Wounded Masculinity: Injury and Gender in Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur

Abstract

Wounded Masculinity:Injury and Gender in Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur Kenneth Hodges In gender studies, critics frequently postulate a masculine ideal of suave and potent invulnerability and then demonstrate how the male characters in question inevitably fall short of it. Bryce Traister has offered a thorough critique of this tendency in American studies, arguing that the focus on "transcendent" masculinity obscures study of "competent" masculinity—ideas of manliness as they are actually practiced.1 Unfortunately, the same tendency can be seen in medieval studies. While invulnerability and easy power may be fantasies for individual men, these daydreams do not reflect the more realistic ideals of manhood expressed in a work such as Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur. Even the best of Arthur's knights are frequently injured in battle, needing time, help, and protection as they recuperate. Malory does not treat these wounds as failures to achieve a dream of inviolate masculinity; instead, injuries are integral to masculinity as it is practiced and celebrated. Wounds not only provide meaning to knightly combats but also educate young knights. They also provide part of the basis for community, as knights errant bond with their healers or return to their companions and courts for healing. Thus, although obviously not desirable in and of themselves, the wounds are necessary for the narrative and part of the chivalric ideal of manhood. To explain adequately the role that wounds play in constructing masculine identities and communities, we must abandon the idea that knighthood depends on "a construct of masculinity as whole and inviolate"2 [End Page 14] (with the corollary that injuries feminize men). Instead, Andrew Lynch's recognition that "wounds are noble"3 needs to be developed further. In particular, if masculinity is understood as intrinsically vulnerable, how is male vulnerability differentiated from female weakness? Why do women get treated as the vulnerable class, assigned special protections in the Round Table oath, when men are literally far more vulnerable? Wounds do not mark failures in the effort to be knightly. Although each wound might be said to result from a failure to ward a blow properly, the inevitability of this happening some times even to the best knights means knights had to deal with the fact that they would be hurt. Medieval sources testify to the thorough understanding that being injured was an essential part of knighthood, even for the best knights. Geoffroi de Charny, when he compares knighthood to religious orders, emphasizes the injuries that knights regularly suffer.4 Likewise, Margery Kempe uses knights as seeming commonplace images of bodily pain and penance.5 Malory's Gawain unwisely makes a similar argument in the Grail quest: "I may do no penaunce, for we knyghtes adventures many tymes suffir grete woo and payne."6 Gawain is a formidable knight, and yet he automatically assumes that knights will be injured. Indeed, the only knight in Le Morte Darthur that seems to escape without serious injury is Galahad.7 These celebrations of knightly suffering as admirable penance mean that injury was not simply a messy historical fact edited out of the [End Page 15] romanticized ideal of knighthood; instead, the ideal of masculinity that chivalric texts celebrate is one that includes being wounded regularly. This fits not only with the historical realities of knighthood but also with the needs of narrative. Elaine Scarry's analysis of combat, although focusing on large-scale war between modern nations, shows why injury is necessary to create meaningful battles. She describes war as a contest in which "each side works to bring the other side to its perceived level of intolerable injury faster than it is itself brought to its own level of intolerable injury."8 Since each side decides for itself what level of injury is considered intolerable, the damage of the fight is an index to how committed the sides are to the issues being fought for: an issue one is willing to die for is judged far more important than a matter that one yields for fear of a bruise. The injuries sustained give weight and worth to the abstract issues being fought about: they visually announce that the issue was so important...

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