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!

RAKE

Men, some to Business, some to pleasure take;
But ev’ry Woman is at heart a Rake.

Alexander Pope, Epistle II: To a Lady, Of The Characters of Women (1743)

Why Do The Good Girls…

It is one of the principal views of this publication: to occasionally venture outside the female sphere and see what the chaps are doing. DASTARDLY DEEDS would seem to be the answer in many cases focused around the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the word rake first came into being.

A spot of rakish gardening: the 'Temple and Chamber of Venus', in the grounds of West Wycombe Park, Buckinghamshire. Photo par Hodge.

I am frequently asked, with a wry smile, ‘So, was your dissertation on garden implements?’, to which I invariably respond, with a smug one, ‘Well, yes.’ You see, rake as ‘a dissolute man of fashion’ derives first from rake as ‘an implement consisting of a pole with a crossbar toothed like a comb at the end’ for ‘drawing together hay etc. or smoothing loose soil or gravel’… you know, a ‘rake’. In this form, the word is (at least) Old English (raca) from the proto-Germanic rak- (‘to gather or heap up’), and rake in its many applications to people springs first and foremost from the compound term rakehell (c.1560). This, in turn, comes from the (apparently common) phrase ‘to rake out hell’ (first cited around 1542), meaning ‘to search’ or, perhaps more appropriately, ‘comb’ out the infernal regions. A rakehell, then (= ‘an immoral person’ or ‘a scoundrel’) is someone than whom there is no-one worse, even should you ‘comb through Hell’. Tut tut.

Oh, what an odious Creature is a Rake!

In this early incarnation, the rakehell is a broadly classless figure who basically spends most of his time making a nuisance of himself. By 1687, he had lost his suffix, and, in the form rake, became defined as ‘an aristocratic man of dissolute and promiscuous habits’. Historically, these ‘habits’ boil down to drinking, swearing, whoring, and causing public disturbances (‘rioting’). Ever a sensualist (and sworn enemy to marriage), his iniquities always involve sexual depravity, often grotesquely extreme: Shadwell’s Don Juan feels ‘forced to commit a rape to pass the time’. Dr Johnson was less than impressed with such goings-on, and he defined a rake in his 1755 Dictionary as ‘A loose, disorderly, vitious, wild, gay, thoughtless fellow; a man addicted to pleasure’. Nevertheless, the true rake is protected from proto-ASBO consequences by his pedigree, which is the only difference between him and a ‘common’ criminal / rakehell.

It is in this ‘hellish’ yet aristocratic form that the rake first becomes defined as that archetype hanging out in the gangs….sorry, ‘clubs’ that the ever-hysterical Victorians dubbed ‘Hellfire Clubs‘. These were either groups of aristocrats dressing up as monks and nuns to commit acts of bestial iniquity, or sedate philosophical and political discussion groups, depending on the fruitiness of the historian. The overlap is more overlapp-y than you might think, and it relates to rake‘s satellite term, and secondary meaning, ‘libertine’. As libértin, this word is all over c18th French literature, which has no real cognate for rake as a distinct term, and it is in this form that rake gives us the Libertines (Pete Doherty) and The Libertine (Swoony Depp). Relating, as you might think, to our word liberty via Latin’s liberta, libertine can mean anything from ‘free translation’ and ‘free thinking’ (the revolutionary ‘liberté, égalité, fraternité’ among other things) to the sexual excess and decadence (‘freedom’, or indeed ‘free love‘) associated with John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, and perhaps even Doherty himself (depending on whether or not you think celebrity is the twenty-first century’s aristocracy).

Never trust a man in a pastel pink two-piece. Robert Lovelace prepares to abduct Clarissa Harlowe, by Francis Hayman.

Set Me Free.

Given this libertine background, it is unsurprising that, in its second wave as ‘The Order of the Monks of Medmenham’, the rakish ‘Hellfire Club’ was associated not only with Sir Francis Dashwood (defined by Wikipedia as ‘an English rake and politician’, and responsible for the horticulture displayed above, left), but also with notables like William Hogarth, the liberty-obsessed Benjamin Franklin and even Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (a close friend of Mary Astell, the ‘first feminist’).

Perhaps, then, this sexual excess could be connected with burgeoning ideas about general freedom, and here we must ask the obvious question: female rake, yes or no? The dictionary says ‘yes’, but cites as proof Pope’s line that ‘every woman is at heart a rake’, closer to an eighteenth-century “‘cor, she’s askin’ for it'” than acknowledged sexual equality. So, institutionally at least, the female rake always risks sliding into the Other Category, as the harlot, which must be at least partially because women were less likely to espouse rakishness as part of a broader public life. The closest we seem to get to an actual love’em’-and-leave’em she-rake is the upper-middle-class lesbian: Anne Lister‘s diaries record her pursuit of local girls, her habit of dressing in male garb, and her nickname ‘Gentleman Jack’. And of course a particularly saucy woman is always free to wear her hat at a ‘rakish‘ angle (where rakish = ‘dashing, jaunty or slightly disreputable’) as modelled by the celebrity adulteress Georgiana ‘Keira Knightley’ Cavendish , Duchess of Devonshire (who was getting it on with THE Earl Grey: libertea, geddit?!!).

What Women Want.

Meanwhile, middle-class intellectuals were determined to shelter poor Woman from such degenerates. They had to: for even the most virtuous young ladies are dangerously susceptible to rakish charm! What is more, they always believe (poor souls) that their chaste beauty and noble virtue can save a rake from himself! (…Katy Perry, anyone?) Samuel Richardson in particular seems to have lived in perpetual horror of just such folly, endlessly repeating his fear of the ‘dangerous but too commonly received notion that a reformed rake makes the best husband‘ and crying ‘But MADAM!’ to those young ladies who wrote to him describing the seductive appeal of his own rake, Clarissa‘s Robert Lovelace. To this, Mary Wollstonecraft:

It seems a little absurd to expect women to be more reasonable than men in their LIKINGS, and still to deny them the uncontroled use of reason. When do men FALL IN LOVE with sense? When do they, with their superior powers and advantages, turn from the person to the mind? And how can they then expect women, who are only taught to observe behaviour, and acquire manners rather than morals, to despise what they have been all their lives labouring to attain?

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Well, quite. Excuse me, I have to rearrange my hat.

Further Rakish Adventures:

• Jane Austen’s Mr Willoughby (A Rake Determined To Marry Well).
• The Dastardly Mr Wickham (A Lazy Lower Class Rake)
• William Hogarth, The Rake’s Progress
• The West Wycombe Caves and West Wycombe Park – A rakish sort of National Trust day out.

NEXT WEEK: S is for Ship