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bloodygranuaileLately I have been generally In A Weird Mood so I decided to continue my Arthuriana kick by tackling a book I have been vaguely intending to read for decades, but have been hesitant to pick up for the past 8 years or so: Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon. Bradley has been dead for 20 years and I acquired my copy because a friend was throwing his away, so no money has gone to Bradley (obviously) or whoever is running her estate. It’s hard to get excited about reading a book by someone who committed child abuse, even if they are dead. But The Mists of Avalon was A Really Big Deal in the world of Arthuriana and in fantasy writing generally, and until quite recently it was especially considered a really big deal specifically as a feminist work, and I wanted to see for myself what the big deal was.
And I can see why it was a big deal, because the book is magnificent. It is not fun or uplifting or girl-power-y and I no longer particularly like to go anywhere near the word “empowering,” but I don’t think it’s that in quite the way people tend to use it these days, but it is magnificent. At nearly 900 pages long, with teeny text and written entirely in a ‘80s-understanding-of-formal-Dark-Ages-style, it’s slow going for a fantasy novel by my standards–I can usually zip through 500 pages of fiction in a weekend these days if I don’t have much else to do, so 900 ought to only take three days of reading or so, right?--and it’s incredibly dark and fucked up, full of dubious ‘80s understandings of Dark Ages life and religion.
Morgaine, half-sister to King Arthur, is our protagonist but not really our hero; not only do we know she’s going to fail, but the story is predominantly an exploration of her consistently making bad choices that seemed to make sense at the time that mire her deeper and deeper into a self-created landscape of ruin and isolation as she, in short, gets everyone she’s ever loved killed, either accidentally or on purpose. Morgause, Morgaine’s aunt, is a power-hungry schemer, but also seems nice enough in her own way until she sort of wanders down the path of becoming a casual serial murderer as well. The various priestesses of Avalon become increasingly vicious, and brutal plotters against Arthur and anyone else in their way as they–quite understandably–seek to prevent the old religion from being wiped out by the Christian religion and its dedicatedly woman-hating priests.
Most of the Christians also suck, with Queen Gwenhwyfar being one of the worst–also a major viewpoint character, Gwenhwyfar is sometimes sympathetic, but is also a piously self-hating Christian fanatic. Her internal torment and self-hatred about her love for Lancelot does absolutely nothing to make her any less intolerant toward anyone else who fails to live up to the standards of sexual purity that she doesn’t live up to herself; she’s overtly nasty to anyone who follows or even tolerates any aspects of the old religion and constantly pushes Arthur to wage holy war against it; and she’s flatly bigoted against anyone with physical deformities, with apparently no idea whatsoever that this constitutes a character flaw about which she might want to at least try to keep her fucking mouth shut. But I guess when you’re the High Queen of Britain you’re allowed to just constantly insult people’s appearance and everyone around you has to consider you kind and gracious anyway? Idunno, I know the characters in this book are working off different moral codes than me but it really struck me how much all the other female characters sneak around to do evil things but Gwenhwyfar is just openly a huge bitch without provocation on a regular basis, and yet whatever other criticisms the other characters have of her, everyone seems to think she’s nice.
There are two different Merlin characters–”the Merlin of Britain” is a title here, not a name, like the Lady of the Lake–and both are advocates of a sort of “all religions are really one religion anyway” assimilationist path that sounds really tolerant and high-minded if you ignore that a) the Christians are absolutely not going to go for it and b) the practical effects of this sort of acquiescence-masquerading-as-syncretism will fall a lot harder on the women than on the men, and the Merlins, however dedicated to the Goddess they consider themselves, are still men, and can get away with more than the priestesses under Christian rule. The machinations of the Merlins and their attempts to play both sides end up driving a lot of the conflict between the forces of Avalon and the forces of Christianity. Both Merlins are very annoying, but then again, most characters in this book are annoying. It’s not a book you read to personally like anyone.
