Flourish your heart in this world: Emotion, reason, and action in Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur

Midwest Studies in Philosophy

Volumn 22, Issue 1, 1998, Pages 182-226

  Ackerman, Felicia ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61149453325     PISSN: 03636550     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4975.1998.tb00337.x     Document Type: Article

References (105)

1. Beverly Kennedy, "The Re-Emergence of Tragedy in Late Medieval England, " in Existential Coordinates of Human Condition, ed. A. Tymieniecka (Boston, 1984), 363-78. I thank Timothy Chambers for the computer search, and I invite readers to blame him if it is in error.
2. For example, C. S. Lewis, "The English Prose Morte, " in Essays on Malory, ed. J. A. W. Bennett (Oxford, 1963), 7-28;
3. D. S. Brewer, Introduction to The Morte Darthur, Parts Seven and Eight (Evanston, Ill., 1968);
4. Terence McCarthy, An Introduction to Malory (Cambridge, 1991);
5. Beverly Kennedy, Knighthood in the Morte Darthur, 2nd. ed. (Cambridge, 1992);
6. and Elizabeth Pochoda, Arthurian Propaganda (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1971)
7. and Felicity Riddy, Sir Thomas Malory (Leiden, 1987).
8. Mark Lambert, Malory: Style and Vision in Le Morte Darthur (New Haven, Conn., 1975), ix.
9. For dissenting views about the moral tone of Malory's writing, see Vinaver, The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, xxvii-xxix
10. and Riddy, Sir Thomas Malory, 6-7. The Baines book itself, a modern retelling of Malory that does not deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as the original, is not recommended. The debate over Malory's identity and character may not be very philosophical, but it is fascinating.
11. For a good introduction, see McCarthy, An Introduction to Malory, 160-67.
12. For a thorough argument in favor of the candidate now generally considered most likely, see P J. C. Field, The Life and Times of Sir Thomas Malory (Cambridge, 1993).
13. For arguments that this candidate may not have been as bad a person as the charges suggest, see Lewis, "The English Prose Morte, "
14. and Brewer, Introduction to The Morte Darthur, Parts Seven and Eight, 35-36.
15. For example, see Alison Jaggar, "Love and Knowledge: Emotion in Feminist Epistemology, " in Woman, Knowledge, and Rationality, ed. Ann Garry and Marilyn Pearsall (New York, 1992), 129-56.
16. Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (Bantam, 1983).
17. See also Robert H. Wilson, "Malory in the Connecticut Yankee, " Studies in English 27 (1948): 185-206.
18. See Howard Gardner, Frames of Mind (New York, 1983).
19. Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte D'Arthur, v. 1, 87-88 (C II, 18; V 89:9-14).
20. Vinaver points out that Malory himself is confused here, as, in fact, "Balin had only one sword left, but... [Malory] was misled [by his French source] into thinking that [Balin] had his two swords with him" (Vinaver, Commentary on The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, p. 1321).
21. Many philosophers have stressed this point. For example, see Richard Brandt, A Theory of the Good and the Right (Oxford, 1979), 13 and 72.
22. Alfred Mele, Irrationality (Oxford, 1987), 6.
23. R.T.Davies, "The Worshipful Way in Malory, " in Patterns of Love and Courtesy: Essays in Memory of C. S. Lewis, ed. John D. Lawlor (London, 1966), 173.
24. See also R. T. Davies, "Malory's Launcelot and the Noble Way of the World, " Review of English Studies 6 (1955): 360
25. as well as the discussion in Beverly Kennedy, "Malory's Lancelot: 'Trewest Lover, of a Synful Man', " Viator 12 (1981): 424-25.
26. For a discussion of this sort of phenomenon, see Jon Elster, Ulysses and the Sirens (Cambridge, 1986).
27. Davies, "The Worshipful Way in Malory, " 173
28. Davies, "The Worshipful Way in Malory, " 172
29. Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 10th ed. (Springfield, Mass., 1993), 861.
30. Gardner, Frames of Mind, 237-76.
31. For discussion of the importance of the role of shame in Malory's world, see Brewer, Introduction to Malory: The Morte Darthur, Parts Seven and Eight
32. and McCarthy, An Introduction to Malory, especially 72-100.
33. See my short story, "Break, Break, Break, " Commentary (February 1991): 40-44.
34. Vinaver points out that the phrase 'for your love' here could be taken to mean 'for your sake' (Commentary on The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, p. 1601).
