Abstract
The restrictive portrayals of Morgan and her analogues in the early modern, Romantic, and Victorian eras continue in modern and contemporary temporary fantasy works. Whereas authorial attempts to control figures of feminine power can be seen to fail in the earlier eras, those attempts are, perhaps oddly, successful in more modern works. This is a surprising and discouraging development for a character so evocative of the ability to evade such efforts at control and containment, in part because the literature of more recent eras might be expected to reflect the growing freedom and independence women enjoy, but chiefly because the fantasy genre lends itself so aptly to unconventional characterizations of women.1 Fantasy novels should, then, provide an ideal venue for Morgan to fulfill the potential for representation that New Medievalism puts forward. However, this is not the case; instead, these works fall dishearteningly short, demonstrating an inability to escape the traps of ideology and language that still inhibit the depiction of characters like Morgan le Fay. Morgan is unable to move beyond conventional portrayals of women in either Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court or three contemporary fantasy novels: Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Mists of Avalon, J. Robert King’s Le Morte D’Avalon, and Nancy Springer’s I Am Morgan le Fay. In A Connecticut Yankee, she functions largely as a foil, demonstrating the dangers of Hank’s unrestrained pursuit of power, while in the fantasy novels, reenvisionings of her role in Arthurian literature are still restricted by gender and societal stereotypes.
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Notes
Alan Lupack, “The Old Order Changeth: King Arthur in the Modern World,” in The Fortunes of Arthur, ed. Norris J. Lacy (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2005), 210, 209–24.
Kim Moreland, The Medievalist Impulse in American Literature (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), 55–56.
Janet Cowen, “‘Old Sir Thomas Malory’s Enchanting Book:’ A Connecticut Yankee Reads Le Morte Darthur,” in Arthurian Studies in Honour of P. J. C. Field (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2004), 311–24.
Betsy Bowden, “Gloom and Doom in Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee, from Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur,” Studies in American Fiction 28 (2000): 179–202. Joe B. Fulton also points out in Mark Twain in the Margins: The Quarry Farm Marginalia and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2000) that “such ambivalence and contradictions may have existed in Twain’s mind but certainly also existed within his historical sources and within history itself ” (23).
Jane Gardiner, “‘A More Splendid Necromancy’: Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee and the Electrical Revolution,” in Mark Twain: An Anthology of Recent Criticism, ed. Prafulla C. Kar (Delhi: Pencraft International, 1992), 182–94.
Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, ed. Shelley Fisher Fishkin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 134. All following quotes are taken from this edition and cited in parentheses in the text.
Mary Lyndon Shanley and Peter G. Stillman, “Mark Twain: Technology, Social Change, and Political Power,” in The Artist and Political Vision, ed. Benjamin R Barber and Michael J Gargas (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1982), 267–89.
See for example Stephen Knight, Arthurian Literature and Society (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983), 197; Shanley and Stillman, “Mark Twain: Technology, Social Change, and Political Power,” 273–74; Taylor and Brewer, “Arthur’s ‘Return’”, 172–73,
and Alan and Barbara Tepa Lupack, King Arthur in America (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2001), 56.
J. D. Stahl, Mark Twain: Culture and Gender (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1994), 104.
See Donald H. Hoffman, “Mark’s Merlin: Magic vs. Technology in A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court,” in Popular Arthurian Traditions, ed. Sally K. Slocum (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green Popular Press, 1992), 46–55.
Shanley and Stillman, “Mark Twain: Technology, Social Change, and Political Power,” 272. In another parallel between the two characters, Hank earlier compares his emerging power to a volcano as well. See Richard Kaeuper, “Telling it Like it Was? Mark Twain’s Rereading of Chivalry in Malory’s Le Morte Darthur,” in Retelling Tales: Essays in Honor of Russell Peck, ed. Thomas Hahn and Alan Lupack (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 1997), 179–90.
Charlotte Spivack, “Morgan le Fay: Goddess or Witch?” in The Company of Camelot: Arthurian Characters in Romance and Fantasy (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994). For examples of Morgan as conventionally evil, see particularly the discussion of Penelope Lively, Pamela Service, and Persia Wooley, Company of Camelot, 34–38.
Jeanette C. Smith, “The Role of Women in Contemporary Arthurian Fantasy,” Extrapolation 35 (1994): 135, 130–44.
Sallye J. Sheppeard, “Arthur and the Goddess: Cultural Crisis in The Mists of Avalon,” in The Arthurian Myth of Quest and Magic: A Festschrift in Honor of Lavon B. Fulwiler (Dallas: Caxton’s Modern Arts Press, 1993), 102.
