SOURCE: Putter, Ad. “The Temptation Scenes.” In “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” and French Arthurian Romance, pp. 100-48. Oxford University Press: Oxford, England, 1995.

[In the following essay, Putter analyzes how the Gawain-poet's temptation scenes differ from those found in his probable sources.]

Introduction

The romance of Perlesvaus, or Le Haut Livre du Graal, was written in the first half of the thirteenth century, perhaps in England or at least by a writer with some knowledge of its geography and its recent historical events.¹ The work recounts the adventures of Perceval, Lancelot, and Gawain, who has undertaken the quest for the sword of Saint John. The relation between the Perlesvaus and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight has already been a matter of considerable speculation.² Like Gawain, the prose romance contains a beheading game. After chopping off the head of a suicidal knight, Lancelot returns to the Waste City one year later for a return blow. When his opponent raises his axe he sees that Lancelot flinches, and impugns his bravery. While he prepares himself for a second attempt, two damsels who have observed the scene from afar beg Lancelot's enemy to spare his life. He does so because, since Lancelot has kept his promise to return, the Waste City has been restored to prosperity.

The presence of a beheading game alone is of course hardly a basis for claiming the Perlesvaus as a source for Gawain. Among works in French, the First Continuation of Chrétien's Perceval, the Mule sans frein, and Hunbaut likewise depict beheading games. But there is another, more revealing analogue to Gawain in the Perlesvaus, which is less well known.³ The romance describes an attempted seduction which bears some intriguing resemblances to the temptation scenes in Gawain. On his quest, Gawain meets two knights who offer him hospitality. As he sits down for supper in a pavilion two ladies enter:

Que que Messire Gavains menjoit, atant ez vos. ii. damoiseles qui viennent en la tente e le saluent molt hautement; et il leur respont au plus bele qu'il sot … ‘Sire, fet l'ainznee, comment est vostre nons?—Damoisele, g'é non Gavains.—Sire, fet ele, tant vos amons nos mielz … E qant il fu cochiez eles s'asieent devant lui, e ont le cierge alumé, e s'apoient desus la coche, e li presentent molt leur service. E Messire Gavains ne leur respont autre chose que granz merciz, car il ne pense fors a dormir e a reposer. ‘Par Dieu, fet l'une a l'autre, se ce fust cil Gavains qui niés est le roi Artu, il parlast a nos autrement, e trovissions en lui plus de deduit que est en cestui; mes cist est un Gavains contrefez …’ Atant ez vos le naim o vient. ‘Biax amis, font les damoiseles, garde nos cest chevalier qu'il ne s'enfuie. Ainsi va il d'ostel en ostel par truandise; si se fet apeler Messire Gavains, mes il no sanble pas, car se ce fust il, e nos volssissions veillier.iii. nuiz, s'en veillast il quatre …’ Messire Gavains ot bien ce que les damoiseles dient, e ne leur respont neent …

(Perlesvaus, pp. 95-6)

While Sir Gawain was eating, two damsels entered the pavilion and greeted him emphatically; and he answered them as best as he could … ‘Sir,’ said the eldest, ‘what is your name?’ ‘Maiden, my name is Gawain.’ ‘Sir,’ she said, ‘then we love you all the more …’ And when Gawain had gone to bed, they seated themselves before him, lit the candle and, leaning on his bed, they fervently presented their services. And Sir Gawain only said, ‘Thank you very much’, for he thought only of sleeping and resting. ‘By God,’ one said to the other, ‘if this were indeed Gawain, Arthur's nephew, he would have talked to us differently, and we would have found more fun in him than in this one. This Gawain is counterfeit …’ Then the dwarf joined them. ‘Dear friend,’ say the damsels, ‘make sure this knight does not run away. This deceiver goes from hostel to hostel calling himself Sir Gawain, but he does not resemble him, for if it was him and we would have wanted to stay awake for three nights, he would have added a fourth …’ Sir Gawain heard all too well what the damsels were saying, but did not say a word.

The next day Gawain must do battle with a knight who can only be killed by piercing his Achilles' heel. When Gawain defeats the knight, the ladies decide that he must indeed be the genuine article. For the second time they offer their services:

Sire, font eles, encore vos offrons nos nostre service, car nos savons bien que vos estes li buens chevaliers. Recevez a amie la quele que vos volez.—Granz merciz, damoiseles, fet Messire Gavains. Vostre amor ne refus ge pas, e a Dieu vos commant.

(Perlesvaus, p. 99)

‘Sir,’ they say, ‘again we offer you our services, for we know well that you are the good knight. Take as your friend whomever you fancy.’ ‘Many thanks, damsels,’ says Sir Gawain. ‘I shall not refuse your love, and I commend you to God.’

With these words Gawain rides off, leaving the ladies to bewail their lost opportunity.

Gawain's adventure from the fifth branch of the Perlesvaus has admittedly nothing of the ingenuity with which the Lady and Gawain combat each other in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. But if the Perlesvaus differs from Gawain's temptation scenes in this respect, the thirteenth-century romance may nevertheless elucidate some of the strategies to which the Lady, Gawain, and the Gawain-poet resort. Like the Lady in Gawain, the two ‘damoiseles’ know Gawain's literary reputation as a ladies' man very well.⁴ Having offered their ‘service’, a euphemism for their sexual favours, their astonishment when Gawain instead retires to sleep is great. So great that they are, or pretend to be, convinced that this Gawain must be an impostor, for the real Gawain would have known better what to do with two damsels. He would have wished to ‘keep vigil’ even longer than they themselves. There is no indication in the text that they address their complaint directly to Gawain. But Gawain overhears, and the ladies no doubt mean him to overhear. For it is with words that they tempt him. They reason and argue but their overtures never depart from the field of language. In fact the temptations in Perlesvaus and in Gawain take the similar form of an invitation to become the ‘Sir Gawain’ about whom their seductresses have obviously heard so much. Why this form should be effective, and whence the ladies derive Gawain's reputation as a womanizer, will be the subject of my first section.

The adventure from Le Haut Livre du Graal resembles the temptation scenes from Gawain in another respect. Gawain's dilemma in the Perlesvaus and Gawain is not simply one of whether to give in or to resist. Like Gawain in the Perlesvaus, Gawain has to refuse politely. In the second section I will show that, like the French Gawain, our hero finds a way of circumventing the dilemma he faces by using the saving ambiguity inherent in ‘luf-talk’. Its potential to be a facet of gallantry, and nothing more, means it is always open to misunderstanding, or the pretence of misunderstanding. This is what Gawain in the Perlesvaus exploits when he responds to the offer of ‘service’, or the offer of an ‘amie’, which may mean no more than ‘friend’, with the polite reply that he is honoured to accept their love. But when he next commends the two ladies to God, it becomes clear that his reply has been no more than an urbane figure of speech, precisely the way in which he pretends to have taken the ladies' words. In the second section I want to show how Gawain in the English romance turns the ambiguity of love-talk to his advantage.

Unlike his counterpart in the Perlesvaus, however, Gawain does not leave the Lady of the Castle empty-handed, but with a green girdle which, as the Lady of the Castle assures him, will save his life. While refusing to merge with the ‘Gawain’ of earlier works, the fantasy of ladies of romance whose love-gifts protect knights on their quests proves irresistible for Gawain. And, like Gawain, the reader, too, momentarily shares the illusion of being in a narrative where magic talismans might work. Of course, all Arthurian romances ask us to believe in their enchanted worlds, but the spell is not usually broken until the romance is finished and we return to reality. The Gawain-poet, however, breaks his spell much earlier, when, at the Green Chapel, he reveals to us and Gawain that the green girdle was, after all, only a matter of make-believe. Chrétien de Troyes plays similar games with his audience and heroes, and I want to explore in a final section how both poets confront us in the course of their romances with our suspension of disbelief.

Narrative Fashioning

As the Gawain-poet makes abundantly clear, Gawain is beset by temptations which are to a large extent of a verbal nature.⁵ Wherever the Gawain-poet talks of the Lady's attack or Gawain's resistance, he refers in fact to the thrust and parry of the words with which the Lady seduces and Gawain rebuffs her, as if to bring home the force which words exert on lives. Indeed, the words used to describe seduction in Gawain are almost indistinguishable from, or used synonymously with, words that describe acts of speech. In the following line, for example, ‘tempting’ (fonden) and ‘questioning’ (fraynen) are practically interchangeable:

Þus hym frayned þat fre and fondet hym ofte,
For to haf wonnen hym to woȝe, what-so scho thoȝt ellez …

(1549-50)

The temptation lurks, so it seems, in the very act of ‘frayning’. Let us look at one such question which the Lady puts to Gawain to see why such a verbal temptation should be effective.

‘I woled wyt at yow, wyȝe,’ þat worþy þer sayde,
‘And yow wrathed not þerwyth, what were þe skylle
Þat so ȝong and so ȝepe as ȝe at þis tyme,
So cortayse, so knyȝtyly, as ȝe ar knowen oute—
And of alle cheualry to chose, þe chef þyng alosed
Is þe lel layk of luf, þe lettrure of armes;
For to telle of þis teuelyng of þis trwe knyȝtez,
Hit is þe tytelet token and tyxt of her werkkez,
How ledes for her lele luf hor lyuez han auntered,
Endured for her drury dulful stoundez,
And after wenged with her walour and voyded her care,
And broȝt blysse into boure with bountees hor awen—
And ȝe ar knyȝt comlokest kyd of your elde,
Your worde and your worchip walkez ayquere,
And I haf seten by yourself here sere twyes,
ȝet herde I neuer of your hed helde no wordez
Þat euer longed to luf, lasse ne more.’

(1508-24)

At first sight, the Lady's question, posed during her second bedroom visit, suffers from a lack of organization. Just as the Lady broaches the topic of Gawain's reputation for courtesy and chivalry, her sentence seems to founder. She proceeds to give her reading of chivalric romance and picks up the loose end only at line 1520. Her lecture on medieval romance, however, is both accurate and pertinent to her project. Chrétien's romances, Thomas's or Beroul's Tristan are some of the many ‘werkkez’ the Lady could quote in support of the ‘chivalry topos’ she expounds. This topos, formulated for the first time in Arthurian literature in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae, sought to resolve the incompatibility between the warrior and the lover by showing how love inspires excellent deeds. Chrétien puts the effect of love on the knight's bravery concisely when he describes Lancelot as ‘the knight made noble and strong by love, and courageous in all things’ (‘cil cui Amors fet riche ❙ et puissant, et hardi par tot …’: Lancelot, 630-1). It follows, so the Lady reasons, that there can be no ‘trwe knyȝtes’ who do not at the same time benefit from the spur of ‘lele luf’.

The topos is a powerful weapon against unwilling men: witness the use that ladies in medieval romance make of it. In the Lanzelet, the host's daughter tries to seduce her guests with lines such as:

jâ solten helde ziere,
die durch diu lant alsus varnt
unt sich mit hübscheit bewarnt,
etwaz reden von den wîben
und die zît hin vertrîben
mit sprechenne den besten wol.

(Lanzelet, 908-13)

Why, fine knights who travel abroad this way and take pains to behave courteously should converse somewhat about women and while away the time in most pleasant conversation.

daz ist wâr,
er gewan nie manlîchen muot,
der nicht toerlîche tuot,
etswenne durch diu wîp.

(Lanzelet, 1016-19)

The truth is that nobody ever achieved real manhood who did not at some time or other act indiscreetly for the sake of a woman.⁶

Note also the scathing remarks of the young widow, when her object of desire, Petit Jehan de Saintré, confesses to not having a lady-friend:

Ha! failli gentil homme, et dictes vous que n'en avez nulle? A ce cop cognois je bien que jamais ne vauldrez riens. Eu! failli cuer que vous estes, d'ou sont venues les grans vaillances, les grans emprises et les chevalereux faiz de Lancelot, de Gauvain, de Tristan, de Guron le courtois, et des autres preux de la Table Ronde … sinon par le service d'amours acquerir et eulz entretenir an la grace de leurs tres desirees dames!

(Jehan de Saintré, pp. 6-7)

Ha! feeble young man, and you tell me that you have none? Then I know immediately that you will never be worthy. Alas! you coward, whence came the bravery, the magnanimity, and the chivalrous deeds of Lancelot, of Gawain, of Tristan, of Guiron the courteous, and of the other heroes of the Round Table … if not from the love-service they rendered to acquire and maintain themselves in the grace of their dearly beloved ladies!

The Lady of the Castle, too, applies the rhetorical weapon of the ‘chivalry topos’ unremittingly to her guest. Like the heroes of her ‘werkkez’ Gawain has excellence: ergo, he must have a lover. The Lady, then, does not simply offer her love; she claims on the basis of her reading that to accept her is only proper. When Gawain does not speak a word ‘þat … longed to luf’, she concludes he must be ‘lewed’, not simply in the sense of ‘uncouth’, which is how most modern editions gloss it, but also in the original sense of ‘illiterate’, that is to say, unable to read the ‘werkkez’ which the Lady adduces as sure proof that Gawain's behaviour goes against the letter.

Gawain has very good reasons besides modesty to decline the Lady's offer to ‘take þe toruayle to myself to trwluf expoun, ❙ And towche þe temes of tyxt and talez of armez’ (1540-1). Not only has the Lady mastered the art of story-telling herself, as Gawain remarks, but the ‘tyxt and talez’ she wishes to hear would only underline the fact that the heroes of old acted differently. Gawain deviates from the ‘lettrure’ by failing to provide the happy ending of romances when knights bring ‘blysse into boure’.

