Glamour Girls:
Explorations of Women, Magic and Sexual Power
in Yvain and Le Morte D'Arthur
None
holds so high degree
That her arts cannot subdue.
- Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Do women have power in the world of courtly love? At a time when men's power was won on the battlefield, women's successes were won on a different terrain - that of love, romance and sexual fascination. In the campaign of romance, all women's wiles and skills were turned toward the end of winning the heart, and thus the battle-arm, of a man (or of men), The rules of courtly love dictated the veneration of the woman, and her utter control over the behavior of a man who would woo her. She could compel him with a mere word to do her will. For the lord to fail his lady in any way was unchivalrous, and for such a transgression she could (and often did) make him suffer by withholding affections, favors, et cetera. It was in this way that a woman survived in an age of wars, plagues and changing economic climates, and that she kept her station and her holdings - or at least wielded some influence over them. The Arthurian romances of the Middle Ages frequently show women gaining influence over their lords and knights in accordance with the tenets of courtly love.
One can certainly argue a case for the power afforded women in this system to be illusory. Whether in life or in literature, women were still chattel; they customarily did not inherit titles and lands in their own right and were regularly treated as the possessions of their fathers, husbands, even brothers and sons. Their livelihood was at the hands of these men, or at the hands of those who could best them in battle. No doubt because of their contingent conditions, women used whatever means at their disposal to gain whatever power they could in a relationship, for that authority was directly related to their physical survival. In the Arthurian romances, these means frequently included those of a magical nature as well as an amatory one.
The sway held by the woman in courtly romance can be likened to the result of sorcery or the exercise of other supernatural arts, and has been, both in history and fiction. The absolute obedience expected of these knights by their ladies; the compulsion and fixation felt by the men after having been charmed by one of these women; the fear and mystery, or at the very least healthy respect, surrounding a woman who is also an enchantress; all provide an interesting parallel to the iconic, erotic, and almost mystical veneration of woman and her power in the realm of courtly love. Witches are repeatedly seen as almost grotesquely sexual creatures, and the art of women's magic often treated with the combination of fear and illicit excitement often reserved for the arts of sexual pleasure. Both witchcraft and sex are ways in which women can assert their power, and both are habitually glamorized, feared or perverted in life and literature alike.
Whether or not non-fictional women in the Middle Ages resorted to the arts of magic in their romantic endeavors (an intriguing question), the female characters in the Arthurian legends can often be found using supernatural aid to further their individual fortunes. Just as the romances show the power exerted over men by a woman's charm and beauty, they also reveal women using magic in order to maneuver themselves into political hegemony, to retain a hegemonic status in the face of a threat, or to unseat someone who has such a position.
It should be noted that not all uses of magic in sexual or romantic situations favor the woman. Although Ygraine became queen and was the mother of Arthur, she was an unwary chesspiece in a game of manipulation and desire played by a king, a duke and a wizard, and could as well be regarded as a victim of a rather magnanimous rapist and his pander. Iseult was the casualty of either an innocent mistake or someone else's mischief (depending on whether anyone deliberately placed the love-drink where she and Tristan would drink it, or if they were both just thirsty), and in the end she was undone not by sorcery but either treachery (in the verse romances) or murder (in the prose romances) - in other words, purely human acts of deceit and violence. Guenevere seems excluded from most magical machination, her tragic romance with Lancelot being caused by nothing but passion. When sorcerous conditions do occasionally enter the queen's sphere, it is usually some in the form event or challenge sent to vex her, or to expose her infidelity to Arthur, by Morgan Le Fay, who is in the later romances always negotiating for more political power and always looking for a way to trouble Arthur's queen.
What these situations have in common is that none of the women named above takes any active role in the working of the magic; they do not solicit it, they do not perform it themselves (or they perform it unwittingly), and they are in complete ignorance to the changes being wrought around them and to them. If each woman lands on her feet, it is through failure on the part of her enemy, through the largesse of those around her, or through sheer luck, not through any expression of control on her own part.
These three women are three of the most prominent in the Arthurian legends, but their experience with magic is not typical for women in these stories. It is much more common to find women at the heart of the magic being performed in a tale or episode, and women operating in a magical milieu are invariably using the magic to advance their own positions, or those of their favorites - and, this being the era of courtly love, that is very often the same thing. For the most part, women in these tales use sorcery the way women use sexual promises: to entice a man into doing something that will serve their personal political needs in a climate where these are a woman's only weapons for advancement and continued existence. The success of these methods varies from story to story, and depends on just what the woman employing the magic is seeking. Looking at two well-known texts - Chrétien's Yvain, or the Knight and the Lion and Book IV of Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur - we can see some of the different ways women deal with sexual and magical power, and the ways in which intimacy and sorcery are frequently woven together in attempts to slake both a woman's private and public appetites.
Next... Secrets of a Lady's Coffer
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