both wives a dual nature for the reader, one in which they exist in a state of equilibrium, as both an innocent “Bride of Christ” figure and a seductress.

This dual nature of women in courtly romances is far from unusual, as R. Howard

Bloch writes, “Gnosticism represented at once a more complicated and a more interesting movement, which can be seen as both pro- and antifeminist in the way that the dominant contradictory attitudes of Christianity…would eventually emerge as the dichotomy surrounding women as the “Bride of Christ” and “the Devil’s gateway.”99 Bloch continues, writing that a strong component of Gnosticism was asceticism, according to which sexual relations “constituted the ‘prototype of all moral offenses’”100 and as such it was gendered feminine. The gendered nature of this mind/body split places the crux of femininity in sexual relations, creating a connection between physical purity—i.e. virginity—and spiritual purity. Virginity in the middle ages existed as a paradox, specifically for women. While chastity was encouraged for both sexes, it was especially problematic for women, who were defined by their cultural roles as wife, mother, or

99 Bloch, R. Howard. Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992) 73. 100 Bloch, 73.

whore.101 For women who chose to be Christian virgins, the paradox of female virginity was only furthered. In this case, the woman is a virgin in a physical sense, but remains an active lover in her relationship with Christ, who she eventually hopes to consummate her love for after death. In this way, she exists once again as simultaneously the Bride of

Christ and a sexual woman.102

Returning to ideals of asceticism, Bloch argues that the deprecation of women and the dual nature of women in courtly love transforms into “an idealization both of women and of love.”103This idealization takes the antifeminism seen in works like Marie de

France and transforms it into a form of “woman worship” that is seen in its later counterparts in Arthurian legend, specifically in the works of Chretien de Troyes.

Interestingly, in de France’s texts, where marriage acts as a destructive and imprisoning force, a likely accurate representation of female life in the Middle Ages, in Troyes’ romances, marriage is used as a way to defend the ways in which gender, masculinity, and femininity were defined. Specifically, marriage was vital to courtly love. The very requirement for courtly love to exist in the first place is that the woman must be eternally unavailable to her male lover. In existing as an ideal like women in courtly relationships do, they reinforce the existence of the woman as a pseudo-religious figure, much like

Guinevere is in Lancelot. The possibility for them to engage in sexual activity with their lovers is seen as a good thing, and something that contributes to their status as pseudo-

101 Chewning, Susannah Mary. “The Paradox of Virginity within the Anchoritic Tradition: The Masculine Gaze and the Feminine Body in the Wohunge Group.” Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity in the Middle Ages (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 113. 102 Chewning, 113. 103 Bloch, 10.

religious figures. However, in the case of Isolde in Erec and Enide, a woman’s marriageability is seen as a good thing, and the elevation of a peasant woman to the status of a queen via marriage is seen as a positive. In the case of Troyes’ Isolde, her virginity allows her to maintain her status as a spiritually pure woman, as well as to maintain her marriageability. In this case she exists as both a possible Bride of Christ figure, emphasized by the white dress and her status as a peasant, both of which make her more of a godly figure, and a possible mother, and therefore a possibly sexually active woman.

Erec even comments on her body, and how perfect it is, in a way that is almost sexual in nature. As such, Isolde exists as both a virgin and a whore.

Much like in real life ideas about femininity that exist in white supremacist movements like the Ku Klux Klan, and especially in the KKK during the height of Jim

Crow, the women of Troyes’ and Marie de France’s stories are held to impossibly high standards. Whereas de France attempts, and often succeeds, to show the fallacies of these ways of thinking about women, and in doing so highlight the problems that come with these impossible ideas of femininity, men like Chretien de Troyes actively support them, and create worlds where these women can exist and thrive. However, in real life, women simply do not match these flattened, elevated ideals, instead operating as dynamic, political, interesting individuals, much like Guinevere does throughout Lancelot, in which she is able to navigate her world and use what level of political power she has to be successful despite her circumstances. And yet, much like Guinevere, the WKKK operate only within the roles that society allows of them, using their political abilities to maintain power in a system that seeks to oppress others.