Nickianne Moody, “Maeve and Guinevere: Women’s Fantasy Writing in the Science Fiction Marketplace,” in Where No Man Has Gone Before: Women and Science Fiction (London: Routledge, 1991), 191–201.
Carol L. Fry, “‘What God Doth the Wizard Pray To’: Neo-Pagan Witchcraft and Fantasy Fiction,” Extrapolation 31:4 (1990): 339, 333–46.
For a defense of Bradley’s portrayal of Morgan, see particularly Lee Ann Tobin, “Why Change the Arthur Story? Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Mists of Avalon,” Extrapolation 34 (1993): 147–57.
Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon (New York: Del Rey, 1982). All citations taken from this edition and cited in parentheses in the text.
Karen E. C. Fuog, “Imprisoned in the Phallic Oak: Marion Zimmer Bradley and Merlin’s Seductress,” Quondam et Futurus 1 (1993): 75, 67–80.
Sabine Volk-Birke, “The Cyclical Way of the Priestess: On the Significance of Narrative Structures in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon,” Anglia 108 (1990): 414, 409–28.
James Noble, “Feminism, Homosexuality, and Homophobia in The Mists of Avalon,” in Culture and the King: The Social Implications of the Arthurian Legend: Essays in Honor of Valerie M. Lagorio, ed. Martin B. Shichtman and James P. Carley (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 288–96.
Marilyn R. Farwell, “Heterosexual Plots and Lesbian Subtexts: Toward a Theory of Lesbian Narrative Space in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon,” in Arthurian Women, ed. Thelma S. Fenster (New York: Routledge, 2000), 319–30.
Judith L. Kellog, “Introduction,” Arthuriana Special Issue: Essays on the Arthurian Tradition in Children’s Literature 13.2 (Summer 2003): 1–8.
J. Robert King, Le Morte D’Avalon (New York: Tor, 2003).
An interesting corollary has long been noted in many young adult novels (and medieval romance): young women who take their sexuality into their own hands are invariably punished by becoming pregnant, either by consensual sex or by rape. See Gayle Nelson, “The Double Standard in Adolescent Novels,” in Young Adult Literature: Background and Criticism, ed. Millicent Lenz and Ramona M. Mahood (Chicago: American Library Association, 1980), 228–31.
Riane Eisler, “The Goddess of Nature and Spirituality: An Ecomanifesto,” in In All Her Names: Explorations of the Feminine in Divinity, ed. Joseph Campbell and Charles Muses (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1991), 13.
See Raymond H. Thompson, “The First and Last Love: Morgan le Fay and Arthur,” in Arthurian Women, ed. Thelma S. Fenster (New York: Routledge, 2000), 341–42.
Peter Scharf, “Moral Development and Literature for Adolescents,” in Young Adult Literature: Background and Criticism (Chicago: American Library Association, 1980), 101–6.
Miriam Youngerman Miller, “‘The Dream Withered’: The Tale of Sir Gawain,” Arthuriana 13 (2003): 86, 85–93.
See Masha Kabakow Rudman, Children’s Literature: An Issues Approach, 3rd ed. (New York: Longman, 1995), 349–51. Kenneth Kidd points out that children’s literature has often been used as a therapeutic tool in dealing with traumatic events of all kinds, reflecting the shift in ideology from protecting children from controversial topics to encouraging exposure to them through books. See “‘A’ is for Auschwitz: Psychoanalysis, Trauma Theory, and the ‘Children’s Literature of Atocity’,” Children’s Literature 33 (2005): 120–49.
It has been suggested that one reason for glossing over the subject of sex in children’s literature is not because adults fear it is too ‘adult’ for young minds, but because adults are uncomfortable answering the questions children might raise upon encountering the topic. See Perry Nodleman and Mavis Reimer, The Pleasures of Children’s Literature, 3rd ed. (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2003), 97.
Catherine J. Montgomery, “The Dialectical Approach of Writers of Children’s Arthurian Retellings,” Arthurian Interpretations 3 (1988): 79–88.
Nancy Springer, I Am Morgan le Fay: A Tale from Camelot (New York: Penguin Putnam, 2001). All citations taken from this edition and cited in parentheses in the text.
Sarah Gilead, “Magic Abjured: Closure in Children’s Fantasy Fiction,” PMLA 106 (1991): 277–93.
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© 2013 Jill M. Hebert
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Hebert, J.M. (2013). Imprisoned by Ideology: Modern and Fantasy Portrayals. In: Morgan Le Fay, Shapeshifter. Arthurian and Courtly Cultures. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137022653_6
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