The Lady's tactical use of romance paradigms has an interesting analogue in Renaut de Beaujeu's startling conclusion to his romance of the Bel Inconnu (c.1185-90). The romance relates the adventures of Guinglain, a young knight in search of his identity. Unbeknown to him, he is Gawain's son, and in various adventures he discovers and proves himself worthy of his name and his ancestry. The Bel Inconnu first liberates the Fairy Maiden with the White Hands, and he is instantly struck by her great beauty. Unfortunately, he is bound by a promise to liberate the castle of the Blonde Esmeree and is thus forced to leave her. He successfully puts an end to the spells and enchantments which had transformed the Blonde Esmeree into a serpent. Esmeree presses her claims for Guinglain's hand but, still enamoured of the Fairy Maiden, Guinglain abandons her. Esmeree, however, remains intent on marrying her hero and with Arthur's help a tournament is announced in the hope of luring him away from his true love. When Guinglain turns up at the tournament, Esmeree exerts her influence on him, and Gawain's son is pressurized into a marriage with Esmeree which Arthur's court has been busily preparing. At this moment, when it seems that Guinglain will forever be joined to the lady of his second choice, the narrator suddenly stops and concludes his romance by addressing the lady whose love has inspired him to compose it:

Ci faut li roumans et define.
Bele, vers cui mes cuers s'acline,
Renals de Biauju molt vos prie
Por Diu que ne l'obliés mie.
De cuer vos veut tos jors amer,
Ce ne li poés vos veer.
Quant vos plaira, dira avant,
U il se taira ore a tant.
Mais por un biau sanblant mostrer
Vos feroit Guinglain retrover
S'amie, que il a perdue,
Qu'entre ses bras le tenroit nue.
Se de çou li faites delai,
Si ert Guinglains en tel esmai
Que ja mais n'avera s'amie.
D'autre vengeance n'a il mie,
Mais por la soie grant grevance
Ert sor Guinglain ceste vengance,
Que ja mais jor n'en parlerai
Tant que le bel sanblant avrai.
Explicit Del Bel Desconeü

(Bel Inconnu, 6247-66)

Here the end is missing, and the romance comes to a halt. Sweetheart, to whom my heart inclines, Renaut de Beaujeu begs you for God's sake not to forget him. He wants to love you sincerely forever, and you cannot deny him this. When it pleases you, he will continue, if not, he will forever be silent. But for a wink he will make Guinglain find his lost lady-love again, so that he may hold her naked in his arms. If you delay, Guinglain will have the misfortune of never seeing his love again. He has no other vengeance but to take out his anger on Guinglain, and I will not continue until I have your wink. This is the end of the ‘Bel Inconnu’.

This is one of the most shameless pieces of emotional blackmail in medieval literature.⁷ If Renaut's Lady wants a happy ending, she must first give her admirer her ‘bel sanblant’. If she does not, Renaut threatens, the ‘grevance’ he suffers will be avenged on his fictional character. The possible gratification of the desires of Guinglain and the Fairy depends on the Lady's willingness to gratify the desires of the poet. The tale thus awaits an ending which only Renaut's addressee can provide. The romance of Guinglain and the Fairy, so Renaut implies, is really about himself and his lady. They will reap the misery or the joy of their fictional characters.

As the Lady of the Castle banks on Gawain's desire to bring his story in line with the chivalric romances about the ‘blysse’ of knights and their lovers, so Renaut de Beaujeu manipulates the Lady's desire to bring the aborted poem to a satisfactory conclusion. The romance paradigm, culminating in the knight's ‘blysse’ with a lady whom he may hold ‘entre ses bras … nue’, is used in both these cases as a magnetic force to whose pull Gawain and Renaut's lady are urged to yield. Renaut and the Lady of the Castle tell romances not in order to amuse their listeners, but in the hope that they will root their own wishes in them, in the hope that their listeners make the love that torments the fictional heroes and heroines their own. In the relationship between the tale-teller and the listener the romance insinuates itself as a mediator of desire.⁸

The lure of the Lady of the Castle's ‘tyxt’ and ‘talez’ is, like that of Renaut's romance, mimetic. She projects in her words a lover of ladies to whom a long tradition of chivalric romance has given its seal of approval, so that Gawain may model himself on the ideal these romances have constructed.⁹ Herein lies the temptation of the Lady's narrative fashioning. It holds out to Gawain the possibility of satisfying the need for recognition, the human desire to find oneself confirmed in the language of the other, in the act of identifying with the heroes of romantic invention.¹⁰ Prominent among these ideals is the ‘Gawain’ of late twelfth- and thirteenth-century romance. It is necessary here to look briefly at his reputation in these romances.¹¹ I will do so with specific reference to two episodes from the continuations of Chrétien's Perceval which seem to have influenced the Gawain-poet directly.

I take my first episode from the First Continuation of Chrétien's Perceval. When Arthur lays siege to Brun de Branlant's castle, Gawain, injured though he is, rides out on a beautiful day to divert himself. He chances on a pavilion where he finds an attractive damsel all on her own. When Gawain greets her she replies:

‘Et cil qui fist et soir et main
Salt et gart monseignor Gavain
Et vos aprés, et beneïe.’

(First Continuation, I. 2629-31)

‘And may he who made morning and evening save, guard, and bless Sir Gawain, and then you.’

Asked why she greets both ‘Gavain’ and himself, she replies that ever since she first heard about Gawain she has loved him for his excellent qualities:

Qu'en lui a plus sens et larguece,
De cortoisie et de proëce,
Qu'il nait en chevalier vivant.

(I. 2649-51)

Because he has in him more wisdom and liberality, more courtesy and prowess, than any living knight.

Despite Gawain's assurances that he is in fact this ‘Gavain’, she refuses to believe him at first. When he insists, she asks him to wait while she checks his appearance with an embroidered image of her idol. The lady quickly returns when she has verified her guest's claims:

A lui s'en vient et si l'embrache,
Baise lui oex et boche et face
Plus de vint fois en un randon.
‘Amis, fait ele, en abandon
Vos met mon cors et vos presant.
Vostre serai tot mon vivant.’
D'amor, de jeu, de cortoisie
Ont puis ensamble tant parlé
Et bonement ris et jüé,
Tant qu'a perdu non de pucele,
S'a non amie et damoisele.

(I. 2699-716)

She comes up to him and embraces him, kisses his eyes, mouth, and face more than twenty times in a go. ‘Friend,’ she says, ‘I surrender and present to you my body. I will be yours while I live.’ … Of love, of fun, and of courtesy they talked, and they laughed and played together, until she had lost the name of ‘maiden’, and had become lover and lady.

The passage is the first in French romance in which a lady falls in love with the idea of Gawain rather than the man himself. She shows no interest in her guest before she positively identifies him as Gawain. Later romancers borrowed the motif of the woman who has fallen in love with Gawain before ever having seen him. That is why it becomes essential for these ladies to be able to identify him should he be passing by. The lady in the First Continuation has an embroidered portrait of her idol, the heroines of later romances use a lifelike statue, or an engraving in a ring. Other ladies hire a servant who is conversant with all the faces of the Arthurian knights, or rely on the expertise of local inhabitants to spot the hero and to report his whereabouts.¹² Like Bertilac's wife, the ‘pucelle’ of the First Continuation has a preconceived notion of Gawain and both refuse to believe they are dealing with him when he fails to meet their expectations. Compare ‘J'ai non Gavains’—‘Gavains, fait ele; ❙ Pas ne le croi’ (2661-2), with the Lady of the Castle's ‘Bot þat ȝe be Gawan, hit gotz in mynde’ (1293). In both cases the ladies take the initiative and embrace their guests; in Gawain ‘Ho commes nerre with þat, and cachez hym in armez, ❙ Loutez luflych adoun and þe leude kyssez …’ (1305-6), and in the Continuation ‘A lui s'en vient et si l'embrache, ❙ Baise lui …’. Even more striking are the correspondences in the way the ladies offer their favours to their guests. Compare lines 2702-4 from the Continuation above with the Lady of the Castle's words:

‘Ye ar welcum to my cors,
Yowre awen won to wale,
Me behouez of fyne force
Your seruaunt be, and schale.’

(1237-40)

Both ladies offer their ‘cors’ and promise they will always ‘your seruaunt be’ or ‘vostre serai’.

La Pucelle de Lis is of course genuinely attracted to her guest and is not merely pretending. For a temptation scene in which a lady feigns interest we may turn to the little-read Fourth Continuation by Gerbert de Montreuil, composed in the early thirteenth century. As Gawain wanders about on his horse ‘le Gringalet’, he is offered hospitality in the castle of a beautiful lady. Immediately, he offers her his services. The Lady, who is in fact out to revenge her brother's death on any knight who happens to pass by, and ideally on Gawain, the alleged murderer, feigns a passionate interest in her guest. The temptation scene corresponds very closely to Gawain, as these passages, juxtaposed with extracts from Gawain, will show.

Malement estera sozpris
Me sire Gavains cele fois,
Se Dieus ne li aïue et fois.

(Fourth Continuation, 12418-20)

This time Sir Gawain will be in trouble, unless God comes to his aid.

Gret perile bitwene hem stod,
Nif Maré of hir knyȝt mynne.

(1768-9)

‘Certes, por vostre chevalier
Me poez d'ore e avant prendre.’
E cele por lui plus esprendre
Et eschaufer de musardie;
‘Sire, ne lairai ne vous die,
Onques nul jor ne m'entremis
D'amours. Je ne sai qu'est amis,
Ne je nel quier nul jor savoir,
N'en mois n'a pas tant de savoir,
Ke chevalier amer seüsse …’

(Fourth Continuation, 12430-9)

‘Certainly, you may from now on consider me your knight.’ And to rouse him even more, and egg him on to foolishness, she said: ‘I should tell you that I have never had anything to do with love before. I do not know what a boyfriend is, and never wished to know, ignorant as I am about how to love a knight.’

          my souerayn I holde yow,
And yowre knyȝt I becom …

(1278-9)

And ȝe, þat ar so cortays and coynt of your hetes,
Oghe to a ȝonke þynk ȝern to schewe
And teche sum tokenez of trweluf craftes.
I com hider sengel, and sitte
To lerne at yow sum game;
Dos, techez me of your wytte,
Whil my lorde is fro hame.

(1525-34)

Et neporquant, se je deüsse
A nul homme doner m'amor,
Vous l'avriiez tot sanz demour
Tant vous voi bel et avenant …

(Fourth Continuation, 1240-3)

But nevertheless, if I had to give my love to any man, you would have it without demur, since you are so handsome and nice.

‘And I schulde chepen and chose to cheue me a lorde,
For þe costes þat I haf knowen vpon þe, knyȝt, here,
Of bewté and debonerté and blyþe semblaunt,
And þat I haf er herkkened and halde hit here trwee,
Þer schulde no freke vpon folde bifore yow be chosen.’

(1271-5)

Le regarde por mieus esprendre
En sozpirant, puis li a dit:
‘Sire, ore ostez sans contredit
Vos armes, tanz est de souper;
N'i arez compaignon ne per
Fors moi et deus cousins germains
Que chi veez; ne plus ne mains,
N'ai de maisnie, ce sachiez.’

(Fourth Continuation, 12468-75)

She looks at him to excite him further, and sighing, she says: ‘Sir, take off your arms, without protest. It is time for supper; there will be no other companion apart from me and my two cousins, who you see here. You should know that they are the only people in my household.’

And now ȝe ar here, iwysse, and we are bot oure one;
My lorde and his ledez ar on lenþe faren,
Oþer burnez in her bedde, and my burdez als …

(1230-2)

Gawain's adventure from Gerbert de Montreuil's romance reads almost like a handbook of seduction. In order to excite her guest the Lady pretends to be a novice in the art of love, pretends that if she had to make a choice Gawain would be her favourite, and emphasizes that he can expect to be left undisturbed. The Lady's tactics, which, as the passages from Gawain show, the Lady of the Castle seems to have studied closely, prove a great success. But just as Gawain approaches to join the Lady in bed, he remembers to cross himself, and then finds the knife which she has hidden under her bed. Now Gawain hides it from the Lady and works his will:

Weille ou non, sosfrir li estuet
Le ju de mon seignor Gavain.

(Fourth Continuation, 12638-9)

Like it or not, she has to submit to Sir Gawain's game.

But the First and Fourth Continuation are not simply implicated as sources which influenced the Gawain-poet. They influence the poet's fictional characters in turn. The Lady uses them to prove that her representations of Gawain as a womanizer must be correct. Gerbert de Montreuil's episode, and Gawain's later account of his adventure with the Pucelle de Lis in the First Continuation in which he confesses to having raped her,¹³ can be used, for example, to suggest to her guest that he could—or rather, is expected to—take her by force:

Ye ar stif innoghe to constrayne wyth strenkþe, ȝif yow lykez.

(1496)

She invokes a literary tradition of a Gawain renowned for his love-affairs to show Gawain that he is unfaithful to the ‘lettrure of armes’.

Her narrative fashioning is not, I think, innocuous.¹⁴ It poses a threat to Gawain, based on the fact that it is ultimately language which realizes notions of identity in reality. Misrepresented in the language of the Lady, who speaks with the powerful backing of a long-standing literary tradition, Gawain faces the loss of his identity:

‘Bot þat ȝe be Gawan, hit gotz in mynde.’