Conclusion: The Road So Far

To an audience in 2019, the Middle Ages often seem far away—a time long past, one that we only see occasionally in the arts, in TV shows like Game of Thrones and in films like Harry Potter, Braveheart, and others. And yet, our understanding of the

Middle Ages has direct consequences on our lives. One prime relevant example is in the

Unite the Right rally that took place in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, in which white supremacists and counter-protesters clashed violently and Heather Heyer was murdered as a direct result.104 During this rally, white supremacists could be found sporting signs, sigils, and memorabilia reminiscent of the Middle Ages. To them, the Middle Ages was a time of white supremacy, one in which gender was binary and white Europeans ruled.

And to a small extent these ideas of the Middle Ages are correct—Europeans in the

Middle Ages struggled with defining race and gender, as well as class, just as we do today, and white supremacy was rampant. In 1290, England forced out all of its Jewish citizens, banning them from returning to the island for centuries.105 However, what these people fail to understand is that the Middle Ages was much more dynamic than they realize. Therefore, it is up to us who study the time period to look into the ways in which

104 For more information on the direct relationship between white supremacy and the Middle Ages as seen specifically in the 2017 Charlottesville rally, see: Livingstone, Josephine. “Racism, Medievalism, and the White Supremacists of Charlottesville,” The New Republic. https://newrepublic.com/article/144320/racism-medievalism-white- supremacists-charlottesville. Accessed 27 April 2019; Kaufman, Amy S. “The Birth of a National Disgrace: Medievalism and the KKK” The Public Medievalist. https://www.publicmedievalist.com/birth-national-disgrace/. Accessed 27 April 2019; Little, Becky. "How Hate Groups are Hijacking Medieval Symbols While Ignoring the Facts Behind Them” History.com. https://www.history.com/news/how-hate-groups-are- hijacking-medieval-symbols-while-ignoring-the-facts-behind-them. Accessed 15 January 2019. 105 Heng, 15.

these people understand themselves and the Middle Ages, and then return to the history and literature of the time itself in order to reclaim the past so that it is not used to harm others, like it so tragically was in Charlottesville.

Approaching the relationship between white supremacists and the Middle Ages is a monstrous task, however. The relationship is one that has existed in America since the

19th century, and in Europe for far longer, and it is full of various intricacies and layers that require deep analysis in order to untangle. One of these is the relationship between white women and white supremacy, and it’s no surprise as to why. White women have aided, participated in, and promoted the oppression of others as well as themselves for as long as there have been women. Most recently, in the 2016 American Presidential election, 53% of white women voted for Donald Trump, a man known for his racist and xenophobic opinions of people of color and religious minorities like Muslim Americans and Jewish Americans, but a man also known for sexually predatory behavior.106 In voting for Donald Trump, though it very well may not have been their intent, these women were merely figures in a long and storied tradition of white women participating in racist and oppressive political movements, using what little political clout they can gain by virtue of their social status in order to improve their own lives at the sacrifice of others. The women associated with the Ku Klux Klan, either through their husbands, boyfriends, and/or relatives in the main organization or through the auxiliary group

Women of the Ku Klux Klan, actively participated in their own oppression and that of others and allowed the group’s fundamental misunderstanding of femininity to guide

106 Rogers, Katie. “White Women Helped Elect Donald Trump” The New York Times, 9 November 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/01/us/politics/white-women-helped- elect-donald-trump.html. Accessed 28 April 2019.

their behavior and their violence against African Americans throughout the Jim Crow period.

But in order to understand this dynamic, it is important to delve into how exactly white supremacists like members of the KKK viewed white femininity in the first place.

In order to do so, we must look at the context of this group: what they were saying, what they were reading, what ideas they were surrounded by in their social circles, and more.

