Women, Suffering, and Heroism in The Story of the Grail Sara Manlowe College

In Chrétien de Troyes’s The Story of the Grail, Perceval is first introduced to the reader as a young boy who lives in the woods with his widowed mother, so isolated from society that when he gets his first glimpse of a party of knights, he believes them to be angels(219). The course of the story then follows Perceval’s journey to becoming the perfect knight, but more than that, becoming a hero suited for great tasks such as the retrieval of the Grail. Through nature, Perceval possesses both beauty and an extraordinary single-mindedness that disallows him to lend his attention to anything but his goal, an attribute that causes men to be impressed and women to be assaulted. Nurture, on the other hand, takes the form of advice given him by his mother and Gornemant of Gohort, honing his single-mindedness into something knightly and heroic. This heroism is measured by his interactions with the Grail, but there is an unspoken dark side to this concept of a hero: those around a growing hero must suffer for his development, none more so than the women of this tale.

It is first worth noting that the narrative explicitly states ‘everyone who observed [Perceval] considered him handsome and noble’(393). The entirety of the story hinges...