Morgan le Fay, Shapeshifter

By Jill M. Hebert

This study re-examines Morgan le Fay in early medieval and contemporary Arthurian sources, arguing that she embodies the concerns of each era even as she defies social and gender expectations. Hebert uses leFay as a lens to explore traditional ideas of femininity, monstrousness, resistance, identity, and social expectations for women and men alike.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Mar 12, 2013
• ISBN: 9781137022653

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MORGAN LE FAY, SHAPESHIFTER

Jill M. Hebert

MORGAN LE FAY, SHAPESHIFTER

Copyright © Jill M. Hebert, 2013.

All rights reserved.

First published in 2013 by

PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®

in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,

175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.

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Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.

ISBN: 978–1–137–02264–6

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hebert, Jill M., 1975–

Morgan le Fay, shapeshifter / Jill M. Hebert.

   p. cm.—(Arthurian and Courtly Cultures)

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978–1–137–02264–6 (alk. paper)

 1. Morgan le Fay (Legendary character)—History and criticism. 2. Arthurian romances—History and criticism. 3. Women in literature. I. Title.

PN686.W65H43 2013

809′. 93351—dc23                                   2012039268

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.

Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.

First edition: March 2013

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction: To Be a Shapeshifter

1. For the Healing of His Wounds? The Seeds of Ambiguity in Latin Sources

2. Sisters of the Forest: Morgan and Her Analogues in Arthurian Romance

3. Morgan in Malory

4. Morgan’s Presence-in-Absence in Renaissance, Romantic, and Victorian Works

5. Imprisoned by Ideology: Modern and Fantasy Portrayals

Conclusion: Beyond Limits

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I have been working on this topic for so long that my family and friends have finally given up asking if I’m sick of Morgan le Fay yet, and so over the years I have been aided by far more people than I can properly thank here. I have been deeply fortunate to have support at every turn, and I hope all those who go unnamed know of my appreciation. I am especially thankful to the students who entered into my enthusiasm for Arthurian literature and to the colleagues who encouraged and enabled my work on Morgan, particularly Macauley Henges for her thoughts on my earliest analyses, Theresa Vann for the summer research fellowship at the Hill Monastic Manuscript Library at Saint John’s University, Mary Morse for her guidance on the work that would become the foundation for the first chapter, Jana Schulman, Jil Larson, Gwen Tarbox, and Sister Susan Rieke for thoughtful comments and assistance of various kinds, and Eve Salisbury for her extremely patient and careful reading and advice.

My deepest and most heartfelt gratitude goes to my family. I want to thank my husband Chris Carlson for his support, sacrifices, and silliness. This book is in memory of my mother Jeanne, and dedicated to my father Dave, who always knows when I need to hear go for the gold.

INTRODUCTION: TO BE A SHAPESHIFTER

The Problem of Boxes and Binaries

Authors tend to portray, and critics to analyze, the character of Morgan le Fay in dichotomous terms, as either a benevolent healer who tends to Arthur after his final battle or as an evil witch out to bring Arthur down. Sometimes both these roles are attributed to Morgan in the very same source, such as in Malory, where she is viewed by the other characters (and critics) as attempting to destroy knights, kill Arthur, and demolish Camelot. Yet at the end of the Morte, this most enigmatic of characters comes to heal Arthur’s wounds, scolding him in a comforting fond-older-sister tone for getting hurt so that she must take care of him.¹ Morgan displays changeable behavior from text to text as well; she is widely accepted as a benevolent healing force in earlier medieval works, while other eras often judge her pejoratively. Even in contemporary fantasy, authorial use of Morgan’s voice, and the addition of motives for her actions either try to redeem her or ultimately relegate her to malevolent roles.

Morgan’s variance has provided much fodder for critics who attempt to reconcile what they interpret as the polar ‘evil’ and ‘good’ states she so often occupies in Arthurian literature, both within single texts and across works from the Middle Ages to the present moment.² At the same time, scholars seem reluctant to expend much effort into trying to explain contrary behavior in male Arthurian characters, though they too exhibit changeability. As Norris J. Lacy points out, Arthur himself is frequently contradictory both within and across sources without apparent discomfort.³ Yet, despite the fact that inconsistent and even conflicting characterization is one of the commonest phenomena in Arthurian romance, according to Helaine Newstead,⁴ Morgan’s apparently contradictory behavior resists easy explanation.

