Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur and Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Professor’s comment: This student uses a feminist approach to shift our value judgment of two works in a surprisingly thought-provoking way. After showing how female seduction in Malory’s story of King Arthur is crucial to the story as a whole, the student follows with an equally serious analysis of Monty Python’s parody of the female seduction motif in what may be the most memorable and hilarious episode of the film.
Much of the humor in Monty Python and the Holy Grail derives from the pure absurdity of its characters and situations. King Arthur roams the British countryside on an imaginary horse, evil enemies can only be appeased with offerings of shrubbery, and the knights of the Round Table battle a bloodthirsty killer bunny, to cite just a few examples. The movie contains a great deal of such explicit comedy, but much of its humor works on a more subtle level, plot and dialogue shrewdly satirizing the unjustness of such Arthurian conventions as autocracy, severe social class distinctions, and vainglorious codes of chivalry. The movie also pokes fun at the rather demeaning view of women in traditional Arthurian legend. In Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur women primarily serve as figures of sexual temptation who bring great danger and suffering to the men that interact with them. Monty Python and the Holy Grail,on the other hand, satirizes the idea of the destructive temptress and presents women characters in a manner that undercuts this negative Arthurian stereotype.
In Malory’s famous account of the King Arthur legend, the most notable example of woman as destructive sexual temptation is, of course, Queen Guinevere. Sir Lancelot’s affair wi...
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..., then, Monty Python and the Holy Grail challenges many of the Arthurian conventions that modern audiences consider outmoded and unjust. With their clever exploitation of the role of Arthurian women, Monty Python rebukes the idea of women as manipulative seductresses and effectively exposes the shallowness of this Arthurian stereotype. And on top of all this cultural enlightenment, they still manage to give their audience a good laugh along the way.
Works Cited
American Heritage Dictionary, 2nd College Edition, 1982.
Malory, Thomas. King Arthur and His Knights: Selected Tales by Sir Thomas Malory, ed. Eugene Vinaver (London: Oxford UP, 1975) 124-25.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Dir. Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones. Perf. Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin. Columbia Pictures Home Entertainment, 1975.
Sir Gawain and The Green Knight is an example of medieval misogyny. Throughout Medieval literature, specifically Arthurian legends like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the female characters, Guinevere, the Lady, and Morgan leFay are not portrayed as individuals but social constructs of what a woman should be. Guinevere plays a passive woman, a mere token of Arthur. The Lady is also a tool, but has an added role of temptress and adulteress. Morgan leFay is the ultimate conniving, manipulating, woman. While the three women in this legend have a much more active role than in earlier texts, this role is not a positive one; they are not individuals but are symbols of how men of this time perceive women as passive tokens, adulteresses, and manipulators.
Eliza Haywood’s Fantomina focuses on an unnamed woman who seduces Beauplaisir several times, using stratagems that on first glance consist of wearing disguises and taking on a new identity. I argue that each of the heroine’s stratagems go beyond simply allowing her to pretend to be something other than she is by giving her agency when it comes to romance and letting her pursue her sexual desires in a time where honor means everything. However, her stratagems are so successful in playing on the perceptions and desires of Beuaplaisir because they appear to give this control to Beauplaisir, making him seem the ‘mastermind’ romancer of ‘many’ women.
In the romances of the Middle Ages, and in most of today’s genres, sexuality is never explicitly illustrated. To avoid graphic images, authors have used flowery language or intense innuendo to portray sexuality. Just like today’s readers, audiences from the Middle Ages wanted ‘the guy to get the girl’. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a satire for the aristocrats of the Middle Ages; when audiences expect romantic and sexual interactions between the Lord and the Lady, the author does not deliver. Sexuality is shaken up and put into different, unexpected places in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. For example, the anticipated relationship between a man and a woman appears not in the encounters between the Lady and Gawain, but in the Lord’s
This essay uses a contemporary short film and an 18th century text to discuss Chatman's concern of bestimmtheit in films. I hope to address certain concerns such as the extent to which a film can "specify" a particular object and what this specification does with regards to our understanding of the text. In addition, I will relate the compression of information into imagery to the limitations of time, given that a short film has a limit of 15 minutes. To do this, I shall analyse the cinematography of the short film, and show how relevant they are in bringing out certain scenarios described in Defoe's text. The short film in question is The Periwig-Maker, a clay-animated film directed by Stephen Schaeffler and narrated by actor Kenneth Brannagh, and it will be analysed with relation to the text it is based on, A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe.
Although some of the story may be based on truth, majority of the film is told through the perspective of the filmmaker. And as our lecture points out, the films manipulate film form to communicate that interpretation to the viewer.
The narrative opens with a holiday feast in King Arthur’s court. The richness of this setting is represented by the decorations surrounding Queen Guenevere described in lines 76-80. “With costly silk curtains, a canopy over,/ Of Toulouse and Turkestan tapestries rich/ All broidered and bordered with the best gems/ Ever brought into Britain, with bright pennies/ to pay.” These lines also symbolize the queen’s role in the poem of a stately symbol of chivalric Camelot and as a female ideal. In this setting women are all around, but Guenevere is positioned above them and is surrounded by expensive, beautiful things. She is clearly made superior.
