Queen of Hearts

Legends love problematic queens. Semiramis, Helen of Troy, the endless range of evil stepmothers - their ranks are some of the largest out there. You can see why: the dramatic potential of a woman who stands for an entire country and doesn't do her job by it is fantastic. On one hand, the queen is a powerful symbol; on the other, she's also an imperfect person. And for my money, no problematic queen is more interesting than Guinevere.

The Accolade, Edmund Blair Leighton

For one thing, she embodies that dramatic potential better than anyone else. The other problematic queens really aren't very good at the queen thing. Helen may look great on Menelaus' arm at public festivals, but she also openly and drastically shucks her duty. Semiramis drags Babylon into a war because a hot king turned her down. The jealous stepmother of "The Six Swans" robs her country of every single one of its heirs, just because they're not her kids. Not only are these women troubling, they can't even do their actual job properly.

Not Guinevere. Regardless of what she does behind Arthur's back, she is acknowledged in every version as a paragon among queens for her performance of her duties. She does the arm candy thing at every tournament and Pentecost feast Arthur throws. She hosts Maying parties and leads court excursions. She even (in an ironically Anglo-Saxon move, given who the historical Arthur's enemies were) offers the cup to his knights when they gather. (We'll ignore that one time the cup was poisoned and she was accused of murder. That's not the point.) Guinevere knows what none of the other queens do: her title is a role. She has lines to memorize and marks to hit, and she nails them all, every single time. Even the writers who don't like her (ahem, Tennyson) freely concede that publicly she is everything and more that a queen should be.

Sir Launcelot and the Queen Talked Sadly Together,
Arthur Dixon

Her failures, unlike her fellows', are private and behind the scenes. And also incredibly, heartbreakingly human. It's hard to forgive her for her betrayal of Arthur, but it's also hard to hate her just because she fell in love. And it's not as if (like Helen, say) she jumped headlong into Lancelot's arms. There are versions I've read where their love remains unconsummated, and even unspoken, up through the Grail Quest. Again: this is a woman who knows her duty. She bottles up her passion, confides in no one, and goes the hell on with her life, her job, and her marriage, as best she can and as long as she can. There's no outside divine influence, no heedless snap decision, not even any base motives. She just loves a man she must not love, and she fights it as hard as she can.

But not hard enough. Guinevere is a problematic queen for a reason.

When at last she begins her affair with Lancelot, writer after writer leaps on those problems. The perfect queen who betrays her duty, her husband, and her kingdom presents a stunning piece of hypocrisy. It doesn't help that Guinevere is actually a crucial piece of the lasting legend of Camelot. Arthur the lawgiver creates a kingdom, but it's Guinevere who brings civilization. Arthur only gets the Round Table because it's part of his wife's dowry. Without Guinevere, Camelot would lack its most potent symbol, as well as much of its courtly appeal and chivalric code. So for one of the true backbones of the realm to break faith with its highest aspirations is an act that undermines not only Guinevere personally, but the entire kingdom she represents.

Lancelot and Guinevere, Michael Manomivibul

And Guinevere's character becomes the mirror for that hypocrisy. From the wise and gracious hostess handing out elegant atonement to young Gawain at her wedding feast, she becomes a shrew of the first order, constantly doubting and questioning Lancelot's love. She can never just talk things out like a normal person; instead she picks fights, deliberately choosing her words to wound. Only honest people make clean breasts of their problems; Guinevere's deception bars her emotionally from taking the straightforward and more honorable road. Worse, she sometimes engages in petty jealousy, in a way highly uncharacteristic of the charmer and politician she would have to be in order to foster harmony and civilization.

In one sense, of course she can't be sensible and thoughtful; she is too symbolic a figure not to be identified first and foremost with her position, and her betrayal is too great not to exploit symbolically in literature. But the transformation of Guinevere from angel to harridan is also much too simple. If she's so obnoxious, why did Arthur fall for her? Why does her court mostly like her? There's got to be something else going on, something not symbolic but human.

La Belle Iseult (also called
Queen Guinevere), William Morris

Enter perhaps the oddest knight in shining armor ever: William Morris.*

A would-be painter and a revolutionary craftsman, Morris wrote the first work to present Guinevere not as a symbol of a decaying realm built on a dream and a lie, but as a human woman caught between passion and duty. The Defence of Guenevere imagines her at her trial before Arthur's knights, speaking on her own behalf with eloquence, dignity, and full awareness of herself. Brilliantly, her "defence" rests on that very thing nearly all earlier Arthurian chronicles deny her: total emotional honesty. Having at last found love, she demands to know if she "must...give up forever...that which I deemed would ever round me move, glorifying all things; for a little word, scarce ever meant at all, must I now prove stone-cold for ever?" She describes her agony of conscience, the anguish of love, the delight at its fulfillment and the shame she feels at that delight. She is, at last, open and honest and entirely sympathetic.

