Stop presses!

A Momentous First has just occurred. Highlyeccentric just drafted a paragraph- the very first paragraph in the essay, discounting the introduction- defining her theoretical approach to literature. Apparently, I use a ‘dialogic’ theoretical basis, as defined by Laurie A. Finke in her chapter on Sexuality in Old French Literature, in the aforementioned Bullough & Brundage ‘Handbook of Medieval Sexuality’.

It’s just as well I started reading B&B, really- I picked up my feedback forms from the honours conference today, and although I thought I’d gone through reasonably clearly for the benefit of everyone the way I saw literature (or at least SGGK) relating to social context, most of them came back with ‘please define your theoretical approach’. So now I have a definition, and I will wave it around. I like this definition, because it will also allow me to argue the validity of the study of literature before historians, should I meet any historians in a fightin’ mood. Also, thanks to Finke, I have names and publication titles which I can use (later) to read MORE about this theory, and generally advance in the world of literary awesomeness.

Everybody witness this amazing first:

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a product of the chivalric ideals of the fourteenth century English nobility. It is not a pure reflection of the practices of that class, by any means, but rather a stylised expression of the ideals by which they identified themselves. The poet guides his audience to identify with Gawain, rarely presenting a scene outside of his point of view. For a fourteenth century audience, the poet’s artistry in this respect would only serve to emphasise a personal identification with Gawain based on his status as representative of Arthur’s court, the embodied figure of the golden age of English chivalry to which fourteenth century chivalry aspired to emulate. The literary depiction of the chivalric ideal is not a static one, however, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in its construction of this ideal can be seen respond to the anxieties facing the knightly class in the fourteenth century. The literary construction of chivalry is, if you like, in dialogue with the actual situation of chivalry in society. This set of assumptions about the relationship between literature and history is defined by Laurie A. Finke, in his overview of theoretical approaches to the study of sexuality in Old French literature, as a ‘dialogic’ approach, emphasising the dynamic, two-way interaction between a literary formulation of an ideal, and the historical realities affecting that ideal.

Please note that it’s very draft-y, and you’re bereft of the rest of the essay it goes with (although so am I, not having written it). If it strikes you, however, that this makes no sense as an introduction to the basic assumptions underlying the essay I’m about to write, please do tell me.
In case you think I need to actually explain the anxieties of the fourteenth century chivalric classes if I’m going to argue anything based on them, yes, I know, and the next paragraph will be a SRS version of this post, plus some more stuff I’ve picked up along the way.

And now, to bed, to mourn the demise of my happy theory-free existence.

Roland and Gawain- further expoundings

I foolishly drank red wine at Formal Dinner, and got all teary over a UNICEF presentation, and now I don’t feel like doing any work. So what I’m going to do is, I’m going to trick myself into writing my commentary for my Gawain class tomorrow by putting it online. Sound fair?

First up, if you’re wondering what’s going on, read this morning’s post about the parrallels between the Charlemange/Roland and Arthur/Gawain relationships. (note- thanks for the tip-off about Ralph the Collier, Jeff. I’m going to see if Middle English Reading Group will help me out with it.)

This morning, I looked at the structural relationships between Roland and Gawain in the courts to which they respectively belong. (Now, I must note that it’s over a year since I read Roland, in translation, and my copy thereof is now in the hands of the Goblin. So I’m really pulling things out of my backside here.) There are two further aspects of the two heroes which I feel worth investigating: one, their personal natures, and two, their wider settings.

The Character of the Hero

No one ever accused Roland of being the sharpest sword in the armoury, did they? If I had my copy (I think it’s the Penguin?) here, I would quote to you from the introduction, but as is, you’ll have to trust me when I say that the editor, whose name I’ve forgotten, talks about just this fact. Roland isn’t the quickest of wit, or the wisest. Not much of a tactician, nor, one suspects, was he really one for courtly poncing around. Rather, he is young, and beautiful, and brave, and that is all that is required of him. See enemy, hoist banner, charge. Instant hero.

