ABSTRACT
Marginalization, placing a person in a position of secondary importance, influence, or power because of age, gender, race, social class or status, occupation, or any other criterion, well may be a psychological fact of human existence, but its morality has often been challenged. Even when most fully instantiated, its principles of division, separation, and opposition are seen as suspect, dangerous, illegitimate. Historic factors—war, struggle for survival, economic insecurity, personal or national intimidation—may account for this alienating of those outside one’s peer group; unfortunately, the phenomenon of distancing is so widespread as to affect society, inspiring those who record it in literature, psychology, or chronicle to detail its occurrence and ramifications. Within the war-ridden English Middle Ages, militant, even violent history has been the context for its literature. Beleaguered writers finding a hundred years of battle and bloodshed at their very doorstep invariably record conflict and contention, particularly within the romance genre. Here, love and war, unity and division, and the personal and the public battle for primacy coexist in an uneasy truce. Here, marginalization of the “Other,” the opposition or the enemy, in a society determining its own identity becomes the focus of the story, the myth of heroes and monsters.