In doing so, we encounter the Middle Ages, in what was a sort of renaissance of medieval culture that happened in the late 19th century in America, particularly in the American

South. This resurgence of medieval literature, art, architecture, and culture came at a time when Anglo-American Southerners were searching for their identity in a post-Slavery

America, and when white supremacist movements were finding their roots and figuring out how best to take out their aggression in a system that no longer viewed them as superior, and the Middle Ages, specifically chivalry and chivalric romance, offered them a distraction and a means through which to funnel their energy during Reconstruction. In identifying with chivalry and courtly culture, these men were able to consolidate the social structures that already existed in the south as a result of slavery, structures that placed white upper-class women at the top of the social hierarchy, with the social structures present in chivalric romance, which also happened to place white women at the top of the social hierarchy. Interestingly, however, it wasn’t just upper-class noblewomen women that were viewed as inherently superior in these stories—lower class and peasant women were also seen as idealized versions of white femininity throughout these romances, a fact that likely appealed to the middle and lower-class people that had been most affected by the Civil War, Emancipation, and Reconstruction.

Though these Southern Americans mostly encountered the Middle Ages through adaptations, the original texts themselves lent some credence to their understanding of womanhood, largely through the concept of chivalry and courtly love. In characters like

Guinevere, the maid of Astolat, and Isolde, readers of chivalric romance encountered certain idealized constructions of femininity that allowed for women to be elevated to pseudo-religious figures, symbols for whiteness, and symbols of spiritual purity that reinforced 20th century ideas about gender and race, particularly for white supremacists.

As such, this understanding of femininity, specifically white femininity, allowed for white men to identify with the knights of King Arthur’s round table, and because of this they were able to view themselves as continuations of a long line of white men, or as they viewed themselves, knights, sworn to uphold the sanctity of white womanhood. In doing so they were able to justify the violence they directed at African Americans, violence that stories like Ellen Grice and Mae Crow’s assaults only stoked.

However, their understanding of the nature of womanhood in these stories was altered—whether this was due to their encountering these stories through adaptations, their own cognitive dissonance, or a combination of the two, it is hard to tell. What these men and women did not understand was that the dynamics of courtly relationships and the social dynamics that existed in chivalric romance do not largely support their view of the Middle Ages. Whereas white supremacists thought about invasion of white spaces exclusively in the context of black men violating white female spaces, in chivalric romances like those of Chretien de Troyes, and especially in the case of Marie de France, the male invasion of female spaces was often seen as not only a positive thing, but a

necessary one for the furthering of courtly love, which writers and readers of the Middle

Ages viewed as the ultimate goal of any chivalric romance.

These men and women largely misunderstood chivalric constructions of femininity as well. In the ideology of the Ku Klux Klan, the white Protestant woman came to represent beauty, spiritual purity, sexual purity, motherhood, and the American home. However, in the romances themselves, these aspects were not priorities— especially in regard to motherhood. Though women often were viewed in terms of beauty

(read: whiteness) and its relationship to spiritual purity, their status as wives and mothers was not as important. In fact, for a courtly relationship between a noblewoman and a knight to function as it was understood to, it was almost required that a woman be married, or at least betrothed. And their status as mothers was not important in the least.

Women in courtly romances were almost never mothers, and if they were it was often only to further the plot, such as in Yonec, in which the lady’s son is meant to avenge his father’s death. The relationship between the lady and her son is not the point. In fact, it is given almost no attention. Because motherhood in this case is only peripheral. And yet in the KKK, motherhood is vital to femininity, as Klan members vow as part of their induction to the organization to protect the sanctity of American homes and white womanhood. The two come as a pair—to protect the sanctity of the home they must also protect the sanctity of white womanhood, and vice versa.

