Abstract
Must romances create the threat of rape? Perhaps not; yet even a cursory survey of the genre will show that a surprising number of medieval romances feature instances of raptus—defined in the medieval sense as either sexual violence or the forced abduction of a woman. Kathryn Gravdal, in her provocative study, persuades that the representation of rape is intrinsic to the aesthetics and chivalric ideology of the works of Chrétien de Troyes, the most influential and imitated of romancers.1 Dietmar Rieger details the frequency with which medieval French romances and other courtly genres depict rape.2 And just a glance at my office bookshelf reveals that a startling number of English romances and Breton lais feature ravishment. In the Auchinleck manuscript alone, among other instances of raptus, the King of the Fairies abducts Sir Orfeo’s Heurodis, and a princess lost in the woods conceives Sir Degaré when violated by a knight who then blithely bids her “Hav god dai!”3 Rape may not be necessary to romance, but it does seem a well-established topos of the genre. If rape is a generic commonplace, it is hardly surprising that that crown jewel of medieval English romance, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, should be concerned with rape. The Lady who attempts to seduce the title character from fidelity to his knightly code casually—almost comically—brings up the threat of rape twice.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight exposes courtly discourse’s potential for sexual violence, attributes that violence to a hermeneutic that imagines reading as rape, and responds to linguistic violence by declaring its own textual integrity. The poem warns that those who violate texts or women will themselves be violated.
The significance of rape to romance is not often discussed…. What has rarely been said is that rape (either attempted rape or the defeat of a rapist) constitutes one of the episodic units used in the construction of a romance. Sexual violence is built into the very premise of Arthurian romance. It is a genre that by its definition must create the threat of rape.
—Kathryn Gravdal, Ravishing Maidens: Writing Rape in Medieval French Literature and Law, 43.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Kathryn Gravdal, Ravishing Maidens: Writing Rape in Medieval French Literature and Law (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), pp. 42–71.
Dietmar Rieger, “Le motif du viol dans la littérature de la France médiévale entre norme courtoise et réalité courtoise,” Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 31 (1988): 241–67.
Sir Degaré, line 132, ed. Anne Laskaya and Eve Salisbury, in The Middle English Breton Lays (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1995), which also includes Sir Orfeo.
Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), pp. 2–25. On the exegetical tradition, see Henri de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis, vol. 1, trans. Mark Sebanc (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), pp. 211–24. I am indebted to Dinshaw for the captive woman, but do not agree that Jerome wishes to deprive the text of “its stylistic… blandishments” (p. 24). Jerome seeks to preserve pagan wisdom and eloquence even while stripping off erotic carnality. My understanding of exegetical carnal and spiritual readings of gendered violence is informed by Shari Horner, “The Violence of Exegesis: Reading the Bodies of Ælfric’s Female Saints,” in Violence against Women in Medieval Texts, ed. Anna Roberts (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998), pp. 22–43.
At least two critics have argued that the poem and/or its critics repress female desire. Sheila Fisher, “Taken Men and Token Women in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” in Seeking the Woman in Late Medieval and Renaissance Writings: Essays in Feminist Contextual Criticism, ed. Sheila Fisher and Janet E. Halley (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989), pp. 71–105; and “Leaving Morgan Aside: Women, History, and Revisionism in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” in The Passing of Arthur: New Essays in Arthurian Tradition, ed. Christopher Baswell and William Sharpe (New York: Garland, 1988), pp. 129–51. Geraldine Heng, “Feminine Knots and the Other Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” PMLA 106 (1991): 500–514.
All quotations are from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. J. R. R. Tolkien and E.V. Gordon. 2nd ed. rev. Norman Davis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967). Bracketed translations are my own, informed by this edition’s glossary and the studies cited below.
Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron, The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), p. 243, n. to 11. 943–69.
R. Howard Bloch, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), especially pp. 113–65.
E.Jane Burns and Roberta L. Krueger, eds., Courtly Ideology and Woman’s Place in Medieval French Literature, Romance Notes 25 (1985); Joan Ferrante, Woman as Image in Medieval Literature from the Twelfth Century to Dante (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975).
David Mills, “An Analysis of the Temptation Scenes in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 67 (1968): 612–30; and Ad Putter, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and French Arthurian Romance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp.117–39.
Joseph E. Gallagher, “‘Trawϸe’ and ‘Luf-Talking’ in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 78 (1977): 365.
Carolyn Dinshaw, “A Kiss is Just a Kiss: Heterosexuality and its Consolations in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” Diacritics 24 (1994): 210–11.
J. A. Burrow, A Reading of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965), p. 91. Gravdal provides a survey of texts dealing with the rape of peasants in Ravishing Maidens, pp. 104–21.
Andreas Capellanus, The Art of Courtly Love 1.11, trans. John Jay Parry (New York: W.W. Norton, 1969), p. 150. Latin text De Amore, ed. Graziano Ruffini (Milan: Guanda, 1980).
Geoffrey Chaucer, Legend of Good Women, line 2324; Wife of Bath’s Tale, line 888; ed. John H. Fisher, The Complete Poetry and Prose of Geoffrey Chaucer (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1977).
La Chevalerie d’Ogier de Danemarche, ed. Mario Eusebi (Milan: Varese, 1963), line 11198; Chrétien deTroyes, Der Percevalroman, ed. Alfons Hilka (Halle, 1932), line 3875. Both quoted by Rieger, “Le motif du viol,” pages 250, 255.
Ralph Hanna III, “Unlocking What’s Locked: Gawain’s Green Girdle,” Viator 14 (1983): 289–302, rejects the pentangle as an icon for the poem’s textuality because its meaning is “clear and exemplary (if not locked to the point of rigidity)”; p. 290. But the pentangle, as any survey of the criticism shows, is indeed a slippery sign.
Lawrence Besserman, “The Idea of the Green Knight,” English Literary History 53 (1986): 219–39; John M. Ganim, “Disorientation, Style, and Consciousness in SGGK,” PMLA 91 (1976): 376–84.
Mother Angela Carson, “Morgain la Fee as the Principle of Unity in GGK,” Modern Language Quarterly 23 (1962): 3–16, first argued the joint identity of the ladies as aspects of Morgan. For a list of other discussions of the characters’ doubling, see Heng, “Feminine Knots,” p. 503.
Robert Holcot, Commentary on the Book of Wisdom, quoted by D. W Robertson, Jr., Preface to Chaucer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963), p. 99.
In her “Getting Medieval: Pulp Fiction, Gawain, Foucault,” in The Book and the Body, ed. Dolores Warwick Frese and Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), p. 152, Carolyn Dinshaw suggests that the poem contains a “deeply buried plot, profound and hidden, in which Gawain is a pawn—between women.” Dinshaw’s idea of why the women manipulate Gawain differs from mine, though we agree on the violence of what they do to Gawain. Her idea of buried plots of same-sex desire certainly complicates the question of who is raping whom in the poem—as does the inclusion of the Green Knight/Bertilak in the women’s plot as either author or collaborator. I owe this last perception to Brad Sisk.
For Myra Stokes, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: Fitt III as Debate,” Nottingham Studies 25 (1981): 36, language specifically has the power to “debase and trivialize the values [Gawain] stands for.”
Boccaccio, Genealogy of the Pagan Gods 15.9, trans. Charles Osgood as Boccaccio on Poetry (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956), p. 125.
Editor information
Copyright information
© 2001 Elizabeth Robertson and Christine M. Rose
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Potkay, M.B. (2001). The Violence of Courtly Exegesis in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In: Robertson, E., Rose, C.M. (eds) Representing Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-10448-9_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-10448-9_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-63116-2
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-10448-9
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)