The anonymous late fourteenth-century romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight directly draws the reader’s attention to the workings of medieval rape culture, as the lady tells Gawain
Ȝe ar stif innoghe to constrayne wyth strenkþe, ȝif yow lykez,
Ȝif any were so vilanous þat yow devaye wolde.
1 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. by J. R. R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon, 2nd edn, rev. by Norman Davis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), lines 1496–7.Assuring Gawain that he could take with force anything that is denied him, the lady conjures the spectre of the Gawain who commits rape or coercive sexual encounters in other romances, such as the Old French
First Continuation and
Fourth Continuation of
Perceval,
Lybeaus Desconus, or the
Jeaste of Sir Gawain.
2 For discussion of Gauvain and rape in the First Continuation of Perceval, see Amy N. Vines, ‘Invisible Woman: Rape as a Chivalric Necessity in Medieval Romance’, in Sexual Culture in the Literature of Medieval Britain, ed. by Amanda Hopkins, Robert Allen Rouse, and Cory James Rushton (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2014), pp. 161–80 (pp. 167–74). For the Fourth Continuation, see Cory James Rushton, ‘Gawain as Lover in Middle English Literature’, in The Erotic in the Literature of Medieval Britain, ed. by Amanda Hopkins and Cory James Rushton (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2007), pp. 27–37 (p. 30). In Lybeaus Desconus, the description of Gyngeleyn as ‘getyn […] of Sir Gawyne / By a forest syde’ recalls the location of rape in the pastourelle, The Wife of Bath’s Tale, and some real-life examples, suggesting a coercive sexual encounter: ‘Lybeaus Desconus’, in Codex Ashmole 61: A Compilation of Popular Middle English Verse, ed. by George Shuffelton, TEAMS (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2008), pp. 111–64 (lines 8–9). On the Jeaste, in which Gawain may or may not actually rape the lady, see Sarah Lindsay, ‘Chivalric Failure in The Jeaste of Sir Gawain’, Arthuriana, 21.4 (2011), 23–41 (pp. 27, 32, 34). That this is a Gawain she seems to admire supports the rape myth of women as secretly desiring rape. But the lady’s words also draw attention to the class dynamics of medieval rape culture, since, as Monica Brzezinski Potkay argues, she effectively suggests that ‘ladies will submit to him and he can rape any woman who’s not a lady’.
3 Monica Brzezinski Potkay, ‘The Violence of Courtly Exegesis in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, in Representing Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature, ed. by Elizabeth Robertson and Christine M. Rose (New York: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 97–124 (p. 105). See also David Mills, ‘An Analysis of the Temptation Scenes in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 67.4 (1968), 612–30 (pp. 623–4); J. A. Burrow, A Reading of ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’ (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965), p. 91. Gawain responds in terms that do not disagree with her but that do try to turn away from the potential for violence:
Ȝe, be God […] good is your speche,
Bot þrete is vnþryuande in þede þer I lende. (1498–9)
In affirming the truth of her words, Gawain acknowledges that he could rape the lady,
4 I therefore do not see him as straightforwardly rebuking her, as Heng argues: Geraldine Heng, ‘A Woman Wants: The Lady, Gawain, and the Forms of Seduction’, Yale Journal of Criticism, 5.3 (1992), 101–34 (p. 107). but insists that in the Arthurian court rape is considered improper, indicating a different framework for sexual ethics while not altogether erasing the violence to which the lady refers. These lines offer a characteristic glimpse of how
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight both integrates and turns away from the narrative and ethical traditions of other Gawain romances. This work problematises and expands upon the focus on rape and force, taking a capacious approach to medieval power dynamics by revealing how they can operate through precise, contextually dependent categories.
Like
The Erle of Tolous,
Sir Gawain provides a nuanced perspective on adulterous desire, as it implies that Gawain desires the lady but still resists her adulterous propositions.
5 My interpretation here departs from those who see Gawain as entirely uninterested in the lady’s advances: see, for example, Brzezinski Potkay, ‘The Violence of Courtly Exegesis’, p. 102; Mills, ‘An Analysis of the Temptation Scenes’, p. 621. These works therefore implicitly challenge the idea that non-consent occurs ‘only when there is no ambiguity in the words or actions of the victim’.
