Another Thing about the Women in "Gawain"

[radiantfracture]

...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.

Comments

[agoodwinsmith]

I haven't read it, but is the Gawain rant meant to make him look like more of a doofus? His own failings led him a dance, but he is still looking for people outside of himself to blame?

[radiantfracture]

"Yet all were charmed and changed
By wily womankind,
I suffered just the same,
So clear me of my crime."

...I think that's a reasonable reading.

He seems to mean it fairly lightly -- "ah, can't trust those lovely ladies," rather than "women, the gatekeepers of HELL," but it's still jarring to my modern eye.

It's a scene where Gawain is bonding with the guy who just nearly chopped off his head, and it comes across as a bit of knightly bro-ing.

[watervole]

wily: (of a person) intelligent, having a very good understanding of situations, possibilities…

(Could easily read as these clever, intelligent, smarter women....)

[radiantfracture]

That's an appealing reading. How's your Middle English?

Armitage is keeping fairly close to the original wording with "wily", though he changes the part of speech. In the Middle English the phrase is

and alle they were biwyled

-- which I'm assuming (?) can be rendered as "all of them were be-wiled" -- but I don't know what exactly "be-wiled" would have meant c. 1400, or what the nuance would have been.

[watervole]

No Middle English, but I'm pretty good at picking up nuances on meaning as I have a very wide vocabulary.

beguiled might be an option as well - but I don't know if that's a valid translation (or how well it fits with the story as it's a very long time since I read it)

[highlyeccentric]

Nono, I think that is 'women the gatekeepers of hell'. But how SERIOUSLY he means it, I'm not sure.

There's an article out there with a title like 'the failure of gawain's confession' that might go into it. Or, uh, i can send you a chunk of my PhD with quotations from a similar speech in La Mort le Roi Artu (translated) and citations to stuff on this, if you want?

[radiantfracture]

I mean, I would love to read a piece of your PhD -- it's probably getting further from the text than I can take the students (since we're actually focusing more on The Hobbit in the end...) -- but it would make me happy.

forgive my inability to refrain from babbling about my professional field

[highlyeccentric]

professional medieval it person (for my sins): you're not wrong there. BUT / OR / AND: there's a whole GENRE of lengthy, clerically-tilted, rants about the evils of women (sexy sexy women) leading men astray, on which this calls. (There's one in 'The Death of Arthur', the french La Morte Le Roi Artu - Bors delivers it to Guinevere after the poisoned apple episode. Unfortunately for this conversation it's left out of Malory's English version)

IF you take the reading of the green chapel scene that it ends in a kind of non-clerical confession - in which the GK assesses Gawain's sins and absolves him - then the misogynistic speech adds to that, especially in that it resembles the speech which one one of the many hermits gives Lancelot after his confession of lust in the Quest of the Holy Grail.

On the other hand: that reading sits uncomfortably. The GK isn't a priest, and Gawain doesn't confess - he has his sins forcibly revealed. And it's Gawain who gives the speech on the evils of women. So. It's not a perfect match. I think part of that mismatch is designed to provoke exactly the effect you point to: Gawian looks a bit... daft. All the bits of the expected Good Knight Absolved story are there, but they're in the wrong order, and Gawain doesn't do bits he should do and does do bits he shouldn't. And then the version he recounts to Arthur's court bears such limited resemblance to any of the previous interpretations! Certainly he doesn't show pious contrition, although he shows shame at some points.

Re: forgive my inability to refrain from babbling about my professional field

[radiantfracture]

Babbling? Are you kidding? This is GREAT.

So where -- in your opinion, at least -- does this somewhat-incoherence of behavior on Gawain's part come from?

Re: forgive my inability to refrain from babbling about my professional field

[highlyeccentric]

... can I say ‘homophobic panic and displacement into women?’ I have citations! (David L. Boyd)

There’s a qualification that I’d put on that, which is that the text commits to no single interpretation/ explanation- the intensely contradictory ending layers are, as I see it, designed to produce exactly what the last century of scholarship reveals: people shouting at each other, unable to resolve interpretations or pin down various signifiers of masculinity, honour, chivalry, etc to stable references that can’t be undermined.
,

Re: forgive my inability to refrain from babbling about my professional field

[radiantfracture]

can I say ‘homophobic panic and displacement into women?’

