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

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killed save Mordred, who was found and fostered by a good man until he reached the age
of fourteen. The May-day story is troubling for a number of reasons. It is sometimes
difficult to reconcile the actions of the Arthur celebrated in English history as a just and
virtuous king with a man who would murder children. Though this is archetypal in
nature, aspects of the story do not fit into traditional plots; J.D. Bruce notes that the first
of May is a birthday of great auspice and one that is often assigned to a hero figure (233),
though Mordred is clearly an anti-hero. The story of the infant cast to sea at birth often
foretells his heroic nature, as is the case with Oedipus, Romulus and Remus, and
Gregory. Of course, Mordred is much more like Judas, the anti-hero cast upon the sea
but saved to fulfill his own destiny. 22
Otto Rank’s study of The Incest Theme in
Literature and Legend accounts the motif of the child exposed to sea as symbolic of birth,
with the parent pulling the child from the womb of the ship floating in the water. But
every time a boy is born the father, subconsciously aware of his son’s infantile yet still
incestuous sexual desire toward his mother, sees him as a potential threat (214-7), and the
cycle repeats. Arthur’s lords and barons were “displeased” over the loss of their children,
but they “putte the wyght on Merlion more than on Arthure. So what for drede and for
love, they helde their pece” (37). Fear of Arthur’s wrath clearly outweighs love—his for
the children of his land, and the parents for their children, and by the end of the book
Arthur’s kingdom has failed. But as Cherewatuk notes, although Arthur is capable of
vengeance,
22 According to Jacobus de Voraigne’s Golden Legend, Judas’s mother dreamed that she would bear a
child that would be the ruin of all their people, so she placed him in a basket and set it adrift. He was
rescued by the Queen of Scarioth, who presented him as her own and raised him. Later, after unknowing
incest with his own mother, Judas meets Jesus and does fulfill this prophecy.