The editor of my Roland (damn, I wish I could remember her name…) had some very eloquent phrases to the effect that ‘The phrase ‘Middle Ages’ are a misnomer… these are the young ages’- young, good-looking, brash and overconfident. We’re talking about eleventh century Francophonia¹ here, the height of the Feudal era, but before the chivalric code and courtly literature had really taken off. Roland and his cohort are defined as knights by two things: their relationship with one another, and their courage. Intelligence and refinement are not held at a high premium.

Now, turning to Gawain. He’s a knight cut from the same mould as Roland. He is young, and beautiful. He is known for his valiant courage, and demonstrates this against tangible enemies in the wilderness of the Wirral. He loves his uncle the king steadfastly. Intelligence is not his strong point. (I have a complicated anaylsis of this, but a) i’m not that generous with the internet, and b), it’s really kind of boring to sit through.) Suffice it to say, Gawain is perfectly equipped to deal with the dangers right in front of him, but he is completely flummoxed by the otherworldly machinations of The Green Knight, Morgan and the Lady. He just plain doesn’t know what’s going on, or how to deal with it, and in the face of these mind-games he is lead into a spiral of deceit, cowardice and sin.

Which brings us to…

The Hero’s world

It doesn’t matter that Roland isn’t the pointiest pike in the rack. His world- or his poet, if you like- doesn’t ask it of him. It asks only beauty and courage and loyalty, and these he has aplenty. Gawain, likewise not the bendiest bow in the rank, would be quite at home in Roland’s world.

* Roland’s life is defined by deep homosocial relationships.² Roland is off with his troops, under the command of his uncle, supported by his foster-brother Olivier. Gawain, meanwhile, is off on his journey alone, into a world where the homosocial is undermined by the homosexual. Does Gawain even know what he would have to give to the Lord if he had his way with the Lady?

Gawain’s masculinity is at stake. Before I go on talking about hetero/homosexual, it’s worth making the disclaimer that I know these categories don’t cookie-cutter fit the Middle Ages. I prefer a disctinction which David L Boyd makes and then passes over, which is that (high) medieval (western european) sexuality is a binary not of hetero/homosexual but top/bottom, the former being appropriate to a man and the latter to a woman. M/M sex is dangerous because it feminises one or both of the participants. Boyd argues that Gawain would be feminised, in that he would have to offer what the Lady gave him, a ‘receptacle’. He doesn’t go that far, happily (for him, if not for future slash fans), but there’s a whole lot of complicated scholarship (see Boyd and Shiela Fisher, for starters), explaining how the girdle is feminising and the axe-wound is a vaginal symbol and so on. Point is, the whole setup runs Gawain in circles, and is a far cry from the straightforward manly bonding of Roland.

As someone known as Nathaniel (sorry, I don’t remember where you blog…) pointed out to me the other day, fourteenth century England had good reason to be concerned about the erosion of boundaries between the homosocial bonds of the feudal order and potential homosexual bonds, in the form of Edward II and his ‘favourites’. Gawain, and the straightforward heroic order he represents, are threatened.

* Roland’s world is utterly devoid of female sexuality. It’s not devoid of women: Bramimunde, in the Saracen court, is an active character. But on Roland’s side, there is only the distant Aude, a token passed between Olivier and Roland to cement their brotherly affection. This looks like a perfect example of Boyd’s heterosex-as-vehicle-for-homosexual-desire trope, but I don’t buy it, in this case. Marrying sisters is a good way to tie two men and their families together in a political as well as affectionate alliance. (And if you like your sister, you’d probably rather her married to someone you know and trust…) IMHO, it’s significant that Roland never makes it home to Aude and the marriage (and the sex) never takes place.

At Hautdesert, however, heterosex does imply some kind of homosexual exchange, as I noted above. Gawain can’t be quite certain of that, though. What he can be certain of is that he’s faced with transgressive and aggressive female sexuality. I’m digging in my heels and maintaining that the Lady is dominant, at least in the first temptation scene. At the very least, the boundary between masculine/top and feminine/bottom is blurred.

