The Proud Lady beyond Redemption in Malory’s Tale of Pelleas and Ettarde

The proud lady more directly disrupts chivalric masculinity in this tale than any other discussed so far, as Ettarde rejects any involvement in recognising Pelleas’s virtue as a knight and lover. As Carolyne Larrington argues, Ettarde ‘refuses to follow the courtly script’: within the romance economy of love and prowess, she ‘has no right not to grant her love to Pelleas, since he is brave and loves her faithfully, especially once Malory has removed the Suite’s mitigating circumstance: that Pelleas is of low birth’.5 Larrington, King Arthur’s Enchantresses, p. 115. Ettarde’s disruption of chivalric and romantic scripts partly aligns her with Chen’s work on asexuality as highlighting restrictive norms, as her (deliberate) refusal to conform draws attention to normative patterns through its difference. Situating Ettarde within the romance tradition of the proud lady in love can further our understanding of the specific nature of her transgression in the Morte, Malory’s punitive response to it, and the wider challenges and opportunities the proud lady in love offers to chivalric masculinity. Ettarde is the most negatively represented, punitively treated, and in some ways most subversive incarnation of a proud lady in love; as such, she reveals the functions this motif can serve at its furthest extreme.

The rupture of expectations Ettarde’s refusal to love Pelleas creates is repeatedly emphasised in this episode. When Gawain first encounters Pelleas, Pelleas tells him that ‘sorow and shame commyth unto me after worshyppe’ (p. 128), emphasising Ettarde’s fracturing of the chivalric economy, where ‘worshyp’ should result in reward rather than ‘sorow and shame’. Malory also asserts that while Ettarde is ‘so prowde that she had scorne of [Pelleas], and seyde she wolde never love hym thoughe he wolde dye for hir’,

Malory’s precise condemnation of Ettarde’s wilful refusal to reward a deserving knight with her love is supported by his entirely altered resolution of the episode. In the Suite, Gauvain repents his betrayal and convinces Arcade to love Pellias instead. While Gauvain argues Pellias’s case, Arcade’s priorities are taken into account: she asks Gauvain ‘le dictes vous sur vostre loyauté que vous cuidés que ce soit mon preu?’ (p. 421, 24. 465) [‘do you tell me on your faith that you believe this is to my benefit?’, p. 237] and tells her knights ‘ja n’en dirés […] chose que je n’en face, pourquoy je y voie mon preu et mon honnor’ (p. 425, 24. 468) [‘I’ll do everything you say […] provided I see my welfare and honor in it’, p. 239]. Arcade thus abides by courtly and chivalric priorities in reflecting on whether Pellias’s noble character surpasses his lower birth, and in attending to these concerns the Suite considers her will and consent. In Malory, however, Ettarde’s will is disavowed and indeed violated. Here, Gawain does not repent and a very different kind of resolution is provided by Nyneve, Malory’s Lady of the Lake, who enchants Ettarde to love Pelleas.10 Malory’s altered ending may partly reflect a desire to portray Gawain more negatively, as Ralph Norris suggests: Malory’s Library: The Sources of the ‘Morte Darthur’ (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008), p. 45. However, this does not seem to sufficiently account for the inclusion of Nyneve. However, Pelleas now scorns Ettarde, for reasons that are not entirely clear: Nyneve has enchanted Pelleas so that he ‘fell on slepe’ (p. 135) and when Pelleas praises God for his sudden hatred of Ettarde, Nyneve tells him to ‘thanke me therefore’ (p. 136), so it may be implied though not clearly stated that Nyneve has also enchanted Pelleas. Nyneve then becomes his lover and wife herself, leaving Ettarde to die of sorrow. While other uses of magic for coercive purposes are portrayed negatively in the Morte, Nyneve’s enchantment is framed as an appropriate punishment for Ettarde’s refusal to love Pelleas. Inna Matyushina’s claim that ‘in the realm of amour courtois, any hint of punishing a lady would have struck a discordant note’ does not, it seems, apply to women who disobey the rules of amour courtois.11 Inna Matyushina, ‘Treacherous Women at King Arthur’s Court: Punishment and Shame’, in Treason: Medieval and Early Modern Adultery, Betrayal, and Shame, ed. by Larissa Tracy (Leiden: Brill, 2019), pp. 288–319 (p. 312). Nyneve tells Ettarde ‘ye oughte to be ashamed for to murther suche a knyght’, insisting that Ettarde’s sudden love for Pelleas is ‘the ryghteuouse jugemente of God’ (pp. 135–6). Positioning her enchantment as divine justice, Nyneve’s words and actions imply that Ettarde merits death for her refusal to love Pelleas. There is some ambiguity as to the appropriateness of this judgement: Siobhán Wyatt argues that her proclamation ‘comes close to being associated with blasphemous words’, opening up a space in which readers may question it.12 Wyatt, Women of Words, p. 47. However, the episode as a whole appears to support Nyneve’s perspective. Pugh has argued (in relation to Amis and Amiloun) that ‘normative sexuality kills in medieval romance […]. Death […] serves a regulatory function in narrative. It frequently codes characters as heroes and as villains’.13 Pugh, Sexuality and its Queer Discontents, pp. 118–19. Ettarde’s death defines her (and not just Gawain) as the villain of this episode, condemning her wilful rejection of Pelleas, and not just reducing the focus upon Arcade’s will in the Suite but actually violating Ettarde’s will through Nyneve’s enchantment. The role-reversal occasioned by this enchantment (turning Pelleas’s sorrow and wish for death into Ettarde’s) positions Nyneve as giving Ettarde a taste of her own medicine in a manner similar to, but more extreme than, Eger’s scorn of Winglayne. Winliane, too, of course, ultimately dies in the Huntington-Laing Eger and Grime, perhaps similarly indicating the regulatory function of death in that narrative. The ending of Malory’s Pelleas and Ettarde episode precisely and deliberately identifies Ettarde’s wilful rejection of Pelleas as transgressive, superseding any focus on representing Gawain negatively to establish Ettarde as a villain within this episode. The Morte offers the most punitive and condemnatory representation of a proud lady in love, which both reveals the subversive potential of this figure and violently eliminates it.

