Arthurian Literature XXVIII, Blood, Sex, Malory: Essays on the Morte Darthur ed. by David Clark, Kate McClune (review)

This strong volume focuses on two prominent markers of identity and social connection: blood, which is a marker of kinship, honor, and suffering; and sex, with all the social complications involved. Throughout, the sex often seems no more joyful than the blood, an ever-imminent threat to body, discipline, worship, and family. As the articles interact with one another, a picture is built up of a vulnerable masculine community threatened by literal wounding, dishonor, and potential social breakdown.

The volume begins with Christina Francis’ ‘Reading Malory’s Bloody Bedrooms,’ in which she argues that the bloody sheets mark male sexual shame, an unwillingness to spend his blood either in battle or legitimate procreation. Megan Leitch, in ‘(Dis) Figuring Transgressive Desire: Blood, Sex, and Stained Sheets in Malory’s Morte Darthur,’ looks at many of the same scenes as well as from earlier Arthurian material, but she emphasizes the desire, often female, contained in these scenes.

Helen Phillips, in ‘Bewmaynes: The Threat from the Kitchen,’ argues that a number of medieval works show class anxieties emerging from kitchen and dining spaces, where the nourishment of aristocratic bodies brought them into intimate contact with the lower classes, giving Gareth’s disguise particular threat.

Gareth and Gawain’s sibling rivalry is one of many Carolyne Larrington considers in ‘Sibling Relations in Malory’s Morte Darthur.’ She traces the alliances and rivalries of brothers competing and protecting one another, sisters helping each other with marriage and love, and brothers and sisters reacting to the knights they meet. From altruistic alliance to incest and fratricide, various sibling relations shape the psychology of the characters.

Lydia Fletcher argues in ‘“Traytoures” and “Treson”: The Language of Treason in the Works of Sir Thomas Malory’ that Malory uses treason and the associated traitor in two senses: an English legal meaning of defying the king or his agents, and a more general sense inherited from earlier French romance of concealed or deceptive hostility.

The conflict between the artificial knightly community of the Round Table and the bonds of actual kinship is the subject of Kate McClune’s ‘“The Vengeaunce of My Brethirne”: Blood Ties in Malory’s Morte Darthur.’ She argues the social community is privileged, while actual kinship too often descends to feud, fratricide, and incest. Sally Mapstone, in ‘Malory and the Scots,’ looks at the treatment of Gawain’s family’s feuds not from the perspective of character but of nationality. She argues that Malory knew Scottish society relied on feud far more than the English.

In ‘Blood, Faith and Saracens in “The Book of Sir Tristram,”’ Caitlyn Schwarz argues that while Malory’s Palomides does not share the attributes of Saracens in many other romances, he is still ‘other’ enough to be kept from full integration in the Round Table. The suspicion that the Saracen might not be defined only by faith but possibly also by blood as well keeps him from successful sexual integration. Similarly, Maria Sachiko Cecire argues that his Saracen blood keeps Palomides separate, but that his persistence in quests he cannot achieve serves to mark the Christian rejection of him and register a noble resistance.

Anna Caughey argues in ‘Virginity, Sexuality, Repression and Return in the “Tale of the Sankgreal”’ that the fragile homosocial knightly community is threatened by intrusions of magic and sexual desire throughout the first part of the book, but the Grail Quest, instead of being an antidote, accentuates these dangers. The emphasis on virginity keeps attention on sexuality and the sin of the non-virgins, and the miracles prove as unsettling as the magic to which they are kin.

The concluding essay, Catherine La Farge’s ‘Launcelot in Compromising Positions: Fabliau in Malory’s “Tale of Sir Launcelot du Lake,”’ shows that a number of Launcelot’s adventures are kin to fabliaux, creating a generic instability that shows the increasing difficulty of...