(1293)

‘Sir, ȝif ȝe be Wawen, wonder me þynkkez …’

(1481)

The possibility of regaining his name, his identity, by identifying with the ‘Gawain’ constructed by the Lady and the literature of the past is the bait which the temptations hold out to him.

The effects of the Lady's strategy leave their marks on Gawain's responses. Note, for example, Gawain's response to her observations that he cannot be the real Gawain because he lacks the amorous leanings of the romance-hero:

‘Querfore?’ quoþ þe freke, and freschly he askez,
Ferde lest he hade fayled in fourme of his castes;
Bot þe burde hym blessed, and ‘Bi þis skyl’ sayde:
‘So god as Gawayn gaynly is halden,
And cortaysye is closed so clene in hymseluen,
Couth not lyȝtly haf lenged so long wyth a lady,
Bot he had craued a cosse, bi his courtaysye,
Bi sum towch of summe tryfle at sum talez ende.’
Þen quoþ Wowen: ‘Iwysse, worþe as yow lykez;
I schal kysse at your comaundement, as a knyȝt fallez,
And fire, lest he displese yow, so plede hit no more.’

(1294-1304)

Again the Lady confronts Gawain with his reputation in the verse romances as ‘the wooer of almost any available girl’.¹⁵ The image of his fictional alter ego does not leave Gawain entirely cold. He asks the Lady eagerly, ‘freschly’, what her observed distinction between ‘Gawayn’ and himself might be. Moreover, he does grant her a ‘cosse’, for which the Lady's ‘Gawayn’ is renowned, and one wonders whether Gawain would have done so if it were not for the Lady's reminiscences about the ‘Gawayn’ everyone admires.

It is no coincidence that just at the moment when Gawain complies with her request for a kiss, when Gawain's self and his model overlap, the words of Gawain's concession conflate the grammatical person ‘I’ with which we represent ourselves, and the ‘he’ by which we are signified in the discourse of others. Instead of saying: ‘I will grant you a kiss lest I displease you’, Gawain's answer registers a striking shift to the third person: ‘I will grant you a kiss, lest he displease you.’ At the point where Gawain and his image in the Lady's words merge, he inscribes himself into the Lady's narrative where he figures as a ‘he’, and abandons the ‘I’ which realizes his identity as a separate individual. The Lady's bait, the appealing possibility of adequate representation in the discourse of the other, thus entails a relinquishment of personal autonomy.

I do not wish to suggest that Gawain's curious change from ‘I’ to ‘he’ is a Freudian slip uttered under pressure. For one thing, Gawain is in fact highly alert to the need to insist on the incompatibility of himself and the Lady's ‘Gawayn’. His protest: ‘I be not now he þat ye of speken’ (1242) focuses precisely on the difference between ‘I’ and ‘he’. Certainly, this defence shows an acute awareness that it is at the space which separates the two that the Lady takes aim. Moreover, Gawain's peculiar handling of personal pronouns does not spring from involuntary confusion. On the contrary, the point of Gawain's answer is that he announces his self-cancellation as he is about to kiss her. He will kiss her ‘at her commaundement’, not because the idea has come from within, but merely to do ‘as a knyȝt fallez’. ‘I will conform myself to your image of me so as to please you’ is what Gawain seems to be saying here. The confusion between himself and his model is deliberate and purely symbolic, serving not to abolish the difference between the two but to keep it in place. For, as Gawain implies, the Lady will embrace not himself but her own image of the knight. When the lady believes she has moulded her interlocutor in the exact likeness of the Gawain of her romances by exacting a kiss, Gawain declares himself momentarily non-existent in order to evade the fixative symmetry of himself and the romantic model in which the Lady attempts to capture him. If the Lady's temptations fail they do so not because her narrative seduction can do no harm but because Gawain senses the strategies employed against him.

Before turning to Gawain's use of tact as a subtle weapon of defence, it should be made clear that Gawain is far from being the only romance to acknowledge the power of fictions to shape or manipulate the present. I have used Renaut de Beaujeu's startling conclusion to Le Bel Inconnu as an illustration of this power at work. For another example we may turn to Chrétien's Cligés. When the three wise men from Salerno have come to pay their last respects to Fenice, who has faked death, they suddenly recall a famous story of a morte fausse:

Lors lor sovint de Salemon,
Que sa fame tant le haï
Que come morte le trahi.

(Cligés, 5802-4)

Then he remembers the story about Solomon, whom his wife hated so much that she betrayed him by playing dead.

Having called to mind the legend of Solomon and his wife who feigned death, the three would-be Magi begin to entertain the possibility that the legend may well have inspired Fenice. When they fail to bring her back to life they apply torture in the vain hope that this will prove right their suspicion that Fenice is actually following the well-known script of the story of Solomon's wife.¹⁶ In Cligés, too, literary works, be it the legend of Solomon or the Tristan legend, have the power to ensnare Chrétien's characters. In the final lines of Cligés, Chrétien shows an awareness that this power inheres even in his own narrative:

Einz puis n'i ot empereor
N'eüst de sa fame peor
Qu'ele nel deüst decevoir,
Se il oï ramantevoir
Comant Fenice Alis deçut.
.....Por ce einsi com an prison
Est gardee an Constantinoble …

(Cligés, 6645-53)

After this any emperor who heard tell of how Fenice deceived Alis was afraid that his wife might deceive him too … That is why the empress is kept locked in prison in Constantinople …

Once again, the telling of a story, the history of Fenice's deception, has a remarkable effect on reality. Constructed as potential Fenices, all empresses remain jealously guarded lest another Cligés should come along. The story of Cligés, ‘l'uevre Crestïen’, captivates its audience in the most literal sense of the word. Like the Lady of the Castle, the characters in Cligés fashion themselves and others according to the powerful models provided by a literary tradition, a tradition which, so Chrétien seems to imply, includes his own romance.

Gawain's Discretion

The hero of the Anglo-Norman romance of Yder is, like Gawain, accosted by his host's wife. The poet of Yder describes the ensuing scene as follows.

Quanques il puet se treit ariere
Mes ele se treit tot dis soentre.
Yder la feirt del pié al ventre
Si qu'el chei ariere enverse
E qu'el en devint tot perse.
Jo nel sai pas de ço reprendre
Kar il ne se poeit defendre.

(Yder, 374-80)

Whenever he can he draws back, but she immediately advances. Yder kicks her with his foot in the stomach, so that she falls over backwards and turns blue all over. I do not think I can reproach him for it, because it was the only way of defending himself.

That this episode should rank as one of the Gawain-poet's possible sources does not strike me as self-evident.¹⁷ To be sure, a superficial similarity between Yder and the temptation scenes in Gawain exists. The host's wife attempts to seduce the hero. But this is about as far as the similarities go. The poet of Yder excels at slapstick effects. The lack of dialogue is made up for by the physical exuberance of the two combatants, the one backing off, the other instantly drawing closer, in the end discomfited only by violence. Lest we make heavy weather of Yder's behaviour, the poet wittily pleads self-defence. The Gawain-poet, too, speaks of defensive movements: ‘The freke ferde with defence, and feted ful fayre’ (1282), but as the Lady confronts Gawain almost entirely on the plane of language, so, too, Gawain must defend himself with words. Yder has a means of repulsing the lady which never seems feasible to Gawain, who faces the more arduous task of discouraging the Lady without causing offence.

Gawain does so with patience and subtlety. Even when, in the third temptation scene, Gawain's resistance has reached a low point, he manages to remain polite:

With luf-laȝyng a lyt he layd hym bysyde
Alle þe spechez of specialté þat sprange of her mouthe.

(1777-8)

Instead of Yder's shove, Gawain first gives a gently dismissive smile, and next utters a not-today-thank-you. Here, in miniature, we see the difference between Yder and Gawain. In the former, the hero and the temptress act without restraint or control. Their movements seem somehow always in excess of what is either necessary or natural. Yder does not just push the lady, he kicks her in the belly. The Lady does not just fall, she topples over backwards and changes colour. In Gawain, however, appearances and words are minutely controlled. No pause or laugh seems unwilled. In a scene where the closing of a door can be an invitation, and Gawain's little ‘luf-lagh’ a rejection, all is understated rather than hyperbolic.

Despite the delicacy of Gawain's refusal, critical consensus has seen in the Gawain-poet's report of his dilemma a sign of Gawain's weakness:

For þat prynces of pris depresed hym so þikke,
Nurned hym so neȝe þe þred, þat nede hym bihoued
Oþer lach þer hir luf, oþer lodly refuse.
He cared for his cortaysye, lest craþayn he were,
And more for his meschef ȝif he schulde make synne,
And be traytor to þat tolke þat þat telde aȝt.

(1770-5)

It is not immediately obvious why the Gawain-poet feels that Gawain's rejection of the Lady's advances should compromise his ‘cortaysye’. The assumption is usually that the poet reports the dilemma only as Gawain himself perceives it. On this account, it becomes possible to argue, as A. C. Spearing does,¹⁸ that Gawain has already succumbed to the Lady's definition of ‘cortaysye’ in, for example, line 1300, ‘Bot he had craued a cosse, bi his courtaysye …’, where courtesy refers, in Dame Ragnell's blunt words, to ‘cortesy in bed’.¹⁹ Having accepted this definition, Gawain now feels he must betray the value of courtesy for which the Lady supposes him to stand. The word ‘cortaysye’ in this passage must, in this view, be read as if in inverted commas. This interpretation involves, however, a significant simplification of the problem that here concerns Gawain, a simplification which has been a tendency of most discussions of the temptation scenes.²⁰ Courtesy versus sin is glossed as an internal conflict between the two options of sleeping with the Lady or turning her down. When all is said and done, Gawain and Yder are envisaged as being in the same situation. Yet what bothers Gawain here is the thought that he, too, may have to resort to an unsubtle rejection à la Yder. For, as the passage makes clear, Gawain does not equate a refusal with a breach of courtesy. It is the possibility of refusing her ‘lodly’, of refusing her in a way that might cause offence, which brings on the concern for ‘cortaysye’. The face Gawain is trying to save, in other words, is not his own, but the Lady's. He feels he can at this juncture no longer counter her temptations without hurting her. To understand why, we need to examine how Gawain had managed to do so earlier.

When the Lady first enters Gawain's bedroom, Gawain carefully lifts up the curtain to see what is going on, and decides on the following plan:

Hit watz þe ladi, loflyest to beholde,
Þat droȝ þe dor after hir ful dernly and stylle,
And boȝed towarde þe bed; and þe burne schamed,
And layde hym doun lystyly and let as he slepte;
And ho stepped stilly and stel to his bedde,
Kest vp þe cortyn and creped withinne,
And set hir ful softly on þe bed-syde,
And lenged þere selly longe to loke quen he wakened.’
Þe lede lay lurked a ful longe quyle,
Compast in his concience to quat þat cace myȝt
Meue oþer amount—to meruayle hym þoȝt,
Bot ȝet he sayde in hymself: ‘More semly hit were
To aspye wyth my spelle in space quat ho wolde.’
Þen he wakenede, and wroth, and to hir warde torned,
And vnlouked his yȝe-lyddez and let as hym wondered,
And sayned hym, as bi his saȝe þe sauer to worthe,
                    with hande.

(1187-1203)

The Gawain-poet endows his character with a psychological depth which is the more remarkable for the shortness of the scene. Gawain's response to the awkward situation he finds himself in when a strange woman sneaks into his room is brilliantly conceived. The reason for the Lady's intrusion into Gawain's bedroom is as yet obscure. She may have other motives than her interest in her guest. Gawain simply cannot tell as yet. Even if she is here for a different reason than love, however, she might think Gawain is construing her motives as such. Imagine the embarrassment to which this what-must-he-be-thinking situation could give rise. Gawain therefore deliberately decides he has not seen a thing. But when the Lady settles on his bed for a ‘ful longe quyle’ it becomes impossible to ignore her. Again Gawain is careful to avoid embarrassment. To stop ‘letting’, to admit, in other words, that he has been aware of her presence all along, would be an acknowledgement of the fact that he has indeed used tact; an admission that the situation is indeed embarrassing. If, on the other hand, Gawain does not show surprise he might seem to suggest that to wake up with his host's wife on the bed is nothing out of the ordinary for him. Gawain therefore crosses and stretches himself elaborately, and while acting ‘as him wondered’, the pretence of surprise will invite her to make her intentions clear.

The scene is rich in situational humour, and shows Gawain's extraordinary awareness of the intricate realities of social interaction. This awareness, which, as Erving Goffman has noted,²¹ involves the inhibition of all acts and statements that might cause embarrassment, has been claimed to be a unique feature of English Arthurian romance.²² Exceptional it indeed is, but a comparison with a scene from Yvain will show that Chrétien de Troyes was equally capable of representing and poking gentle fun at the social game of keeping up appearances.

The episode I refer to is one in which two damsels and their lady happen upon a naked man in the middle of the forest. To the maiden's astonishment, the man turns out to be Yvain. She decides, however, not to wake him up:

Molt s'an seigne, et si s'an mervoille;
cele ne le bote, n'esvoille …

(Yvain, 2909-10)

She frequently crosses herself in amazement; but she does not touch or wake him …

Fortunately her lady has a box of ointment received from Morgan la Fee which can cure any form of madness. She gives it to the damsel on the condition that it must not be applied too lavishly, but the maiden gets so carried away in massaging the naked Yvain that she has soon finished the content of the box:

S'il en eüst cinc setiers,
s'eüst ele autel fet, ce cuit.

(3005-6)

And the same would have happened if she had had five gallons, I think.

