Sovereign Fantasies: Arthurian Romance and the Making of Britain by Patricia Clare Ingham (review)

REVIEWS thing, because the upshot is an imperative to readers to rethink what we thought we knew about Chaucer’s pilgrims. Lois Bragg Gallaudet University Patricia Clare Ingham. Sovereign Fantasies: Arthurian Romance and the Making of Britain. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001. Pp. 288. $49.95. Sovereign Fantasies is a brilliant title for a book that aims to reconfigure literary history around repressed and forgotten colonial archives. Referring at once to fantasies by sovereigns, to fantasies of sovereignty (by sovereigns and others), and to fantasy structures with cultural authority, Sovereign Fantasies seeks to recover the regionalist histories of English Arthurian romances in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The fantasies that Ingham identifies concern various forms of communal belonging (gender, ethnicity, class, nation), structured through pleasure and pain. Ingham argues that English Arthurian romances offer particularly rich sites for investigating fantasies of past and future unity because they emerged in times of instability and because ‘‘they occupy . . . a shared border between cultural identities of historic importance to British sovereignty : English, Welsh, and French’’ (p. 3). This is unity, however, riven by regional and ethnic differences, which romance overwrites with gendered identifications (p. 14). Alongside these fantasies of union, Arthurian romance ‘‘encodes subversive possibilities and potentialities’’ (p. 91). In pursuing these arguments, Ingham makes several interrelated theoretical moves. First, she identifies romance as a ‘‘colonial genre’’ with substantial cultural ambitions: its very structures engage the problematics of loss and mourning that characterize victimized cultures. This generic argument engages in dialogue with postcolonial theories that identify ambivalence as a psychic product of coercive encounters. The third maneuver, then, is psychoanalytic and aims to articulate the roles of fantasy in the construction of individual and collective identities, as well as links between the cultural and gendered ‘‘other.’’ 411 ................. 9680$$ CH16 11-01-10 12:37:19 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER Following the theoretical introduction, the book opens with two chapters that establish prophecy as fundamental to the Middle English tradition. Linking Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth-century writings with fifteenth-century English prophecies, these chapters articulate ‘‘the subtle cultural relation between Arthurian history and Arthurian fantasy ’’ (p. 15). Ingham views Welsh vaticinative poetry as a ‘‘‘postcolonial ’ collection’’ (p. 38) with a vexed relation to English sovereignty: ‘‘A Middle English tradition of political prophecy, propaganda, and genealogy built upon a textual futurism borrowed from Welsh poetry means that Welsh poetic practice becomes a way of encoding England’s doubled history as both conquered space and conquering sovereignty’’ (p. 50). The result is a prophetic structure that signals ‘‘a melancholy British endurance through loss rather than despite loss. . . . link[ing] cultural recovery to the work of mourning’’ (p. 53). The next three chapters examine this work of mourning in the Alliterative Morte Arthure, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the Stanzaic Morte Arthur. The Alliterative Morte (Chapter 3) resists the triumphalism of later English histories while mourning the loss of a distinctly ‘‘Welsh’’ (and therefore oppositional) Arthur; coping with this loss, the poet expresses concern for suffering innocents, especially women. Ingham links this mournful historiography to increased intimacy between metropolitan and provincial aristocrats. In Gawain (Chapter 4), the central conflict between Gawain and Bertilak’s Lady performs the problematics of male agency in the face of gender troubles (p. 131), while the Green Knight himself embodies a fantasy of Welsh sovereign recovery (p. 125). He also neatly captures the multiple valences of sovereign fantasies: he performs the sovereign’s fantasy of immortality; his powers (especially over death) fulfill anyone’s fantasy of sovereignty; he is the magical product of Morgan’s own fantasy of sovereignty; this fantasy threatens literally to dominate the Arthurian court. Whereas Gawain is concerned with troubles between communities, the Stanzaic Morte (Chapter 5) addresses troubles within a single domestic community (p. 155). The poisoning of the Scottish knight, for example, displaces local rivalries onto foreigners. Women, meanwhile, both inspire bellicose virility and mourn its destructive effects. In the context of England’s war with France, the poem’s gendering of desire serves nationalistic purposes (p. 149). The last two chapters examine regional issues in several fifteenthcentury texts, all placed in relation to the conflicts of the Wars...