Vision and Gender in Malory's Morte Darthur (review)

In Vision and Gender in Malory's Morte Darthur, Molly Martin argues that the Morte is mainly concerned with "defining and valorizing the male community of knights and its specific version of romance masculinity" (1). According to Martin, Malory's "masculinist project" depends upon vision, in particular how masculinity is produced in images of masculine bodies and behaviors. Right at the start, therefore, Martin makes it clear how her work is supplying something that is lacking from the existing body of Malory scholarship: a book-length study of the relationship between vision and gender in the Morte. Martin rightly notes that this lack is especially surprising given our age's critical interest in vision, thereby encouraging her readers to believe that her book is an innovative contribution to a popular direction of scholarly inquiry.

Martin's introduction explains how later-medieval ideas about seeing and being seen are more complicated than the theories of vision most commonly embraced today: instead of being located primarily in the male gaze, visual power is apportioned between both the image and its viewer. Martin argues that the production of masculinity in the Morte depends in large part upon knights becoming "spectacle[s] of masculinity" that are viewed by a multilayered audience consisting of other characters, the narrator, and the readers: the reactions of these various audiences are essential to the text's valuation of masculinity. But Martin also describes how one of the most influential medieval theories of vision—the one asserted in the idea of courtly love as defined by Andreas Capellanus—manifests in the Morte to present the male lover as incapacitated by the sight of his beloved lady. While the knight's masculinity depends upon the images of his person and his masculine behavior being viewed by others, it is also endangered when he gazes upon his lady and is rendered passive by the suffering of desire.

Martin's first chapter following her introduction focuses on "The Tale of Sir Gareth." It might seem imprudent for Martin to devote an entire chapter to just one episode; after all, her subject—the Morte in its entirety—is very long while her book is not (180 pages, quite a few of them dominated by notes, albeit ones justified by the breadth of Martin's research). However, "Sir Gareth" provides the clearest and most basic examples of the phenomena described in the introduction. Furthermore, the thorough examination of this story is especially welcome considering the one shortcoming of the introduction, which is that Martin is so busy explaining theories about vision and courtly love that she has to postpone presenting passages from the Morte. Admittedly, introductions are often light on evidence, but quotations from Andreas, Lacan, and Barthes show up before passages from Malory; a chapter that lingers on one part of the Morte and examines several substantial passages up close thus comes as a relief.

Martin's ensuing chapters deftly expand the breadth of her focus without sacrificing depth of analysis, and in most cases it is immediately clear how each chapter will add a new layer to Martin's argument. Chapter Two examines the linked cases of Launcelot and Trystram, two men whose visibility is especially important to their status as champion knights and thus as ideals of masculinity: they must be seen fighting in battles and tournaments, and they must be seen as objects of female desire. But at the same time, the fact that their sexual desires are adulterous requires that they maintain a certain degree of invisibility.

The third chapter might seem the least involving. It explores the cases of four more knights, including Gawayne, who either fail at creating masculine spectacles of themselves or choose not to do so. Martin's conclusion is that in every case, the knight who is not seen performing masculine action is marginalized by Arthurian society. Thus there are no exceptions to the rule Martin described in earlier chapters, or rather the exceptions are punished so severely that...