Perhaps because Morgan’s actions are so unpredictable, critical attempts to resolve her ‘inconsistencies’ are likewise widely divergent in their interpretations of her motives, purpose, and meaning. One common explanation is expressed by critics such as Elisa Marie Narin, who has seen Morgan as a manifestation of the Other,⁵ a character upon whom fear of the unknown or unpredictable is projected, making her a receptacle for mysterious and negative, if not evil, aspects of ourselves. In Frederic Jameson’s formulation of the symbolic nature of narrative, he explains that

Evil . . . continues to characterize whatever is radically different from me, whatever by virtue of precisely that difference seems to constitute a real and urgent threat to my own existence . . . the woman, whose biological difference stimulates fantasies of castration and devoration . . . behind whose apparently human features a malignant and preternatural intelligence is thought to lurk. [It] is not so much that [s]he is feared because [s]he is evil; rather [s]he is evil because [s]he is Other, alien, different, strange, unclean, and unfamiliar.⁶

In a survey of contemporary fantasy accounts in which Morgan is a featured player, Raymond Thompson attributes her behavior toward Arthur to ambivalent yet normative sibling relations,⁷ while Malory scholars such as Elizabeth Sklar view her as an essentially sociopathic personality, respecting no boundaries and acknowledging no rules save those dictated by her own ambitions, envy, and lust.⁸ Maureen Fries defines Morgan as a ‘counter-hero,’ rather than a traditional heroine, because she does not occupy conventional female roles, but instead has the ability to violate the norms of the patriarchy and possess the hero’s superior power of action without possessing his or her adherence to the dominant culture.⁹ In other words, each critic attempts to find a consistent role designed to encompass Morgan’s oftentimes unsettling inconsistencies, using the metaphor of the Other as a starting point and a catch-all answer.

However, as Jameson’s definition of the Other and these critical positions illustrate, scholarly commentary tends to follow a binary path, defining Morgan as different and therefore malevolent. Of the responses cited here, Fries’s explanation is the most promising in that it moves Morgan outside traditional categories of thought. Yet her attempt to revalue Morgan’s negative characterization still imposes a too-restrictive, oppositional definition; like other critics, Fries’s strategy for reconciliation is ultimately unsatisfactory. Such efforts to find consistencies in Morgan’s behavior reinforce dichotomous categories that many of the original sources also impose. In their attempts to force constancy on Morgan’s multifarious nature, critics relegate her once again to stereotypes such as the benevolent healer, archetypes such as the femme fatale, and ideological prisons such as the Ave/Eva dichotomy.¹⁰

Unfolding the Box, or, How Not to Arche the Type

In her feminist analysis of archetypal thought, The Bitch is Back: Wicked Women in Literature, Sarah Aguiar argues that Jungian archetypal theory connote[s] universal and essentialist properties.¹¹ She sees the Jungian reliance upon binary oppositions as a handicap to feminist thought, concluding that feminist questioning and re-envisioning of archetypes can only result in the enlarging of meanings that surround the types.¹² Archetypes are, by their nature, limited: they are employed to help define a person or character, to say ‘this, but not that,’ to attempt to contain that which is uncontainable. Morgan is problematic because she neither conforms to conventional models of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ femininity nor adheres to the traditional place of women in society. Because of this tendency, authors and critics tend to invoke outmoded archetypal, androcentric explanations of her behavior to keep her in her place. Frequently, writers and scholars attribute to Morgan the ‘femme fatale’ archetype, which presents women as ‘man-eaters’ whose sexual allure leads to a man’s destruction. While Morgan’s character often traps men and exhibits sexually voracious behavior, she is much more than such a definition would allow. She is not the ‘Eve’ side of the Ave/Eva opposition; rather, she embodies characteristics and behaviors that cannot be classified by simple-minded dichotomies. For example, Morgan does not quite fit the description of a supernatural ‘enemy’ provided by Hilda Ellis Davidson and Anna Chaudri: "Supernatural enemies may be ambivalent in nature and not invariably hostile, but they are always potentially dangerous. They may not confine themselves to one form: they are often shape-shifters, able to appear as unfamiliar monsters or phantoms or in apparently familiar human or animal form, but they are always endowed with monstrous or terrifying characteristics."¹³ The applicability of such definitions or archetypes like the femme fatale breaks down when Morgan also exhibits traits that fall outside their bounds, such as beauty or healing, as demonstrated in her ubiquitous role as Arthur’s caregiver after his final battle. Archetypes, with their ‘either/or’ orientation, cannot, then, usefully be applied to a character like Morgan who refuses to fit into artificially constructed patterns of behavior.

