On Holy Terror

Years ago in graduate school, I wrote a paper about Frank Miller's 300, arguing that the film version was a deliberate and brash manifestation of post-9/11 paranoia and xenophobia. I was only just venturing into my studies of late medieval crusades literature, but I already noticed startling similarities between the narrative mechanics of the film and of the romances that fascinated me. I remember sitting in the theater watching the film, amazed by its beauty and appalled by its blatant homophobia and racism. I had expected, however, that Frank Miller (for all intents and purposes the godfather on set) and Zach Snyder (the director) would at least try to offer some sort of defense of the film. In interiews, Miller waxed downright belligerent whenever questions about the film's depiction of the Persians and its implied critique of the contemporary Middle-East came up. Take, for instance, his statements during NPR's State of the Union broadcast (the irony of his segment following Kwame Anthony Appiah's was not lost on me):

FM: When you think about what Americans accomplished, building these amazing cities, and all the good it’s done in the world, it’s kind of disheartening to hear so much hatred of America, not just from abroad, but internally.  

NPR: A lot of people would say what America has done abroad has led to the doubts and even the hatred of its own citizens.  

FM: Well, okay, then let’s finally talk about the enemy. For some reason, nobody seems to be talking about who we’re up against, and the sixth century barbarism that they actually represent. These people saw people’s heads off. They enslave women, they genitally mutilate their daughters, they do not behave by any cultural norms that are sensible to us. I’m speaking into a microphone that never could have been a product of their culture, and I’m living in a city where three thousand of my neighbors were killed by thieves of airplanes they never could have built.

It's perhaps unsurprising, then, that Miller would go on to create Holy Terror. The comic was originally intended to be a Batman story that pitted the caped crusader against Bin Laden and other extremists. Somewhere along the way, and perhaps to the relief of most franchise lovers, Miller decided that this was not, in fact, a Batman story. Batman was replaced by a hero known as The Fixer, and his accomplice/lover is a catburgler rather than Catwoman.

I remember hearing about Miller's Holy Terror a few years ago, but it fell off my radar rather quickly amid the maelstrom of dissertating and a cross country move. It came to mind a couple of weeks ago, however, after I got into a lively conversation on Twitter about modern iterations of militant Christianity, and I realized -- especially since I plan to talk about this topic at length in the conclusion to my book -- that I needed to read it. I bought a copy (used, since I couldn't in good conscience buy a new one) and have spent the past couple of weeks figuring out what to say about it.

Its xenophobic portrait of Middle Easterners is so appalling that -- at first -- it's hard to know where even to start. I'll describe a few of the most crucial moments in the comic, however, in part to give readers a sense of what takes place in the comic, and in part to help me sort out my thoughts on it.

You don't need to look any further than the cover or the comic's epigraph to gather that this comic is is a reactionary post-9/11 revenge fantasy (that it was released close to the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks is, perhaps, evidence enough). The cover (pictured left), gives us the first glimpse of the The Fixer and one of many nameless assailants. I couldn't help but notice the difference in the features: consider the clearly defined white/Anglocentric face of our hero with the faceless (and black) void, human only insofar as it has eyes and, at least in the recent past, teeth. From its inception, then, the comic perpetuates the horrendous notion that dark skin connotes threat. And we need only look at any number of tragic narratives in our own country's very recent history to get a sense of why the perpetuation of that kind of imagery is both grotesque and downright dangerous.

Things escalate quickly just a few pages into the comic, where we encounter this epigraph:

"If you meet the Infidel, kill the infidel" -- Mohammed

This is not, in fact, a direct quotation from the Q'uran. At best, it's a heavily paraphrased (and wildly decontextualized) version of 9:5: "Slay the pagans wherever you may come upon them, and take the captive, and besiege them, and lie in wait for them at ever conceivable space . . . ." It's unclear whether Miller is aware of the original version and its context, but the point of this epigraph is nevertheless crystal clear: to ensure that readers of the comic are encouraged from the start to perceive Muslims as inherently threatening. Again, wildly problematic, but hardly unsurprising.

The first sequence in the comic introduces both The Fixer and the Catburgler, the former chasing the latter on account of a stolen bracelet. The chase takes an erotic turn, but a nail bomb interrupts their rooftop tryst. The comic then flashes back to the events leading up to that bomb going off, and it is here that we are introduced to the first of many caricatured Middle-Eastern villains:

The fact that Amina is both an exchange student and a humanities major should give us pause. In this one panel, Miller implies that both exchange programs and the humanities are in some way in direct/indirect collusion with al Qaeda. And as we recently saw with UMass's decision to deny Iranian students entry, or this study on the likely effects of post 9/11 policies on Muslim exchange students, Middle-Eastern students seeking an education in the U.S. face a plethora of difficulties and are discriminated against in a variety of overt and covert ways. The roots of this discrimination are found in post 9/11 fears of al Qaeda and other forms of militant Islam gaining traction in the U.S., and Holy Terror directly capitalizes on those fears in its depiction of Amina.

