The King’s Damosel
Avon, 1976
143 pages
| 
Quest for Camelot
Warner Bros. Studios, 1998
93 minutes
|
So this review is going to be slightly different in format, because in addition to comparing Vera Chapman’s novel The King’s Damosel to the original legend, I will also be discussing how it differs from the animated movie Quest for Camelot, which credits this book as its source material.
Warning for Spoilers and Trigger Warning for Discussions of Rape
However, I screwed up my courage and decided this was the
year I would actually read The King’s
Damosel. Thus, here is my review, laced with comparisons to what the movie
version eventually became.
I very quickly determined that the movie is extremely
loosely based on the book. Character names and roles were dramatically changed.
While Chapman’s version puts a feminine twist on “Sir Beaumains” and The Grail
Quest by focusing on Lynett, the stories are still very recognizable from the
originals. Quest for Camelot…well,
not much really stayed over. Lynett randomly became Kayley, though she retains
her Chapman-given tomboyishness and that she was raised as a boy by her sonless
father, Sir Lionel. Lynett’s loves Gareth and Lucius were combined into Kayley’s
love interest Garrett (a modern movie removing
a potential love triangle? Thank goodness for small favors!). Lynette’s sister
Leonie was cut entirely. Juliana was promoted from governess to Kayley’s
mother. Ruber, the Red Knight, had his goal shifted from marrying Leonie and
taking over her lands to killing Arthur and conquering all of England. He also
became the main antagonist when he’s in the book for about 30 seconds. The Quest
for the Holy Grail becomes a quest for a stolen Excalibur. Lynett’s hawk Jeanne
became Garrett’s falcon Ayden/Silverwings (whoever made this decision knows
nothing about hawks; the females are the ones people catch for use because
they’re bigger and stronger). The two-headed dragon Cornwall & Devon is
unique to the movie.
The book begins, interestingly, with the double wedding
of Leonie and Gareth and Lynett and Gaheris, with Lynett absolutely dreading it
because she’s in love with Gareth. We then flash back to Lynett’s rape as a
child (more on that later), and then to Ruber’s invasion a few years later.
Very little time is spent on the Beaumains plot, though a fun twist is that
it’s tomboyish Lynett who is mistaken for a kitchen boy and given the name Pretty
Hands. We never see why she’s in love with Gareth, we’re just told that she is.
This book also does an injustice to Gaheris, I think. We’re told he’s crude and
brutish, but we never see it. He wants to be married to Lynett as much as she
wants to be married to him, so on the wedding night he refuses to consummate
the marriage then leaves and we never see him again. I wish we’d gotten some
proof Gaheris deserves the bad rap he’s given in the marketing on the cover and
inside the front of the book, which seems to paint Gaheris as Lynett’s rapist.
In fact, it’s Bagdemagus and the rape happened years earlier. Gaheris, I think,
is actually being pretty honest in refusing to have sex with someone he’s not
interested in and knows is not interested in him even though they are married.
A lot of men back then would have either done what they saw as their duty or
secured their hold over “their” property by raping an unwilling wife on their
wedding night, because even today in most places marriage isn’t legal until
it’s consummated. Gaheris’s refusal to do so I think actually speaks fairly
well for him. He certainly doesn’t hurt Lynett any more than she’s already been
hurt.
Lynett in despair goes to King Arthur and begs for a job
so she won’t have to face life with an absent husband who doesn’t want her. He
makes her The King’s Damosel, an official messenger. She spends the next
several years riding around accompanied by Lancelot, Perceval, Gwalchmei (not
Gawain), and Bors as her backup when she delivers messages from Arthur.
Eventually she meets up again with Bagdemagus. He captures her, but her knights
break her out and Lancelot kills Bagdemagus. They are all captured by Morgan le
Fay who hands Lynett over to Bagdemagus’ men. Lynett escapes and winds up lost
in some caves where she meets Lucius, a blind young man who is mostly the basis
for Garrett. He was blinded not in an accident but from spending several years
a prisoner in the caves. He was found and raised by a seer, the Sybil, who
admits to Lynett that Lucius is dying. Lynett has fallen in love with Lucius
and decides to set out to seek the Holy Grail. Lucius asks since she is seeking
a cure to save his life if she could also ask for his sight.
Obviously none of this happens in Quest for Camelot, which is filled with dragons, ogres, half-men
half-metal creatures, magic plants and other imaginary beings, dreams of
knighthood and random happenings. Really the movie has almost no connection
with the Arthur legend other than the side characters of Arthur and Merlin and
the constant chatter about Camelot and Excalibur (which btw does not appear in
the book). Excalibur stands in for the Grail as a magical cure-all at the end.
However, here the movie and the book differ in a striking way.
