Students of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight agitated by problems of Biblical exegesis, gender,
and the status of Christian heroes may find an essay by Catherine S. Cox useful. In “Genesis and
Gender in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,”1 Cox attempts to enrich the debate about the
poem’s relationship to Christian doctrine:
SGGK’s exegetical poetics...are based upon its intertextual and intercultural engagement
with not only Christian but also Jewish exegetical modes. Specifically, the construction
and articulation of gender apropos of the “temptation” sequence can be analyzed in
relation to both the Vulgate and Hebrew Genesis/Bereshit creation and expulsion
sequences, allowing for a deeper understanding of the Gawain-poet’s complex poetics,
themselves part of SGGK’s larger interconnected concerns with gender, religion, and
language. (378)
After flinching in his encounter with the Green Knight at the end of the poem, Gawain
“expresses contrition for his apostasy and cowardice.
These expressions of contrition are
interrupted, however, by a brief and curious outburst, the so-called ‘antifeminist diatribe’”(378).
Gawain associates himself with Adam, who was also brought to sorrow by the deceits of women.
The poem links the triangle Bertilak-Gawain-Bertilak’s Lady to the Edenic triangle GodAdam-Eve. Cox situates the poem’s allusion to the Old Testament in a medieval context:
In Christianity’s typological reconfigurations of Old Testament personae, Eve is never
just Eve; rather, her depiction is always haunted by her implicit contrast to that icon of
unattainable feminine virtue, the Virgin Mary, and her worth accordingly diminished.
That the Lady is characterized by Gawain as irresistable superficially mitigates his
accusation of seduction, and, as such, his commonplace gesture of conflated
condemnation and praise overtly calls to mind this ubiquitous dichotomy of Eve and
Mary, opposing representatives of woman’s duplicitous nature at the core of so many
misogynistic treatises. In Jerome’s famous phrasing, “Mors per Evam, vita per Mariam,”
the typological antithesis connecting “Eva,” seductress and sinner, with “Ave,” Gabriel’s
greeting to Mary at the scene of the Annunciation comprising the reversed letters of
Eva’s name. When Gawain describes himself as having been, like Adam, “with one
bygyled,” he simultaneously reinstates, by way of implicit opposition, the Virgin Mary to
her rightfully prominent place in the Christian knight’s code of values and conduct. It is
1
The Chaucer Review 35.4 (2001) 378-390.
2
perhaps fitting, then, that the Lady appears in response to Gawain’s prayer to the Virgin,
and is contrasted with the “auncian”(948)—Morgan herself, or perhaps a doublet, the
Lady herself being another—through images of color and texture that call to mind fruit in
general and apples in particular (since a ubiquitous medieval misreading of Genesis
identifies the forbidden fruit as an apple). Curiously, the Virgin Mary ultimately rescues
her knight from the Lady’s sexual temptation...but offers no intervention to prevent
Gawain’s succumbing to his desire for survival. The Virgin Mary’s own interests, it
would seem, are confined to sexual chastity, a reflection perhaps of her own status in
medieval Christianity as the embodiment of chaste female perfection and the mother of
God’s son, wholly defined by her sexuality or perceived absence thereof. (379)
Cox claims that divided traditions (“Hebrew/Latin,” “Jewish/Christian,” “Old/New”)
fissure the poem; the ending of the poem, which describes Camelot’s refusal to recognize
Gawain’s shame, endeavors to overcome the divisive influence of the Green Knight:
The closing scene of SGGK replicates the medieval polemicists’ agenda: to bolster the
credibility of Christian doctrine on behalf of the Christian faithful. Refusing to engage in
the kind of critical scrutiny that might undermine tenuous faith or incite nascent doubts,
the court and the poem instead seem to favor the strategy endorsed by Aquinas, “Quorum
fides ex hoc est firmior quod nihil diversum audierunt ab eo quod credunt”[Wherefore
the faith of the (ignorant) is firmer if they hear nothing that conflicts with what they
believe]...Having eradicated the potential contagion of Gawain-as-Other, and with it the
unwelcome implication that the court’s own self-defined subjectivity is vulnerable to
critique, the court reclaims its place at the center of SGGK’s idyllic, homosocial,
normative world. (385)
While I find her reading of the poem’s weird ending plausible, I wonder if a medieval audience
would have perceived a divide between Christian doctrine and Jewish history; does every
allusion to the story of Eden necessarily imply a serious engagement with Jewish thought or a
subversive challenge to Christian ideology?
Amid the flotsam and jetsam of Cox’s often
abstruse verbiage, some excellent quotations of medieval writers await the industrious scavenger
(or pilferer?).
