4 - Paternity and Monstrosity in the Alliterative Morte Arthure and Sir Gowther

Summary

Mandeville's Travels features the bodies of four kinds of monstrous women whose transformative bodies have the potential to seem, rather than be, human. In Mandeville, transformation permits monstrous women to transgress the boundaries between monstrous territories and human communities, demonstrating medieval anxieties about miscegenation and the potential for monstroushuman procreation. However, male monsters also embody these fears about miscegenation and procreation – and many of them appear in texts set far closer to home than the monstrous transformative women who populate the distant and mysterious East. Indeed, the forests of medieval Europe, as represented in medieval romances, teem with enormous men – giants who rape, murder, consume, and attempt to penetrate the communities that surround their lonely haunts in mountains or forests. Killing and dismembering are popular means of disabling the threat of the giant, as happens in the Alliterative Morte Arthure. Alternatively, the author of the romance Sir Gowther employs the thematically necessary trope of transformation to dispatch his eponymous giant in a way that seems, superficially, more reassuring. These two Middle English texts seek to rid human communities of their monsters in safe and final ways. The male monsters in both the Alliterative Morte and Sir Gowther are dispatched – one through death and one through transformation – and yet, these monsters of excess appetite and sexuality continue to haunt the communities they once terrorized after they are removed from the narratives. While the violent emasculating death of the Giant of Mont St Michel in the Alliterative Morte forces readers to recognize all-too-human acts of terror and the resulting disruption of lines of inheritance, the preservation of Gowther's material body after his spiritual and physical transformation leaves more than just a specter of the monster in the middle of the text. In Gowther, the monster's physical body, now transformed to a human one, acts as a trace of its former self.

Where Mandeville's transformative female monsters pass as human and infiltrate human communities, the sexualized male monsters in the Alliterative Morte and Sir Gowther disrupt the hierarchy of paternal inheritance. Both male monsters, creatures of excess, threaten communities through their hypermasculine and sexual bodies.