Abstract
Starting from the 1970s, firmly situated in the realm of second-wave feminism, through the contemporary portrayal of Matilda into third-wave feminism and post-modernism, the fictional Matilda is molded and shaped in ways appropriate to the time frame of the fiction, but not necessarily a reflection of the historical Matilda. This proposed chapter thus seeks to explore the relationship between the fictional Matilda and the historical one, and its impact on modern perceptions of medieval queens as both sovereigns and mothers. The chapter will primarily explore Matilda’s attitudes to conception and motherhood as seen in fiction since the 1970s, demonstrating a gulf between the fictional and historical Matildas and a wider discrepancy in the general perception between the factual Matilda and the “she-wolf” (Castor 2011) of fiction. Furthermore, the chapter will survey the major fictional subgenre in the works of Plaidy, Jones, and Garwood featuring an affair between Matilda and Stephen—and Henry II as Stephen’s son—and probe its seeming importance to a fictional narrative.
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- 1.
Fiona Tolhurst, Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Translation of Female Kingship (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 16.
- 2.
Agnes Strickland, Lives of the Queens of England, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard, 1841), accessed 16 December 2014, https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=rPYPAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
- 3.
K.R. Potter, ed. and trans., Gesta Stephani (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950, reprinted 1976, 2004.)
- 4.
Cf. Charles Beem, The Lionness Roared: The Problems of Female Rule in English History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Marjorie Chibnall, The Empress Matilda: Queen Consort, Queen Mother and Lady of the English (Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers, 1991); Tolhurst 2013.
- 5.
Marjorie Chibnall, “The Charters of the Empress Matilda,” in Law and Government in Medieval England and Normandy, ed. George Garnett and John Hudson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 276.
- 6.
In this piece, the term “post-feminist” or “post-feminism” is used to indicate the world after the second-wave feminist movement, not to imply the sometimes-suggested current phase of “post-feminism.”
- 7.
Kate Ellie, “Gimme Shelter: Feminism, Fantasy and Women’s Popular Fiction,” in American Media and Mass Culture: Left Perspectives, ed. Donald Lazere (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), 225.
- 8.
Jean Plaidy, The Passionate Enemies (London: Pan, 1976).
- 9.
Sharon Penman, When Christ and His Saints Slept (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1995).
- 10.
Elizabeth Chadwick, Lady of the English (Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks/Landmark, 2011).
- 11.
This leaves out two other novels featuring Matilda as a protagonist. The first is Ellen Jones’ The Fatal Crown, published in 1991 by Simon & Schuster with a paperback reprint from Avon Books, and rather more firmly in the realm of historical romance (the author, perhaps unsurprisingly, credits Nesta Pain’s popular biography of Matilda from 1978 as “having particularly stimulated my imagination,” 556). Although the book had an initial print run of 100,000 (Reed Business Information Review 1990 via Amazon, http://www.amazon.com/The-Fatal-Crown-Ellen-Jones/dp/0380717077, accessed February 23, 2015), it does not seem to have found wide readership although its recent reissue as an e-book might warrant a new audience. The second is Haley Elizabeth Garwood’s The Forgotten Queen, published in 1998 by the small press The Writer’s Block (West Virginia, US). This, via a small press with a small print run, also did not find a wider audience. However, both novels carry on with Jean Plaidy’s fictional devise of Matilda and Stephen having a sexual relationship resulting in Henry II, thus providing a narratively satisfying ending of the child of the two combatants eventually receiving the throne of England. While outside the broader scope of this paper, these two novels alongside Plaidy’s may warrant further attention in the exploration of this narrative trope in admittedly small body of Matildan fiction.
This chapter is also focusing on novels with Matilda as the protagonist, declining to study novels where she appears as a secondary character such as Ken Follet’s Pillars of the Earth (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989) and E.L. Konigsburg’s A Fine Taste for Scarlet and Miniver (1973).
- 12.
Bruce Lambert, “Eleanor Hibbert, Novelist Known as Victoria Holt and Jean Plaidy,” The New York Times, January 21, 1993, accessed 16 December 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/1993/01/21/books/eleanor-hibbert-novelist-known-as-victoria-holt-and-jean-plaidy.html
- 13.
Allison Light, “‘Young Bess’: Historical Novels and Growing Up,” Feminist Review 33 (Autumn 1989), 61.
- 14.
Plaidy, Passionate Enemies, 29–30.
- 15.
Plaidy, Passionate Enemies, 80, 82.
- 16.
Plaidy, Passionate Enemies, 109.
- 17.
Plaidy, Passionate Enemies, 135.
- 18.
Plaidy, Passionate Enemies, 135.
- 19.
Plaidy, Passionate Enemies, 140.
- 20.
Plaidy, Passionate Enemies, 141.
- 21.
Plaidy, Passionate Enemies, 142.
- 22.
Plaidy, Passionate Enemies, 147.
- 23.
Plaidy, Passionate Enemies, 153–5.
- 24.
Plaidy, Passionate Enemies, 155.
- 25.
Plaidy, Passionate Enemies, 179.
