Abstract
The last chapter suggests that Malory’s Arthuriad begins early on to dismantle a providentialist frame and the rule of law as perceivable means to the containment of violence. The Pentecostal Oath apparently sets the boundaries of chivalric life, for it brings violent action to social account, and under the control of the sovereign. Yet, in its specification of gender roles and its replication of terms of war as well as of romance, the Oath exposes both the tenuousness of our grounds of knowledge and a fissure between theoretical “knowledge” of chivalric control and the experiences both of the knights within the text and of our reading of that text. For the reader, generic expectations, the social worlds the text projects, and different literary registers harness and direct our responses to violence. This chapter looks at how Malory investigates and questions both the reader’s and the writer’s ability to establish and maintain the parameters of a self-contained fictional world. Violence works on the residual knowledge of reader and writer alike to point up the subjectivity and variability of our response to the Arthurian narrative as a whole. So the rhetorical constructions of violence, and the cultural assumptions implicit in the text, indicate a general slippage between action and interpretation, for the actants as for the readers. Elaine Scarry, in her seminal work on physical pain, writes of the body’s “referential instability” in war, and of how cultural and political institutions yet make the body signify ideologically by virtue of juxtaposition.1
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Notes
The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 117.
Mark Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996). The link between Lacan and chivalric narrative can be productive, as Lacan draws on romance vocabulary to describe psychoanalytic processes. See Robert S. Sturges, on Chrétien’s Lancelot, in “La(ca)ncelot,” Arthurian Interpretations 4.2 (1990): 12–23 (p. 12); Fradenburg, City, Marriage, Tournament, especially chapter eleven; Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and the members of Interscripta, “The Armour of an Alienating Identity,” Arthuriana 6.4 (1996): 1–24; Kathleen Coyne Kelly, “Malory’s Multiple Virgins,” Arthuriana 9.2 (1999): 21–29.
Calvin Thomas, Male Matters: Masculinity, Anxiety, and the Male Body on the Line (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996).
For the fantasy of physical integrity, see Kathleen Coyne Kelly, “Malory’s Body Chivalric,” Arthuriana 6.4 (1996): 52–71.
Lee Patterson, Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), pp. 197–230; Elizabeth Porter, “Chaucer’s Knight, the Alliterative Morte Arthure, and the Medieval Laws of War: a Reconsideration,” Nottingham Medieval Studies 27 (1983): 56–78; Juliet Vale, “Law and Diplomacy in the Alliterative Morte Arthure,” Nottingham Medieval Studies 23 (1979): 31–46.
The Stanzaic Morte Arthur has the Archbishop promise the recuperation of political stability, and respectful treatment of Gaynour, by means of the queen’s physical return “into hyr boure” (2314). For archaeological evidence of noblewomen’s “enclosure,” see Roberta Gilchrist, “Medieval Bodies in the Material World: Gender, Stigma, and the Body,” in Medieval Bodies, ed. Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), pp. 43–61.
For London as “king’s chamber” and the king’s “bridal chamber,” in the entry to celebrate Richard II’s reconciliation with the City in 1392, and as “secret chambre of Englond,” in the welcome of Katherine of Aragon as Prince Arthur’s bride in 1501, see Gordon Kipling; respectively, Enter the King: Theatre, Liturgy, and Ritual in the Medieval Civic Triumph (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 16–17; The Receyt of the Ladie Kateryne, EETS o.s. 296 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 9.
James Turner Johnson, Ideology, Reason, and the Limitation of War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), cites the thirteenth-century writer Guerrero, to the effect that “a prince may make war to free himself from unjust tribute” (p. 50). See also M. H. Keen, The Laws of War in the Late Middle Ages (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965), pp. 63–81.
Karen Pratt traces, in the Mort, this association with land, “the most important symbolic meaning of a woman’s body” in the Middle Ages “The Image of the Queen in Old French Literature,” in Queens and Queenship in Medieval Europe, ed. Anne K. Duggan (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 1997), pp. 235–59 (pp. 255, 256).
