I am writing a series of posts about my attempt to re-read The Mists of Avalon in light of the terrible things we know about the author Marion Zimmer Bradley (MZB). The story has now advanced considerably and although it wasn’t my original intention in this re-reading, I feel I am able to glean a little bit of insight into why MZB was able to write a strongly “feminist” story with huge influence, while also being a seemingly deeply committed paedophile. Here i will discuss a little about what I think her story tells us. Past posts in the series:

I hope to follow up with a discussion of why we liked this story when we were young, a brief discussion of MZB’s intense homophobia, and an assessment of the difference between male and female characters in the story. But for now I will briefly discuss what I think we can learn about MZB’s philosophy on child abuse from between the lines of this story.

Trigger warning: This post is going to discuss the politics, sociology and history of rape, and is necessarily going to have to involve detailed discussion of the topic. I’ll try to keep it dry, but if this seems like it might be a bit much for you, you might want to stop here. For those not reading onward, I give my conclusion first, and then explain the reasoning.

Summary

This is the tl;dr for those who don’t want to read an extended discussion of the history and sociology of sexual abuse. Basically, I think that MZB understands and is fully cognizant of the principle of consent, and thinks that sex without consent is wrong. But in circumstances where the victim either is not capable of understanding consent, or due to social and cultural forces is not able to give consent, she reverses our understanding of the concept. In these circumstances, where consent cannot be given, she believes rape cannot occur. To MZB, for a person to be a victim of rape they have to be capable of resisting or saying no to sex. If they don’t understand sex and consent or society is structured in such a way that consent is not possible, they have not been raped. MZB does not see children as capable of consent – in fact I think she sees them as a kind of animal, under the control of an adult master, and it’s possible she doesn’t think children are even sentient – and so she thinks the sexual abuse of children is a natural consequence of adult desire, which cannot harm children. This explains her long-standing support for her husband’s child abuse, and her victimization of her own children, in which she very much treated them as objects under her control rather than independent living people. Below, I explore the reasons I developed this theory.

Three powerful moments in the story

There are a couple of scenes in the books which either serve to drive the plot forward or give an insight into the sexual politics of the story. Three crucial scenes are:

  • Arthur’s pagan king-making ritual, in which he and his sister Morgaine are tricked into having sex with each other (even though they’re basically children), and Morgaine becomes pregnant with his child. Neither Arthur nor Morgaine consider this to be rape, and the entire narrative thrust and tone of the story is that the only bad part of this was the fact that they were brother and sister
  • Gwenhwyfar is married to Arthur in an arranged marriage, after which she spends her life being fucked by him to try and produce heirs, even though her true love is Lancelet. At no point in the story does she or anyone else consider this to be institutionalized or organized rape and her only complaint about it is that maybe Arthur doesn’t love her because she was delivered to him as a secondary consideration to his primary coronation present, which was a hundred horsemen
  • Gwenhwyfar is raped by her “brother” Meleagrant, who claims rulership of her inherited lands after her father Leodegranz dies, and plans to make her his consort and thus claim the right of kingship. This is physically violent altercation in which he beats her and forces her, everyone in the story considers this to be rape and Morgaine additionally thinks Gwenhwyfar considers it to be her fault because in her christian religious viewpoint women always deserve to be mistreated

I also reported earlier that in the first part of the story there are many scenes in which children are depicted as sexually active and curious, and the basic assumption of the story is that having sex with these children is natural and while lascivious and possibly unsavoury there is nothing about the process which is bad for the children.

From the various accounts of the relationships in the story we can establish some themes of sexual and personal agency in the story. First let’s consider the case of Gwenhwyfar, in the context of how fantasy writers and readers typically interpret the institution of arranged marriage in their medieval worlds.

