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Another Thing about the Women in "Gawain"
Apr. 11th, 2018 04:18 pm...Or rather woman, or rather Morgan le Fay disguised as an old lady.
Spoilers for medieval alliterative verse.
There's a substantial stanza in Fitt II about Gawain not finding disguised-Morgan the least bit interesting compared to the very pretty Lady whose duenna (or something, since the Lady is married) she plays.
Retrospective dramatic irony arises when it turns out that this old woman Gawain has ostentatiously ignored is, in fact, the orchestrator of this entire course of events, from the appearance of the Green Knight onwards. Gawain's whole year of wandering, his crisis of self-image, his sexy neck scar, all of it -- down to Morgan.
It seems like a lesson, doesn't it?
Don't ignore seemingly unimportant people.
Keep your eye on harmless old ladies.
The Gods come in disguise.
Apart from creating this irony, though, the Gawain Poet doesn't seem to make much of it, at least not overtly. It's more like a twist put in as an afterthought at the end. "Aha! It was Morgan all along!"
What an odd person or conglomeration of persons the Gawain poet must have been.
I would really be tempted to find threads of proto-feminism in "Gawain"'s tapestry, were it not for that famous rant our eponymous1 hero goes on towards the end about the treachery of women. It's isolated to one stanza -- I suppose there's no textual evidence that this was a Later Addition? The vitriol seems so counter to the spirit of the rest of the tale.
This speech also doesn't follow logically from the action at all, given that the Lady was acting on Bertilak's orders, so if anyone's treacherous it's him -- although I guess he was acting on Morgan's orders. But Gawain doesn't say "Women! They use big green and sometimes reddish men to instruct other women to flirt me to death!"
The narrative doesn't really need an evil genius behind it in any case, as it's mostly pretty jolly, despite the mortal peril -- the only harm that's done in the end is to Gawain's pride and I suppose his sense of security, and that's his own fault.
Anyway, I don't really know enough about how the poem came into being to render these complaints. It *feels* a bit like Beowulf in the unsettled company of both paganism and Christianity, but I don't yet know whether its composition history bears that out at all.
{rf}
1. All right, so it doesn't properly speaking have a title, and
for it to be eponymous
his name must be Anonymous.
FINE.
Spoilers for medieval alliterative verse.
There's a substantial stanza in Fitt II about Gawain not finding disguised-Morgan the least bit interesting compared to the very pretty Lady whose duenna (or something, since the Lady is married) she plays.
Retrospective dramatic irony arises when it turns out that this old woman Gawain has ostentatiously ignored is, in fact, the orchestrator of this entire course of events, from the appearance of the Green Knight onwards. Gawain's whole year of wandering, his crisis of self-image, his sexy neck scar, all of it -- down to Morgan.
It seems like a lesson, doesn't it?
Don't ignore seemingly unimportant people.
Keep your eye on harmless old ladies.
The Gods come in disguise.
Apart from creating this irony, though, the Gawain Poet doesn't seem to make much of it, at least not overtly. It's more like a twist put in as an afterthought at the end. "Aha! It was Morgan all along!"
What an odd person or conglomeration of persons the Gawain poet must have been.
I would really be tempted to find threads of proto-feminism in "Gawain"'s tapestry, were it not for that famous rant our eponymous1 hero goes on towards the end about the treachery of women. It's isolated to one stanza -- I suppose there's no textual evidence that this was a Later Addition? The vitriol seems so counter to the spirit of the rest of the tale.
This speech also doesn't follow logically from the action at all, given that the Lady was acting on Bertilak's orders, so if anyone's treacherous it's him -- although I guess he was acting on Morgan's orders. But Gawain doesn't say "Women! They use big green and sometimes reddish men to instruct other women to flirt me to death!"
The narrative doesn't really need an evil genius behind it in any case, as it's mostly pretty jolly, despite the mortal peril -- the only harm that's done in the end is to Gawain's pride and I suppose his sense of security, and that's his own fault.
Anyway, I don't really know enough about how the poem came into being to render these complaints. It *feels* a bit like Beowulf in the unsettled company of both paganism and Christianity, but I don't yet know whether its composition history bears that out at all.
{rf}
1. All right, so it doesn't properly speaking have a title, and
for it to be eponymous
his name must be Anonymous.
FINE.