- 26.
Plaidy, Passionate Enemies, 196.
- 27.
Plaidy, Passionate Enemies, 149.
- 28.
Plaidy, Passionate Enemies, 149.
- 29.
Plaidy, Passionate Enemies, 157.
- 30.
Plaidy, Passionate Enemies, 228.
- 31.
Plaidy, Passionate Enemies, 303.
- 32.
Plaidy, Passionate Enemies, 312.
- 33.
Lauri Umansky, Motherhood Reconceived: Feminism and the Legacies of the Sixties, (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 11.
- 34.
Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973).
- 35.
Abortion Act 1967.
- 36.
Penman, Slept, 60.
- 37.
Penman, Slept, 40–2.
- 38.
Penman, Slept, 58–9.
- 39.
Penman, Slept, 98, 136.
- 40.
Nicholas Orme, Medieval Children (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 55–6; Tracy Adams, “Medieval Mothers and their Children: The Case of Isabeau of Bavaria,” Childhood in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Albrecht Classen (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2005), 272.
- 41.
Penman, Slept, 240.
- 42.
Penman, Slept, 240.
- 43.
Penman, Slept, 316–17.
- 44.
Penman, Slept, 99.
- 45.
Penman, Slept, 295.
- 46.
Penman, Slept, 295.
- 47.
Penman, Slept, 418.
- 48.
Penman, Slept, 421.
- 49.
Penman, Slept, 850, 858, 870.
- 50.
Penman, Slept, 37.
- 51.
Penman, Slept, 34.
- 52.
Penman, Slept, 61–2.
- 53.
Penman, Slept, 173.
- 54.
Penman, Slept, 279.
- 55.
Penman, Slept, 737.
- 56.
Penman, Slept, 740.
- 57.
R. Clare Snyder-Hall, “Third-Wave Feminism and the Defense of ‘Choice,’” Perspectives on Politics 8(1) (2010): 259.
- 58.
Umansky, Motherhood, 132; 159–60.
- 59.
Umansky, Motherhood, 160.
- 60.
Chadwick, Lady, 8.
- 61.
Chadwick, Lady, 32.
- 62.
Chadwick, Lady, 146.
- 63.
Chadwick, Lady, 260–3.
- 64.
Sarah Wendell, “The Bitchery Glossary,” Smart Bitches Trashy Books, November 11, 2011. http://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/2011/11/the-bitchery-glossary/
- 65.
Chadwick, Lady, 272–3.
- 66.
Chadwick, Lady, 274.
- 67.
Chadwick, Lady, 281.
- 68.
Chadwick, Lady, 502.
- 69.
Chadwick, Lady, 1–4, 15, 140, 143–4.
- 70.
Chadwick, Lady, 143–4.
- 71.
Chadwick, Lady, 88–9, 91.
- 72.
Chadwick, Lady, 147.
- 73.
Chadwick, Lady, 149.
- 74.
Chadwick, Lady, 150.
- 75.
Chadwick, Lady, 186.
- 76.
Chadwick, Lady, 284.
- 77.
Chadwick, Lady, 285.
- 78.
Chadwick, Lady, 375.
- 79.
Chadwick, Lady, 428–9.
- 80.
Chadwick, Lady, 430–1.
- 81.
Chadwick, Lady, 327.
- 82.
Chadwick, Lady, 25–6.
- 83.
Chadwick, Lady, 114.
- 84.
Chadwick, Lady, 192.
- 85.
Chadwick, Lady, 257.
- 86.
Chadwick, Lady, 280–2, 415–18.
- 87.
Chadwick, Lady, 510.
- 88.
Chadwick, Lady, 511.
- 89.
Ealasaid Munro, “Feminism: A Fourth Wave?” Political Insight 4(2) (September 2013): 22–25.http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/2041-9066.12021/full Accessed 26 Feb 2015.
- 90.
Lambert, “Eleanor Hibbert”; Garwood, Forgotten Queen, vii-viii; Penman, Christ, 909; Chadwick, Lady, 522.
- 91.
Chadwick also expressed a desire to write the “forgotten or at best marginalized” Adeliza: “Adeliza of Louvain. Lady of the English. The Forgotten Queen,” Elizabeth Chadwick: Living the History, January 31, 2010. Accessed February 23, 2015. http://livingthehistoryelizabethchadwick.blogspot.co.uk/2010/01/adeliza-of-louvain-lady-of-english.html; “A Few Questions with Elizabeth Chadwick for the Release of Lady of the English,” The Medieval Bookworm, June 2, 2011. Accessed February 23, 2015. http://medievalbookworm.com/author-interview/a-few-questions-with-elizabeth-chadwick-for-the-release-of-lady-of-the-english/
- 92.
Ellie, “Gimme Shelter.”
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Weikert, K. (2016). The Empress Matilda and Motherhood in Popular Fiction, 1970s to the Present. In: Fleiner, C., Woodacre, E. (eds) Virtuous or Villainess? The Image of the Royal Mother from the Early Medieval to the Early Modern Era. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51315-1_11
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