‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came’
The Dark Tower has fascinated readers for centuries. Writers from Shakespeare in King Lear, to Browning in Childe Roland; Alan Garner in Elidor and then Stephen King with his Dark Tower series, have all chosen to visit the Tower in order to experience their own different yet unsettling adventures!
Think of films and books where Towers are linked to dangerous secrets, to cruelty that has gone unchecked and to prisoners pining for freedom where the only way is DOWN literally and psychologically!
The symbolism of the Dark Tower is a book in itself, and Freudian theory would make much of the tower’s no doubt phallic shape and link this to worldly masculine power and authority, coupled with the probable oppression of women.
Perhaps it is the apparent subversion or ‘hijacking’ of this oppression that encourages me to enjoy the way that women in Merlin manipulate the messages of the Tower for their own uses, away from male rule, even from the complacent governance of the so called ‘male gaze’.
Merlin at the Dark Tower offers a very different form of occupation and rule: significantly during prime time Saturday family viewing!
Ordinarily, towers in fairy tales are traditionally places where imprisoned innocent women passively wait to be rescued by the resolve and enduring love of an absent Prince. Wicked, usually ‘mad’ individuals imprison the ‘Princess’ who can do nothing but suffer beautifully, still preserving her innocence and integrity despite her endless trials in the lonely Dark Tower of her waiting.
The Princess is always good at waiting, indeed waiting and goodness are almost the very same thing. She waits because she is innocent, yet ironically is praying for the eventual consummation embodied in the bold Knight in Shining Armour.
The ‘ Princess’ prays for the redemption and release granted her when her Knight or Prince in shining armour turns up, usually late of course, making the tale still more morally worthwhile and suspenseful!
Now Merlin has taken its viewers to the Dark Tower on a Saturday night with disconcerting results !
Not least because the Prince’s authority (in this case the King) as saviour has been usurped by the Princess and possibly even by the Queen herself!
For who is really the rescuer? And who will offer the consolation of consummation?
True, Gwen is tortured by her fears of betrayal , but then we see Morgana’s own fears around her permanent solitude, her lonely days and nights in this Dark Tower that we are assured is all imagination!
Who does she dream of in this dark tower of everlasting night?
Why is there so much emphasis on estrangement and alienation?
The boundaries between the real and the imagined worlds in Merlin become confused as we are told the Dark Tower does not really exist. How can Gwen be imprisoned in a place that does not exist? Merlin is wrong of course because he is relentlessly innocent. The Dark Tower is the place of longing, frustration and romantic desire.
Don’t we all build our own Dark Towers at times? The Dark Tower of 2 am dreaming wakefulness?
And in any case, who is fit to judge fairly between what constitutes reality and illusion in Camelot?
Unsurprisingly then, there are disconcerting moments of blurring between the identity of the Knight in shining armour’s behaviour and that of the usurping Princess too!
Moments of heightened ambiguity are always interesting as they shape the meaning of any text.
Imagine Morgana’s situation, her chequered history with her family and friends.
Is Morgana only a figure of destruction or does she relish the role of the saviour? Does she even want to be rescued from her exiled self and situation? Whose need is greater?
These questions seemed rather disconcerting to me and rather interesting too!
This short review will explore why I say disconcerting!
But first, I have to confess here, that I am only an intermittent Merlin viewer.
A Merlin tourist rather than a loyal fan.
The Mentalist is definitely more my cup of tea. (Very ironic if you saw the recent belladonna episode).
However my daughter loves giving me details of the back stories around Merlin and on the weekend I caught the Dark Tower episode where Gwen is trapped by Arthur’s gone- very- bad -sister -but-still- ravishing-Morgana in the lonely Dark Tower and is mentally tortured by the strange hallucinations that come to visit her in that isolated place.
She is visited in fact by her worst fears. Her fears of being betrayed by those she loves and relies on. These fears are animated into the very faces and bodies of Arthur and Merlin et al. Who can she trust under such circumstances?
Well Morgana of course…
Morgana deviously leaves Gwen to suffer /via short whiles/wiles, and then keeps offering Gwen warmth and nurture, via food and affectionate care, as she seeks to break down Gwen’s defences and bring her apparent ‘victim’ over to her own desperate side.
