THE MURK OF AVALON

I'm usually a sucker for fiction about Arthurian Britain, particularly when they delve into the conflicts between pagan lore and Christian doctrine during that not-strictly-historical period. I'd heard nothing but good things about Marion Zimmer Bradley's 1982 novel, THE MISTS OF AVALON, and finally chose to crack this massive 800-page tome.

I knew before reading that MISTS was a feminist rendition of the Arthurian tradition, which emphasized the male agency of King Arthur and his knights, but did, in contrast to some comparable traditions of other cultures, allow for some agency on the part of female characters. The most famous of these are generally Guinevere, queen to Arthur and lover to Lancelot, and Morgan LeFay, sometimes represented as half-sister to Arthur, and the mother to Modred, the child of their mutual incestuous encounter. I also knew in advance that MISTS' focus was the character Morgaine, Bradley's take on the evil, magic-wielding sorceress LeFay. The traditional Morgan was not invariably associated with the magical isle of Avalon, but in MISTS Morgaine is not just a sorceress, but an iniatiate into the mysteries of matrifocal British paganism. Avalon, a domain perpetually shrouded in mists, is in some ways a perfect visual symbol for what some have called "the mystery of womanhood," at least as compared to the blunt, obvious preoccupations of the male gender-- few of whom, in Bradley's cosmos, are particularly sharp blades.

Unfortunately, Bradley reveals more than she conceals through having most of her characters chew the fat endlessly about who's sleeping with whom and whose parents brought about what psychological traumas. I have no objection to a latter-day author transporting some modern-day psychological observations into the matrix of Arthurian myth; indeed, as every writer is a child of his or her time, it's well nigh impossible not to do so. What I found egregious in Bradley's MISTS is the repetitiveness of many of her tropes regarding character makeup and ongoing plot-conflicts. This authorial inability to know when "less would be more" may have come about simply because during the majority of her career Bradley did not work in such lengths.

As I commented in my only other blog-comments on a Bradley book here, I've read twenty or more of Bradley's SF-fantasy works. She came to prominence in a period when almost the only publishing outlet for SF-fantasy was in the format of the paperback novel, usually not much beyond 100,000 words in length. I've rarely retained strong memories of those Bradley novels that I've read: whether written in the 1960s or the 1980s, I've found them to be efficiently plotted stories told in a simple "meat-and-potatoes" style. Obviously, given the strong popularity of her ongoing "Darkover" series and MISTS itself, it's possible that I'm simply not destined to be one of Bradley's bigger fans.

Nevertheless, even though MISTS by design is meant to be a long, generation-spanning work, the book's substance could have been boiled down to a more comfortable 500 pages without losing anything but repetitious character-and-plot tropes. Another culprit may be the fact that any author attempting to do a "big novel" on the Arthurian theme has a prodigious number of stories from which to choose. Naturally, Bradley gives preference to stories focused on the Morgan character, providing quasi-realistic takes on stories  like this one from Thomas Malory in which Morgan forces Arthur to fight a warrior named Accolon.  A minor consequence of this focus as that male-focused tropes, such as Arthur drawing the sword Excalibur from a stone or a tree, are substantially altered, and downplayed save when they are relevant to the novel's main conflict: the fading of the pagan and matrifocal way of life before that of all conquering Christianity.

I fully understand why Bradley chose to focus on the domestic world of women in her feminist re-writing of Arthurian themes. Although Arthur's Camelot did not exist as such in recorded history, Bradley must model her version of that world upon the medieval society of the time, with its extremely bifurcated gender-roles (though she does mention in passing that the older Celtic tribes harbored women who took up arms upon the battlefield). Yet for all the talk of rival religious traditions, Bradley's world is one in which both God and the gods are silent.  Any fans of Arthurian fantasy will find that the only magic in MISTS can be explained by the evocation of various psychic powers that have simply been interpreted as magic. Oh, and there's one "dragon," never seen "on-camera" as it were, but Bradley implies that it's nothing more than some prehistoric venom-spitting worm.

These rationalizations of mythic material are standard enough in what I tend to deem "bestseller fiction," and indeed Bradley's MISTS may have been successful with audiences precisely because it did not require those readers to believe in dragons and enchanted swords.  Still, bestseller fiction is capable of providing some philosophical discourse on certain topics, like what makes one religion different from one another. Bradley, no philosopher, placates possible Christian readers by having many of her pagans assure the Christians that "all gods are one." Yet clearly all religions are not one, given that so much of the novel is devoted to showing how feminine agency is reduced and downgraded with the encroachment of patrifocal Christian beliefs.  But I will admit that since most of Bradley's characters don't have the intellectual background conducive to long religious debates, such discourse would have been difficult to render credible.

