ARTHURIAN ACADEMIC
Muriel Whitaker remembered
Living in the fairly isolated area of Lac Le Jeune, B.C., in the 1950s, Muriel Whitaker wanted to provide her children with the best education possible, without sending them away to a distant school.
Whitaker’s husband, along with his brothers, constructed a oneroom log schoolhouse where the mother of five gathered enough children from the surrounding area to legally open a school and teach her children through the eighth grade.
“She was very organized, and she taught everything,” said Whitaker’s daughter Mary Ellen Binder, a retired teacher herself. “She taught gym class, usually things like skiing and hiking and that sort of thing, because we didn’t have a regular gym.”
Education was of the highest importance to the eminent scholar of medieval and Arthurian literature, who was considered an expert in her field and enjoyed an illustrious career as a writer and professor at the University of Alberta.
Whitaker died on Aug. 5 at the age of 93.
Her greatest scholarly work, a book called The Legends of King Arthur in Art, was published in 1990 after 20 years of research. It is celebrated as a major contribution to the field of Arthurian literature.
“It’s a very perceptive book,” said Stephen Reimer, a professor of English at the University of Alberta since 1987. “It considers works of art that reflect the Arthurian legends from medieval to modern times, and always with a very strong connection that she makes to literary texts.”
Whitaker was born in Kamloops, B.C., on June 14, 1923. She was named after her mother, a teacher and member of the first class to graduate from the University of British Columbia in 1916.
Whitaker’s grandfather was one of the first pioneers to settle in the area. He eventually purchased and retired to a ranch and fishing resort in Lac Le Jeune, south of Kamloops, which would remain in the family until the 1960s.
The eldest of six children, Whitaker quickly became one of the top students in the province. In 1941, she was awarded the Governor General’s Academic Medal for having top marks in high school.
“Education was always very important in the family,” Binder said. “She was very driven when it came to academic achievement, and very competitive. When she graduated from UBC with a BA (English), she was second in the province, which bothered her because she thought she should have been first.”
Whitaker took her competitive edge to the University of Toronto, where she gained a master’s degree in English.
She began her first job as a high school teacher in Armstrong, B.C. She was dismayed to learn that her job would include teaching physical education to soldiers returning from the Second World War.
In 1947, she met and married John Whitaker, a farmer. The couple welcomed their first child in 1948 and moved to Lac Le Jeune to operate the family resort for the next 20 years.
When her marriage began to fall apart, Whitaker moved to Vancouver, where she began pursuing her PhD in medieval English literature at UBC in 1966.
“It was really unusual at that time for women to accomplish this type of degree, because it was very difficult,” Binder said. “She was an expert in medieval literature, especially King Arthur. The legends and art of King Arthur were her passion.”
Whitaker became a professor for the Department of English at the University of Alberta in 1969.
“She was considered an international expert in her field,” Binder said. “She travelled every summer to Europe, for about 30 years, to do research, give papers and attend conferences.”
Despite her busy schedule, Whitaker always made sure to visit the old family resort in Lac La Jeune. It was her favourite place in the world.
“She liked to say that she hadn’t missed a summer there since she was two months old,” Binder said. “She went every single summer. It was kind of a tie to her childhood and all the years that we were growing up.”
Whitaker officially retired from the University of Alberta in 1990 but continued to write articles and make new discoveries in her field. She was a staunch supporter of higher education and had an insatiable desire for teaching.
“Professor Whitaker was a very kind person, and a very excellent teacher,” said former student Brad Bucknell. “She was also a worldclass scholar.
“I recall that she had her firstterm class over to her house for a medieval Christmas dinner,” he said. “She had a variety of dishes, all cooked by herself and her daughter ... And she explained the ingredients (and) the seasonings, according to what was available at the time.”