The sexual content is pretty dark and fucked up too, and it is here that it is hardest to even temporarily put aside in one’s brain that Bradley enabled her husband’s pedophilia. Parts of the book speak eloquently about the injustice of selling off teenage girls in marriage to men much older than them, and how this alienates girls from their own sexuality to the point where some characters are surprised, after many years of marriage, to discover that they have one. Lancelet, the greatest and knightliest of all of Arthur’s great knights, is tortured-ly bisexual and at one point he and Arthur and Gwenhwyfar have a threesome, which I think is supposed to be shocking, although–while I certainly found it a bit surprising that it was included in the book–it is one of the less creepy encounters in the entire 900 pages. Morgaine is nearly as obnoxiously self-serving and hypocritical in her thoughts on sex and religion as the pious adulteress Gwenhwyfar is; she is constantly drawing a distinction between the Goddess-given magical rites of sexuality and mere “animal rutting,” but the distinction doesn’t seem to have any actual criteria other than how she feels about it, and is mostly invoked based on whether or not she wants to be contemptuous about any given encounter. (IMO, Morgaine’s religious snobbery around sexuality–and, frankly, the sacramentalization of sexuality in a lot of these New Agey religions that Bradley was part of and their noble-savage-y understanding of ancient fertility cults–is more of a mirror to the Christian priests’ obsession with sexual purity than she thinks.) Morgaine, frankly, is a great protagonist because she is a fascinating psychological study in being very active and scheming but somehow never taking any responsibility for her own actions, because she is smart enough and philosophical enough to rationalize doing whatever she wants to do and then convincingly tell herself that she had no choice when it turns out badly.
Reading this book was a deeply strange experience. When I was reading it I couldn’t put it down, but frankly, often once I’d put it down I’d hesitate to pick it back up. I wish I’d read it ten years ago before we knew what we know now about its author, so that I could have just read the damn book, instead of also testing my ability to read a book as just the book when the author is a) terrible and b) safely dead. Anyway I think I’m glad I read it, even though I have mixed feelings about having found it to be such a powerful book, and I don’t think I’ll be rereading it anytime soon (or ever).
While there’s more Arthuriana to be read, the last one sitting on my TBR shelf in hard copy right now is an antique-looking edition of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Mort d’Arthur. According to his Wikipedia page Malory might also have been a rapist, but at least it’s unconfirmed that that’s even the right Thomas Malory. I’m getting very tired of learning things about authors.
And I can see why it was a big deal, because the book is magnificent. It is not fun or uplifting or girl-power-y and I no longer particularly like to go anywhere near the word “empowering,” but I don’t think it’s that in quite the way people tend to use it these days, but it is magnificent. At nearly 900 pages long, with teeny text and written entirely in a ‘80s-understanding-of-formal-Dark-Ages-style, it’s slow going for a fantasy novel by my standards–I can usually zip through 500 pages of fiction in a weekend these days if I don’t have much else to do, so 900 ought to only take three days of reading or so, right?--and it’s incredibly dark and fucked up, full of dubious ‘80s understandings of Dark Ages life and religion.
Morgaine, half-sister to King Arthur, is our protagonist but not really our hero; not only do we know she’s going to fail, but the story is predominantly an exploration of her consistently making bad choices that seemed to make sense at the time that mire her deeper and deeper into a self-created landscape of ruin and isolation as she, in short, gets everyone she’s ever loved killed, either accidentally or on purpose. Morgause, Morgaine’s aunt, is a power-hungry schemer, but also seems nice enough in her own way until she sort of wanders down the path of becoming a casual serial murderer as well. The various priestesses of Avalon become increasingly vicious, and brutal plotters against Arthur and anyone else in their way as they–quite understandably–seek to prevent the old religion from being wiped out by the Christian religion and its dedicatedly woman-hating priests.
