Male Trouble: Sir Launfal and the Trials of Masculinity

The main title of this essay makes two allusions: one to Judith Butler’s famous Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity and the other to “female trouble” a term for gynecological problems—that is, for the kind of trouble only women can get.¹ We could consider the two allusions as pointing to two views of gender. According to the first, any gender identity is really a performance and a copy for which there is no original; according to the second, gender is a real thing located in real bodies. The fact that the second term has no masculine equivalent (although there are certainly many medical conditions to which only male bodies are susceptible) underscores the point that in our society it is the female body that is subject to trouble of various kinds. On the other hand, we could say that if gender is something that one does rather than something that one has, perhaps trouble of this sort can be avoided altogether. Up to this point, I have been stressing the differences between these two views of gender, but my intention is not to bring about a recrudescence of the debate between essence and construction. Rather, I want to read Thomas Chestre’s Sir Launfal as promoting a view of masculinity in which maleness is a condition with what we could call structural flaws.² In contrast to femaleness, which appears to have a solid basis in the world of the poem, Chestre presents maleness as something that is inherently uncertain. While many narratives from the medieval period and later depict a youth working through a variety of problems in order to achieve the form of adult masculinity considered proper in his society, Sir Launfal suggests that the achievement of adult masculinity can never be more than a qualified success: male status is always accompanied by male trouble.

The easiest way to begin a discussion of Chestre’s focus on masculinity is to examine his relation to his sources.³ While many medieval poems have no surviving source, Sir Launfal has several. In his introduction to the poem, A.J. Bliss, following earlier scholars, identifies these as the anonymous Middle English Sir Landevale, Marie de France’s Lanval, and the Old French Graelent, all of which are still extant; he also cites a romance mentioned by Andreas Capellanus, which has since been lost (24–31). Much valuable work has been done on the relation of Sir Launfal to its sources, but the tendency unfortunately has been to see Chestre’s poem as a sort of anthology and to berate him for failing to be Marie de France. The most extreme example of this attitude can be found in A.C. Spearing’s study, in which we are informed that “Chestre destroys the meaning of Lanval precisely by identifying totally with the very fantasies that it represents” (118).⁴ Not having any information on Chestre’s personality or on with what he did or did not identify, I shall concentrate on the text itself. In any case, as Myra Seaman points out in her brilliant essay on Sir Launfal, “no compelling evidence suggests that Chestre even knew Marie’s text” (107).⁵ Chestre’s differences from Marie and from the other texts that can be seen as his sources are more striking than his similarities to them: while all the authors who use the story deal with the problems of masculinity, it is only Chestre who takes them as his focus.

My concern is thus with the unusual tone and distinctive emphasis of Sir Launfal Earl R. Anderson has identified “the main concern of the poem [as] Launfal’s manhood, the threats to it by Gwenere, the affirmation of it by Triamour” (119). Sir Launfal is not the only version of the story to consider the fragility of masculine identity, however. Many medieval romances are concerned with the ways in which knights can or cannot establish their knighthood, but I would argue that Chestre has amplified this theme—a theme that can also be found, although to a...