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Vilain, Auctor : the Upward Flow of Wisdom in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight / by Gail Althea Bell.

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Vilain, Auctor : the Upward Flow of Wisdom in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight / by Gail Althea Bell. Yf LAIN, AUCTOR: THE UPWARD PLOW OF VfSCCfl IW SIR GABAfN AMD TRE GREEN KNIGHT -m __I- -- I-_.-- ---- Gail Althea Bell THESIS SUBHXTTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLHENT Of THE REQUIREHENTS FCR THE DEGREE OF RASTER OF ARTS in the Departaent English C Gail Althea Bell 1981 SISCN FRASEX UNXVERSITP October 198 1 A11 rights reserved, This thesis may not be reproduced i~whale or in part, by photocopy or other meaos, without permission of the author, APPROVAL NAME: Gail A1 thea BELL DEGREE: Master of Arts TITLE OF THESIS: Vilain Auctor: The Upward Flow of Wisdom in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. EXAMINING COMMITTEE: Chai rman: Dr. Michael Steig Dr. Joseph Gal 1agher, 'Senior Supervi sor Associate Professor of Engl ish Dr. dary-~nnStouck, Assistant Professor of Engl ish Dr. Harvey De i ROO, Assistant Professor of Engl ish Dr. Kieran Kealy , ~xtehalExaminer Professor of English, U.B.C. Date Approved: 3/81. PARTIAL COPYRIGHT LICENSE I hereby grant to Simon Fraser University the right to lend my thesis, project or extended essay (the title of which is shown below) to users of the Simon Fraser University Library, and to make partial or sing l e cbp ies only for such users or in response to a reqbest from the library of any other university, or other educational institution, on its own behalf or for one of its users. I further agree that permission for multiple copying of this work for scholarly purposes may be granted by me or the Dean of Graduate Studies. It is understood that copying or publication of this work for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. T it l e of Thes i s/Project/Extended Essay Author: \A5 I gnature) ABSTRACT ~ri5i.c~of a Gawain pa&& Gfeeg Knight have noted in the Green Knight fir! both his Bertilak and his Grene Gome forms) a mixture of churlishness and magisterial power, and have found it difficult to account for these contrasting features. The first: quality is especially difficult to account for if one assumes that a~edievalpeople sar socieJp in strict hierarchical terms, and if one recalls that the Greern Knight is a source of wisdom-an auctor-to a peerless romance knight, Sir Gavain, This critical difficulty may be resolved by recognizing that the fourteenth century had several images of the k~ightand that the Green Knight fits the least exalted of them, Analysis of the text shows that while Gawain is a romance knight, the Green Knight is a realistic 'knights, a rich merchant trained in law, who seeks to nurture in himself the aanners and material culture of the romance knight, but who understands the impossibility of the romance ideal 02 perfectios? attaified by knights without effort as a gift of nature, The poem mediates between the valu~s of romance knights and those of the real world, showing withouz ranmur that both value sets are flawed or incomplete, TABLE OF CONTENTS ~pprovZtlw*- a---t-*------a=tiw-1-at-tm-~-im---mm----~-*-- --wii Ilf- Is the Green Knight a Kcight? ,a,,,- -olws 36 IV, Bertilak de Hautdesert I Hat: The Self-aade Rnight --,63 V, Some Literary Actecedents and Affinities ..w,-m .-*-. .-101 VI, Conclnsion: The Counsel of Imperfection ,, , ,,, - -- 117 Bibliography ,-,m-,m.w,--,-,, ,,,.. ~,~~l.,..*a=,-.IIw--mI,-*-----* 332 I. The Auctor In Medieval Literature @hen Gavain arrives home at Camelot with a scar on his shoulder and another on his soul, the fof k of Canelot largh lightly and assuoae with limited romance vision that Gawain will sejcin his society and again be a spotless knight of Camelot. To them, the virtue of a knight comes from ascription, rather than fraa a judgment based on action; the adventure of a Round Table knight is by definition ~erfect,As a result, every lord a~d lady will wear a face ,,, for sake of that segge,in swete-, . For that watz acordfd the renoun of the rounde table, 1 The adventure coamertiorat~dby the girdle is to be washed in the general ap~robationgranted the Round Table, For Gawain, however, the virtue he has lost is gone forever fgeTher hit onez is tachched twynne wil hit neuereg(2512)), Gatrain's refusal to be comforted and reintegrated into this society is a aeasure of the fact it is no longer his society, He has learned to separate image from actuality and idea froin real isation and can no longer -----------------* Norman Davis (&.)aGawai~! j& Green Kni*. Seccnd . Edition, (~riginaledieors 3, R-R, Tolkien and E-V-Gordon) . Oxford, Clarendon, 1967, lines 2518-2519- BL1 quotations from Sir Gawain and the Green gniqht will be from this edition, with --L --- -- -- -- spellings