The Feminized, Fetishized, Totally Awesome Gral

In a previous post there was a great discussion of the Gral as both a male and female

character. I'm going to take the Gral as feminine and run with it a little bit, to discuss

how the Gral functions as a fetish (in the Freudian sense) for the male characters.

There's a lot of the feminine associated with the Gral in chapter nine. The Gral is

protected by a "Christian progeny bred to a pure life", which echos the basic chivalric code

of "pure" (ok, well, at least Christian) knights charged with serving women. (232) The

function of women is to "observe restraint...be well proofed.' (15-16) So "pure" men and

women serve the Gral and the Gral, much like women, keeps away from everyone but the one

destined for it. It's a Gral very concerned with fidelity, I feel.

The Gral, however, I think is much more fetishized than women. There are literally hundreds

of women in this poem, but only one Gral which serves as a desire-object for both men and

women. I think specifically for Parzival, the Gral serves almost as an obsession or a

fetish.

A fetish is, in basic Freudian terms, what you need to function when your desired outcome

does not match up with your expected outcome. Actually, you develop a fetish when you discover that your female lover doesn't have a penis, but in more general terms. A fetish is what you focus your energies on when you just cannot deal. A fetish is also exclusively the realm of men.

The Gral is what Parzival needs to function within the text. When he loses sight of the

Gral, he literally drops off the page, unable to do anything but sit with a hermit for years

on end. When he first sees it, he is so stunned, so preoccupied, and so unable to think that he lets it slip through his grasp. It then functions as his only driving force, what he uses to get himself through his ordeals.

This isn't mean to refute the other post, but add to it. Perhaps the Gral is the ultimate, fetishized feminine? The fetishized masculine? I don't know where I fall, personally, between thinking of its characterization as female or male, but it's certainly alive in a way objects can be only through fetishes.