The Vulnerable Hero: Havelok and the Revision of Romance

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The Vulnerable Hero: Havelok and the Revision of Romance The Vulnerable Hero: Havelok and the Revision of Romance Julie Nelson Couch The Chaucer Review, Volume 42, Number 3, 2008, pp. 330-352 (Article) Published by Penn State University Press DOI: 10.1353/cr.2008.0002 For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cr/summary/v042/42.3couch.html Access provided by Boston College (28 Sep 2013 14:05 GMT) THE VULNERABLE HERO: HAVELOK AND THE REVISION OF ROMANCE by Julie Nelson Couch Þe tale is of Hauelok imaked: Wil he was litel he yede ful naked. (Havelok the Dane, lines 5–6)1 This first image of Havelok the Dane in the early-fourteenth-century Middle English poem is striking because it introduces the protagonist first and fore- most as a destitute child. Doubly striking is the lack of attention these lines have drawn. Generally, editors attend to the more conventional introduc- tions of Havelok as a “god gome” or the “wicteste man at nede” (lines 7, 9).2 The critical conception that reduces Havelok the Dane to an early example of a formulaic or “popular” Middle English metrical romance has periodically obscured the poem’s particular appropriation of the medieval romance genre, that is, the alternative cultural-literary aesthetic it expresses, begin- ning with the atypical introduction of its hero.3 The hero, son of the King of Denmark, is presented to the reader first as a child, as “litel,” and, in this Middle English version, it is Havelok’s childhood—his experience of it and the narrator’s focus on it—that fills out the tale, fills the hero’s speech, and motivates his drive to reclaim his kingdom. In a genre better known for its invincible heroes, “litel” and “naked” immediately establish this hero’s defining characteristic: vulnerability.4 These descriptors dog Havelok through the story, signaling the hero’s material and social lack and under- lining an unshakeable susceptibility. Ultimately, this romance dramatizes an experience of vulnerability—rhetorically and culturally epitomized by child- hood—as the core of a less aristocratic heroic subjectivity.5 Romance Inscribing heroism with vulnerability violates a generic dictum of chivalric romance that equates nobility with invincibility and aristocratic identity with social supremacy. Prototypical twelfth-century Francophone romance THE CHAUCER REVIEW, Vol. 42, No. 3, 2008. Copyright © 2008 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. JULIE NELSON COUCH 331 formulates an idealized aristocratic world in which the knight-hero retains his innate high-born identity as an invincible shield even while he constructs that identity, and even when he ventures, nameless or mad, into the treacherous forest of romance.6 In contrast, the vulnerability adhering to childhood never diminishes in the upward, social-and-maturational trajectory of Havelok, so that a generic model that focuses exclusively on aristocratic ideology is not sufficient for analysis of this Middle English poem.7 This essay will demonstrate that Havelok becomes king through vul- nerability, not in spite of it. The vein of vulnerability that infuses the Middle English Havelok evidences the poet’s appropriation of the romance genre into a non- elite vernacular. By virtue of not being composed in a status language, the English poem does not concern itself so persistently with aristocratic exclusivity.8 My argument about the function of vulnerability in Havelok participates in recent criticism that approaches Middle English romances in terms of their distinct aesthetic and cultural priorities, rather than in terms of their assumed aesthetic inferiority beside French models. The essays collected in Ad Putter and Jane Gilbert’s The Spirit of Medieval English Popular Romance (2000), for example, read Middle English romances as “strategic interventions,” especially in relation to the elite genre they adapt.9 Traditionally, the alterations to the romance genre evident in Middle English poems—more action, less speculation; gratuitous, sans-sword violence; non-aristocratic characters and activi- ties; unrefined love and speech—have been interpreted as an inability on the part of a vernacular writer, accommodating a socially inferior audience, to render fully and appropriately aristocratic romance into English.10 In contrast, Gilbert and Putter, among others, recognize that Middle English narratives relate in oblique rather than in imitative ways to the aristocratic basis of the genre.11 To earlier readers as well as to current ones, it has been obvious that the Middle English Havelok the Dane is neither courtly nor chivalric.12 The poem hosts a surplus of emotional bluster and indignation from a garru- lous narrator who also supplies a store of homely proverbs and “realistic” details of peasant work and life. The hero grows up in a fisherman’s hut, and, to secure employment, the starving youth knocks down other aspi- rant porters on a Lincoln bridge. Even when Havelok marries the English princess Goldboru, their union is not an