I mean, it's what I've been hoping you would say...

So you think it's wit, or play, on the part of the poet?

Re: forgive my inability to refrain from babbling about my professional field

[highlyeccentric]

"can I say ‘homophobic panic and displacement into women?’"

I mean, it's what I've been hoping you would say...

Oh, well then. Let us pretend I've dragged this out as part of my Grand Design to induce suspense.

So you think it's wit, or play, on the part of the poet?

Yes, AND. Firstly, as I often remind students, POETS SHOW OFF FOR OTHER POETS. (This explanation doesn't work as well for what's called /popular/ romance, but for SGGK? Hell yes). If something is unnecessarily complex it is ALWAYS a good idea to consider the possibility that it is so because the poet is showing off to other poets.

Secondly, uh. Okay. I have two explanations that may help here. Let's start with the student-level one first. Here's an exercise I did with my class two years ago, when I taught SGGK over five weeks (less time this year, alas):

Take fitt 4. Starting with Gawain's conversation with his guide, count the number of 'revisions' or 'reversion-ings' of the plot so far you get. Count the number of times you get A CRUCIAL NEW PIECE OF INFORMATION that causes you to completely re-organise your understanding of the previous four fitts. (People, even scholars, talk about the reveal at the green chapel like it's a single thing - it actually comes in two stages, and then is followed by gawain's misogynist reframing. I call that three versions)

Then count how many of them DIRECTLY CONTRADICT THE PREVIOUS ONE. I think the only two consecutive explanations that are in concordance are Bertilak's, and then just barely so.

(Warning, if you try this: it took about half an hour and not all the class finished it. They were working with the original text though)

That many internal contradictions is unlikely to be accidental. The week I did this was, hilariously, the same week episode 10 of Yuri On Ice aired, so I knew perfectly well that several of my students had /retrospective reveals/ on the brain, and I was really struck by the AFFECTIVE similarities myself. Like. The episode 10 reveal in YOI (it revealed the two leads had had earlier, romantically or sexually tinged, interactions that one of them had been too drunk to remember - causing a complete revision of existing assumptions about why The Blonde One had barged into The Brunette One's life and taken over his sporting career and hit on him all the time) had a massive affective impact on the fandom. Would 'it was Morgan all along' have similar affective impact on a first-time reader of SGGK? most student audiences are studying it 1-2 fitts at a time, and get lectures and read readings, so don't reach the reveal unspoiled. But what if you did?

AND YET. The difference between the two, structurally, is huge - the YOI reveal is singular, and /resolves/ questions. The SGGK reveal is fragmentary, and raises more than it answers. I used this exercise to push students toward thinking about the function of those contradictions and the possibility that the ambiguity is deliberate. The point may be not to cause you to question Gawain's honour but to cause you to question the entire system by which men determine each other's honour

(There's a lot of stuff on SGGK and it's critique of chivalric masculinity. I think the Boyd article I cited earlier touches on it - I can dig out more if you want. I think Tyson Pugh's Queering Medieval Genres goes there too, and in undergrad I was enamoured with an article about /castle design/ and military technology change - essentially that the armoured knight was becoming obsolete by the 14th century, and there's a consequent shift to chivalry as a moral ethos to uphold the ruling classes and a huge anxiety goes with it. I don't think that anxiety is NEW, really, but i'm happy to say it's operative. Apparently the castles described in SGGK are out of date and that had something to do with it. )

My second explanation, the version I'd write if I were writing on Sir Gawain, comes to kind of the same conclusion but via, uh, my ad-hoc assembled theory of literature, and via scholarship on Chrétien de Troyes. Let's skip my analogies to children's books. Let's also take it as read (see: Ad Putter, SGGK and French Literature) that SGGK is heavily influenced by 12th and 13th century French romance, including Chrétien de Troyes.

