1. I have thus far avoided any reference to sexual acts as "straight" or
"gay," "homosexual" or "heterosexual," because, as Allen J.
Frantzen has pointed out (Before the Closet: Same-Sex Love from Beowulf to
Angels in America [Chicago, 2000]), these terms are, "before the modern era,
inaccurate" (p. 1). Besides implying categories of identification that may not be in existence
in the medieval period, they certainly do not fit the behaviors of Bertilak, Gawain, and Bertilak's
wife. Numerous scholars have investigated the ways in which this poem challenges norms of
gendered behavior and sexuality, among them Sheila Fisher, Geraldine Heng, Carolyn Dinshaw,
David Boyd, and Clare Kinney, all cited below. They point out variously, and valuably, how the
poem works to inscribe and/or challenge our received notions of how gender and sexual activity
should be perceived in the Middle Ages. My purpose in this essay is to consider how the poem's
use of (pseudo-)historical material drawn from Layamon's Brut complicates its own
presentation of norms and oppositions.
2. Quotations from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight are from J. R. R. Tolkien
and E. V. Gordon eds., Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,
page 77
2nd edition, revised by
Norman Davis (Oxford, 1967 [1925]). Translations are my own.
3. I am grateful to Scott D. Westrem for allowing me to use an early version of his
edition of the map, The Hereford Mappa Mundi: A Transcription, Translation, and Analysis of
Its Legends (forthcoming from Brepols, 2001).
4. Quotations from Brut are from the Caligula manuscript edition of G. L.
Brook and R. F. Leslie, eds., Layamon's Brut, edited from British Museum Ms. Cotton
Caligula A.IX and British Museum Ms. Cotton Otho C.XIII, 2 vols., Early English Text
Society, original series, nos. 250, 277 (London, 1963, 1978). Electronic Text Center, University
of Virginia Library, http://etext.virginia.edu/mideng.browse.html. Downloaded February 13,
2000. Translations are my own.
5. Tolkien and Gordon, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, include a facsmile of
the first manuscript page. No punctuation is visible.
6. Tolkien and Gordon, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, p. 70n.
7. The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1996
[1978]), p. 207n. Theodore Silverstein, ed., Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A New Critical
Edition (Chicago, 1984 [1974]) reviews the scholarship on the reference; he also prefers
Aeneas over Antenor, citing the authority of Frederick Madden, p. 112n.
8. Jane Gilbert reads Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in the context of the
other poems in the same manuscript; see "Gender and Sexual Transgression," in A
Companion to the Gawain-Poet, ed.Derek Brewer and Jonathan Gibson
(Cambridge, 1994), pp. 53-69. According to Gilbert, "Cleanness contains a clear
depiction of gender and sexual transgression, and an equally clear condemnation of that
transgression" (p. 53). Gilbert reads Gawain against this condemnation as also
comdemming any suggestion of potential intimacy between Bertilak and Gawain.
9. David L. Boyd, "Sodomy, Misogyny, and Displacement: Occluding Queer
Desire in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," Arthuriana 8.2 (1998),
77-113, at p. 83.
10. Clare Kinney has argued that "actions, people, and objects are regularly
assigned competing identities" in the poem; see "The (Dis)Embodied Hero and the
Signs of Manhood in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," in Medieval
Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages, ed. Clare Lees (Minneapolis, 1994), pp.
47-57 (quoted from p. 55).
11. Sheila Fisher, "Taken Men and Token Women in Sir Gawain and the
Green Knight," in Seeking the Woman in Late Medieval and Renaissance
Writings, ed. Sheila Fisher and Janet Halley (Knoxville, 1989), pp. 71-105. Also see Fisher's
"Leaving Morgan Aside: Women, History, and Revisionism in Sir Gawain and the
Green Knight," in The Passing
page 78
of Arthur: New Essays in Arthurian Tradition,
ed. Christopher Baswell and William Sharpe (New York, 1988), pp. 129-51. On the other hand,
Clare Kinney has argued that the poem explores masculine behavior from a perspective of varied
possibility, first creating an "essentialist" portrait of masculinity in the form of the
Green Knight as he intrudes into the Christmas festivities at Camelot, but then modifying this
conception by emphasizing the importance of Gawain's verbal ability in his encounters with the
lady of Hautdesert. See Kinney, "The (Dis)Embodied Hero," p. 48 and p. 52.
12. Fisher, "Taken Men and Token Women," p. 86. Geraldine Heng has
extended Fisher's analysis with the suggestion that the women of the poem are not simply
occupied in exchanges among men, but also participate in a parallel universe of connections
among themselves, in a pair of essays: "Feminine Knots and the Other Sir Gawain and
the Green Knight," PMLA 106 (1991), 500-14; and "A Woman Wants:
The Lady, Gawain, and the Forms of Seduction," Yale Journal of Criticism
5 (1992), 101-34.
13. Carolyn Dinshaw, "A Kiss is Just a Kiss," Diacritics 24.2-3
(Summer/Fall 1994), 205-26, at 208.
14. Dinshaw, "A Kiss is Just a Kiss," p. 222.
15. Dinshaw, "A Kiss is Just a Kiss," p. 222. Boyd makes a similar argument
(he appears to be unaware of Dinshaw's essay) in which he concludes that "the conscious
return of the repressed as an act of denial is nonetheless the return of the repressed after all:
transgressive reinscription at its best" ("Sodomy, Misogyny, and
Displacement," p. 105).
16. Dinshaw, "A Kiss is Just a Kiss," p. 206.
17. This point was drawn to my attention by Andrew Ciravolo; Harvey De Roo has also
discussed this earlier scene of flirtation and its consequences for Gawain's culpability in the later
events of the poem. See De Roo, "Undressing Lady Bertilak: Guilt and Denial in Sir
Gawain and the Green Knight," Chaucer Review 27 (1993), 305 - 324.
18. And it lingers. Boyd describes Morgan's "sexual wiles and acquired magical
skills," implying that she has learned magic, but that any trickery or cunning she employs
which relates to sexuality is somehow innate. Any geek (male or female) at a high school dance
knows that flirtation is indeed an acquired skill. Boyd, "Sodomy, Misogyny, and
Displacement," p. 92.
19. De Roo, "Undressing Lady Bertilak," p. 317.
20. Heng, "Feminine Knots," p. 501.
21. Heng points out that the poem refuses to come to rest upon any concluding
interpretation of the meaning of Gawain's performance, in-
page 79
stead enacting "slippery reversals
of hierarchy and priority asserted in the quick substitution of one construction [of the girdle] after
another," in "Feminine Knots," p. 508. Arthur Lindley and C. Stephen Finley
also argue that the poem resists closure. See Lindley, "'Ther he watz dispoyled, with
spechez of myerthe': Carnival and the Undoing of Sir Gawain," Exemplaria 6
(1994), 67-86, and Finley, "'Endeles Knot': Closure and Indeterminacy in Sir Gawain
and the Green Knight," Papers on Language and Literature 26 (1990), 445-58.
22. On the relevance of Freud to the poem, see Boyd, "Sodomy, Misogyny, and
Displacement," pp. 97-98. Boyd also raises the possibility of laughter as dismissive, p. 104.
23. Dinshaw, "A Kiss is Just a Kiss," passim, discusses readings and
misreadings of Gawain in the poem.
