Women in Sir Gawain
Women in Sir GawainThe Role of Women in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
One major theme in “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” is the role that women have. This poem shows that women are not always as innocent as they seem, and yet they do have some kind of power over men almost all of the time.
It is an easy to read “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” as a romantic celebration of chivalry, but Ruth Hamilton believes that “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight contains a more wide-ranging, more serious criticism of chivalry than has heretofore been noticed” (Hamilton 113). Specifically, she feels that the poet is showing Gawain’s reliance on chivalry’s outside form and substance at the expense of the original values of the Christian religion from which it sprang. As she shows, “the first order of knights were monastic ones, who took vows of poverty, obedience, and chastity. The first duties the knights undertook, the crusades, were for the Church” (Hamilton 113). The great divergence in the two came with the rise of courtly love in which the knights were led to great feats of bravery and uplift by devotion to a mistress rather than God. Given the Church’s mistrust of women and the flesh, the contradiction seems clear. Hamilton tells us there was a mass of clerical writings in the Fourteenth Century that were critical of chivalry and show the split between chivalry and the church during that time.
Given this mistrust of women by the church, the placement of the women in the story is a critical medium for delivering this message. Interestingly, the women appear to have great power. Bertilak’s wife is carrying on with Gawain in the bedroom as the aggressor. Morgan is the initiator of the plot which begins the story, and she is strong enough to move into Bertilak’s castle, turn him green and order him to walk and talk with a severed head.
Lady Bertilak is seen in the Biblical role of temptress, as Maureen Fries shows “Eve became known as the source and symbol of lust and the dangers of the flesh; it was she who led Adam astray” (Bertilak, 27). In fact, Gawain actually places her in a long line of other biblical temptresses including Delilah and Bathsheba (1216-19).
Although she is seen as a temptress, Lady Bertilak is also strongly associated the romantic archetype of “courtly love”. As such, Fries says, the Lady “becomes the ambivalent mirror in which the knight pictures his own potential for moral achievement or moral failure in terms of the male warrior ethos such literature was designed to glorify” (Freis, 28).
The Virgin Mary has a special relationship to Gawain. Mary is unique among women in Christianity. She is a life giver without sin, the only woman to have both motherhood and chastity. This seems to sum up the positioning of Mary on...
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