Most of the Christians also suck, with Queen Gwenhwyfar being one of the worst–also a major viewpoint character, Gwenhwyfar is sometimes sympathetic, but is also a piously self-hating Christian fanatic. Her internal torment and self-hatred about her love for Lancelot does absolutely nothing to make her any less intolerant toward anyone else who fails to live up to the standards of sexual purity that she doesn’t live up to herself; she’s overtly nasty to anyone who follows or even tolerates any aspects of the old religion and constantly pushes Arthur to wage holy war against it; and she’s flatly bigoted against anyone with physical deformities, with apparently no idea whatsoever that this constitutes a character flaw about which she might want to at least try to keep her fucking mouth shut. But I guess when you’re the High Queen of Britain you’re allowed to just constantly insult people’s appearance and everyone around you has to consider you kind and gracious anyway? Idunno, I know the characters in this book are working off different moral codes than me but it really struck me how much all the other female characters sneak around to do evil things but Gwenhwyfar is just openly a huge bitch without provocation on a regular basis, and yet whatever other criticisms the other characters have of her, everyone seems to think she’s nice.
There are two different Merlin characters–”the Merlin of Britain” is a title here, not a name, like the Lady of the Lake–and both are advocates of a sort of “all religions are really one religion anyway” assimilationist path that sounds really tolerant and high-minded if you ignore that a) the Christians are absolutely not going to go for it and b) the practical effects of this sort of acquiescence-masquerading-as-syncretism will fall a lot harder on the women than on the men, and the Merlins, however dedicated to the Goddess they consider themselves, are still men, and can get away with more than the priestesses under Christian rule. The machinations of the Merlins and their attempts to play both sides end up driving a lot of the conflict between the forces of Avalon and the forces of Christianity. Both Merlins are very annoying, but then again, most characters in this book are annoying. It’s not a book you read to personally like anyone.
The sexual content is pretty dark and fucked up too, and it is here that it is hardest to even temporarily put aside in one’s brain that Bradley enabled her husband’s pedophilia. Parts of the book speak eloquently about the injustice of selling off teenage girls in marriage to men much older than them, and how this alienates girls from their own sexuality to the point where some characters are surprised, after many years of marriage, to discover that they have one. Lancelet, the greatest and knightliest of all of Arthur’s great knights, is tortured-ly bisexual and at one point he and Arthur and Gwenhwyfar have a threesome, which I think is supposed to be shocking, although–while I certainly found it a bit surprising that it was included in the book–it is one of the less creepy encounters in the entire 900 pages. Morgaine is nearly as obnoxiously self-serving and hypocritical in her thoughts on sex and religion as the pious adulteress Gwenhwyfar is; she is constantly drawing a distinction between the Goddess-given magical rites of sexuality and mere “animal rutting,” but the distinction doesn’t seem to have any actual criteria other than how she feels about it, and is mostly invoked based on whether or not she wants to be contemptuous about any given encounter. (IMO, Morgaine’s religious snobbery around sexuality–and, frankly, the sacramentalization of sexuality in a lot of these New Agey religions that Bradley was part of and their noble-savage-y understanding of ancient fertility cults–is more of a mirror to the Christian priests’ obsession with sexual purity than she thinks.) Morgaine, frankly, is a great protagonist because she is a fascinating psychological study in being very active and scheming but somehow never taking any responsibility for her own actions, because she is smart enough and philosophical enough to rationalize doing whatever she wants to do and then convincingly tell herself that she had no choice when it turns out badly.
Reading this book was a deeply strange experience. When I was reading it I couldn’t put it down, but frankly, often once I’d put it down I’d hesitate to pick it back up. I wish I’d read it ten years ago before we knew what we know now about its author, so that I could have just read the damn book, instead of also testing my ability to read a book as just the book when the author is a) terrible and b) safely dead. Anyway I think I’m glad I read it, even though I have mixed feelings about having found it to be such a powerful book, and I don’t think I’ll be rereading it anytime soon (or ever).
While there’s more Arthuriana to be read, the last one sitting on my TBR shelf in hard copy right now is an antique-looking edition of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Mort d’Arthur. According to his Wikipedia page Malory might also have been a rapist, but at least it’s unconfirmed that that’s even the right Thomas Malory. I’m getting very tired of learning things about authors.