One solution to the problem of defining such troubling characters is expansion of the archetype, or what Aguiar describes as enlarging the meanings that surround the types.¹⁴ However, this solution rapidly becomes problematic too. Expanding an archetype’s definition implies at least two potential pitfalls: one involves simply showing how the archetype shares or does not share characteristics of another, an operation that reinforces the inherent problem of reductivity and constraint. Another opens up the archetype too much, quickly making that definition useless for purposes of comparison and thus invalidating its purpose of identifying a particular ‘type.’ As Aguiar rightly points out, an archetype’s applicability to literature is not, nor can be, universal, because many male-authored female characters have little or no inner consciousness, the attribution of a feminine archetypal form becomes nearly impossible.¹⁵ Early literature in which Morgan plays a significant role lacks psychological depth, and only in recent works such as Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Mists of Avalon can she express an inner life and motives for her actions. For a literary character who does not conform to archetypes or dichotomous definitions, and who cannot be analyzed productively in Jungian terms, archetypes become an outmoded means of examination. When authors and critics attempt to confine this particular character to definitive categories, the need to escape them quickly becomes evident. Writers and critics thus need to move beyond the impulse to impose restrictive categorizations on Morgan’s character.

Working toward an Acceptance of Complexities and Contradictions

If Morgan cannot be made to fit a definition, or any definitions for that matter, a productive analysis of her appearances requires freedom from the kind of expectations created by binaries and archetypes. This study engages in such an analysis by examining specific works and scenes within these works where Morgan initially appears hemmed in by the critical or authorial impulse toward restriction and social constraint. For example, Morgan’s ‘presence in absence’ in early modern, Romantic, and Victorian works highlights those eras’ attempts, and failures, to dictate clearly a woman’s place in society. Yet even as her appearances or absences illustrate the concerns of each era, the many manifestations of Morgan continually evade and confound such reductive attempts at categorization, demonstrating the potential for more expansive, if not more imaginative, representations.

A study that maps out Morgan’s fluidity from early medieval through contemporary Arthurian sources requires a flexible theoretical approach, one compatible with the changeable nature of the subject. For such a study, New Medievalism, articulated by Stephen G. Nichols and others, provides the means to interrogate and reformulate assumptions about the discipline of medieval studies.¹⁶ Nichols argues that we should view the Middle Ages as a period that revels in improvisation even as it builds on and reveres a tradition, that endorses fluidity even as it cherishes fixed systems. New Medievalism is appropriate to my study in several interrelated ways. Because Morgan is a character who undergoes multiple and sometimes seemingly contradictory portrayals, there are both ‘disjunctions’ and ‘continuities’ in the way she is depicted (such as whether she possesses the power to heal and harm), and whether she is depicted at all in some literary epochs.¹⁷ Many authors seem to have taken liberties in adaptations of Morgan’s role, or some leave her out entirely. For this reason, she is an excellent subject for the interrogation of what is ‘known’ as well as for what is unknown. Emblematic of female power, Morgan literally represents the concept of the potential for representation; her ability to cross and/or blur boundaries, making them personally irrelevant while simultaneously illustrating the restrictions they place on others, is but one example. Only by moving beyond limited conceptions, by accepting multiple and new ‘modes of representation’ can we understand how well suited Morgan is to such an exploration. Her character invalidates preconceptions of woman’s place and troubles social and gender boundaries, in both medieval and postmedieval eras. The primary sources provide evidence that Morgan does not change from ‘good’ to ‘evil’ over time, but retains the potential for a range of representations right from the beginning. She is a shapeshifter, after all.

An Undefinition: The Shapeshifter

For the purpose of this study, the term ‘shapeshifter’ is both a denotative and a connotative term signaling Morgan’s ability to change ‘shape,’ to evade being shaped by others, and to manipulate the shape of others such as the knights with whom she interacts. In Malory, Morgan physically transforms herself and her retinue into stone to evade Arthur’s wrath, while in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Vita Merlini she changes her shape into that of a bird. These incidents suggest an earlier association with the Morrigan, a Celtic goddess who can become a black bird, and the loathly lady figure who alters her appearance from ugly to beautiful.

