Performing Identity and Gender in Gwen & Art Are Not in Love

The Thematic Claim: Identity as a Script to Be Learned and Performed in Gwen & Art Are Not in Love (2023) by Lex Croucher is a novel that treats identity not as a fixed essence but as a series of performances. From the opening tournament, where the only female knight enters to jeers, to the battle in which Gwen disguises herself as the king, the story repeatedly stages scenes of characters putting on costumes, adopting mannerisms, and playing roles assigned by the court. The gap between the performed self and the private self becomes the engine of both comedy and tension. Gender, in particular, is treated as a script that characters must learn to deliver convincingly: Gwen must perform the docile princess, Arthur must perform the heterosexual suitor, and Bridget must perform the knight in a world that insists knighthood is a man's role. Yet the novel complicates this by showing that performance is not always falsehood—Bridget's knighthood is both a costume and her truest self, and Gwen's disguises allow her to access parts of herself the court would never permit. The thematic claim, then, is that identity is something we do, not something we are, and that the doing can be both liberating and constraining. To explore this, the novel traces the theme across three major plot movements: the fake courtship, Bridget's knighthood, and Gwen's battle disguise, each of which reveals a different facet of performed identity. ## The Fake Courtship: Staging Desire The central performance of the novel is the fake courtship Gwen and Arthur stage. From the moment they discover each other's secrets in the courtyard—Arthur kissing a boy, Gwen watching Lady Leclair—they agree to perform a romance neither of them feels. The performance is immediately legible to them as performance: Arthur's panicked offer to be tarred and feathered or sent back to his father reveals that both are terrified of what the court would do with their true desires. Their agreement to discuss the matter privately is really an agreement to co-author a fiction. The performance extends into every public interaction. When Bridget thanks Gwen's suitor for his favour, Gwen must correct herself mid-sentence—denying Arthur is her suitor before realizing how ridiculous this sounds given that they are trying to convince everyone in Camelot of the opposite. The moment is comic, but it exposes the fragility of the performance: the lie is so thin that even its performers forget it. The fake courtship is a costume that fits badly, and the novel keeps drawing attention to the seams. The performance also has a cost. When Gwen confesses her feelings for Bridget to Gabriel, he walks away, leaving her flooded with shame. The scene demonstrates that the performance of heterosexuality is not merely a personal choice but a social requirement enforced by the people who love you. Gwen's internal monologue—wondering whether she is monstrous for looking at Bridget the way she does—shows that the performance has been internalized, that the court's script has become her own self-doubt. ## Bridget's Knighthood: Performing Against the Script Bridget Leclair is the novel's most sustained challenge to the idea that gender determines identity. She enters the tournament to jeers, the only female knight among men, and her presence in men's clothes is so anomalous that guards stare at her as if she were a lost dragon. Her body itself becomes evidence of her transgression: the bruising from Sir Marlin's blows, the split lip, the hard muscle visible beneath her tunic. The novel insists on the physicality of her performance—she is not pretending to be a knight; she is enduring the actual consequences of being one. Bridget's own account of her path to knighthood is the novel's clearest statement of its thematic claim. Asked why she persisted despite being turned away for years, she answers that the people who rejected her knew nothing about her except what they assumed by looking at her, and that she knew she could do it, so she did. The line distinguishes between the identity others assign by looking and the identity she knows through action. Her knighthood is not a disguise but a refusal of the disguise the court would impose on her—the disguise of femininity as helplessness. Yet Bridget's performance is not effortless. The novel shows her suppressing emotions, maintaining a faint smirk through pain, and navigating a world that treats her as a spectacle. When she tells Gwen at the cultist gathering that she is stubborn and knows who she is, the declaration is both a boast and a survival strategy. Knowing who you are, in this world, is a form of resistance. The scene also contrasts Bridget's confident self-knowledge with Gwen's halting confession—Gwen offers that she is consistent with her embroidery and that she is a coward, and the crowd's lacklustre response suggests that her performance of self-revelation has failed. Bridget's identity is performed, but it is performed with conviction, and the novel suggests that conviction is what separates authentic performance from mere imitation. ## The Battle Disguise: Performing the King The novel's most literal performance of identity comes in the battle sequence, when Gwen disguises herself as the king. After escaping the battle, Gwen and Agnes remove Gwen's borrowed armor to reveal page's clothes beneath—a double disguise that layers costume upon costume. Gwen has not merely put on armor; she has put on the role of the sovereign, the most masculine authority in the realm. The fact that she survives the battle and returns to find her father dead—making Gabriel king—underscores the arbitrariness of the roles being performed. The crown, like the armor, is something that can be worn. This scene connects to the earlier moustache disguise, when Gwen and Agnes dress in Arthur's clothes