She fanatically rubs his body with this ointment, leaves a suit of clothes, and hides behind a tree while Yvain gets dressed:

Derriers un grant chasne s'areste
tant que cil ot dormi assez,
qui fu gariz et respassez,
et rot son san et son mimoire.
Mes nuz se voit com un yvoire;
s'a grant honte; et plus grant eüst
se il s'aventure seüst.
et de sa char que il voit nue
est trespansez et esbaïz
et dit que morz est et traïz,
s'einsi l'a trové ne veü
Or ne vialt mes plus arester
la dameisele, ainz est montee,
et par delez lui est passee,
si con s'ele ne l'i seüst.
Et la dameisele autresi
vet regardant environ li
con s'ele ne sache qu'il a.
Esbaïe, vet ça et la
que droit vers lui ne vialt aler.
Et cil comance a rapeler:
‘Dameseile, de ça, de ça!’
Et la dameseile adreça
vers lui son palefroi anblant.
Cuidier li fist par ce sanblant
qu'ele de lui rien ne seüst,
n'onques la veü ne l'eüst,
et san et corteisie fist …

(Yvain, 3012-59)

She hides behind a great oak until he had slept enough, and woke up better and cured, in possession of his senses and his memory. But he sees that he is naked like ivory, and is greatly embarrassed, though he would have been even more embarrassed if he had known what had happened … His naked body causes him alarm and shame, and he says he is dead and betrayed if he is found or seen like this … Now the damsel waits no more, but gets on her palfrey and rides in his direction, as if she did not know that he was there … Looking bewildered, she goes now here and now there, since she did not want to go straight at him. And he calls out: ‘Damsel, here, here!’ And the damsel turned her ambling palfrey towards him, making him believe that she did not know anything about him and had not seen a thing. She acted cleverly and courteously …

Like Gawain, this ‘dameseile’ has mastered the art of pretending. The potential gêne for both parties is great. Yvain is stark naked, but to be seen naked, or to be observed watching someone naked, would be much worse, as both Yvain's monologue and the Lady's actions suggest. How can the damsel give Yvain the opportunity to extricate himself from his compromising position? She strikes on the same solution as Gawain. She pretends not to have seen, and hides behind the tree until Yvain is presentable. Even when Yvain has dressed she must tread carefully. Her act goes much further than a momentary look in the other direction. Like Gawain, the damsel realizes that to be seen to have purposefully ‘not seen’ something would only draw attention to the fact that something potentially embarrassing has taken place. She therefore does not make for Yvain directly, but purports only to be riding by as if wholly ignorant of his presence. She thus convinces Yvain that he has seen her first, and to complete her performance she pretends at first not to hear him as he calls out for help. The witty episode in Chrétien need not necessarily have influenced the Gawain-poet. But we find such a display of tact only rarely in medieval literature.²³ Where we do find it, it is never as developed or minutely observed. In his De Nugis Curialium, for example, Walter Map praises Henry II for his courtesy when, on seeing a monk's private parts exposed, ‘Rex, ut omnis facecie thesaurus, dissimulans uultum auertit, et tacuit.’ (‘The king, like the treasury of all courtliness, turned his face and was silent’.)²⁴ If this is courtliness, then how much more praise do Gawain and the damsel in Yvain deserve!

In addition to Yvain, the Gawain-poet seems to have made use of Chrétien's Lancelot. In one episode, which I have discussed elsewhere, Lancelot receives hospitality from a Lady who has engineered a test of his prowess. Lancelot takes on her household, who appear to be raping her, but just as he gains the upper hand the Lady calls the game off. But yet another ordeal awaits Lancelot. He has promised to sleep with the lady in return for her hospitality. Lancelot, however, can only think of Guinevere and is absolutely mortified. He lies completely still in bed until the maiden realizes he has no interest. She takes her leave and then begins to speak to herself:

‘Si vos voel a Deu comander;
si m'an irai …’
‘Des lores que je conui primes
chevalier, un seul n'an conui
que je prisasse, fors cestui,
La tierce part d'un angevin;
car si con ge pans et devin,
il vialt a si grant chose antendre
qu'ainz chevaliers n'osa enprendre
si perilleuse ne si grief;
et Dex doint qu'il an veigne a chief.’

(Lancelot, 1260-78)

‘I would like to commend you to God, and will be off …’ ‘Since I met my first knight, I have never known one that I would prize at one third of a penny compared with him. For I think and guess that he has undertaken so great an enterprise that no other knight before him undertook one so dangerous and hard; may God give him success.’

Besides the overall correspondences between this scene from Lancelot and the temptation scene in Gawain, it is in particular the lady's monologue which betrays a direct influence. For at the end of the Lady's first visit to Gawain's bedroom she, too, ponders in herself that:

‘Þaȝ I were burde bryȝtest,’ þe burde in mynde hade,
‘Þe lasse luf in his lode—for lur that he soȝt
                              boute hone,
                    Þe dunte þat schulde hym deue,
                    And nedez hit most be done.’
                    Þe lady penn spek of leue,
                    He granted hir ful sone.

(1283-9)²⁵

The gist of their monologues is the same. Both are spoken just after or before the ladies take their leave. In addition, an echo of the first part of the lady's monologues in Chrétien's Lancelot can be found in lines 1268-75 of Gawain. But the most important similarities between this scene from Gawain and Chrétien's Lancelot are to be found in the minute observation of the strategies with which unpleasant situations can be avoided. The Lady does not thrust herself on her guest. When she leaves, Chrétien drops a hint that she normally sleeps naked:

si est an sa chanbre venue,
et si se couche tote nue …

(Lancelot, 1263-4)

So she went to her room, where she went to bed stark naked.

As she lies down on Lancelot's bed, however, she does not undress entirely but keeps on her ‘chemise’.

et la dameseile s'i couche,
mes n'oste mie sa chemise.

(Lancelot, 1202-3)

And the damsel went to his bed, but she did not take off her chemise.

Why not? Because in case Lancelot has no appetite she will not have fully committed herself and will therefore be able to withdraw while allowing some uncertainty on which to construct the face-saving fiction that sex was not what she was after. How does Lancelot cope? He observes that the lady has not undressed entirely and decides that her policy is worth following:

Et il se couche tot a tret,
mes sa chemise pas ne tret,
ne plus qu'ele ot la soe feite.

(Lancelot, 1213-15)

And he lies down at the far end of the bed, but, like her, he does not take off his shirt.

When Lancelot observes the maximum distance between himself and her, the lady perceives that he is clearly not interested in what she has to offer. She therefore decides to leave, but not without maintaining the semblance that nothing extraordinary has in fact taken place:

‘S'il ne vos doit peser,
sire, de ci me partirai.
En ma chambre couchier m'irai
et vos an seroiz plus a eise.’

(Lancelot, 1248-51)

‘If you do not object, sir, I will leave you, and sleep in my room, so that you will be more comfortable.’

In the end, as Marie-Luce Chênerie writes, Lancelot's would-be lover ‘leaves the room in all her dignity … appearances have been saved; she offered nothing and nothing has been refused … we will admire the delicacy of this suggestion’.²⁶ Lancelot is of course not in the least sad to see her go: ‘the knight does not mind at all, but freely lets her go’ (‘au chevaliers mie ne grieve, ❙ einz l'an leisse aler volentiers’: 1262-3). In this comic ritual of leave- taking, it is only the author's hint that Lancelot lets her go happily which betrays his relief. I suspect that the same hint is present when Gawain grants the Lady of the Castle leave ‘ful sone’ (1289).

The lady's display of tact does not stop at this. The next day she accompanies Lancelot on his quest. When Lancelot spots a comb with the Queen's golden hair entangled in it, he nearly collapses. The lady leaps from her palfrey to assist him but at this moment Lancelot is overcome by shame and asks her what she has dismounted for. The lady weighs her options and decides against telling him the truth:

Ne cuidiez pas que le porcoi
la dameisele l'an conoisse,
qu'il an eüst honte et angoisse,
et si li grevast et neüst,
se le voir l'en reconeüst;
si s'est de voir dire gueitiee,
einz dit come bien afeitiee:
‘Sire, je ving cest peigne querre,
por ce sui descendue a terre;
que de l'avoir oi tel espans,
ja nel cuidai tenir a tans.’

(Lancelot, 1446-56)

Do not think that the lady revealed her motives, because it would have caused him shame and embarrassment, and would have hurt his feelings. And so she abandons the idea of telling the truth, and says courteously: ‘Sir, I came to fetch this comb, that is why I got down on the ground. I was so eager to have it that I could not stop myself.’

Rather than recognizing Lancelot's near-collapse for what it is, by admitting that she has come to help Lancelot, she hides ‘le voir’ from him, and pretends she has only come to get the comb. Like Gawain, who feigns sleep, she has a highly developed sense of the ‘honte’ and the ‘angoisse’ to which an open acknowledgement of the faux pas could lead.

But Gawain's ingenuity is to be taxed further. By pretending not to see the Lady of the Castle he had given her the opportunity to save her role as Bertilac's wife. The Lady, however, will not be ignored, and she makes her intentions abundantly clear:

‘Ye ar welcum to my cors,
Yowre awen won to wale;
Me behouez of fyne force
Your seruaunt be, and schale.’

(1237-40)

Much has already been said about the potential ambiguity of these lines. As Tolkien and Gordon pointed out in their edition, ‘cors’ need mean no more than ‘person’.²⁷ More speculatively, David Mills has suggested another possible double-entendre between ‘cor(t)s’ (courts) and ‘cors’ (body), ‘won’ (delight) and ‘won’ (dwelling).²⁸ The ambiguity of a word, however, does not simply manifest itself in the act of enunciation. If we only had the context of the First Continuation to go by, in which Gawain responds to the same offer by taking ‘cors’ in the literal sense, and sleeps with the damsel, we would never have known that the word ‘cors’ could be equivocal. And likewise, if Gawain had decided to act like the French hero of the First Continuation, there would surely have been no reason to consult the MED for semantic polyvalence. Meaning would in that case be fixed because speaker and hearer agree on one. Single meaning and ambiguity arise, in other words, out of a process of negotiation. What makes us alive to the multiplicity of meanings in the Lady's words is precisely the fact that these meanings are being contested, that their negotiations do not come to a halt in an agreement between the Lady and Gawain. What the Lady intends as a come-on, Gawain deliberately misreads as politeness pure and simple. Only by a misprision of the sexual innuendo does he activate the other, innocuous side of the Lady's words. In fact, his response to the Lady of the Castle is no less tactful than his decision not to see the Lady enter the bedroom. The ‘speches skere’ (1261) with which he replies to her innuendoes are a deliberate misrecognition of her adulterous intentions. By mistaking her in this way, Gawain can dissuade her, without giving open recognition that he is in fact aware of what she is after.

What makes Gawain's polite dissuasions possible is the saving ambiguity of ‘luf-talk’. Potentially one of the most pronounced ‘face-threatening acts’, advances and love-talk are hedged in by hints, metaphors, double-talk, and circumlocutions which allow the speaker to go ‘off-record’, not to commit himself to one attributable intention, and thereby to avoid being held accountable for any offence or unpleasantness.²⁹ Love-talk, born of and used in situations where so much self-esteem is at stake, contains for this reason a considerable interpretative leeway. Is it mere dalliance or does it serve an ulterior purpose? When Gawain sits beside the Lady in Bertilac's hall, sharing in the public joy, neither the Lady's glances, nor Gawain's response to them, can escape this potential ambivalence:

Such semblaunt to þat segge semly ho made,
Wyth stille stollen countenance, þat stalworth to plese,
Þat al forwondered watz þe wyȝe, and wroth wyth hymseluen,
Bot he nolde not for his nurture nurne hir aȝaynes,
Bot dalt with her al in daynté, how-se-euer þe dede turned towrast.

(1658-63)

Although the Lady ‘wyth stille stollen countenance’ intimates her love for her neighbour, Gawain responds to her as if all were done ‘in daynté’. Unwillingly admitted to the Lady's secret communications, Gawain finds himself placed in a ‘collusive relationship’³⁰vis-à-vis Bertilac and his retainers, and the only way he can avoid causing offence to the Lady and the crowd who observe the scene is by acting as an interpreter, by translating her advances into an acceptable form of ‘nurture’. But just as the Lady's innuendoes can be interpreted as a form of urbane dalliance only, Gawain's gallantry can also be mistaken for a sign of an illicit love-affair. The ‘dede’ of dalliance can always be turned ‘towrast’.

Chrétien similarly draws attention to the language of love. An episode from Cligés will serve as an illustration. In the passage below, the lovers Cligés and Fenice say goodbye while the bystanders look on:

Molt ot fez sopirs et sangloz
Au partir celez et coverz,
Que uns n'ot tant les ialz overz,
Ne tant i regart cleremant
Qu'au departir certenemant
De verité savoir peüst
Qu'au anträus deus amor eüst.

(Cligés, 4284-90)

There were many hidden and concealed sighs and tears at the departure, so that, however hard one had looked, and however clearly one had seen it, it would have been impossible to say or know for certain whether the two who departed were in love.

As Chrétien makes clear, it is not that their behaviour cannot be interpreted as a sign that ‘antr'aus deus amor eüst’. But no one can tell positively. By slightly disguising their emotions, passion and polite gallantry become indistinguishable. In point of fact, even for Fenice Cligés's parting words take on the very ambivalence which had benefited the couple earlier on:

Cligés par quele entancion
‘Je sui toz vostres’ me deïst,
S'amor dire ne li feïst?
Mes ce me resmaie de bot
Que c'est une parole usee
Si repuis bien estre amusee.
Don ne me sai auquel tenir,
Car ce porroit tost avenir
Qu'il le dist por moi losangier.