Several reviewers have mocked the fact that she's a "humanities major" since no such major actually exists, but I think Miller knew exactly what he wanted to do here as well. All of the characters, both heroic and villanous, in Holy Terror are generalized caricatures created for the sake of the jingoism Miller wished to promulgate. Amina, as a humanities major, then, embodies dangers Miller sees in academia writ large, as he apparently views the scholars within it as left-leaning cultural relativists who inadvertently support the causes of those who would see the end to freedom of thought or expression. His inability to envision academia (or, let's be honest, any corner of the globe) as a space occupied by an array of complex and dynamic persons would be hilarious if it its effects weren't so awful. The representation the Amina as the femme-fatale-suicide bomber-humanities-majoring-exchange-student is deeply problematic, then, because -- like the epigraph that begins the comic -- it relies on a host of oversights that, when played out in the actual world, have direct and downright catastrophic consequences. It perpetuates a cancerous and self-contradictory mythology that condemns freedom of expression while trying to protect it, while also pointing an accusing finger at any exchange student who happens to come from the Middle-East and/or be Muslim (Miller regularly fails to distinguish between the two).

He also deliberately conflates al-Qaeda/Islam (the two are, regrettably, one and the same to him) with "the Dark Ages," implying that the insurgents in his story will usher in second Dark Age if they are allowed to succeed (see left). As many have argued (myself included), to associate anything we perceive as Other or as aberrant with "the Medieval" betrays both ignorance and an unwillingness to grapple with the very real and modern problems of the contemporary world. Al Qaeda is not medieval. It is the result of a complex series of modern events, pressure points, and entanglements. To refuse to see that, is to refuse to take ownership of our contemporary world. An interpretive and an imaginative failure to say the least.

To make matters worse, the comic insists on genocide and torture as the only way to confront and defeat the Other, resorting every step of the way to one-dimensional and caricatured portraits of both hero and villain. Consider, for instance, the implications of this portrait of an insurgent (below right), or the crude and offensive scenes of mass-killing and torture (below left).

The comic reaches its zenith of anti-Muslim rhetoric in its depiction and description of a mosque in Empire City:

The Saudis spent a fortune on this place. It's the oldest mosque in Empire city. People come from miles around -- but only a very few are let inside. It's as close to an inner-city sovereign nation as you'll find, this side of Rome. It's as silent as a tomb. It keeps secrets.

It goes without saying that this evokes and plays upon the the xenophobia that surrounded (and in some ways dominated) discussion of The Ground Zero mosque back in 2010. Consider the following quotation from this regrettable and inflammatory op-ed about the proposed mosque, for example:

Not only that, but Rauf [the Imam behind the proposed project] has called America compatible with sharia law. Indeed, America, he says helped deepen his identification with Islam; talking to The New York Times, he stated, "in that sense, you could say I found my faith in this country. For me, Islam and America are organically bound together. This is not my story alone. The American way of life has helped many Muslims make a conscious decision to embrace their faith." And his partner, el-Gamal? He turned to Islam after the attacks of 9/11. (He also has a history of violent crime, with attacks coming as recently as 2005.)

This, of course, raises the question of whether Cordoba [the name of the proposed mosque] can or will become a seat of a jihadist movement. And the truth is, the more we know about Feisal Abdul Rauf and his cohorts, the more I tend to wonder. Rauf has already skillfully turned American Muslims and non-Muslims into enemies of one another -- something even Osama bin Laden failed to do. His disingenuousness, dishonesty, and disrespect make me wonder what else he and his mosque might be capable of achieving in the name of what he calls 'peace.'" 

The author's cognitive dissonance and weak arguments in this quotation (and in the article as a whole) are obvious, but the paranoia seeping from the op-ed is worth considering alongside Miller's Holy Terror. Both respond to perceived threats of Islam by assuming that we're embroiled in a religious war. Both strongly suggest that a mosque -- ANY mosque -- can and will harbor terrorists. Both insinuate -- if not state outright -- that all Muslims are to be feared and are, to greater or lesser degrees, complicit in acts of terror waged by Muslims extremists. Both authors, in other words, caricaturize twenty three percent of the world's population in order to promote a deeply xenophobic jingoism.

It's no surprise then, that the mosque in Holy Terror affirms and validates such a worldview. The Catburgler enters it -- grudgingly disguised in a burka -- with our narrator describing "the night wind blow[ing] away seven centuries." Yet another attempt to distance the heroes in the text from the insurgents (and, more broadly, America from the Middle East), by insinuating that the latter is somehow still "stuck" in the Middle Ages.

