Iqra’i

A reader writes:

Chivalry (assuming they mean it not just as a synonym for knighthood, in which case it would be tautological) was a performance, as much drag as you say the wearing of a bowtie is. The whole thing with asking ladies for their favors and wearing them in the joust, of quests against knights defending magical castles etc, was very deliberately staged. It always already looked back to the distant past — people in the 12th-15th century looking back to a mythical King Arthur. Knights were of a social level where marriages were arranged and the whole courtly love thing was window-dressing (either for marriage or adultery). Nor did chivalry improve the treatment of women outside the knights’ own social class. Remember Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur was written while he was in prison for rape.

This is an important point. I’m all in favor of stories that make us better. Looking back to a noble and vanished past can inspire us to greater virtue, whether or not the past was actually noble. (C.f. sacred veils.) It’s much the same as looking to literature for inspiration, with the added hook that we can claim a real inheritance.

It’s that very claim of inheritance, though, which makes the sacred veil problematic. Our interaction with the past owes far more to our unthinking assumptions than to the stories we articulate. Trying to embody the values exalted in our stories is one thing; ignoring our actual inheritance from the things behind the veil is quite another.

It becomes a sort of doublethink — we “know” that knights treated ladies well, and we aspire to the same. At the same time, there are viciously unchivalrous undercurrents in our society, from Malory to the present. Claiming chivalry as an inheritance may inspire us. Claiming it as our only inheritance lets us ignore all the other strains in our heritage — their causes hidden, perhaps, but their effects all too evident.

Don Quixote is a tragic figure because, for him, the veil worked. He called the whores ladies not to inspire them to better their lives, but because he didn’t understand that there were whores. The world in which he found himself could not have come from the noble past he believed in. His private world was cleaner, better, purer, but it was all in his head.

The good old days weren’t always. That doesn’t negate the lessons we draw from them, or their value as stories and roles, but we mustn’t allow the fact that “it would have been nice if” to blind us to the nastier things that we have inherited unthinking.