Of course, I’ve deliberately stacked the deck there, partly because I don’t think the chivalry debate is actually a debate; it’s a way of obscuring the real issues behind a warm, old-timey phrase.

“Chivalry” tends to enter the conversation when it is suggested that women might be treated as equals in the public space, that they might not be subjected to sexualised commentary for simply walking down the street, or might be paid an equal salary to men.

Then “chivalry” suddenly arrives as the benign, patronising face of patriarchy. Don’t women want men to open doors for them, to buy drinks for them, to arrange for them to be unable to support themselves economically and thus be dependent on the contingent goodwill of another person for their livelihood? That’s just plain mean, and almost certainly emotionally manipulative.

The reason this gambit interests me is not how ridiculous it sounds when spelled out (though that too) but how much explanatory force is attributed to such a vague and nebulous ideology.

Even more than evopsych, another gender-wrangle bugbear, “chivalry” offers so little specific justification. Even the debased version of evolutionary psychology one meets in the arguments of MRAs and redditors who have stumbled furiously into the comments section of Feministe (in the manner of a partygoer in Cancun who reaches for that Hawaiian shirt in the wardrobe and finds himself amid the snows of Narnia) purports to present an argument and a set of historical (well, mythical) explanations.

That’s why “chivalry” is so often a distraction, a way of blowing warm, nostalgic smoke across the debate until its not clear what we’re even arguing against.

The other reason it seems odd is the diametrically opposed way we use “medieval”. Like sixteenth-century humanists, we rush to brand anything barbarous, vicious or ignorant as “medieval”. The actions of Boko Haram, for example, or the conditions in an inner-city crackhouse, or Creationism. Somehow “chivalry” expresses a comfortable reactionary vision of gender relations, in which women simper and accept being corralled into particular spheres of activity away from real power, whereas “medieval” is backward and dumb. The bad kind of backward and dumb.

Between them these terms manage a bait and switch on our engagement with the past and its bearing on gender politics. A necessary one, given the preponderance of “princess” vocabulary which saturates the images offered to girls and young women. Narratives about dating, dress and men’s attention are full of language which assumes that the chivalric romances of the Middle Ages – all those castles, quests, damsels and princes – are the natural image of relations between genders.

At the same time, it’s necessary to decry the treatment of women in other countries as “medieval”, to maintain the fiction that women in our culture have nothing to trouble their heads about. The terminology carefully allots two meanings to the same collection of past events, and assigns our (rightly) divided feelings of shame, horror, belonging and heritage to whichever side is needed to keep gender norms in place.

The word “chivalry” has been particularly bothering me recently since I started rereading bits of Malory’s Morte Darthur. One of the most influential Arthurian works in the English language, this fifteenth-century version of the Camelot legends looms over almost all subsequent Arthurian works in some form or another, whether that be Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, or the recent BBC TV Merlin.

An examination of this romance also gives a bit of a lie to the myth of “chivalry”. It’s not that it debunks the soft-focus pageantry with a brutal expose of fifteenth-century repression and sexual violence (though an account of its author might do something of the sort). Rather, it undermines the “princess” paradigm by offering a very different kind of female character.

As Helen Cooper notes in her edition of Morte Darthur, women are often the characters who incite action:

Most of them, moreover, are active agents, not mere passive damosels.

The book also seems quite at home with women’s romantic agency: to quote Cooper again, Malory “takes it as natural and unthreatening…that women have sexual desires” and act upon them.

One particular passage struck me as illuminating this issue: when Dame Lyonet realizes her sister Lyonesse is in love with the knight Sir Gareth. The section doesn’t need much more prologue:

Then was Sir Gareth more gladder than he was more. And then they troth-plight, other to love and never to fail while their life lasteth.

And so they burnt both in hot love that they were accorded to abate their lusts secretly. And there Dame Lyonesses counselled Sir Gareth to sleep in no other place but in the hall, and there she promised him to come to his bed a little before midnight.

Their counsel was not so privily kept but it was understood, for they were but young both, and tender of age, and had not used such craft before.

Wherefore the damosel Lyonet was a little displeased, and she thought her sister Dame Lyonesse was a little over-hasty, that she might not abide the time of her marriage; and for saving of her worship [reputation] she thought to abate their hot lusts.

And she let ordain by her subtle crafts that they had no their intents either with other as in their delights, until they were married.

Unfortunately I haven’t got space to continue copying out the episode, but the way she decides to use her “subtle crafts” to frustrate her sister’s insufficiently crafty crafts involves creating an enchanted knight who comes charging in whenever Gareth and Lyonesse manage some alone-time, causing Gareth to have to battle it.

He defeats it each time, in increasingly final ways (eventually swiping its head off, and carefully chopping the head into a hundred pieces and dropping it out of a window into the moat) but each time Lyonet puts it back together with magic ointment. Because who doesn’t have space in their life for a moment-ruining sorcerous cyborg created by their older sister?