Guinevere, Meredith Dillman

But even at her best, she can't win. Because despite her eloquence, and despite the real torment of her soul, she is still a woman both wronged and wronging. Guinevere's archetypal appeal and human fascination are both tied directly to her dual nature: perfection and destruction, love and betrayal, honor and shame. No matter how sympathetic and understandable her motives are, what draws us to her are the contradictions that break Camelot. She is the greatest problematic queen in all of legend: problematic because we understand her and cannot absolve her.

*(Morris, of course, had personal experience with a problematic woman torn between love and duty: his own wife, Jane, one of the great muses of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It's not hard to see where Morris could have drawn from life; but it is moving that he, the cuckolded husband, can summon such vast sympathy for the adulterous wife.)

The Dark Side of the Moon

Fair warning: Today's the day wherein I crush all your youthful ideals.

Now that we've got that out of the way, let's talk about Camelot.

Arthur's Camelot, Alan Lee

The name itself is a universal shorthand for perfection, for a time of ideals, for the realization of a few impossible dreams. It's about as rose-colored as you can get. And for good reason: the whole point of having a legend like Camelot is to believe that things can be better, that justice can win over brute force, that one brief shining moment of good is worth all the suffering it takes to win.

So all things considered, we've done a really good job at forgetting that every single one of Camelot's turning points is rooted in betrayal (at best) and rape (at worst).

Take five minutes. Make a list. The moments where everything changes. I'll bet it includes:
- the conception of Arthur
- the sword in the stone
- the conception of Mordred
- Merlin and Nimue
- Galahad
- Lancelot and Guinevere's affair
- the death of Arthur

Let's go through it one thing at a time.

Arthur's very existence is due to betrayal and rape, depending on who tells the story. After fighting the Saxons back to the shores, Uther and his kingdom figure they can settle in for some well-deserved peace. Instead, Uther falls wildly in lust with Igraine, the wife of his most stalwart supporter in the war that just ended five seconds ago, and provokes a whole new war against Gorlois because the man gets touchy at the thought that the king wants to sleep with his wife. Ultimately, unable to prevail against Gorlois' forces, Uther resorts to magic and trickery: he has Merlin enchant him to look like Gorlois, so he can pass through the defenses of invincible Tintagel and sleep with Igraine. While wearing her husband's face.

I don't care how you interpret that. It's messed up. And it's wrong.

To be fair, interpretations vary wildly, mostly in how they deal with Igraine's reaction to this whole mess. Malory casts her as loyal wife to Gorlois, who in fact proposes the flight to Tintagel herself. Mary Stewart has a proud but lovesick Igraine conspire with Uther and Merlin to trap Gorlois. Marion Zimmer Bradley's Igraine loves Uther, but refuses to betray her husband (up until he betrays her, that is). On the whole, people shy away from the notion of rape. But in Malory's version, that's what Arthur's conception is. Uther intentionally misleads Igraine to trick her into sex, when she already refused consent to his face.

The once and future king is a child of rape. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

The sword in the stone is far less drastic, but treachery is still involved. Young Arthur, in search of a sword for his forgetful foster brother Kay, turns to the unclaimed sword stuck randomly through a stone in the churchyard. He pulls it out as easy as blinking and gives it to Kay. Problem solved! Go Arthur, savior of the day!

Until Kay recognizes the sword and what it means, and decides that the best possible option is to lie.

Granted, Kay is not the nicest guy, and certainly not nominated for brother awards in this or any century. But this is low, even for him. He knows Arthur pulled out the sword. He knows exactly what that makes Arthur. And instead of being a man about it, accepting that his annoying younger brother might actually be the long-awaited king (who, by the way, is supposed to SAVE THE KINGDOM), Kay's first instinctive move is to grab the glory for himself. You can argue that Camelot owes its existence more to Sir Ector's ability to smell a lie than to Arthur's go-getting nature; young Arthur certainly gives the impression of wanting to please, and it's not hard to imagine that he'd back Kay's lie in hopes of impressing his brother.

Nigel Terry and Helen Mirren as Arthur and Morgana, Excalibur, Warner Bros.

We don't even need to discuss why the conception of Mordred is betrayal and rape, right? It doesn't matter if the treacherous sister is Morgause or Morgan; if she wore Guinevere's face to fool Arthur; if Arthur was young and raw when it happened, or if he was already king. Mordred's mother does the exact same thing to Arthur that Uther did to Igraine: deliberately lies and distorts events for the sake of her own agenda, regardless of Arthur's consent or input.

