OTHERWORLDLY BODIES: READING THE REVENANT IN MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE

By

MATTHEW J. SNYDER

A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

2014

1

© 2014 Matthew J. Snyder

2

In memory of James J. Paxson

3

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to acknowledge and thank R. A. Shoaf, Terry Harpold, Richard Burt, and Will Hasty for serving on my committee. My many conversations with Al Shoaf about Chaucer, the England of the fourteenth century, and the politics of professing medieval literature have been illuminating and enlightening. I am proud to call myself his student and even more so that he calls me his colleague and friend. From the days when I was a master’s degree student in his graduate seminar on psychoanalysis, Terry

Harpold’s warmth and unflagging support have buoyed me in moments of uncertainty.

The late James J. Paxson helped me shape my early ideas about revenancy in medieval literature through long discussions during his office hours, over lunches, and on the road to and from the International Congress on Medieval Studies in the summer of 2009. I would not have started down this path without Jim’s enthusiasm for and insight into my proposed topic, and as such, this work is dedicated to his memory. He is sorely missed.

The Department of English at the University of Florida has provided material support throughout my graduate work. I have been the beneficiary of numerous teaching assistantships, a research assistantship working under Peter L. Rudnytsky as

Assistant to the Editor of the journal American Imago from 2008 to 2011, a Robert

Bowers Fellowship in Medieval and Renaissance Studies in 2011, a Graduate

Mentoring Fellowship with the University Writing Program in 2012, and a number of graduate travel grants. I’m grateful to have been so generously supported during my time at UF.

I forged a number of friendships in Gainesville that will surely long outlive the too- brief time we were able to spend here together before lighting out for new destinations.

4

Among those, I hope that Rex and Angela Krueger, Paul Des Jardins and Kristin

Denslow, David and Ginny Lawrimore, and Rob Houston and Rebekah Fitzsimmons will remain in my life for its duration.

Finally, I could not have completed this project without the near-constant encouragement of my first reader, best friend, and wife, Christy, and the motivation provided by the birth of our son, Kieran, for both of whom I do all that I do.

5

TABLE OF CONTENTS

page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... 4

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ...... 9

ABSTRACT ...... 10

CHAPTER

1 INTRODUCTION: REVENANCY IN THE MIDDLE AGES: THE OTHERWORLDLY BODY RETURNS ...... 12

The Zombie (as Post-Human) ...... 12 The Ontology of the Medieval Revenant ...... 14 There and Back Again: A Brief History of the Otherworldly Body ...... 18 The Revenant by Definition Returns: Chapter Summaries ...... 24 John of Salisbury’s “Organic Analogy” and the Revenant as Wound ...... 26

2 “MUSE ON MY MIRROUR”: REFLECTION AND REFRACTION IN THE AWNTYRS OFF ARTHURE ...... 30

A Distant Mirror ...... 30 A Prismatic Revenant ...... 33 The Progressive Hybridity of AA ...... 35 By the Tarn in Inglewood: The Revenant Appears ...... 36 Guenevere’s First Question ...... 38 In Defense of Gawain’s Reply ...... 39 The Otherworldly Body of AA’s Revenant ...... 41 The Eclipsing, Reflecting Mother ...... 43 Hell or Purgatory? ...... 46 The Signum ...... 48 On the Question of the Revenant’s “Mynnyng”: Further Fractured Readings ...... 51 Chronicle, Romance, and the Specter of Lancelot in AA ...... 58 Spectating through the Prism: Two Views of Chivalric Violence ...... 65 Psychoanalytic Readings of the Mother-Daughter Mirror...... 66 Sigmund Freud ...... 66 Jacques Lacan and D. W. Winnicott ...... 68 Other Readings ...... 70 Nancy Chodorow ...... 71 Jane Flax ...... 72 Luce Irigaray ...... 72 Ronnie Scharfman ...... 74 Marianne Hirsch ...... 75 Terry Harpold ...... 77 No Way out of the Mirror ...... 78