Morgaine, the center of the novel, is fascinating in the novel's first half, as we see her caught in the machinations of the king-making pagan priests who plot to bring about the birth of Arthur. Yet while I admire the complexity with which Bradley lays out her vision of familial relations between dozens of Arthurian figures, some of them result in the aforementioned repetitiveness. As a young woman Morgaine falls in love with Lancelet (the novel's version of Lancelot), with the result that she and the novel's version of Guinevere are rivals for the knight's charms. This could have been a sound plot-idea, but Bradley returns to it again and again, rarely saying anything new beyond another chorus of Morgaine singing "Poor Poor Pitiful Me."

I'll note in conclusion that just as the Morgan-Arthur relationship is sometimes incestuous in certain stories, Bradley uses incest-motifs frequently throughout MISTS: for instance, Lancelet is Morgaine's cousin, the son of the woman who initiates Morgaine into the mysteries and who is more of a mother to Morgaine that the woman who births her.  In my other essay I commented that THE DOOR THROUGH SPACE is replete with such motifs, though only a more thorough reading of her corpus of works would reveal whether or not it's a repeated theme.

ELECTRA COMPLICATIONS

Though I'm trying not to recycle an inordinate number of my fantasy-film reviews on this blog, I want to examine in greater depth the concepts suggested by this passage from my review of the 2012 SNOW WHITE AND THE HUNTSMAN:

Apparently Magnus' wife does die naturally, but following that event, Ravenna uses her sorcery to stage a fake attack on herself, so that Magnus can come to her rescue and be ensorcelled by Ravenna's charms.  This duplicity leads to the film's strongest scene, when Magnus attempts to celebrate his wedding-night with his new wife.  Ravenna, after immobilizing Magnus with her power, rants about her previous abuse: "I was ruined by a king like you once... I replaced his queen-- an old woman..."  "Ruin" here implies rape, albeit one presumably sanctioned by a forced marriage.  We don't know what happened to Ravenna's original abuser, but she's clearly chosen to vent her rage on a surrogate, slaying Magnus with a (phallic?) knife, after which she takes over the kingdom with her own forces, commanded by her now-grown brother Finn. 

I wrote this in part to point out how the screenwriters had chosen to rewrite the traditional folktale of Snow White with an eye to feminist politics.  But this is not to say such feminine-based concerns don't have valid roots with the traditional Snow White folklore-stories.  Indeed, when I heard the Queen's justification for taking over Magnus' kingdom, I thought that in effect the writers had managed to invoke two archetypes of the "persecuted maiden" and to play them off one another: what I'll call "the Maiden Persecuted by Hera" and "the Maiden Persecuted by Zeus."

The original Snow White story does not dwell on any deep motivations for the Queen.  The tale is concerned only with the persecution of the maiden Snow by her stepmother, who is explicitly jealous of the younger woman's beauty.  She is thus covalent with at least one aspect of the Greek goddess Hera, who in modern times is best known for jealously persecuting either the lovers of her husband Zeus or the fruits of his amours with other women. 

As Ravenna recites her litany of injuries, though, the film's screenwriters evoke the opposing trope of the maiden pursued and persecuted by a powerful, quasi-paternal figure, a la the Greek father-god Zeus.  The best known exemplar of this trope is the folktale known as "Donkey Skin," though the tale's basic structure appears in as many variant forms as the structure of Snow White does. The princess who comes to be known as "Donkey Skin" duplicates the trope of the young woman who is as beautiful or more so than an older rival.  However in this case, the rival is her own mother, now deceased, who perversely tells her husband not to marry another woman unless that woman is as beautiful as the aforesaid mother.  This pledge leads the king to covet his own daughter as a wife. Most versions enable the princess to escape this fate and to be married to an age-appropriate suitor.  Some versions allow the king to prosper with another wife, others cause him to be killed for his wickedness.