6 Leah Schwebel, ‘Chaucer and the Fantasy of Retroactive Consent’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 44 (2022), ‘Colloquium: Historicizing Consent’, ed. by Harris and Somerset, 337–45 (p. 344). Gawain is clearly keen to make the lady’s acquaintance when he first sees her: after a description of her beauty, in which we are told she is ‘wener þen Wenore, as þe wyȝe þoȝt’ (945), Gawain greets the two ladies, and ‘þe loueloker he lappez a lyttel in armez’, then ‘askez / To be her seruaunt’ (973–6). They also enjoy each other’s company at the feast:
Such comfort of her compaynye caȝten togeder
Þurȝ her dere dalyaunce of her derne wordez,
Wyth clene cortays carp closed fro fylþe,
Þat hor play watz passande vche prynce gomen. (1011–14)
Of course, even here the
Gawain-poet is careful to distinguish between enjoyment of each other’s company and adulterous desire: their conversation is ‘clene cortays carp closed fro fylþe’. But Gawain’s admiration of the lady’s beauty and enjoyment of her company suggest he does feel desire for her, if desire that is moderated by restraint, as with Beulybon and Barnard in
The Erle of Tolous.
7 Mann similarly argues for the focus on Gawain controlling his desires: Jill Mann, ‘Courtly Aesthetics and Courtly Ethics in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, in Life in Words: Essays on Chaucer, the Gawain-Poet, and Malory, ed. by Mark David Rasmussen (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), pp. 187–220 (p. 217). Sir Gawain invites empathy for Gawain in part by positioning his struggle to avoid the lady’s temptation as one to which the reader is given intimate access, in contrast to our lack of access to the lady’s thoughts. This focus on Gawain as an exemplary though imperfect figure who experiences temptation aligns with his role in the poem’s much-debated ending as a knight who accepts his flaws yet is still deemed ‘on þe fautlest freke þat euer on fote ȝede’ (2363).
This careful balance between desire and restraint is developed by the shift in their relationship that seems to occur when they move from the hall to the chamber. Gawain seems particularly concerned about their relationship in the chamber scenes, drawing attention to the difference between their joyful conversation in the hall, where they are watched by others, and the tension of the scenes that take place (apparently) without others watching. When the lady enters Gawain’s chamber, Gawain ‘schamed’ (1189), and he pretends to sleep while he
Compast in his concience to quat þat cace myȝt
Meue oþer amount – to meruayle hym þoȝt.
8 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, lines 1196–7. For discussion of the ethical importance of this pretence at sleep, see Megan G. Leitch, Sleep and its spaces in Middle English literature: Emotions, ethics, dreams (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021), pp. 131–4.Gawain’s response indicates the unusual and improper nature of the lady’s actions: her intrusion into the chamber marks a stage of their relationship with which Gawain is less comfortable, indicating his unwillingness to overstep the boundary of adulterous desire, and revealing the way in which a relationship might differ (or appear to differ) depending on its physical location in particular spaces.
9 See further Megan G. Leitch, ‘Enter the Bedroom: Managing Space for the Erotic in Middle English Romance’, in Sexual Culture in the Literature of Medieval Britain, pp. 39–53 (pp. 45, 47). Although the public/private dichotomy is a post-medieval way of thinking, relative senses of public and private still existed in the Middle Ages, particularly in terms of how a space was used.
10 See Shannon McSheffrey, ‘Place, Space, and Situation: Public and Private in the Making of Marriage in Late-Medieval London’, Speculum, 79.4 (2004), 960–90 (pp. 961, 977). While the late medieval chamber was not necessarily a ‘private’ place, Hollie Morgan notes that ‘the chamber in literary texts is almost always private, and for the sole use of the protagonists’, however different this was from the everyday reality for most medieval people.
11 Hollie L. S. Morgan, Beds and Chambers in Late Medieval England: Readings, Representations and Realities (York: York Medieval Press, 2017), p. 41. Gawain’s concern about spending time with the lady in a relatively private place reveals the ways in which desire and control are differently inflected according to their precise context, perhaps reflecting back on the coercive dynamics of the chamber scenes in the accused queen romances.
The power balance between Gawain and the lady is also affected by the social dynamics of the space they inhabit, in which Gawain is a guest and the lady a host or hostess, adding to her ‘implicit right to be dominant within the chamber’.
12 Ibid., p. 219. While Ad Putter discusses the importance of hospitality in this poem and earlier French romances, he concentrates primarily on why the audiences for these works might have been interested in the behaviours and dangers associated with hospitality; here, I address how this affects our interpretation of the seduction scenes.
13 Ad Putter, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and French Arthurian Romance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 51–99. The role of a female host is a complex and ambiguous one, as Judith Still notes, observing that women operate more often as hostesses, who ‘impl[y] hospitality offered by the master of the house’, acting only as ‘an intermediary’.
14 Judith Still, Derrida and Hospitality: Theory and Practice (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), p. 21. In this romance, part of the problem Gawain faces is the ambiguity as to whether the lady acts as an extension of her husband’s hospitality or whether she becomes a host in her own right within the confines of the chamber, a problem that further makes use of the ambiguous space of the chamber as both ‘belong[ing] to the head of the household’ and as a location in which women were able to exert particular agency.
