Warm Pants and Wild Places: Domestic Anxieties in Malory’s Morte Darthur and T. H. White’s The Once and Future King

Abstract

The creative vision of a man tormented by his own familial troubles, T. H. White’s Once and Future King (1938–58) is a text that simultaneously longs for, and is compelled to escape, the security of domesticity. Reflecting contemporaneous developments in child psychology, and drawing on its author’s own unhappy childhood and experience of psychoanalysis, White’s tetralogy uses the Arthurian child to explore the complex pressures exerted by domesticity upon the developing human psyche. White’s medieval source, Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur, depicts the centripetal activities of questing knights as they continually return to the safety of the court following trials in the forest or battlefield, but posits the domestic spaces of Camelot as equally perilous, associated with the ultimate collapse of the Arthurian kingdom. White’s adaptation harnesses this tension to consider a paradox at the heart of childhood development: the need for dependent self-sufficiency. Focusing on the representation of domestic space and the mother figure in White’s work, Elly McCausland argues that The Once and Future King sees the absent children of the medieval Morte Darthur transposed into a modern, introspective literary culture deeply aware of the connections between youth, memory and trauma. The chapter demonstrates how, perceiving Malory’s text as haunted by the spectres of damaged children, White exploits its narrative gaps to explore the multiple invisible childhoods behind the Camelot value system and to consider these blank spaces through the lens of his own fraught upbringing and troubled relationship with domesticity and the maternal, a relationship characterized by longing and revulsion in equal measure.