Morgan’s ability to change shape signifies her potential to evade and to resist the shape(s) that others—authors, critics, and characters—attempt to impose upon her, to use the expectations of others against them, and to move among, outside of, and around assumptions as necessary. Unlike some of the loathly lady characters whose shapes are changed by the curses of others, Morgan’s power in part comes from the fact that she always retains agency, choosing among multiple forms at will. As a marker of reform, she can also influence others to change their shapes, and so she often appears at points where a change or expansion of the limits of identity is required. In this sense, the shapeshifter metaphor is useful not only for examining Morgan, but also for exploring how her ability to elude constraint demonstrates, by comparison, how strict culturally determined definitions of identity inhibit other characters (such as knights) with whom she interacts. Morgan shapeshifts both literally and metaphorically as she confounds traditional social and gender expectations; her power in Arthurian literature is generated by that very agency. This study allows one to do for Morgan what society does not seem able to do for women in general: to remove her from the Eve/Ave dichotomy and allow her to be contradictory, inconsistent, and unclassifiable. But rather than imposing the ‘definition’ of shapeshifter on Morgan, this term opens up rather than closes down her ‘potential for representation’ and celebrates her indefinable nature.

To this end, chapter 1 examines four Latin sources—selections from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Vita Merlini, Etienne de Rouen’s Draco Normannicus, and Gerald of Wales’s De Principis and Speculum Ecclesiae—all of which appear to give rise to Morgan’s characterization as a benign healer, a characterization that scholars accept uncritically.¹⁸ But this simplistic view of Morgan is complicated and undermined both by the influence of Celtic mythology and folklore concerning goddesses and fairies, and by the Latin authors themselves whose roles as ecclesiastics and clients of the king influence their negative portrayals of the otherworld and its denizens.

Because Celtic thought features the ability to embrace seemingly contradictory aspects simultaneously, rather than viewing them as oppositional, Celtic goddesses like the Morrigan are multifarious. As a shapeshifter who protects, aids, and loves yet threatens, harms, and hates the traditional Irish hero Cuchulainn, the Morrigan has long been viewed as having a strong influence on the subsequent characterization of Morgan. Yet, Celtic sources are not the only precedents to consider; Roman goddesses such as Sulis, who presides over healing springs and concurrently is associated with disease also prefigure Morgan.

The interpretations generated by translations from Latin to English further contribute to Morgan’s complex portrayals. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Vita Merlini (ca. 1150), though most often used as evidence of Morgan’s benevolent portrayal in the Latin texts, also gives the most evidence for her indeterminacy through both Celtic and Roman influences and the ambiguity inherent in any translation. Morgan is depicted as a shapeshifter with the ability to fly, echoing descriptions of the Celtic Morrigan, who transforms into a black bird in accounts of her dealings with Cuchulainn. Ambiguity also appears in her role as healer, recalling other Celtic and Roman goddesses with power over life and death and suggesting Morgan’s potential to do harm as well as to provide remedy. Geoffrey’s phrasing implies not only Morgan’s ability to heal Arthur, but her coincident ability to injure him as well; the very line that describes Morgan’s willingness to attempt his recovery also hints at suffering and death. The Vita actually seems to reinforce Morgan’s range of abilities, adding facets to what has often been explained as a one-dimensional portrayal and laying the foundation for her complexity in later works.

Like the Vita, Etienne de Rouen’s Draco Normannicus (ca. 1168) opens the way to ambiguity. It claims none of the distance from the ‘fables’ that Gerald of Wales later attempts, accepting magical elements such as Morgan’s status as nymph and her ability to render Arthur immortal. Though this account initially appears benign, darker overtones emerge through associations with the motif of fairy retention of the hero in the Otherworld. Additionally, ambiguity is introduced when Arthur is made overlord to the English (and Christian) King Henry II, and lord of the Antipodes—a region with demonic associations.

Gerald of Wales mentions the episode twice: once in the Speculum Ecclesiae (ca. 1213) and again in De Instructione Principum (ca. 1223). Gerald’s partially Welsh heritage conflicts with his desire for advancement and patronage from the English king, resulting in a deep concern with his reputation for truth-telling. In the Speculum, Gerald allows for ambiguity when he undermines the very ‘truth’ he purports to tell by relating the Britons’ stories of the ‘fantastic goddess’ Morgan and of Arthur’s return after she heals his wounds. But by the time of his second work, tantalizing hints of immortality have been erased, leaving only the most benign of Morgan’s appearances; she seems a simple mortal healer with no supernatural powers.