35. In fact, Elaine does not blame Launcelot for unwittingly leading her on. For a story about a woman who does blame a man for unwittingly leading her on, and who discusses some of the moral issues involved, see my "The Forecasting Game" in Prize Stories 1990: The O. Henry Awards, ed. William Abrahams (Doubleday, 1990), 315-35.
36. P J. C. Field explains Guenever's angry response to Launcelot by saying that "[determined to hit back at whatever cost, she accuses him of every fault she can think of" (Introduction to Le Morte D'Arthur: The Seventh and Eighth Tales [London, 1978], 60).
37. D. Thomas Hanks, Jr., "Malory, Dialogue, and Style, " Quondam et Futurus 3 (1993): 30.
38. Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 10th ed., 582.
39. See Eugène Vinaver, Introduction to King Arthur and His Knights: Selected Tales by Sir Thomas Malory (Oxford, 1975), xv, although he uses this observation here in the service of a point somewhat different from mine. What I want to stress is that the knights are men of action as opposed to men of reflection.
40. See also E J. C. Field, Romance and Chronicle (Bloomington, Ind., 1971), 150.
41. Of course, this is not equally true of all the knights. Gawain and Balin, for example, seem generally far more impetuous than Gareth and Tristram, not to mention Dinadan. Palomides seems to be both reflective (at least as compared with the other knights) and impetuous. For discussion of knightly self-control, see Brewer, Introduction to Malory: The Morte Darthur, 12-19;
42. Field, Romance and Chronicle;
43. and Kennedy, Knighthood in the Morte Darthur.
44. But see Elster, Ulysses and the Sirens, 40-41, for an acknowledgment of the value of spontaneity.
45. The Vinaver edition omits 'wise', but APA members may or may not be pleased that Vinaver's glossary explicates 'philozopher' (Malory's spelling here) as 'learned man' (The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, p. 1731)
46. or 'wise man' (Malory: Works, p. 800).
47. Lambert notes "the parallel situations: both the queen and Gawain are bidding farewell to [Launcelot] and looking back on the ruin of the Round Table" (Lambert, Malory: Style and Vision in Le Morte Darthur, 160).
48. Larry Benson describes this action as a case of Percival's "symbolically becoming a eunuch for the Lord" (Larry D. Benson, Malory's Morte Darthur [Cambridge, Mass., 1976], 213)
49. As Field points out, "Malory's characters are prone to forgetting, " not in the sense of "total oblivion, but letting things slip to the back of one's mind" (Introduction to Le Morte D'Arthur: The Seventh and Eighth Tales, 53).
50. Joseph Shapiro, No Pity (New York, 1993).
51. For philosophical discussion of this and other issues related to pity and self-pity, see my "Pity as a Moral Concept/The Morality of Pity, " in Midwest Studies in Philosophy 20 (1995): 59-66.
52. For a recent example, see Richard Bernstein's review of Jean-Dominique Bauby, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, in the New York Times, May 23, 1997, B31, where the reviewer notes approvingly that the author (a stroke victim totally paralyzed except for the blinking muscle of his left eye) has "disdain for self-pity."
53. Larry Benson describes Gareth's endurance of Lynet's abuse as part of the process of his "learning... chivalric self-control" (Malory's Morte Darthur, 103). But note that Gareth's self-congratulatory speech is also self-contradictory. If he really "took none heed" to Lynet's words, then how did they manage to anger him?
54. The Gareth/Beaumains remark does not have recourse to religion, but the penitence of Launcelot and Guenever is clearly religious. An even more telling example of a religious Malory theme that also occurs in present-day life, but without the religious underpinning that grounds it in Malory's world, is illustrated by Galahad's death. Galahad approaches death with a heartfelt acceptance - in fact, eagerness - that would gratify any present-day hospice director. But hospices nowadays expect to promote such acceptance even in dying people who lack the religious belief that makes the attitude so understandable in Galahad's case - the certainty that one is going on to a better world. See my "Goldilocks and Mrs. Ilych: A Critical Look at the 'Philosophy of Hospice', " Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 3 (1997): 314-24.
55. Vinaver, Malory: Works, 789.
56. Vivaver's glossary also points out that Malory sometimes uses the same word in an archaic sense in one passage and in a modern sense elsewhere (Works of Sir Thomas Malory, p. 1703).
57. In the popular abridged edition, King Arthur and His Knights: Selected Tales by Sir Thomas Malory, Vinaver explicates 'envy' in this passage as 'spite' (116).
58. and Kevin T. Grimm, "Fellowship and Envy: Structuring the Narrative of Malory's Tale of Sir Tristram, " Fifteenth Century Studies 20 (1993): 77-98. I discuss unrequited love later in this essay.
