Characterization in Malory and Bonnie

Abstract

Malory's characters remain a valuable area of study, especially given their foregrounding in the Winchester manuscript. Despite the importance of character in the Morte, Malory's characters are often misunderstood. In particular, the typical scholarly dismissal of Gawain and praise of Lancelot overlooks Gawain's heroic attributes-something long recognized by Bonnie. (KSW) My title, as many readers will undoubtedly realize, is taken from and pays tribute to Robert Henry Wilson's 1934 monograph on characterization in Malory.1 This remains one of the most insightful analyses of the Morte Darthur yet undertaken, and by juxtaposing Bonnie Wheeler to one of the finest Malory scholars of all time, I mean also to pay homage to Bonnie. But my title is meant not merely to praise Bonnie by association with Wilson, nor merely to suggest the likely longevity of her own scholarship: I also invoke Bonnie's own interest in Malory's characters. I am thinking in particular of her articles on Gawain, on Gareth, and on Palomides, though this only scratches the surface of Bonnie's scholarly achievements.2 Obviously in the brief space allotted me I cannot discuss all of Bonnie's work nor all of the characters in Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur. Accordingly, I shall confine myself to a brief discussion of character in general before turning to Malory's and Bonnie's characterizations of Gawain. Partly as a revisionist reaction to A. C. Bradley, partly to prioritize the merits of different critical methodologies ranging from the New Critical to cultural materialist to poststructuralist, scholars of Renaissance drama have spent much of the last two generations avoiding character.3 Whilst our Renaissance colleagues have only lately returned to the benefits of character study, there has always been a component of Malory criticism devoted to the Morte Darthur's characters. Such character study is interesting and valuable in and of itself, but it can also help answer other questions about Malory's and the Morte's narrative art: thus Wilson uses character to elucidate also Malory's handling of his sources;4 Bonnie relates character to what she considers to be romance's and the Morte's paratactic and 'polysemous...indeterminacy'5 ; and I myself have attempted to use Malory's characters in part to reveal the genre of the Morte Darthur and the complex nature of heroism expounded by Malory.6 Elizabeth Edwards deliberately focuses on plot instead of character in her account of women in the Morte, but she acknowledges that character is important to Malory and that he is capable of creating some semblance of 'subjectivity for women' in the closing tales of his Arthuriad.7 This is a telling admission, the truth of which is apparent in the role character study plays in the ever-increasing number of scholarly inquiries devoted to feminist and gender issues in Malory's text.8 This scholarly focus on characterization in the Morte Darthur is further justified-if only rarely acknowledged by critics-by the physical layout of the text in the Winchester manuscript (now London, British Library MS Add. 59678), the sole surviving manuscript version of the Arthuriad.9 Winchester is not Malory's holograph but a copy one or two stages removed.10 Although critics have yet to establish with certainty the reason for or origin of the rubrication of names in Winchester, what is certain is that the manuscript is the oldest and most authoritative text of the Morte, and that the rubrication of names in the manuscript emphasizes character above all else. Here I am in complete agreement with Caroline D. Eckhardt, who observes, 'As if to call attention to the presence of the king and the many other characters, the [Winchester manuscript] scribes regularly wrote all the text's proper names in red ink and in a slightly more formal script than the rest of the text.'11 As Helen Cooper notes, the red names practically leap off the page: they immediately and strikingly capture the reader's attention even before the lexical meaning of the words themselves are registered. …