Chapter 2 continues to draw upon Celtic ideas of the sovereignty goddess and the figure of the healer in the Latin sources as they influence the depiction of Morgan and her loathly lady / fairy mistress analogues in later medieval works such as Sir Launfal, the Vulgate and Post-Vulgate or the Lancelot-Grail cycle, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. From their location in the forest, Morgan and her ‘sisters,’ the loathly lady and fairy mistress, use their liminal status to challenge and expand upon conventional ideas about knightly identity and the influence of women. The setting allows these ladies to guide their pupils beyond the narrow confines of civilization to a place more representative of the complexities of ‘real’ life, as represented by uncontrollable and chaotic nature. When knights enter the forest, they encounter a kind of ‘wild condition’ that requires them to augment, and sometimes replace, their knowledge of courtly social norms with learning about the unpredictable realm beyond castle walls.¹⁹ Under the guise of the instructress, the influences of the wild man/woman, the fairy figure, and the loathly lady combine to form a picture of Morgan as the powerful, unpredictable feminine that destabilizes knightly identity and questions social expectations of both female and male behavior in Arthurian romance.

In the Vulgate and Post-Vulgate cycle, Morgan’s teachings focus on Lancelot.²⁰ She provides him with opportunities to become, literally, a knight ‘errant’ through wandering both geographically and within his own mind and identity. The forest changes, according to Morgan’s purpose, from an arena that tests Lancelot’s ability to keep his word not only to Morgan but also to himself and Guenevere, to both prison and refuge where Lancelot is able to reveal his ‘true’ identity as Guenevere’s lover, a fact that Morgan later reveals to Arthur.

In Thomas Chestre’s Sir Launfal, the Morgan-like fairy mistress Tryamour helps to invert and confuse the civilization vs. forest dichotomy.²¹ The forest provides Launfal with the lessons and rewards he does not receive from the king. Finding none of the community and respect he requires at court, Launfal meets with a fay woman in the forest who supplies these needs; when Launfal breaks the geis Tryamour places on him in return for her favor, her gracious forgiveness highlights the uncivilized behavior the court displays toward the knight. In confirmation of this, Launfal leaves the chivalric world to be with Tryamour, having learned the value of clemency that the court’s teachings could not provide.

Morgan’s appearance in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight has occasioned a great deal of critical discussion, due in large part to the ambiguity of her position in the poem: is she central, as the agent of Gawain’s lesson, or is she marginal, revealed as she is only at the end of the poem?²² Clues throughout the poem demonstrate her power, such as her ability to transform Bertilak, her honored position at Bertilak’s right hand, and the poet’s reference to her as ‘goddess.’ Morgan’s orchestration of Gawain’s lesson in humility demonstrates her ability to incorporate the elements of forest and court, as well as Christian and pagan value systems to demonstrate the need for adaptability. Her agency teaches him not to underestimate the power of women to provide important lessons that the court cannot—the need for humility and an understanding of the indeterminacy and unpredictability of the wider world that Morgan represents.

The English loathly lady tales and the German Parzival by Wolfram von Eschenbach also test a knight’s willingness to subject himself to a female order more complex than the orders of chivalry and court.²³ Partially indebted to the Irish Sovereignty Hag stories, as they are known, these tales illustrate a knight’s attempts to redeem himself through the power and knowledge of a woman who operates outside of stereotypical rules of behavior and conduct. Accepting her guidance causes the knight likewise to step outside those expectations; the ability to subject oneself to such ‘wildness’ signals the knight’s ability to adapt to new situations and think for himself. It also signals his ability to submit to female power in order to learn more about himself and his place in an ever-changing world. In each situation, a knight must leave the court for the forest in order to find a place to grow in ways that will make him both a better knight and a better human being; the unpredictable nature of the setting and its denizens, Morgan and her analogues, provide the challenges that enable this development.

The discussion of Morgan’s ability, in chapter 2, to move among categories and identities continues in chapter 3. In Malory, Morgan also challenges and enhances knightly identity, adding the role of political advisor, as she provides a means of examining what loyalty to a lord entails in Malory’s time, an era full of conflicts between the theory and practice of knighthood.²⁴ Though primarily a reworking of French sources, Malory’s Morte Darthur also seems to reflect the conflict engendered when strict ideals are complicated by disillusionment about the practice of chivalry in the late fifteenth century. By the time Malory composed his version of the Arthurian story, the code of knighthood that Geoffroi de Charny set forth a century earlier in his Livre de chevalerie, a code valuing loyalty to a knight’s lord, honor, and prowess had become increasingly difficult to achieve during the constantly shifting political climate of the War of the Roses.²⁵ Charny sets forth rules that are straightforward, unbending, and idealistic, while the Morte Darthur repeatedly evokes the difficulty of finding knightly identity in idealist principles while dealing with a world that falls short of those ideals.

