Heide Estes

Monmouth University

   Gawain's travels in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight suggest a world in which home--i.e., Camelot--is "normal," while away--the opposing castle of Hautdesert where Gawain perforce spends his Christmas vacation--is "other," characterized by unfamiliarity, dislocation, perversity. And in fact the atmosphere at Hautdesert appears somewhat peculiar, with various challenges to "normal" sexual identity, and with permutations of physical intimacy, or at least the suggestion of such intimacy, that are, to say the least, surprising. The typical journey of medieval romance juxtaposes a "real" world where things and people behave according to expectation with a "magical" world in which the usual rules are suspended. According to this paradigm, we might expect that this poem would place Hautdesert outside the bounds of tradition, separated by its difference from the expectations that govern Camelot and the remainder of the Arthurian world.

   However, Gawain's journey away from Camelot and back is framed by references, in the first and last stanzas, to the journeys into exile of Aeneas and of Brutus, the legendary founder of Britain, that complicate this apparent opposition. As this paper will argue, this framework complicates the poem's presentation of gender and sexuality. Rather than a clear opposition between, say, marital sexuality and everything else, we find a situation in which potentially adulterous acts and kisses among men are vested with varied--and shifting--values. The poem uses references to the (imagined) British past to complicate any simple reading of the tale it tells in terms of sexual morality or transgression.1

   Sir Gawain and the Green Knight opens with a summary of the events leading from the fall of Troy to the establishment of Britain:

   In thus contextualizating the action of the poem, the Gawain-poet subtly challenges the centrality of Camelot. The poet zooms in from Troy to Rome and finally to England, thus placing Arthur (named in the second stanza) and Camelot (introduced in the third) quite literally at the

   In his movement inward, however, the poet simultaneously places Camelot at the center of the Arthurian world, the place where Arthur's retinue has converged for the Christmas season. When the Green Knight intrudes upon Arthur's joyous festival, he at first appears an apparition from beyond reality. However, in bidding Gawain seek him out a year hence he makes clear that his home is, if far from Camelot, still within the bounds of the real world in which Arthur and his knights live and travel. Gawain's long journey in search of the Green Chapel will emphasize the marginality of that place to Arthur's world. However, the narrative once again challenges that spatial positioning: the action at Hautdesert and the nearby Green Chapel occupy 67 of the poem's 101 stanzas, or fully two thirds of the poem. Moreover, the action at Hautdesert is enclosed like a Matrioschka doll by Gawain's journey there and back, in turn enclosed by action at Camelot, in turn enclosed by references to Brutus, in turn enclosed by references to Troy. Camelot is, in other words, at once placed within the center of the poem, yet shunted to its margins, in ways textual, narratological, and cartographical, thus refusing to allow any conclusive understanding of its spatial significance.

   The poem's framing references to Brutus, and their significance, further complicate attempts to assign meaning to the Arthurian world and to Gawain's travels within that world. If the domain of the Green Knight is not an unreal counterpart to the real world of Camelot, it at least appears that Gawain travels from normativity to perversity and back. But Gawain's out-and-back journey is framed by reference to Brutus, the descendant of Aeneas who was, according to legend, founder of England and ancestor of Arthur. That this founding legend is not unambiguously glorifying is suggested by the reference in the first stanza to treason, an allusion that has puzzled scholars of the poem. A look at Layamon's Brut, the first English version of this particular English foundational myth, illuminates this puzzle but further problematizes the character of Brutus and the nature of the land that claims him as its founder. These questions ultimately cast a shadow over Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

   Layamon's poem begins, like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, with the fall of Troy through treachery, followed by a brief account of Aeneas's odyssey to Rome and the tale of his great-grandson, Brutus, who, the poet explains, left Rome, brought his people to England, and named the new nation for himself:

   The narrative sequence in this passage--the seige of Troy, the reference to treachery, and the escape of Aeneas to become the conquerer of new lands--mirrors precisely the sequence in the opening stanza of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Moreover, while Brut's structure is primarily chronological, and in fact chronicle-like, the longest single section of Layamon's narrative (nearly 5,000 of 16,000 lines, concluding near the end of the poem) deals with the birth, life and death of Arthur. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is, of course, likewise devoted primarily to a tale of the Arthurian court. The latter poem is far more intricately structured than Brut, and, unlike Brut, concludes with an enveloping reinvocation of Brut and Troy. However, the final scene in Brut is the return of the sons of King Cadwallader to England, where they gather their people--whose identity, it is emphasized, is British--for a journey to Wales. This return journey provides a sort of narrative closure for the poem echoed, though far more formally, by Gawain's return journey to Camelot and the Gawain-poet's final framing re-invocation of Brut and Troy.

