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The Return of King Arthur: The Legend through Victorian Eyes by Debra N. Mancoff

1997; Scriptoriun Press; Volume: 7; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/art.1997.0022

1934-1539

Maureen Fries,

Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies

156ARTHURIANA debra N. mancoff,7ä<· Return ofKing Arthur:The Legend through Victorian Eyes. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1995. Pp. 176, color illus. isbn: 0-8109-3782-4. $35. Rounding a corner in the Museo de Arte in Ponce, Puerto Rico, a few years ago, I was ravished by my first sight ofEdward Burne-Jones's TheSUep ofArthurinAvaUn— surely the jewel in the crown ofthat bejeweled museum, the largest repository ofpreRaphaelite painting in our hemisphere. It is reproduced as the final and double page full-color illustration in Debra Mancoff's bookon the nineteenth-centuryArthurian Revival and—like the reproductions of the other 130-plus objets d'art represented here—of very good quality indeed. One would have liked more color (Frederick Sandys's gorgeous Morgan UFay, for instance) but one understands about the costs of art books, and visually, at least, this volume lives up to Jo Goyne's advance billing when she asked me to review it, as a 'really gorgeous' production. But Mancoffaspires to discuss more than art, and there's the rub. 'Retold in the poetry ofAlfred Lord Tennyson, William Morris and Sir Walter Scott' as the dustjacket blurb has it (there are other literary, mainly briefretellings) the legend'sVictorian ambiance is (generally) rendered quitewell. But ambiance is one thing, textual accuracy another, and even in her Victorian retellings Mancoff's prose is filled with errors which will pain Arthurian scholars and misinform the amateurs who will buy this as the coffee-table book it seems at least partly intended to be. Let us begin, asall modern aficionados ofthe legend must, with the supposititious Malory, whose works were not 'written after his release' (Mancoff, p.19): had they been, why would he—specifically exempted from all general pardons—call himself more than once a knight-prisoner and pray on the last page of his book for 'good delyveraunce' (Malory, Works, ed. Eugene Vinaver, 2nd, ed. p. 726)? Mancoff's plot summary ofLe Morte Darthur is riddled with other mistakes: in Malory's book the sword does not get into the stone through a deathstroke thrust ofUther (19)—that detail isJohn Boorman's in his freely adapted film Excalibur—but through the agency ofMerlin (Works 7); the Lady ofthe Lake's command as she gives Arthur Excalibur is not 'that he use it in the cause ofjustice and. . .return it when his work is completed' (19) but that he 'woll gyff me a gyffte whan I aske hit you' (Works 35); Gawain does not come from as close as Cornwall' (19) but from (Lothian and) Orkney; Geraint is a figure from Welsh Arthuriana rather than the Erec known to Malory from his French sources and is in any case and under any name not one ofMalory's prominent Round Table knights as Mancoff implies (19); Merlin is not 'removed from the court'(i9) but removes himself. Traditional courtly characters are equally misprized:'Tristram's character is not 'deformed...into a sensualist bent on earthly pleasure' (64) by Tennyson, but from his beginnings and not from 'later works...obsessed with adulterous love' (65)— always ambiguous and his adventures always ambivalent, this is the knight who participates in a blasphemous oath to protect his affair in Gottfried von Strassburg's classic early thirteenth-century version of his story and who in Malory has 'suche chere and rychcs and all other plesauance that he had allmoste forsakyn La Beale Isode' (Works 273). Chrétien deTroyes' Guinevere does not scorn Lancelot because of REVIEWS157 his choice ofthe cart 'rather than walk the long miles to save her' (66-67)—for me the most puzzling ofMancoffs misreadings-but because, a noble equestrian, he has hesitated to mount a base vehicle to effect her rescue. Nor does Lancelot carry 'Guinevere back to his sovereign's court' (67) after his first defeat ofMeleagant: only after two imprisonments does he return (Guinevere and Gawain have preceded him by a long stretch ofnarrative) to his ultimate victory. Nor '[i]n the medieval tradition' does Lancelot '[t]ime and again[descend] into madness': (67)—his Guinevere-induced dementia is notable for depth rather than repetition, nor is his final payment for his passion a Victorian invention 'unimagined in medieval times' (70)—for who could imagine a more harrowing decline than his groveling upon Guinevere's and Arthur's graves, accompanied by anorexia and wasting away 'by a kybbet shorter than he was' until he is 'strake dede': however 'sweetest savour aboute hym,' Lancelot's Malorian end causes an understandable 'grettest dole' among his nearest and dearest (Works 723-724). As mistaken as are Mancoff's readings of Malory, however, more surprising are her wrong interpretations ofTennyson's IdylL·. Especially misleading is her version of Tennyson's Pelleas: this knight and his scornful lady, Ettarre, never 'become lovers' (60), an error Mancoffrepeats by grouping him with '[o]thers' who follow Lancelot and Guinevere: 'Tristram with Isolt, Pelleaswith