The description of the mosque's interior only builds on that assumption. The Catburgler is almost immediately apprehended by the mosque's inhabitants, and she is led down below sea level into what she describes as "The Old City -- built by long-forgotten ancients . . . a race of madmen." As you can see in the image below, this underground space is adorned with grotesque sculptures and -- oddly -- what appear to be ancient Greek helmets. She encounters both a traitorous drunk Irishman who has teamed up with al-Qaeda and a leader of sorts -- a diminutive figure so covered in jewelry that only his misshapen mouth is visible. This leader ridicules Westerners for their

obliviousness and states the following:

"We come right out and call ourselves al-Qaeda -- the cell -- and you don't stop to consider what that means. We're scarcely a microbe, a speck, a tiny part of an organism so vast as to be beyond belief. Were I utterly at your mercy . . . even I could only provide the vaguest hint of the organization's size -- or its true purpose. Even Sheik Osama -- may peace be upon him -- was merely a slave beneath a slave beneath a slave."

In sum, we're given a vision of a vast and impossibly organized network of insurgents, and we're told that The West (America specifically) has been too blind and oblivious to its vastness. And, as a aside, Miller appears to completely misinterpret and mistranslate the meaning of the name al Qaeda. Again though, here we have an instance where the paranoia and xenophobia characteristic of Miller's worldview loudly proclaim themselves. The insurgents, as we soon discover, are about to launch a weapon of mass destruction on Empire City. They are halted (read: massacred) by the Fixer in the nick of time, the weapon described in ways that clearly attempt to justify the indiscriminate killing. The comic doesn't end there though. Instead, we're introduced one final time to Dan Donegal -- the tough-talking cop in league with The Fixer. We see him "shivering in his sheets like a scared little boy," traumatized by the terrorist attacks at the outset of the story. We are made to bear witness to his trauma, again, as a means of justifying the brutality and xenophobia that precede it.

In sum, this raw, wildly problematic, and downright incoherent story is even more virulent and extreme than the post-9/11 film version of 300. I kept thinking about that film, and about Miller's incendiary comments about Islam and the Middle East at the time of the film's release, as I read this comic, because Holy Terror strikes me as simply a more ossified (I can't really bring myself to call it "refined") reflection of his fear and hatred of Islam and his inability to distinguish between the majority of its adherents and the extremists who warp it.

It struck me as curious (and, if I'm being honest, more than a little hopeful), then, that this comic garnered nowhere near as much attention as either the graphic novel or the film version of 300, and that few -- if any -- could formulate any sort of defense or dismissal for the obvious anti-Muslim sentiment. Supporters and defenders of 300 often resorted to the argument that it's "just an action flick" and that people who objected to the vilification of the Persians (and, to be fair, any non-white person in the film) were just "thinking too hard." The film was frequently praised for its cinematic prowess and was relatively popular at the box office. To be sure, it garnered a reasonable degree of criticism, but there seemed to be a somewhat even number of critics who overlooked or weren't concerned enough to comment upon the racist/xenophobic undertones of the narrative. With Holy Terror, however, you're hard pressed to find a review that doesn't comment on the awfulness of the worldview it espouses, and it garnered nowhere near the cultural traction as 300, even though the two works proffer similar kinds of cultural fantasies.

I wonder, as a result, what role temporal distance has to play in these reactions. Is it easier to tell a story laced with xenophobia when you place the events in the distant past and bury your message in a swords and sandals epic? When, in other words, you appropriate and elide ancient historical particulars as opposed to recent ones? That certainly seems to be the case when you compare the two stories and their reception. And it has made me wonder about the similar "problems" I see in Richard Coer de Lion. As I write in one of my book chapters, relatively few versions of the medieval story include the more fantastical episodes that we often associate with it (the repeat cannibalism, the demonic horses, the lion-heart-eating, the demon mother), and I argue that these omissions in the RCL tradition have to do with the problems inherent in presenting a fantasy version of events in the relatively recent past.

Perhaps, then, we could consider Holy Terror as a very modern sort of "recovery romance" -- a type of romance that, as I describe in my book project, proffers fantasies of Christian/Western triumph over perceived Muslim enemies. Like Isumbras or RCL, Holy Terror (and 300) are symptomatic of cultural desires, appetites and impulses -- specifically of desires for stability and superiority at a time where neither seemed or were possible. It's very easy to dismiss Miller's Holy Terror for its awfulness, its incoherence, even its artlessness, but I think it's important to avoid Othering him over much. To do so would be to risk making the same moves that he deploys by repeatedly arguing that Islam is "medieval." I see Miller, then, as an alarming harbinger of sorts -- as a representative, however, hyperbolic, of a worldview that needs to be paid careful attention to so that we can find ways of pushing back against it. We need -- especially in light of the persistent tendency to code anything that we don't want to acknowledge as modern as "medieval" -- to remind ourselves of the fact that his work is symptomatic of a worldview hardly unique to him and him alone.

