III

As an allegory of social pressure, the Weeping Castle invites many readings. Its polysemous quality makes it typical of romances whose allegories are not continuous, but concentrated in certain symbolic centers, usually a castle or a garden. For example, the first section of the episode, which concludes the story of the love philtre, points to a reading of the Weeping Castle as an allegory of impending adultery, where the love of Tristram and Isode stands in opposition to the social necessity of a political marriage. The story is also effective as a lesson in the oppression of women, a lesson Malory himself may not have recognized. Women are not only pawns in a male world of violence but judged by their beauty, effectively silenced, and turned into rivals of each other.^[38] A New Historicist might further read this episode as the story of colonial conquest, where Tristram washes ashore and then insinuates himself into the existing system of power as a first step in altering it to his own advantage.

Such readings survive Malory's translation of his French original, although each is subversive of Malory's supposed intention to establish Tristram as a chivalric ideal, the model of conduct and bringer of justice. As a socially symbolic action, Tristram's confrontation with the foul cus-

tom-of-the-castle entrapment turns the episode into more than the story of impending adultery or a battle against tyranny or an image of righteous conquest. Malory leaves out much of his source. He practically extinguishes the Weeping Caste as an allegory of love: Tristram is more interested in finding Lancelot than idling with Isode. Malory also blurs the confrontation between Tristram and an alien culture. In the French text, Brunor's wife is a giant—the usual romance image for the Other—and part of the local population lives by piracy.^[39] And Malory eliminates the origin of the caste custom, when Dialetes establishes a set of values (knightly prowess, female beauty) that convinces his people to reject outsiders.

It is hard to argue from omission and equally difficult to relate Malory's work to a specific historical context, despite two or three candidates scholars have offered as the real Thomas Malory.^[40] We know little more about him other than that he was probably a member of the knight class in England who owned property and may have participated in the regional feuds among great lords that did more damage than the Wars of the Roses during the 1460s in England. We do not know much about Malory's thoughts on marriage or foreign trade. Nor does Malory's often ambiguous prose style give us much confidence in any precise reading or the meaning of any particular scene. These caveats notwithstanding, it seems fair to say that Malory's version of the Weeping Caste reflects a fifteenth-century consciousness of the moral, historical, and ritual power of social customs.

The contrast between an old and good, seemingly natural law and actual legal practice seems clear enough in the story at large. The Round Table represents an ideal that cannot survive the worldly limits the Grail quest exposes, or the conflicts, such as Lancelot's adultery, that chivalry should circumscribe. Mordred's treason and Gawain's hotheadedness bring Arthur from the height of the wheel of fortune to the dark pit of which he dreams before he is defeated in battle. He is finally ferried away by ladies who could heal him but arrive too late to save his life because Sir Bedevere fails to signal them by hurling Arthur's sword into a

lake. Bedevere twice lies to the dying king, claiming to have seen nothing but "waters wap and waves wan" (MD 21.5). Such moral ritual in Arthurian romance constantly reminds us that chivalry is a spiritual condition.

Moreover, what we know about Malory and his first printer, William Caxton, supports the overall conclusion of the scene: that keepers of customs should mind the ideals of Arthurian chivalry. For Malory promotes Tristram as one who named those practices by which good men may distinguish social classes. Tristram represents an ideal which those who pretend to be gentlemen should strive to imitate:

Wherefore, as meseemeth, all gentlemen that bear old arms ought of right to honor Sir Tristram for the goodly terms that gentlemen have and use and shall do unto the Day of Doom, that thereby in a manner all men of worship may discover a gentleman from a yeoman and a yeoman from a villain. For he that gentle is will draw him to gentle deeds and follow the noble customs of gentlemen. (MD 8.3)

In a similar way, William Caxton—who first printed Malory's text—viewed the immediate present as an age of decline, while the past was a time when men worked for the common good. For Caxton "the golden age is almost any other place and time than late fifteenth-century England."^[41] He insisted his books were not for ordinary people but for nobles and the educated. Caxton claimed he printed romances because they assisted moral instruction. As a printer working in Westminster Abbey to supply aristocratic patrons, Caxton doubtless regarded King Arthur as symbolic of a social order that he also promoted with texts like the Book of Good Manners , the Feats of Arms , and the Knight of the Tower .

