Trauma, it has been discovered, may be passed down generationally. This ‘trans-generational adaptation’ is defined as a response to recurring oppression or violence, inherited through behaviours exhibited within the family or the community. The emotions associated with transgenerational trauma are social hostility, mistrust, and shame. These emotions also appear in the generational dynamics that lead to three dishonourable deaths at the center of Malory's Morte Darthur, those of King Pellinore, Queen Morgause, and Sir Lamorak. King Pellinore is Lamorak's father, and Gawain, Gaheris, Aggravain, and Gareth are the sons of King Lot and Queen Morgause. Proceeding in the chronological rather than the narrative order of the murders, Pellinore is killed when Gawain and Gaheris set upon him. Queen Morgause is decapitated by her son, Gaheris, when found in bed with Pellinor's son, Lamorak. Finally, Lamorak is hewn down by Lot and Morgause's sons, except for Gareth. All of the deaths are flagrant violations of chivalric culture and specifically of Malory's Round Table code, and all are motivated by shaming acts involving parents or relatives of the elder generation. Although hostility and mistrust can certainly be attributed to Gawain and his brothers as they engage with Pellinore and Lamorak, it is primarily shame that drives their actions. My argument focuses on shame as an emotional inheritance that affects Lot and Morgause's sons and Arthur's reign. I examine the links between Malory's use of shame language and its medieval philosophical background; the brothers’ double sense of shame, inherited from their father and mother; active and passive shame displayed in Morgause's death; and the Orkney princes’ self-shaming in their murders of Pellinore and Lamorak. The negative repercussions of the Orkneys’ shame trouble Arthur's reign from the beginning to the end of Malory's ‘hoole book’.

From the Classical and Medieval Inheritance to Malory

For current English speakers, shame is an unpleasant emotion, associated with humiliation and guilt, caused by wrongdoing and/or moral transgression, and sometimes experienced vicariously. Although psychologists and historians of emotion note wide cultural differences in understanding shame, the features listed above are shared with past formulations of shame in the west.

The most familiar wound in medieval romance is not literal but metaphorical: the wound of love. The conceit imagines the heroine (consciously or not) penetrating the knight’s heart – either through her image or gaze – and inflicting a wound that only she can heal. Romance writers such as Chrétien and Guillaume de Lorris adopted the metaphor from the troubadours. By the time Chaucer’s Troilus passes Criseyde in the temple and is ‘Right with hire loke thorough-shoten’, the entire audience would be familiar enough with the motif to wonder whether the lady would serve as the knight’s physician or agent of death. In contrast to Chaucer, Malory shows little interest in the lover’s malady. Rather, it is physical injury – cuts, slashes, stabs and punctures – that Malory reports, usually under the single noun ‘wound’.

Malory treats these injuries realistically. Wounds are staunched to stop the flow of blood, searched, cleansed – on one occasion with ‘whyghte wyne’ to prevent infection (234.18–19) – and ‘salved’. ‘Rest’ or ‘repose’ is required so that the injured man may be made ‘hole’ or ‘healed’, his injury ‘well eased’ or ‘well amended’. Yet wounds in the Morte Darthur can bear more than literal meaning. Chivalry demands martial display and, as Andrew Lynch claims in his seminal study, blood is ‘the basic currency of fights and quests’; its display literalizes noble status. Thus blood that flows from male-on-male violence and the resulting wounds prove a knight’s worth, sometimes even when he loses the battle, as for La Cote Male Tayle (473.15–32). Injuries can represent a knight’s honour and function, in Laurie Finke and Martin Shichtman’s witty phrase, as ‘symbolic capital’. Arguing against a tendency of gender critics to assess all wounds as feminizing, Kenneth Hodges analyses the positive role wounds play in educating knights and creating community, stating that ‘the injuries sustained give weight and worth to the abstract issues being fought about’. Through wounds and their trace in scars, Malory writes upon a knight’s body the honour he has gained in battle.

Intriguing to me, however, are the wounds that mark not honour but dishonour, and the ways they are interpreted by the injured knight within the tale and the audience outside it.

The alliterative Morte Arthure presents one of the most striking displays of death in the entire Arthurian corpus. There the king walks across the strand, turning over the bodies of his men who had fallen in the first battle against Mordred:

Nothing so ‘weighed down’ the king (‘sanke hym so sade’) as does the sight of the Round Table's fallen men. The architectural arrangement of their corpses reveals how they met their end. The small band had been driven off to the side and outnumbered by Mordred's troops, encircled by them, and cut down. At the center of their company (‘soppe’) lies ‘sir Gawayne the gude’.

Thus Sir Thomas Malory prefaces his version of the final battle between King Arthur and Mordred at the climax of his late fifteenth-century Le Morte Darthur. Arthur's words, actions, and attitude, especially his privileging of right and revenge over personal safety, indicate the force of heroic motivation and its costs in Malory's Arthuriad. This combination of heroism and its fatal consequences makes Malory's Arthuriad more poignant than many of his sources. Malory's version of the final battle also displays Malory's own artistry and the nature of medieval storytelling and originality, for Malory inherited the outline of the narrative from his French and English sources, but felt free to treat this and other scenes according to his own artistic vision. As Fanni Bogdanow observes,

At the same time, Malory's aphoristic sentiment suggests a truth at the heart of the Arthurian myth, that death is the king's lot, awaiting him as it does everyone else, both in the Arthuriad and in life.

As the previous chapter has demonstrated, both Elaines hope for companionable marriage with Launcelot, and, failing to secure his affection, they attempt to barter their bodies. Elaine of Ascolat's plight reveals patriarchal assumptions about the social necessity of virginity in a marriageable daughter while Elaine of Corbin's reveals the assumed value of producing children, particularly sons. In the Morte Darthur female sexuality is never simply about a woman's control of her body; familial and even public concerns intrude on her bodily destiny. Whereas for Malory's women, maintaining chastity is required in order to bear a legitimate heir, for Malory's men, no such prescription holds. For the Morte Darthur's fathers, a “natural” view of sex prevails.

With the exception of the “Tale of the Sankgreal,” throughout the Morte Darthur men engage in sex within and outside of marriage. Apart from Queen Guenevere, women conceive children with surprising ease, usually upon the couple first coming together. Arthur's first illegitimate son results from such a fortuitous conception:

Malory's narrator is, for the most part, unobtrusive. His focus is solidly on the story, moving us forward in plot and time. When he does intrude upon the narrative, he does so typically with set phrases such as “Now leve we of this mater” or “And so I leve here of this tale” (Works 769.1 and 1154.1). Occasionally the narrator will break into the story, to address the audience in his own voice. At these points, the narrator's voice cannot be distinguished from Malory's. For example, the narrator praises the young Tristram with the comment “he laboured in huntynge and in hawkynge – never jantylman more than ever we herde rede of” and remarks when he is unhorsed, “Here men may undirstonde that bene men of worshyp that man was never fourmed that all tymes myght attayne, but somtyme he was put to the worse by malefortune” (Works 375.16–18 and 484.18–20, emphasis mine). Such comments sometimes make the narrator sound like a chivalric apologist, but they also remind us of Malory's lived presence behind the narrative. More than that, they suggest the community of “gentlemen” and “men of worship” that the author envisioned as his audience.

Regarding Malory's identity, we know with certainty only what we can derive from his book. In the explicits the author specifically reveals his status, identifying himself by formal title and proper name, “Sir Thomas Malleorré knyght” (Works 845.29, cf. 1037.11–12, 1154.18, and 1260.26–7).