This passage also exhibits some surprising gender politics. On first reading it’s simply another fabulous (in both senses) tale of magic and love, but the framing is strikingly modern.

Firstly, the narrator seems to find nothing either surprising or blameworthy about the two young people wanting to have sex before marriage: that use of “lust” is, in context, simply denoting a particular emotional and physical state. It’s not the “lust” of the Seven Deadly Sins, it’s more like the lust of a Magnum advert or a Cosmo special issue.¹

Neither does Lyonet see anything wrong with her sister wanting to sleep with Sir Gareth – she simply realizes that everyone else knows what is going to happen, and that her own wish for her sister to be happy won’t stop people shaming Lyonesse. She creates the magical knight because she’s acutely aware of the gap between her own sympathetic understanding of her sister’s feelings and desires, and the hypocritical attitude of the society they have to live within.

Interesting that the word “craft” is used of both Lyonesse’s secrecy and Lyonet’s magic. I’m tempted to read this as suggesting they’re both sets of skills which the women have developed in order to survive in a difficult world – though Lyonesse’s is far less effective. The initiative Cooper identifies in Malory’s women is dramatically present here: Lyonesse instructs her lover where to be at night and comes to visit him, whilst her sister makes a counter-plan to foil her.

Sexual attraction is hardly an unusual motive for action in the fiction we see around us, but in this case it’s the young women who take action and negotiate their way between their feelings and the expectations of a broader community.

There’s also something meta-romance about Lyonet’s solution. I may be over-reading this brief passage, but Malory’s deliberately laconic style encourages us to interject motivations and connections to make sense of the narrative. So I think the form Lyonet’s obstruction takes – an enchanted bouncer – is also a symbol of her superior ability to understand heroic romance as a genre.

“Alright, little sister”, her choice of magical weapon seems to say, “You want to be the heroine of a chivalric romance? Because in all the romances I’ve read you don’t get the knight that easily…” She ironically goes along with Lyonet’s casting of herself as romantic damosel, and cranks up the volume, providing her sister with her very own enchanted nemesis to overcome before she can get what she wants.

If we wanted to translate this into a realist mode, this gestures towards the idea that love doesn’t end your story arc as a person, and that finding the person you want to spend “happily ever after with” doesn’t subsume your identity into a “game over” montage.

Lyonesse still has to deal with what Camelot will think of her, and she’ll do so whilst remaining Lyonesse and a member of her own society. The meta-romantic element, in which Lyonet goes to the spell-book to slow up her sister’s love life, seems to valorise young women who are symbolically and semantically competent, as well as active in the world.

Lyonet wins this episode because she is more capable than Lyonesse of taking the narratives which surround them in their culture, understanding and decoding them, and then redeploying those narratives to her own advantage, with a combination of critical analysis, sisterly compassion, and geeky in-joke wit.

So if nothing else, this chunk of Malory provides us with another reason to sneer at “chivalry” when used to argue that the world was better when women were (supposedly) passive, and to own up to our medieval heritage, whether it’s embarrassing, troubling or apparently irrelevant.

Because occasionally we may trip over moments like this, where Dame Lyonet is exercising her subtle crafts. Crafts which, as I read them over again, look more and more like medieval geek feminism.

• Images taken from Kate Beaton’s inspired ‘courtly love’ comics over at Hark! A Vagrant.
• Jem Bloomfield also blogs at Quite Irregular

1. Not that either of those are anything but problematic, but my point here is the modernity of the word’s implications.

C

CHIVALRY

Chivalry is dead, but you’re still kinda cute.

– Nelly Furtado, Promiscuous (2006)

Chivalry. Not one of feminism’s most pressing issues, but definitely one of its more genteel debates.

Do you, as an attractive female who also happens to be a feminist, deign to take the seat that dude offers you on the crowded tube or laugh hollowly and stick your head back in your neighbour’s armpit? Is chivalry OK?

Personally, my view on this debate is always affected by the point that 99% of the men I’ve met who talk about chivalry with misty-eyed fervour are also the kind of Nice Guys who Really Aren’t Very Nice At All.

But that’s not for here.

What I am interested in is looking at its complex linguistic heritage.

Horses

What’s that sound in the distance?

Why, it’s the sound of clopping hooves – and chivalry‘s etymological root come to join us. Neiiigh.

Animal instincts. Photo by Hodge.

For though chivalry in English means (first definition ahoy!)  ‘the code of behaviour demonstrated by a perfect knight‘, were we French we’d replace ‘knight’ with ‘chevalier‘, or ‘horseman’ – from the root word cheval (= ‘horse’).

