I really enjoyed reading “The Ends of Enchantment: Colonialism and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” by Lynn Arner. I found the interpretation of the medieval text interesting and appropriate. However, there are some elements that left me thinking.
I, personally, considered SGGK to be one of the most truly Christian texts of all the ones we’ve read. Unlike The Quest, which forced the presence of the hermits and other religious imagery into the text, but not in a consistent manner with the Christian faith, this one seems to define the events and the actions of the knights strongly and consistently around this faith. While The Quest offered us with a mega-mix of Christianity and magic working both to the same purpose (obtaining the grail), SGGK includes magic only as the product of the realm of paganism. According to SGGK, magic opposes Christianity and Gawain's decision to put his faith in an amulet is precisely what weakens him. The strange mix of Christianity and magic that appears in many (most) of the texts we’ve read is something that has troubled my sometimes-very-structured mind during the whole semester. However, SGGK has provided a well-developed argument in accordance to the belief that it represents.
However, what I find interesting is the relation between the colonialist voice of the text in relation to the spiritual belief that it defends. It is quite obvious that the colonized would be identified with the monstrous, the other and the spiritual (and political) enemy. What seems puzzling though is that it is the Green Knight who spares Gawain’s life. He seems to represent the devil himself and carries out his activities in the chapel: “the devil’s lair/ where, at the nub of night/ he makes his morning prayer” (2187-90). But at the same time, in his castle the knight actually follows the most important of Christian rites, the mass. So, what could resemble one of the multiple tests that God imposes on his followers, such as that put on Abraham, in this case is the action of one who serves both God and the devil…
Understanding it from the point of view of this Welsh land that is still pagan, maybe, the answer could point towards a mid-point of conversion of these pagans. If this were the case, then at the sight of the faithful man’s spiritual prowess, the Green Knight respects and honors him. In doing this, the pagan rises himself to an honorable position too. However, Arner argues that “SGGK encourages English readers to resist identifying with or sympathizing with people from these regions and, instead, instructs audience members to understand themselves to be a superior form of humanity to the Welsh” (85). I believe that the end of the poem complicates the political/religious colonizing notions implied in the text. It does not inscribe the resolution under a single point of view. While it may be true that the text encourages the English to feel in the right to conquer the Welsh as Arner says, the conclusion of the poem raises the Welsh to a more dignified position by depicting them as people who are capable of honoring a spiritual prowess.
Hi, Natalia! I'm with you 80%, except that I wouldn't say the ending of SGGK complicates Arner's argument so much as it contradicts it entirely. The remaining 20% is me not liking the "Ends of Enchantment" article at all.
ReplyDeleteI may be bringing my 21st-century aesthetic into it, but I just don't buy that the Green Knight, Lady Bertilak and even Morgan are the bad guys in this story; there's such narrative tension between the friendliness of Gawain and his host and the dread of Gawain for his beheader, and then the "ta-da!" revelation that Gawain was only being tested (in his performance of Christian and chivalric ethics, no less, the opposite of barbarism as Arner would have us see it).
Also, I feel that Arner's supposition that the colonizer/colonized dynamic mutates into or is represented by the male/female dynamic also falls apart: since Morgan La Fey is revealed to be the ultimate executor of goings-on.
For now I'll just note, first, that the Christian elements of Bertilak have their analogues in his behavior in the guise of the Green Knight as well, but we may talk more about that in class; and second, that the different responses of Gawain and the rest of Arthur's court to his experience are an important crux to an interpretation of the poem, so we will surely talk more about that!
ReplyDeleteNatalia, I felt Quest was more Christian than SGGK. Or maybe it had more Christian elements than SGGK. Granted SGGK is more redeeming for Gawain, after being sort of trashed in Quest. Quest is more Christian because I think Christianity's essential characteristic is sacrifice and there was more of that in Quest than in SGGK. SGGK was about temptation and Gawain was a little Judas (kissing, etc); Quest had temptation, sacrifice, mercy, confession, second chances. It was more comprehensive as a religious didactic tale. Its Christian goal was more defined perhaps. SGGK's goal seems to be more like Arner says: expressing British anxiety about Others, it was a disguised vehicle for the British anti-Welsh agenda.
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