In Book IV, part of our reading for tonight's class, Morgan le Fay goes from nice, innocent little convent girl to a demonized, power-hungry, scheming *itch with magical powers. She schemes to steal Excalibur and the scabbard and trick Accolon into fighting Arthur so he can kill Arthur and she can become Queen of England. After her plot fails, she uses sorcery to shape-shift and escape pursuit, then flees to her lands and hides out for a while.
Up until now, we've only encountered Morgan le Fay as a more positive figure. Monmouth makes little mention of her, but in his Vita Merlini, she is a benevolent healer and ruler of the magical isle where Arthur is taken after his mortal wounding. Anna, and not Morgan, is mentioned as Arthur's sister; Morgan is just his healer. As a spiritual healer, the figure of Morgan is linked with various Celtic goddesses, including Morrigan. In Chretien de Troyes's romances, Morgan is a healer whose ointment cures Yvain's madness and she's actually (buddy-buddy) a guest at Erec and Enide's wedding. Although she seems a troublemaker in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, one can argue that she was just doing it to test Arthur and his knights to make sure they remained on the right path — a benevolent admonition of sorts, even if she does use magic and rather unChristian behavior while she's at it. But the point is, in SGGK, Morgan is not directly and overtly demonized or made out to be a villain as she is in Malorys' Le Mort d'Arthur.
So, why the change? What could have caused Morgan to degenerate from near-goddess to a villainous character?
A provocative dissertation I found, "Goddess Dethroned: The Evolution of Morgan le Fay," by Dax Carver (available on Dissertation Abstracts International) argues that blame for this evolution lies at Cistercian feet. Carver writes that any deity or mythological figure often undergoes a process of evolution, often a humanizing process, and that Troyes enacts this process for Morgan, downgrading her from a spiritual healer to a wedding guest who can make simple ointments. Carver parallels the ‘blackening’ of Morgan le Fay in the Lancelot-Grail cycle with the advent of a new order within the Catholic Church: the Cistercian monks. In fact, these Cistercians could have written the Lancelot-Grail cycle: “The evidence for Cistercian authorship is spread through the Quest. We meet with no black monks, Benedictines, but only with a white hermit, white monks and white abbeys—the Cistercian habit was white” (37). Furthermore, “the stages through which Lancelot passes before he obtains absolution . . . are those which are systematically set forth in a manual of confession by Nicholas of Clairvaux [Clairvaux being the site of the most powerful Cistercian monastery at the time], possibly a friend of our author, and surely bound by the same vows” (37).
Carver builds on this hypothesis of Cistercian authorship to argue that the Cistercians, who believed in the importance of separating themselves from women (the inciters of sexual desire), marked out Morgan as evil because of her pagan origins and magical abilities. “Geoffrey of Monmouth, Chretien de Troyes and even the author of Gereint tried to neutralize the negative effect of Morgan’s magical powers by focusing on her healing faculties. Unfortunately, however, ‘the Cistercians believed that it was blasphemous to attribute healing or prophetic powers to a female who was not a member of a religious order and, furthermore, that such powers undermined the authority of the priesthood and the church.’ Quite simply, the Cistercians, and all Arthurian romance writers that followed in their shadow, could not abide a strong, powerful woman who was essentially benign. Such would not only be giving credence to the power of the female, but in Morgan’s case, to a pagan god” (39).
Thus, since Morgan had too important a role in the Arthurian legends to be gotten rid of altogether, the Cistercians had to twist her character into a villainous woman in order to condemn paganism and magic as unchristian. This influence spread from the Lancelot-Grail cycle to Malory, but the damage wasn’t done yet. Later Arthurian tale-spinners would transfer Arthur’s incest with Morgause to Morgan le Fay, further blackening her character.
Basically, I just wanted to point out the interesting fact that Morgan, in Malory, is just a stepping stone along the course of an evolution of a character. Just as Nasreen noticed a difference in Malory’s treatment of Gawain, and other characters appear somewhat differently (Arthur, for one, loses a duel with Pellinore!?) … so does Morgan. We’re at the turning point at which Morgan goes from heroine/good to villain/bad, and this turning point has led to modern retellings of the Arthurian legends in an attempt to redeem and recover Morgan from this ‘blackening.’
Source: Carver, Dax D. “Goddess Dethroned: The Evolution of Morgan Le Fay.” Diss. Georgia State University, 2006. http://etd.gsu.edu/theses/available/etd-04282006-082115/unrestricted/carver_dax_d_200605_ma.pdf.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Excellent post Tara! I was curious about this too and it seems like a very plausible explanation. We've certainly seen this influence change characters before, both inside and outside of the world of Arthuriana.
ReplyDeleteWhat's interesting to me is that by making Morgan le Fay into this super villain, they increased her presence in the text. Even when she is "near goddess" she is not a constant presence. Post her "downgrade" however she is always on the mind of the court and therefore the reader. She is a constant threat and that only makes her more powerful. Though she can now be condemned, in a sense they cause her to win.
I think it's interesting too that just like Arthur's legend sucks in all the great heroes from other legends and his story is ever evolving, Morgan sucks in two other major female characters and absorbs their story. They are like the male/ female character vacuum of the middle ages!
Just like Hannah, I think it is so intersting how you point out that the Cistercian monks who decided to degrade her into evil, did so becasue she was too important to discard altogether... She is certainly important in earlier versions of the tale of King Arthur, but never to the extent that she reaches in these later ones where she is turned into evil. And it totally seems to work well with the great belief they had during the Middle Ages of the presence of evil. I think that, in the face of the uncertainty and ignorance of the universe that existed in the Middle Ages, and with the desire to dominate society in terms of maleness and Christianity, defining extremes would be a good way of grappling with these issues.
ReplyDeleteIt does seem to be an interesting feature of Arthuriana that it has a hard time disposing of characters from the tradition even when it wants to replace them; instead, it takes former heroes and champions and blackens their characters. In addition to the case of Morgan, well detailed here, we've seen how Gawain's character darkens once Lancelot is introduced; how Perceval's special qualities are dimmed by the introduction of Galahad, who's even more special; and how Mark, initially sympathetic, becomes villainous by the time the prose Tristan gets through with him. It's even possible that Mordred was not initially a foe of Arthur's. One of the earliest texts to mention Arthur is a bit of Welsh verse that notes only that Arthur and "Medraut" (=Mordred) fell in battle at Camlann--but it doesn't say that they fell in battle against each other. It's just possible that they were allies then. Anyway, this need to hold on to prior characters, even if it requires radical transformation in their personalities and histories, is still another curiosity of the conservative (or recycling-friendly?) story-making tendencies of Arthuriana.
ReplyDeleteWhat's fascinating to me is how Morgan is a villainess in the canon, yet there remain traces of her benevolent side. She destroys Arthur but she is also one of the queens who take Arthur to Avalon. Contemporary Arthur stories (e.g. Excalibur) have her both lover and nemesis to Arthur.
ReplyDeleteThe weird thing is it makes psychological sense. Morgan is Arthur's half-sister, so has reason to love him; but his father killed her father, so she has reason to hate him. I think this psychological complexity is why she continues to fascinate in books like The Mists of Avalon, and The Circle Cast: The Lost Years of Morgan le Fay.