15 Morgan, Beds and Chambers, p. 219. Gawain’s sense of tension between his loyalty to Bertilak and reluctance to offend the lady seems to suggest that he reads her as his host within the chamber, but Bertilak’s climactic revelation reimposes the role of hostess rather than host upon his wife by suggesting that she was acting on his orders after all. Regardless of this precise role, as a host or hostess the lady holds a certain power over Gawain, which may be aligned or in tension with her husband’s influence. Still argues that it is an ‘imbalance of power that creates the need for hospitality in the first place’, while Jacques Derrida notes that ‘hospitality’ derives from a combination of
hostis (stranger/enemy) and
potis (to have mastery or power), indicating that the potential for violence is inherent within hospitality.
16 Still, Derrida and Hospitality, p. 13; Jacques Derrida, ‘Hostipitality’, in Acts of Religion, ed. & trans. by Gil Anidjar (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 356–420 (pp. 401–2, 361–2). See also Emile Benveniste, ‘Hospitality’, in Indo-European Language and Society, trans. by Elizabeth Palmer (London: Faber & Faber, 1973), pp. 71–83, whose etymology Derrida is following. For a discussion of these aspects of hospitality in Sir Gawain, see Putter, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and French Arthurian Romance, pp. 52–3, 76–99. Gawain’s dependency upon Bertilak and his wife is emphasised by the circumstances in which he arrives at the castle, ‘ner slayn wyth þe slete’ (729) and praying for ‘sum herber þer heȝly I myȝt here masse’ (755). The balance of knowledge and power between these figures is also unequal: Gawain relies on Bertilak’s assistance to find the Green Chapel, and while he does not even know his host’s name, Bertilak and his court know Gawain’s identity and purpose.
17 See lines 901–9. Derrida addresses the significance of names in hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle and Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality, trans. by Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), pp. 27–9. The roles of stranger and host are almost reversed, as Bertilak and his wife seem the strange and unknown figures to the reader and potentially to Gawain, while Gawain is all too well known to them and, of course, is the focal point of the reader’s knowledge.
18 However, their knowledge of Gawain may be somewhat misleading. See Carolyne Larrington, ‘English Chivalry and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, in A Companion to Arthurian Literature, ed. by Helen Fulton (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), pp. 264–76 (pp. 269–70). In keeping with this imbalance of knowledge, Bertilak controls and directs their relationship, suggesting the exchange of winnings and their respective roles within it: this seems to approach the need to ‘act with “excess,” make an absolute gift of his property’ seen as characteristic of the impossibility of unconditional hospitality in modern philosophy.
19 Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida, ed. by John D. Caputo (New York: Fordham University Press, 2021), p. 111. But this imbalance of power also highlights Gawain’s dependency on and vulnerability to Bertilak and his wife. His situation as the guest of Bertilak and his wife in some ways recalls that of Horn, Amis, and Bevis, who depend on the hospitality of another court, providing a suggestive resonance that hints at Gawain’s potential vulnerability in these scenes.
Gawain’s desire neither to ‘lach þer hir luf, oþer lodly refuse’ (1772) may recall the accused queen narratives and
The Franklin’s Tale with its emphasis on not causing offence. However, Gawain’s concern seems to differ from the women’s, as while the outcome of the queens’ refusal highlights the dangers of any rejection whatsoever, Gawain’s wish not to appear ‘lodly’ seems to reflect a concern with how the lady might perceive him. Although Putter suggests ‘the face Gawain is trying to save […] is not his own, but the Lady’s’, it is ‘his cortaysye’ for which Gawain ‘cared’ (1773), and he is preoccupied with whether or not he is living up to his reputation as Gawain throughout these scenes and in the poem more widely.
20 Putter, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and French Arthurian Romance, p. 120. There remains, then, an element of gendered power structuring the scene and its anxieties: Gawain is not so concerned as to truly fear retribution if he rejects the lady, and his wish not to offend her is perhaps an act of generosity rather than self-preservation. Yet this is not the only power dynamic shaping the scene, as the lady’s role as host/hostess enables her to exert pressure and coercion upon Gawain; that her hospitable role is crucial to this is borne out by the parallels Putter identifies in other romances where a knight is propositioned by a host or hostess figure.
21 Ibid., pp. 117–18, 123–6.It is not difficult to identify elements of coercion in the lady’s advances: although she tells Gawain that he could rape her if he wanted to and insists ‘me behouez of fyne force / Your seruaunt be’, it is she who jokingly threatens to ‘bynde yow in your bedde’ and claims to have ‘kaȝt’ him.