And yet what is arguably the most important point regarding chivalric romance, as Maurice Keen writes, “outside literature, chivalry really was no more than a polite veneer, a thing of forms and words and ceremonies which provided a means whereby the well-born could relieve the bloodiness of life by decking their activities with a tinsel

gloss borrowed from romance.”107 These stories, though they are so clearly capable of being adapted across time and political movements, were written as a distraction for the wealthy—a way for them to remove themselves from reality and instead enter a world of romance, ceremony, finery, and magic. Chivalry has no real application in the world beyond literature and art, because it does not reflect people as they actually are—it portrays an idealized version of humanity that can never truly be achieved, because it is not based in the reality of humans as dynamic, complex individuals. Instead, much like in the case of Isolde and Guinevere’s handmaiden in Erec and Enide, people are flattened, made two- and one-dimensional in order for them to be elevated to an idealized symbol for womanhood or purity or chivalry. And when they begin exhibiting behavior reminiscent of actual humans, such as what we see with Guinevere in the stanzaic Morte

Arthur, they face ostracization and punishment.

Stories from the Middle Ages may only seem important in the context of popular culture and fantasy, but as we have so clearly seen in the past two to three centuries in

America, and in the current resurgence of neo-Nazis, xenophobia, and white supremacy in Europe over the last 10 years, the ideas expressed in medieval literature are still very much relevant to contemporary life. The way in which this literature and culture is used to further hate movements is shocking, and disappointing, and requires the work of many to dismantle. This work takes time and effort, but it is so incredibly important that we continue it, both to prevent hate groups from resurfacing and gaining real power, and in order to aid people of color, who are often victims of this ideology and who have been and continue to do important work in showcasing both the diversity of the Middle Ages

107 Keen, 7.

and the problematic ideologies that come from the period.108 Though the work of these authors is beyond the scope of this project, their work is nevertheless crucial to the understanding of the Middle Ages and the constructions of race and gender that were established during the period.

Future expansions of this project hope to incorporate the perspectives and publications of medievalists of color like Matthew Vernon and Cord Whitaker with the goal of exploring the ways contemporary medievalists interact with Anglo-American medievalisms as well as the ways in which non-white/non-Protestant Americans of the

19th and 20th centuries interacted with adaptations of Medieval literature, art, and culture, and ways in which medieval people of color interacted with genres like chivalric romance and Arthurian legend. Future expansions of this project also aim to explore the ways in which the idealization of white womanhood in the Jim Crow South affected constructions of black womanhood and invoked the hyper-sexualization of black women, as well as caused continued violence towards black women and girls.

As a white woman who grew up in the American South, I have always been fascinated by the ways in which white women and girls are perceived by the general public, and the places that we are supposed to occupy in the grand scheme of white

Southern society. Debutante balls and beauty pageants full to the brim with white dress-

108 Some great reference texts here are Matthew Vernon’s Black Middle Ages: Race and the Construction of the Middle Ages, Cord Whitaker’s “Race-ing the dragon: the Middle Ages, race and trippin’ into the future”, published in the journal Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies (a journal also worth mentioning in this context), any and all of Geraldine Heng’s foundational work in medieval race studies, as well as the burgeoning field of postcolonial medievalisms, explored in Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World, a collection of essays which combines postcolonial theory and the study of medievalism beyond Anglo-American contexts.

clad teenagers, purity rings, and the glorification of southern (read: white southern)

“belles”, all continue to exist as fundamental aspects of southern culture in the 21st century. Though these aspects of southern culture may seem relatively harmless on the surface, despite their conformity to harmful binary views of gender identity, they continue to exist as relics of a dark past—and holdovers to a dark contemporary period for the American South. This past, established in the works of 12th century romance authors of France and Britain such as Chretien de Troyes, Marie de France, Geoffrey of

Monmouth, and many other unknown anonymous authors, and adapted for popular consumption in the 19th, 20th, and even still in the 21st century, continue to influence the ideas of white supremacists, and inform and influence the struggle with white supremacist ideology and its understanding of race, gender, and class that continues in the American South to this day.

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