The loathly lady is a stock character ...
Characteristics edit
In its basest form, the story of the loathly lady involves a knight who, under punishment of death, must discover what women desire most in the world. While searching for the answer, he encounters a hag, who agrees to reveal the truth to him if he marries her. After the wedding, she offers him a choice: to remain old and ugly but faithful, or to transform into a beautiful, young, but adulterous maiden. Having been told that women desire sovereignty above all, the knight turns the question back on the hag, and by giving her mastery of her own fate, he allows her to become both young and faithful.[1]
- Nobility
- A forest setting
- Transformation
- The teaching of a lesson
Origins edit
Irish and Norse mythology edit
- Niall
- Diarmuid
- Hrólfs saga kraka
- Hjálmþés saga ok Ölvis
- The Laidly Worm of Spindleston Heugh
Chivalric romance edit
In the Middle Ages, the loathly lady appeared in various chivalric romances, particularly Arthuriana. The four best-known medieval derivatives of the original Irish texts are Geoffrey Chaucer's "The Wife of Bath's Tale", the anonymous 15th-century manuscript The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle, the Arthurian ballad "The Marriage of Sir Gawain", and the "Tale of Florent" in john Gower's Confessio Amantis.[2] The similarities and differences among these four popular versions indicate that the loathly lady was a traditional story, either told orally or whose manuscripts have been lost, that was independently interpreted by the different authors, although there is some indication that the author of the Wedding borrowed from Chaucer and Gower.[3]
- Gingalain
- The Awntyrs off Arthure
- Holy Grail (de Troyes, Wolfram von Eschenbach, Mabinogion)
- "King Henry"
The shapeshifting character of Duessa from Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene can be seen as an inversion of the earlier loathly lady stories. Rather than a beacon of sovereignty, Duessa represents what Spenser perceived as the dangers of Irish sovereigny, and she must suffer defeat for the glory of England.[4]
Chaucer's Canterbury Tales edit
Many of the retold narratives in Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales derive at least in part from Arthurian romance, with The Wife of Bath's Tale serving as a retelling of the loathly lady story. Chaucer's narrative most closely aligns with the works of Gower, with further inspiration from The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle and "The Marriage of Sir Gawain".[5] The narrator makes one fundamental change to the text: the impetus for the knight's misfortune is his rape of a young maiden, and the punishment levied upon him by Guinevere, who gives the now-anonymous knight one year to find what women desire most in the world. A hag offers to give him the answer, thus sparing his life, in exchange for marriage.[5]
Interpretations edit
Within Chaucer's tale, the loathly lady serves primarily to victimize the knight-rapist, helping him to understand the role in which he placed his own victim.[6]: 74 To the knight, the prospect of consummating his marriage to the crone is on par with the rape that he committed, and he begins to barter his less valuable possessions in the name of protecting that which he holds closest, his personhood.[6]: 74 In addition to forcing the knight to feel his own victimization, the loathly lady uses her dual status as a beautiful, unfaithful maiden versus an aged but loyal crone to highlight two major social inequities: gender is the most obvious, but she also comments on the undue status placed on the wealthy and high-class in Chaucer's time.[6]: 74–75
In modern culture edit
There are a few direct adaptations of the loathly lady story in modern popular culture, such as Marguerite Merington's 1913 play The Testing of Sir Gawayne and Richard Blackford's 1984 opera Gawain and Ragnell.[7]
The Irish Literary Revival resurrected a number of archetypal figures found in Celtic mythology, including the sovereignty goddess. Rather than maintaining her shapeshifting nature, however, revivalist writers instead divided the goddess into a beautiful young woman, symbolizing the embodiment of ancient Ireland, and a separate, less popular hag.[8] The archetype of the loathly lady appears in the works of James Joyce, particularly A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. The character of Stephen Dedalus, in addition to making direct references to both the loathly lady story and the sovereignty goddess, encounters Gaptooth Kathleen in a similar quest for knowledge and artistic fulfillment.[9]
Characters evoking the tropes of the loathly lady can also be found in contemporary children's film. The fairy godmother in Disney's live-action Cinderella (2015), for instance, transforms from a haggard old woman to a younger, more opulently-dressed magician when she first appears to Ella.[10] Even more indicative of the loathly lady trope in contemporary cinema is the character of Princess Fiona in the Shrek film franchise. Initially portrayed as a classically beautiful young woman, Fiona is under a curse that transforms her into an ogre every night. When the curse is broken, however, Fiona does not revert back to the maiden, but becomes entirely ogre.[11]
See also edit
References edit
- ^ Garry, Jane; El-Shamy, Hasan, eds. (2005). Archetypes and Motifs in Folklore and Literature: A Handbook. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe. p. 130. ISBN 0-7656-1260-7. Retrieved December 13, 2021.
- ^ Bollard, John K. (1986). "Sovereignty and the Loathly Lady in English, Welsh and Irish". Leeds Studies in English. 17: 41–59. Retrieved December 13, 2021.
- ^ Norris, Ralph (Summer 2009). "Sir Thomas Malory and The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell Reconsidered". Arthuriana. 19 (2): 82–102. Retrieved December 13, 2021.
- ^ Carter, Susan (November 2005). "Duessa: Spenser's Loathly Lady". Cahiers Élisabéthains: A Journal of English Renaissance Studies. 68 (1): 9–18. doi:10.7227/CE.68.1.3. Retrieved December 13, 2021.
- ^ a b Wurtele, Douglas J. (Fall 1987). "Chaucer's Wife of Bath and her distorted Arthurian motifs". Arthurian Interpretations. 2 (1): 47-61. Retrieved December 13, 2021.
- ^ a b c Biebel, Elizabeth M. (1998). "A Wife, a Batterer, a Rapist: Representations of 'Masculinity' in the Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale". In Beidler, Peter G. (ed.). Masculinities in Chaucer: Approaches to Maleness in the Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde. Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer. pp. 63–75. ISBN 0-85991-434-8. Retrieved January 10, 2022.
- ^ Gerritsen, Willem P.; van Melle, Anthony G. (1998). A Dictionary of Medieval Heroes. Translated by Tanis Guest. Woodbridge, UK: The Boydell Press. p. 119. ISBN 0-85115-780-7. Retrieved December 17, 2021.
- ^ Tymoczko, Maria (1994). The Irish Ulysses. Los Angeles and Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. p. 101. ISBN 0-520-08027-0. Retrieved December 13, 2021.
- ^ Heiniger, Abigail (Winter 2012). "'The Supreme Question': Gratifying the Loathly Lady in James Joyce's Ulysses". James Joyce Quarterly. 49 (2): 315–334. Retrieved December 13, 2021.
- ^ King, Sally (2019). "New Shoes, Old Paths: Disney's Cinderella(s)". In Hermansson, Casie; Zepernick, Janet (eds.). The Palgrave Handbook of Children's Film and Television. Cham, CH: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 111–129. ISBN 978-3-030-17619-8. Retrieved December 17, 2021.
- ^ Kelly, Kathleen Coyne (2012). "The Medieval Entertainment Channel: The Shrek Quartet". In Ashton, Gail; Kline, Dan (eds.). Medieval Afterlives in Popular Culture. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 203–218. ISBN 978-0-230-33734-3. Retrieved December 17, 2021.