On Time and the Garden

Asheville skyline and Blue Ridge Mountains

I've had a whirlwind summer thus far, and it's gone by too fast (especially since there's still so much more work to do . . .). I've tried to research and write, and taken on many (too many) side projects (as my last post mentioned). I've been planning a brand-new ESOL course, which I'll teach in the fall and spring. I had a beautiful road trip to Asheville, North Carolina to help my friend Ali move, and enjoyed spending time there with close friends and exploring both the city itself and the surrounding Blue Ridge Mountains. I also attended my first New Chaucer Society conference in Portland, Oregon. I found the conference to be, as the best conferences always are, equal parts invigorating and exhausting. All of the panels I attended were excellent and the discussion lively. My own panel went really well. I got great questions, and I felt that all of the papers worked together beautifully to bring out new ideas. I was also lucky enough to be presenting on the same panel with my friend Sharon, who gave her first conference paper, which was excellent. I was reminded once again of how lucky I am to be in a field with such intelligent, warm, lively people.They're people who pose interesting questions and allow for productive dialogue.

Portland Chinese Gardens
(Where the reflections are more real than the buildings.)

This conference is set up particularly well for graduate students, with generous financial assistance, a full-day graduate seminar, and a generally welcoming environment in which all are made to feel part of the community. I met some new people and spent time with old friends; I saw many wonderful papers and a really outstanding plenary lecture by Carolyn Dinshaw. Dinshaw spoke eloquently about history and temporality and Mandeville's Travels. I also got to explore Portland a bit and to visit some delightful family members whom I don't see often enough.

Countryside outside my hometown
(Where I've had some new adventures this trip)

Now, after two years away, I am home for a visit to Northern California. The last time I was home, I was here for the birth of my friend Dominique's son. This time I made it to that son's second birthday party. The differences between the newborn baby and two-year-old make concrete for me the temporal distance between my last visit and this one. I am staying with my grandmother in my childhood home, a place filled with memories of the times I had there and the people I've loved who used to live there and who live there still. I still expect to discover my grandfather dozing in a chair when I walk into a new room. I still expect to hear my father's voice calling for me from the next room to come and see something he's discovered in the newspaper or in a book or online. I am aware of the way in which the space I'm in exists relatively unchanged, and only time separates me from previous moments in the same locations. I'm particularly struck by the garden, much grander than it was when I was a child. I spent so many happy hours in that yard, swinging on my swing set or having adventures or pretending to be in a fairy land.

Roses from our garden

My grandpa spent many hours in the yard as well, working in his treasured rose garden and planting new varieties of tomato. Three activities my grandfather loved above all: photography, hiking, and gardening. I would swing and he would garden and we would need no words to express our contentment. I see traces of him everywhere in this garden. Flowers that he planted still bloom each year, their colors bursting forth from the past into the present. My dad loved the garden, too, and had information and opinions on every plant. When we had landscaping done some years back, my father would bake treats and make snacks and bring them out to the gardeners and just talk to them for hours. When I stand in the garden now, I feel comforted in knowing that a space they both loved so much is still thriving.

Park outside of Portland

I was primed by the NCS conference to think about time and the garden. There was so much discussion at the conference of time, history, and space (as with the plenary I mentioned above), of ecologies, of objects. (There was also a whole thread on oceans! I presented on a panel in this thread, and saw some other incredible oceans panels as well.) One of the conference receptions was held in the beautiful Chinese Gardens, a lush location which fostered much happy mingling between scholars young and old (aided by a generous sprinkling of champagne). I had also gone for a walk outside of Portland with my cousins Susan and John, who had explained to me that the topography we saw (verdant trees and brooks) would have covered downtown Portland, a fairly new city, only about a hundred years ago. Trees have been cleared away to make room for streets and buildings, but wild greenery still makes its presence known around the margins of the city. We walked from this landscape past the mowed lawns of suburban Portland, and I noticed the similarities and differences of these landscapes. I also visited the Buffalo Botanical Gardens earlier this summer, a Victorian greenhouse wonderland filled with spaces that seem wild (carnivorous plants lurk in one spot, koi fish swim playfully in another), and yet in which everything is contained and categorized. The rooms are carefully themed and the enclosed nature of the space allows for a great deal of control. With all these experiences this summer, both recreational and professional, I was uniquely prepared to think about urban spaces and greenery as I returned to my childhood home.

Buffalo Botanical Gardens

Gardens are complex spaces; they're natural and yet cultivated. My grandmother talks brightly to me of one plant that has been carefully chosen and another, right next to the first, which, as she puts it, "the birds brought to us -- a delightful surprise." No matter how deliberately a garden is maintained or controlled (I'm looking at you, topiary), the natural world will make its mark. Animals and weather patterns, for example, cannot be easily regulated. So the garden is both natural and manmade. Gardens are popular spots in medieval literature because of their liminal existence in a variety of categories. They blur the line between public and private, outside and inside. Medieval dream vision poems most often begin in gardens, complicating the distinction between awake and asleep, reality and dreaming. I am reading Bachelard's book on The Poetics of Space right now, and he praises the house for enabling us to dream. In medieval literature, it is often the garden that facilitates dreaming (though Chaucer sometimes writes about falling asleep in bed while reading a good book, a practice all too familiar to me).

