Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- List of Abbreviations
- Foreword
- Introduction: The Revel, the Melodye and the Bisynesse of Solas
- ‘So wel koude he me glose’: The Wife of Bath and the Eroticism of Touch
- The Lady's Man: Gawain as Lover in Middle English Literature
- Erotic Magic: The Enchantress in Middle English Romance
- ‘wordy vnthur wede’: Clothing, Nakedness and the Erotic in some Romances of Medieval Britain
- ‘Some Like it Hot’: The Medieval Eroticism of Heat
- How's Your Father? Sex and the Adolescent Girl in Sir Degarré
- The Female ‘Jewish’ Libido in Medieval Culture
- Eros and Error: Gross Sexual Transgression in the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi
- Perverse and Contrary Deeds: The Giant of Mont Saint Michel and the Alliterative Morte Arthure
- Her Desire and His: Letters between Fifteenth-century Lovers
- Sex in the Sight of God: Theology and the Erotic in Peter of Blois' ‘Grates ago veneri’
- A Fine and Private Place
- Erotic Historiography: Writing the Self and History in Twelfth-century Romance and the Renaissance
- Index
The Lady's Man: Gawain as Lover in Middle English Literature
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- List of Abbreviations
- Foreword
- Introduction: The Revel, the Melodye and the Bisynesse of Solas
- ‘So wel koude he me glose’: The Wife of Bath and the Eroticism of Touch
- The Lady's Man: Gawain as Lover in Middle English Literature
- Erotic Magic: The Enchantress in Middle English Romance
- ‘wordy vnthur wede’: Clothing, Nakedness and the Erotic in some Romances of Medieval Britain
- ‘Some Like it Hot’: The Medieval Eroticism of Heat
- How's Your Father? Sex and the Adolescent Girl in Sir Degarré
- The Female ‘Jewish’ Libido in Medieval Culture
- Eros and Error: Gross Sexual Transgression in the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi
- Perverse and Contrary Deeds: The Giant of Mont Saint Michel and the Alliterative Morte Arthure
- Her Desire and His: Letters between Fifteenth-century Lovers
- Sex in the Sight of God: Theology and the Erotic in Peter of Blois' ‘Grates ago veneri’
- A Fine and Private Place
- Erotic Historiography: Writing the Self and History in Twelfth-century Romance and the Renaissance
- Index
Summary
EROTICISM and the heroic go hand in hand for today's audiences: the male rhero is often only as good as his ability to bed attractive women, a trait that allows the male reader or viewer to identify with the hero's serial love affairs. An integral part of the James Bond myth is that Bond can have any woman he wants, despite (or perhaps because of) his misogynistic attitudes:
With most women his manner was a mixture of taciturnity and passion. The lengthy approaches to a seduction bored him almost as much as the subsequent mess of disentanglement. He found something grisly in the inevitability of the pattern of each affair. The conventional parabola – sentiment, the touch of the hand, the kiss, the passionate kiss, the feel of the body, the climax in the bed, then more bed, then less bed, then the boredom, the tears and the final bitterness – was to him shameful and hypocritical. Even more he shunned the mise en scène for each of these acts in the play – the meeting at a party, the restaurant, the taxi, his flat, her flat, the week-end by the sea, then the flats again, then the furtive alibis and the final angry farewell on some doorstep in the rain.
Bond often sleeps with women who are his enemies as well as allies; either way, his lovers often end up dead, leaving him free to pursue further sexual encounters.
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- Chapter
- Information
- The Erotic in the Literature of Medieval Britain , pp. 27 - 37Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2007