Since the beginning of the tales of King Arthur and his knights of the table round, the sexual tension between Launcelot and Queen Guinevere has been a subtext, and thus a rich and convenient focal point for the various themes of the work. One of those central themes is, of course, the ancient chivalric code of Arthur’s time, and the broader or expanded version of that, the Homeric versus post-Homeric, the so-called shame versus guilt paradigm. In this example, I relate this code to the interaction of Launcelot with not only Guinevere, but also with Lady Elayne of Astolat, the knight’s professed, and not very subtle admirer.
While Guinevere is firmly anchored in the rapidly receding, shame based culture, Lady Elayne symbolizes the emerging, guilt oriented, inner-directed norm in the work. Given a simple definition of shame as that which is a fault of being, as opposed to guilt which is a fault of doing, Lady Elayne is a transformative figure in Morte D’Arthur. Her ‘fault’ is seen as a failure to be good enough for Launcelot to consider for his spouse, or even as his clandestine lover as it turns out. This shame is not absorbed easily; upon being dismissed, Lady Elayne makes the fateful–and fatal–decision, to kill herself. This is not some teenage drama queen acting out when a potential boyfriend fails to call after a first date. This is Malory’s nod to the paradigm shift overtaking the culture during Arthur’s time, the change, due largely to the advance of monolithic Christianity, from shame based culture of the chivalric code, to the guilt based one of the emerging new age.
The background is this: Launcelot and Guinevere have been ‘an item’ since time out of mind. But the author makes no derogatory comment, and never refers in a sordid or negative way to their affair, which must surely have been fully consummated. Launcelot does, after all, visit the queen in her chambers after hours. And in a telling bit of text, when Mordred and Agravaine are conspiring to expose the transgression of Launcelot and their queen, the author remarks that Launcelot has removed his armor in Guinevere’s presence. This doesn’t mean simply that he took off his metal protection; Malory is telling us that no self-respecting knight ‘bares himself’, reveals his inner feelings, the workings of his heart in such a way. Malory’s readers would have understood this for what it was: Launcelot gave himself fully to Guinevere. This is a knight who apparently could have had any number of fair damosels in his time, and who recently refused the advances of Lady Elayne, even turning aside an offer to be her paramour.
But the real expose’ in the scene in Guinevere’s chamber is the author’s choice of whom to blame in the affair. Malory casts the intense light of condemnation not on Launcelot and Guinevere, but on Mordred and Agravaine for making the affair public, thus endangering the fellowship and social comraderie of good knights everywhere. According to the shame based code, this act of public revelation opens the entire society to danger.
The rest of the text is devoted to the erosion, and eventual dissipation of that social definition, the very world in which Malory lived and wrote. Launcelot and Guinevere pay for their transgression, true. But their sin is not their clandestine hookups in darkened castle keeps; it is the fact that they’ve allowed their affair to put all they know and obey at risk, and indeed to its eventual collapse. Their failure is not the affair itself, but their inability to keep their personal sentiment under control. Both have ignored the admonition to “Loke that your harte and youre mowthe accorde’”. Indeed, early in the work, Malory chastises Mordred for ‘being open mowthed’. Launcelot and Guinevere thereafter seek a life of contrition, not because of their adultery, but because they are destroyers of good knights, and thus catalysts in the departure of an age.
Lady Elayne offers a transformative contrast. She has clearly, and quite publicly, fallen in love with Launcelot. In his words she ‘has loved me oute of mesure’. Elayne’s adulation of this knight isn’t the love of Launcelot and Guinevere, courtly, of a pattern, contained behind chamber walls, closeted if you will; it is an open, professed love with all the trappings of public declaration, and the potential for tragic, again public humiliation.
Which, of course, is exactly what happens to the poor, rejected Elayne. This is a reversal of the courting going on elsewhere in Camelot. Lady Elayne does all the ‘jousting’ if you will, all the courting of her intended. She is the one with her heart on a sleeve, albeit the sash on Launcelot’s battle dress. The red sash is the young woman’s heart; it flies free in the crush of battle, the public symbol of her hopes and dreams for a life with her knight in shining armor. Then those hopes are dashed, as her knight reverts to his courtly, outer-directed ways, refusing even to bed her as his lover on the side. Malory gives us an interesting insight here: He tells us that Launcelot refuses Elayne’s offer of her bed out of admiration and respect for her father and brothers! This is the love of a system, not a concern of the heart.
Elayne makes the decision to refuse sustenance, and shortly dies, the victim of that system. Malory has given us a view of Lady Elayne’s heart. She’s the only actor on that stage exposed in such a way. No one condemns Launcelot’s seeming disregard for the young woman’s suicide. No one, that is, except, in an interesting bit of foreshadowing on Malory’s part, Guinevere herself. As the queen says, you might have ‘shewed hir some bounte’…which myght have preserved hir lyff.’ Guinevere chastises him for not being more forthright with her own potential rival for the fellow’s affections. Either Guinevere is anticipating the disruption of the court and its trappings, or she’s even more high maintenance than previously depicted.
All others are keepers of the shame based, outer directed code that demands obedience to the public perception of acts, not to the guilt that arrives from inside, from hearts troubled by those actions. This is the change of heart, so to speak, the revolution taking place that, in Malory’s estimation, threatens to undermine, and in fact does destroy, a way of life. It’s the departure from the scene of all those good knights, including Arthur himself.
The author won’t let it go completely; Malory was, after all, a knight himself. He inserts an editorial by way of obituary. Arthur’s tomb is to bear the engraving ‘Here lies Arthur, the once and future King’.
Elayne & Gunievere - Their Disparate Roles in Morte D'Arthur and the Coming New Age
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