Initially Gwen resists. But she weakens as Morgana’s warmth becomes stronger, more reassuring, more enduring. We realise that this is ‘courtship’ in an age where ‘courtship’ was generally considered the preserve of the instigating male. Part of this Dark Tower courtship involves food. Food is an ambivalent agent/sign of sustenance in many myths and stories:think of Persephone confined to Hades/the Underworld because she eats pomegranate seeds and of course Eve who instigates the Fall of mankind through eating that apple in Eden. Eating is also linked to Morgana’s vampiric need for allegiance, for a ‘soul mate’ she can use to destroy Camelot. Morgana’s gaze is alternately predatory, mistrustful and hungrily tender.
It reminded me of the condition that can occur between kidnappers and their hostages- the Stockholm Syndrome.
This syndrome describes the stage when hostages come to view their captors with affection and even loyalty, ultimately rejecting the relationships and loyalties they had before they were kidnapped. (See the story of the heiress Patty Hearst for more on this syndrome).
In The Dark Tower episode, the vulnerability and goodness of the lonely Gwen is set against the sultry artfulness of the conniving Morgana, who is significantly also lonely and shown occupying her own isolated room, ever shrouded in black. Morgana seems to be in permanent mourning but for whom?
She is another ‘Woman in Black'(Susan Hill) but without the debilitating disfigurement. In fact her beauty seems related to her moral disturbance. If the ‘Prince of darkness is a gentleman’ (Shakespeare) then in this case, she is also a lady!
But to go back to that Dark Tower. And Morgana’s tender care of her prisoner. Such tenderness in the cold climate of the Dark Tower seems dangerous to say the least. A Pandora’s box of possibilities. In Merlin’s family timed show, it makes for disconcerting viewing as passionate love seems on the brink of expression, yet we are supposed to believe that Gwen loves only the insipid Arthur. He is her only knight…just rather late as a rescuer.
I just wasn’t convinced…
I used the term ‘disconcerting’ as Trust gives way to Betrayal in the Tower and I felt that the rather ineffectual knights of Camelot seemed ill equipped to defeat the sultry manipulations of Morgana who positively purrs with her tender deceit!
Morgana, surely is a tigress, whilst Arthur and Merlin seem more like bleating sheep!
Lots of rustling through foliage in the forest went on, as the rescuers failed to extricate themselves from the maze. I wasn’t betting on their brain size or capacity for victory until poor downtrodden Merlin took charge temporarily.
And why does Merlin continue to remain silent about his life saving arts? After 4 series and now into the 5th, I would have thought some change of heart might inject some animation into the relationship between Arthur and Merlin? Yet we endure lots of camera shots of Merlin’s resolutely clenched and yes- ever silent mouth.
He remains mute. Honour and mutism seem inextricably linked.
A powerful psychological truth then or just a frustrating method of keeping King Arthur floundering and bounding through yet another prime time series?
Merlin the Mute seems remarkably uninterested in change. Yet how many times has he saved Arthur’s life I wonder without any promotion from his servant’s weeds?
Perhaps then, it is the stoical woodenness of Arthur and Merlin that renders Morgana so interesting?!
But let’s go back to the Dark Tower. Even the name is delicious enough to make you shudder with fearful fascination. Think of Hitchcock’s wonderful film Vertigo …
Ironically I thought the room’s animation with Gwen’s fears of betrayal superb and full of vertigo and disturbing possibilities…Pandora’s box in fact…the moments where she is taunted by visiting hallucinations of those she loves and trusts were horribly unsettling. Back to our own night time fears, our own visits by the Dark Tower!
The episode’s finale was again powerfully affecting, where we realised that Gwen was now ‘possessed’ by Morgana’s dark arts.
Morgana has claimed Gwen as her own.
This claiming or possession reminded me of Romantic poems like Coleridge’s Christabel and Kubla Khan, as well as Keats’ Lamia and La Belle Dame Sans Merci , where the female villain is more than just an alluring, yet evil temptress. In these Romantic poems these females are quite capable of eliciting our sympathy through our disconcerting recognition that the moral boundaries between temptress and victim can be slippery indeed.
Morgan’s actions attempt to bring chaos and instability to Camelot. Yet her powers are also those of the magical creator. She ‘rewrites’ what may seem to be rather dull relationships and associations through her magical ability to ignite the imagination so that it catches fire!
This ‘fire’ seems linked to emotion and sexuality and reorders the relationships in Camelot.
Thus, Morgana usurps her brother Arthur through her implicit ‘courtship’ of Gwen. This courtship leads to the apparently ‘saved’ innocent Gwen stealing away from Arthur’s (platonic) marital bed in the night to meet with the hungry, vampiric Morgana in the woods. (See Coleridge’s Christabel for a similar meeting).