(Cligés, 4366-97)

With what intention did Cligés say: ‘I am all yours’, if it was not out of love? … But what really worries me is that it is a cliché, and I may be deluded … So I do not know how to take it, for it might well be that he said it to flatter me.

Was Cligés's parting word a trite commonplace or a token of his love? Even Fenice herself can no longer be sure.

But the closest analogue to the passage from Gawain above is in Chrétien's Yvain, where Laudine entertains Arthur's court, which has arrived to participate in the festivities in honour of her and Yvain's wedding:

et la dame tant les enore
chascun por soi et toz ansanble,
que tel foi i a cui il sanble
que d'amors veignent li atret
et li sanblent qu'ele lor fet;
et cez puet an nices clamer
qui cuident qu'el les voelle amer;
quant une dame est si cortoise …

(Yvain, 2456-63)

and the lady honours them all so well, collectively and individually, that there were some who thought that her attention was inspired by love; but I would call them fools for thinking that a lady who is courteous to them loves them …

Like Gawain, Laudine acts only in ‘daynté’, but, like the Gawain-poet, Chrétien shows that her courtesies can always be mistaken for love. At stake in these moments from Gawain and Chrétien is a confusion not so much about the meaning of words or actions but about their force,³¹ or, in Chrétien's words, the speaker's ‘entancion’ at the moment of enunciation—a confusion, to be precise, about whether gallantry is intended as a means to an end, as an invitation to reciprocate love, or is merely an urbane manner of speech which seeks to achieve no such perlocutionary effect.

In order to see how Gawain exploits this ambiguity of ‘luf-talk’ to his advantage, let us look at a dialogue from the first bedroom visit. The passage opens with his response to the Lady's offer of her ‘cors’:

‘In god fayth,’ quoþ Gawayn, ‘gayn hit me þynkkez,
Þagh I be not now he þat ȝe of speken;
To reche to such reuerence as ȝe reherce here
I am wyȝe vnworþy, I wot wel myseluen …’
‘In god fayth, Sir Gawayn,’ quoþ þe gay lady,
‘Þe prys and þe prowes þat plesez al oþer,
If I hit lakked oþer set at lyȝt, hit were littel daynté;
Bot hit ar ladyes innoȝe þat leuer wer nowþe
Haf þe, hende, in hor holde, as I þe habbe here,
To daly with derely your daynté wordez,
Keuer hem comfort and colen her carez,
Þen much of þe garysoun oþer golde þat þay hauen …’
‘Madame,’ quoþ þe myry mon, ‘Mary yow ȝelde,
For I haf founden, in god fayth, yowre fraunchis nobele,
And oþer ful much of oþer folk fongen bi hor dedez,
Bot þe daynté þat þay delen for my disert nys euen,
Hit is the worchyp of yourself þat noȝt bot wel connez.’
‘Bi Mary,’ quoþ þe menskful, ‘me thynk hit an oþer;
For were I worth al þe wone of wymmen alyue,
And al þe wele of þe worlde were in my honde,
And I schulde chepen and chose to cheue me a lorde
Þer schulde no freke vpon folde bifore yow be chosen.’
‘Iwysse, worþy,’ quoþ þe wyȝe, ‘ȝe haf waled wel better;
Bot I am proude of þe prys þat ȝe put on me,
And soberly your seruaunt, my souerayn I holde yow,
And yowre knyȝt I becom, and Kryst yow forȝelde!’

(1241-79)

The Lady's words are again potent with sexual innuendo. She responds to Gawain's modest retort that he is unworthy of the price she sets on him by imagining just how popular he would be with ladies. If they had his company, they would find delightful words, comfort, and relief from their sorrows. The word ‘comfort’, like its Latin counterpart solatia, has the connotative meaning of sexual enjoyment. The word ‘carez’ too is by no means straightforward. The ‘carez’ which Gawain would relieve could refer to ‘pangs of love’.³² While the Lady's subordinate clause is hypothetical, she connects the hypothetical fulfilment of the ladies' desire explicitly with her own situation when she reminds Gawain that what for her imagined ladies must remain wishful thinking can in her case become reality: ‘as I þe habbe here …’. Her whole speech implies that the potential value of Gawain to ladies can now become a reality, if only Gawain would live up to it.

Gawain's clever response to her argument revolves around the interpretative choice Fenice imagines apropos of Cligés's parting words. Apparently unaware that the Lady might have said this out of love for him, he replies to it as if her words were indeed ‘une parole usee’ and as if she had indeed said it ‘por losangier’. Thanking her for her ‘fraunchis nobele’, from which her ‘praise’ must have sprung, Gawain then denies the value she has set on him as if that had been the Lady's only intention. When the Lady next suggests—again in a hypothetical clause—that she would list Gawain as her first choice, Gawain responds again by a deliberate misprision of the perlocutionary effect the Lady is trying to achieve. Purporting to take her proposition merely as a supposition for the sake of argument, he commends her on her good choice in reality: ‘ȝe haf waled wel better’, and gallantly offers his service.

Let us look at one more example of the way Gawain manages to keep the Lady at bay. During her first visit to Gawain's bedroom, the Lady had asked Gawain for a kiss. When she entertains her guest the following morning she reminds him of the instruction in politeness she had given him the day before:

‘What is þat?’ quoþ þe wyghe, ‘Iwysse I wot neuer;
If hit be sothe þat ȝe breue, þe blame is myn awen.’
‘Yet I kende yow of kyssyng,’ quoþ þe clere þenne,
‘Quere-so countenance is couþe quikly to clayme;
þat bicumes vche a knyȝt þat cortaysy vses.’
‘Do way,’ quoþ þat derf mon, ‘my dere, þat speche,
For þat durst I not do, lest I deuayed were;
If I were werned, I were wrang, iwysse, ȝif I profered.’
‘Ma fay,’ quoþ þe meré wyf, ‘ȝe may not be werned,
Ye ar stif innoghe to constrayne wyth strenkþe, ȝif yow lykez,
Yif any were so vilanous þat yow devaye wolde.’
‘Ye, be God,’ quoþ Gawayn, ‘good is your speche,
Bot þrete is vnþryuande in þede þer I lende,
And vche gift þat is geuen not with goud wylle.’

(1487-1500)

As usual Gawain plays the dummy, pretending not to understand what the Lady is driving at. When she reminds him of yesterday's kiss, his response is again phrased as a hypothetical statement so as to avoid talking about kisses to be given here and now. Moreover, Gawain suggests that in certain conditions a kiss might be inopportune, in the hope that by investigating the conditions in which a kiss is felicitous, he will be seen to explore possible routes of escape. Of course the route Gawain explores had already been blocked by the Lady when she implied that her ‘countenance’ is ‘couþe’. But the Lady's suggestion that a kiss would be welcome to her is an implication contained in a general maxim—‘where favour is plain to see, one should not hesitate to stake one's claim’—which does not explicitly refer to her particular situation. As Gawain implies when he expresses his doubts about having met this condition, he does not count himself so lucky as those who can rely on their ladies' favour. When the Lady then suggests that even if he were refused he could easily take a damsel by force, Gawain is quick to point out an impropriety in her suggestions, for, in Arthur's land, the use of force is frowned on.³³ In this way Gawain succeeds in diverting the Lady's moves on to the safe ground of a debate about the dos and don'ts of love.³⁴

Gawain's tactics in the temptation scenes are therefore not to reject the Lady's love-talk, but to participate in a way that will define it as nothing more than playful banter. True, this is not the way the Lady of the Castle sees it, when she expresses disappointment with Gawain's reluctance to show off his skills in love-talk:

And I haf seten by yourself here sere twyes,
Yet herde I neuer of your hed helde no wordez
Þat euer longed to luf, lasse ne more …

(1522-4)

And her assessment of the situation has been reduplicated by numerous critics who argue that the Gawain-poet endowed his hero with an ‘English’ moral uprightness that precluded his participation in the ‘French’ game of courtly love.³⁵ But in fact Gawain shows a remarkable adeptness at playing the courtly lover. Moments before the Lady expresses her surprise at not hearing any words ‘þat ever longed to luf’ from her guest the Gawain-poet describes the two busily talking ‘Of druryes greme and grace’ (1507). When she reprimands Gawain for not indulging in love-talk she is right only in so far as we credit her definition of love-talk as a prelude to action. For words of ‘druryes’ she has had from Gawain in plenty.

Gawain's knowledge of the corpus of love-literature and his ability to act the lover are clearly demonstrated in the opening exchange between the Lady and Gawain:

‘God moroun, Sir Gawayn’, sayde þat gay lady,
‘Ye ar a sleper vnslyȝe, þat mon may slyde hider;
Now ar ȝe tan as-tyt! Bot true vus may shape,
I schal bynde yow in your bedde, þat be ȝe trayst’:
Al laȝande þe lady lanced þo bourdez.
‘Goud moroun, gay,’ quoþ Gawayn þe blyþe,
‘Me schal worþe at your wille, and þat me wel lykez,
For I ȝelde me ȝederly, and ȝeȝe after grace,
And þat is þe best, be my dome, for me byhouez nede’:
And þus he bourded aȝayn wiþ mony a blyþe laȝter.
‘Bot wolde ȝe, lady louely, þen leue me grante,
And deprece your prysoun, and pray hym to ryse,
I wolde boȝe of þis bed, and busk me better;
I schulde keuer þe more comfort to karp yow wyth.’

(1208-21)

The Lady shows herself to be well versed in the conventional metaphors of courtly love. She is the person who wages war on the lover, who captures her powerless lover whom only a truce can save. This is of course the stuff on which the representations of love in both lyrics and romances are based.³⁶ And Gawain, the magisterial love-talker, answers the Lady in kind. He is the Lady's prisoner, completely dependent on her will. Between the Lady and Gawain, an imaginary play-world interposes itself, whose stylized conventions had been elaborated by numerous texts, such as the following by the trouvères Blondel de Nesle and Gace Brulé respectively:

Et bien set [la dame] que sui en prison.
S'or ne me met a guarison,
Nule autre ne m'en puet jeter.

And my lady knows well that I am in prison, and if she does not bail me out, no one else can release me.

De tantes parz ai esté assailiz
Que je n'ai mais pooir de moi deffendre,
Ne je suis si forz ne si hardiz
Qu'envers Amors osasse plus contendre.(37)

I am assailed from so many sides that I have no power to defend myself, and I am not so strong or bold as to fight Love any longer.

Gawain cannot be faulted for his ignorance of the corpus of love-literature or his inability to enact it.

As a virtuoso performer of the game of courtly love, Gawain has in actual fact much in common with the way Chrétien de Troyes presents the hero in his romances.³⁸ During the feast in honour of Yvain and Laudine's wedding, we meet Lunete and Gawain engrossed in playful flirtations:

La dameisele ot non Lunete.
.....A mon seignor Gauvain s'acointe
qui molt la prise, et qui molt l'ainme,
et por ce s'amie la clainme,
qu'ele avoit de mort garanti
son compaignon et son ami;
si li offre molt son servise.

The damsel's name was Lunete … She introduces herself to Gawain, who thinks highly of her, and likes her a lot, and for that reason he calls her his amie, since she had saved his companion and friend [Yvain] from death. He insistently offers her his service.

Lunete then tells Gawain of Yvain's adventures:

Mes sire Gauvains molt se rit
de ce qu'ele li conte et dit:
Ma dameisele, je vos doing
et a mestier et sanz besoing
un tel chevalier con je sui.
.....—Vostre merci, sire, fet ele.

(Yvain, 2417-42)

Sir Gawain laughs heartily about her story and says: Damsel, I put myself at your disposal, whenever you need me … Thank you, sir, she replies.

There is no reason to assume that Gawain or Lunete regard these offers of love and service as anything more than a pleasant and elegant pastime. The English Gawain, too, simply deems it polite to meet the ladies at Castle Hautdesert and to offer them ‘To be her seruaunt soþly’ (976). As Chrétien suggests, the rationale behind his character's plaisanterie is not passion but his gratitude for Lunete's efforts on his friend Yvain's behalf. To take to heart Chrétien's saying that gallantry must not be misconstrued as love—‘cez puet an nices clamer ❙ qui cuident qu'el les voelle amer’ (Yvain, 2461-2)—we need to distinguish both in Gawain and Yvain between love in game and love in earnest. Whereas later verse romances about Gawain show him interested primarily in the latter, the romances of Chrétien, with the possible exception of his last romance,³⁹ resemble Gawain in portraying a knight whose penchant for acting the lover is simply part and parcel of social gracefulness.

What the ‘play’ between Gawain and the Lady of the Castle presupposes is the difference between who they are and what they do, between themselves and the models of love-literature they follow, between fiction and reality. That is why Gawain can safely accept this kind of ‘confort’, and why, when the Lady's thoughts turn out to be far from ‘clene’, Gawain must double his efforts to impose his vision of their dalliance as a game. While the Lady attempts to break down the boundary which separates the lovers of fiction from herself and her host, Gawain attempts to keep the Lady in the realm of play where actions are ‘non- consequential’ and ‘do not denote what these actions for which they stand would denote’.⁴⁰ Gawain's misreadings of the Lady's advances as merely playful serve as a hint that she must not confuse their dalliance with the real thing, not simply because of the different meaning it carries in the play-world, but because as play their actions are only a stand-in, representing what Gawain insists to be absent in reality.