59. A more formal expression of the same sentiment, "More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered prayers" was apparently misattributed by Truman Capote to Saint Teresa of Avila. According to Capote's biographer, "[s]he did express similar sentiments ... and [Capote] probably assumed that a paraphrase was a direct quotation" (Gerald Clarke, Capote: A Biography [New York, 1988], 310).
60. Angus Wilson, "Envy, " in The Seven Deadly Sins, ed. Raymond Mortimer (New York, 1962), 6.
61. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), 532. Rawls distinguishes envy in this sense from more benign forms of envy, such as admiring and wanting for oneself but not actually wishing the ending of "the enviable harmony and happiness of [another person's] marriage or family."
62. Claudia Card, "On Mercy, " Philosophical Review 81 (1972): 199.
63. Reiss, Sir Thomas Malory, 118;
64. and Brewer, Introduction to The Morte Darthur Parts Seven and Eight.
65. Judith Martin, Miss Manners' Guide to the Turn-of-the Millennium (New York, 1989), 446.
66. See Susan Wolf, "Moral Saints, " Journal of Philosophy 79 (1982): 419-39
67. for an argument that moral perfection may actually preclude some other desirable qualities - an argument that will hardly surprise anyone familiar with the anecdote about Alice Roosevelt Longworth's embroidered pillow saying, "If you don't have anything nice to say, come sit by me, " or with W. H. Auden's question, "Why is it that kind remarks are seldom as funny as unkind?" ("Anger, " in Mortimer, The Seven Deadly Sins, 82).
68. and P.F. Tucker, "Chivalry in the Morte, " in Bennett, Essays on Malory, 85-86.
69. Frederick Douglass, "The Nation's Problem, " in African-American Social and Political Thought 1850-1920, ed. Howard Brotz (New Brunswick, N.J., 1992), 316-17. (This material also details other facets of Douglass's views on pride, which I will not go into here.)
70. R. M. Lumiansky, "The Tale of Lancelot and Guenever: Suspense, " in Lumiansky (ed.), Malory's Originality (Baltimore, 1964), 205-32.
71. See also Lumiansky, "The Tale of Launcelot: A Prelude to Adultery" in ibid., 91-98.
72. Kennedy, Knighthood in the Morte Darthur and "Malory's Lancelot: 'Trewest Lover, of a Synful Man'."
73. See Armistead Maupin, Tales of the City (New York, 1994). This point also counts against the elaborately argued accounts of Lumiansky and Kennedy, cited in notes 121 and 122, respectively.
74. Seven years is also the amount of time the necrophilic sorceress Hellawes has loved Launcelot unrequitedly, she tells him. But this is hardly an example of the sort of love Malory is exalting. (Note also that in a different context, Muriel Whitaker mentions Malory's seven-year periods as archetypical [Arthur's Kingdom of Adventure (Cambridge, 1984), 107]).
75. For discussion of inconsistencies and discrepancies in Le Morte D'Arthur, see R. M. Lumiansky, "Introduction" in Malory's Originality, 7;
76. E. K. Chambers, English Literature at the Close of the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1945), 191ff.;
77. Ellyn Olefsky, "Chronology, Factual Consistency, and the Problem of Unity in Malory, " Journal of English and Germanic Philology 68 (1969): 57-73;
78. and Bert Dillon, A Malory Handbook (Boston, 1978).
79. P. E. Tucker, "Chivalry in the Morte, " especially 76-81;
80. Peter Waldron, "Vertuouse Love and Adulterous Lovers: Coming to Terms with Malory, " in Sir Thomas Malory: Views and Re-Views, ed. D.T. Hanks, Jr. (AMS Press), 1992, 54-61
81. and also Davies, "Malory's 'vertuouse love', " Studies in Philology 53: 459-69
82. See Pochoda, Arthurian Propaganda, 128-29.
83. Richard Lovelace, "To Lucasta, Going to the Warres, " in The Poems of Richard Lovelace, ed. C. H. Wilkinson (Oxford, 1930), 18.
84. For a fictional account of people who repudiate this sort of love, and take pride in loving each other more than honor, see my short story, "For the Loved Ones in Your Life, " Sunday Journal Magazine, Providence Journal-Bulletin, August 21, 1988.