6

3 HISTORICAL TRAUMA, THE CRITIC, AND THE WORK OF MOURNING IN CHAUCER’S PRIORESS’S TALE ...... 79

Who Speaks in Chaucer’s Texts? ...... 79 Hard and Soft Readings of PRT ...... 80 Historical Trauma and the Blood Libel Legend ...... 82 The Labor of the Tale...... 84 Important Differences between PRT and the Trinity College Manuscript ...... 86 The Hugh of Lincoln Case ...... 88 Kiddush ha-Shem and PRT ...... 90 The Work of Mourning ...... 92

4 THE CORPSE OF LAW AND THE CORPUS OF TRADITION: CHIVALRY, LITERARY NATIONALISM, AND SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT’S THEMATICS OF REVENANCY ...... 94

Caxton and the “Use” of Chivalry ...... 94 Reading the Revenant in SGGK ...... 97 The Resurgence of Chivalry in Fourteenth-Century England ...... 99 An Untenable “Technique of Living” ...... 103 Chivalry’s “Revenant Logic” ...... 105 The Green Knight’s Arrival ...... 108 Gawain’s Speech ...... 110 Shame and Chivalric Law ...... 114 The Poem’s Thematics of Revenancy ...... 118 “If þou redez hym ryʒt” ...... 121 A Forfeiture of Life ...... 123 To the High Hermitage ...... 127 Gawain’s Identity and the Stakes of Literary Nationalism ...... 129 Gavains Contrefez ...... 132 “I be not now he þat ʒe of speken”: The Gawain-Poet’s Agenda ...... 135 A Jewel for the Jeopardy: The Lady’s Trap, the Pentangle, and Sleʒt ...... 144 Becoming Chivalry: Gawain’s Self-Conceived Apotheosis ...... 147 Confessions, Withholdings ...... 148 The Knight’s Restoration and the Collapse of the Law ...... 151 The Sign of Surfeit: The Girdle and Gawain’s Final Confession ...... 155 The Court’s Laughter—and Gawain’s Silence ...... 158 Chivalry Does Not Consent to Be Used ...... 162

5 ASCENDING SPIRALS: REFINEMENT AND TRANSFORMATION IN TROILUS AND CRISEYDE ...... 164

A Body in Stasis ...... 164 The City and the Man: Ascending Spirals ...... 165 Lollius and The House of Fame ...... 170 Benoît, Boccaccio, and the Problem of Auctoritas ...... 172 The Desire for Troy: Between History and Fantasy ...... 175

7

Chaucer and “le Neufu Troy” ...... 178 Troilus Is Always Already Dead ...... 179 The Problem of the Filostrato and the Zone between Two Deaths ...... 182 Chaucer’s Troilus Suspects that He Is Always Already Dead— ...... 186 —And So Do Other Characters in TR ...... 189 (Chaucer’s) Troilus’s Refinement ...... 192 Achilles’ Gift ...... 193 “Th’ende is every tales strength”: At the Heart of the Revenant’s Desire ...... 194

APPENDIX: EVERY LINE REFERENCE LINKING TROILUS AND DEATH IN TROILUS AND CRISEYDE ...... 198

LIST OF REFERENCES ...... 205

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 220

8

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

AMA The Alliterative Morte Arthure

AA The Awntyrs off Arthure at the Terne Wathelyn

CT The Canterbury Tales

MED Middle English Dictionary

OED Oxford English Dictionary

PRP The Prioress’s Prologue

PRT The Prioress’s Tale

SGGK Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

TR Troilus and Criseyde

9

Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

OTHERWORLDLY BODIES: READING THE REVENANT IN MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE

By

Matthew J. Snyder

May 2014

Chair: R. Allen Shoaf Major: English

I identify and explore the trope and thematics of the revenant—the corporeal living dead—in four Middle English poems: the anonymous Awntyrs off Arthure at the

Terne Wathelyn and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Geoffrey Chaucer’s