and adhere false moustaches to escape the castle. Arthur's instruction to walk more like a man is the novel's most explicit acknowledgment that gender is a set of learned behaviors rather than an essence. Gwen's discomfort in Arthur's tunic—tight across her stomach and loose about the shoulders—mirrors her discomfort in the role of princess: both are clothes that do not fit. The disguise also grants freedom. In the city, Gwen sees her father's people for the first time without the court's staging, and the experience is both disorienting and exhilarating. The performance of a lower-class man allows her to escape the performance of the princess, suggesting that identity is not only constrained by performance but also liberated by it. ## Symbols of Performance The novel's symbols reinforce this theme. Gwen's diary represents the private self that cannot be performed—the record of desires that must stay hidden. The Lancelot letters, recovered from Tintagel, reveal that even the legendary Arthur Pendragon loved a man, suggesting that the performance of heterosexuality has always been a fiction at the heart of Camelot's mythology. The crow Morgana, watching from the statue of Arthur Pendragon in the final chapter, suggests a witness to the ongoing performance of identity across generations. Even Excalibur Nine—the sword—is a symbol of the gendered authority that Gwen briefly wields and Bridget has claimed through skill rather than birth. ## Complexity and Contradiction The novel refuses a simple binary between authentic and performed identity. Bridget's knighthood is both a performance and her truest self; Gwen's disguises allow her to experience freedom she cannot access as the princess. The cultist gathering is the novel's most complex treatment of this tension. Gwen, hiding behind her hood, is pressed to make an offering—to name one thing that helps her and one that hinders. Her offering of embroidery and cowardice falls flat, while Bridget's offering of stubbornness and self-knowledge is delivered with conviction and immediately followed by departure. The scene suggests that authentic self-knowledge is not something that can be performed on demand—it is something that must be lived. The novel also shows the cost of performance. Gabriel's reaction to Gwen's confession demonstrates that the performance of heterosexuality is enforced by the people who love you, and Arthur's constant performance of the rakish suitor is a mask he wears to protect a desire the court would punish. The novel's happy ending—Gabriel choosing to govern true to himself, Gwen and Bridget reconciling, Arthur and Gabriel kissing—suggests that the performance can be retired, but only after the social order that demanded it has been broken. Even then, the ending is not a complete escape from performance: Gabriel is still a king performing kingship, nervous before his address, and the crow still watches from the statue. The novel's final position is that identity is always partly performed, but that the performance can become more honest. ## Study Questions 1. How does the fake courtship between Gwen and Arthur function as a performance, and what does it reveal about the social pressures facing queer characters in the novel? The fake courtship is a collaborative fiction that allows Gwen and Arthur to hide their true desires from the court. It reveals that heterosexuality is a compulsory performance—both characters must stage a romance to avoid punishment, and the performance is so fragile that even its performers forget it, as when Gwen denies Arthur is her suitor to Bridget. The courtship shows that the court's expectations are powerful enough to require elaborate deception. 2. In what ways does Bridget's knighthood challenge the novel's gender norms, and how does the novel complicate the idea that her identity is simply performed? Bridget's knighthood challenges gender norms by demonstrating that skill, not birth or gender, determines competence in combat. The novel complicates the performance framework by showing that Bridget's knighthood is not a disguise but her authentic self—she persists because she knows she can do it. Her identity is performed in the sense that she must constantly prove herself against assumptions, but it is not false. 3. How does Gwen's disguise as the king in battle connect to the novel's broader theme of identity as performance? Gwen's disguise literalizes the theme: she puts on armor and plays the sovereign, the most masculine role in the realm. The fact that she survives and returns to find her father dead—making Gabriel king—underscores the arbitrariness of these roles. The disguise also connects to her earlier moustache adventure, where Arthur instructs her to walk more like a man, showing that gender is a set of learned behaviors. 4. What role do the Lancelot letters play in the novel's treatment of identity and performance? The letters, recovered from Tintagel, reveal that Arthur Pendragon loved Lancelot—a man. This suggests that queer desire has always existed at the heart of Camelot's mythology, hidden beneath the performance of heterosexual legend. The letters give Gabriel and Arthur a historical precedent for their own love and suggest that the performance of heterosexuality is a fiction maintained across generations. 5. How does the novel's ending—Gabriel choosing to govern true to himself—resolve or complicate the theme of performed identity? Gabriel's choice to govern differently, quoting from the Lancelot letters and assembling a new council, suggests that the performance can be retired once the social order that demanded it is broken. However, the ending is not a complete escape from performance—Gabriel is still a king performing kingship, and the novel shows him nervous before his address. The ending suggests that identity is always partly performed, but that the performance can become more honest.