The Lady of the Castle, however, chooses not to take the hint and does not avail herself of the opportunity for an honourable retreat. If Gawain pretends to be deaf to her intentions, the Lady can decide not to hear Gawain's. The problem of his tactful approach is that it circumvents the issue; it cannot address it openly. His tact ultimately keeps all options open, including the choice to ‘lach þer hir luf’.

In an ingenious way the Gawain-poet succeeds in conveying the increasing difficulty of Gawain's tactful deferrals. After the first temptation scene the Lady's only triumph is a goodbye kiss. But she uses the small territorial advantage she has gained to great effect. In the second temptation scene she refers to her previous session with her guest as a lesson on which they should build and, though not without difficulty, she wrests from Gawain the first kiss of the day half-way through her visit to his bedchamber. The third temptation scene involves no preliminaries at all. She opens a window, walks up to his bed, and kisses Gawain even before he has the chance to welcome her. No time is wasted on any preambles:

Þe lady luflych com laȝande swete,
Felle ouer his fayre face, and fetly hym kyssed;
He welcumeȝ hir worþily with a wale chere.
He seȝ hir so glorious and gayly atyred,
So fautles of hir fetures and of so fyne hewes,
Wiȝt wallande joye warmed his hert.
With smoþe smylyng and smolt þay smeten into merþe,
Þat al watz blis and bonchef þat breke hem bitwene,
                              and wynne.
                    Þay lanced wordes gode,
                    Much wele þen watz þerinne;
                    Gret perile bitwene hem stod,
                    Nif Maré of hir knyȝt mynne.

(1757-69)

Gawain, struck by the lady's beauty, is at this point on the verge of surrender. The scene recalls Perceval's temptation in the Queste del saint graal. Perceval is also about to give in to a lady's temptations, until he sees the cross on the hilt of his sword and returns to his senses:

Et lors resgarde la damoisele qui li est si bele, ce li est avis, que onques n'ot veue sa pareille de biauté. Si li plest tant et embelist, por le grant acesmement qu'il voit en li et por les douces paroles que ele dit; qu'il en eschaufe outre ce que il ne deust.

(Queste del saint graal, p. 109)

And then he saw the maiden, who seemed to him so beautiful that he had never seen her equal in beauty. She pleased and delighted him, because of the beauty he sees and the sweet words she says to him. They heated him more than they should.

Gawain is equally overwhelmed and inflamed by the sight of the Lady. The personifications of Gawain's feelings—‘Wiȝt wallande joye warmed his hert’, ‘al watz blis and bonchef þat breke hem bitwene’—suggest Gawain is no longer acting, but being acted on. Gawain and the Lady still speak, but the poem no longer lets us listen in on their conversation, as if to suggest it has become too private. Significantly, it is when we next hear Gawain speak that we know he has pulled back from the ‘gret perile’ of intimacy: ‘God shylde’, quoþ þe schalk, ‘þat schal not befalle!’ (1776).

Finding her guest as resistant as ever, the Lady of the Castle decides, in her final opportunity to break through Gawain's defences, to get her message across whatever the cost:

Quoþ þat burde to þe burne, ‘Blame ȝe disserue,
Yif ȝe luf not þat lyf þat ȝe lye next,
Bifore alle þe wyȝez in þe worlde wounded in hert,
Bot if ȝe half a lemman, a leuer, þat yow lykez better,
And folden fayth to þat fre, festned so harde
Þat yow lausen ne lyst—and þat I leue nouþe;
And þat ȝe telle me þat now trwly I pray yow,
For alle þe lufez vpon lyue layne not þe soþe
                              for gile.’
                    Þe knyȝt sayde, ‘Be sayn Jon,’
                    And smeþely con he smyle,
                    ‘In fayth I welde riȝt non,
                    Ne non wil welde þe quile.’
‘Þat is a worde’, quoþ þat wyȝt, ‘þat worst is of alle;
Bot I am swared for soþe, þat sore me þinkkez’.

(1779-93)

The sudden directness of the Lady's words is striking. There are no ambiguities here which allow Gawain to extricate himself from overtly acknowledging what the Lady is after. Does he love her or another, she asks, and she insists on a straightforward answer: ‘layne not þe soþe for gile.’ We cannot understand why Gawain feels he must now refuse her ‘lodly’ and compromise his courtesy, unless we realize that he can here no longer tactfully misread the Lady's intentions in a way that will save her face. She drops all her cover in an attempt to hit home and thus deprives Gawain of the possibility of maintaining for her benefit the illusion that she was merely playing an urbane game. The Lady speaks her mind and demands the truth. Gawain does his best to soften its impact. There is his gentle smile, an indirect answer which picks up on the question whether he has a lover rather than the question whether he loves her, and a slight qualification at the end in ‘þe quile’. But if the purpose of courtesy is to avoid unpleasant situations, then Gawain has indeed fallen short of this ideal. As the Lady's response makes clear, the truth hurts, however much Gawain tries to cushion it. But in so far as the Lady insists on the ‘soþe’ in a way which allows Gawain no scope for any strategic misreading of her intentions, and offers him, in Goffman's words, ‘no excuse for excuse’, she leaves him no other choice.⁴¹

The Art of Make-Believe

The Lady of the Castle, is, as we have seen, an expert reader of medieval romance. As she tells Gawain stories about knights and their lady-loves, Gawain must counter by insisting on the difference between his own situation and the episodes in romance in which knights equip themselves with lovers. The difference is not simply that he is not the ‘Gauvain’ of many French verse romances, always ready to indulge in a love-affair. For while the Lady of the Castle reduces the difference between the history Gawain is in the process of writing and the histories of previous romances to a deviance in Gawain's character, she directs attention away from her own questionable credentials as a romance-heroine. Maidens, widows, and hosts' daughters may be fair game for the wandering knight, but in the long history of Gawain's love-life there is not a single affair with the host's wife. Courtly romances underwrite a law of hospitality which anthropologists have observed to be as universal as the prohibition of incest: any usurpation of the host's role by the guest is taboo.⁴²

A whole series of anecdotal stories about Gawain, written in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in Italian and Latin, take this very moral as their subject. In these stories Gawain decides to receive hospitality from this castellan to quench his curiosity. But to his surprise he is treated very well. When he takes leave of his host he asks him why he has not been beaten like all the others. The host explains:

Cum milites veniunt ad domum meam, ego nitor eis honorem facere; ipsi vero in contrarium faciunt et dicunt: ‘Domine, domine, ego nolo, hoc non faciatis!’ et nolunt in domo mea mihi dominari.⁴³

When knights come to my house, I go out of my way to honour them; they, however, oppose me and say: ‘Lord, lord, I will not do this, don't do that!’ They do not allow me to be a lord in my own home.

Because Gawain has respected the fact that the host should be the master in his own house and cannot allow a guest to step into his shoes, he escapes scot-free. Of the many versions of this anecdote, Antonio Pucci's fourteenth-century Italian telling, which includes a temptation by the host's wife,⁴⁴ spells out most explicitly the nature of the transgression which sleeping with the host's wife behind his back would involve. To commit this sin would be to assume the place of the host, or, as Gawain puts it, ‘to be traytor to þat tolke þat þat telde aȝt’ (1775). This is what the Lady wishes Gawain to forget when she compares Gawain with the heroes of romances who bring ‘blysse into boure’: that she is not suited for a narrative about knights who acquire lovers. She is not a potential bride but the wife of the paterfamilias, and is in this sense ‘mother’ rather than ‘lover’.

If I invoke here the metaphors of an Oedipal drama it is not because on some mysterious ‘latent’ or ‘underlying’ level the Lady is really Gawain's mother, as some critics have argued,⁴⁵ but because the law of hospitality which forbids Gawain to usurp the place of the host by sleeping with his wife resembles the Oedipal prohibition at the literal level. Obedience to the Father or the paterfamilias entails a sacrifice, be it the son's desire to be at one with the mother, or the guest's desire for the host's wife or anything which might encroach on the host's privileges. In both cases participation in culture requires that roles are distinguished and distances are kept in play, between father and son, or between host and guest.

The Lady's temptations take as their object of attack the differentiations between Gawain and his literary model, guest and host, the wife of the paterfamilias and a lover of one's own. As I have argued in an earlier section, Gawain knows the importance that attaches to maintaining the distinction between the Lady as lover and as Bertilac's wife, between the amorous ladies and the knights whom they inspire in chivalric romance and his own situation. But in the face of Gawain's awareness that in his own adventure the host's wife functions as a dangerous opponent, the Gawain-poet's Lady conjures up a romance-paradigm which hides from Gawain and the reader that she continues to play the role she had played all along: not that of a lady whose love will support the knights she admires, but, like the mother of the family drama, a figure whose love puts obstacles in the way of success.

Her temptations withstood three times, the Lady acknowledges defeat. But as she is about to leave the room she retraces her steps and asks Gawain, as if in a final by-the-way, for a gift to remember him by. When Gawain refuses she eventually offers him the green girdle, and although Gawain first refuses it, he quickly changes his mind when she reveals that the girdle has the power to keep its wearer from harm:

Þen kest þe knyȝt, and hit come to his hert
Hit were a juel for þe jopardé þat hym iugged were:
When he acheued to þe chapel his chek for to fech,
Myȝt he haf slypped to be vnslayn, þe sleȝt were noble.

(1855-8)

After Gawain has spent three mornings belabouring the discrepancy between previous romances and his own situation, it is finally a love-gift with magical properties in which Gawain and the reader suspend their disbelief. After many hours in which Gawain stubbornly refuses to be ruled by the authority of previous romances, he and the reader fall for one of the oldest commonplaces of romance: the talismanic love-token.

The motif may be found, before the birth of Arthurian romance, in Benoît de Sainte-Maure's Roman de Troie, in which Medea presents her lover Jason with magical gifts that will assist him in his adventure of the Golden Fleece. In Arthurian romance, Yvain similarly receives a gift with protective qualities from Laudine. Before he leaves her on his round of tournaments, Laudine gives him a magical ring that will protect him from harm:

Mes or metroiz an vostre doi
cest mien anel, que je vos prest;
de la pierre quex ele est
vos voel dire tot en apert:
prison ne tient ne sanc ne pert
nus amanz verais et leax,
ne avenir ne li puet max;
mes qui le porte, et chier le tient
de s'amie li resovient,
et si devient plus durs que fers …

(Yvain, 2602-11)

Now I will put this ring of mine on your finger, and I lend it to you. And I want to tell you plainly about the nature of its stone: no true and faithful lover will be taken prisoner or will shed blood, and nothing bad can happen to him. But he who wears it, and cherishes it, will remember his beloved. Then he will become tougher than iron.

The ladies of the Vulgate Lancelot, too, trust that the gift of a girdle will boost the morale of their champions. When Gawain undertakes a combat for the lady of Roestoc, her servant advises her as follows:

‘Et je voes loeroie que vous li donisiés aucune druerie et par aventure cuers li croisteroit, car dames ont aidié a faire maint preudome.’ Et ele s'i acorde bien. [The Lady gives her gift to Gawain and says] ‘si vous aport de mes drueries et vous pri que vos les portés en ramenbrance de moi. Et sachiés que je suis tout vostre. Or si combatés por vostre amie durement.’ Lors li baille le coroie et le fremal, et il le chaint et met le fremal a son col.

(LVIa, 31-2)

‘It would be praiseworthy if you gave him some love-token. It might increase his courage, for ladies have often helped men in this way.’ And she agrees completely. ‘I am bringing you a token of my love, and I pray you wear it in remembrance of me. And know that I am wholly yours. So fight for your lady-love as hard as you can.’ Then she hands him the belt and the lace, and he ties it around him and puts the lace around his neck.

Like the many chivalric heroes who have gone before him, Gawain in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, who has thus far refused to give in to the Lady's seductions in order to preserve an allegiance to the host, ends up by embracing, as romance-heroes do, a ‘luflace’, which she insists must remain hidden from her husband:

And [she] bisoȝt hym, for hir sake, disceuer hit neuer,
Bot to lelly layne fro hir lorde; þe leude hym acordez
þat neuer wyȝe schulde hit wyt, iwysse, bot þay twayne for noȝte.

(1862-5)

This love-token is a gift which Gawain thinks is known only to himself and the Lady. No longer a threat to Gawain, the Lady becomes Gawain's partner in a ‘secret coalition’ which, Gawain believes, excludes the host.⁴⁶

The Lady of the Castle seems suddenly to have undergone a structural change which transforms her from Gawain's earlier enemy into an adjuvant, who, like the ladies of romance, hands out a gift so that her loved one may thrive on its beneficial properties. If Gawain may retrospectively be analysed as a narrative in which the Lady of the Castle represents Gawain's ‘enmy kene’ (2406), the function of the Lady's offer of the girdle is precisely to hide this structure momentarily beneath a familiar romance-paradigm in which the Lady appears as helper rather than opponent. The girdle lures Gawain and the reader into believing they are in a different romance, in which ladies assist their lovers in their quests. True, Gawain knows that she is Bertilac's wife, and that in that capacity she is quite different from the marriageable ladies of romance, but still he believes her love-gift might save his life. And the reader colludes in Gawain's wishful thinking. Rationally, we know perfectly well that girdles are not magical talismans, but fancying ourselves to be in the fantastic world of romance where such magical love-gifts abound, we, like Gawain, overlay our knowledge of the way things are with the belief that we are in a romance where things can be different.