OKAY. SO. Here's a quote from my actualfax published article on Chrétien, summarising someone else's work:

The group of scholars who produced Thinking through Chrétien identify commonalities between the lyrics and the romances ascribed to Chrétien: both groups of texts, they suggest, circle around a given problem rather than seeking a way out of it, as contemporary scholastic literature would do. They call this ‘thinking on the spot’, a process analogous with running on the spot: it does not go anywhere in particular, but engages the same mental processes as does the real activity. By repetition, variation, intertextual references, and departures from chronological narrative time these texts do not prescribe solutions to recurring conundrums, but open up possibible consequences both positive and negative. The patterns of ‘thinking on the spot’ and delayed signification highlighted in Thinking through Chrétien are also addressed by Constance Brittain Bouchard, although she uses a different set of terms. Bouchard suggests that Chrétien and his contemporaries drew on the patterns of dialectic reasoning in circulation among twelfth-century intellectual circles. However, the use of dialectic in romance does not tend toward the resolution of contradictions with clear answers: attempts on the part of any character to choose a single path or elevate on single value usually prove fruitless by the end of the narrative. Instead, the hero of romance moves toward balancing [must balance?] opposing principles in productive tension, through repetition and reflexivity in both the plot and discourse of the romance.7 It is therefore not productive scholarship to seek out a single didactic stance on the part of the author. The consistent entwining, in these texts, of marriage negotiation with female friendship suggests a creative willingness on the part of the literary community in Troyes and Champagne to experiment with the horizon of possibilities pertaining to the romance genre. In the case of these romances, this experimentation rests on the inversion and extension of tropes commonly associated with marriage, friendship, and interpersonal influence.

(Article in Parergon, 33.1, 2016)

I think the same applies to SGGK, although if I wanted to advance it in an article I'd need to deal with the changes in scholastic rhetoric between the 12th and 14th centuries - i do think that even if scholastic writing got MORE straightforward, vernacular literature did not necessarily do so. I think the way that SGGK circles back on itself resembles what the Thinking Through Chretien people find in Chretien's lyrics: it's not that Only Smart People Find the Red Thread and Unravel It, it's that the text aims to /get you involved in searching for the read thread/.

When I talk about this in relation to my thesis texts I also draw in reader response theory a bit, and sometimes fan theory and transmedia theory. We KNOW medieval audiences consumed texts communally: different members of the audience would have different access to related material. Part of the artistic experience may be /making people talk about things/. Kinda like how some TV shows aim to Make Fans Shout online, you know? Or how some franchise movies are wildly different experiences if you've consumed the tie-in material /and the discussion between fans with different levels of access generates hype/.

PROBLEM: it is generally characteristic of mid-to-late 14th and 15th century english texts to _simplify_ rather than complicate their french sources. BUT. SGGK is not an straight adaptation - it's highly intertextual, but it's a prequel if it is anything. And it's fuckin' UNIQUE in its literary features, no other English Arthuriana is anywhere NEAR as convoluted, it's weird as hell and i had to put caveats every time I cited it as a comparison to my source texts.

Re: forgive my inability to refrain from babbling about my professional field

[radiantfracture]

Sorry for the delay on replying to this great dense gorgeous stuff.

I have a simplistic question. Some of your observations I find really exciting in that they seem to tie into a thread on orature / performative culture I'm hoping to weave into the class.

(Phew, sustained that metaphor all the way through. It was close.)

We KNOW medieval audiences consumed texts communally

So reader-response (or listener-response), absolutely. When the narrator says something like "but time is too tight to tell how they went" (tr. Armitage) -- this sounds very much like the joking asides to a listener a storyteller might use. (That could hold for a reader, too, of course.)

The question, right, the question -- well, do you happen to know of anything that talks about SGGK in relation to performance / oral literature, The Oral Tradition, or how these romances would be consumed collectively?

Or is SGGK more the chamber play of romances?

And this:

both groups of texts, they suggest, circle around a given problem rather than seeking a way out of it

With your discussion of the balance vs. dialectic -- that powerfully connects to the bits I have learned about the way storytellers/orators teach through story -- through inviting the listener/reader to think through a problem themselves, rather than presenting an answer.

Does that, you know, resonate?

Re: forgive my inability to refrain from babbling about my professional field

[radiantfracture]

*And also, may I quote you?

