ENGL 2300 Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: Masculinity, Courtly Love, Hypermasculinity
Document Summary
The two courtly settings in the poem (arthur"s court, hautdesert court) show gender relations di erently. Britain understood its origins to be connected to the fall of troy. In every case the place is named after the male founder. Role of women in arthur"s court: arthur and the knights have agency, women are involved only as recipients. Women de ne the codes (i. e chivalry), yet they are removed from participating in it. She is said to be more beautiful than the jems and objects around her but at the sae time her beauty kind of blends with them, she has eyes of quartz which makes her more of an object. Women have no sense of subjectivity, activity or agency, more of an object to be looked at. Ipped and we see that really a woman was controlling the whole thing.
