Morgan Le Fay As Other in English Medieval and Modern Texts
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University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 8-1996 Morgan le Fay as Other in English Medieval and Modern Texts Sandra Elaine Capps University of Tennessee - Knoxville Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Capps, Sandra Elaine, "Morgan le Fay as Other in English Medieval and Modern Texts. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 1996. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/8 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Sandra Elaine Capps entitled "Morgan le Fay as Other in English Medieval and Modern Texts." I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in English. Laura Howes, Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: Mary E. Papke, Karen D. Levy, Joseph Trahern Accepted for the Council: Carolyn R. Hodges Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official studentecor r ds.) To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Sandra Elaine Capps entitled "Morgan Ie Fay as Other in English Medieval and Modern Texts." I have examined the final copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in English. Laura Howes, Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: Accepted for the Council: Associate Vice Chancellor and Dean of the Graduate School MORGAN LE FAY AS OTHER IN ENGLISH MEDIEVAL AND MODERN TEXTS A Dissertation Presented for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree The University of Tennessee, Knoxville Sandra Elaine Capps August1996 iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Many people have helped me directly and indirectly in beginning, continuing, and finishing this work. I want to thank my committee members for guidance, advice, empathy, humor, and just the right amount of fear: Dr. Mary E. Papke, Dr. Karen Levy, and Dr. Joseph Trahern. I especially wish to acknowledge the great debt lowe to my director, Dr. Laura Howes, who offered me sagacity, sympathy, and sensibility when I needed it most. I would also like to thank my friends for their invaluable help: Elizabeth Lamont, who blazed the trail before me and served as a long-distance guide; Samantha Morgan, whose unwavering conviction and support urged me to finish; and Patricia Bernard Ezzell, who remains the pragmatic realist, my touchstone of reality. Finally, I want to thank my dog Buddy, who good-naturedly endured hours of inactivity, curled up around my computer chair. iv Abstract In this study the presence and power of Morgan Ie Fay will be re-examined as an ever-shifting figure of alterity in both medieval and modern texts. Using cultural materialist studies, the character of Morgan will be examined against contemporary medieval culture in four medieval texts-Vita Merlini, Layamon's Brut, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Le Morte Darthur-that span the mid-twelfth to the late fifteenth-centuries. Her presence in the moderntexts Gate of Ivrel and Mists of Avalon will be read against a feminist agenda, analyZing her increased visibility and voice in twentieth-century Arthuriana. Postmodern texts, such as Arthur Rex and Merlin, explore and exploit the transgressive nature of Morgan's otherness and focus on the darker humor that has been long neglected in the Matter of Britain. The film Excalibur, as well as other forms of popular culture, tum to the simplicity of allegorical characters and return to the· Middle Ages for images of Morgan as an irrational, evil presence. The positive recuperation of Morgan Ie Fay, then, remains in the hands of fantasy writers, particularly feminist fantasy writers, who in their re-visioning of the Arthurian legend, provide Morgan Ie Fay and other female characters with a "literature of their own," a significant voice and presence in the Matter of Britain. v PREFACE Arthurian literature has been of immense interest to both the literary world and the world of popular culture for centuries; yet, ironically, the shifting nature of the figure of Morgan, one of Arthuriana's prime movers, has been largely ignored. While some work has been done on Morgan, it has focused largely on her link with individual works, particularly Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Malory's Le Morte Darthur. The three major works that have dealt intertextually with the fee fail, however, to provide a comprehensive look at Morgan in Arthurian literature. Myra Olstead's 1959 dissertation, 'The Role and Evolution of the Arthurian Enchantress," is concerned only with medieval romance~, while Kathryn M. Hopson's 1993 dissertation, "Re-visioning Morgan Ie Fay: A Unifying Metaphor for the Image of Women in Twentith Century Literature" deals only with the modem period. On the other hand, Lucy Allen Paton's 1903 book, Studies in the Fairy Mythology of Arthurian Romance, although good, is both dated and largely concerned with Celtic mythological studies. The purpose of this dissertation, then, is to build upon these earlier works, to examine the presence, power, and importance of Morgan Ie Fay as the eternal/generic Other (as the tenn is defined by Simone de Beauvoir) in the continuum of medieval English Arthurian and selected fantasy and postmodern texts. Such an examination will reveal much about medieval and modem gender ideologies, as well as the submerged/emerging voice of the repressed and the marginalized voice of the female figure of power in the Matter of Britain itself. As a fee Morgan is always outside the "civilized" world (as this world has been defined by Catherine LaFarge and others), but she is a figure of great power in her own domain of nature. The fear of nature, the anarchic, ungovernable world of the wilderness, was the nightmare vision of medieval society. Yet, the wilderness is also the home of the fee, an "invaginated" place of power where men fear to go unless they are mad or seeking hennetic solitude. The medieval world of the romance was a world in which a psychological need for order, a man-made measurable order, kept all vi but the bravest knights, the maddest lunatics, and the most penitent recluse within the small enclosed pockets of civilization in the period. It was also the place in which the Other was seemingly given freer expression than in its own civilized world of the court, a world of order and male camaraderie. Simone de Beauvoir's insight into alterity as part of mankind's need to polarize helps to illuminate the function the Other played in medieval society. The Other is outside the social order, beyond the known. Morgan as Other represents the transgressive: the tension between the Christian and pagan worlds, between the male and female position of Subject and Object, between the centered and the marginalized. The earliest written account of Morgan pre-dates the earliest English written accounts of Arthur by a millenium. This account is found in Pomponius Mela's De Chorographia Libri Tres, a first-century Latin text that locates her on an island (the TIe de Sein off the coast of Brittany) where she enjoys the company of eight sister goddesses and fellow shape-shifters. The next written Latin text is from a Welshman, Geoffrey of Monmouth. In his twelfth-century work, Vita Merlini, Morgan retains her benevolent goddess status. Morgan's character shifts throughout later medieval literature, however, as she is molded into an increasingly evil and irrational presence whose original healing powers are supplanted by a threatening sexuality in Sir Thomas Malory's fifteenth-century work Le Morte Darthur. Modern women fantasy writers, in turn, have brought Morgan from the periphery to the center where she finds both her voice and her reason. In these recent texts, the marginalized Other becomes the Subject. The romance's stereotypes are replaced by characters with both "personality and contemporaneity" in these romances (Barron 5). Morgan can become a pious pagan priestess or a futuristic warrior; her position inverts (or at least questions) the medieval paradigm of man as Subject and woman as Object within the text. Similarly, po~tmodern authors find the many facets and layers of Morgan's textuality ideal for its transgressive possibilities and shifting nature. In sharp contrast, Arthurian film has used the allegorical bias in the medieval Other as compelling chiaroscuro characterization of the major Arthurian vii figures, and Morgan's reputation as evil sorceress precedes her. Thus, while Arthurian film tends to restore a portion of Morgan's earliest supernatural power, the powers are recuperated quite negatively. A close study of the film Excalibur is a telling counterpoint to its source in Malory's Le Morte Darthur. Chapterl--One is notborn, butrather becomes, an evil sorceress. The study of Morgan as Other is a study of the ever-shifting figure(s) appropriated and altered by the various authors of Arthuriana. Morgan's literary roots lie in the Celtic oral tradition wherein her various roles include fairy enchantress, goddess of battle, and sorceress extraordinaire (d. Myra alstead). Yet, by the end of the Middle Ages, her character has been almost completely rationalized and demonized.