Gray, Hugh. What is Cinema? selected and translated from the first two volumes of Qu'est ce que le cinéma? . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967.
Sir Gawain and the Green knight, one of the fourteenth century Middle English alliterative romances told a story of a beheading game which was used to highlight the importance of honor, chivalry and masculinity. The poem, being one of the Arthurian stories, introduced the character of Morgan le Fay who sets the story in motion (by sending the green knight) by wanting to humiliate Arthur’s court and frighten his wife Guinevere. Morgan Le fay’s Character set a story that survived years and is still revered to be one of the best poems. In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Morgan le Fay redefines how masculinity is viewed during the Arthurian period.
In the development of the narrative every event is motivated, i.e. follows a causal relationship. In the same way the use of cinematic style is generally motivated by the narrative. The connection between narrative and cinematic style is highly conventional. Due to the dominance of the style viewers come to expect certain stylistic choices for certain narrative situations. For example if you have a hostage situation there will invariably be a cross-cutting between the rescuers and the hostage. All of the above results in what Bordwell has called "an excessively obvious cinema,". in that it follows a set of norms, paradigms, and standards that match and gratify viewers expectations (Film Art, 2008). In other words by the end of a classical Hollywood film answers for all questions have been provided and one doesn’t leave the cinema perplexed and startled as one would after some New Hollywood films or European Art films. From an ideological perspective, these practices discourage viewers critical inquiry of any particular film as well as the underlying practices of mainstream cinema in general. Although the authors do not support the anti-humanist arguments of theorists who applied the concept of interpellationto cinematic spectatorship, their conclusions in fact provide strong evidence for at least a serious consideration of interpellation and the power of classical Hollywood
...ow, library has long tradition of resources sharing and networking which the nature shows how the information sharing happened. Going beyond explicit knowledge, libraries needs to develop a website portal that serves sources of selective and relevant knowledge and information whether on site or remote, and in all formats. Library and archives in the future may consider three publishing models for digital archiving formats such as :
In the Middle Ages, the roles of women became less restricted and confined and women became more opinionated and vocal. Sir Gawain and The Green Knight presents Lady Bertilak, the wife of Sir Bertilak, as a woman who seems to possess some supernatural powers who seduces Sir Gawain, and Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Wife of Bath Prologue and Tale, present women who are determined to have power and gain sovereignty over the men in their lives. The female characters are very openly sensual and honest about their wants and desires. It is true that it is Morgan the Fay who is pulling the strings in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; nevertheless the Gawain poet still gives her a role that empowers her. Alison in The Wife if Bath Prologue represents the voice of feminism and paves the way for a discourse in the relationships between husbands and wives and the role of the woman in society.
Challenging gender roles has been an arduous task. As Virginia Woolf notes, “For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.” The structure of history, particularly that of war, has placed women as useless in comparison to men and as having no purpose beyond pleasing their partner. Euripides, for example, places women in the aftermath of the Trojan War as helpless in the face of the victors. Moreover, Macawen’s adaptation of the tragedy Trojan Women and Evans’ Trojan Barbie both discuss the docile attitude of women after a period of war. Aristotle signals diction and plot, two of the six parts of tragedy, which interprets events through the language and the actions that take place. Through the use of diction and plot, both Macewen and Trojan Women and Trojan Barbie, both Macawen and Evans challenge gender roles through the character of Helen, shows she will do whatever it takes to survive an atmosphere of male dictated war.
As a man fascinated with the role of women during the 14th Century, or most commonly known as the Middle Ages, Chaucer makes conclusive evaluations and remarks concerning how women were viewed during this time period. Determined to show that women were not weak and humble because of the male dominance surrounding them, Chaucer sets out to prove that women were a powerful and strong-willed gender. In order to defend this argument, the following characters and their tales will be examined: Griselda from the Clerk's Tale, and the Wife of Bath, narrator to the Wife of Bath's Tale. Using the role of gender within the genres of the Canterbury Tales, exploring each woman's participation in the outcomes of their tales, and comparing and contrasting these two heroines, we will find out how Chaucer broke the mold on medievalist attitudes toward women.
Grimm, Kevin T. “Knightly Love and the Narrative Structure of Malory’s Tale Seven.” Arthurian Interpretations, vol. 3, no. 2, 1989, pp. 76–95. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/27868661.
According to Mazumder, Sultana and Al-Mamun (2013), lack of tourism strategies in some member countries against others reflects lack of integration and implementation that hinder progress. This has resulted in an imbalance in tourism development with some countries showing insufficient for example Laos and Myanmar while others like Malaysia and Singapore show prosperity. Due to the significant changes equally experienced in the developing areas (Telfer & Sharpley, 2008), member countries need to take initiatives like emphasizing and focusing on alternative tourism forms including ecotourism, sustainable tourism, pro-poor tourism, and community-based tourism (CBT) – all of which ultimately aim at generating more beneficial development for local populations (Reid, 2003) and hence a promoting a uniform development between members. Alternative tourism is used as a strategy by countries like Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia. This has initiated the participation of communities through community-based-tourism to increase