Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: The Role of Women Essay Example

the poet uses

women in the story to deliver this message. In contrast to reality at the

time, women in the story are given great power: Mary, when properly worshiped,

gives Gawain his power, Lady Bertilak operates alone in the bedroom and

singlehandedly taints the chevalier, and Morgan the Fay instigates the

entire plot, wielding enough power. The author is using them as a metaphor

for other anti-social forces and dangers outside the control of feudalism

and chivalry, drawing upon biblical and classical examples in his audience's

minds of where femininity is linked with subversiveness. Lady Bertilak

is clearly seen in the Biblical role of the temptress, the Eve who led

Adam astray--in Gawain, she represents the traditional female archetypes

of courtly love, disobedience, lust and death. Eve's antithesis is the

Virgin Mary, who is the only women who achieves motherhood while maintaining

her chastity; she represents spiritual love, obedience, chastity, and life

That Gawain is Mary's Knight is made clear

as he is robed for battle; the pentangle represents the five joys of Mary,

and he has "that queen's image / Etched on the inside of his armored shield"

(648-649). As long as he is solely focused on his quest for the Green Knight,

he derives his prowess and courage from his special relationship with Mary.

On his journey to look for the Green Knight he is beset by a number of

hardships, and is finally brought to the point of despair. Alone and freezing

in the forest, he prays to Mary for shelter and a place to say mass on

Christmas Eve. She answers his prayers and leads him to Bertilak's castle;

however, his arrival at Bertilak's court throws him into a totally different

world. Here, Gawain impresses courtiers of Bertilak's castle with his prowess

in the field

of courtly love rather than the feats of daring or his upholding

of his honor, traits that would draw compliments in Arthur's court. Camelot

is portrayed in its youth, long before it too is tainted by Lancelot and

courtly love; Arthur is young, "child-like (86)" and the "fine fellowship

of Camelot was in its fair prime." The analogy is obvious: Arthur's court

embodies chivalry's pure roots, where martial exploits were the primary

subject of interest, whereas Bertilak's castle represents the low point

of the degeneration the poet perceives chivalry to have undergone.

The Lady's association with courtly love

also ties this aspect of chivalry with degeneration and sin. Immediately

upon his arrival in Bertilak's court, the separation between courtly love

religion is clear: Gawain at Mass is "in serious mood the whole service

through"(940). This serious mood is immediately forgotten with the sight

of the Lady, whom he immediately focuses on at the expense of Christmas'

meaning. Instead of finding solace in the meaning of Christmas, Gawain

and the Lady "found such solace and satisfaction seated together, in the

discrete confidences of their courtly dalliance" (1011-12). When Gawain

was alone in the forest, fearing death, he could only think of one thing,

that Mary should lead him to a place to say mass on Christmas. Now, instead,

the Lady has drawn him away from Mary and made him forget the significance

of the day.

The bedroom, however, is the true testing

ground. From the first day of their bedroom sessions, the Lady subtly establishes

a bargain of her own with Gawain; one based on his prowess in courtly love.

By becoming her knight Gawain has entered into another bargain, but now

Gawain's bargain is with a woman rather than a man, and his ability to

please her with his talk is

being tested rather than a "true" chivalric

value such as loyalty, valor or truthfulness. This bargain, compared with

Gawain's exchange of winning bargain with Bertilak and beheading game Bargain

with the Green Knight, highlight the conflict of values in chivalry. In

contrast to Arthur's classic values, the Lady believes that "the choicest

thing in Chivalry, the chief thing praised, / is the loyal sport of love"

(1512-13). This points out a serious conflict; in the game of courtly love,

a man is forced outside of the traditional male hierarchies, placed on

equal footing with a woman, and not subject to the feudal loyalty system.

Above all, unlike the other contests established by men where the rules

are clearly defined, the Lady's game is ambiguous.

It is meaningful that the bedroom scenes

are juxtaposed with scenes from Bertilak's hunts. It seems as if this is

what the Gawain poet intended to suggest when he positioned the bedroom

scenes within the hunt scenes. The hunt scenes show an unambiguous world

of men and an appropriate venue for male chivalric action. The men are

outside, in vigorous, heroic, manly pursuit, training for what is really

the purpose of chivalry--the defense of the land and the service of the

Church. Clear hierarchies and rules are meticoulously explained; the lord

is in the lead, the boldest and most active, and detail is spent in each

hunting scene describing the rules of carving and distributing the days

spoils. While the hunt is going on Gawain is lying in bed, and this is

mentioned in each hunting scene to emphasize the contrast. In contrast

to the hunt scenes, Gawain's situation seems too pleasurable, bordering

on the sin of luxury and representing a private world outside of the traditional

hierarchies, rules and loyalties. The Lady is not just

suggesting certain

moral associations to the reader; she is a real temptress testing his chastity

and a real object of courtly love, testing his courtesy. As she presses

him more and more aggressively as each day passes, the conflict between

his spiritual love and courtly love becomes apparent, for he is "concerned

for his courtesy, lest he be called caitiff, But more especially for his

evil plight if he should plunge into sin, and dishonor the owner of the

house treacherously" (1773-75). While he is able to see that his chastity

is more important than his courtesy, he is still desperately trying to

balance the two. It is this inability to make a clear and unambiguous choice

between the two that leads him to accept the girdle. Despite Mary's credit

in saving him from sin, for "peril would have impended Had Mary not minded

her knight" (1768-9), Gawain still disavows her. When the Lady directly

asks him if he has another love, Gawain, instead of citing his devotion

to Mary, answers, " 'I owe my oath to none, nor wish to yet a while'"

(1790-1). His devotion has been lost in his bargaining.