The joke the Gawain-poet plays on Gawain and the reader is his obfuscation and subsequent revelation of what we could always have known: that a green girdle is, after all, a green girdle, and that the Lady is Bertilac's wife rather than Gawain's secret admirer. What Gawain learns from the Green Knight when the joke is revealed is not simply that it is foolish to suspend this distinction and the distinctions which inevitably follow—those between mine and thine, between the privileges of guest and host, between self and the knights of romance who can do the impossible when armed with love-tokens. He learns also that to believe one can get away with suspending these distinctions is to believe in magic.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is not the only romance that makes its hero and its audience believe in magic when it is not there. There is an important connection here between the Gawain-poet and Chrétien de Troyes, who frequently lures us into a world of make-believe, only to explode the fiction in which we had suspended our disbelief. The episode of the magic tower from Cligés will illustrate this. Like Gawain, Cligés and Fenice are convinced that the miraculous inventions of Fenice's nurse Thessala and Cligés's servant John will enable them to escape from reality.⁴⁷ Because Fenice is married to Cligés's uncle, she is reluctant to desert her husband for his nephew by eloping to Arthur's kingdom. In this case they would surely be defamed for their infidelity. With the help of Thessala, Fenice feigns death, and John builds a tower with invisible entrances, constructed in such a way that the couple will be able to spend the rest of their lives there without ever being found out. Thus they will be able to enjoy each other without incurring shame. When Fenice gets tired of being locked away in a tower and yearns for fresh air, John agrees to wave his magic wand yet again. He opens an invisible door and reveals to the lovers' eyes the most paradisal garden they have ever seen:

Lors vet Jehanz ovrir un huis
Tel que je ne sai, ne ne puis
La façon dire ne retraire.
Nus fors Jehan le poïst faire.
Ne ja nus dire ne seüst
Que huis ne fenestre i eüst,
Tant con li huis ne fust overz,
Si estoit celez et coverz.

(Cligés, 6297-304)

Then John opens a door—I do not know what kind of door, and cannot say how he did it. Only John could have done it. And no one could have said there was a door or window in it, for unless the door was open, it was hidden and concealed.

As in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the marvellous in Cligés seems to offer the heroes a final victory over the real. As the green girdle, had it worked, would have allowed Gawain to survive a beheading ‘vnslayn’, to refuse the Lady's love and yet draw on the power of her ‘luf-lace’, to withhold what is rightfully the host's without incurring reproach, and to err without consequence, so John's magic seems to create an alternative world in which the couple can have it both ways. Fenice can live with her husband's nephew without being slandered, the couple can hide away in a tower, while enjoying the seasonal changes of nature.

Such is the power of the Lady and John's fictions that despite the knowledge that we cannot eat the cake and have it, Gawain, the couple in Cligés, and their readers submit to them. But just as the green girdle turns out to be no more than the piece of cloth which we might have known a girdle to be, the magic of John's construction dissipates before the reader's eyes. While Fenice and Cligés live out their impossible dream of wish-fulfilment, a knight named Bertrand who happens to be hunting in the neighbourhood sees his hawk disappear in the tower. We have been told that the walls of the tower are so high that no one could possibly scale it:

Et li vergiers ert clos antor
de haut mur qui tient a la tor,
Si que riens nule n'i montast,
Se par la tor sus n'i entrast.

(Cligés, 6333-6)

And the garden is enclosed by a high wall connected to the tower so that no one can get in unless through the entrance in the tower.

But Bertrand does the impossible, and hastens to penetrate the impenetrable hide-out to retrieve his hawk.

Tantost se vet au mur aerdre
Et fet tant que oltre s'an passe.
Soz l'ante vit dormir a masse
Fenice et Cligés nu a nu.

(Cligés, 6360-3)

Then he begins to scale the wall, until he comes to the top. Beneath the tree he sees Fenice and Cligés sleeping naked in each other's arms.

Like us, the couple have been deceived into believing that they can have their paradise on earth. I use this formulation deliberately, for Chrétien consciously fashioned Jehan's tower after medieval descriptions of heaven, and in particular after Drythelm's vision of heaven in Bede's Ecclesiastical History. Like Bertrand in Cligés, Drythelm and his guide encounter an apparently unscalable wall, without doors or windows, when, inexplicably, they suddenly find themselves standing on top of it:

Cumque me in luce aperto duceret, vidi ante nos murum permaximum, cuius neque longitudine hinc vel inde neque altitudine ullus esse terminus videretur. Coepi autem mirari quare ad murum accederemus, cum in eo nullam ianuam uel fenestram uel ascensum alicubi conspicerem. Cum ergo pervenissemus ad murum, statim nescio quo ordine fuimus in summitate eius.⁴⁸

When he led me in open light, I saw before us an extremely high wall. There seemed to be no limit to its length and height in every direction. I began to wonder why we were headed towards it, since I did not see a door, a window, or an ascent anywhere in it. But when we had reached the wall, we suddenly stood on its summit—how, I do not know.

When Bertrand similarly leaps over the high wall, Fenice and Cligés's paradise is lost. They have been inhabiting an illusion. And so, as in Gawain, the heroes and readers harshly awake to reality and the realization they have been duped by their credulity.

It may well be true that Cligés suggests a correspondence between the magicians Thessala and John, and Chrétien de Troyes.⁴⁹ Both create the most outrageous fictions, build castles in the air, and yet always find an audience willing to make these their homes. But a more accurate representation of both Chrétien and the Gawain-poet must be the Lady of the Castle, a teller of romances which she herself knows to be fictitious, a manipulator of wishful thinking, as unreliable and shifty as the poets who lead their readers up the well-trodden paths of escapism which they mercilessly expose as blind alleys.

Chrétien and the Gawain-poet's art is one of deception, and time and again they wrongfoot their audience and fictional characters, until a startling subversion of expectations catches us realizing we have been tricked into believing we were in a different narrative. Consider, for another example, the way Chrétien plays games with the reader in his Chevalier de la charrete. Lancelot is on his way to the Sword Bridge, and has to pass through the Stony Passage, which, as Lancelot is warned, is guarded by an army of hostile men:

‘Ne vos sera mie randuz
maintenant que vos i vandroiz;
d'espee et de lance i prandroiz
maint cop, et s'an randroiz assez
einz que soiez outre passez.’

(Lancelot, 2170-4)

‘It will never be surrendered to you on your arrival. You will have to put up with many blows of sword and spear, and will have to deal many, before you get through.’

When Lancelot arrives at the passage, numerous men with axes stand ready to defend it. Lancelot defeats one knight and the men-at-arms leap forward brandishing their axes. Like Lancelot, we brace ourselves for a fight, since this is the way romances usually test their heroes, but what actually happens defeats our expectations:

et li sergent as haches saillent,
mes a escïant a lui faillent,
qu'il n'ont talant de feire mal
ne a lui ne a son cheval.

(Lancelot, 2229-302)

and the soldiers leap forward with their axes, but they miss him on purpose, since they have no wish to hurt him or his horse.

The dangers, as it turns out, have no material reality outside Lancelot's and our minds. Once he has conquered his fear and confronted his opponents, the objects of his fear dissolve.⁵⁰

The Gawain-poet springs a similar surprise on us. Not only do we suspend our disbelief in the green girdle, but we are also convinced that Gawain is destined to receive the blows of a demonic Green Knight. Again, our familiarity with romances in which knights are brought face to face with monsters strengthens us in our belief that something awful is about to happen. And indeed, when Gawain arrives at the macabre Green Chapel, and hears the Green Knight whetting a huge axe, the scene seems set for violence. But, like Lancelot's opponents, who strike blows that studiously avoid their target, the Green Knight strikes two blows in the air and a third that does no more than nick Gawain's skin.

As in Lancelot, the terrible encounter with the enemy existed only in our imagination. In the romances of Chrétien and the Gawain-poet this imagination is at the mercy of poets who play with it at their will, who deliver us from evil and enchantments just as easily as they plant them in our minds.

Notes

1. Thomas E. Kelly, Le Haut Livre du Graal: A Structural Study (Geneva, 1974), 18. Perlesvaus's link with England is borne out by its manuscript tradition. The Oxford Manuscript in the Bodleian (Hatton 82) was probably copied in England, and was definitely circulating in England from the early fourteenth century onwards. It was known to the English author of Fouke Fitz Warin and to Malory, as noted by R. H. Wilson, ‘Malory and the Perlesvaus’, MP 30 (1932), 13-21, and P. J. C. Field, ‘Malory and the Perlesvaus’, MAE 62 (1993), 259-69. The Gawain-poet could therefore have had first-hand knowledge of the work.

2. See W. A. Nitze, ‘Is the Green Knight Story Really a Vegetation Myth?’, MP 33 (1936), 351-66.

3. Only Larry D. Benson, Art and Tradition in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (New York, 1965), 221-2, notes the analogue.

4. On this aspect of the Perlesvaus see Thomas E. Kelly, ‘Love in the Perlesvaus: Sinful Passion or Redemptive Force?’, Romantic Review, 66 (1975), 1-12.

5. The point is lucidly made by Thomas L. Wright in an analysis of the temptation scenes: ‘Luf-Talking in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, in Approaches to Teaching Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. M. Y. Miller and J. Chance (New York, 1986), 77-86.

6. Trans. K. G. Webster, Lanzelet (New York, 1951), 39.

7. The point of its conclusion seems to have been lost on much criticism of the romance. Thus Laurence de Looze argues that the open ending of the work shows the author's conviction that ‘writing, like loving, demands freedom, and that endings and genres cannot be forced upon the reader’. That the open ending is the narrator's trump card in a manipulation of an unwilling lover, and thus aims at restricting freedom, is overlooked: ‘Generic Clash, Reader Response, and the Poetics of the Non-Ending in Le Bel Inconnu’, in Courtly Literature: Culture and Context, ed. K. Busby and E. Kooper (Amsterdam, 1990), 113-23, at 115. The editor of Le Bel Inconnu called the work ‘banal dans son fond’ (p. x), while Keith Busby in the Arthurian Encyclopedia, ed. Norris J. Lacy (Cambridge, 1986) claims the French romance is ‘brought to a satisfactory conclusion’. Busby may here be confusing the work with the English adaptation by Thomas of Chestre, in which the Fairy Maiden becomes a malevolent enchantress from whom Guinglain narrowly escapes. Thomas of Chestre, who provided the happy ending missing in his French source, thus succumbed to the desire for a satisfactory closure on which the narrator relies. See Jeri S. Guthrie, ‘The JE(U) in Le Bel Inconnu’, Romantic Review, 75 (1984), 147-61, for an illuminating discussion of Renaut de Beaujeu's ending.

8. I draw here on René Girard's model of mimetic desire. Rather than assuming that there is a direct line from desiring subject to object of desire, Girard argues that desire is triangular. There is always a third party whose desire or imagined desire for the same object makes that object alluring. See his Mensonge romantique et verité romanesque (Paris, 1961).

9. Geraldine Heng, ‘A Woman Wants: The Lady, Gawain, and the Forms of Seduction’, Yale Journal of Criticism, 5 (1992), 101-35.

10. Two notorious victims of precisely this temptation are Dante's Paolo and Francesca who, on reading about Lancelot and Guinevere's affair in the Vulgate Lancelot, give each other their first kiss and become involved in a passionate relationship whose consequences they now suffer in Hell. As René Girard writes: ‘The written word exercises a veritable fascination … it is a mirror in which they gaze, discovering in themselves the semblances of their brilliant models’: ‘From the Divine Comedy to the Sociology of the Novel’, in Sociology of Literature and Drama, ed. Elisabeth and Tom Burns (Harmondsworth, 1973), 101-8, at 102.

11. Much work has been done on the character of Gawain in medieval literature. The broadest studies are Keith Busby's Gauvain in Old French Literature (Amsterdam, 1980); Bartlett J. Whiting, ‘Gawain: His Reputation, His Courtesy, and His Appearance in Chaucer's Squire's Tale’, MS 9 (1947), 189-244; and Per Nykrog, ‘Trajectory of the Hero: Gauvain, Paragon of Chivalry 1130-1230’, in Medieval Narrative: A Symposium, ed. H. Bekker-Nielsen et al. (Odense, 1979), 82-93. Martin B. Shichtman has written on Gawain's appearance in Wace and Laȝamon; ‘Gawain in Wace and Laȝamon: A Case of Metahistorical Evolution’, in Medieval Texts and Contemporary Readers, ed. Laurie A. Finke and Martin B. Shichtman (Ithaca, NY, 1987), 103-19. For studies of the character of Gawain in the romances of Chrétien in particular see William A. Nitze, ‘Gauvain in the Romances of Chrétien de Troyes’, MP 50 (1952-3), 219-25, and Douglas Kelly, ‘Gawain and Fin Amors in the poems of Chrétien de Troyes’, Studies in Philology, 67 (1970), 453-60. On the role of Gawain in thirteenth-century prose and verse romances see Fanni Bogdanow, ‘The Character of Gawain in the Thirteenth-Century Prose Romances’, MAE 27 (1958), 154-61; and Beate Schmolke-Hasselmann, ‘Eine Idealfigur in Zweispalt: Ritter oder Liebhaber’, in her book Der Arthurische Versroman von Chrestien bis Froissart (Tübingen, 1980). Three recent studies of Gawain in English romances are Heinz Bergner's ‘Gawein und seine literarischen Realisationen in der englischen Literatur des Spätmittelalters’, in Artusrittertum im späten Mittelalter: Ethos und Ideologie, ed. Friedrich Wolfzettel (Giessen, 1984), 3-15; Alfred Schopf, ‘Die Gestalt Gawains bei Chrétien, Wolfram von Eschenbach, und in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, in Spätmittelalterliche Artusliteratur, ed. Karl Heinz Göller (Paderborn, 1984), 85-104; and Philip C. Boardman, ‘Middle English Arthurian Romance: The Repetition and Reputation of Gawain’, in The Vitality of the Arthurian Legend, ed. M. Pors (Odense, 1988), 71-90.

