Refiguring Disability: Deviance, Blinding, and the Supernatural in Thomas Chestre's Sir Launfal

Abstract

This essay examines Thomas Chestre’s fourteenth-century Middle English Sir Launfal , which features the blinding of the adulterous Queen Gwenore by the fairy Tryamour, in view of the complex legal and social valences of blinding and blindness in the Middle Ages. While blinding could both symbolize the holiness of a saint and serve as the punishment for a treasonous or sexual criminal, blindness could also signify a literary figure’s inward sinfulness. By featuring the blinding of a female character that is marked by her sexual promiscuity and cruelty, Chestre’s tale complicates the already dense subtext of both the punishment and the impairment. In particular, Gwenore’s impaired body comes to personify Artour’s corrupt, unjust, and ineffectual court, while Tryamour’s status as an agent of justice casts her supernatural, all-female countercourt as a powerful and enabling force. Building upon David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s theory of narrative prosthesis, the essay argues that Gwenore’s blinding represents an intrinsic narrative drive to control the deviancy that her sexual impropriety creates. However, instead of neatly concluding the narrative, Gwenore’s punishment succeeds in producing alternative narratives that challenge common medieval notions of femaleness, femininity, and disability.