Prioress’s Prologue and Tale and Troilus and Criseyde. A revenant character appears explicitly in the Awntyrs and the Prioress’s Tale. I argue that Troilus and Criseyde and

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight can be read with an eye toward what I term the two poems’ thematics of revenancy, a subtext that contextualizes and reinforces the cultural provenance of the revenant. These revenant characters and their thematics, which are familiar to poets and audiences from historical chronicle and folklore, fit metaphorically into medieval political theorist John of Salisbury’s “organic analogy” of society as a human body in that they represent a gap or wound in that social body. This is especially the case when they appear in poems written under patronage and consumed by a courtly audience. In these instances, I argue, the revenant and its thematics may signal the poet’s conscious or unconscious awareness, projection, and underscoring of various social and cultural problems in late-medieval England. In other words, I make the case throughout this dissertation that the explicit or implicit presence of otherworldly, living-

10

dead bodies in Middle English poetry may indicate the poet’s awareness of an English social body inflicted with wounds. These wounds by their nature resist suturing or closure. In the fourteenth century, the English social body is beset by plague, armed conflict, class upheaval, religious strife, rebellion, and regicide. Other troubling socio- cultural phenomena include the resurgence of chivalry as a “technique of living” among the aristocracy and the rewriting of a number of near-sacrosanct literary traditions, including the classical heritage and the Arthurian romances of the French poet Chrétien de Troyes. The otherworldly body of the revenant is at once familiar and terribly strange.

It serves, I contend, as an emblem of breach and division in the fourteenth-century

English social body through its persistent, irrepressible return in the most prominent poetry of the age.

11

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: REVENANCY IN THE MIDDLE AGES: THE OTHERWORLDLY BODY RETURNS

“Yet tel me,” quod the somonour, “feithfully, Make ye yow newe bodies thus always Of elementz?” The feende answerde, “Nay. Somtyme we feyne, and somtyme we aryse With dede bodyes, in ful sondry wyse, And speke as renably and faire and wel As to the Phitonissa dide Samuel.”

—Geoffrey Chaucer The Friar’s Tale

They believed all sorts of things—and maybe they saw all sorts of things, too, for the Middle Ages had some curious phases.

—H. P. Lovecraft “Pickman’s Model”

The Zombie (as Post-Human)

A recent addition to the swelling body of scholarship dealing with the figure of the zombie—whose rapid proliferation itself can scarcely match that of the volumes produced by scholars seeking to theorize it1—purports to offer its readership “an archaeology of the zombie,” charting its evolution from lowly creature of folklore, to center-stage star of Western entertainment media, and finally to what is arguably the current pinnacle of theoretical, discursive, and cultural analysis: the figure of the “post- human.”2 The volume’s editors note that their study of the zombie’s ancient origins

(which is, after all, the literal sense of the term archaeology) and evolution is, at least in

1 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen writes: “Just as the zombie swarm has captured various film, games, books and television, so the critical explanations for the zombie’s recent ubiquity are legion. ... Like the undead themselves zombie studies relentlessly continue to appear: no sooner is one essay or edited volume processed than another demands to be taken into account” (“Undead” 402).

2 The volume to which I refer here: Better off Dead: The Evolution of the Zombie as Post-Human, ed. Deborah Christie and Sarah Juliet Lauro (New York: Fordham UP, 2011). The quotation is from the volume’s back cover.

12

part, an exercise in unearthing the creature’s historical lineage—and by necessity, given the goal of the project, the roots of its ontology (Lauro and Christie 1–2). Of course, this is as it should be: for how can one determine a thing’s status as “post-” anything prior to pinpointing (or at least leaving no stone unturned in an investigation of) its moment of genesis-as-thing, its, as Martin Heidegger puts it, very thinging?3

Yet the project as typically constructed betrays an historical oversight. It takes the zombie of Haitian Voodoo practice as the starting point of a zombie ontology whose furthest evolutionary incarnations are the creatures that have inundated popular culture at large for the last several years. The Haitian zombie is sometimes a corpse taken from its grave and ensorcelled into an approximation of dumb, brute life by a powerful

Voodoo priest. Other times, it is a living person, likewise ensnared by malevolent magic, then controlled from afar and made to do its master’s bidding.4 The Haitian zombie is almost certainly, as the editors of and contributors to the volume contend, the catalyst for the United States’ fascination-bordering-on-obsession with the figure of the undead

(arguably beginning with George A. Romero’s 1968 film Night of the Living Dead), a cultural saturation later adopted by much of the rest of the world.