Ravenna's story seems a bit like "Donkey Skin with an unhappy ending." Because Ravenna is in the narrative position of the antagonist, viewers of HUNTSMAN do not know much about the circumstances of her "ruination," her mastery of occult powers, etc. Aside from what Ravenna tells the audience while killing Magnus, there's just one other scene that directly expounds on Ravenna's history.  In a scene occuring much later in the story, the audience sees Ravenna in her childhood.  She is in the company of her mother in what appears to be a humble village, and the mother is placing on young Ravenna a spell that will give the power to manipulate men by enhancing her natural beauty with enchantment.  The main function of the scene is to reveal Ravenna's sorcerous weakness, so that the heroine may kill her later.  In addition, Ravenna's mother takes this step because she already anticipates a raid on the village by soldiers who are going to take Ravenna away to be the bride of their master.  A younger version of Ravenna's brother Finn is present when the mother casts the spell.  There is the suggestion that the village will be razed even though the villagers don't resist the soldiers, and the scene ends with Ravenna being carried away.  If Finn is not taken along with Ravenna to the unknown king's castle, he presumably survives in some other manner, since he's alive and well at the time when Ravenna takes over Magnus' kingdom.

What's interesting about this scene is the conspicuous absence of the father of Ravenna and Finn.  One presumes that they had a sire of some sort, who is either dead or otherwise unavailable.  But the resonance of Ravenna's words in the murder-scene suggest that symbolically, outside the actual diegesis of the film, it is the unidentified monarch who is father to them both.

Recall that the basic oppositions of Ravenna's monologue duplicates the basic structure of the "Donkey Skin" story.  The king's old wife does not perish naturally, but is put away by the king because she has committed the unforgiveable act of growing old.  This trope does appear in some traditional tales, though natural death seems to be the preferred method to place the persecuted maiden in danger, whether from a lascivious father or a jealous stepmother.  It is arguable that the very nebulousness of Ravenna's unknown ravager leads one to associate him with the absent father-figure; the sire whom no one sees.

The queen's brother Finn seems to have no basis in any traditional "Snow White" or "Donkey Skin" tale.  In the film Finn serves as Ravenna's enforcer, leading her men to hunt down Snow White and to fight with her protector, the Huntsman.  The screenplay does not explicitly state that there has been some incestuous hanky-panky between the queen and her brother, but certain lines-- as when Finn tells Ravenna that he has given her "my all"-- were effective enough that dozens of online reviews of the film have "read" the characters' relationship as incestuous.  I agree with this, but I would extend it to imagine that their relationship might have its origin in the recapitulation of Ravenna's ruination by her "symbolic father."  If Ravenna had been depicted as the actual, rather than the symbolic, daughter of her ravager, one would expect her to show Freudian ambivalence to him: both loving him as her parent and hating him for his crime.  Finn may be "read" as the helpless male sibling who allows his sister's rape to take place, onto whom Ravenna projects the love that the father betrays.  And yet the love Ravenna and Finn share has also been tainted by the father's rape of Ravenna, with the result that their relationship also devolves into incest-- though this is the least of their crimes.

The unknown monarch may or may not pay for his crime; the film tells us nothing of him save what Ravenna says about him.  The audience never knows in what way Ravenna thinks Snow's father Magnus is similar to the nameless king.  In the traditional "Snow White" tale, one may read the father's willingness to remarry after his wife's natural death as a loose betrayal, and it seems likely that the screenwriters were drawing a symbolic connection between this level of betrayal-- which would only seem so to Magnus' daughter, though she never objects to Magnus' remarriage in the film proper-- and the more overt form of betrayal seen in "Donkey Skin," wherein a father oversteps his bounds by seducing his daughter, with or without having "put away" her mother.

It's interesting that both Ravenna's mother and Snow's mother conjure with the image of the traditional tale's "three drops of blood," which is usually applied only as a signifier of Snow White's charmed beauty.  By extending this motif to the queen in her childhood as well as to Snow, the writers suggest that the function of women's charms and beauty is one that all women potentially have at their command, and that it is-- or can be used-- to counter male acquisitiveness and/or aggression.  The screenplay isn't quite intelligent enough to distinguish the specific moral reasons as to why Ravenna's sorcerous charms are evil while Snow's natural charms are good. The script does portray Ravenna as tyrannizing women as much or more than her male victims, and conjures somewhat with the Arthurian motif of the "waste land" to demonstrate that Ravenna has been too tainted by her misfortune to make a decent ruler.  The most one can say is that in some manner the power invoked by both mothers is one that can be turned to good or evil, a familiar trope supported by the elucidation of Ravenna's weakness.  On one hand, if Ravenna devours Snow White's heart-- rather than simply having it torn out to kill Snow, as in the traditional tale-- she can be immortal and beyond any of the ravages of time.  On the other, Snow's blood-- depending on the film's somewhat confusing plot-circumstances-- can and does slay the evil queen.  Since the whole film leads up to the battle of Magnus' natural daughter and his ilicit second wife, one might say that the main point of the film is to validate the very aspect of life which Ravenna refuses to accept-- the ability of the young to overthrow the elder generation.  In this familiar equation, the sole comfort of the elders who watch the film is that their representative in HUNTSMAN gets all the best lines and the most evocative scenes in the story.