Arranged marriage and consent in fantasy literature

Most fantasy literature that is set in identifiably medieval settings that are both culturally and technologically medieval establishes a cultural milieu in which, at least among wealthy and noble families, arranged marriage is the norm and women are married into families for political reasons with the sole goal of producing heirs, usually male. Of course there are stories that subvert this fundamental process, and fantasy tales that reject it or – as I think is the case with Game of Thrones, critique it – but this process is common to fantasy stories and I think is put there because it reflects the understanding that a modern liberal audience has of the sexual politics of that period. MZB’s book is no different, and it is very explicit throughout the story that young women are to be married off in politically convenient ways, and their primary role in their new families is to breed. Arthur even expresses this openly in an argument with Gwenhwyfar when, to try and reassure her that he genuinely does love her and doesn’t see her as just some baggage that came with his horsemen, he points out to her that if he really didn’t love her he would put her aside for a “brood mare”. Much of the complexity of the relationship between Arthur, Gwenhwyfar and Lancelet revolves around the fact that Arthur isn’t willing to give up on his wife even though she is not discharging the single purpose of her marriage to him, which is not to love him, or even to give him sexual pleasure, but to give him an heir.

The modern feminist understanding of this system is that it is one of organized, systematic rape, sexual slavery and human trafficking, in which women have no agency or freedom and are essentially chattel to be traded for political gain. At the time MZB was writing the second wave of feminists were critically reassessing the history of marriage, with feminists like Betty Friedan describing modern marriage as a kind of prison or trap for women, and feminists like Kate Millett and some thinkers in anarchist and Marxist feminism linking the institution of marriage to prostitution. While the ordinary, every day lives of women in these medieval marriages were, obviously, characterized by small acts of resistance, the kindness of the men they were married to and various forms of accommodation and acceptance, these human nuances should not be allowed to distract us from the fundamental structure of the medieval institution, at least as it is envisaged in popular fiction and fantasy. It was an organized and systematized form of human trafficking, in which women were sold – often as children – to be used sexually and biologically and discarded if they did not provide at least one of these two services.

I don’t know if MZB was aware of the feminist critique of the modern or primitive institutions of marriage that was becoming widespread and controversial at the time of her writing, but there is no sign in her writing that she has any understanding or concern for this critique. There is no character in her story who speaks the way Cersei does in Game of Thrones[1], for example, who openly criticizes the institution into which she was forced in explicitly feminist terms, and contrasts the agency and freewill of her affair with her brother with the brutality and inhumanity of her marriage to Robert. The primary complaint or concern that any woman in the novels has about her marriage is that she might get a coarse or ugly man, or that she hasn’t got the man she wants. For example when Morgaine conspires with Elaine (young, pretty, ready to marry) to seduce Lancelet, she warns her that marriage isn’t a bed of roses, especially if married to a man who really loves someone else, and Elaine replies that at least if she marries Lancelet she’ll be getting a handsome man. She doesn’t offer any implicit or explicit critique of the institution overall[2], or express any desire not to marry – she just accepts that she must, and since she has access to a witch she decides to make sure her husband is handsome. Morgaine – the primary voice of the author and one of the two main representatives of modernity in this story – also offers no criticism of the institution, only strategies to bend the rules. Gwenhwyfar, who is in love with Lancelet, never complains that she had her agency or sexual consent taken by the decision of her dad to give her away like a horse to Arthur – her only concern is that Arthur doesn’t want her. Morgaine, reflecting on the marriage, observes that Gwenhwyfar has spent her life being ploughed by the man she doesn’t truly love, but just accepts this aspect of the institutions of the time.

Children and consent

There are many instances in the first half of this story of children having sex, either with each other or with adults, and the difference in tone and attitude towards this is noticeable. Children are presented as having just appetites, not really feelings, though these appetites may persist into adulthood and become strong desires (as with Morgaine and Lancelet, for example, or Gwenhwyfar and Lancelet). When children have sex or seek sex they – especially the girls – are the instigators rather than the recipients of the attention, and are presented as voracious and persistent in their appetites. The description of their behaviour makes them seem more like animals than people, and their appetites like fundamental, simple biological urges rather than complex emotional processes. Even when sex happens to the main characters when they’re children – as in when Morgaine and Arthur have sex in the king-making – it is essentially natural and unfettered by emotion or guilt or morality. At the end of the scene, in the morning after their second bout of sex when Arthur realizes he has fucked his own sister there is no concern or anger about the fact that a child was forced to have sex – just despair at having broken the taboo on having sex with a family member. The act of this child losing his virginity is even praised, as he says:

I do not suppose I will ever meet you again … for you are a priestess and dedicated to the Goddess. But I want to say thsi to you – … you were the very first. No matter how many women I may have, for all my life I will always remember you and love you and bless you. I promise you that.

