GENDERED MAGIC AND ARTHURIAN SOVEREIGNTY BY ERIN CHANDLER DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2018 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor Robert W. Barrett, Chair Associate Professor Renée R. Trilling Professor Martin Camargo Professor Emerita Karen Fresco ABSTRACT In presenting a mythical establishment of British and English nationhood that is one of the most popular traditions of the medieval period, the legends of King Arthur are particularly suited to a study of the role of the supernatural in the establishment and maintenance of sovereignty in medieval romance. My dissertation, “Gendered Magic and Arthurian Sovereignty,” argues that the supernatural figures within the Arthurian tradition interact with the sovereign in a way which is determined by and mediated through issues of gender. My project surveys the largely unexplored overlap between these the study of the ties between the monstrous and national identity in medieval literature and the study of women in Arthuriana. In the insular Arthurian tradition, women take on two conflicting roles, safeguarding a dynastic succession, as the sovereign does, even as they threaten that very succession through outsized desire, as the tradition’s monsters do. My project articulates how Giorgio Agamben’s concepts of homo sacer and the sovereign exception are particularly suited to the gendered context of a nation-building and nation-defining medieval literature. According to Agamben, the sovereign’s power exists in his ability to place the figure he calls homo sacer in a state of exception from the law, in which he may be legally killed in order to confirm the sovereign’s rule. “Gendered Magic” shows how the exchange of women in Arthurian legend creates an essentially female homo sacer without whom the sovereign cannot exist. Each chapter of my dissertation thus examines the relationship between women, sovereignty, and the supernatural in a different literary genre and context, showing how this relationship transforms to complement differing ideas of the significance of King Arthur’s court. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost, I must thank my committee members, Renée Trilling, Martin Camargo, Karen Fresco, and especially my chair, Rob Barrett, for their unflagging patience and positivity, as well as for their invaluable feedback. They have made me, in so many ways and sometimes against my will, into a better scholar. I would not have been in a position to begin this project, let alone finish it, without Paul and Dominique Battles, who treated me from the beginning like a fellow scholar and modeled through their teaching, their research, and their mentorship how to be one. Additionally, Kimberly Fonzo, Jill Clements, Stephanie Clark, Shannon Godlove, Amy Rowan Sach, Ann Hubert, Shawn Gilmore, and Sarah Sahn held their lanterns ahead of me to light my way down the grad school and dissertation path, always ready with advice and encouragement. I have been blessed with a cheering section full of people who believed I could do this even when I didn’t and demonstrated their love through words, hugs, and silly gifts. My most heartfelt thanks go to Kelly Williams, Kate Norcross, Bethany Crismore, Whitney Shouse, Jenaba Waggy, and, from The Internet, Carrie Gessner and Amanda Haney. Throughout the dissertation process, inspiration came at opportune moments from many quarters. I must single out the following artists, who put words in my heart when I needed them most: Sir Terry Pratchett (mayherestinpeace), Kelly Sue DeConnick, Hayley Atwell, Michele Fazekas, Tara Butters, and The Doubleclicks—Angela M. Webber and Aubrey Turner. Finally, I thank my family—especially my parents, Dave and Jan Chandler; my brother and sister-in-law, Adam and Brandi; my fairy godmother, Barbara Hoffman; my grandmother, Lauretta Schoelkopf; and my cat, Rey. Thank you for supporting me in all possible ways, more than I can ever repay. I love you infinitely. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ...............................................................................................................1 CHAPTER 1: THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS: THE ARTHURIAN CHRONICLE TRADITION ............17 CHAPTER 2: BEAUTIES AND BEASTS IN THE BRETON LAIS .......................................................68 CHAPTER 3: BEASTLY BEAUTY: MIDDLE ENGLISH LOATHLY LADIES ...............................124 CHAPTER 4: STRANGE WOMEN LYING IN PONDS, DISTRIBUTING SWORDS: GENDERED BOUNDARIES IN LE MORTE D’ARTHUR ...........................................188 CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................246 REFERENCES ................................................................................................................254 iv INTRODUCTION The legends of King Arthur have not only survived, but remained popular throughout the centuries in part because they present an image of an ideal sovereignty, although the nature of that ideal shifts and changes between time periods and genres. That very adaptability is in fact the key to its ongoing appeal: Arthurian Britain both reflects and reshapes its audiences’ ideas of what sovereignty and nationhood should be. Throughout the medieval period, from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth-century introduction of Arthur’s full biography to Thomas Malory’s fifteenth-century amalgamation of all his favorite parts of what had become a fully fleshed-out legendary world, that sovereign ideal encompasses both the foundational, military strength of the chronicle king and the courtly, interpersonal relationships of the romance lord. Regardless of genre or century, though, King Arthur’s sovereignty is intimately wrapped up with the women and the supernatural figures with whom he associates. In this dissertation, I will contend that the women and the supernatural figures in the Arthurian legend are connected in that they play the same role in both legitimating and threatening the sovereign’s rule, and that the supernatural figures within the Arthurian tradition interact with the sovereign in a way that is determined by and mediated through issues of gender. In approximately the past twenty years, scholarship on both women and the supernatural in Arthurian literature has been on the rise. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen has explored the ties between the monstrous and national identity in medieval literature, establishing monsters and giants as threats to both human civilization and to the individual’s sense of humanity in that they expand and distort human physicality and emotion; at the same time, though, “closer examination reveals that the monster is also ... a foundational figure,” the originary figure who must be driven out, killed and incorporated into communal memory, in order for a coherent human civilization 1 to form.1 Cohen also acknowledges that the monster shares with the women of medieval literature an emphasis on the body as both the site of a perceived “sensuous physicality, ”so that both women and monsters are alienated through bodies, which are seen as Other due to their supposed excesses of size and/or sexuality. He does not dwell on this connection, however, and also does not discuss the relationship between women and the sovereign. At the same time, the study of women in Arthuriana has become a topic of increasing interest, with volumes such as Arthurian Women and On Arthurian Women: Essays in Memory of Maureen Fries dedicated specifically to the various women who intersect with Arthur’s narrative.2 Fiona Tolhurst in particular has examined the roles female Arthurian characters play in relation to the male- dominated society they inhabit and to the sovereign himself in her two monographs on the women in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s works who, Tolhurst argues, are increasingly deprived of subjectivity in their marriages and motherhoods as the tradition is transmitted and retransmitted over time.3 Additionally, Laura D. Barefield’s Gender and History in Medieval English Romance and Chronicle draws on works such as Gayle Rubin’s “The Traffic in Women,” Patricia Claire Ingham’s Sovereign Fantasies, and the volume Women and Sovereignty edited by Louise Olga Fradenburg to likewise argue that women’s roles in the Arthurian (and other medieval literary) dynastic successions are subsumed into the patriarchal genealogical system, ultimately depriving these characters of agency.4 They are important in that they are mothers, but that is all. My 1 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), xii. 2 Thelma S. Fenster, ed., Arthurian Women (New York: Routledge, 2000) and Bonnie Wheeler and Fiona Tolhurst, ed. On Arthurian Women: Essays in Memory of Maureen Fries (Dallas: Scriptorium Press, 2001). 3 Fiona Tolhurst, Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Feminist Origins of the Arthurian Legend (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 4 Laura D. Barefield, Gender and History in Medieval English Romance and Chronicle (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 2003); Gayle S. Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex” reprinted in Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader, ed. Gayle S. Rubin (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011); Patricia Clare Ingham, Sovereign Fantasies: Arthurian Romance and the Making of Britain (Philadelphia: 2 project surveys the largely unexplored overlap between these two areas