Knight Fever I

A quick look at anything written about gender and film in the past decade or so will tell you that narrative presence, whether in terms of speech time or screen time, often has a lot to do with gender. By now, there is a widely-known, established means of measuring the representation of women in fiction: the Bechdel test, in which a score is meted out according to both quantity (the proportion of lines spoken by women in a particular piece of media) and quality (whether those lines entrench pernicious female stereotypes). A large-scale comparative study carried out by Hannah Anderson and Matt Daniels, published online in 2016, found that in over 75% of films male characters were responsible for between 60% and 100% of the dialogue.

In terms of the literature and culture of the more distant past, the same patterns of gendered vocal absence can be observed – the notable silencing, for example, of Shakespeare’s female protagonists at the end of his plays, when characters are largely paired up in a happily-ever-after world in which the challenging Kates and Beatrices are hushed into silence. In contrast, early literature often idealises male characters as present in various ways: present in mind; present in voice; present at the core of a narrative. In medieval romance, these different kinds of presence are key to the construction of idealised chivalric masculinity. The ideal knight, so argues Bernard de Clairvaux, should be present of mind and body – not someone filled with inappropriate impulses, or prevented from action by dressing his “tender, delicate hands in big cumbersome sleeves” (‘Ad Milites Templi’, p. 37). Though the knights of secular romance fiction are different from Bernard’s idealised knights in terms of their concerns (being far more interested in matters of the heart), they are similar in terms of the crucial role that different kinds of agency and presence play in their figuration.

Within these discussions surrounding figurative and narrative presence and expressions of masculinity, we might question what happens to the knights of romance when they fall ill. Illness presents the romance knight with a problem: he is no longer able to remain active – present of body and also sometimes of mind – and he must therefore also cease to be narratively “present”, dropping out of the narrative until he recovers. The knight may obtain his state of unwellness through a highly masculinized activity – fighting in a battle or tournament, for example – or through disease, though it must be said that knights do not seem to just “fall ill” because of the fallibility of their own bodies very often. Indeed, knights engaged in bloody battle often seem remarkably, unrealistically capable of “reanimating” almost instantly, ready for their next task, adventure, or long night of love-making. However a knight becomes ill, it does not matter. The outcome is the same if the knight is no longer able to remain active within the narrative: he is kicked out, or pushed to the margins of the narrative at best, until he can return to the frame of action.

Knightly illness is presented as a grave tragedy in romance for this reason – when Gawain is gravely ill in the Mort Artu, the great tragedy is not the possibility of his death but that he is ill (159.17-19), or that he might never again bear arms (166.12-13). As Gawain himself remarks earlier in the text, when Lancelot cannot attend a tournament due to illness, ‘it is indeed a great pity when a noble knight has an illness which stops him carrying out acts of prowess’ (41.114-17). In the case of more minor characters, such as the vavasour’s son in the Mort Artu, illness may prevent them from entering the narrative frame at all; the vavasour’s son is only able to do so once he has recovered from his illness, joining Lancelot to attend a tournament (45.6-10). For more major characters, a period of illness and absence nevertheless provides an important narrative function: the reader is invested in them, and therefore reads onward in the hope and expectation that they will heal and return to the action. Clearly, illness has quite an impact on a knight’s narrative presence – but what happens when knights are aware of this, and decide to use it for their own ends? Watch out for part two, where I’ll delve into some examples of knights who feign illness!

(This blog post and part II is based on a recently published article by Mary in the Journal of the International Arthurian Society.)