Furthermore, the machinations of female sexuality are behind all this confusion. As Boyd points out, the blame for transgressive homosexual desires is shifted onto women; his women-as-objects-between-men thesis can be inverted, and the men become ‘taken men’ in women’s power, as Shiela Fisher argues. Sadly neither of them consider the sexual implications of this- what does it mean for the Lady to instigate a homosexual exchange? If Gawain knows he may have to ‘pay back’ Bertilak, does he think Bertilak has orchestrated it, or the Lady? And then, at the end of the poem, we find out that Morgan is behind the whole operation. As a result of his ‘trafficking’ with women, as Sheila Fisher puts it, Gawain dons the girdle and loses his heroic standing. Women, to put it bluntly, are dangerous and they’re undermining the masculine warrior code by which Roland lived and Gawain ought to live.

* Roland’s enemies are this-worldly and they stay that way. He’s facing a whole pile of Saracens, all he has to do is charge them down and die heroically. His conflict is that between sensible tactics and his stubborn pride- pride wins, and he gets to be a hero. Bonus points.

Gawain’s enemies, on the other hand, can’t make up their mind if they’re otherwordly or thisworldly. First off, he has the otherworldly Green Knight, who is scary as hell. Next, he has the Lady, who ought to be thisworldly but is behaving very transgressively. Then there’s the fact that his host, apparently thisworldly, is also the otherworldly Green Knight. And finally we find out that the whole apparently thisworldly castle of Hautdesert is ruled by Morgan ‘the goddess’, and she orchestrated the entire sequence of events. Poor ole Gawain just can’t keep up. He doesn’t have the information he needs to understand what’s going on around him, but what’s more he just doesn’t seem to try. He just bumbles along trying to keep his head on and his masculinity invoilate from moment to moment.

* Finally, and this is a point I haven’t investigated properly in relation to either poem, there’s the question of economic anxiety. I have a book waiting to be read called ‘The Poem as Green Girdle’, which is all about commercial imagery in SGGK. For now, suffice it to say that in Roland, everything is shiny and beautiful, while in Gawain, everything is shiny and beautiful and has a definite price, even Gawain himself. Roland associates display with nobility and worth; Gawain associates display with wealth and commercial value. Roland’s worth as a hero is displayed in his rich ornamentation; Gawain’s worth as a hero is measured and curtailed by pricing. I need to poke into this a bit more, and have another look at Roland (in the French… blerg…), but I venture the suggestion that the later poem is evidencing an anxiety about the burgeoning market economy, the nature of wealth and the possibility of it amassing in non-noble hands, a concern which simply isn’t relevant in Roland.

What I’m trying to say here…

is that Gawain is an old-skool knight, a big, pretty, kinda dumb warrior of the Roland type, completely at sea in the confusing and threatening world of the fourteenth century. A good three centuries separate the two poems, and in that time a whole courtly culture has had time to develop, on the foundations of the feudal society in which Roland is located, and is now threatened by all kinds of things. The poet emphasises this disparity between the heroic past and the unstable present through the character of Gawain- not through a great courtly knight like Lancelot, or even the later French incarnation of Gawain, but through a Gawain who bears more resemblance to Roland, and who simply cannot cope with the confusion of his new situation. Perhaps this is why the poem shows such leniency toward Gawain’s cowardice in saving his own life- a hero used to facing down his enemies in combat shouldn’t be expected to unravel the twistings of monsters and Morgan.

~

1. As Keith Busby pointed out to the CMS the other night, a good deal of medieval ‘french’ literature is preserved in English manuscripts. Nobody mention this to the French department, ok?
2. If you try to tell me Roland and Olivier were having slashy gay buttsex, I will cry.

Gawain and Roland: Matching Pair

Let me test this theory out on you, O Blogosphere.

France’s great hero-king, Charlemagne, had a nephew. Roland. Or at least, so the cycle of hero-myths tells us. The pair of them are commemorated in the Chanson de Roland (11thc), where Charlemagne embodies France, and French Kingship. Roland, meanwhile, embodies France and French knighthood. Everybody with me so far?

