Three Types Of Arthurian Women

In the past five centuries Arthurian romance has become a popular theme many times invoked by men of letters. I find in the long history of its literary interpretation Arthurian women exist more clearly as a category than as disparate individuals. Much worse than this oversimplification is that they are often related with such adjectives as "passionate", "unreasonably jealous" or even "lustful". Attributable to the advent of feminism, in recent decades there have emerged the studies focused on Arthurian women. But in their criticism of the patriarchal system they have established a new model, an oversimplification of another kind, that interprets most, if not all female characters, as being reduced to mere instruments of men.My reading experience, especially that of two Arthurian romances, Sir Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur and Chretien de Troyer's Arthurian Romance, is responsible for my suspicion that Arthurian women have long been stereotyped and the distinction and differentiation among different female characters are completely neglected or even deliberately ignored in the process of stereotyping. During my study, I also noticed that self-awareness could vary from one Arthurian woman to another, both in degree and kind. By a woman's self-awareness I mean in this thesis that she is conscious of her self as an independent human being with her own qualities, values, work to do or missions to perform. When she acts, she does so more out of her own deliberate intention than being compelled to take action by external forces. She acts with a clear sense of purpose.A spectrum can be drawn along which women are located in accordance to the degree of self-awareness. Therefore my discussion proceeds in the order of group A, the women who are endowed with the least self-awareness, group B, the middle, and group C, the women presenting themselves as the strongest.In Group A I put women such as Guenevere, Isoult, Laudine, Enide and Elaine. Not knowing serves as the central trait in the development of these female characters, where lies the convergence of all the other qualities: great physical beauty, high social status, extreme passiveness and weak intellectual power.Physical beauty is essential to our heroines, without which they lose their significance and sink into oblivion. Physical beauty also determines their social role of men's sexual object. In the romance they often serve as an incentive to heroic actions and at the same time its reward. However important the role of physical beauty plays in romance, it is nonetheless considered the antithesis of intellectual and moral strength in Christian ideology. The second quality, high social status, on the one hand, enables them to be the most privileged women in Arthurian society, women who are supposed to live a life of ease under men's protection. On the other hand, it limits their scope of life to such an extent that their concerns seldom go beyond men's protection and affection. The last two qualities rather reinforce each other. By being passive or habitually depending on others for problem solving, they not only give up their right of developing their intellectual power, but also naturally lose interest in everything except their love. Lacking necessary intellectual power also greatly weakens their ability to understand the world, which compels them to be even more passive. Therefore, in the text, we often see these women either completely lose themselves in the extreme passivity and submit to the patriarchal system, or are totally controlled by excessive passion of love. They appear to have little sense of self-respect and their personal power is so weak that their survival completely depends on the knights' service. In many cases they are unable to act on their own except in the matter of love, which controls their life and to which everything else is subordinate. In Group B, I put women like Lunete, Soredomors and numerous nameless damsels. Their self-awareness helps to make them independent individuals, rational enough to understand...