SUMMERS, KAREN CRADY, Ph.D. Reading Incest - The University ...

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Roses followed soon after. Generations of Englishmen were embroiled in war and strife.
Malory’s book glorifies chivalry during a period of time in which values such as honor,
virtue, and mercy were often ignored, yet its popularity suggests that many Englishmen
enjoyed such tales, perhaps nostalgically longing for a return to order. 20
Cooper notes
that the fall of Camelot comes about because of the splitting of the kingdom into
viciously hostile magnate affinities in a manner analogous to [Malory’s] own age of the
Wars of the Roses” (826), a splitting which may be traced to the incestuous conception of
Mordred.
Malory’s decision to make Mordred Arthur’s son has implications for the
trajectory of the tales. Cooper finds that Malory’s sources do not agree on Mordred’s
relation to Arthur; in the Alliterative Morte Arthure and the accounts of Geoffrey of
Monmouth Mordred is his nephew, son of Anna (Malory changes her name to Morgause)
and King Lot. The Brut and Suite du Merlin likewise identify Mordred as Arthur’s
nephew. It is in the French Vulgate cycle that Anna is identified as Mordred’s mother
(Cooper 826). Malory’s decision to “override,” in Cooper’s terms, the larger historical
tradition that names Mordred as his nephew means that he shapes the story to emphasize
the incest. Cooper terms Malory’s book a “counter-romance,” the antithesis of romance’s
happy ending, as Gower demonstrated repeatedly. Cooper says that
the prose romances differ from the stanzaic ones not just in medium but in
structure and content, to the point where they demand a rethinking of our concept
of the genre . . . the choice of prose over verse for stories of disaster, even when
they also recount chivalric and amatory material, and the selection of such
20 Caxton’s first edition was published in 1485 and reprinted five times, followed by at least 4 other
editions by other publishers up until 1634. See Archibald and Edwards, A Companion to Malory, xiii, 241.