England’s great hero-king, Arthur (sorry, no humourous videos), had a nephew. Gawain. Or at least, so the cycle of hero-myths tells us. The pair of them turn up all over the place in medieval English literature. Before someone imports Lancelot from the Continent, Gawain is the premier knight of Arthur’s court- take, for example, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (14thc). Arthur embodies England and English kingship. Meanwhile, Gawain embodies England and English knighthood. We have a parrallel, yes?

Back when I wanted to be an Arthurianist, and read all kinds of crappy Arthurian pop-history, quite a few books I read talked about the creation of the Arthur myth as a response to the French foundation legends centred around Charlemagne. Now, being old and wise, I’m willing to bet that there’s more to it than that. However, I do note that, in all my (fairly haphazard) research into the Gawain tales, lots and lots of people make comparisions between the ‘English’ Gawain and the ‘French’ Gawain- and squabble over which the Gawain of SGGK better embodies- but no one seems to step outside the Arthurian canon, which is odd. I’m not so sure that the fourteenth century would’ve drawn such a big distinction.

I have more Gawain-Roland relationships I can draw out, but I have to go and get ready for work now. So I’ll leave you to sit on this one- tell me what you think!

Conference Paper proposals- advice, anyone?

Firstly, I just sent in my itty-bitty topic statement for the English Department Honours Conference next month, to whit:

Perception and Power in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
An analysis of power relationships through verbs of perception and cognition, which highlights Gawain’s failure as a hero, and complements existing theoretical interpretations.

Doesn’t that just sound fantastic?

Secondly, sometime soon I need to submit a paper proposal if I want to present at the Australian Early Medieval Association Conference in October, but I’ve never even *seen* a paper proposal before. Anyone got really useful tips on putting them together?

Three Ways To Improve Your Middle English Experience

1. Cider. There is a sweet spot, a perfect level of tipsiness, which is just right for consuming Middle English literature. I’m currently slightly over it, which is why the blog-posting instead of the studying.

2. The Chaucer Studio. There is no way to overstate the benefits of aural comprehension for picking up middle English. Words that look funny sound familiar. Some benefits can be gained by reading aloud to yourself, as I did with the Book of the Duchess last year. Vast benefits can be garnered if you have a resource like USyd’s Middle English Reading Group to hand.¹ The Chaucer Studio (a co-operative effort between the University of Adelaide and Brigham Young) takes that one step further, with dramatic readings of assorted medieval texts. Lolo, who Knows People at Adelaide, ordered us all copies of their recording of SGGK, and I have to say, it’s the best twenty dollars I’ve spent this year. It turns what was hours of glossary-flipping into an hour’s read-a-long-book session (sadly, without the BING, PLEASE TURN THE PAGE messages of childhood). And I swear I understand more of it at the end: the aural experience reinforces verbal echoes and parallels. It’s much easier to notice, say, the repeated exclamation ‘Thou art not Gawain!’ if you have an aural memory of it the first time around.

If you’re a hardened Middle English Scholar, the recordings mightn’t do much for your comprehension (although you might enjoy them anyway). But next time you’re teaching an intro or intermediate Middle English class, consider setting or making available a recording- every student in Lolo’s class this year considers the CD a worthwhile investment, so it’s not just my quirk.

3. Not sitting at your desk. Does anyone else get really sore elbows from extended study?

~

1. Do other unis have Reading Groups like this? Old English Reading Group has been the third best thing to happen to me since I came to uni (the first and second being Awesome and JP, although not in that chronological order). Academically, it’s great for forcing you to retain vocab, and exposing you to texts outside of your range of study. More than that, though, with the range of people, from undergrads to retired lecturers and including members of admin staff and the occaisonal ring-in from the Real World, it creates a real community of scholarship which transcends academic rank. OERG has been crucial in my personal shift from Student Focused On Immediate Marks to Apprentice Academic. And it means I have the Venerable Emeritus, Source Of All English Language Wisdom, to help me with my homework at random.

