I love Arthurian legend, the basis for "courtly love" which the article refers to as "Arthurian" chivalry or "loverboy" chivalry. Courtly love was essentially invented by Eleanor of Aquitaine, inspired by the troubadour culture of the south of France, cultivated by her grandfather Duke William of Aquitaine. Queen Eleanor founded the "courts of love" in which great ladies would play lawyers and debate the highly romanticized and highly idealized manners and general behavior of their knighted admirers. It allowed women to hold forth upon matters of deportment and courtesy as well as discussing poems,songs and ballads. The bottom line was the respect and reverence which noble men were expected to show to noble ladies. It gave agency to women in an era of arranged marriages, when people did not marry for love. Women of all classes could be beaten by their husbands and mistreated in any number of ways. There was always the danger of both men and women finding love outside of marriage. Courtly culture acknowledged that such forbidden love happened but channeled it into chaste manifestations, because when actual adultery occurred it could lead to war, imprisonment or corporal punishment, depending upon the rank of the lady and her husband. Not a Christian ideal but then many think it was influenced by the Cathars, as I explore in my novel The Night's Dark Shade. From The Chivalry Guild Letters:
Carolingian chivalry is the essentially French version, and its mythos is the chansons de geste (“songs of great deeds”) involving Charlemagne and his paladins—the most famous of which is The Song of Roland.
Carolingianism is about war and God. It is the chivalry, Gautier
writes, of the “11th and 12th centuries—that of the crusades, that of
our [epic poetry]. It will appear rude and barbarous to some people, but
in truth is strong and healthy, and has formed for us the powerful race
whose glory has filled the world.” Roland and company don’t have much
time for the finer points of etiquette and don’t dedicate themselves to
idealized romantic love; they are too busy fighting Saracens and
protecting Christian civilization.
As for the more popular Arthurian or English chivalry, Gautier has less fond things to say. He writes:
The
romance of the Round Table spread amongst us the taste for a less wild
but also a less manly chivalry. The elegancies of love in them occupied
the place formally reserved for the brutality of war and the spirit of
adventure in them extinguished the spirit of the crusades. One will
never know how much harm this cycle of the Round Table inflicted on us.
It’s civilized us no doubt; but effeminated us. It took away from us our
old aim, which was the tomb of Christ gained by blood in battle. For
the austerities of the Supernatural it substituted the tinsel of the
Marvelous. It is to this dangerous but charming literature that we owe
for theatrical, the boastful, rash chivalry which proves so fatal during
the Thirty Years’ War.
This kind of chivalry also
gives birth to the satires of Cervantes and company, which aren’t making
fun of paladins defending Christendom but instead the errant knights
roaming the countryside looking for damsels to rescue. “And we must
confess,” Gautier notes, “that some complaints of the great satirist are
not without foundation.” (Read more.)
From Becoming Noble:
Modern discourse offers only impoverished models for women. Feminism
dismantled an older understanding of womanhood without replacing it with
a sustainable alternative. It treats the household as a prison,
motherhood as an obstacle to self-realisation, and the virtues
historically cultivated by women as instruments of oppression.
Ironically, in so doing, it foreclosed many of the domains by which
women wielded substantial influence over civilization.
The
reaction is equally impoverished despite its superficial conservatism.
The trad-wife thing, to take the obvious example, is a performance of
homemaking that lacks any serious theological or historical foundation.
It reduces womanhood to a visual display of domestic labour, detached
from the actual structures of authority, education, and spiritual
responsibility that characterised the aristocratic household. At bottom,
it is a reaction to feminism conducted on feminism’s own materialist
terms.
The home-schooling mother model
is a significant improvement but still shares a visceral and fatal
error which precludes its wider adoption. These approaches treat the
domestic as something small. None advances the majesty of the Christian
aristocratic tradition: that the household is the foundational unit of
civilisation, that its proper ordering is a matter of cosmic
significance, and that the woman who presides over it wields a form of
distinct and profound authority. (Read more.)
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as a young person I found it dark and shocking, especially Blanche's proclivities which result in her utter destruction. All I could see was the crazy, drunken old slut; it was quite unappealing. It still is. However, now I am better able to see Blanche as she had once been. I can see the sweet and refined person whose mental and emotional stamina were destroyed by trying to hold onto her patrimony, without any help from anyone. (Stella was too busy romping with Stanley to save Belle Reve or take care of the dying old folks.) I can see the heartbroken wife who gradually awoke to the horror that her marriage was not really a marriage. I pity the fact that the shattered Blanche sought to ease her pain by adopting a promiscuous lifestyle, as have many before and after. In Blanche's case being a sexually "liberated" woman resulted in the further fraying of her psyche; I daresay the same thing has happened to other liberated women as well. All may not end up in the mental hospital, but a little of the soul dies and one's human dignity is tarnished by taking refuge in hedonism.