In the movie, when Excalibur gets put back in the Stone,
it magically cures everything within Camelot of all ills, if only for a few
seconds—except Garrett’s sight. I’m still not completely sure why the
filmmakers chose to do this, especially in light of what happens in the book at
this point. In the book, Lynett finds the Grail by (of course) asking a
question in the traditional hall with the Fisher King—the test that Percival
fails in legend. She heals the Fisher King and carries the Grail back to Lucius
with the injunction that he can choose to be healed of his illness or have his sight restored, not both. He
chooses sight because he so desperately wants to see his love. He dies of his
illness after a month of bliss. I’m not 100% sure how I feel about this choice,
probably because it’s not the choice I’d make. I’d personally rather live a
lifetime blind than have a month of sight, particularly if I could spend that
lifetime with the love of my life and my death would mean leaving my beloved partner
alone. However, it poses an interesting question about the nature of happiness:
choosing a short time of absolute bliss or a lifetime of ups and downs. I know
which I’d pick, but not everyone is the same and in that way it is
thought-provoking. In the face of this, the movie having Garrett’s blindness be
the one thing Excalibur doesn’t cure
feels like even more of a cop-out than it already did from just watching the
movie alone. I think I know why the movie creative team did what they did: they
wanted to avoid backlash about curing a disabled main character by magic, but
this flies in the face of the source material, which had the character make a
definite choice that not all readers might agree with and stick to the
consequences of that choice. Or we could have seen that there was at least one
other thing Excalibur couldn’t cure to soften the blow.
On the Rape
(trigger warning and swears for salkjsdfsntsFAIL):
This book is not a kids’ book, what with extramarital
sex, talking severed heads and so on involved in the plotline. This makes it a
somewhat surprising choice for an attempted Disney-ripoff adaptation in the 90s
given the sheer number of much more kid-friendly Arthurian works to pick from.
Sure, this was the era when Disney tried an animated kid-ifyed version of Hunchback of Notre Dame, but at least
that movie paid some tonal homage to its dark source material. Quest for Camelot is so utterly sweet
and cute and so full of whimsical fantasy except for a few bizarre turns here
and there I pity any kid who actually got his or her hands on King’s Damosel while still a child. Less
than twenty-five pages in, Lynett is raped by her father’s friend Bagdemagus at
thirteen. Yeah. Not something you want kids stumbling on, particularly girls
looking for strong female heroes to idolize. Bagdemagus believes her dressing
and acting as a boy and trying to learn how to be his page is actually all a
giant ploy begging for sex. Because women who appear to like doing “man-only”
things are really just pretending interest so they can be that much more
attractive (insert Fake Geek Girl™ tangent here). Anyway, he blathers the usual
pre-rape excuses about how she’s been “asking for it” when she tells him no,
proceeds to rape her, again spouts the cliché line about how the hype didn’t
live up to the product, and rides away, leaving her alone in the woods. Merlin
shows up randomly at this point and tells her to pick herself up and get over
it. Which apparently she does, though she harbors some resentment that she
takes out on Bagdemagus later to her own detriment.
There are a lot of things that bother me about this
scenario. First, the rape-as-origin-story for a lead female character is really
problematic. In this day and age it’s really overdone, though it might not have
been when this book was published in 1976. It takes away agency she might have had by
making her the victim of something that was done to her that she then has to go
off and avenge. This is particularly annoying with Lynett, who has a perfectly
good reason later to go off adventuring: she has to save her lands from being
taken over by Ruber, and she was already a tomboy who wanted to be a knight to
begin with so she really didn’t need a revenge incentive. She also doesn’t
particularly want to be married to Gaheris even without the problem of her not
being a virgin bride.
Second, telling a
rape victim “oh well, it’s not like your virginity was that important to you
anyway, no big loss right?” is heavily insulting even outside a culture where
female premarital virginity is important. Dude, it’s her virginity, not yours.
It should have been her choice when or when not to give it up even if she
didn’t value it in the marriage market. I get that you (the author, through
Merlin) are trying to say female virginity is overvalued in society and is
often mixed up with purity, but you don’t say that to a thirteen-year-old
virgin who was literally just raped in front of you. You also don’t say to your
raped character “You have to forgive him” and then tell us throughout the book
her lack of forgiveness is her greatest failing. Choosing to forgive such a
wrong is important in order to not let it ruin your life with bitterness, but
it’s a process. Forcing it on the character as a necessity in order to escape
peril later in the way that the book does I find extremely uncomfortable.
Third, and most important, Lynett fails to ask Merlin the
obvious question: where the fuck were you
when he was raping me? Merlin seems to know all about it, which means he
either knew beforehand (being Merlin) or he was watching. Which just makes it worse. If Lynett isn’t going to say
it, I will: What the HELL, douchebag. This is the problem I had
with Merlin in Mary Stewart’s trilogy about him and it turns up here again.
Just going along with what you’ve foreseen as Destiny means you come off as an
enormous asshole because you sit back and watch when stuff like this happens
instead of trying to prevent it. This is possibly one of the most annoyingly
mysterious and unhelpful versions of Merlin I’ve read to-date. I wanted to
throttle him every time he showed up after that.
Overall
I liked the book more than I was expecting to given what
I knew about it going in. I did find myself rooting for Lynett over the course
of this short novel. It does have the sense of epic wonder and tragedy that
makes Arthurian legends work so well. But I can’t get behind how the rape was
done and there were some key characterizations missing (like Gaheris and
Gareth) that would have made the story much more nuanced.
Despite its problems and gaping plotholes (and one enormously annoying song I can’t stand) I still like the movie. It’s a cute diversion and occasionally has some good concepts. There are just plenty of things I wish they’d done differently, particularly now that I’ve read the source material. They’d have had a stronger movie if they had.
3 Stars on The King’s Damosel
3 Stars on Quest for Camelot
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