   However, Layamon's explanation of Brutus's departure from Rome to seek out a new nation places the situation in less than optimal light. Layamon explains that Brutus was forced to leave Rome and seek a new home elsewhere because he inadvertently killed his own father on a hunting expedition. The father, in trying to help the son make a kill from a herd of deer, drove them toward him:

   The celebrated hero-founder of Britain is an exiled parricide, banished to the margins of his own world just as he is relegated to the narratological margins of both Brut and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In framing the poem within this context, the Gawain-poet complicates the significance of categories of margin and center and frustrates efforts to read the poem in terms of simple opposition.

   Camelot and Hautdesert, for instance, appear opposed spaces, balanced in the weight of their significance. Some possible interpretive pairs assignable to the two spaces might be margin/center; normative/perverse; Christian/pagan; masculine/feminine; real/faery. However, there are three locations, not two: Gawain leaves Camelot and stumbles across Hautdesert while searching for the Green Chapel. Moreover, Brutus's journey is a one-way flight into exile around the Mediterranean and across Europe, rather than a round trip with an ending at a familiar home. Rather than serving expected meanings, then, the layers of travel narrative serve to confuse and, perhaps, subvert expectations. The framing of Gawain's journey by the journey of Brutus to Britain unbalances the apparently neat pairing of the two worlds of Camelot and Hautdesert.

   Moreover, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight opens with mention of treason, in line four of the stanza quoted above. Who is the traitor? Tolkien and Gordon, who insert the colon at the end of line four (the manuscript has no punctuation at that point),5 read the traitor as Aeneas, named in the next line, and cite medieval tradition as the reason for doing so.6 Although Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron replace the colon with a period, suggesting a transition from an idea about treason to a different idea involving Aeneas, they follow Tolkien's and Gordon's reading, noting that medieval tradition also makes Gawain a descendant of Aeneas.7 However,

   The reference to treason in the prologue-like opening to Brut gives context to an additional occurrence of adulterous treason which occurs later in the same poem, when Mordred, nephew to Arthur, marries Queen Guinevere and declares himself king of Arthur's realm. This occurs while Arthur is in Rome; a thegn reports what has occurred in Britain in his absence:

   Mordred's usurpation of the throne and incestuous marriage to Guinevere take place in Camelot, while Arthur is far away. In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Camelot is a location of celebration and apparent peace, but it will

   Hautdesert, however, appears exempt from this pattern of disruption. Is the Lady's pursuit of Gawain, and the adultery implied by that pursuit, threatened by the same doom that hangs over Camelot, over Troy, even over Sodom and Gomorrah, as the Gawain-poet describes it in Cleanness?8 Gawain certainly sees it this way, when he mentions Adam and Eve, Samson and Delilah, and David and Bathsheba as couples doomed by women. On the other hand, several scholars have interpreted the events at Hautdesert as challenging sexual norms only to reestablish "sweet heteronormativity."9 Trying to unravel the skein of associations, the twisted threads of connection, involved with the events and the characters at Hautdesert can easily cause a headache.10 They cannot be unraveled any more than the lines of a carpet page can be pulled straight--only followed under and over, around and around, leading to profound vertiginousness and, given sufficient stamina, back to the beginning. Where, then, does the path beginning with Paris's treasonous seduction of Helen at Troy lead us at Hautdesert? To a fork in the road, apparently, a fork leading in one direction to Gawain's humorless assessment of the situation and in the other direction to Bertilak's (or is the Green Knight's?) winking chuckle. Bertilak reads Brut; Gawain does not.

   Sexual transgression has been the focus of a number of recent interesting studies of the poem. A particularly noticeable blurring of traditional gender roles is inscribed in the central sequence of hunts which occur while Gawain is resting at Hautdesert awaiting his re-encounter with the Green Knight. Bertilak, lord of the castle, informs Gawain on the evening of his arrival that he plans to go hunting the following day, but suggests that since Gawain has been traveling, he remain in the castle and rest, and "to mete wende / When ye wyl, wyth my wyf, þat wyth yow schal sitte" ("go to meals, when you will, with my wife, who will sit with you, " 1007-8). Moreover, Bertilak proposes a game: whatever he wins in the forest will be exchanged for whatever Gawain wins inside the castle.

