Complicating and Undermining Feminist Legend in le Roman de Brut

Abstract

In the history he called De gestis Britonum, Geoffrey of Monmouth presents the marriage of Queen Igerna and King Uther as founded upon both love and equality, Igerna and Uther’s daughter Anna as a pivotal figure in British history, Queen Ganhumara as King Arturus’s partner in power, Helena as heroic in her resistance to sexual violation, and her nursemaid as heroic in her self-sacrifice. Nevertheless, Geoffrey’s narrative of the British past contains gaps that his early translators Wace and Laȝamon fill in ways that tend to undermine his feminist version of the Arthurian legend. Although female figures in Wace’s roman de Brut and Laȝamon’s Brut have received some scholarly attention, its focus has tended to be narrow. Most studies limit themselves to either Guenevere alone or a small number of female figures, and they tend to focus on either Wace’s or Laȝamon’s poem. ¹ However, comparative analysis of all the female figures that appear in the Arthurian sections of both Geoffrey’s history and its early vernacular translations reveals what the two poets have in common: they domesticate the unusual female figures that their predecessor in Arthurian literature created. In Le roman de Brut, Wace complicates the feminist version of the Arthurian legend that he inherited from Geoffrey of Monmouth by expanding the account to which he had access through both the Vulgate and First Variant versions of his source text, yet he undermines feminist legend in two ways.