The ever-brave Knight Gawain first sees her all alone resting beneath an elm. The mirror held in her hand attracts her gaze. You might say her transfixed gaze upon her mirror reflects her shameful vanity and pride. She is, after all, Chrétien de Troyes’ Haughty Maid of Logres. But mirrors expose all truths. They reflect the world as it is with all its combined beauty and ugliness. So, yes, the Haughty Maid is vilified. Her pride and public disdain of noble knights makes her an evil outcast. Yet, there is more to her tale. Within Chrétien’s The Story of the Grail (Perceval), the Haughty Maid exposes the imperfections of knights and their chivalric code that works to blame, objectify, and vilify, the very people knights swear to protect.

 

Who is the Haughty Maid of Logres? Well, Chrétien presents her as a female villain. She is an enemy to any knight who dares approach her. Knight Gawain is one of those unfortunate souls to cross her path. During their time together, the Haughty Maid seeks to bring “misfortune and grief and trials and shame” upon Gawain (463). Thus, as an enemy of the knights, people label her as “excessively proud and wicked” (482). She is too prideful to accept help from knights and she actively expresses her resentment. She even leads several knights to their deaths. As such, she becomes the “malevolent maiden” among many other degrading titles (468). Other characters go so far as to say she is “worse than Satan” (472). This woman is so entrenched in evil that the devil becomes a relief. I mean, yes, she does expedite the death of some knights and throws out some insults to Gawain, but should those actions really condemn her so foully?

 

I think not. The Haughty Maid even does Gawain the courtesy of warning him away from her saying, “I urge you to dismount unless you want to wait and be killed. Climb aboard and escape” (470). She both warns Gawain and is not even the one to directly fight him. He could have listened, but he did not. His sense of honour kept him there. With this in mind, she cannot be as evil as they say for the blame is not entirely hers to bear. Of course, the scales are always tipped in favour of the knight over the woman. She is, after all, the one of the few characters to be compared to the devil multiple times! We are not even given a true name for her like Gawain. She is always the Haughty Maid making our impression of her constantly placed in the negative.

 

In fact, despite all these horrific depictions, the Haughty Maid’s villainy is a product of her culture. In some cases, she is a victim. Within Chrétien’s Arthurian society, knights are viewed as the protectors and warriors whereas women “should be polite, courteous, and well-mannered” (469). Additionally, women should be inherently passive beings for they need to rely upon men to get things done. For instance, there is a group of women who “are waiting for a knight who’ll come there to protect them, to restore their inheritances to the ladies, to give husbands to the maidens” (474). Essentially, women are expected to be polite while relying upon a knightly saviour.

 

But, if women are not acting courteous, they are automatically vilified. Before our encounter with the Haughty Maid, a vavasor speaks ill of women saying, “a woman’s not a woman, if she hates evil and loves the good” (453). In this instance, women are automatically shoved into the villainy corner. To be a woman is to be inherently evil. In the Medieval Arthurian society, women are being stretched thin! Either they are perfect polite naïve beings who are “those silly girls the knights sport with and carry away” or they fall into villainy (463). There is no in-between, no balance. It is no wonder that the Haughty Maid is labelled as evil. Her options were limited in the first place.

 

So, upon deciding that she does not need nor want a knightly saviour, the Haughty Maid can no longer be anything but evil in society’s eyes. Fortunately, becoming the outcast allows the Haughty Maid to act freely. She is no longer held back by expectations. As such, she has no problem refusing to accept aid from Gawain. She will quite loudly speak her mind! For instance, she tells Gawain, “May God never honour me again if I ever exhibit even the least desire to accept your service” (465). Such a vow with God displays her commitment to avoiding a knight’s service. She is leaving no room for error. She also refuses to let Gawain touch her saying, “your hands are not clean enough to hold anything I’d wear or put around my head” (465). This aversion to touch alludes that the knights are dirty and imperfect beings despite their hero complex. Therefore, in both these instances, the Haughty Maid shows that she will not accept anything from Gawain – neither help nor touch. By insulting the accepted protectors of her society, she is quickly ostracized and condemned by those around her. They clearly say she is “possessed of the devil” and so forth (486). Her character goes against the grain. This bold move to express ideas and opinions different from the norm makes her unacceptable in society. Her gained autonomy from knights leaves her ridiculed and isolated from everyone else. Yet, I daresay her actions make her quite the budding feminist in a male-dominated world.

 

Now, her boldness and refusal to accept knightly aid could be read as her exhibiting too much pride. Chrétien does display pride as being a fault in any character. Pride is described as “wicked and foolish” (490). But I find it goes deeper than that. In refusing touch or help, the Haughty Maid brings doubt upon the honour and chivalry of knights. Within Chrétien de Troyes’ Arthurian world, part of the knight’s chivalric code involves providing aid to women. One knight is told, “should you encounter…a lady in need of aid, or a maiden in distress, make yourself ready to assist them if they ask for your help, for it is the most honourable thing to do. He who fails to honour ladies finds his own honour dead inside him” (387). Thus, a knight should be helpful towards a woman. It would be counter-productive to cause, or add to, her distress.