3
In “The Cinematic Consciousness of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” 2 Jeremy Lowe
reexamines the work of the literary critic Alain Renoir. Renoir, son of the famous filmmaker,
applied his hereditary understanding of movies to an analysis of the form of Sir Gawain and the
Green Knight in several essays published in the late fifties and early sixties. Lowe exploits
developments in film theory during the decades since Renoir’s cinematic essays:
Recent scholarship on the poem points to the ways in which it resists closure, and
classical film theory [which celebrated the work of auteurs like Renoir père], with its
emphasis on structure and rigid composition, now seems poorly equipped to deal with the
poem’s complexities. Similarly, recent psychoanalytic film theory, with its insistence
that the cinema spectator is woven into the dominant narrative of the film, cannot
adequately explain the contingencies, transitions, and constant renegotiations that make
up Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Psychoanalysis also depends upon the intimate
relationship established between the cinema audience and the central protagonist of a
film, and it is one of the claims of this essay that no such relationship exists between the
audience of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the character of Gawain. (68)
To classical and psychoanalytic film theory Lowe opposes the anti-Oedipal theory of
Deleuze and Guattari:
According to Deleuzian film theory, the cinema audience is able to experience a film
without necessarily identifying with one character; consequently the film becomes a play
of surfaces, a system of interconnected perspectives that continually renegotiate meaning.
The cinema spectator has access to this system, but occupies no stable point within it, so
that the cinematic experience is both fluid and open-ended. The term “cinematic
consciousness,” referring to the complex system of interconnected perspectives that
involve the spectator, helps us to explain our own shifting and often inconsistent attitudes
towards Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. We, the audience of the poem, have access to
this “cinematic consciousness” and contribute to it, generating an interpretive network
which is the product of multiple perspectives, but which simultaneously extends beyond
the control of any single point of view. (69)
Psychoanalytic film theorists often assert that the gaze of the moviegoer binds him to the
protagonist of the film, but Lowe contends that
2
Exemplaria 13.1 (2001) 67-97.
4
Psychoanalytic film theory, with its dependence upon the active mastery of the gaze,
cannot really help us interpret the poem that so consistently undermines the very notion
of mastery, and which certainly challenges, in the hapless figure of Sir Gawain, the
notion that the male gaze is either active or dominant....We are his restless companions:
one moment we see him through the eyes of the courtiers at Camelot who criticize his
adventure (674-83), but at another we feel his cold as he sleeps in his irons on the bare
hillside (729). Gawain’s very identity is always under review, and we cannot identify
with him; if this were a film, the camera would not suture us into an intimate relationship
with him, but would be roving around, freed from its moorings. With such perpetual
shifts and relocations, Gawain can never truly emerge as a fully realized, Oedipal subject.
(73)
The best example of the roving camera technique occurs near the end of the poem: after
the Green Knight nicks him, Gawain “leaps forward to challenge his opponent on equal terms,”
but the perspective of the poem then abruptly shifts to the Green Knight, who leans on his ax and
laughs at Gawain (88). Lowe attests that
For Deleuze, “[i]t is always “a great moment...when the camera leaves a character, and
even turns its back on him.” At such a moment the audience is reminded that the camera
is not aligned completely with one character; instead, the film is composed of a network
of components that map out a space beyond the scope of any one viewpoint. Cinematic
consciousness is not the preserve of one character, or even the audience of the film, it is
the camera itself, unchained from the restrictions of the localized gaze, and able to roam
freely in this open space—the Whole. The Whole itself is a product—it establishes
“aberrant paths of communication between noncommunicating vessels...[but] there is
never a totality of what is seen nor a unity of points of view.” The schizophrenic who
shatters the boundaries of social order and the camera that destabilizes the linear narrative
both approach an understanding of the Whole. Crucially film, like the poem, allows an
audience a chance to touch upon the Whole, because although the film/poem narrative is
linear, there are a number of “privileged instants” that allow us to step outside the
narrative boundaries and examine the mise-en-scène freed from the subjective perception
of any one character. (89)
5
Not only does the style of the poem give the reader privileged moments in which he can
recognize the Whole, the Green Knight, by revealing the details of the plot against Gawain and
inviting him back to his castle, also grants the protagonist a glimpse at the whole; however,
Gawain rejects this invitation; his asinine outburst of anti-feminism testifies to an egocentric
concern with his own weakness that inhibits him from recognizing the Whole.
Lowe posits that
The poem closes with three verdicts on Gawain’s adventure—the Green Knight’s,
Camelot’s, and Gawain’s own...Gawain’s “failure” to establish himself back at court
allows all of these interpretive possibilities to co-exist; none of the interpretations is
universally accepted, and none is categorically denied. In fact all are true within their
own terms: Gawain does certainly commit a very slight transgression, as the Green
Knight claims; his shame is great and bespeaks a certain cupidity, as he claims; and he is
a hero at Camelot, as Arthur’s court claims. Only we, the audience, are able to see all of
these points simultaneously and in relation to one another. (95)
This essay is one of the best I have read this semester, but I find it unsatisfying in some
ways. Although I think Lowe does an excellent job of purging from the poem misguided
psychoanalytic film theory, sometimes I wonder if the cure is worse than the disease: Lowe’s
argument becomes most persuasive when he depends the least on the theoretical support of
D&G. His argument might become more persuasive if he found some medieval analogues for
tantalizing but opaque Deleuzian terms like “the Body without Organs” and “the celibate
machine,” terms which Lowe employs too casually. D&G express an alarmingly sanguine
attitude toward schizophrenia—an attitude which Lowe adopts without any sign of
embarrassment. Although he insists on the fragmented structure and style of the poem, Lowe
oddly presupposes a univocal audience, the often invoked “we,” when in fact the linguistic
opacity of much of the poem stratifies its (modern) audience.