occasion for courtly spectacle. Fin amor is not on their minds when Goldboru’s evil guardian Godrich forces her to marry his cook’s scullion (Havelok) in an attempt to deprive her of the English throne. As Laura Hibbard writes, Havelok “is frankly horrified at marriage with a wife whom he is too poor to support.”13 Later, when Havelok returns home with Goldboru and Grim’s sons to reclaim Denmark, he successfully overthrows the evil usurpers not by 332 THE CHAUCER REVIEW chivalric conquest, but by popular verbal support, capture of the villains, trials by jury, and tortuous executions. Leaving off the usual chivalric apparatus of love and conquest, the poet of Havelok nevertheless negotiates the issue of identity that is central to the romance genre.14 In romance’s most familiar arc, a knight embarks on a quest that, while reaffirming the particular social identity of an empowered, glorified nobility, inflects his character with a certain individualism of experience. Initially, the Middle English Havelok appears to fulfill the generic function of reasserting noble identity in the tradi- tional manner—that is, of resolving the anxiety of aristocratic identity by fantastically representing nobility as innate and readable. Although child Havelok loses his kingdom, he eventually regains it with the help of miraculous recognitions of his proper identity via a king’s birthmark (kynmerk) on his shoulder and a light-beam that emanates from his mouth when he sleeps. Though “proper” identity is ultimately recog- nized in Havelok, anxiety is not sublimated from the narrative plane by means of an abiding presence of invincibility.15 Instead, the hero Havelok—going without food and clothing, and being abused and threatened without the ability to fight back—is perpetually vulnerable. And the poet perpetually concretizes the hero’s vulnerable subjectivity by means of expressions of fear: Havelok’s own utterances as well as the narrator’s urgent prayers for help. In Havelok anxiety is incorporated into the very structure of heroic identity. A special feature of romance, idealization, is used in Old French and Anglo-Norman romances to glorify an exclusive, feudal elite. It is turned in Middle English romance toward the glorification of a society that perceives itself (whether accurately or not) as more centralized and integrated.16 Middle English romances typically promote the proper fulfillment of roles within boundaries of family, social class, kingdom, and church, and these institutions are represented as entities that intertwine to form ideal society.17 Middle English poems such as Havelok never presume to duplicate an idealization of aristocratic culture. Since the poem is not so bent on maintaining a discrete caste of elites, the happy ending goes beyond the conventional restoration of prior nobility. In fact, the nobles of Havelok—the grasping guardian earls—are demoted to donkeys’ backs. Hence, when Havelok regains his position after an ignoble, vulnerable childhood and youth, the result is not merely a rematerialization of a static aristocratic court with its proper personages back in their places. In Havelok the experience of vulnerable childhood, by being reenacted through the course of the poem, redraws the final configuration of (noble) adulthood. Furthermore, the rearticulations of Havelok’s childhood experiences become more than simply repetitious; they create an operative tissue of JULIE NELSON COUCH 333 textualized memory.18 As Havelok’s vulnerable childhood is “remembered” through the poem, the memorializations shape a nobleness constitutive of vulnerability and commonness. Childhood in the Text Hwo micte yeme his children yunge Til þat he kouþen speken wit tunge, Speken and gangen, on horse riden, Knictes an sweynes bi here siden. (Havelok, lines 368–71) When Havelok’s father, King Birkabeyn, consults his knights about who should “yeme,” or take care of, his children after his death, the narrator maps in little a journey through age. The young children will progress from not-speaking to speaking, walking, and, finally, to the class-signifying activity of noble adulthood: riding on a horse accompanied by knights and swains.19 In this image of accretion, as in Havelok and Middle English narrative generally, childhood falls just outside the social identity that delimits adulthood, occupying a preclassed space.20 Though the son of a king, Havelok grows up as fisherman Grim’s son and works in his youth as a fishseller and cook’s scullion, experiencing the activities and oppres- sions of the lower social classes before returning to his birth status. As I will demonstrate in this essay, Havelok’s social nonalignment and his subsequent freedom to work and play as a commoner moderate the concomitant experience of harsh vulnerability. The narrative represents childhood as outside the secure props of social hierarchy in ways that are both dangerous and exciting.21 A notion of vulnerable childhood does not inform identity in the earlier account of Havelok in Geoffrey Gaimar’s Anglo-Norman L’Estoire des Engleis (ca.
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