Re: forgive my inability to refrain from babbling about my professional field

[highlyeccentric]

Uh, yes! But. see my comment elsewhere - I'm not sure what level you're teaching? it probably would not be WISE to quote me as An Authority if you're teaching undergrad medieval lit courses (you can probably get away with it in first-year surveys, I legit googled virginia woolf in class this past week).

If you're teaching high school or continuing ed or something, go nuts! The link I just gave you for my article gives you my Name and Actual Standing, etc. (although oh glod, the article went to press with a [square bracket editorial note] in it??? Welp.) If you're teaching university classes, /i/ don't mind, but you might want to apply caveats.

[marycatelli]

Certainly a married woman could have a duenna. Christine de Pisan had some advice for such women in Treasure of the City of Ladies.

Also, what would have unfolded differently if he HAD known who that old woman was?

[radiantfracture]

Oo, what was the advice? I haven't read Chrstine de Pisan in a very long time. Practically since she wrote it.

Also, what would have unfolded differently if he HAD known who that old woman was?

Good question -- a good one to ask students to consider. (I am allllways thinking about what I could ask them to think about.)

What do you think?

He'd have been more wily? I'm not sure what status, as Arthur's sister but also an Evil Sorceress, Morgan would have had. Depends on the poem, maybe.

Would he have been more suspicious that she was behind it all?

But he'd still have had to keep his promise. More bitterly, perhaps, with a sense of having been manipulated into it rather than coming out of honour and duty.

Yes, I think we'd have had an altogether pissier Gawain.

[marycatelli]

Advice? This, that, and the other thing. use stories to inspire her with good examples. Do everything in your power to persuade her to remain faithful, but quit if she's determined. Other stuff. I don't remember the extent of it.

[highlyeccentric]

'Don't underrate ugly / poor / unprepossessing people' is a recurring plot trope in medieval *popular* romance (it crops up in 'high' romance too, but not often as they key trope). I think re Morgan the common comparison is the Loathly Lady tale - her description calls to mind that of the hag in Gawain and Dame Ragnell, although they turn out very differently.

[larryhammer]

it doesn't properly speaking have a title

Wait, the ms. lacks a title? Huh!

[radiantfracture]

This is my somewhat scanty understanding of the ms. situation, yes.

Medievalist drive-by

[highlyeccentric]

Titles in manuscripts are actually pretty rare! Sometimes they say 'here bygneth...' but even then that might not be the title we apply to it. Titles are usually the work of the first modern editor. Many non-fiction texts of the middle ages are known by their first few phrases; short poems usually known by their first line. Romances it's a bit more of a crap shot.

[highlyeccentric]

I promised you citations! *adds to tomorrow's to-do list*
sorry, this week ATE ME ALIVE

[radiantfracture]

Helllooooo you there inside the evil week we're going to get you out (lets down rope woven of Friday)

Seriously, it'd be awesome but don't make it another Thing that Must Be Done.

[highlyeccentric]

Ugh. I'm in post-submission slump, can barely get my brain together to do ANYTHING. But I am teaching Gawain at the moment on mondays, so this conversation is useful in that it reminds me I do care - apparently I care more if it's not during work hours or on my work computer, but hey.

Allow me to gloat: I'm teaching a course on adaptation this semester. I taught SGGK in translation (the Oxford World's Classics ed), the 15th century poem The Greene Knight, and this coming week, Malory Ortberg's 'Texts from Sir Gawain' and Kat Howard's 'The Green Knight's Wife' and I also got late permission from the author to add in a piece of fanfic. AND. I gave my students the option of doing creative presentations instead of analytical. This week a student dressed up her friend and interviewed him, in French, about his experience at the Green Chapel. On Monday, I have one student who's submitted drawings of Gawain in Disney Princess outfits, and another has written me a humourous modernisation. I LOVE MY LIFE.

[radiantfracture]

I promise I won't just endlessly reply to everything BUT your course sounds aces and I wish I could take it.

Also, Malory Ortberg!

Also, I love having people do creative assignments, though I'm still trying to figure out how to grade them. (What do you do?)

Umm if the princess drawings are shareable... :D