85. At least, he renounces her by what Davies aptly calls the "very liberal condition" ("The Worshipful Way in Malory, " 167
86. and "Malory's 'vertuouse love', " 466) of agreeing to "never come in that queen's fellowship as much as ye may forbear" (v. 2, 272
87. Lynne Sharon Schwartz, "The Melting Pot, " in her The Melting Pot and Other Subversive Stories (New York, 1989), 16.
88. Felicia Ackerman, "Buddies, " Commentary (December 1994): 52.
89. Arlie Hochschild, The Managed Heart (Berkeley, 1983), 7.
90. See Mary Ann Sorrentino, "A Buddy System, " Sunday Journal Magazine, Providence Journal-Bulletin, July 17, 1988, for an uncritical account of an AIDS buddy program. Of course, there is a sense in which the "friendship" of emotional charity does arise "of the heart, " in the sense of arising from a general ("heartfelt") desire to do good, just as, if Launcelot had married Elaine of Astolat out of pity, he could be said to be acting from pity that was in his heart. But Launcelot's point is presumably that love and its manifestations must arise from personal affection. The question about AIDS buddy programs and the like is whether the same might be said for friendship and its manifestations. Obviously programs like the AIDS buddy program and the Big Brothers may try to match up compatible people. But the aim of the buddy or Big Brother is accepted as being (at least partly) charitable in the sense of arising from a desire to offer emotional help to those in need, rather than arising from a desire to make a special point of seeking out people with AIDS or fatherless children on the grounds that they are apt to be better company than healthy people or children from intact families. For a fictional portrayal of an AIDS buddy program, see my short story, "Buddies."
91. F. Whitehead, "On Certain Episodes in the Fourth Book of Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur" Medium Aevum 2 (1933): 199-208;
92. and Vinaver's Commentary on The Works of Sir Thomas Malory.
93. For example, see John Steinbeck, Appendix to The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (New York, 1976), 380.
94. Benson offers this last example, as well as the case of Launcelot and Beaumains (mentioned in note 89), in support of the fact that "Malory is ... firm on the restriction of knighthood to the nobly bom" (Benson, Malory's Morte Darthur, 150).
95. See also Grimm, "Fellowship and Envy: Structuring the Narrative of Malory's Tale of Sir Tristram, " 78.
96. But the jauntiness of "thanked be Our Lord Jesus/ Thank me" is found in Caxton but not in Vinaver. The Vinaver edition instead has Pelleas saying "And now such grace God hath sent me that I hate her as much as I have loved her, " to which Nimue replies, "Thank me therefore" (The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, 172: 22-25; I have modernized the spelling).
97. For a fictional treatment of this point, see my short story, "Flourish Your Heart in This World, " in Clones and Clones: Facts and Fantasies about Human Cloning, ed. M. Nussbaum and C. Sunstein (New York, 1998), 310-31. As the title suggests, the story involves Malory themes.
98. See the discussion in Maureen Fries, "Indiscreet Objects of Desire: Malory's 'Tristram' and the Necessity of Deceit, " in Studies in Malory, ed. James W. Spisak (Kalamazoo, 1985), 87-108
99. and "Malory's Tristram as Counter-Hero to the Morte Darthur, " Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 76 (1975): 605-13;
100. Kennedy, Knighthood in the Morte D'Arthur, 168;
101. For convenience of exposition. I use the term 'romantic love' broadly enough to apply in Malory's world, despite such claims of some scholars as that "Romantic love is part and parcel of Romanticism, a distinctly modern movement" (Robert Solomon, "The Virtue of Love, " in Midwest Studies in Philosophy 13 [1988]: 22).
102. Solomon, "The Virtue of Love, " 15.
103. Space limitations prevent me from going into the question of the relation of friendships between individual knights, on the one hand, and the fellowship of the Round Table, on the other. For an interesting discussion of this issue, see Elizabeth Archibald, "Malory's Ideal of Fellowship, " Review of English Studies n.s. 43, no. 171 (1992): 311-28.
104. For discussions of this construction, see Jeremy Smith, "Language and Style in Malory" in A Companion to Malory, ed. Elizabeth Archibald and A. S. G. Edwards (Cambridge, 1996), 102;
105. and Lambert, Malory: Style and Vision in Le Morte Darthur, 16-19. But taking this to be metaphorical does not require a similar attitude toward the emotional displays that, taken literally, play such a large role in giving Malory's characters so much richness, excitement, and immediacy. I am indebted to many people for many exciting discussions of this material, including James Dreier, Shannon French, D. Thomas Hanks, Jr., Donna Harvey, Carol Kaske, Sara Ann Ketchum, Alfred Mele, Carole Roos, James Van Cleve, and the students in my philosophy in literature courses, especially Cornelius Simons, whose undergraduate honors thesis on Malory I have profitted from reading, Jubin Meraj, and Anna Timone, despite her dreadful opinion that Le Morte D'Arthur is "ridiculous." An expanded version of note 51 and the material leading up to it was read at the 33rd International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, May 1998.