On rape’s association with the foundation of states, see Laurie A. Finke and Martin Shichtman, “The Mont St. Michel Giant: Sexual Violence and Imperialism in the Chronicles of Wace and LaƷamon,” in Violence against Women in Medieval Texts, ed. Anna Roberts (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998), pp. 56–74. E. Annie Proulx, Postcards (London: Harper Collins, 1994) offers a finely judged and resolutely antifoundational treatment of rape as narrative beginning and dynamic. On expansionism and Christendom, see Robert Warm, “Arthur and the Giant of Mont St Michel: The Politics of Empire Building in the Later Middle Ages,” Nottingham Medieval Studies 41 (1997): 57–71.
Elizabeth Archibald observes fellowship as particular to Malory’s Arthurian world: “Malory’s Ideal of Fellowship,” Review of English Studies n.s. 43 (1992): 311–28.
For critical response to this section as a journeyman piece, see Vinaver’s introduction (1:li–lvi); P.J. C. Field, Romance and Chronicle: A Study of Malory’s Prose Style (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1971), p. 67. Sally Shaw argues for Caxton’s reworking of an “unsophisticated” text in “Caxton and Malory,” in Essays on Malory, ed. J. A. W Bennett (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), pp. 114–45 (p. 143). John Withrington, in “Caxton, Malory, and The Roman War in The Morte Darthur,” Studies in Philology 89 (1992): 350–66, offers further evidence for Caxton’s hand in revision of the tale. A lively debate continues over Malory’s putative authorship of the “Caxton” version; see the articles in “Special Issue,” ed. Saida: Shunichi Noguchi, “The Winchester Malory,” 15–23; Charles Moorman, “Desperately Defending Winchester: Arguments from the Edge,” 24–30; P. J. C. Field, “Caxton’s Roman War,” 31–73.
See for example: “The gome and Þe grette horse at Þe grounde lyggez” (Morte Arthure, 1372), and: “Schaftes schedred wer sone & scheldes yÞrelled, And many schalke thurghe schotte withe Þe scharpe ende,” The Siege of Jerusalem, ed. E. Kölbing and Mabel Day, EETS o.s. 188 (London: Milford, 1932), ll. 1117–18).
Cf. Merlin (171): “plora des iex de sa teste.” Roberd the Robber “wepte faste water with hise eignen,” William Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman: A Critical Edition of the B-text, ed. A. V. C. Schmidt (London: Dent, 1978), Passus V, 1. 473.
The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), I, 2603–10. Future references to The Canterbury Tales are by fragment and line number.
See Vinaver’s comment (3:1388), and cf. Beverly Kennedy, Knighthood in the Morte Darthur (Cambridge, UK: Brewer, 1985), p. 107. Kennedy characterizes Arthur’s view as “rational and pragmatic” where Launcelot is “irrational and impractical,” yet concludes that Launcelot is “more noble.”
The Winchester Manuscript itself supplements the poem where Arthur will not spare those who ally themselves with the Saracens (1:224.1–3), but their enmity against Arthur defines them more than does their religion: “sle doune and save nother hethyn nothir Crystyn” (1:224.4). For Caxton, the enemy is heathen: Gawain counsels that with God’s help they will overthrow the “sarasyns and mysbyleuyng men” (1:235.6). Caxton’s version of Arthur’s campaign replicates the partisan element in Godeffroy of Boloyne, ed. Mary Noyes Colvin, EETS e.s. 64 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1893), p. 152, where “oure peple,” the crusaders, fight “mescreauntes.”
This has romance as well as chronicle precedent; the hero of Sir Percyvell of Gales also dies in the Holy Land: Ywain and Gawain, Sir Percyvell of Gales, The Anturs of Arther, ed. Maldwyn Mills (London: Dent, 1992), ll. 2280–283. Malory’s account of Arthur’s death conflates the Brufs report that it is “dotous,” with the ending of the Brut itself.
Lesley Johnson, “King Arthur at the Crossroads to Rome,” in Noble and Joyous Histories: English Romances, 1375–1650, ed. Eiléan Ní Cuilleanáin and J. D. Pheifer (Dublin: Blackrock, 1993), pp. 87–111, argues the Morte “questions whether, and how far, the quest for an empire is compatible with that for salvation” (p. 111).