The knight, or chevalier, is in origin a nobleman on horseback who goes around rescuing maidens and fighting dragons. He is chivalrous in behaviour, displaying (the word’s second definition) ‘courage, honour, justice and readiness to help the weak’.

Key examples can be found in the legends of King Arthur and his horsebacked Knights of the Round Table – in particular Sir Gawain and the so-good-he-couldn’t-be-gooder Sir Percival (who later becomes Wagner’s Parsifal).

The chivalrous are those on horseback.

But it’s the secondary meaning of chivalry that we best recognise today: ‘courteous behaviour, especially towards women’ (that is, giving up your seat on the tube, which Percival would totally have done if he didn’t travel everywhere by cheval).

Courtly-powered lovin’

Chivalry – and the courtesy that defines it – is also the base idea behind courtly love, which the devoted may remember we addressed separately in the Alphabet Glory Days.

Charles I – Equestrian portrait by Anthony van Dyck

This is what the knights are doing when they’re not out fighting –  sighing for love among rose bushes, swooning at the touch of a ‘lily-white hand’ and definitely giving up their seats for a woman on the medieval commute.

And it was said to have been invented by a woman, Eleanor of Aquitaine.

Before she married Henry II and brought her French customs over to England, Eleanor had a period presiding alone over a predominantly male grouping in Poitiers.It seems inventing an elaborate code of chaste devotion to a single lady – courteous behaviour, if you will – was a good way for Eleanor to bring these bored and potentially restless knights into order – and, I assume, to block potential sexual aggression at the same time (cf. the court of Elizabeth I, which saw a resurgence of ‘courtly’ devotion to ‘Gloriana’, the ‘Virgin Queen‘).

Courtship

With these courtly roots, it’s appropriate that, during the English Civil War, the word chevalier should lend itself so enthusiastically to the Royalist cause in fighting for king (and court).

In this context, the Cavaliers were enemies to the Roundheads and cousins to chevaliers via the Latin source-word ‘cabellarius’ (also meaning ‘horseman’).

The origin of this term is actually pre-war, in the grouping of courtly ‘cavaliers’ at the original Carolingian court (a bit like the courtly lovers at Poitiers).

These included the ‘Cavalier poets‘, a conglomerate of literary courtiers formed by the King himself, including Robert Herrick and Edmund Waller.

The term in this usage is ambiguous, though. On the one hand, cavalier was often used in allusion to the King’s refined (indeed ‘knightly’) sensibilities, which, incidentally, included a famous love of horses – as the many magnificent equestrian portraits of him attest.

But, in a pejorative sense, the cavalier poets were so named because they were famously ‘roistering gallants’ and ‘libertines’. This is cavalier‘s other meaning: ‘haughty, disdainful or supercilious’ or ‘offhand and unceremonious’ (a bit like wearing your hat at a ‘rakish’ angle).

So cavalier is almost a contraction in terms.

The Don

This is the very ambiguity we find in Mozart’s great libertine opera, Don Giovanni, written about 100 years later. The ‘Don’ is a nobleman and serial womaniser. He’s a standard-issue rake, in fact: we learn in the Catalogue Song that he’s seduced 1,003 women in Spain alone.

Sir Charles Grandison

He is throughout referred to in the Italian as a ‘cavalier’, understood (and, for us English-speakers, translated) according to context variously as ‘gentleman’ (nobleman on horseback) and ‘rake’ (careless womaniser) – as in the opera’s subtitle, ‘Il dissoluto punito’ (‘the debauchee punished’).

Thus, when Don Giovanni takes the pretty peasant girl Zerlina away from her finance, Masetto, to show her his castle (no, really), Don Giovanni ‘reassures’ the jealous Masetto by saying he needn’t worry – his fiancee is ‘in the hands of a cavalier‘.Unfortunately, that’s exactly what Masetto is afraid of. “Let the cavaliere make a cavaliera out of you!” he trumpets at the departing Zerlina – he knows what’s going down (this).

Court to City

Back to English climes.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Queen Anne halved the size of the English court and moved it out of central London.

In so doing, she ultimately ended up transferring power from court to city – and courtesy became civility (from the Latin cives (= the city)).

The White Knight accompanies Alice through the forest

This is the age of opening doors, watching your language and standing up when a woman enters the room. Chivalry has gone domestic; men are civil now in Britain. Only the hot-headed Italian Don Giovannis are still cavaliers.

But when Samuel Richardson wanted to depict a perfect (but domestic) Englishman, he still made him an aristocratic knight (Sir Charles Grandison). Jane Austen did too: her paragon of virtue (himself based on Sir Charles), is pointedly named Mr Knightly (Emma).By this point it’s faded away to a name rather than a title, but the gentleman still has a vestigial horse (if you will).

