If you were present at the previous Loinfire Club meeting, you may have noticed that the Chronicler really doesn't like the Knight of Darkness very much and has a lot of things to say about it. To minimise the number of unfunny digressions by the Chronicler (usually in parenthesis) in the actual writeup of the session and generally exorcise it so that she can concentrate one very angry woman scorned (Brynhildr, if anyone cares), the rant has been given its own little post:
(Incidentally, the image is John Waterhouse's La belle dam sans mercie [The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy])
This book has the romance novel version of the Virgin/Whore complex, which incidentally is much like the standard splitting of the female figure into the archetypal Virgin (the pure, innocent, beauteous angel) and the Whore (EvilSlutBitchQueen) but it includes this crucial difference: the Virgin is sexualised, but only because of hero's desires such that she has no sexuality of her own or is unaware of it ("What is that tingly feeling between my legs, I wonder? Oh...oh!") Often it is the virginity/purity/innocence of the Virgin that the hero finds sexually attractive and the Whore is eventually found repulsive.
It is this which we see time and time again, deeply ingrained it is in the very mythos of the setting, in almost every single female character who makes an appearance. It engages in a dialogue with the original Arthurian corpus, which itself is very much coloured by medieval misogyny and courtly love (among many, many other things) which makes the Cistercians who wrote the Vulgate Cycle look like open-minded feminists.
It's almost as though she had list of all the female characters in Arthurian legend and systematically classed them as either Virgin or Whore. Morgan, Narishka and Elaine of Corbenic are obviously whores. Merewyn and interestingly Guinevere, get to be Virgins.
Guinevere is scrubbed clean and recast as a romance novel heroine (without the happy ending). She never even loved Lancelot, never betrayed Arthur, never schemed with Mordred. It was all invented by slanderous tongues after Slut!Elaine raped Lancelot in the guise of Guinevere. She was certainly not infertile and had four legitimate children with Arthur. She was a protector of the Holy Grail itself and her dying wish was to be buried next to Arthur.
Merewyn's virginity and innocence remains untainted after something in the region of seven hundred of years of servitude in the castle of orgies and masturbation. She never even touched herself. Or got raped by some evil knight who was so drunk he couldn't see her.
Morgan le Fay, on the other hand, is the most EvilSlutBitchQueen imaginable with an insatiable sexual appetite. She has her manslave perform cunnilingus whilst plotting the hero's demise. The Valley of No Return (in which far, far too much of the book is spent) is full of her abandoned lovers. Narishka, her right hand woman, never loved her son and gets cast as Ultimate Bad Mother who didn't want the pain of childbirth so got Elaine to do it for her.
Male sexuality is, of course, treated in a completely different way. It is presented as a norm that true male sexuality is ferocious to the point of being uncontrollable (and this is also somehow admirable and sexy). The hero growls threats about it to the heroine. He prides himself at reigning in his libido as the heroine innocently cuddles up to him. The rapist comedy relief double act attest to how men can be seen as victims of their rampant, uncontrollable sexuality. (Her use of Thomas Mallory, burglar, rapist and sheep rustler, as a hero in one of her books in this series is probably also telling. Though Mallory is quite a character. He wrote most of the Morte in prison, from which he repeatedly and rather spectacularly escaped, and was specifically excluded from pardons of by both Henry VI and Edward IV.)
Perhaps it's just that in a normal romance novel there are fewer characters and so it seems less widespread. Perhaps this book does take it to a new and terrifying extreme. Perhaps I'm overreacting and in the next book of the series we'll have some characters that'll overturn this scheme I've worked out. Perhaps it hasn't gotten popular enough to become a comic book series...
Perhaps...
PS: I'm not asking every retelling to have a feminist agenda. But can we just step away from the Virgin/Whore divide and try working on some real characterisation?
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