   As Bertilak sets off for his hunt on the following morning, the poet makes a point of specifying the fact that the deer to be hunted are female, not male, in comparison to Brut, in which the hunters (Brutus and his father) as well as the hunted (deer) are male. In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, male hunters pursue female deer while, within the walls of the Bertilak's castle, Gawain awakes naked in bed in the morning to find Bertilak's wife creeping into his room and climbing into his bed. She immediately begins her attempt to seduce him, telling him "Ye ar welcum to my cors, / Yowre awen won to wale" ("you are welcome to my body, to pursue your own course of action, " 1237-38). She tests Gawain's verbal dexterity, his resistance to her sexual demands, and his faith to his promise to her husband to return whatever he "wins" during his days in the castle in exchange for the fruits of his hunt out of doors. As Sheila Fisher has observed, the hunt within the walls mirrors the one outside, while the lady's bold pursuit of Gawain inverts traditional expectations of gender behavior.11

   Moreover, the terms of Bertilak's "game" with Gawain open the door to the possibility of intimacy between the two men: each day, Gawain has to return his winnings to the lord. In fact, at the end of each day, Gawain "returns" to Bertilak the kisses he has received from the lady; on the third day, he gives Bertilak three kisses "[a]s sauerly and sadly as he him sette couthe" ("with as much relish and as vigorously as he could plant them," 1937). The suggestion, as Fisher has argued, is that if he had sex with the lady, he would have to have sex with the lord to even the score. Fisher concludes that the poem "raises the possibility" of physical intimacy between the two men but "then swerves in order to forefront not the homosexual, but the homosocial."12 In a nuanced essay further exploring the possibility of erotic interplay between Gawain and Bertilak, Carolyn Dinshaw considers the heterosexually dominant ordering of the world in contemporary documents ranging from the opening to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales to the other poems attributed to the Gawain-poet, with a detour through Augustine's thought. Dinshaw argues, as does Fisher, that the poem produces the possibility of "deviant sexuality"13 in order to stage its "containment."14 Dinshaw herself swerves at the last minute from this conclusion, however, suggesting that "queering" the text in current critical discourse is a modern moment in the "history of various strategies deployed to resist that containment. . . . When, after all, is a kiss ever just a kiss?"15

   However, the use of history in the poem functions to challenge and interrogate "normative heterosexuality."16 I have already proposed the possibility that the "traitor" of the poem's opening stanza is neither Aeneas nor Antenor, but the adulterous Paris of the prologue to Brut, which would in turn suggest the adultery of Mordred and Guinevere later in that poem. And in fact the

   Yet it is not sex with the lady per se that would be deadly, in the logic of the poem, but refusal of subsequent sex with the man. Sex with the lady implies death for Gawain unless it is followed by sex with the man. The joke, then, is that intimacy between the two men would "cure" the fault of adultery. Ultimately, Gawain is punished by the Green Knight/Bertilak, not for his initial flirtation or subsequent sexual play with the lady, and not for accepting her gift of the green girdle--sexually charged as it is19-- but for keeping that gift from the lord, from violating the terms of the game. Hautdesert is, it appears, different after all from Camelot and Troy. Sexual expression, as long as it occurs in accordance with the rules of the game, is without violent punishment, for the rules here are different rules than those that govern either Camelot or Troy.

   Gawain's interpretation of events is that he has failed miserably, and he vows to wear the green girdle forever in order to be constantly reminded of his own downfall. His rant against the women of the poem has been seen as a stain on his chivalry, as it may be, but it also makes explicit within the poem the problematic status of adulterous (hetero)sexuality, a theme only hinted at heretofore. When Gawain comes to understand that his punishment--a single nick along his neck--has to do with his gift from the lady, he begins to make sense of the events of the preceding days in terms of adulterous sexuality, and so he invokes a series of heterosexual couples. It would appear that the poet is suggesting a critique of all sexuality, whether between men and women or between men and men, in favor of the chastity demanded of servants of the Church.

   However, the fact that Gawain's rant is not the poem's final answer is suggested by its placement--after Bertilak has told him that he himself instigated his wife's attempts to seduce Gawain, but before Bertilak tells him, further, that Morgan le Fay is behind his entire adventure. His rant is misinformed, misplaced, even uninformed. It takes too seriously his

    The games of the poem are, of course, interrelated and complicated, and reach outside the poem back once again to Layamon and Brut. The poet uses the word "game" with numerous denotations to link the two pursuits, of wild game and of Gawain, to one another, and also to their various contexts within the poem: the playful games of the Christmas season, the sinister game of the beheading exchange, and the framing references to Brutus. As feasting begins at Camelot, the Green Knight enters and requests "a Crystemas gomen" ("a Christmas game," 283): the exchange of one axe stroke for another. The same phrase (Christmas game) is used to refer to the less sinister games that characterize the season at Camelot (l. 495); at Hautdesert, the lords and ladies are similarly engaged in "gomnez in halle" (l. 989).