Why Fourteenth Century Knights Had Good Reason To Be A Little Angsty

I just finished a long and complicated article on what J.P. would call ‘Boy History’. Not something I’m used to dealing with- now many of his classes have the assessment blocks broken up so that you have to write one ‘boy history’ essay (politics, warfare, technology, economics, maybe disease and medecine?) and one ‘girl history’ (religion, women, books/literature/art, daily life), but I happily sailed through three years writing my papers on the Church (although in my defence, for JP’s classes I picked the ‘boy’ end- papal polcies and ecclesiastical politics. Have I mentioned my ginormous crush on Innocent III?), literature and women. Now, however, I find myself embroiled in a long paper on the Infantry Revolution of the Fourteenth Century. Tactics and weapons and all far too late for my taste. Why, you ask? Well, good question.

The last two papers I read- David L. Boyd’s Sodomy, Misogyny and Displacement: Occluding Queer Desire in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight¹ and Donald R. Howard’s Structure and Symmetry in Sir Gawain, both made mention of ’social tensions’ which were undermining the economic and political validity of the chivalric class. I can’t remember what Howard said about it, but Boyd’s argument was that this was *displaced* in the form of transgressive sexuality (threatening male social order) and the blame placed on women.

I don’t think that’s entirely true. I think Gawain is, in himself, a barely-hero (not an anti-hero, but still not up to heroic standards), and I have an arse-kicking grammatical analysis to prove it. He’s not a perfect hero and his personal flaws lead to his downfall. However, it is true that he’s systematically disempowered throughout the text- I think his flawed character is such as to encourage this- and it seems that this reflects some anxieties on the part of the knightly class whom he represents. What could they be, though? To this end, I ploughed my way through Technology, Society, and the Infantry Revolution of the Fourteenth Century, an article by John Stone.

What I have learnt so far is:

* That in the fourteenth century, as anyone who has seen Braveheart will remember, infantry start defeating cavalry across Europe. Apparently the first such battle was at Courtrai in 1302, when Flemish commons defeated French horsemen.
So Thing One is: if infantry start replacing cavalry as Awesome Troops of Doom, perhaps the class of mounted chevaliers start feeling out-of-control.

* That in the fourteenth century, contemporary with these changes, come social changes which result in greater political privileges for the commons. Stone takes issue with some deterministic military historians who argue that technological innovations in warfare *create* social change, and argues for a combination of factors. He points out that the Flemish commons who defeated the French were defending their rights, not establishing them. However, he notes that the English case is quite different to the Flemish. Where the Flemish urban population had been experiencing relative peace in which to grow wealthy and powerful on the back of their textile industry, in England, resources had been funneled consistently into the Hundred Years War. This was causing resentment (and possibly revolts? I seem to remember hearing somewhere along the line that there were some revolts around about now? Wycliffites?)
So Thing Two is the commons agitating for (and gaining) political power. Do we have a House of Commons in England by now? I’m terrible with late medieval history…

* That Europe was in a period of economic prosperity, something which had been developing since the twelfth century. Prosperity means surplus resources, which means you can set up commerce and industry, which creates a liquid, cash-based economy. New commercial opportunities also means new power bases- this is the period where guilds become powerful, and where towns start setting up as communes. I’m not sure to what degree this is happening in England- the history teacher who taught me about guilds and so forth had no respect for geographical differences. But it’s happening, and even if it’s not on a large scale at home, the English do know what goes on on the Continent.
So Thing Three is: a flourishing cash-based economy with new opportunities for commerce and power is undermining the land and produce based economy which supports the feudal system.

All up, the chivalric class, collectively, have good reason to be feeling insecure in the fourteenth century. Hero-tales like the Arthur legends are a sort of group reassurance activity; they glorify the chivalric ethos, and reinforce the identity and purpose of the knight in the face of contemporary changes. I think Gawain himself, as a barely-hero with no control over his impossible situation, reflects the anxieties of the time. The poem glorifies the material and social world of chivalry, but it is at the end of the day a poem about failure- about one man who failed his code; about a code which fails to equip its hero with the skills to face his new situation.