This is not how a modern writer would summarize an act in which a child was tricked into fucking his sister.

I think the way that MZB writes about sex with children expresses that she does not believe children are able to understand consent, and that to them sex is as natural and normal as any body function, that their desire to express it and enjoy it is natural, and that there is no reason adults should not take advantage of this. In the case of King Lot, he takes advantage of it by fucking any girl he can get his hands on; but he insists on controlling his own children’s natural expression of their sexuality in case they should devalue their virginity or embarrass him in so doing. Viviane, the Lady of the Lake, treats Arthur’s natural sexual expressiveness as an opportunity to bind the two Englands together, and for some cruel adult reason (never properly explained) takes pleasure in making him do this to his own sister – but the only form of cruelty possible in this act is the cruelty of incest, since the idea of an adult having sex with a child or two children having sex with each other is natural and simple. Since they have no independence or adult sentience, they are simply bodies to be played with, and since they are free – as children – of guilt and morality, nothing that they do or that is done to them sexually can be wrong unless it breaks some taboo of the adult world. And the only taboos in the adult world surrounding sex are homosexuality and incest.

The rape of Gwenhwyfar

In contrast, when Gwenhwyfar visits her “brother” Meleagrant, her rape is clearly described as a breach of consent, a violent imposition of one man’s will and body on a woman. He beats her, tears her clothes, and then rapes her, and plans to do it again and again until she is pregnant. She expresses clearly that she does not want it, and when she is rescued by Lancelet he does not doubt that she did not want it and resisted it. No one else who learns about it doubts this either – her ability to consent to any man except her husband is crystal clear, widely understood by men and women alike. The only complication – observed only by Morgaine – is that, since she is a devout christian she believes women are the source of all evil and sin, and that she somehow deserved the rape or brought it upon herself and the only way she could be truly free of blame is if she died resisting it. But this is a side point, a mere detail in the unfolding tragedy of Gwenhwyfar’s rape.

It’s clear, then, that MZB understands and respects the notion of consent, and she extends this even to the adult female villains of her story (as I will describe in another post, I think Gwenhwyfar is the primary villain of this novel). Gwenhwyfar, as an adult, has clear sexual agency, desires and limits – provided she is expressing them with anyone except the man she was sold to, who retains ultimate rights over her body. I think this clear description of adult consent, and the clear excision of that right of consent within the framework of marriage, establishes an important principle underlying MZB’s work: if the social and cultural context strips you completely of the ability to consent, then it is no longer rape, because rape requires the ability to consent. I think this is the clue as to MZB’s paedophilia: a perverse inversion of the modern understanding of consent.

Conclusion: How MZB inverts the concept of consent

I think what this means in total is that for MZB if you are intellectually unable to consent because you are a child; or if the socio-political context has stripped away your right to consent so that from birth you have no right to consent, then you cannot be raped. It is a kind of inversion of how we understand consent – especially as it applies to children – in the modern world. Thanks primarily to the work of feminists, sex workers, the gay rights movement and children’s rights activists, we now understand that if someone is unable to consent because they aren’t old enough to make moral judgements (children) or they have no power over their own circumstances (prisoners, slaves, women in medieval Europe as envisaged in fantasy stories) then any sex with these people must be rape. But MZB flips this: if you cannot understand consent, your ability to consent cannot be taken away from you, and so rape cannot happen. A child cannot be raped, because they don’t understand the morality of sex and they don’t have the ability to say yes or no. If they express an animal desire to explore their body with you, or you can trick them into playing with you, you’ve done nothing wrong because they couldn’t understand their right to say yes or no, and they don’t understand morality. The same is true for a wife in Arthur’s England – since the entire social and political milieu strips away her power to say no to marriage, rape cannot happen in marriage. Rape is only possible when choice can be exercised.

This may sound sick and disturbing to the modern reader but it was actually a pretty common theme running through much of western culture in the 1960s – 1990s. In my post on my experience growing up in Jimmy Savile’s England I describe some of the ways in which British people viewed children and sex, and I think some of this is reflected in MZB’s work. Of course there must be some additional, depraved element to it, since her husband was a voracious, open serial paedophile and she supported him and was to some extent involved in pro-paedophilia activism. But I think at the heart of it must be this principle that where consent is impossible, rape is impossible. You can’t rape animals, children or your wife, because biology, intellectual development, or cultural norms have removed their ability to consent, and rape can only exist when there is a right to consent that can be taken away.