22 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, lines 1239–40, 1211, 1225. See Brzezinski Potkay on the connection of ‘force’ with terms for rape: ‘The Violence of Courtly Exegesis’, pp. 106–7. Moreover, that she enters his chamber while he is sleeping in the first and third seduction scenes may obliquely echo perhaps the most famous classical narrative that intertwines rape and hospitality, the rape of Lucretia, in which Tarquin is entertained by her as a guest and enters her chamber at night to rape her.
23 See the discussion of Lucretia in Saunders, Rape and Ravishment, pp. 152–77. I do not want to conflate Lucretia’s experience with Gawain’s: the violence to which Lucretia is subjected is very different to the flirtation and potential sin that Gawain must negotiate (sin being the frame of reference Gawain brings, and medieval Christian readers probably would have brought, to this episode). I do not agree with Brzezinski Potkay that ‘seduction slides into rape’; rather, my more moderate proposition is that we should recognise that Gawain is in a situation in which the lady is capable of coercing him.
24 Brzezinski Potkay, ‘The Violence of Courtly Exegesis’, p. 108. There has tended to be a perception of the lady’s actions as comic amongst critics who have focused primarily on the gender dynamics of their exchange, reflecting a broader, enduring stereotype that ‘sexual violence against men is funny’.
25 Tanaka Mhishi, Sons and Others: On Loving Male Survivors (n.p.: 404 Ink, 2022), p. 2. Judith Weiss, for example, refers to Gawain’s unease with the lady entering his chamber as ‘a delightful moment of comic surprise’, noting that ‘for hundreds of years romances and novels have […] portrayed women who take the initiative in courtship comically and critically’.
26 Judith Weiss, ‘The wooing woman in Anglo-Norman romance’, in Romance in Medieval England, pp. 149–61 (p. 149). See also Susan Signe Morrison, ‘The Body: Unstable, Gendered, Theorized’, in A Cultural History of Comedy in the Middle Ages, ed. by Martha Bayless (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), pp. 99–119 (pp. 111–13); Joseph E. Gallagher, ‘“Trawþe” and “luf-talkyng” in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 78.4 (1977), 362–76 (pp. 369–72); Mills, ‘An Analysis of the Temptation Scenes’, pp. 612–13; Burrow, A Reading of ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, p. 78. Mann offers a view of humour coupled with seriousness more similar to my own: ‘Sir Gawain and the Romance Hero’, in Life in Words, pp. 221–34 (p. 228). Yet the first scene in which the lady enters the chamber may carry something of horror in it, as well as the shift to social comedy in Gawain’s awkward response to her unexpected entry. The half-heard sound of ‘a littel dyn at his dor’ (1183) that awakens Gawain and the instinctive urge to see what the noise might be, as ‘a corner of þe cortyn he caȝt vp a lyttel’ (1185), are a recognisably alarming situation in which to wake up.
27 See further Jordi Sánchez-Martí on this sonic moment and its ‘reality effect’: ‘Noise, Sound and Silence in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, in Medieval Romance, Arthurian Literature: Essays in Honour of Elizabeth Archibald, ed. by A. S. G. Edwards (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2021), pp. 111–26 (pp. 123–6). While the lady’s entrance is a comic anti-climax, the subtle predatory undertones of her entry may be reflected in the interlaced hunting scenes, which seem to position Gawain as hunted and the lady as a hunter.
28 See, for example, the discussion of this parallel (and its limits) in Burrow, A Reading of ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, pp. 86–7, 98–9; Henry L. Savage, ‘The Significance of the Hunting Scenes in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 27.1 (1928), 1–15. There are elements of comedy in the seduction scenes, to be sure, but they may seem less comic and more threatening when we take into account the vulnerable position of Gawain as a guest in this household. The attendant potential for violence that accompanies hospitality is already a theme of the poem through the beheading game and the description of the hunt, and the lady’s actions may work with these threads to suggest a more dangerous aspect to her seduction. This is compounded by Bertilak’s later reinterpretation of the power dynamics behind the scenes in the chamber, when he claims that it was he who ‘wroȝt’ his wife’s wooing (2361), suggesting a conspiracy between wife and husband, hostess and host, which reveals the extent of their control over the situation. Regardless of how we interpret the ending, Bertilak’s final revelations do seem to return to and compound the imbalance of power between host and guest, indicating the issues of volition, consent, and will at play in this dynamic. In this light,
Sir Gawain may further illustrate the range of people who are the targets of sexual coercion in medieval romance. This romance draws attention to the specific contexts in which gendered power dynamics can be reconfigured through alternative systems of power such as hospitality, providing a more capacious view of who was affected by medieval rape culture, as victim-survivors or perpetrators.