Morgan’s purpose in the Morte Darthur is to serve as a critic of the idealistic expectations of the chivalric system and of the performance of knightly and kingly identity. She repeatedly attempts to force Arthur to see that his failure to address the treason of Lancelot and Guenevere’s affair harms his reputation as king and knight. This fault causes his followers to doubt the worth of their king, and by extension, the worth of their own identities as his representatives. Arthur’s willful blindness allows Lancelot to operate within two codes of conduct, attempting to maintain fealty to his king while remaining loyal to Guenevere. Accolon also benefits from Arthur’s myopia when his allegiance shifts from Arthur to Morgan. When Morgan manipulates Accolon into fighting Arthur unknowingly, Arthur spares him because of both Accolon’s ignorance and Morgan’s influence. Morgan’s imprisonment of Alexander, and her threat to his physical well-being and therefore to his ability to perform knightly duties demonstrates that he is more loyal to his own identity as knight than to Arthur himself. Alexander’s wounded state also serves as Morgan’s signal to Arthur of the weakness of his kingdom, paralleling as it does the weakened, blinded state that prevents the king from combating the treason that harms both his kingship and kingdom.

Cognizant of Arthur’s dishonored and fragile rule, the knights then divert the loyalty they rightly owe to Arthur to other activities, such as courtly love, while they conspire to hide Lancelot’s treason from the outside world in an attempt to protect their own reputations. Morgan’s actions reflect a concern over this fragmentation as she challenges both king and knights to repair the damage worsened by their injurious codependency.

Chapter 4 shows how echoes of Morgan’s character are still present in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Romantic and Victorian poetry such as Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, and the visual art of the Pre-Raphaelites.²⁶ Morgan’s complexity is both endorsed and undermined by ways in which contemporary paintings and poetry deal with the issues of their day, particularly when they address the place of women in society. Rather than draw on Morgan as depicted in earlier sources, authors often create new characters. Throughout these eras, Morgan’s attributes are distributed among several women, defusing the implied threat an independent woman might pose. The reasons for this are as complex as Morgan herself, but seem to stem in part from cultural anxiety about strong female monarchs such as Elizabeth and Victoria, both of whom upset traditional expectations for feminine behavior, social place, and power. Such unease is expressed through the creation of one-dimensional, allegorical, or archetypal female characters, an expression that reassigns these women to restricted roles. The Faerie Queene’s allegorical cast features a character named Argante, the same moniker that Layamon appended to his Morgan character earlier; Spenser’s Duessa is a shapeshifter who uses her feminine wiles on knights. All of these characters exhibit many of the same behaviors as Morgan does in Malory, yet her traits are distributed among several women, reducing their potential threat. Likewise, the Romantic era attempts to deal with the problem of dangerous women, this time by reducing them to the archetypal femme fatale. Morgan in Anne Bannerman’s Prophecy of Merlin (1802), for example, is characterized much like the fairy in John Keats’s La Belle Dame Sans Merci, a poem that evokes a simultaneous fascination and fear of powerful women, whose voracious love threatens to consume men.²⁷

In the Victorian era, the place of women was addressed through the Woman Question: should women be domestic angels, or should they advocate for rights and power of their own? Victorian characterizations of powerful women such as Morgan begin to dismantle this Angel of the House / fallen woman dichotomy, varying from the Romantic femme fatale archetype, to a defense of the maligned Morgan, to a refreshing acceptance of her and her analogues as polyvalent. Two poems by Madison J. Cawein show Morgan wielding sexual and magical power in the destruction of knights lured to her side, while T. K. Hervey’s Feasts of Camelot (1863) places a vindication of Morgan’s good name in the mouth of Guenevere (perhaps surprisingly given their traditional enmity).²⁸ Pre-Raphaelite artists such as Edward Burne-Jones view the powerful women they paint as outside human constraints and celebrate them as forces of nature. Tennyson’s revamped Vivien in Idylls of the King shies away from such recognition, however, by substituting Vivien for Morgan despite their strong similarities. Anxiety about the power of women is managed through control of a one-dimensional character who is once again dismissed when she takes up Morgan’s role of revealing the faults of Arthur and his court.

Although the feminine characters in these eras tend to be crafted in severely reductive terms, little more than conventional femme fatales or Angels of the House, they are also stubbornly suggestive of Morgan’s complexity. While Morgan le Fay does not appear as a complex character, continuity remains in analogues who are granted recognizable aspects of her multifaceted persona. The power of female characters may be dispersed, but Morgan’s many manifestations lurk just beneath the surface.

Chapter 5 examines Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and three