Clothes Make the Man: Parzival Dressed and Undressed

Abstract

This paper interrogates the gender identity of the protagonist in the thirteenth-century German romance Parzival by examining the role that clothing and nudity play in creating/exposing the hero’s gender. The young protagonist, Parzival, creates ‘gender trouble’ first by identifying knights’ armour with ladies’ clothes and then by arriving at King Arthur’s court dressed in clothes given to him by his mother, who wishes to exclude him from chivalric society. Parzival’s costume is not specifically feminising, but the costume signifies that Parzival is not of aristocratic birth, and thus, that he does not share the gender of the aristocratic men. Althoush Parzival’s attitudes towards clothes imply that his gender is not firmly fixed, the author, Wolfram von Eschenbach, twice exposes his protagonist nude to his audience, and uses these opportunities to establish Parzival’s masculinity and status as a knight. When Parzival eventually takes on the appearance and behaviour of an aristocratic man, his success in the Grail quest is still attributed to his mother, suggesting that the ideal knight requires a gender that encompasses both masculmity and femininity.