Malory’s more extreme punitive approach to the motif of the proud lady in love perpetuates and promotes what we would now think of as rape culture. In this light, the accusations against Malory of two counts of the raptus of Joan Smith may offer a sobering reminder of the potential connections between literary and real-life violence. We do not and may never know what actually happened between Malory and Joan Smith, and focusing restrictively upon the binaries of guilty and innocent seems misdirected, particularly if we allow these binaries to govern our interpretations of Le Morte Darthur. As we have already seen in Chapter 1, and as we will return to in Chapter 5, the Morte is a work of huge variety, including in its approach to issues of coercion and gender. At times it seems highly nuanced and sensitive in its account of the pressures of love or the shock of violation. But recalling potential echoes of the Pelleas and Ettarde episode in Malory’s biography may fruitfully remind us that literature forms part of the means by which real-life misogyny and violence are normalised and perpetuated, urging us to recognise how the Morte is imbricated in and actively upholds the values of late medieval rape culture.

The misogynistic implications of the Pelleas and Ettarde episode are perhaps particularly long-lasting, as later rewritings of and references to this story continue to blame Ettarde for her refusal to love Pelleas, upholding misogynistic ideas about women and consent.14 See my discussion of post-medieval adaptations of this story in ‘Desire, Consent and Misogyny’. In doing so, they reveal the wider cultural impact of the motif of the proud lady in love and of the ideas and ideologies upheld by the romance genre. Malory’s Morte Darthur, of course, has become a particularly canonical romance (albeit, within academia, relatively recently) and so holds greater cultural reach.15 Leitch and Rushton’s New Companion to Malory observes that ‘Malory is now canonical and widely taught’, positioning this as a change that has occurred between the publication of A Companion to Malory in 1996 and the New Companion in 2019: Megan G. Leitch and Cory James Rushton, ‘Introduction’, in A New Companion to Malory, ed. by Leitch and Rushton (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2019), pp. 1–10 (p. 1). On the afterlives of Malory’s Morte more generally, see A. S. G. Edwards, ‘The Reception of Malory’s Morte Darthur’, in A Companion to Malory, ed. by Elizabeth Archibald and A. S. G. Edwards (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1996), pp. 241–52. But despite its unusual influence on later literature, the Morte indicates (if more prominently and extremely) the impact of romance’s engagement with resistance to love. The works discussed in this chapter often incorporate powerful condemnations of resistance to love and forceful reassertions of normative desires and conventional gendered roles. However, they also raise some questions about these gender roles, particularly chivalric masculinity and the extent to which it depends upon women for its successful construction. There are, then, suggestions of gender roles and sexual practices that sit outside of medieval norms encoded within these narratives, and the proud ladies’ resistance at times functions as a means of queering normative behaviour and assumptions. Even in the Morte, where we are presented with a narrative that overtly condemns Ettarde, from a perspective focused on consent it is not Ettarde’s but Pelleas’s behaviour that is unreasonable. By the time Malory was writing, consent was well established as (at least in theory) paramount to medieval marriages and, as Elisabeth van Houts has argued, consent had also been adopted as ‘a tool that could be used [by laypeople] to push their own demands for self-­determination’.16 Elisabeth van Houts, Married Life in the Middle Ages, 900–1300 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), p. 4. Understandings of consent were thus not entirely limited to marital contexts, suggesting that this was an available framework of reference for the Pelleas and Ettarde episode. From this perspective, Ettarde simply wants to be rid of Pelleas: we are told that ‘all she doth hit is for to cawse hym to leve this contrey and to leve his lovynge’ (p. 131), while she later tells Gawain that ‘I hated hym moste, for I coude never be quytte of hym’ (p. 133). Ettarde’s desire to be rid of Pelleas is one reason I do not find convincing Amy Kaufman’s suggestion that ‘the female characters against which Nynyve pits herself are arguably the constructions of patriarchal fantasy more than they can be said to represent “real” women’: Ettarde too seems to be resisting the constructions of patriarchal fantasy.17 Amy S. Kaufman, ‘The Law of the Lake: Malory’s Sovereign Lady’, Arthuriana, 17.3 (2007), 56–73 (p. 63). However, the rarity of these insights into Ettarde’s desires corresponds with Kaufman’s suggestion that ‘a female character’s struggle within Malory’s text is, quite frequently, a struggle of competing narratives’: ‘a woman’s pleas for her own sovereignty and safety must struggle against a privileged male narrative just to be heard’.18 Amy S. Kaufman, ‘Malory and Gender’, in A New Companion to Malory, pp. 164–76 (pp. 172, 174). Ettarde’s pleas for her right to choose – or refuse – a romantic partner are almost entirely erased by the narrative’s overt sympathy with Pelleas, deploying Nyneve to further encourage readers (perhaps particularly female readers) to accept the condemnation of Ettarde as appropriate.19 Roberta Davidson argues that Malory uses Nyneve ‘to voice his own interpretations, guiding us to read the episodes “correctly”’: ‘Reading Like a Woman in Malory’s “Morte Darthur”’, Arthuriana, 16.1 (2006), 21–33 (p. 27). But while later narratives and the Morte itself overtly condemn Ettarde, this cannot entirely confine readers’ responses. As Jeff Rider argues,