12. These medieval equivalents of the ‘wanted’ photograph and the bounty hunter are used in Hunbaut, the Non-Cyclic Lancelot, L'Atre périlleux, and the Perlesvaus respectively.

13. Gawain's confession of rape does not match the aventure as the poet has narrated it earlier. For an attempt to resolve this contradiction see Jean Frappier, ‘Le Personnage de Gauvain dans la Première Continuation du Conte du Graal’, Romance Philology, 11 (1957), 331-44. Frappier's ingenious argument that Gawain confesses rape in order to exonerate the maiden has been called into question by Pierre Gallais, ‘Gauvain et la Pucelle de Lis’, in Mélanges offerts à Maurice Delbouille, 2 vols. (Gembloux, 1964), ii. 207-29.

14. Communicative acts, as Ross Chambers and Stephen Greenblatt have emphasized, have the power to produce new situations, to change the relationship between speaker and listener. Their interpretation of narratives not simply in their contexts, but also with an eye to the new contexts they seek to produce, is of particular relevance to Gawain, where seduction and story-telling go hand in hand. See Ross Chambers, Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and the Power of Fiction (Minneapolis, 1984), and Stephen J. Greenblatt, ‘The Improvisation of Power’, in Literature and Society: Selected Papers from the English Institute: 1978, ed. Edward W. Said (Baltimore, 1980), 57-99, reprinted in Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago, 1984), 222-54. I borrow the term ‘narrative fashioning’ from Greenblatt's essay.

15. Whiting, ‘Gawain’, 232.

16. This episode from Cligés has been suggestively analysed by Robert W. Hanning, ‘“I Shal Finde It in a Maner Glose”: Versions of Textual Harassment in Medieval Literature’, in Medieval Texts and Contemporary Readers, ed. Laurie A. Finke and Martin B. Shichtman (Ithaca, NY, 1987), 27-51. It should be noted that Hanning's proposed reading of the three physicians as ‘exegetes who all but annihilate the poetic value of a text’ (39) overlooks the troublesome fact that their interpretation of Fenice as a ‘morte fausse’ is essentially correct.

17. Both this scene from Yder and Lancelot's seduction in the Vulgate Lancelot, included in E. Brewer's Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: Sources and Analogues, bear only a vague resemblance to the temptation scenes in Gawain, certainly in comparison with the seduction of Gawain in Gerbert de Montreuil's Continuation.

18. ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, in his Criticism and Medieval Poetry (London, 1962, 2nd edn. London, 1972), 28-50, at 39-40.

19. Wedding of Sir Gawain, l. 639. The use of the word by Dame Ragnell shows up the inadequacies in Tony Hunt's argument in ‘Irony and Ambiguity in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, FMLS 12 (1976), 1-16, which sees in the temptation scenes a conflict between the Lady's ‘continental’, understanding of the word ‘courtesy’ and Gawain's ‘English’ notion of ‘courtesy’, in which, as Hunt mistakenly claims, amorous implications were absent. The conflict as I see it turns on an opposition between courtesy as politeness and courtesy as a first stage of courtship. The tension between these two conceptions is the topic of a medieval debate which cuts across national boundaries. See the illustrative material in D. W. Robertson, ‘Courtly Love and Courtesy’, in his A Preface to Chaucer (Princeton, NJ, 1962), 448-63.

20. But see Benson's perspicacious reading of Gawain's predicament in Art and Tradition, 46.

21. Erving Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Harmondsworth, 1959, repr. 1975) is an illuminating attempt to analyse social interaction from the point of view of conscious role-playing. His discussion of tact (222-30) has proved particularly useful in the following discussion.

22. Morton Donner, ‘Tact as a Criterion of Reality in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, PELL 1 (1965), 306-15.

23. As B. N. Sargent has shown, there is certainly no medieval writer before Chrétien whose fictional characters have as much social sensitivity. See her ‘Old and New in the Character-Drawing of Chrétien de Troyes’, in Innovation in Medieval Literature: Essays for Alan Markman, ed. D. Radcliff-Umstead (Pittsburgh, 1971), 35-48.

24. Walter Map, De Nugis Curialium: Courtiers' Trifles, ed. and trans. M. R. James, revised by C. N. L. Brooke and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford, 1983), 102.

25. I have not followed the edition which places a full stop after line 1283, at the cost of garbled syntax. Unlike Tolkien and Gordon, I take lines 1284 and following to be part of the Lady's internal monologue, as I fail to see why the Gawain-poet's suggestion that the Lady knows of Gawain's appointment at the Chapel is ‘a serious flaw in the handling of the plot’ (110).

26. ‘[Elle] quitte la chambre avec toute sa dignité … les apparences sont sauvés, elle n'offrait rien et on ne lui a rien refusé … on admirera la délicatesse de cette suggestion’ (Marie-Luce Chênerie, Le Chevalier errant dans les romans arthuriens en vers des XIIe et XIIIe siècles (Geneva, 1986), 575).

27. This is how the lady in the Mule sans frein intends it when she thanks Gawain for restoring to her a lost bridle with the words: ‘“Sire”, fait ele, “il est bien droiz ❙ Que je mete tot a devise / Lo mien cors a vostre servise”’ (‘“Sire”, she says, “it is only right that I put myself entirely in your service”’: 1082-4). For a similar formula see Cligés, 2304. See also Burrow, A Reading, 80-1.

28. David Mills, ‘An Analysis of the Temptation Scenes in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 67 (1968), 612-30.

29. I draw here on the study by Penelope Brown and Stephen C. Levinson, Politeness: Some Universals in Language Use (Cambridge, 1987). For a different linguistic approach to Gawain see Kim Sydow Campbell, ‘A Lesson in Polite Non-Compliance: Gawain's Conversational Strategies in Fitt 3 of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Language Quarterly, 28 (1990), 53-62.

30. The term is Goffman's, Presentation of Self, 174.

31. The term is J. L. Austin's. I quote from his Philosophical Papers (1961, repr. Oxford, 1970), 251: ‘Besides the question that has been very much studied in the past as to what an utterance means, there is a further question distinct from this as to what was the force … of the utterance. We may be quite clear what “Shut the door” means, but not yet at all clear on the further point as to whether as uttered at a certain time it was an order, an entreaty, or whatnot. What we need besides the old doctrine about meanings is a new doctrine about all the possible forces of utterances …’.

32. See the MED s.v. ‘cares’ 2b and ‘comfort’ 3a.

33. The rule is also rehearsed by Chrétien's Gawain, who in the Perceval reminds a knight whom he punished for rape: ‘qu'an la terre le roi Artu ❙ sont puceles asseürees’ (‘In King Arthur's land the safety of maidens is assured’: 6876-7).

34. J. F. Kiteley has rightly seen similarities between the temptation scenes in Gawain and Andreas Capellanus' De Amore: ‘The De Arte Honeste Amandi of Andreas Capellanus and the Concept of Courtesy in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Anglia, 79 (1961), 7-16. Not noted by Kiteley is the parallel between Gawain's tactics and those of the noblewoman courted by a man of higher rank (De Amore, pp. 136-42). Her suitor begs her for the ‘reward’ (praemium) for his service, but the lady pretends not to know what he is driving at. Like Gawain, she plays the dummy. When he, like the Lady of the Castle, must of necessity be more explicit, he is told off for asking her too crudely (explicito affatu). In works where love remains for the most part a matter of rhetoric, such similarities are only to be expected and they need not point to direct influence.

35. This argument is an old one, but it appears to have lost little of its attraction. See Else von Schaubert, ‘Der englische Ursprung von Syr Gawayne and the Grene Knyght’, Englische Studien, 57 (1923), 331-446; Paul Christopherson, ‘The Englishness of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, in On the Novel, ed. B. S. Benedikz (London, 1971), 46-56; and Arlyn Diamond, ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: An Alliterative Romance’, Philological Quarterly, 55 (1976), 10-29.

36. See John Stevens, Medieval Romance: Themes and Approaches (London, 1973), 188-92.

37. Quotations are from Roger Dragonetti's exhaustive study La Technique poétique dans la chanson courtoise (Bruges, 1960), 107, 110-11. For more examples of the metaphors of battle and imprisonment see his section ‘Le Vocabulaire féodal’, 61-113.

38. Derek Brewer misrepresents the character of Gawain in the romances of Chrétien when he describes him as a ‘promiscuous knight’ whose many ‘amorous adventures’ are fables of ‘sexual valour’. In point of fact, Gawain's only would-be amorous adventure, in Chrétien's Perceval, is rudely interrupted by indignant townspeople. I am therefore in disagreement with his view of the temptation scenes as a confrontation between the the ‘English’ Gawain who ‘repudiates the French character’: ‘Courtesy and the Gawain-Poet’, in Patterns of Love and Courtesy: Essays in Memory of C. S. Lewis, ed. J. Lawlor (London, 1966), 54-85, at 75, 81.

39. Frappier's influential view that the Perceval portrays Gawain as a frivolous lady-killer has come under attack. See Guy Vial, Le Conte du Graal, la Première Continuation (Geneva, 1987), 12-24.

40. I quote from Gregory Bateson's thoughtful discussion of play in his article ‘A Theory of Play and Fantasy’, in Play: Its Role in Evolution and Development, ed. J. Brunner (London, 1976), 119-29, at 120.

41. Goffman, Presentation of Self, 228.

42. Julian Pitt-Rivers, ‘The Law of Hospitality’, in The Fate of Shechem (Cambridge, 1977), 94-112.

43. Kittredge, A Study of Sir Gawain, 96-7. See also his edition of three Latin analogues in the appendix, 272-3.

44. Antonio Pucci, ‘Uno Capitolo d'Antonio Pucci’, ed. Alessandro Wesselofski, Rivista di Filologia Romanza, 2 (1875), 221-7. The closest Middle English analogue to Pucci's canzone is Sir Gawain and the Carl of Carlisle, ed. Donald B. Sands, Middle English Verse Romances (1966, repr. Exeter, 1981), in which the guest's test of obedience includes an order to kiss the host's wife but to leave the ‘prevey far’ (466) or rather to preserve it for the host's daughter, whom the host gives to his guest instead. The Carl demonstrates the rule of romance that, while the host's wife is taboo, the guest can sleep with the host's daughter, since in doing so he will not arrogate to himself the functions of the host. The Carl's interdiction and the offer of his daughter thus deflect the possibility of what Tony Tanner in Adultery in the Novel, 12, has called a ‘category-confusion’ between guest and host.

45. See Derek Brewer, ‘The Interpretations of Dreams, Folktale and Romance with Special Reference to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, NM 77 (1976), 569-81, and his Symbolic Stories: Traditional Narrative and the Family Drama in English Literature (Cambridge, 1980), 72-91. See also Christopher Wrigley's ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: The Underlying Myth’, in Studies in Medieval English Romances: Some New Approaches, ed. Derek Brewer (Cambridge, 1988), 113-28; Anne Wilson, Traditional Romance and Tale: How Stories Mean (Cambridge, 1976), 96-108; and Enrico Giaccerini, ‘Gawain's Dream of Emancipation’, in Literature in Fourteenth-Century England, ed. Piero Boitani and Anna Torti (Tübingen, 1983), 49-64. The formulations ‘latent’, ‘underlying’, ‘at a deeper level’, which these studies continually oppose to the ‘literal’, ‘manifest’, or ‘superficial’ level show a tendency to discard the literal level without being fully aware that this is the only level which gives access to whatever ‘hidden significances’ these studies claim to unravel. If readings of this nature are to be fruitful, the question that needs to be asked is how the literal level engages structures or paradigms which psychoanalysts have associated with the Oedipal conflict, and it is only with reference to the letters of a text that such questions can be answered and accounted for.

46. J. G. A. Marino, ‘Games and Romance’, doctoral dissertation (University of Pittsburgh, Penn., 1975), 262. See also Geraldine Heng, ‘Feminine Knots and the Other in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, PMLA 106 (1991), 500-14, at 504.

47. The following discussion of Chrétien's Cligés owes much to Peter Haidu, Aesthetic Distance in Chrétien de Troyes: Irony and Comedy in Cligés and Perceval (Geneva, 1968), 100-3. Cligés offers the closest analogue to Gawain's motif of magic which does not work. For other uses of the motif see Helen Cooper's ‘Magic that does not Work’, M&H 7 (1976), 131-46. On magic in Arthurian romance, see also Peter Noble, ‘Magic in Late Arthurian Verse Romances’, BBSIA 44 (1992), 245-54.

48. Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. and trans. B. Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford, 1969), 492-3.

49. See Michelle A. Freeman, The Poetics of ‘Translatio Studii’ and ‘Conjointure’: Chrétien de Troyes's Cligés (Lexington, Ky., 1979), 91-7, 157-61, and Grace M. Armstrong, ‘Women of Power: Chrétien de Troyes's Female Clerks’, in Women in French Literature, ed. M. Guggenheim (Stanford, Calif., 1988), 19-46, at 41-2.

50. On Chrétien's manipulation of expectations in the Lancelot see Evelyn Mullaly, The Artist at Work: Narrative Technique in Chrétien de Troyes, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 78 (Philadelphia, 1988), 137-41.