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

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he elsewhere displays the characteristics of a good king; he places the common
good before his private desires; he upholds the law and acts as an impartial judge,
even toward his wife; he loves his knights and regrets having to choose among
them (236).
Gower’s readers would have recognized the wrath and the incest as symptoms of the
unrestrained passion, poor self-governance, and unkynde love that crippled so many of
the kings in Confessio Amantis.
Arthur’s intention in slaughtering the children was to make sure that he destroyed
his own son. As the riddle of Apollonius of Tyre indicates, incest is a sort of cannibalistic
self-consumption, as the incestuous parent consumes or otherwise uses his child to
strengthen his own body. The paramount duty of a king is to produce a legitimate heir; it
is even more true for a queen. In this both Arthur and his queen fail, she from barrenness
and he because his heir apparent is the result of incest. Arthur is able to father children—
one out of wedlock and one the product of incest—but unable to produce a legitimate heir
for his kingdom. It seems likely that Guenevere’s barrenness is a function of the
narrative, providing an emphasis on the patrilineage that was so important to medieval
European societies. Because it has been proven that Arthur can father children, the
burden of failure falls to Guenevere, who not only has relations with her husband but
with Lancelot too and gets pregnant by neither. Barrenness is sometimes seen as a
(fortunate) result of incest; other times, incest is feared to produce deformed children, or
monsters, as in the case of the Questing Beast. If the idea of Guenevere bearing
Lancelot’s bastard child, making Arthur a cuckold, is so untenable that she must remain
barren, she nevertheless does manage to provide Arthur with a Round Table full of