The relationship between kidnapper and victim is consummated in secret -shrouded in night time mists rendering their assignation urgent and passionately intense, their own Dark Tower in the making!
What will Merlin say?
Probably very little!
PS. I enjoyed writing this! Perhaps not with the same helter skelter delight of the Skyfall review , but I enjoyed the energy of writing this and the new challenge of writing about visual things too. Next The film of The Woman in Black!
A TRULY WONDROUS REVIEW. DEFINITELY CHRISTABELLAIN!! LOVED IT. X
Yes really good reading and I agree that the men came across as a bit insipid and ineffectual compared to the women! I like your reading of the symbolism of the tower. Katie Mcgrath (Morgana) is soon to be in an adaptation of Kate Mosse’s ‘Labyrinth.’
Way to romanticize female-on-female violence. Gwen wasn’t just being tortured by her fear of betrayal, she was being tortured by mandrake roots. Mandrake roots, which as we have seen with Uther, only takes one to drive a person crazy. You’re basically downplaying Morgana’s torture of Gwen (complete with putting the word victim in quotations as if Gwen wasn’t really a victim in the episode when she was) to present this flowery view of female subversion of male power. Torture is not a courtship. Hades did not torture Persophone in the underworld, Eve was not tortured before she ate the apple. A woman using her power (in this case magic) to torture another woman is not a cause for celebration because she twarted the efforts of the men to rescue the woman that she was torturing. There are issues of class and other inequalities between Gwen and Morgana which just can’t be brushed aside to present this flowery view of female empowerment. So perhaps some attention should have been paid to that before writing this essay.
Many thanks for your comment on Merlin. I certainly wasn’t trying to suggest that Gwen’s predicament in the dark Tower was pleasurable. She is tortured by her own worst fears and this involves fears of betrayal and rejection. That is why I mentioned the Stockholm syndrome where the victim becomes convinced that the torturer is their friend.
However I don’t agree that Morgana’s behaviour cannot be read also as courtship. Since when has love negated more negative aspects of human emotion and behaviour? We all can be fascinated horribly by what our beloved ma/may not be doing? And I am certain that Morgana gets pleasure from usurping her brother in Gwen’s affections. ‘Courtship’ is in any in case a collection of rituals designed to make another fall in love. As Duffy powerfully suggests in his first poem in Rapture, ‘You’: ‘Falling in love is glamorous hell.’
Persephone was tortured mentally and probably physically in the underworld. She is stolen by Hades with Zeus’ complicity and some myths suggest sexual violation. It is only Demeter’s dramatic actions that find her daughter , as grief stricken she plunges the earth into perpetual Winter. Thus Demeter’s disloyal brother Zeus recants and allows Demeter to rescue her daughter for only HALF the year. The rest of the year she has to live in the Underworld with Hades.Surely collusion between the male gods? A lot of fun for Persephone I am sure.
Eve is tempted by the serpent’s insinuating suggestions in her ‘ear’. This is again a form of mental torment.And thus the female is perpetually ‘damned’ through history as the source of chaos and damnation.
When Morgana has Gwen captive she is using her for revenge. But revenge is multifaceted and reveals the vulnerability of both parties.
Anyhow I appreciate you don’t agree at all. I did agree I had neglected the important class issue betwen Morgana and Gwen. And I know I was pushing a reading like Coleridge’s Christabel or Keats’ Lamia. But I still hold to the very powerful contrast in energies between Camelot and The Dark Tower.
Re Liz’s comments and your reading.
Any reading is only going to be part of the story, and yours appears to validly emphasize the erotic element of the witch figure. This is par for the course for fairy tales and fantasy, and I thought you were well aware of the implications of this. Merlin belongs to this tradition and all will end well – probably.
Re Liz’s comments and your reading.
Any reading is only going to be part of the story, and yours appears to validly emphasize the erotic element of the witch figure. This is par for the course for fairy tales and fantasy, and I thought you were well aware of the implications of this. Merlin belongs to this tradition and all will end well – probably!
As a woman, the idea you were romanticizing ‘female on female violence’ or even that this is what ‘Merlin’ showed, is frankly silly. It hints, I suspect, at an affinity for the rhetoric of victim hood, the type of viewpoint that would see Margaret Hamilton’s exuberant and thrilling Wicked Witch of the West as collaborating with misogyny rather than an exhilarating joke.
Hilariously!! Good British humour.
Great food for thought
Very entertaining