slightly altered as the print device being used for this pager cannot reprodnce yq* Qr thorn- Line numbers will be given in the text directly after the quotation, that he is by definition good Gavain, Neither his role as camelot knight aor his device of the pentangle of interfccked virtnes can protect him from the knowledge of his human frailties- Though "a1 watz this fayre folk in her first, age 154) **, the most suitakle time for the seeking of learning, only Gawain will, through his experiences, find it, As a result of the teachings of his green 22- 2 Gauain now has an understanding of the real nature and impossibility of perfection, and will not be comforted by the Round Table, His self-condemnation is based on a more com~lex#oral vision than 2This word will be used to refer not to an author but to an authority figure, a teacher or a judge. The definition is one considered by the Middle Enqlish Dictionary , Hans Kurath and Sherman H, Kuhn (eds,) , Anrt Arbor, U~iversityof Hichigan Press, 1956---a This dictionary is the source of all definitions used in this papr unless there is an indicaticn to the contrary in the text, The word auckor has, according to the RED, several meanings, First listed is the creator, ancestor or perpetrator of a Ferson or institution, Second is the source of authoritative information or opinion: a teacher, The coemonly-recognised meaning, author or scurce of a story, is considered to be a sub-definition of this one; the editors point out that it is cften very difficult to tell whether a citation is referring to ail aathor or to an authoritative source of inf oretation- Chaucer iia the Hcus Fame says ?*No other auctour alegge LnThe MED concludes that he means source of authoritative informaticn, not merely author- The "Cm version of --Piers ---Plowman says **Ho was hus autor and him of gode taughte." Other definitions are offered: guardian, and in law, the accuser or plaintiff, An auctrice is defined as a woinac whose opinion is accepted as authoritative, The use of the word auctor to mean - source of wisdom seems therefore appropriate, Although Marie Borroff, working fro@ the Oxford English Dictionary, concludes that etavster has many of the same meanings, the poet's use of this word in the epithet "aghlich maystern[l,136) seems to colour the term in this Foem too strongly.[Borroff, Sir Ganain -and --the --Green pniqhl~ A Stylistis 2nd Metrical Survey, p112,j is found in most romances, Gawain has seen that abstract or definitional perfec tior. dces not long survive the coinplexities of the real world. The Green Knight has given him what amounts to a ~OQFS~~of imperfectiol- Gawain should measure himself, he says, not against the pentangle virtues nor against an ideal for the good knight of Camelot, but against gedestrian humans: .-,,sothly me thynkkez On the fautlest freke that ever on fete yede, As perle be the quite pese is of prys more, So is Gawayn, in god fayth, bi other gay knygtez- (2362ff) Since the Green Knight_ set Gawairt *s test one would expect Gawain to permit him to say vhfther the ppil had passed, But Gawain cannot accept the Green Knight's assessment any more than he will later be able to accept the assessmfnt of the Bound Takle. further, he cannot accept anything the Gose, now revealed as Bertilak, offers, Though he takes the green girdle, he does nut do so in the sririt in which it is offered fi9apure token/ of the channce of the Grene Chapel (23!18-23W3'38"), Be utter1 y refuses the more i~portantoffers of absolution from his fault aod continued hospitality and friecdship (2425-2423)- It is kith something resembling repugnance that he seizes his helmet, sends sarcastic greetings to his nhonoured ladyes" and pointedly says the adventure has been an evil one for hiat ("1 haf soiorned . sadly's), Curing the bedroom scenes and the three blows at the Green Chapel, Gawain has been slowly stripped of his perception Of himself as pentangle knight and source of nurture. He has been led through a set of teaching exercises by an individual who, besides being his rccial inferior, is unaware that in destroying Gawain 's ideal of innate perfection, he has made aeaningless to Gawain his manners and Luxury, which the Green %night hiaself aspires to, , One of the themes of S& Cawai~224 3& Gree_n Kniq3?,s is the lack of juncture between the two wcrlds it describes, Gamin is a romance knight who adventures in the real Ricardian world 3 \,Z represented by Hautdesert, bringing with him inadequate romance values. Bertilak is a *knight8 of the real fourteenth century, which means that he has some romance psetections, but that his essential values are realistic ones of status and economics. In Bertilakqs worl8, Cawain .L,ries to apply his own valws, but they faif him, This F~O~UC~Sa comedy of transplanted values and psychological displacement, which sometimes takes the form of anachronism.
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