Ettarre'(6o) (Alfred LordTennyson, IdylL· ofthe King (NY: Airmont, 1969). Pelleas, moreover, earns no mention in her fourth chapter, 'WomanWorship,' a phrase she notes 'entered theVictorian vocabulary during 'the 1860s' as an implied 'definition ofwomanhood as an ideal moral existence' (72). Yet he is the only character in the IdylL·who uses that term. Transformed by his experience with Ettarre (Tennyson omits Malory's happy ending, in which Pelleas marries The Lady of the Lake) and become the lawless Red Knight presiding over a court of 'ruffians' and 'harlot-brides,' Pelleas 'howlfs]' to Arthur, '"art thou not that eunuch-hearted King / Who fain had dipt free manhood from the world—/ The woman-worshipper?"' (IdylL· 270-271). Pelleas, scorning 'woman worship,' meets a terrible fate: fallen, drunk, from his horse, 'leapt upon' by Arthurs knights who trample 'out his face from being known' and sink 'his head in mire' before they wipe out his followers (male and female alike) and fire their tower home (271-272), he is the last and nowconquered obstacle to Arthur's safe ways. ..from shore to shore' but his end leaves the King with a heart where 'pain was lord' (272). Had Mancoff used this episode—one ofthe most intriguing in the poem—she could have explored the paradoxical and tragic implication of 'woman worship' in the work as a whole (see my 'WhatTennyson Really Did to Malory's Women,' Quondam etFuturus:AJournal ofArthurian Interpretations 1 (Spring 1991): 44-55). Other careless details abound: inTennyson's 'Merlin andVivien,' the ensorcelment of Merlin ends not 'beneath a rock' (94) but 'in the hollow oak' where 'he lay as dead'(IdylL· 17). Over-generalizations emerge even in the discussion of Victorian culture: 'Victorian children' do not entirely 'appear in art and literature as angelic beings' (101), and Mancoffwould have been wise to consult the photographic record Victorian ChiUren, where preteen pregnant child prostitutes and homeless street urchins appear alongside the more respectably middle-class subjects. As beautiful 158ARTHURIANA and lavish as its illustrations are, the text of The Return ofKing Arthur is deeply flawed and this book must be approached with the strongest ofcaveats. MAUREEN FRIES State University ofNew York College at Fredonia debra N mancoff, The Return ofKing Arthur: The Legend through Victorian Eyes. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1995. Pp. 176. color illus. isbn: 0-8109-3782-4. $35. This attractively-produced bookapplies the term 'Victorian' ratherloosely, since many of its examples post-date Victoria's reign. It also seems to equate Tennyson's vision with that of the age. Such a popular volume may fairly shun controversy, but less bland homage to Malory's, Tennyson's and Pre-Raphaelite models might have been admitted. Even Beardsley, in this reading, is turned to favour and to prettiness. The reader is offered a brief introduction, plus six chapters on the subject ofthe growth ofthe Arthurian legend in the Middle Ages, the nineteenth-century revival, Tennyson's re-casting of the legend, Arthurian women (especially Elaine, Enide, Guenevere and Vivien), Tennyson's Galahad and 'the construction of Victorian Childhood' (102) (a topic pursued into the twentieth-century), and fin de Steele responses to Arthur. The book resembles a popularisation of parts of Girouard's influential Return to CameUt, with more Tennyson and more gender studies and a stylistic blunder like 'wide-eyed ingenuity' (32). The survey seems to aim at non-specialists with no French and less Latin (even 'nobUsse obligéis translated (38), though Chevalierde U Charrete is not (66)), and the blurb emphasizes reactions 'today' Professor Mancoffacknowledges some academic mentors but, unfortunately, none seems to have been a medievalist, for the summaries ofChretien's and Malory's narratives are full ofinaccuracies, distortions and romantic embroideries: Geraint is not a Malory character (19), nor Gawain a Cornishman, nor Meleagant a king (66). Guenevere flees from Mordred to the Tower of London, not a nunnery (19); and Malory does not speculate about either's interior life. Even Malory's greatest admirer might hesitate to characterize his magnificently mysterious Morte Darthur as 'a clearly-crafted narrative' (20), and the Vulgate title is Mort Artu (78). (Ci. Thomas Gray who appears as 'Grey' (22).) Professor Mancoff's persistent habit ofcallingArthur 'the Once and Future King' and her allusion to the 'mists of Avalon' anachronistically evoke (one assumes intentionally) twentieth-century novels about the legend. Nothing is said about the extent ofTennysons or the artists' firsthand knowledge ofthings medieval or ofthe power this conferred on those mediators of Arthurianism. Such flaws vitiate the author's thesis about 'Victorian transformation' (9). More successful is the account of Victoria's and Albert's promotions of this 'transformation' during the 1840s, as well as of nineteenth-century prescriptive literature for women which imaged middle class home life as a transaction between a knight-errant and a Lady-wife (83). The point about the influence on children of 'medieval' domestic furnishings is a good one (106); and the quotation from N. H. Mallock's 1972 spoof ofTennyson is a delightful item (135). ...