Genesis and Gender in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Abstract

���� � Sir Gawain and the Green Knight has long been admired for its pervasive and sophisticated blending of literary genres and traditions, especially its almost seamless incorporation of Christian doctrine into a hybrid of Celtic myth and Arthurian romance. 1 From its elaborate depictions of Yuletide feasts, to its humorous, sometimes poignant, scenes of temptation and penance, SGGK draws off Christian motifs and iconography, incorporating elements derived from vast and complex interpretive histories of biblical texts. But SGGK’s exegetical poetics, I shall argue, are based upon its intertextual and intercultural engagement with not only Christian but also Jewish exegetical modes. Specifically, the construction and articulation of gender apropos of the “temptation” sequence can be analyzed in relation to both the Vulgate and Hebrew Genesis/Bereshit creation and expulsion sequences, 2 allowing for a deeper understanding of the Gawainpoet’s complex poetics, themselves part of SGGK’s larger interconnected concerns with gender, religion, and language. As we shall see, cultural categories of identity converge in the text’s evocations of biblical gender, allusive sites of reconfiguration that foreground and problematize identity categories and the underlying ideological assumptions that they betray. The Edenic associations of Gawain’s plight are overtly displayed as the beheading game ends and Gawain, confronted with evidence of his own cowardice, briefly forages into misogynistic Christian tradition, seeking the Green Knight’s—and the reader’s—exoneration and understanding. As Gawain observes his own blood glistening against the white surface of the snow-covered ground—“le schene blod ouer his schulderes schot to lOe erlOe. / And quen le burne seZ le blode blenk on lOe snawe. . .” (2313‐14) 3 —he realizes that, having survived the “strok,” he must come to terms with the dishonesty that has textured the Chapel encounter and its discomfiting reflection upon his inner virtue and Christian faith. Having invested his faith in the Lady’s magic girdle—which, as promised, girded a man who was not harmed—rather than in his Christian faith, Gawain expresses contrition for his apostasy and cowardice. These expres