ADDENDA: I meant to add that Ravenna gets one definite proof of Snow's ability to replace her, as she Ravenna replaced the "old woman" of the backstory.  Early in the film, Snow is able to escape her jail because Ravenna's brother Finn has been watching her mature for some time.  He confronts her in her cell, trying to talk her into yielding to him, and she breaks free by wounding him.  Though the action of Snow getting free could have taken place with any random guardsman, there's a special irony that even Ravenna's brother-- with whom she shares some special bond-- is lured by Snow's charms.  To be sure, when Ravenna upbraids Finn, her dialogue doesn't communicate the sense of a jealous rage toward an incestuous lover.

MYTHIC DREAMS

I've always found it a source of aggravation that I rarely have mythic dreams of the kind H.P. Lovecraft describes in his old letters.  Most of the dreams I can remember are depressingly bland remixes of everyday life, with only mild if any symbolism.

For instance, some time after I retired from my job at the end of 2010, I dreamed of my place of work as a desolate shell, which had been (so far as I reasoned in the dream) temporarily closed down so that massive work could be done on the plumbing, or something like that. That's practically Freud 101: "I'm not there now, so that means that they can't go on without me!" Eh, big deal.

Recently I did have an interesting animal-dream, which are a rarity for me.  I dreamed of a battle in which a colossal red shark was repeatedly battered into defeat and death by an equally colossal white whale. 

Immediately the logical assumption would be: "white whale= Moby Dick." Red sharks, however, don't have any major representatives in folklore or literature that I can think of, so I immediately thought of the tale of the White Dragon and the Red Dragon, as recounted in this entry for Wikipedia:

The tale is taken up by Nennius in the Historia Brittonum. The dragons remain at Dinas Emrys for centuries until King Vortigern tries to build a castle there. Every night the castle walls and foundations are demolished by unseen forces. Vortigern consults his advisers, who tell him to find a boy with no natural father, and sacrifice him. Vortigern finds such a boy (who is later, in some tellings, to become Merlin) who is supposed to be the wisest wizard ever to live. On hearing that he is to be put to death to end the demolition of the walls, the boy is dismissive of the advice, and tells the king about the two dragons. Vortigern excavates the hill, freeing the dragons. They continue their fight and the red dragon finally defeats the white dragon. The boy tells Vortigern that the white dragon symbolises the Saxons and that the red dragon symbolises the people of Vortigern. If Vortigern is accepted to have lived in the 5th century, then these people are the British whom the Saxons failed to subdue and who became the Welsh.
 

I'm certainly more than a little aware of this curious myth, and have occasionally seen it given abstruse magical or alchemical interpretations. However, I don't know any reason why I would have had that British myth, or concerns relating to that British myth, on my mind recently, aside from having finished reading T.H. White's BOOK OF MERLYN about a month ago.

One minor point of interest is that in my dream, the white behemoth defeats the red one.  But that detail may indeed be drawn from the fact that Melville's novel MOBY DICK is one of the few literary works I consider to possess the same complexity as real, "unauthored" myth-cycles.

Of  course, Moby Dick has been run through the mill of pop culture as well, and I'd be lying if I claimed that I was not aware of some of these instances, such as this Hanna-Barbera superhero-flavored cetacean from the 1960s:

Still, I will say that the white whale in my dream didn't resemble this cuddly fellow in any way whatsoever.  It's possible that my subconscious mind correlated both sharks and whales as some sort of "dragons of the deep." But the color symbolism doesn't seem to add up into anything, unless I was to go really far afield, into the domain of Tantric symbolism, where "the red" and "the white" connote femininity and masculinity respectively.  But that too seems to lead to no particular revelations, unless I cared to delve into the tedium of Freud 101 once again.