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This article analyzes violence in two of William Morris' Arthurian poems in terms of Julia Kristeva's theories of psychic violence, especially the linguistic construction of identity and her modernist aesthetics of resistance. (RBK)
'If there exists a 'discourse' which is not a mere depository of thin linguistic layers, an archive of structures, or the testimony of a withdrawn body, and is, instead, the essential element of a practice involving the sum of unconscious, subjective, and social relations in gestures of confrontation and appropriation, destruction and construction-productive violence, in short-it is "literature," or, more specifically, the text.' -Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language
Walter Pater created a new category to describe William Morris' poetry- aesthetic poetry. This poetry echoes an older medievalism characterized by 'mystic passion, passing here and there into the great romantic loves of rebellious flesh, of Lancelot and Abelard.'1 Pater's reading yokes together the spiritual, aesthetic, and sensual elements of Morris' poetry, capturing especially the tone of his early Arthurian poems. Conflict in these poems represents for Pater a reaction against Christian prescriptions, often featuring 'a deliberate choice between Christ and a rival lover.'2 Lovers choose 'to be without hope, protesting against all lower uses of love, barren, extravagant, antinomian.'3 Pater's criticism also articulates what many have identified in Morris' poetry as a sense of escapism, which Pater described as the 'secret of the enjoyment' of his poetry.4
The description clearly pertains to the poems in Morris' first volume of poetry, The Defense of Guenevere, and Other Poems, published in 1858 when Morris was twenty-four years of age. The volume includes four Arthurian poems based on scenes from Malory's Morte and other medievalist poems inspired by various sources.5 All of the poems present the medieval world as both beautiful and violent, heroic and treacherous, transcendent and bleak. Certainly Pater had in mind the title poem and the one that follows it, which presents Lancelot's and Guenevere's last meeting, in describing their love as 'barren, extravagant, antinomian.'6 It is also easy to think of Morris' turn to medieval sources as a form of escapism, especially in light of his later works, where the poet is merely an 'idle singer of an empty day.'7
On the other hand, the presence of physical violence in...