   At Hautdesert, the lord Bertilak proposes not a game, but a "forwarde" ("covenant," 1105) that the two men should swap winnings for the coming three days, as Bertilak goes hunting while Gawain remains within the castle to rest. However, he will refer indirectly to the bargain as a game later in its course, calling Gawain "godly in gomen" ("gracious in game," 1376). The term "game" recurs twice in quick succession on the first day of this exchange, once indoors and once out, linking the two hunts. After Gawain extricates himself from the lady's seduction by granting her a kiss, they "made myry al day, til the mone rysed, / with game" ("made merry all day, until the moon rose, with game, " 1313-14). Five lines later the poet brings us back to the outdoor scene of Bertilak's hunt with this transition: "And ay þe lorde of þe londe is lent on his gamnes, / To hunt in holtez and heþe at hyndez barayne" ("And always the lord of the land is occupied in his games, to hunt the barren hinds in wood and heath," 1319-20). The poet uses "game" to refer to flirtation as well as hunting at several other points in the poem, reinforcing this linkage.

   A particularly multivalent scene occurs at the end of the second day's hunt, when Bertilak presents Gawain with the head of the hog he has killed on that day's hunt. The semantic resonance of the lord's thegns who "hondled… the hoge head" ("handled… the huge head," 1633) with the Green Knight, who held up his own "hede in his honde" (444) strengthens the link between the two scenes, clarifying the fact that the entire poem revolves around a hunt of one sort or another. Like the first day's deer hunt, moreover, this passage is linked to the framing references to Brutus through Bertilak's comment to Gawain about the hog's head: "þis gomen is your awen" ("this game

   The question of who is hunting whom, and how this engages gender dynamics, is actually more complicated, however. We learn at the end of the poem--when Gawain does--that in fact not the lady, but in fact Bertilak himself--who has just been revealed as one and the same as the Green Knight--has been hunting him--but doing so at Morgan le Fay's behest. Moreover, as the Green Knight explains to Gawain (2452-62), Morgan has staged this entire incident in order to harass Guinevere. Ultimately, it appears that all of these machinations have been put into play so that a woman can hunt a woman.20 And inversely, Gawain has requested the contest with the Green Knight in order to protect Arthur, who has had to agree to it in default because of the stunned silence of all the knights in his court. The game itself is instigated by Morgan le Fay, but seems to have been given a different set of meanings by the Green Knight, in the additional game he has proposed to Gawain at Hautdesert.

   The multiple connotations of the word "game" in the poem point to the multiple connotations of the game itself, a series of connotations played out in the conclusion to the poem, each enriching and compounding the others but none finally superseding the others.21 Gawain's rant is an effort to reinscribe gender roles whose solidity have been shaken in his mind by the course of events he has just experienced. His fury also suggests a possible response to the homoeroticism of the game at Hautdesert, a homophobic rage at being drawn in to something of which he wants no part. The Green Knight's laughter, however, is the laughter of the insider, of one privy to a set of second meanings for common signs, one who comprehends and encompasses all of the possibilities. They include his own dual nature--not only is he both Bertilak and the Green Knight, but he is also erotically linked to both male (through the game) and female (through his marriage). Gawain returns to Camelot to face the laughter of his compatriots, a Freudian giggle reflecting discomfited titillation22 in the face of which he finds himself once again made the object of meanings that compete with his own self-understanding.23 That the seeming middle path is also not the poem's final answer, however, is suggested by the conclusion, which refers once again to Brutus and to Troy, circling around to its beginnings and evoking once again the trope of journey to/from, a journey for which completion is impossible.

   Like an endless knot, the questing/questioning of the poem has no end; the questions always lead through apparent answers to reformulated questions. There is no resting place, no final meaning, for this poem. If it

   Bertilak "reads" the ominous and the disruptive in Layamon's depiction of the origins of Britain. By locating the story of Gawain's flirtation with Lady Bertilak within the context of Layamon's chronicle of treason in Troy as well as at Camelot, the Gawain-poet complicates any reading of Camelot and Hautdesert as opposed places with opposed valuations. Treason is already and always present at Camelot, named with obscure referent in the first stanza of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight--and this very obscurity points to the difficulty of reaching any conclusions surrounding gender or sexuality in the poem. The use of history shows that femininity, masculinity, normative sexuality and transgression are all difficult, perhaps impossible, to define. Gawain, of course, does not read Brut, and is therefore left floundering in search of a finality which is unobtainable within the world of this poem.