Can you spot the swing?

There's also a real way in which the garden we have now is the garden of my family's dreams. Much planning and discussion and work and love went into the garden, and everyone felt as if they were witnessing, as the plants grew and blossomed, their floral visions coming to vivid life. And, in some cases, exceeding imagination. Plants grow and change and interact in surprising ways. I walked into the backyard and was astonished at how plants have covered my old swing set. A tiny swing emerges from a tangle of leaves and flowers, barely visible from a distance. When I was young, it was the swing set which defined that backyard space for me. Its crisp lines divided the space and were easily visible from inside the house. Now, from inside, I could almost miss the swing if I didn't know it were there. I moved into this home when I was seven, and the swing set was there waiting for me. It is the same swing set that my dad and aunt and uncle played on before I was born. My grandpa put that swing set up in the yard in 1964 when they moved to this house, but it had been in the family before that, traveling with them from Oxnard to Santa Cruz to Sunnyvale before landing here in Petaluma. My grandparents first set up the swing set around 1950, before my father was born, so he played on it his whole childhood and then I did the same. The swing set always seemed to me a tangible object connecting me to my father's childhood. It connected me to past and future, ground and sky. If I swung high enough, I could see both our own yard and over the fence to the plum trees in the yard next door. There's a freedom for a child in swinging, but a contained freedom, a comfortable kind of freedom. Within the confines of our yard I could have adventures and know that an adult was right around the corner. The swing set always seemed a permanent fixture, rooted in the ground like a metal tree, a part of the yard more reliable than the fleeting petals that visited the garden in spring. The fact that the swing set had in fact been relocated multiple times, that it neither grew from the yard nor originated there, simply didn't fit with my conception of my childhood.

A new photo I made to look old
-- more playing with time

Flowers bloomed and wilted, but that swing set was always there, would always be there. Now, as the leaves and flowers cover and enclose the swing, I see that the swing set really has been taken into the garden. The overgrowth has made the set its own, has turned it into a kind of trellis, covered by plants but also holding them up in a kind of symbiosis of metal and paint and flower and leaf. Unlike the inside of the house, the garden really looks nothing like it did when I was little; changes happen and are made to happen. But if I look close enough I can see traces of my childhood, of my dad's childhood and my grandparents' adult life. The swing is still there, hidden amidst the leaves like a secret memory; the baby rosebush my grandpa planted for me in seventh grade (a rough year for me, as for many kids) still blooms amid newer plants. Layers of vegetation and layers of memory intertwine in that space which is both of the house and separate from it. Some of the same plants bloom, but their petals are new each year, highlighting the ways in which temporality and tangibility can be both very fragile and very real.

Hermeneutics of Consumption in Perceval of Galles

I am looking forward to hearing all about Kalamazoo from Kristi -- so terribly sad to have missed it this year, but the impending move to California made the annual pilgrimage impossible this time around. From the sound of it, the conference was as energizing as ever! I have a feeling that my co-blogger will be posting within the next few days, if not sooner, but in the meanwhile, I thought I'd make a long-overdue contribution . . .

With the looming cross-country move, I'm afraid I haven't had nearly as much time for blogging as I'd hoped for over the past few months.  I have several posts  (currently in nascent form and backlogged given the pre-move insanity) which will soon find their way over here. At the moment, however, my brain is firing in several different directions, which doesn’t make for lucid blogging!  But since I've only been meaning to do this since March, I want to share a paper I presented at this year's NEMLA convention.  Writing it was a somewhat hair-raising experience; deciding to present (and, I'll confess, write) a conference paper just a few days after my dissertation filing deadline might have been more than a bit absurd on my part. Miraculously, however, my paper somehow came together despite the time crunch, and I am so glad to have had the opportunity to present in this particular session. The panel, organized by my inimitable co-blogger, Kristi, and the equally lovely Hilarie Lloyd, was both diverse in content and convergent in interests and theme.  I am always amazed by these kinds of sessions. The fact that you can manage to have a papers on a medieval romance, Jhumpa Lahiri, Edwidge Danticat, and victory gardens all speak to each other is nothing short of innervating, and a true testament to how interconnected we can be despite our specializations.

And so, without further ado, the paper!

It’s Not Easy Eating Green: Hermeneutics of Feminine Consumption

in Sir Perceval of Galles.

This map, by Lynton Lamb, appeared on the endpapers to Charles Williams’ first edition of Taliessin Through Logres (1938).

From Charles Williams, edited by David Llewellyn Dodds (Rochester: Boydell, 1991). 