“To King Henry the Fourth: In Praise of Peace,” The English Works of John Gower, ed. G. C. Macaulay, 2 vols., EETS e.s. 81, 82 (London: Oxford University Press, 1900, 1901), 2:481–92 (p. 489, ll. 283–84).
See Beverly Kennedy, “Malory’s Lancelot: ‘Trewest lover, of a synful man,’” Viator 12 (1981): 409–56; Joerg O. Fichte, “From ‘Shyvalere de Charyot’ to ‘The Knyght That Rode in the Charyot’: Thoughts on Malory’s Adaptation of the Vulgate Lancelot,” in: Genres, Themes, and Images in English Literature, ed. Piero Boitani and Anna Torti (Tübingen: Narr, 1988), pp. 73–89, argues Lancelot is primary expositor of Malory’s “ideal of active knighthood” (p. 89). For more skeptical inquiries into Malorian masculinity, see Cohen, “The Armour”; Coyne Kelly, “Malory’s Body Chivalric.”
Gary Ferguson, “Symbolic Sexual Inversion and the Construction of Courtly Manhood in Two French Romances,” The Arthurian Yearbook 3 (1993): 203–13 (203).
For a woman’s gift of a sword as Arthurian motif, see Jennifer R. Goodman, “The Lady with the Sword: Philippa of Lancaster and the chivalry of Prince Henry the Navigator,” in Chivalry and Exploration, 1298–1630 (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 1998), pp. 134–48 (pp. 144–47). John F. Plummer discusses the shield’s emblematization of sexual consummation and loss of male psychic wholeness, in “Frenzy and Females: Subject Formation in Opposition to The Other in the Prose Lancelot,” Arthuriana 6.4 (1996): 45–51.
E. Jane Burns, “Which Queen? Guinevere’s Transvestism in the French Prose Lancelot,” in Lancelot and Guinevere: A Casebook, ed. Lori Walters (New York: Garland, 1996), pp. 247–65.
See Commentary (3:1408–13). 1:253.20–264.5 correspond to Micha 4:165–95 (Lacy 3:153–60). 1:264.6–272.31 are analogous to Micha 5:25–47 (Lacy 3:212–217). The rescue of Kay at 1:272–278 derives from Micha 5:281–93 (Lacy 3:272–77. The Melyot adventure (1:278–84) is based on Li Haut Livre du Graal: Perlesvaus, ed. William A. Nitze and T. A. Jenkins, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1932–37), 1:340–45. Launcelot’s encounter with Pedyvere, 1:284.15–286.18 finds analogue in Micha 4:317–25, 339–45 (Lacy 3: 189–90, 193–94). The conclusion to the tale (1:286.19–287.26) is based on Micha 4:393–99 (Lacy 3:205–06). P. J. C. Field demonstrates how the Paris text of the Lancelot Micha edits is rather closer to Malory’s source than is the London version Sommer edited that Vinaver used for comparison, in: “Malory and the French prose Lancelot,” Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 75 (1993): 79–102. David R. Miller relates sources to the Tale’s structure in: “Sir Thomas Malory’s A Noble Tale of Sir Launcelot du Lake Reconsidered,” BBIAS 36(1984): 230–56; A. E. Hartung, “Narrative Technique, Characterization, and the Sources in Malory’s ‘Tale of Sir Lancelot,’” Studies in Philology 70 (1973): 252–68.
Edward Donald Kennedy, “Malory’s ‘Noble Tale of Sir Launcelot du Lake’, the Vulgate Lancelot, and the Post-Vulgate Roman du Graal,” in Arthurian and Other Studies Presented to Shunichi Noguchi, ed. Takashi Suzuki and Tsuyoshi Mukai (Cambridge, UK: Brewer, 1993), pp. 107–29, sees the events of the Launcelot section as important primarily for their connective function (p. 108).
Dante, The Divine Comedy 1: Inferno, ed. and trans. John D. Sinclair (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961), p. 78 (5.121–38).
D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 195. Coyne Kelly also draws on Miller, to argue for the erasure of violence in this text as another “open secret,” “Malory’s Body Chivalric,” p. 65, fn.2.