The hierarchical values set forth in the Morte Darthur promote the ideology of the ruling class for which Caxton published and Malory most probably wrote. Yet the Morte Darthur does not therefore remain the prisoner of a single social class. Caxton never defined his noble readers, and "probably such remarks were meant to indicate that his works

were fashionable rather than provincial."^[42] As Northrop Frye reminds us, "An upper-class audience is inclined to favor romance and fantasy in its entertainment, because the idealizing element in such romance confirms its own image of itself." At the same time, "whatever an upper-class audience likes is probably going to be what a middle-class audience will like too."^[43]

The Morte Darthur retains its appeal because it conjures a distant past of moral excellence, a sense of natural law that persuaded medieval audiences to venerate a former time. Both Malory and Caxton associated what they considered to be good values, such as courtesy and gentleness, with the "custom and usage" of medieval chivalry.^[44] For Malory and Caxton, the word "custom" was part of the discourse of chivalry that belonged to an earlier era, already outmoded as they worked. To his translation of Ramon Lull's Book of the Ordre of Chyvalry , for which the prose Lancelot was an important source, Caxton adds an appeal for a revival of what chivalry represents:

O ye knights of England! Where is the custom and usage of noble chivalry that was used in those days? What do ye now but frequent baths and play at dice? And some not well advised use not honest and good rule: against all order of knighthood. Leave this. Leave it and read the noble volumes of St. Grail, of Lancelot, of Galahad, of Tristram, of Perseforest, of Percival, of Gawain, and many more.^[45]

Malory also appeals to the past as a source of values. When he expresses his disappointment in fickle Englishmen, he does so by conjuring the image of a world usurped by foul customs: just what the Weeping Castle represents. His strong rhetoric gives the illusion of historical immediacy to this passage, where Arthur's knights desert him. It is one of Malory's longest personal asides:

Lo ye all Englishmen. See ye not what a mischief here was? For he that was the most king and noblest knight of the world, and most loved the fellowship of noble knights, and by him they all were up-holden, and yet might not these Englishmen hold them content with

him. Lo thus was the old custom and usages of this land, and men say that we of this land have not yet lost that custom. Alas! this is a great default of us Englishmen, for there may no thing us please no term. (MD 21.1)

As E. K. Chambers notes, this lament is not a political analysis of the fifteenth-century "breakdown of law and order . . . of the corruption of officials, of the excessive taxation, of the ruin of the countrysides by the enclosure of agricultural land for pasture."^[46] Nor can we find in it such details as would have contributed to Erich Auerbach's notion that over the centuries literature grew in its capacity to represent reality. By glossing over motivations, Malory's elliptical style establishes the romantic mood readers of English associate with tales of the Round Table. Malory completely eliminates the prose Tristan 's story of how Dialetes founded a custom to punish Christians who arrived at his island. He gives little hint of what the French text makes clear, that Breunor himself is forced to maintain a practice he finds repulsive. Yet Malory retains the sense of entrapment so brilliantly narrated by the romance he turned into English.

Justice may require a rendering of what is due, but what is due depends on the acceptance of standards. When a group or a society accepts a questionable standard of justice—such as the foul custom maintained at the Weeping Castle—a gap opens up, creating a felt need for change. If the solution is merely a matter of passing a new and better law, there is no problem. But in a system of customary law, where custom is itself the standard of justice, even a bad custom may be justified. Change requires more than the sudden intervention of force; a society must accept a new vision of itself, which means redefining its customs and accepting, to a certain extent, a new morality. The custom of the Weeping Castle offers an abstract image of legitimacy and superiority to which Tristram objects and conforms with reluctance, but which he nonetheless honors, until a better, more chivalrous custom establishes its own legitimacy.