Marriage, Adultery, and Inheritance in Malory's Morte DArthur by Karen Cherewatuk (review)

Abstract

KAREN CHEREWATUK, Marriage, Adultery, and Inheritance in Malory's Morte DArthur. Arthurian Studies LXVII. Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2006. Pp. xxvii, 149. isbn: 0261-9814. $80. £45. Karen Cherewatuk's Marriage, Adultery, and Inheritance in Malory's Morte Darthur studies Malory's Morte in light of late medieval history, culture, and audience. She reads the Morte not as an antiquated chivalric retrospective but as a reflection of fifteenth-century values and concerns: Malory wrote 'for an upwardly mobile audience of peers whose values and taste are reflected in the Morte Darthur' (xiv). Cherewatuk develops her argument by tracing patterns in language and action that reveal Malory's 'class-based moral conservatism or pragmatism that colors his treatment of marriage and sexual relations' (xviii). The Introduction illustrates her approach by analyzing three key passages from the 'Tale of Lancelot' dealing with wives and paramours. She sees Lancelot's ambivalence about women and love, his 'insistence on the queen's chastity within marriage and his discomfort with the adultery,' as emblematic of Malory's own, the reason that Malory refrains from acknowledging the adultery and postpones its clear depiction as long as possible (xxii-iii). Although the Arthurian tales are steeped in adultery, Malory, as a member of the fifteenth-century English gentry, resists this central theme. Through insightful close readings of the Morte juxtaposed with generous historical analogues, Cherewatuk guides her readers through Malory's reworking of tales of marriage, adultery, and family inheritance in light of 'the gentry's concerns about intimate relationships within and outside of the family' (xv). Karen Cherewatuk's first two chapters focus on marriage. While fifteenth-century nobility generally married for economic and political reasons, the gentry more often put greater value on love and companionship (xxiv). She argues that the 'Tale of Sir Gareth,' commonly considered Malory's invention, reveals both noble and gentry attitudes. The later Middle Ages was moving from marriage as a privately pledged troth to public marriage ceremonies that demonstrated familial approval and ensured female purity and family lineage: 'Ever the social conservative, Malory would side with the Paston elders against children choosing their own spouses and times of marriage' (20). Using fifteenth-century families like the Pastons as historical analogues, Cherewatuk interprets Lynette's preventing the couple's premarital sexual union and Gareth's required re-winning of Lyonesse in tournament as reflections of gentry values. In publicly uniting the Lady Lyonesse with King Lot's son, Malory subordinates secret vows and sexual urgency to create a love match that ensures economic and political stability. Cherewatuk's exploration of Arthur's failed marriage provides a first-rate analysis of Guenevere's importance in the Morte. Although childless, Guenevere brings the Round Table as her dowry: 'Guenevere has supplied her husband with men and by analogy begotten the great society. Through the exchange of dowry, the queen's body makes possible the metaphoric body of men' (36). Paradoxically, Guenevere's infertility protects her as an adulterous queen by removing the possibility of illegitimate heirs. Interweaving historical background and fascinating discussion of medieval medicine, Cherewatuk reads Guenevere through the lens of fifteenth-century views of weddings and dowries, adultery, infertility and procreation, motherhood, and widowhood. She concludes that Guenevere's adulterous body becomes identified with her dowry, the body politic of Arthur's knights, so that '[h]er rejection of her body in the last tale simultaneously signals the end of the chivalric body' (55). Chapter Three, on 'The Two Elaines,' carefully compares these suitors for Lancelot's hand, heart, and body, only two of a bevy of disappointed ladies the 'knyght wyveles' leaves in his wake. …