Abstract
Like Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight belongs to the ‘Gawain’ canon, a group of stories which centres upon Gawain in his role as one of the knights of the Round Table, and which presents him with a series of quests involving women, both fair and foul, young and old. As the Gawain poet acknowledges, Gawain is the ladies’ man of medieval romance: when the Lady enters his bedroom on the first morning of his sojourn at Hautdesert she claims to be surprised at the knight’s sexual reticence:
So god as Gawayn gaynly is halden, And cortaysye is closed so clene in hymseluen Couth not lyʒtly haf lenged so long wyth a lady, Bot he had craued a cosse, bi his courtaysye, Bi sum towch of somme tryfle at sum talez ende’ (1297–301)1
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Notes
All quotations from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight are taken from J.R.R. Tolkien and E.V. Gordon (eds.). Sir Gawain and The Green Knight (Oxford, 1967). All future references to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight will be made parenthetically in the chapter.
This misogynist diatribe has been much discussed by critics and will be the focus of my argument in the next Section of this chapter. A detailed list of relevant criticisms will be found at notes 3 and 4.
Psychological realism: John Burrow, A Reading of ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’ (London, 1965), p. 147; A.C. Spearing, The Gawain-Poet: A Critical Study (Cambridge, 1970), p. 229; David Mills, ‘The Rhetorical Function of Gawain’s Antifeminism?’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 71 (1970), pp. 635–40; R. A. Shoaf, The Poems as Green Girdle: Commercium in ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’ (Gainesville, Florida, 1984), p. 47; Susan L. Clark and Julian N. Wasserman, ‘Gawain’s “Anti-Feminism” Reconsidered’, Journal of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association, 6 (1985), pp. 57–70.
Comic: Maureen Fries, ‘The Characterization of Women in the Alliterative Tradition’, in Bernard S. Levy and Paul E. Szarmach (eds.). The Alliterative Tradition in the Fourteenth Century (Kent, Ohio, 1981), pp. 25–45; Howard V. Hendrix, ‘ “To luf hom wel, and leve hem not”: The Neglected Humor of Gawain’s Antifeminism’, Comitatus, 14 (1983), pp. 39–48.
Theme and genre: Robert L. Kindrick, ‘Gawain’s Ethics: Shame and Guilt in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Annuale Mediaevale, 20 (1981), pp. 5–22; John Eadie, ‘Sir Gawain and the Ladies of Ill-Repute’, Annuale Mediaevale, 20 (1981), pp. 52–66.
The quotation comes from Fries, ‘The Characterization of Women’, p. 37.
Detailed lists of criticisms on this field may be found in: Mary Dove, ‘Gawain and the Blasme Des Femmes Tradition’, Medium Aevum, XLI (1972), pp. 20–6; Fries, ‘The Characterization of Women’, p. 44; David Aers, Community, Gender, and Individual Identity (London, 1988), p. 210; and Catherine Batt, ‘Gawain’s Antifeminist Rant, the Pentangle, and Narrative Space’, in The Yearbook of English Studies, 22 (1992), pp. 117–39; p. 118. A useful summary of critical works on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight may be found in Michael Foley, ‘The Gawain-Poet: An Annotated Bibliography, 1978–85’, Chaucer Review, 23 (1989), pp. 251–82.
Katharine M. Rogers, The Troublesome Helpmate (London, 1966), p. 60; Dove, ‘Gawain and the Blasme Des Femmes Tradition’, p. 26; Aers, Community, Gender and Individual Identity, p. 170; Sheila Fisher, ‘Leaving Morgan Aside: Women, History, and Revisionism in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, in Christopher Baswell and William Sharpe (eds.), The Passing of Arthur (New York, 1988), p. 143; Batt, ‘Gawain’s Antifeminist Rant’, p. 137.
Allegory became a focus of critical attention in the 1960s as a backlash against New Criticism; allegorists tended to search for eternal and universal characteristics in the text and emphasized the writer’s dependence upon symbolism; for example, Spearing, The Gawain-Poet; Gerald Morgan, ‘The Validity of Gawain’s Confession in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’ Review of English Studies, NS XXXVI (1985), pp. 1–18.
For the Gawain Poet’s full canon see: A.C. Cawley and J.J. Anderson (eds.), Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (London, 1926).
For example see Derek Brewer, ‘Courtesy and the Gawain-Poet’ in J. Lawlor (ed.) Patterns of Love and Courtesy (London, 1966), p. 84.
