Purdue University Purdue e-Pubs Open Access Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 12-2016 Perceval's sister and Juliet Capulet as disruptive guides in spiritual quests Joanna Benskin Purdue University Follow this and additional works at: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/open_access_dissertations Part of the Comparative Literature Commons, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, and the Literature in English, Anglophone outside British Isles and North America Commons Recommended Citation Benskin, Joanna, "Perceval's sister and Juliet Capulet as disruptive guides in spiritual quests" (2016). Open Access Dissertations. 943. https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/open_access_dissertations/943 This document has been made available through Purdue e-Pubs, a service of the Purdue University Libraries. Please contact [email protected] for additional information. PERCEVAL’S SISTER AND JULIET CAPULET AS DISRUPTIVE GUIDES IN SPIRITUAL QUESTS by Joanna Benskin A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of Purdue University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Interdisciplinary Studies West Lafayette, Indiana December 2016 ii THE PURDUE UNIVERSITY GRADUATE SCHOOL STATEMENT OF DISSERTATION APPROVAL Dr. Charles Ross, Chair Department of English Dr. S. Dorsey Armstrong Department of English Dr. Angelica Duran Department of English Dr. Paul W. White Department of English Approved by: Dr. Charles Ross Head of the Departmental Graduate Program iii To Brian, my fellow pilgrim. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I give hearty thanks to my intrepid committee members, Charlie Ross, Dorsey Armstrong, Angelica Duran, and Paul White. You’ve trained me in kindness and dedication along with scholarly brilliance. Thanks also to many who have been my friends and colleagues at Purdue—especially Case Tompkins, Trey Gorden, Hwanhee Park, David Sweeten, Adrian McClure, Ingrid Pierce, Dana Roders, Christina Weiler, Brian Nakawaki, Erin Kissick, Kate Koppy, Crystal Kirgiss, Yuhan Huang, Gina Hurley, Justin Barker, Rama Alhabian, Chad Judkins, Karen Feiner, Adrianna Radosti, and Michelle Parsons. Y’all are great, and you make me better at writing, thinking, and being a person. v TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ...................................................................................................................... vii INTRODUCTION. THE “ART OF IMITATION” AND WOMEN CHARACTERS ...... 1 0.1 Representation Matters .............................................................................................. 1 0.2 Women’s Deaths and Literary Meaning ................................................................. 10 0.3 Overview of Chapters.............................................................................................. 13 CHAPTER 1. PERCEVAL’S SISTER IN VITA .............................................................. 17 1.1 Women and Religion in Le Morte Darthur ............................................................. 17 1.2 The Oath and the Ban .............................................................................................. 27 1.3 Women in the Grail Quest ....................................................................................... 33 1.4 Perceval’s Sister as Spiritual Guide ........................................................................ 45 CHAPTER 2. PERCEVAL’S SISTER IN MORTE ......................................................... 60 2.1 The Holy Death of Perceval’s Sister ....................................................................... 60 2.2 Perceval’s Sister as Eucharistic Symbol ................................................................. 71 2.3 Limits and Importance of the Disruption ................................................................ 81 CHAPTER 3. JULIET IN VITA ........................................................................................ 87 3.1 Shakespearean Teaching and Petrarchan Poetry ..................................................... 87 3.2 Romeo as Petrarchan Poet and Neoplatonic Lover ................................................. 90 3.3 Mutuality in the Meeting Sonnet ........................................................................... 108 3.4 Juliet’s Negotiation of Sainthood in the Meeting Sonnet ..................................... 111 3.5 Religious Implications of Juliet’s Sainthood ........................................................ 135 vi 3.6 Petrarchism and Linguistic Disruption in the Balcony Scene ............................... 145 CHAPTER 4. JULIET IN MORTE ................................................................................. 161 4.1 Juliet’s Sainthood in the Tomb.............................................................................. 161 4.2 The Statues and Juliet’s Petrarchan Representation .............................................. 176 4.3 Critique of Petrarchism and Neoplatonic Love ..................................................... 182 4.4 Juliet as Moral Center and Disruptive Poet ........................................................... 188 CONCLUSION. THE VIRTUE OF DISRUPTION ...................................................... 197 5.1 What Could Have Happened ................................................................................. 197 5.2 Perceval’s Sister and Nimue ................................................................................. 198 5.3 Juliet and Helen from All’s Well that Ends Well ................................................... 204 5.4 Disruption and Delightful Teaching ...................................................................... 209 REFERENCES ............................................................................................................... 212 VITA ............................................................................................................................... 223 vii ABSTRACT Author: Benskin, Joanna. Ph.D. Institution: Purdue University Degree Received: December 2016 Title: Perceval’s Sister and Juliet Capulet as Disruptive Guides in Spiritual Quests Major Professor: Charles Ross Perceval’s sister in Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur and Juliet in William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet act as disruptive guides in spiritual quests by contradicting the expectations placed on them as women characters. Though women are banned from the quest for the Holy Grail, Perceval’s sister accompanies the Grail knights as an authoritative spiritual guide and a symbol of the Eucharist. Previous critics have not recognized Perceval’s sister as a fundamental disruption to the systemic misogyny of the Morte or her Eucharistic significance. She challenges both the chivalric misogyny that sees her as an object of rescue and the spiritual misogyny that sees her as a detriment to holiness. Though Romeo wants to use Juliet as a saintly conduit for his Petrarchan and Neoplatonic enlightenment through love, Juliet poetically resists her own canonization because she knows that being a saint means being dead and distant from Romeo. Past readers have not understood the necessity of Juliet’s death in Juliet’s sainthood or her poetic disruption of Petrarchan spiritual love. Shakespeare critiques Petrarchism in Romeo and Juliet by showing Juliet’s death as a result of Romeo’s poetic habits and showing Juliet as a disruptive poet who is aware of the danger. 1 INTRODUCTION. THE “ART OF IMITATION” AND WOMEN CHARACTERS 0.1 Representation Matters In this study, I examine the figures of Percival’s unnamed sister in Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur and Juliet in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. These fictional women act as disruptive guides in men’s spiritual quests. Perceval’s sister and Juliet Capulet exist in overwhelmingly patriarchal social and literary worlds where being a woman comes with oppressive expectations, particularly in the context of the spiritual quests undertaken by male characters. Perceval’s sister is expected to be either an object of rescue or a sexual temptation, and at the very beginning of the Arthurian search for the Holy Grail, her presence on the spiritual quest is forbidden because she is a woman. Juliet is expected to be a saintly conduit for Romeo’s spiritual quest for enlightenment in the Petrarchan and Neoplatonic paradigm of love. Both of these women characters disrupt the expectations placed on them. Perceval’s sister joins the quest despite the ban on women. In defiance of both chivalric and spiritual misogyny in the Morte, she serves as an authoritative spiritual guide and becomes a symbol of the Eucharist, whose other symbol is the Grail itself. Juliet refuses the Petrarchan role of the distant and idealized saint who will inspire Romeo’s spiritual enlightenment. She knows that saints have to be dead, and she pushes back against Romeo’s poetry and works for more equitable communication and for love poetry in which she can be alive. Malory and Shakespeare complicate inherited gendered expectations and spirituality in their works by representing Perceval’s 2 sister and Juliet as disruptive spiritual guides who resist the oppressive structures in which they live. Reading resistance in the stories of fictional women is different from investigating women’s historical conditions and from formulating feminist theory, though it intersects with both of these endeavors. The stories of Perceval’s sister and Juliet do not accurately reflect the experiences of the real women contemporary with their authors, nor do they in themselves validate a theory of gender. While theory and