IV - Sibling Relations in Malory's Morte Darthur

Summary

Introduction

Until the current decade, the most significant family relationship, both in analysis of medieval western culture and in psychoanalytic studies, was that of child and parent: between father and son in the textual productions of the medieval aristocracy, confirming class status and constituting a major component of identity in medieval literature; between mother and child in Freudian and post-Freudian psychoanalysis as it teased out the ramifications of Freud's Œdipal complex. Since the turn of the millennium, however, psychoanalytical attention has turned to sibling relationships, a field which psychologists were already investigating. With the work of Juliet Miller in the psychoanalytic field, Terri Apter (at a popular level) and Judy Dunn and Victor Cicirelli in developmental and social psychology, new insights into sibling relationships in adult life have been achieved, broadly agreeing with folk-psychological understandings of sibling behaviour, as negotiating ‘feeling[s] of envy, primitive and horrible’, as well as evidencing profound loyalty and love. In this essay I examine some sibling interactions in Malory's Morte Darthur, using a broadly psychoanalytical perspective to investigate how sibling relationships are assimilated to the other kinds of affective ties within the fifteenth-century romance world of Malory's text and the earlier versions of sibling bonds which Malory found in his sources.

Catherine La Farge has recently taken dramatic note of blood-relations between siblings in Malory: ‘Brotherly embraces hover on the brink of murder. Love between brother and sister is crucially represented by fatal incest.’