‘Am I nat an erthely woman?’: Malory’s Morte Darthur

Abstract

One of box-office successes of 1990 was The War of the Roses, a light-weight comedy which centred upon the battle of the sexes and the contemporary issue of divorce settlements. The ‘war’ between the eponymous Mr and Mrs Rose includes several murder attempts, the destruction of valuable possessions and turning the family dog into a dish of tasty paté. Undoubtedly, the witty allusion of the film’s title was lost upon the majority of American audiences, but the parallel it draws between sex-conflict and social disturbance — in this case the English civil wars of the fifteenth century — is strangely reminiscent of similar situations in Malory’s Morte Darthur.¹ It is hardly likely that Danny DeVito, the director of The War of the Roses, found himself reading either Vinaver’s erudite or Caxton’s bowdlerised versions of Sir Thomas Malory’s romance, but he shows an awareness, albeit limited, of the way in which civil and gender disruption became united in the mid-fifteenth century, both in the cultural productions of that time and in the way in which that age is still characterised.² At the same time, we must recognise how far twentieth-century definitions of ‘the battle of the sexes’ differ from those held by Malory and his contemporaries. The spirited attacks of Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas, who play the Roses, pale into insignificance when compared to the assaults committed by the characters in the Morte Darthur. The following examples provide clear evidence of how violence is often condoned in the text, but they also prove conclusively that the gender stereotypes of women as passive victims and men as domineering aggressors are as little relevant to Malory’s work as they are to the twentieth-century movie.