Perceval's sister and Juliet Capulet as disruptive guides in spiritual quests

<p>Perceval’s sister in Sir Thomas Malory’s <em>Le Morte Darthur</em> and Juliet in William Shakespeare’s <em>Romeo and Juliet</em> act as disruptive guides in spiritual quests by contradicting the expectations placed on them as women characters.</p> <p>Though women are banned from the quest for the Holy Grail, Perceval’s sister accompanies the Grail knights as an authoritative spiritual guide and a symbol of the Eucharist. Previous critics have not recognized Perceval’s sister as a fundamental disruption to the systemic misogyny of the Morte or her Eucharistic significance. She challenges both the chivalric misogyny that sees her as an object of rescue and the spiritual misogyny that sees her as a detriment to holiness.</p> <p>Though Romeo wants to use Juliet as a saintly conduit for his Petrarchan and Neoplatonic enlightenment through love, Juliet poetically resists her own canonization because she knows that being a saint means being dead and distant from Romeo. Past readers have not understood the necessity of Juliet’s death in Juliet’s sainthood or her poetic disruption of Petrarchan spiritual love. Shakespeare critiques Petrarchism in Romeo and Juliet by showing Juliet’s death as a result of Romeo’s poetic habits and showing Juliet as a disruptive poet who is aware of the danger.</p>

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Interdisciplinary Studies

Year

2016

Author dc:creator

• Benskin, Joanna

Contributors dc:contributor

• Charles Ross
• Dorsey Armstrong
• Angelica Duran
• Paul W. White

• Language literature and linguistics
• Social sciences
• Eucharist
• Morte darthur
• Religion
• Romeo and juliet
• Saints
• Comparative Literature
• Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
• Literature in English, Anglophone outside British Isles and North America

Repository record dc:identifier

https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/open_access_dissertations/943

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:docs.lib.purdue.edu:open_access_dissertations-2122