Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (SGGK) is a 14th Century chivalric Romance poem written in Middle English. It is best known for the challenge between the two eponymous characters: at Christmas time in King Arthur’s court a terrible green knight appears and asks anyone to strike him a blow with the condition that he may return it. Thinking himself a big man, Gawain severs the Green Knight’s head from his shoulders, and the court is horrified when the knight merely picks up his severed head and leaves, calling on Gawain to keep his end of the bargain by seeking him out in a year’s time. It’s a trope that is seen in a few early Romances, a challenge of courage that seems insurmountable yet is very rarely fatal. There is however an undercurrent of gender subversion and homosexual vs homosocial desire in SGGK that marks out its position at the tail end of chivalric Romance.
It is first important to consider chivalric homosocial culture, as it was more open to men showing affection, being emotionally close, even kissing as part of a culture of brotherhood and support, than many male spaces today. Indeed I know a man who blanches at hugging his own son, as he considers it feminine to show affection. Toxic masculinity prevents heterosexual men from being emotionally intimate with each other. Which of us does not remember every young man they knew saying ‘no homo’ after every interaction they had in 2011? The kissing and camaraderie in SGGK is not necessarily queer, but owing to the growing concerns over homosexuality in the Church at the time, I would argue it is certainly implicitly queer in parts of the poem.
The most explicitly homosocial or potentially homoerotic part of the poem is the exchanging of gifts motif between Gawain and Lord Bertilak (who we later discover is the Green Knight), in which Gawain promises to give Bertilak whatever he has received during his stay in exchange for whatever Bertilak has won on his hunt. Each of the three days Gawain stays in Bertilak’s castle, the lord’s wife tries to seduce him, though he manages to only take kisses (and latterly a magic girdle which he keeps hidden). At the end of each day he must give these kisses to Bertilak, the implication of her attempts at seduction being that if Gawain had given in to them, he would have had to perform the same sexual acts with his host. The whole thing does seem a little bit like a badly contrived set up for a threesome, but there we are.
It would be reasonable to think that most of the discourse around the homoeroticism present within the text is focused on this exchange; however, it is considered a show of homosocial norms by most. Though the kisses between the two are given apparent ‘savour’ – there is an underlying desire, one which Bertilak certainly comments upon, Carolyn Dinshaw argues that the ‘unintelligibility’ of the kiss between Gawain and Bertilak contrasts with the overt sexuality of the kisses between Gawain and the Lady: the heterosexual kiss has potential for sex within the poem, where the homosexual one doesn’t. I personally think that the potential for sex would be reduced only by social norms of the time, the poet having to reign in explicit sexual connotations between same sex couples due to contemporary views of homosexuality as sinful.
It is the description of the Green Knight that garners much of the discussion of queer desire in the text. Richard Zeikowitz argues that the Green Knight is a disruption of homosociality, a threat through his attractiveness: the narrator dwells on descriptions of the Green Knight, not only as a marvellous giant, as something out of the ordinary, but something ‘fitly formed’ and attractive, and dressed pleasingly. Indeed, upon our first encounter with the knight the narrator spends multiple stanzas detailing the clothes he wears, his weapons, his looks, almost obsessively. No woman is described with the same attention, though Bertilak is given a similar once over by Gawain himself. Make of that what you will.
There is also gender subversion in the text. Gail Ashton argues the queerness present in SGGK is due to Morgan Le Faye, a powerful yet unattractive woman, as outside heterosexual and homosocial norms of the time, as a catalyst for the Green Knight’s transformation. Ashton asserts Morgan is a sort of queer puppeteer of the plot, subverting gender expectations of herself and orchestrating the gender subversion of others. Morgan’s orchestration of the narrative purely to frighten Guinevere could also be read as a queer desire for the other woman’s attention.
The Green Knight is seen as a castrated male figure who instead of perishing, thrives. Dinshaw argues that Gawain’s role in the exchange of gifts motif is symbolically that of a woman: he is the passive recipient of the Lady’s desires, as well as the female role in kissing Bertilak. Gawain’s uneasy seduction is contrasted in the poem with the hunting of does, which are reduced to the role of passive flesh, and portioned up.
David Boyd also picks up on the subversion of Gawain’s gender, not only as the prey of the Lady, but as a potentially passive recipient of the Lord, a reasonably well known trope for the medieval reader: the lecherous old lord using his wife to seduce young men for his own pleasure. Which in my view, somewhat discounts Dinshaw’s unintelligible kiss – readers would have associated it with this trope. Boyd argues that the whole poem is set up as a defence of ever more outdated chivalric values, which the narrator believes have been undermined by queer desire, ultimately the fault of the machinations of women. Morgan creates a situation in which homosexual desire almost wins out over heteronormitivity, and therefore undermines the heroic figure of Gawain with shame and self doubt.
I believe it is worth noting that desire in SGGK is seen through the lens of others, not Gawain’s. We are told the desire of the Lady, of Bertilak, of Morgan, but not of Gawain: he brushes off attempts of seduction from both Bertilak and the Lady. The only thing he accepts eagerly is the girdle which might protect his life. Perhaps Gawain then is an asexual character, more interested in honour and adventure than in sex. Indeed, though throughout Arthurian literature he has various lovers, and multiple children, he is one of the knights not tied specifically to a wife. Malory paints him as a ‘Maiden’s Knight’, a champion of all women as declared by Guinevere herself, perhaps as he generally seems to desire no wife he is seen a champion without the ulterior motive of sex.
Gawain’s shame and awkwardness at the end of the poem is shrugged off by the Green Knight and by Arthur’s court. He wears the girdle as a show of his Christian frailty, his guilt at concealing it from his host. But everyone else sees it as a sign of his courage and honour, as a symbol of an interesting adventure. Perhaps it is something else that puts Gawain at unease: his desire for another man, another man’s wife, or indeed possibly his lack of desire at all in a world that even today, defines men by their ability to want.
Bibliography
- I used Jessie Weston’s translation of the text, available here: https://www.yorku.ca/inpar/sggk_weston.pdf
- The Perverse Dynamics of Gawain and the Green Knight – Gail Ashton
- A Kiss Is Just a Kiss: Heterosexuality and Its Consolations in Sir Gawain and the GreenKnight –Carolyn Dinshaw
- The Enigmatic Character of Sir Gawain: Chivalry and the Heroic Knight in the Arthurian Tradition – Amy Katherine Carr
- Covert Operations: the Medieval Uses of Secrecy – Karma Lochrie
- Sodomy, Misogyny, and Displacement: Occluding Queer Desire in “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight – David L Boyd
Gawain, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight on Wikipedia
The Witching Hour 