White Knights

Strangely enough, the vestigial horse becomes more literal in the modern age, in the form of the ladies’ proverbial ‘ideal man’ – a chivalrous gentleman. Mr Right is also a ‘knight in shining armour’.

He’s even a  Lewis Carroll-esque ‘White Knight’, a noble rescuer (as in the song ‘My White Knight’ from Meredith Wilson’s The Music Man, where the knight in question will, her mother thinks, ‘save’ Marian the Librarian from Old Maidery).

Remember when Grace first meets Leo – the Great Romance – in Will and Grace? He’s on a horse in Central Park. That’s how you know he’s a Big Deal Romance.

Never trust a man on horseback

And, to conclude very crudely, I suppose this is what happened to chivalry .

It became the polite behaviour of the  gentleman – enshrined in tradition and developed over a couple of hundred years to become our friend offering me a seat on the bustling 21st century commute and sitcom single girls dreaming of their ‘Mr Darcy’.

But I still hear the sound of clopping hooves. The fantasy may be more Sir Gawain than Don Giovanni, but you know what they say – the apple never falls far from the lexical tree.

• For more from the Alphabet of Feminism – a whole series of posts about language, gender and history – visit the Alphabet category. Contains lots of hand-drawn illustrations!

Gasp.

But you knew that already. It’s the least mysterious murder mystery ever. Even Hastings could have cracked it (well, maybe). Just google “chivalry is dead!” and you’ll find plenty of witnesses to testify to the fact that it was feminism what done it.

It is also, apparently, a tragic case of mistaken identity as countless Daily Fail and Torygraph writers assert that chivalry wasn’t even sexist. It’s just about being nice to women. Isn’t that what you want, slavering harpy hordes? For us to be nice to you?

Despite being fatally trampled under the feminist jackboot, chivalry is surprisingly pernicious. I spend quite a lot of time arguing about gender on the internet, as you might imagine. And recently the most inflammatory topic seems to be chivalry. Sparked by a call from Graham Linehan on Twitter for chivalry to be resurrected (see here and here) I’ve gotten into a number or heated discussions disputing the value of chivalry today. Sadly, I believe rumours of the death of chivalry to have been greatly exaggerated.

Some people I spoke to claimed that they were defending chivalry as a general approach, towards all genders. But isn’t that just ‘not being an arse’? Why does it need a special name? Especially one with such deeply gendered associations. However pure the intention, bringing chivalry back from the dead serves no one. It’s a problematic idea in any context because it fetishises an imbalance of power. It’s fairness as charity rather than right, in which a privileged group extend a superficial form of power to another group along highly formalised lines.

As it is most commonly understood, as a code of behaviour for men towards women, chivalry is sexist. As Amanda Marcotte says:

Chivalry is a set of behaviors where men feign servitude and humility towards women, but in practice they tend to actually reinforce men’s greater social status.

In my recent conversations I’ve been confirmed in my suspicion that there are a lot of Nice Guys out there who don’t want to hear this. I think the most common objections I’ve encountered go like this:

“But I believe in equality/I’m a feminist, how dare you tell me I’m sexist just for being nice to women? That doesn’t fit with my carefully constructed self-image *cries*”

Following codes of behaviour towards women forged hundreds of years ago isn’t really an act of gender resistance. Sorry. Try turning your deeply-held commitment to equality to use by being considerate and respectful to everybody. If you already are: great! Why not drop the silly name for it?

“But I’m only being nice. Would you rather I punched you in the face rather than opening the door for you?”

Are you nice in this way to everyone? If so, good for you! If not: lots of women find chivalric or ‘gentlemanly’ behaviour patronising or irritating at best, and creepy and coercive at worst.  Of course I prefer chivalry to brazen misogyny, but those aren’t the only choices, people. And both enshrine an archaic, damaging attitude toward women and reinforce the idea that women should be treated as women rather than as people.

You may have seen the pithy, ironic poems by suffragist Alice Duer Miller that Lili Loofbourow shared on the Hairpin the other day. Her meditation on chivalry is one of my favourites, and neatly captures the problems with the idea:

It’s treating a woman politely
As long as she isn’t a fright:
It’s guarding the girls who act rightly,
If you can be judge of what’s right;
It’s being—not just, but so pleasant;
It’s tipping while wages are low;
It’s making a beautiful present,
And failing to pay what you owe.

Exactly. Women are owed equality. In the context of hundreds of years of struggle to be taken seriously, for agency, autonomy, self-representation, and social, political and economic power, the feeble gift of a seat or a door held open can feel like a joke. Or even an insult. For me it acts as a reminder of the social expectation – even now – to be ladylike. Grateful, graceful, delicate. Powerless.

Epilogue

Besides, chivalry can quickly become desperately tedious, as Kate Beaton understands:

from http://www.harkavagrant.com - copyright Kate Beaton