~

1. SUCH AN AWESOME PAPER ZOMG. Really. Queer theorists take things like medieval kink seriously. Boyd’s footnotes include a paper titled ‘Anal Rope’, which from the reference Boyd made to it, looks like it deals with the bondage jokes that none of my class believe are actually there. I don’t buy Boyd’s ‘chivalry is all based on repressed homosexuality’, though. Dude. Chivalry is based on LOTS of things, particularly on the feudal system. And the feudal system is an economic and political structure wot is necessary for things like keeping Vikings out of your territory. Time goes on, a system becomes an ideology and it picks up things like the chivalric code, which may or may not provide a way of chanelling mano-a-mano desires, but you don’t seriously think ALL homosocial activity is repressed homosexuality, do you? And I have a rant coming up about the way Boyd completely sidelines female sexuality.

They taught me half-arsed Foucault in first year…

Same as they taught me half-arsed Functional Grammar.¹ These two things turned me off the English department entirely. Yet here I am, working on a presentation for the English Honours Conference, and if you’d told me in first year that I’d be grateful to have learnt these two things, I would have told you to shove it up your jumper and let me go back to history class. How wise I thought I was then!

Ahem. Hello again, blogosphere! Long time no see! I have few ideas these days and those I have I am cuddling close to me in the hope of knocking them into articles at some stage.

Here is a thought I had tonight while brushing my teeth:

When the Green Knight arrives in Camelot, all the power of the gaze lies with Arthur and his court. There are five sight/seeing verbs in the 286 lines I was looking at. Four of them have Arthur or his court looking at the Green Knight. They are all in the (authoritative) narratorial voice. The fifth is in the Green Knight’s voice, has him as the subject, and is modified by wolde. Though it is to be presumed that the GK does see Arthur, as he wishes, since he SPEAKS to Arthur, this is not noted by the narrator.
The GK’s ‘occular acts’² are expressed indirectly, as action clauses involving his eyes (which he casts and rolls). Arthur and his court are never the direct objects of the GK’s gaze.

What we have here is not a Foucault-ian Panopticon, where an unseen watcher judges many. Rather, many seen spectators judge one. In one of the three cognitive verbs in the narratorial voice, the court deme the GK to be phantom or fairy. If we have an unseen watcher it is the Narrator, who himself makes two direct judgements on the GK- but the Narrator is not associated with any verbs of sight/seeing, he is a purely intellectual presence.

When Gawain gets to Hautdesert, though he represents Arthur’s court, he (and the court through him) lose all the power of their gaze. He acts in two sight verbs in the 183 lines I analysed (once at the beginning and once at the end), looking first upon Bertilak and then upon the Lady. Each sight act is associated, not with judgement (as in deme, above), but with an indirect perception, thuht (seemed, appeared (to him)) or loked (She looked/appeared gracious). The agency in Gawain’s gaze is lost in his inability to follow through with an agentive judgement. And, to make matters worse, both times his perception is shaky, if not outright wrong. (Is Bertilak a worthy lord? Is the Lady gracious? I don’t think so, but the poem doesn’t make it clear one way or the other.)

~

1. Or was I a half-arsed learner? Undoubtedly I was, particularly when it came to Foucault. But they gave me brilliant marks, so their standards must have been as low as mine. I actually quite liked half-arsed functional grammar, and the fact that only three of us in the room could remember what an adverb was, so I put a good effort into it, and wrote a ripper essay in my final exam defending the use of grammatical analysis in literary studies. The real nightmare in that course was Sassure. Put me to sleep every tuesday for a month with signs and signifiers and whatnot.
2. Isn’t that a fabulously wanky phrase? I lifted it from Sarah Stanbury’s book Seeing the Gawain Poet. Sadly, she doesn’t think about agency at all when talking about shifting occular perspectives. Can anyone suggest a more comprehensible phrase than ‘ocular act’?

Who Needs a System of Sigla: Redux

I now know the answer to the question ‘who needs a system of sigla?’