          

            This map is not medieval, but it resonates with the medieval configuration of women and women’s bodies in the text I’ll be discussing here.  It appeared as the endpapers to a 1938 poetry collection entitled Taliessin Through Logres by Charles Williams, a member of the famed Inklings and one with a keen investment in things Arthurian. Here you can find the map of Europe, superimposed by a woman’s body.  At the head, we have England, the seat of Arthurian power, and further down, we have Jerusalem in a place would be more shocking if it didn’t align so neatly with medieval configurations of the Holy City as the navel of the world.  This map – however unwittingly – encapsulates the relationship between feminized corporeal and terrestrial bodies in Sir Perceval of Galles, one that directly informs and is informed by the instances of ingestion that occur throughout the narrative.

This paper comes out of a larger discussion in my dissertation about the emblematic roles that women play in late middle English romances, especially those concerned with aspects of crusade and recovery (of territory and from various kinds of trauma).  The Middle English romance Sir Perceval of Galles relies on imbricated levels of recovery for its narrative momentum, many of which hinge on the comingling of female bodies and the landscapes they inhabit.  Both bodies (corporeal and terrestrial) are inextricably bound to one another in this romance. Their relationship is established in its very first lines, and reinforced throughout Perceval’s martial defense of a placed called “Maydenlande” – a region whose very name alludes in a charmingly obvious way to the symbolic relationship between female bodies and feminized landscapes.  The scene that seals this relationship, however, involves a strange act of ingestion, involving one of the most pivotal women in the text — Perceval’s mother — consuming nothing but grass and water; consuming, in essence, the very thing that defines her worth and the worth of the other women in her society.  Her eating seeks a tacit reversal of the established association of female bodies with territory, but in the end her eating only reinscribes her in that very circuit of symbolic value.  

The significance of this passage only becomes clear through the establishment of symbolic female bodies earlier in the romance, and so I’ll begin my discussion by providing you with a brief summary. The Middle-English Sir Perceval of Galles is, by all accounts, focused on male action. It centers on the exploits of Perceval, a young man raised in the wilderness by a mother afraid of the dangers of chivalric society (which press men into armed conflict and which resulted in the death of her husband).  Perceval grows curious about the broader world, and eventually abandons his mother to enter society.  He fails on numerous occasions to read the world correctly, inexperienced as he is with its nuances.  He learns slowly, but gradually, how to acculturate himself, and develops from a “fool of the field” who mistakes a pregnant mare for a destrier to one of Arthur’s elite knights and a king in his own right.  His mother, largely absent from the story, looms in the recesses of Perceval’s developing identity, however, and he eventually embarks on a quest to recover her.

Scholars have often remarked that this version of Perceval’s story lacks the very thing that defines its source text. Chretien’s Conte du Graal, is, after all, dominated by Perceval’s Grail quest and all of its failures.  Here, however — to draw on an observation of Russell Peck’s — Perceval’s mother, and his sense of home, becomes his grail.  His redemptive and penitential quest to recover her becomes the final feat he must accomplish before he can end his life fighting in the Holy Land as a crusader.  Women, then, play a significant role in the romance, even if their “screen-time” remains remarkably brief.

Perceval of Galles begins with the marriage of the eponymous hero’s parents, an event that establishes the interconnectedness of feminized bodies in the romance. King Arthur gives his sister Acheflour in marriage to a knight, confusingly named Perceval as well.  This passage makes clear, however, that this marriage comes with more than just a bride:

Tharefore Kyng Arthoure
Dide hym mekill honoure:
He gaffe hym his syster Acheflour,
   To have and to holde
Fro thethyn till his lyves ende,
With brode londes to spende,
For he the knyght wele kende. (21-27)

[Therefore King Arthur did (Sir Perceval) much honor: he gave him his sister Acheflour, to have and to hold, from thence until his life's end, with broad lands to use, for he knew the knight well.]

The wedding then, connects the bride to the land by making a marriage with her synonymous with territorial acquisition.  Perceval Sr., in the lines that follow, journeys to the church to — as the narrator tells us – marry the woman and “win gifts that were good” — yet another reminder that this marriage indelibly ties women to the tangible goods that they bring into a marriage.

            This dynamic is revisited in the middling portion of the romance, as the young Perceval wages a war against a Sultan, who threatens to overtake a region called Maydenlande.  Throughout this episode, Lufamore — the besieged ruler of Maydelande — is consistently bound (both literally and figuratively) to her territory.  The sultan, for instance, seizes her lands, and — wishing to claim her body as well — forces her to retreat into her castle while he lays a siege (977-1000).   Lufamore herself enacts this binding of territorial and corporeal bodies by stating that whoever rescues her will "hafe this kyngdome and me, / To welde at his will” (1339-1340).  Her desire to ensure that the right man gains control over her and her lands trumps any desires for continued autonomy on her part; she finds herself in control, after all, only because her brothers, her father, and her uncle have already been killed by the sultan. 