I wonder to what extent this attitude permeated the 1960s and 1970s sexual revolution in the USA; I also wonder to what extent it is an exclusively US/UK principle, somehow related to the way that US libertarians cannot conceive of coercion in the absence of violence. A lot of work was done by feminists in the 1960s – 1990s to establish the principle that sexual coercion wasn’t just physical violence: the concept of “date rape” was invented in the 1980s to extend this principle, and activism on marital rape and intimate partner violence was also intended to ensure that people could defend themselves against coercive structures other than those based on outright violence. Now the concept of coercive control and financial abuse arises naturally from this earlier work. A lot of this material was still in its infancy or undeveloped when MZB wrote these novels, but that doesn’t excuse her: lots of people thought sex with children was wrong when she wrote this book and she knew it because they ostracized her and her husband from Californian SF society because her husband insisted on fucking every kid he met. So she must have been committed to these principles beyond just a casual, negligent kind of disrespect for other people’s rights and she must have known roughly what principles she was expressing when she wrote this book.

To be fair to MZB[3], other than these subtle hints I cannot read into this novel any special attempt to describe or defend a principle or morality of paedophilia. But it is clear that she thinks that children are sexual creatures whose sexual desires and interests are the right of adults to exploit, and it is also clear that she only believes adults have the ability to consent within narrower confines than we would think of as normal today. A key difference from modern morality is this implicit principle that if you can’t consent you can’t be raped, and I think part of the reason that so many of us didn’t notice how awful that was when we were reading these books decades ago is that this principle was much more normal in our culture then than it was now. For example, when I read these books as a child my father would openly advocate for the right of men to beat and rape their wives, my mother openly believed children who got raped deserved it (she told me so!) and there was a general sense that girls had a precarious virginity that was precious, difficult to defend to adulthood, and in a sense every adult man’s right to take early if the girl “led him on.” So I think we who read these books as kids then, growing up steeped in that culture, would probably not have noticed how awful it is. But now, having grown up and having worked to change that about our own culture, when we look back on these books and re-read them in the light of all the changes we have worked on the society we were raised in, we are shocked by their callousness. At the time though the principles in this book were in many senses just the water we were swimming in.

I guess the key difference, and the reason that I am re-reading this book, is that MZB and her husband were committed, principled paedophiles, and so she made some effort in the early parts of this book, when the main characters were children or very young adults, to express these principles more explicitly and more openly than many authors steeped in the same culture might have; and at the same time the careful, quite beautiful way she has told the entire story of the Arthurian court from a women’s perspective – coupled with the way the SF community were able to bury her and her husband’s obvious crimes – misled us into thinking these books were a genuinely ground-breaking feminist work.

In retrospect, it’s a mish-mash of conservative and backward-looking morality tales, centred around the value of virginity, the right of men in a world of men to take what they want, and the power of social norms to so completely obliterate some people’s rights to bodily autonomy that it is not even possible to conceive that they have been violated. That’s not feminism – it’s a morality of violence and power, perfumed and wrapped in lace, adorned with a few baubles of paganism but, at its heart, the same old story of lust, power and the right of kings and men to take what they want.

Image note: This picture of Gwenhywfar is by Zooombie Grrl on Deviant Art, check her out!

fn1: Please understand that whenever I reference Game of Thrones I am referencing the tv show, since I haven’t read the book, but assuming that for at least the majority of the show characters like Cersei speak with the voice of the novel, since George RR Martin was involved in writing the show.

fn2: As an aside, it’s interesting to me that this book was so often described as a “feminist retelling of Arthurian legend” when it so consistently failed to offer any feminist critique of the central medieval institution in the story. There are really only two institutions in this story: the church and the family, expressed through christian marriage, and although she offers some relatively stringent critiques of the former, she never makes any effort to identify the terrible sexism of the institution of marriage that creates the legal, political and social context driving all the primary conflicts in this story! I don’t think it can be considered a feminist retelling of the legend if it doesn’t try to grapple with this part of the story!

fn3: This woman was one of the greatest and most influential science fiction/fantasy writers of my youth, but now just to write these few words seems foul and grotesque!