Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur and Monty Python and the Holy Grail Es

Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur and Monty Python and the Holy Grail Professor’s comment: This student uses a feminist approach to shift our value judgment of two works in a surprisingly thought-provoking way. After showing how female seduction in Malory’s story of King Arthur is crucial to the story as a whole, the student follows with an equally serious analysis of Monty Python’s parody of the female seduction motif in what may be the most memorable and hilarious episode of the film. Much of the humor in Monty Python and the Holy Grail derives from the pure absurdity of its characters and situations. King Arthur roams the British countryside on an imaginary horse, evil enemies can only be appeased with offerings of shrubbery, and the knights of the Round Table battle a bloodthirsty killer bunny, to cite just a few examples. The movie contains a great deal of such explicit comedy, but much of its humor works on a more subtle level, plot and dialogue shrewdly satirizing the unjustness of such Arthurian conventions as autocracy, severe social class distinctions, and vainglorious codes of chivalry. The movie also pokes fun at the rather demeaning view of women in traditional Arthurian legend. In Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur women primarily serve as figures of sexual temptation who bring great danger and suffering to the men that interact with them. Monty Python and the Holy Grail,on the other hand, satirizes the idea of the destructive temptress and presen ts women characters in a manner that undercuts this negative Arthurian stereotype. In Malory’s famous account of the King Arthur legend, the most notable example of woman as destructive sexual temptation is, of course, Queen Guinevere. Sir Lancelot’s affair wi... ..., then, Monty Python and the Holy Grail challenges many of the Arthurian conventions that modern audiences consider outmoded and unjust. With their clever exploitation of the role of Arthurian women, Monty Python rebukes the idea of women as manipulative seductresses and effectively exposes the shallowness of this Arthurian stereotype. And on top of all this cultural enlightenment, they still manage to give their audience a good laugh along the way. Works Cited American Heritage Dictionary, 2nd College Edition, 1982. Malory, Thomas. King Arthur and His Knights: Selected Tales by Sir Thomas Malory, ed. Eugene Vinaver (London: Oxford UP, 1975) 124-25. Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Dir. Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones. Perf. Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin. Columbia Pictures Home Entertainment, 1975.