The Reclamation of a Queen: Guinevere in Modern Fantasy
Book by Greenwood Press, 1991

INTRODUCTION
Guinevere (Ganhumara, Gaynore, Gwenhwyfar, Wenhaver, Gwinfreda, Gwenda, Winlogee): her names are myriad. 1 With medieval Arthurian works appearing in at least twenty-nine languages ranging from Aragonese and Breton to Tagalog, Welsh, and Yiddish, it is evident that Guinevere, along with Arthur and other heroes of the legend, claimed international attention. Though well known as a figure in the Arthurian mythos, Guinevere has consistently been overshadowed by the male figures of these knightly tales. It may be argued that these numerous names for Guinevere result primarily from the phonology of the nonstandard European name "Guinevere"; at the same time this variety of Guineveres symbolically belies the apparently passive and peripheral role which the queen plays in much of the Arthurian mythos. Ironically, this variety of names also is at odds with the generally perceived sameness of Guinevere's depiction and the ubiquity of those recurring motifs associated with her--adultery, childlessness, abduction, rescue, convent retirement. Parke Godwin, a modern novelist who has employed the Arthurian material in Firelord ( 1980) and Beloved Exile ( 1984), says of the Arthurian legends: If you consider Camelot as one of the archetypes of the world, you can't get away from the female image; it's integral. All our legends--Arthur, Oedipus, Hamlet, Orestes, woman is central to all of them. 2 How ironic then to consider that, even though the female is central to Arthurian legend, Guinevere, perhaps the most significant female character, has in the past achieved centrality primarily through her association with the patriarchal perception of woman as Eve and temptress. This is not to suggest that all depictions of Guinevere have been pejorative. Obviously the Guinevere in medieval texts is not the same Guinevere as the one in Tennyson, Morris, White, or other authors. We must remember when dealing with this figure that characterization as we speak of it in, for example, the privileged realistic novel of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is quite different from the medieval concept of figural depiction. Yet the recent treatment of the literary construct ' Guinevere' in modern fantasy suggests that there has been a general perception of Arthur's queen as a passive object of men's desires or as a destructive temptress.

The majority of Arthurian works, written for the most part by male authors working within a patriarchal culture, present a Guinevere viewed through the lens of androcentrism. J. M. Gray, in his study of the Idylls of the King, remarks about Tennyson's Guinevere, "Guinevere has received little attention. It may have a purely technical reason: her appearances are fewer and in less dramatic situations than her lover." 3 I would suggest that technical considerations may have some bearing on the neglect of Guinevere, whether in Tennyson or in other Arthurian works. But, more to the point, the treatment of Arthur's queen in every historical period has been influenced by basic sociological and ideological pressures. In Arthurian Literature and Society ( 1983), Stephen Knight notes that the Arthurian legend centers on the question of power; this accounts for the material's longevity and pervasiveness in the Western world. 4 Although certain aspects of the figure of Guinevere have been affected by genre, as well as historical, sociological, and ideological milieus, from a feminist perspective I would further suggest that the Arthurian material, in addition to other functions, serves as a vehicle for assigning women their proper subordinate position within a hierarchy of gender-determined relations. The representation of Arthur's queen has been traditionally conditioned by a masculine interpretation of woman; thus a vital character in the Arthurian material has paradoxically remained until now a shadow figure. This study began with a perception of Guinevere as a traditionally passive, often maligned, and generally peripheral figure in the Arthurian mythos. Numerous authors from Algernon Swinburne to Charles Williams and John Steinbeck have commented on a certain "lack" in the figure of Guinevere. For example, when Steinbeck began work in 1958 on a retelling of Malory, later to be published in unfinished form as The Acts of KingArthur and His Noble Knights Arthur and His Noble Knights ( 1976), a letter from his literary agent, Elizabeth Otis, indicates Steinbeck's interest in the revision of the figure of Guinevere. Otis writes to him:

Wonderful that you are coming to consider my friend Guinevere, she has been so neglected. You may notwant to do much with her, but she really must have been an important part of the picture. ( The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights, 366) In a subsequent reply to Otis and editor Chase Horton, Steinbeck agrees with the comments on the traditional Guinevere and voices his irritation at the constraints which the scholar's Guinevere appears to place on the treatment of this figure: I too have felt this lack about Guinevere. She has always been the symbol when in fact she must have been a dame. I have been reading a great deal about women in the Middle Ages and I think I know now why modern scholars can't think of her as anything but a symbol. There was just a different way of looking at them. It shows up in every phase of women's life as described by contemporaries. ( The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights, 366)

Unfortunately, Steinbeck's Arthurian novel was left unfinished at his death, but the incomplete manuscript as published features a highly sympathetic treatment of Guinevere, especially in the portion entitled "The Noble Tale of Sir Lancelot." Here the queen is described as beautiful, proud, and commanding; she exhibits none of the coyness and petulance seen in the versions of Malory or Tennyson. Given Steinbeck's concern with the depiction of women in the Arthurian material, we may speculate that further work on the manuscript might have created a significantly revised figure of the queen. Recent revisionist treatments by modern fantasy writers have followed in the footsteps of Morris and Steinbeck by presenting a transfigured Guinevere. I attempt to approach the representation of Guinevere from a number of seemingly diametrically opposed perspectives. First, as a medievalist, I analyze the treatment of Guinevere in medieval English and translated French sources within a historical, sociological, and ideological context. These texts serve as the foundation for the transmission of the Arthurian myth through Malory, Tennyson, Twain, and modern fantasy novelists.