Arthur and Gorlagon
摘要
This chapter demonstrates how Arthur and Gorlagon articulates an identity network that connects the sovereign and the wolf to each other, to different domestic and non-domestic spaces, and to the animate and inanimate beings within them. It also reveals the mutability of space, and how space and objects make meaning through the intra-activity between bodies and things. Fasting and feasting, along with feast tables and the king’s bed, are important here, having links to the werewolf-sovereign bond. The poet uses them to increase the villainy of the treacherous queen in Gorlagon’s story, foregrounding her disruption of heteronormative activities, while through the king’s behaviour he reframes a traditionally female gendered space, the hortus conclusus, similarly interrupting family and reproductive time. Likewise, he demonstrates the werewolf’s queer potential through interspecies comingling and reproduction. In various ways, then, the characters’ identities embody Morton’s concept of queer ecology. However, the tale ultimately contains the threat of queer bodies and time by amplifying the violence associated with the werewolf and his lord, and by testing the boundary between good governance and tyranny. The chapter concludes by considering the tale’s Arthurian frame, and its presentation of Camelot as both the pinnacle expression of the courtly world and a flawed, fractured society.