Graduate Student, English
University of Manitoba, English, Film and Theatre
PhD Student, TA, RA
Thesis Title: Nameless Women in "Le Morte Darthur"
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David Watt
Michael Van Dussen |
About
Funded by a SSHRC Canada Graduate Fellowship, I am presently enrolled in doctoral studies at McGill University under the supervision of Dr. Michael Van Dussen.
Tentative PhD Dissertation Topic:
“We be here for this cause: if we may se ony of arraunte knyghtes, to teche hem unto stronge aventures,” announce three unnamed damsels in Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur. Who are these nameless women? And why do they possess mysterious knowledge of “strange adventures”? Nameless damsels such as these are not the exception in Le Morte Darthur; they are prevalent and pervasive. Frequently active in knightly affairs and familiar with the ways of adventure, many unnamed women come and go with a vast amount of autonomy, entering the text briefly to direct a quest or bestow a magical object and then departing. Anonymous women play a major role in generating a strong current of feminine influence and their incessant repetition asserts their importance to the text as a whole. Indeed, while only thirty-three named women appear in the entire Morte Darthur (most of them mentioned only once briefly), there are more than sixty unidentified women with speaking roles throughout the Morte. My doctoral dissertation proposes to attend to the so-far unstudied nameless women of the Morte. It will examine the narrative significance of these women as well as the issue of their namelessness, and, in so doing, will lend scholarly support to the ongoing recovery of what Geraldine Heng has called the “feminine subtext” of the Morte Darthur.
Arthurian literature has traditionally been defined and dominated by men – male authors and male characters – beginning with the eponymous Arthur himself. However, a sea-change has been underway in Arthurian scholarship in the past two decades, with much greater attention being given to female figures. Yet, while scholars such as Carolyne Larrington and Thelma Fenster have worked to re-claim and study named Arthurian women, the many anonymous female characters who inhabit Malory’s Morte Darthur have not received the same consideration. Already marginalized within Malory’s text by virtue of their unnamed status, they similarly remain on the periphery of Malorian scholarship. Likewise, while the theme of naming and namelessness in fiction has been the subject of many studies, none of them have concentrated upon the unidentified women within the Morte. To the best of my knowledge, no studies have been conducted on this topic. In exploring and testing literary conceptualizations of gender, my study aims to fill this gap in Malorian scholarship and will contribute towards the project of expanding women’s history. Situated within the broader context of existing treatments of Arthurian women, my dissertation will provide a new, feminist reading of the Morte Darthur as I explore and validate the nameless women who have not received sufficient attention. Though the anonymous women that I will consider appear in a male-authored text, they still may provide us with a glimpse into the lives of women in the Middle Ages and offer a new perspective from which to think about gender in the Arthurian world.
Contact Information
| Address: | Montreal, Canada |
