Marriage, Adultery, and Inheritance in Malory's Morte Darthur (review)

This study of selected interesting aspects of the Morte Darthur ultimately offers readers a deeper understanding of Malory as a social conservative and man of his time. Karen Cherewatuk shows how the 'Tale of Sir Gareth', which Malory may have invented, and his adaptations of sources in other Tales uphold the marital and gender values of his gentry and aristocratic readers. She shows further the extent to which these values diverged from the Church's ideal of virginity and from the consensual, companionate form of marriage enshrined in canon law. Instead the secular ruling classes enforced a pragmatic moral code over sexual behaviour and inheritance, with a view to preserving civic order and building prosperity across generations. While continuing to venerate kings and lords like Arthur and Lancelot, who through inadvertence, passion or conflicted loyalties violated this code, the Morte Darthur centrally demonstrates the tragic consequences that such violation entails.

Cherewatuk's surveys of the gentry's views on virginity, marriage, infertility, adultery, illegitimacy, incest and dowry encourage the reader to make comparisons with the present-day attitudes that they helped to form. However she warns against the modern reading habit, derived from the realistic novel, of imagining a background of romantic motivation for the sexual and familial relationships depicted in the Morte. For this she substitutes 'the dominant ideas and behaviours' of Malory's contemporary audience, as revealed 'in their letters and practices' (p. xv). These prove to be the Paston letters, with minor allusions to the Cely family letters; the disruptive, tragic history of English royal dynasties from the dethronement of Richard II to the accession of Henry Tudor; and the marriage and inheritance provisions of canon and secular law. In defiance of New Historicist strictures, Cherewatuk's methodology validates textual interpretation within a historical context. While her findings may indeed be provisional, the reader is empowered to accept or reject them on the basis of the evidence presented. Moreover, by approaching the Morte through painstaking research, Cherewatuk allows the patriarchal attitudes of fifteenth-century elite society to emerge more powerfully than they might have done if she had begun to argue from a declared feminist position.

The chosen approaches produce findings that ring true; in fact they illuminate the Morte. For example, Cherewatuk outlines Malory's construction of a Guildford family of baronet status for the Maid of Ascolat on the basis of a few summary references in his sources. She elucidates an added incident, in which Sir Bernard forbids his daughter to accompany Gawain to her chamber, as reflecting the commodification of marriageable daughters' virginity in English ruling families. The enlarged perspective allows the reader to appreciate the Maid's initiative, and the enormity of her actions, when in her family's presence she offers herself to Lancelot as his wife and, failing that, his lover. Given her value to her family as an asset in the marriage market, Lancelot's use of the Maid to disguise his affair with Guenevere emerges, according to Cherewatuk, as self-centred and insensitive. Conversely, an awareness of the text's commercial assumptions makes his counter-offer, of a yearly thousand-pound dowry to be paid when the Maid marries someone else, seem admirable. To past 'romantic' readers, by contrast, Lancelot's counter-offer has often appeared as unforgivably crass.

Cherewatuk proceeds to explicate the tensions produced by Malory's 'class-based moral conservatism' (p. xviii) in most of the Morte's significant episodes. These include Lancelot's encounters with other ladies, notably Guenevere and Elaine of Corbin; the stages of Gareth and Lyonesse's courtship; Arthur and Guenevere's marriage; and knightly fathers' relationships with their illegitimate sons, including Pellynor with Torre, Bors with Elyne, Lancelot with Galahad, and finally Arthur with Mordred. Interspersed with judicious references to earlier critics, the discussion features a close reading of formulaic words and phrases in the Morte as an analytic tool appropriate to Malory's narrative...