V - Mirroring Masculinities: Transformative Female Corpses in Malory’s Morte Darthur

Summary

‘Sertes, had nat this jantillwoman bene, I had nat come hyder at thys time.’ So says Sir Galahad, when Percival’s Sister leads him to the ship that announces itself as Faythe, joining him with the two friends who will accompany him for the journey out of the familiar world of chivalry and the community of the Round Table into the spiritual realm.

Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur explores the nature of knighthood, creating a chivalric community in which the ideals of chivalry can be tested to their fullest extent. Yet this chivalric community and its members are shown by the narrative to be, as Kenneth Hodges describes it, ‘noble but fatally flawed, fatally unstable’. By the end of the text the chivalric community must share the narrative with a newly formed spiritual community, comprised of former pillars of the chivalric community, so that the two communities must exist in tension with each other. I argue that this broader narrative is mirrored in the briefer narratives of Sir Pedivere’s Wife and Sir Percival’s Sister, whose bodies function as symbols prefiguring this broader transformation within a number of the knights who make up the chivalric community. These stories each function as what Kateryna Rudnytzky Schray refers to as a ‘plot in miniature’, that is, as single episodes that serve to map out the broader plot of the text in which they are situated. By looking at these miniature narratives, we can see the ways in which these two women, who both lose their lives as a result of the expectations of the chivalric community, call for an alternative community in which the behaviours that cause their deaths will no longer be accepted. The narratives of the knights who encounter these bodies follow a pattern of failure, in which the corpse critiques the knight’s behaviour and the code that has enforced it; penance, in which the corpse enacts some kind of discipline or punishment against the knight; and ultimately repentance and transformation, as the knight takes on a new role in a new community distinct from the demands of the chivalric community.

Corpses and Community

Before discussing the bodies of Pedivere’s Wife and Percival’s Sister, however, some groundwork is necessary.