For moral readings, see: Derek Brewer, “Malory’s ‘Proving’ of Sir Launcelot,” in ed. Adams, Diverres, Stern, and Varty, The Changing Face, pp. 123–36; Andrew Welsh, “Lancelot at the Crossroads in Malory and Steinbeck” Philological Quarterly 70 (1991): 485–502, argues Launcelot’s love is “admirable in its loyalty but sinful and destructive in its effects” (p. 498).
Janet Jesmok, “‘A knyght wyveles’’: The Young Lancelot in Malory’s Morte Darthur” Modern Language Quarterly 42 (1981): 315–30. Felicity Riddy writes of the text’s “painful ambivalence” toward women, Sir Thomas Malory, p. 58: “by virtue of their sex they should be protected, but by virtue of their sexuality they deserve to die.”
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 4.
Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity, and the Aesthetic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992). See also, Elisabeth Bronfen and Sarah Webster Goodwin, “Death and Gender,” pp. 13–15 of “Introduction” to Death and Representation, ed. Sarah Webster Goodwin and Elisabeth Bronfen (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).
For Gareth as family drama and maturation narrative, see Derek Brewer, Symbolic Stories (Cambridge, UK: Brewer, 1980), pp. 100–11. See also Thomas L. Wright, “On the Genesis of Malory’s Gareth,” Speculum 57 (1982): 569–82. For the link with courtesy books, see Felicity Riddy, Sir Thomas Malory, pp. 60–83. Wheeler interprets Gareth’s career in terms of alchemical processes in ‘“The Prowess of Hands’: The Psychology of Alchemy in Malory’s ‘Tale of Sir Gareth,’” in Culture and the King. The Social Implications of the Arthurian Legend, ed. Martin B. Shichtman and James P. Carley (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), pp. 180–95.
On the “bipartite form” as a conventional medieval structure, see William W Ryding, Structure in Medieval Narrative (The Hague: Mouton, 1971). I do not endorse Ryding’s opinion on the Morte itself as (p. 160): “a series of independent stories whose presentation as one continuous romance was due entirely to Caxton.”
Jane Gallop, Thinking Through the Body (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p. 7.
Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, ed. and intro. John B. Thompson, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1991), p. 118, notes how rites of institution “naturalize” social oppositions.
Olivier de La Marche, Traités du duel judiciare. Relations de pas d’armes et tournois, ed. Bernard Prost (Paris: Léon Willem, 1872), pp. 55–95. Fradenburg also mentions this briefly, City, Marriage, Tournament, p. 211.
Lybeaus Desconus, ed. M. Mills, EETS o.s. 261 (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), 1. 1414; the narrator describes how: Wyth fantasme and fayrye Pus sche blerede hys yƷe, Pat euell mot sche Þryue. (ll. 1432–34)
Renaut de Beaujeu, Le Bel Inconnu, ed. G. Perrie Williams (Paris: Champion, 1929): Mais por un biau sanblant mostrer Vos feroit Guinglain retrover S’amie, que il a perdue, Qu’entre ses bras le tenroit nue. (ll. 6255–58) [But for a fair look, he will ensure for you that Guinglain finds his love, whom he has lost, and will hold her naked in his arms.] Simon Gaunt, Gender and Genre in Medieval French Literature (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 102–13, looks at the ending of the poem in the context of the ambivalence of romance constructs of masculine identity.
Laurie A. Finke and Martin B. Shichtman, “No Pain, No Gain: Violence as Symbolic Capital in Malory’s Morte d’Arthur” Arthuriana 8.2 (1998): 115–34 (123–24).
Donald L. Hoffman comments on Gareth’s success generally in contrast with Balin’s failure, in: “Malory’s ‘Cinderella Knights’ and the Notion of Adventure,” Philological Quarterly 67 (1988): 145–56 (145–48).
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© 2002 Catherine Batt
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Batt, C. (2002). Narrative Form and Heroic Expectation: The Tale of Arthur and Lucius, The Noble Tale of Sir Launcelot du Lake, and The Tale of Sir Gareth of Orkney. In: Malory’s Morte Darthur. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-11183-8_3
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