 

Yet, the Haughty Maid explicitly pushes against knights despite the promise of the code. So, are the knights really as chivalric as they appear to be or does the Haughty Maid have a justified reason for avoiding and insulting them? She does because after pushing Gawain to complete many dangerous tasks, the Haughty Maid reveals her motivations. We learn that a knight killed her lover and then “loved her against her will” (485). Thus, her initial experience with knights is one of possession and death. Knights were the cause of her distress rather than her protector. Yet, because her society is reliant on knights, winning a woman in combat is accepted. For, by killing her original lover, the knight proved he could better serve her. She even poses this question, “do you think you’re more worthy than him because you’ve defeated him?” (484). This question shows that it takes more than just violence to be a good knight. Worthiness – especially in gaining one’s favour – involves much more than just killing someone in her eyes. Instead, the knight was only doing what he wanted in order to prove his mettle. All this serves to do is objectify women and cause them more grief which is exactly what a knight should avoid contributing to. What happened to knights being the protectors and defenders? Such doubt leads to the Haughty Maid’s decision to act against everyone else. Her “vile” actions are, thus, a critique on chivalry and its imperfect practice.

 

In fact, if you recall, the Haughty Maid consistently refused to accept aid or touch from Gawain. Again, she would say to Gawain, “if you ever held any part of me with your bare hand, or touched or fondled me, I would think myself shamed” (465). This avoidance could stem from her trauma with past knights. They have clearly hurt her, and she is “not naïve as you think” (465). Allowing Gawain to touch her would signal that everything is okay and would continue a cycle of knights manhandling women as they please. Even Gawain assumes that the Haughty Maid is someone he can manhandle. Their first encounter involves the Haughty Maid preventing him from, as the Haughty Maid says, “grab me and carry me down this hill across your horse’s back” (463). And do you know Gawain’s response? He responds, “that’s right, damsel” (463). Clearly, there is a perceived acceptance for the Haughty Maid to just go along with what a knight does. If he kills her lover, she is his. If he wants her to travel with him, she must do so. A knight must “save” her whether she wants it or not. This is one problem with knightly chivalry. It favoursthe man, and his perception of a woman’s needs more than it considers the woman’s side of things.

 

Let us look beyond the Haughty Maid for a moment. There is this one toxic relationship between another knight and his maiden. This knight believes this maiden has been unfaithful when in fact she was treated “against [her] will” (391). Rather than console her, as a knight should, he punishes her severely. She becomes tortured with skin that is “lacerated as though it had been torn” and her clothes were practically in tatters (427). Her supposed protector “forces me to follow after him in such misery and shows no concern” (427). Such mistreatment is a case of victim-blaming. Her knight punishes this maiden for something she had no control over. With such horrific events occurring between knights and women, the Haughty Maid’s disdain and actions towards knights become more understandable. If this is what knights are truly capable of, then maybe it is best to question, avoid, and defend against them. The knights, in this case, become the greater villain against women. They are quick to blame and fierce in punishment, and it is all justified under maintaining honour and chivalry.

 

Of course, all these revelations about the imperfect knights are not perfectly outlined in the text. Though she does reveal that she lost her lover to a knight, the Haughty Maid does say that she acted so wickedly because she wanted to anger a knight enough to kill her and relieve her of her grief. Therefore, although her actions speak towards a rebellion against knighthood, Chrétien focuses us back on love and its many motivations. He attempts to make violence towards women more romantic. He either downplays it or the violence often becomes a test towards a knight’s chivalry or reveals some insight about love and romance. For instance, love and its grief drove the Haughty Maid to act prideful and sinful while Gawain perseveres in the face of her “wickedness.” She even repents and reintegrates back into the “accepted” behaviour by pledging herself to do Gawain’s bidding. It is like the only good option is for women to accept their role as submissive to men. Yet, in testing male chivalry, we can view the chivalric code as more of an ideal that cannot be upheld in its entirety. There may be an exception like Gawain who stuck by the Haughty Maid despite her untoward intentions. But this exception only serves to emphasize the imperfections. The perfect knight is not the norm, and the test of chivalry often fails.

 

The chivalric code sounds nice in theory, but it is far from perfection in actual practice. The Haughty Maid of Logres becomes a villain after a knight killed her lover in an attempt to gain her favour. Based on this negative experience, the Haughty Maid begins a campaign to rebel against the accepted practice of knightly protectors as established in the chivalric code. Her scorn shows the dominant imperfections within knights. And, when a woman disrupts this common practice, they are automatically labelled as evil even when the blame is not entirely theirs. Yet, this evilness is only a product of Medieval knight culture. For, in Chrétien’s Arthurian world, the favour lies with the man. The woman is left to suffer violence and their suffering is twisted to challenge and elevate a knight’s honour. Chivalry exists for the man and his reputation only while leaving the woman to suffer and submit. If it means escaping such oppression, maybe becoming a malevolent maid is not so bad after all.