A: Piers Ploughman scholars. Lawrence, who cares (possibly too much…¹) about manuscript sigla, told us on tuesday that there around fifty MSS of Piers. And a single MS could have several sigla, refering to the texts within (so, for example, an MS with both C and B recensions in it will have two conventional sigla- one for the C and one for the B text.) This is all very confusing, but, on the other hand, with so many MSS, if you tried reffering to them by manuscript short title, your word count would disappear quicker than you could say ‘verbose’.

On the other hand: Piers Ploughman scholars have sets of conventional sigla! I am very jealous.

~

1. Just kidding, Lawrence. One can never care too much about persnickety details, I say.

Medieval Kink: or, what better way to up my google ranking?

I am, (un)fortunately, blessed with an innocent mind, and despite the best efforts of many of my friends and associates, sometimes, I just don’t get the dirty jokes. Fortunately, in the world of medieval literature, there is almost always someone who’s done a close text study of the dirty joke, and spelt it out in sensible terms like ’symbolism’ and ‘inversion’ and ‘verbal echoes’, which is the only way an innocent nerd like me will pick up on it.

Tonight I have discovered, courtesy of one David Mills and the Journal of English and Germanic Philology, that the temptation scenes in SGGK are full of bondage jokes.¹

I did realise they were an extended innuendo, I’m not that dim. Lady sneaks into Gawain’s bed, refuses to let him get up and dressed, baldly announces ye are welcom to my cors, and gloats about how many ladies wish they had him in their embrace, as she does here. Gawain, meanwhile, sputters and prevaricates, and manages, for three successive nights, to keep pushing their discourse back into the conventional exchange of loyalty and compliments between knight and lady. Amusing stuff, right? Is Gawain cleverly blocking her every attack? Or is he simply too dumb to pick up on what she’s offering? (The irony being that, even if he knows exactly what she’s offering, he can have no idea what game she and Bertilak, and Morgan behind them, are playing at.)

The factor that I’d not noticed until I picked up Mills’ article is that the Lady comes in and assumes the dominant role- not only by propositioning Gawain, but by doing so in the language of assault, restraint and servitude.

She addresses Gawain as a sleeping sentry, who ought to be on better guard: Ye ar a sleeper unslyge, Þat mon may slyde hider. Mills notes the use of the impersonal pronoun ‘mon’- while not specifically masculine, it removes from her any particularly feminine typecasting. Next, she announces I schal bynde yow in your bedde. Gawain picks up on this imagery of attack and conquest, asking her to deprece your prisoun, but evades the sexual innuendo, asking permission to get up and dress before he becomes the butt of any more sniggering jokes. The Lady refuses, announcing that Ye schal not rise of your bedde… I schall happe you here Þat oÞer half als, and syÞen carp with my knyght that I kagt have. In the next stanza, she alludes to other ladies, each of whom wishes she haf Þe, hende, in her holde, as I Þe habbe here. Politely speaking, many ladies wish they could hold Gawain in their arms… but the Lady’s halde on him is rather more forceful, a prisoun in spite of his attempts to extricate himself. In line 1257 she reduces him from Þe to hit holly in my honde Þat al desyres- which, as Mills puts it, ‘reduces him from a human-being to an object of desire’.

The symbolism here is working on several levels. The imagery of attack and capture parrallels nicely with the hunt scene in the previous stanza. I don’t know my courtly lyric poetry nearly as well as I should, but it strikes me that the Lady’s pursuit of Gawain is an inversion of the sort of hunting imagery associated with the ‘heart/hart hunt’ in The Book of the Duchess. Here, it is the woman who is actively hunting- and her quarry is not Gawain’s heart, but his body. (For one thing, that would be a damn sight less funny when it comes to the exchange of winnings at the end of the day…) Her ‘knightly’ role serves to create a link with her husband, out hunting and doing his knightly thing in the forest. At this stage, it looks as if there is a parrallelism forming between the two (Berty out in the forest, bravely hunting down what he wants… and the Lady, inside, going after her desire with the same dedication)- as the plot unwinds, it turns out they are in fact assaulting Gawain together, and, in hindsight, the Lady’s dominant role in the scene perhaps symbolises her husband’s masculine direction of her actions.²

Mills links the Lady’s sexual dominance with the genre of fablieux, which seems fair enough. It’s downright funny, watching poor little Gawain scrabbling to extricate himself from a sexual situation. Compared to the studly Gawain of the later Chevalier a L’Epee, whose lady-friend has to keep excusing herself from his attentions,³ our Gawain is far from the virile figure the Lady paints him out to be.

