The Outlaw-KnightLaw's Violence in The Faerie Queene, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and The Dark Knight Rises

In Christopher Nolan's 2012 film The Dark Knight Rises, the hero begins as an outlaw, and an outlaw masquerades as a hero. Their names, Wayne and Bane, rhyme; they belong to the same secret martial order; both wear masks and love the same woman. As the plot unfolds these figures move between the same spaces, appropriating each other's weapons and motivations. Although the film embeds them in an allegorical discourse in which one represents justice and the other uncontrolled violence, their differences are often surprisingly minor. Legal and political theorists as varied as Walter Benjamin, Robert Cover, and Giorgio Agamben have asserted the inseparability of law and violence. In the modern state, Benjamin claims, "all violence as a means is either lawmaking or law-preserving" (287). How, then, does the state's violence distinguish itself from others, and how does it come to legitimize its own vision of law as "justice"?

The problem is far older than Nolan's film. This essay explores a figure I term the "outlaw-knight," a curious hybrid who reappears from the early days of modern statehood to uncover a fundamental indeterminacy at the heart of state-sanctioned law and violence. The outlaw-knight is a fantasy of political nostalgia, one that reifies the processes and problems of modern state formation by turning to an idealized form of feudalism. This figure marks periods of political change with a backward-looking critique of modern statehood through the figure of the individual aristocratic hero. It appears in the early modern period notably as the Knight of Justice in Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene (1596), written at a pivotal point of nostalgia for a feudal aristocratic past amid the centralization of the sixteenth-century Tudor monarchy. The outlaw-knight persists in modern cultural forms like the American Western and superhero films, reifying the conflicts between violence and the law in the modern democratic state. A look at Book 5 of Spenser's Faerie Queene, John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), and Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises (2012) will illustrate how, in varied historical and political circumstances, the outlaw-knight returns to mediate clashes between rival laws, rival forms of violence, and rival symbolic interpretations, asserting the hybridity and indeterminacy of the state's means for dealing with threats to its sovereignty.

As an early modernist, I want to argue for the importance of addressing precursors and histories of both political concepts and aesthetic figurations in modern cultural forms. Parsing their politics without also examining the past that these works call up and strategically idealize or misrepresent provides only a partial view of their artistry and political maneuvering. Although there are other examples of the outlaw-knight, I have chosen these three very different texts because of fundamental similarities in their genre and mode. First, all three of these works politicize nostalgia, idealizing a premodern past in order to criticize their contemporary politics. Furthermore, they romanticize the same past, the European chivalric Middle Ages. Second, these three works rely on fundamental similarities in genre and narrative technique, which they derive from that premodernity. They are nostalgic not only in their themes and figures but, much more intrinsically, at the level of their form. The epic-romance genre of The Faerie Queene, shared by the two films, particularly suits reflection on statehood in transition or under threat. Combining the wandering narratives, amorous escapades, aristocratic subjects, and heroic ascendancies of romance¹ with the nation-building, collectivizing concerns of epic, The Faerie Queene's mixed genre is inherently backward looking.² The heroism of the aristocratic individual is the central drama of all three works considered here, told in the form of quest narratives that deliberately project modern political concerns onto medievalized but equally politically freighted narrative landscapes. Third, all three of these works write epic-romance in the allegorical mode: their narratives follow emblematic dynamics in which characters are clearly referential, figuring larger social and political ideas.³

I propose that Ford's and...