            The invading Saracen army directly threatens the Christian landscape in ways that are directly linked to rape. As the messenger tells Perceval:

Up resyn es a Sowdane:
Alle hir landes hase he tane;
So byseges he that woman
   That scho may hafe no pese."

He sayse that scho may have no pese,
The lady, for hir fayrenes,
And for hir mekill reches.
   "He wirkes hir full woo;
He dose hir sorow all hir sythe,
And all he slaes doun rythe;
He wolde have hir to wyfe,
   And scho will noghte soo.
Now hase that ilke Sowdane
Hir fadir and hir eme slane,
And hir brethir ilkane,
   And is hir moste foo.
So nere he hase hir now soughte
That till a castelle es scho broghte,
And fro the walles will he noghte,
   Ere that he may hir too.    (977-96)

["Uprisen is a sultan, all her lands has he taken; he so besieges that woman that she may have no peace." He says that she may have no peace, the lady, because of her fairness, and because of her great riches.  "He works her full woe; he does her sorrow all her days, and everyone he slays straight away.  He would have her to wife, and would not so. Now has the Sultan her father and her uncle slain, and each of her brothers, and (he) is her greatest enemy.  So closely he has pursued her now that she has been brought to a castle, and he will not leave the walls until he might take her.]

The verb “to take” appears frequently in this passage, and it is one that was regularly used in medieval literature to refer both to the wrongful acquisition of land and to rape.  The consistent use of this word in the passage renders coterminous the bodies threatened by the sultan.

            His actions require swift martial — and marital — action, and Percival brashly charges to the rescue as soon as he hears word of the sultan’s invasion.  That the contested territory is called Maydenlande firmly solders the female and territorial bodies in the text, because it recalls all that a knight such as Perceval can hope to win in the course of chivalric adventures: lands, a wife, and a heritage. But it also signals the obligations a knight has to protecting pure and untouched female bodies. As a result, the name inspires the urgency of Perceval’s quest, actualizing his chivalric potential in the process.  Perceval almost single handedly routes the Saracen army, beheads the sultan, and subsequently wins the hand of Lufamour. They are married almost immediately afterwards. As the narrator tells us: 

            Now has Perceval the brave

            Wedded Lufamour the bright

            And is  king full right

            Of all that broad land. (1745-48).

Like the marriage of Perceval’s parents that beings the romance, this description links the woman — in this case Lufamour — with the land itself. Their marriage, in sum, is important in no small part because of the territory and knightly/kingly accouterments Perceval acquires though her.

            After his full instatement into chivalric and Arthurian society, Perceval’s thoughts eventually wind his way to his mother, who as we discover, has been living on a diet of grass and water in the woods:

He thoghte on no thyng,
Now on his moder that was,
How scho levyde with the gres,
With more drynke and lesse,
   In welles, there thay spryng.

Drynkes of welles, ther thay spryng,
And gresse etys, withowt lesyng!
Scho liffede with none othir thyng
   In the holtes hare. (1772-80)

[He thought on nothing, not at all on his mother, how she lived upon the grass, with more drink and less from wells that sprang. (She) drinks from wells, that spring there, eats grass without ceasing! So she lived on no other thing, in the gray woods.]

He grows concerned for his mother’s well-being and laments that he left her “manless” in the forest.  As he discovers, her situation is dire indeed. She has gone mad with grief; the sultan’s brother, the Giant Gollerothirame, attempted to woo her with Perceval’s ring, causing her to assume that her son is dead.  While her insanity is not directly associated with her ingestion of the earth, retreating to the wilderness in medieval literature is often configured as a descent into madness.  Her flight to the forest with the young Perceval at the outset of the romance because of her fears of chivalric violence invite such associations, and her diet of earth and water alone is, I argue, a uniquely feminine iteration of madness in the romance, and one that seeks to reverse the significations at play earlier in the narrative.

Her consumption of the earth attempts (inadvertently) to reverse the previously established association of female bodies with territory.  Whereas the land serves as a signifier of the woman’s societal worth, here the mother seeks autonomy over the land that has defined her existence by becoming its devourer.  She tries, through this act of consumption, to transform herself into a signifier rather than one signified, reversing — in essence — the circuit of value into which she, and the other women in the romance, have heretofore been inscribed.  Jeffrey Jerome Cohen has appropriated Deleuze and Guattari’s theories of posthuman bodies to explain the relationship between knights and their horses.  In essence, he argues that the two co-create and perform a so-called inhuman circuit, a “strange assemblage” in which identity and form are inextricably interlinked, where “no possibility of concrete embodiment” can be found and where the “best analysis can only map movements” ("The Inhuman Circuit," 172).  I would like to offer here that Perceval’s mother, in her eating of earth and water, creates a parallel inhuman circuit.  But whereas the relationship between man and horse is an inherently active one, the relationship between woman and land is deeply and inexorably passive.  Its circuitry requires dominion.  And so, while Acheflour, in a presumably maddened state, hungers for a reversal of this cyclic system of worth, her symbolic ingestion can only backfire.  In the end, it only literalizes her body’s indelible connection to the land and the requirements of masculine rule and protection that are also bound to it.