The joke goes further than mere sexual exuberance on her part, though. The Lady is offering Gawain the her body, to take his awen won from it. But how is she offering this service to his desires? [O]f fyne force, of course! By binding him in his bed and holding him against his will! What’s more, she intimates that any number of other women would love to dominate him in kind.

Now, this emasculation of Gawain is quite definitely not supposed to be read as the natural order of things. You could probably link it with the exchange of winnings and make a good homoerotic analysis out of it. And it all works wonderfully with the plot at large. But for the dirty joke to fly in the meantime, how much of an idea of erotic domination do you need circulating in your culture? It’s funny seeing a woman take on an unnatural role- but the intimation that other women would like to do the same suggests that the Lady doesn’t consider herself alone in her kink… and nor are the audience intended to.

I’m not suggesting that it would be encouraged or accepted, or that you could buy bondage gear on the streets of London. But it seems to me that the poem is suggesting that the Lady thinks domination would serve Gawain’s awen won (so therefore, the idea of domination as erotic can’t be completely foreign), and that the joke is on Gawain. As he scrabbles to escape, does he even realise exactly what she’s offering? Is he trying to preserve his honour by not sleeping with his host’s wife… or is he trying to keep his manly person out of the hands of this rogue domme and her unnatural tastes?

~
1. David Mills, ‘An Analysis of the Temptation Scenes in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, JEGP 1968, p. 612-630.
2. But then, of course, there is Morgan Le Fay lurking around in the background, directing him. Gawain’s reduction to a sexual object in this scene may also be reflecting his reduction to the object of Morgan’s grudge against Arthur.
3. If you missed out on the fun, read about how Gawain keeps the ladies happy in bed here.

Adventures in Middle English: Semantic Drift tarnishes a perfectly good word.

Once upon a time, when I were a wee thing, my mother gave me the sage advice never to take up with a man who reffered to women as ‘chicks’ or ‘birds’. Men like this, she impressed upon me, infantalise women and treat them like objects. Somewhat tangentially, I cannot hear the word ‘chick’ without remembering the object I was holding at the time, a teatowel.

Accordingly, I was somewhat startled, reading along in Sir Gawain, to find Bertilak’s wife reffered to as the gay burde.¹ Along with the intrusive teatowel, this conjures up a mental image of twenties men in smoking jackets reffering to their flapper friends as ‘quite a gay bird’.

A quick check of the TGD gloss returns ‘maiden, damsel, lady’, and suggests nothing dismissive about it. The etymology of the term is obscure, though- TGD suggest Anglo Saxon byrde, meaning embroideress.² My Anglo-Saxon dictionary, meanwhile, doesn’t turn up that definition for byrde, instead giving me an adjective, ‘well born, noble, rich’.

The OED suggests that the term may be a poetic application of the Norse term for ‘bird’; they also suggest association with the Middle English bryde or the Anglo-Saxon bryd, but they note that even with the older form the phonetic development would be very odd indeed were that the case; the Anglo-Saxon adjective for ‘well-born’, meanwhile, they tell us is rare, occuring only once and then in a masculine form.

Advice for the week: next time you are disparagingly called a ‘bird’, hold your head high in the knowledge that you are either well born, marriagable, poetic, or possibly an embroidress.

If he calls you a chick, though- that one only turns up in the twentieth century, and has no pedigree at all.

~

1. ll. 1003
2. To which my inner Pratcheteer responds “SEAMSTRESS, nudge nudge wink wink”.