The Beguiling of Merlin, Edward Burne-Jones

Merlin and Nimue... yeah, I'm going to go ahead and skip the rape charge on that one. Merlin's consent is a weird issue here, since he knows from the start that he will fall for her and she will betray him, but he's an absurdly powerful magician: if he really wanted to avoid her, he would have. (Besides, I've seen versions where her final treachery comes by promising him sex if he'll just climb inside that tree for two seconds, in which case the rape question is a moot point.) Betrayal, on the other hand, is all over this. Merlin gives Nimue everything she asks for, teaching her all his most powerful magics, and in return she seals him alive inside a tree. (Or in a cave, as your preference may be. I like the tree, personally.) Despite the rather fantastic revisionist versions I've read over the years, this story has never really been about anything but betrayal. Even though Nimue takes her mentor's place at Arthur's right hand, and saves him as many times as Merlin had, you get the sense that she'd have to do it to make up for taking Merlin away.

Lancelot and Elaine, Henrietta Rae

Lancelot and Elaine's relationship is the most unhealthy in the whole damn mythos. Yes, that's a bold statement; yes, I stand by it completely. Elaine may be the first stalker fangirl on literary record. She willfully fails to realize that nursing Lancelot back to health does not entitle her to love-of-his-life status. She thrills to find that he wore her token to a tournament, and conveniently ignores the fact that he wore it (like a cad, I must admit) only to assist in fighting incognito. When he rejects her (again, not with the best grace), what's her gut impulse? Is it to get over him? Is it to find another love? Is it to plot bloody vengeance?

It's to force him to marry her by raping him.

Oh, yeah. Elaine-on-Lancelot action is the most straightforward case of rape in the stories. He doesn't want her; he doesn't like her; he's told her no multiple times. Sometimes she only uses magic to make herself look like Guinevere; sometimes she also roofies Lancelot. And then she just doesn't understand why he literally goes insane at the revelation of what's happened.

The irony of it all is that out of this appalling encounter is born Galahad, the perfect knight. But for Lancelot at least, the ends don't justify the means. He never returns to Elaine. He and Galahad have a nonexistant father-son relationship; Galahad saves Lancelot on the Grail Quest, but that's about it for bonding time. And it's hard not to imagine that Lancelot would be grateful that his unwanted son wasn't around after the Grail Quest to remind him of the absolute darkest chapter in his life.

Lancelot and Guinevere, Herbert Draper

Not to mention that Lancelot's got his own bit of betraying to do back home.

Again, no explanation needed. This might be the world's most famous love triangle. It's not supposed to happen, but it does, and the exploitation of Lancelot and Guinevere's affair destroys Camelot.

The Rescue of Guinevere, William Hatherell

The betrayal here is colossal: betrayal of a spouse, betrayal of a friend, betrayal of loyalty, betrayal of a lifetime of work, betrayal of a dream. I'm not saying that Lancelot and Guinevere are singlehandedly responsible for all this betrayal; a lot of it was done by Mordred and his cadre of jealous knights. But this was the fulcrum they used to move their world, and it worked so well because they didn't have to make anything up. They just had to enhance what was already there.

Which leads us to the most unkindest cut of all: Mordred's betrayal of Arthur.

How Mordred was Slain by Arthur, Arthur Rackham

To give Mordred his due, Arthur was an absentee dad who tried to have him killed at birth. But just destroying Arthur's kingdom, marriage, and closest friendship wasn't enough for Mordred; he had to go that extra mile and mess deeply with Arthur's head, winning his trust, appearing to support him, and then backstabbing him at the earliest opportunity. Arthur's last stand at Camlann is one of hopelessness. He's had everything stripped from him in a breathtakingly short amount of time, and all by the long-lost son he wanted to trust. To be honest, I tend to forgive him for the child-murder thing, if only because he suffers so much by the end that I feel like he's atoned and then some. Mordred, on the other hand... for his sheer cold-blooded viciousness, for his total dedication to making Arthur's life hell just because he can, Mordred can never suffer enough. (Yes, I'm biased. I love Arthur. Arthur the person does not get enough love.)

Could you argue that the incredibly depressing roots of the legend are the reason why its trappings are so bright and hopeful? Sure. All that agony and betrayal is ten times worse if it's pointless. If it's endured in the service of a higher ideal, that makes it a little easier to bear. And I don't think we'd still be telling these stories if their surrounding framework didn't provide more hope than they do on their own.

But it's still depressing. The heart of Camelot is very dark. And it makes the legend too simple if we forget that.