This loss of devotion and faith is his

undoing for it was his faith in Mary, through the contemplation of her

five joys and her symbol on the back of her shield, which gave him his

prowess and courage. With a weakening of his faith in her, which we can

read as a weakening of his spiritual faith as well, he is prey to the Lady's

offer of another token to protect him, the girdle. In this way he becomes

guilty of the sin of cowardice, as Gawain himself names it when his failings

are revealed to him by the Green Knight. Gawain has traded

the protection

of a holy figure and his patron, the Virgin Mary, for a sorceress' protection.

Viewed in the ultra-Christian perspective of the author, Gawain is trading

divine protection for small comfort under the protection of black magic,

in effect making a deal with the devil.

In addition to this, Gawain's acceptance

of the girdle weakens the feudal system by forcing him to conceal it from

his host and in the process break his agreement with Bertilak. While he

has upheld his bargain with the Lady, and performed with spotless courtesy

in the game of courtly love, he has had to break his word and disobey the

Lord to do it, in a sense choosing Eve's disobedience over the obedience

of Mary. Here the poet most strongly criticizes the changing face of chivalry;

in his opinion the game of courtly love will ultimately break the male

social bonds which hold feudalism together. Only the traditional Christian

hierarchies, from which chivalry was born, can provide the framework with

which chivalry can survive. This is reinforced by the final exchange between

Gawain and the Green Knight where the poet shows the way he feels feudalism

should work--by banishing courtly love and women from the code of chivalry.

The men re-appropriate the power the women seemed to hold in order to support

the male social order. First we see that the outcome of the beheading game

rests on his performance of the exchange of winnings game. Second, the

Green Knight reveals that the Lady acted at his behest and thereby appropriates

the power she seemed to hold. Later in the scene, he reveals that Morgan

sent him to Arthur's castle in the guise of the Green Knight; however,

by the time he reveals this, he has already appropriated the plan for his

own

purposes. It is also possible that the exchange of winnings game, which

becomes the basis for the judgment, is his own invention since he does

not attribute this to Morgan. This enables him to then turn her plan, which

was hatched for destructive purposes, to a noble and elevating test which

serves the high moral purpose of teaching Gawain a lesson--hold true to

the ideals of the Christian doctrine as a support for the chivalric code.

Gawain, in his confession and absolution,

goes through a similar shifting of power and blame. When the Green Knight

first reveals Gawain's failure of "cowardice and covetousness" (2374),

Gawain shows deep shame in his own actions. However, upon his absolution

he shifts the blame from himself to women, becoming one more man unwittingly

duped by women and led into sin. In this way he displaces the blame and

is able to regain his power within the story by returning not as a failure

but as a fully reinstated knight of honor. As he is shifting the blame

to women, he comes to the realization that chivalry does not hold the path

to perfection and therefore discards courtesy and renounces women. He concerns

himself instead with his sins of cowardice and covetousness. He refuses

to return to the castle to make peace with Bertilak's wife and Morgan,

despite his kinship with latter, effectively banishing them and eliminating

the internal conflict generated, are eliminated. Power is back in the hands

of the appropriate authority, and Gawain's loyalties are redefined.

This shift in blame can be traced by the

girdle's changing symbolism. First, as a symbol of female sexuality, the

lady offers it as a love token under the pretense of its life saving powers.

In this way it undergoes its first transformation, from love token

to token

endowed with the magic to protect his life. When the confession and absolution

scene occur, it becomes a possession of the Green Knight, who then redefines

it as a token "of the great adventure at the Green chapel" (2399); at this

point Gawain takes it up as a symbol of his shame. Thus courtly love turns

is revealed to be dark sorcery, which to accept is shameful. However, with

its conquest comes absolution and honor.

The message being sent by the author goes

deeper still. Upon his return to the round table, the girdle is adopted

by he entire court. Although this appears to be a symbol of Camelot's solidarity,

it is also symbolic of how Arthur does not take Gawain's lesson to heart.

The poet's audience was familiar with the legend of Camelot's fall, and

knew its destiny to be degeneration at the hands of Guinevere, Morgan and

Lancelot, emblems of courtly love. The poet's allusions to Troy reinforce

the similarity between the two emblems of civilization torn apart by the

discord caused when men covet women. Women and feminine symbols are the

author's scapegoats in assigning blame for the end of the feudal economy

and way of life, a simple, tangible, recognizable enemy that he blames

for the end of an era, which, in reality, was brought to a close by sweeping

socioeconomic factors beyond the control of men.