KAREN ALKALAY-GUTworld could be used to explore urgent Victorian anxieties about sexual
fidelity. In Arthurian legend, Guenevere's adultery plays a crucial role
because she weakens the fraternal bonds between the Knights of the Round
Table. Yet Morris has no interest in attacking Guenevere for threatening
the potency of this brotherhood but is concerned instead with her ideas of
truth and testimony.
Although Guenevere never has the opportunity to defend her adultery in
the original Arthurian legends, she articulates a truly defiant voice in
Morris's poem. In this dramatic monologue, she manages to divert the
attention of her accusers just long enough for Lancelot to save her from
execution, a heroic rescue totally unrelated to the verdict or justice of the
trial. Guenevere develops an intricate pattern of contradictory explanations
that have the texture of the densely woven decorative tapestries for which
Morris became famous. In his painting of Guenevere, these distinctive
tapestries adorn the bed, the furniture, and the walls, and are given as
prominent coloring and detailing as the central character in the portrait.
Drawing on the imagery of flowers, leaves, and stems, these designs adhere
to John Ruskin's belief that art must be true to nature. Yet the fact that
these realistic motifs run in repeated patterns suggests that artistic truth is
relative not absolute, and that foregrounding some details over others is an
arbitrary artistic decision.
It is the idea that truth is arbitrary that absorbs Guenevere's speech.
Guenevere begins her formal defense by presenting an allegory in which a
dying person simply addressed as "you" encounters an angel who presents
him with two lengths of cloth, one long and blue, the other short and red.
Told by the angel that "One of these cloths is heaven, and one is hell" (WM
I, i), the dying man is asked to choose between them. When the unnamed
"you" selects the blue one, hoping to be saved, "you" discovers that the
choice is wrong. The absolute values that formed the basis of that choice
have proven fallacious. Yet if the values attached to the angel's cloths
appear completely capricious, they do so with vital consequences. This is
the familiar Pre-Raphaelite world that employs all kinds of traditional
iconography only to erase any symbolic significance from such imagery.
Guenevere, therefore, tells what appears to be a beautiful religious tale that
sets up certain moral expectations but ultimately produces contradictory
evidence. In this respect, it is significant that the poem begins in medias res
with the disjunctive "But," which suggests that her words have been
arbitrarily cut - rather like the repeated designs of Morris's well-known
wallpapers - out of a much larger pattern: one whose meanings are less
significant than the aesthetic pleasure they provide, and whose beginning
and endings are more a function of the careful attention to the pattern and
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