As I already mentioned, Perceval embarks on his journey to find his mother out of concerns that she lives “manless” in the woods.  Her unusual appetites and rejections (of traditional demarcations of identity and worth, but also of civilization) ultimately requires the entrance of a male who can restore proper order. In the world of Perceval of Galles  both female and territorial bodies require protection and governance, benefits that Perceval actively denied his mother when he abandoned her in the forest.  Their eventual reunion, her subsequent recovery from madness, and their return to society (to Perceval’s kingdom in Maydenlande) signals both the mother's return to her rightful place and status, but also the reinscription of the feminine into the culture and the lands that define her worth.  It also enacts a form of domestic recovery that parallels and facilitates Perceval’s crusading.

            This feminized inhuman circuit, then, primarily endorses the value of the male’s chivalric identity.  Acheflour’s aberrant appetites for reversal and for agency are cut short through her son’s rescue and, compellingly, through another act of ingestion:

The geant had a drynk wroghte,
The portere sone it forthe broghte,
For no man was his thoghte
   Bot for that lady.
Thay wolde not lett long thon,
Bot lavede in hir with a spone.
Then scho one slepe fell also sone,
   Reght certeyne in hy.
Thus the lady there lyes
Thre nyghttis and thre dayes,
And the portere alwayes
   Lay wakande hir by.

Thus the portare woke hir by -
Ther whills hir luffed sekerly, -
Till at the laste the lady
   Wakede, als I wene.
Then scho was in hir awenn state
And als wele in hir gate
Als scho hadde nowthir arely ne late
   Never therowte bene.
Thay sett tham down one thaire kne,
Thanked Godde, alle three,
That he wolde so appon tham see
   As it was there sene.
Sythen aftir gan thay ta
A riche bathe for to ma,
And made the lady in to ga,
   In graye and in grene. (2245-70)
   

  [The giant had made a drink, the porter soon brought it forth, for he thought on no one except that lady. They did not wait long then, but poured the liquid in her with a spoon, right certainly in haste. Thus the lady laid there, three nights and three days, and the porter always lay watching by her. Thus the porter watched beside her — because he loved her truly — until at last the lady woke, as I understand. Then she was in her own state, and as well in her normal way as she had been neither early nor late.  They set them down on their knees and thanked God, all three, that He would look upon them so, as it was there to see. Then after they prepared a rich bath, and made the lady go into it, in gray and in grene.] 

Perceval brings his mother to a castle after finding her in the forest, and the porter supplies a magical elixir, which he and Perceval promptly pour down her throat.  She sleeps for three nights and three days, with the porter watching over her every moment. When she wakes she is described as being “in her own state . . . as she had neither formerly nor recently been before.”  This drink, created, supplied, and administered by males, permanently erases any attempts of autonomy created by the mother’s previous acts of consumption, and it also literalizes her inscription into the very system she had attempted to break.  That she is placed in Maydenlande with her daughter-in-law Lufamore in the closing lines of the romance, then, completes her reinstatement in the feminized inhuman circuit of the romance.

            Acts of ingestion in this romance are ones that seek either to affirm or deny the coterminous nature of feminized corporeal and terrestrial bodies and their ties to those who would govern them.  Threatening forms of consumption exist as well, in the form of the Sultan cast as a literal and figurative rapist (of lands and of territory), and in his brother, the Giant Gollerothirame, who causes Acheflour to go mad with grief by attempting to woo her with her son’s ring (which he procured through a complicated series of events).  Women’s bodies are synchronously aligned with the lands that they intrinsically promise to the men in this romance world, and Achefloure’s attempts to short-circuit her ties to that society in the end only inscribe her more deeply into that symbolic system.  Like Charles William’s drawing, her body becomes a chivalric roadmap — it gives birth to a hero and must be rescued by a hero, and any attempts to break it free will ultimately prove fruitless.

The romance’s consistent return to the coterminous nature of feminine and territorial bodies informs Perceval's development as a knight and as a crusader.  It inspires and legitimizes his desires to protect women while actualizing his social ascension from an outsider to a king and favored member of Arthur's court. By feminizing its landscapes, this romance amplifies the hero’s obligations to protect them in ways that prefigure and enhance the prestige of his final crusade in the Holy Land.  In this way, Sir Perceval of Galles literalizes the symbolic implications of female bodies and their consumptive powers as starkly as William’s map, demonstrating women in this romance are figures superimposed but also forever bound to, the lands that they inhabit.