Defending Guinevere: Re-reading William Morris’ “The Defence of Guenevere”

This essay examines how William Morris strategically defended Guinevere and her affair with Lancelot in his poetry “The Defence of Guenevere” within the cultural landscape of the nineteenth century. Instead of repeating the conventional reading of Queen Guinevere as a model of transgressive women fixed by the dichotomous good versus bad femininity, this essay more focuses on Guinevere’s various guises in order to contexualize Guinevere and her adultery in a broader sense of human nature. First, this essay explores how Morris portrayed a true picture of Guinevere, which was obscured and overshadowed by the dominant gender discourse of the time, by applying his anachronistic and unconventional literary device deviated from conventional social norm and literary style. Although Morris’ radical and unconventional Arthurian world failed to appeal the contemporaries, this essay argues that it was Morris’ subtle and ingenious way that reflected the nineteenth century culture as well as his forward-looking view of a potential shift in the status of women. Considering the fact that it was a critical period in the evolution of modern legal and cultural attitudes to the relation of women and sexuality, Morris was a more realistic observer describing Victorian anxieties about the conservative Victorian sexual discourse in his poetry.