Jean de Meun, Roman de la Rose, trans. H. W. Robbins, (New York, 1962); Christine de Pisan, The Book of the City of Ladies, (ed.) M. Warner (London, 1983).
See Chapter 1, pp. 14–35.
Dove, ‘Gawain and the Blasme des Femmes Tradition’, pp. 25–6.
Marion Wynne-Davies, Geoffrey Chaucer, ‘The Tales of the Clerk and the Wife of Bath’ (London, 1992), pp. 7–8 and 12–18.
Katherine Usher Henderson and Barbara F. McManus (eds.). Half Humankind (Chicago, 1985).
Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson (ed.) (Minneapolis, 1984), pp. 195–6. The use of the dialogic in feminist criticism is discussed in the Introduction pp. 1–13.
This critical telescoping reflects the literary conventions of the medieval period. See: Diane Bornstein, The Lady in the Tower (Hamden, Conn., 1983), pp. 9–10.
Dove, ‘Gawain and the Blasme des Femmes Tradition’; Batt, ‘Gawain’s Antifeminist Rant’.
Fries, ‘The Characterization of Women’; Fisher, ‘Leaving Morgan Aside’.
Shulamith Shahar, The Fourth Estate (London, 1983), pp. 11–21.
Fisher, ‘Leaving Morgan Aside’, pp. 137–8. Batt notes a similar containment in the Lady’s language: Batt, ‘Gawain’s Antifeminist Rant’, p. 131.
Jean Froissart, Chronicles, trans. Geoffrey Brereton (Harmondsworth, 1978), pp. 309- 15.
Larry D. Benson, Art and Tradition in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (New Brunswick, NJ, 1965), pp. 38–44; W.R.J. Barron, ‘Knighthood on Trial: The Acid Test of Irony’, Forum for Modern Languages Studies, XVII (1981), pp. 181–97; Judith Weiss, ‘The Wooing Woman in Anglo-Norman Romance’; in Maldwyn Mills, Jennifer Fellows and Carol M. Meale (eds.), Romance in Medieval England (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 149–60. Other criticisms which try to interpret the Lady’s unexpected behaviour are: A. Francis Soucy, ‘Gawain’s Fault: “Angardez Pryde”’, The Chaucer Review, 13 (1978), pp. 166–76; George Sanderlin, ‘Sir Gawain and Lady Bertilak’ USF Language Quarterly, 22 (1983), pp. 17–19; Christopher Wrigley, ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: the Underlying Myth’, in Derek Brewer (ed.) Studies in Medieval English Romance (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 113–28.
Fries, ‘The Characterization of Women’, p. 35.
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (London, 1979).
R. S. Loomis, Wales and the Arthurian Tradition (Cardiff, 1956), p. 89. For a description of the loathly lady tradition see above, Chapter 1, pp. 14–35.
Larry D. Benson, Art and Tradition, p. 100; Fries, ‘The Characterization of Women’, p. 38. See also Anne Wilson, The Magical Quest (Manchester, 1988), p. 212; and for an annotated bibliography of criticisms on Morgan: Jeanne T. Mathewson, ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: Twenty More Years of Fascination’, in Valerie M. Lagorio and Mildred Leake Day (eds.), King Arthur Through the Ages (New York, 1990), pp. 217–18.
Fisher, ‘Leaving Morgan Aside’, p. 144.
Ibid, p. 146.
Selma R. Williams and Pamela Williams Adelman, Riding the Nightmare (New York, 1978), pp. 25–32.
Shahar, The Fourth Estate, pp. 268–80; Bonnie S. Anderson and Judith P. Zinsser, A History of Their Own (London, 1989), pp. 161–73.
Fisher, ‘Leaving Morgan Aside’, p. 133.
Suzanne W. Hull, Chaste, Silent and Obedient: English books for women (San Marino, Calif., 1982).
The Gawain Poet is also prescient in his description of the relationship between Arthurian men. The love-triangle of Arthur, Guenevere and Lancelot is mirrored in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by Bertilak, the Lady and Gawain. The homoerotic relationship between the two male characters in the first group, which becomes important in early twentieth-century literature, is prefigured by the kissing game in the latter combination. It is important to remember that the kisses given by Gawain to the Green Knight are on one level no more than the courteous tokens exchanged between friends, but simultaneously, carry the sexual charge imparted by the manner in which they were first given by the Lady.
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© 1996 Marion Wynne-Davies
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Wynne-Davies, M. (1996). ‘And purʒ wyles of wymmen be wonen to sorʒe’: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In: Women and Arthurian Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24453-9_3
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