Often, however (as Cohen points out), the zombie “ancestry” traced by academics writing about American film and media culture—some of whom presume the zombie to be, as he paraphrases, “a distinctively American colonial monster”5 (“Undead”

408)—“collects traits and narratives from other monsters, many of them ancient and

3 See Heidegger (197–99).

4 The tasks that these automatons were forced to commit by their Voodoo masters were surprisingly mundane, at least to our Westernized, George Romero-driven conceptions of what zombies are capable of: often they were made to labor in the sugarcane fields (see Seabrook 93).

5 Cohen’s reference is to Bishop (38).

13

European. The zombie’s literary heritage is obscured by the fact that its progenitors do not pass under the term ‘zombie’” (“Undead” 408). Paradoxically, if the zombie is post- human, it perhaps owes that renovated academic status at least in part to another, far older monster, one dating to the pre-modern era prior to the printing press (let alone mass media), where it had an impressive degree of cultural notoriety and impact. That would be the medieval period’s own version of the ambulatory corpse, returned from the grave to revisit the world of the living: the revenant.

The Ontology of the Medieval Revenant

If the revenant is one possible progenitor in a monstrous lineage leading to the post-human, world-cultural dominance of the zombie, what then, it is fair to ask, is—or was—a revenant? At the most basic level, a revenant is a walking corpse; unlike the contemporary figure of the zombie, however, the revenant is not a mindless automaton driven by a simple instinct to feed on human flesh. Indeed, the medieval revenant sensu stricto, while it may seek to harm the living, doesn’t want to consume them. It sometimes may not wish them harm at all, but returns from the grave for other purposes entirely. The revenant is a particularly tricky cultural construct that operates at multiple cognitive registers in the Middle Ages, as it does for us in the here and now. The difficulty extends all the way to its very terminologicity: the logic, we might say, of its linguistic termini, its beginning and end in language. The figure and the word exists simultaneously in two natural languages, and yet the meanings of the French revenant and the English “revenant” are shaded slightly differently—but not enough to prevent the blurring of lines of distinction between them.

The French iteration of the word means “one who returns” (from the verb revenir,

“to come” again)—and, in that also a “ghost,” one who has returned from beyond the

14

grave. The English version, while retaining the primary definition of someone or something that returns, like a traveler or a ghost, shifts in its secondary definition to encompass, not the ghost’s spectral shade (in English we have the words “ghost,”

“specter,” “phantom,” “wraith,” etc., to delineate the returned incorporeal spirit; we do not require another term to fill that cognitive gap), but the return of an embodied dead person—that is, the return from the grave of a corpse. Here we begin to see the revenant's lineal connection to the zombie. The ghost’s incorporeity is, in point of fact, its defining feature in the catalog of supernatural beings; in most usages, the ghost is the ethereal return of the soul of a deceased person, not the lifeless body. We conclude, then, that the French revenant and the English revenant are not the same ontological entity. Their names are a pair of false cognates; the originary French term and its conceit undergoes a transformation from the fantasmatic to the enfleshed in its English iteration. In other words, in crossing the lingual barrier from French to English, the revenant materializes.

This is to say that the revenant—or at least the revenant that serves as the thematic thread running through and binding together the textual interventions of this dissertation—is not a phantom or a ghost. It is a tangible, corporeal body, one all the more uncanny and otherworldly for its solidity and its familiarity. It is familiar not only because in the European Middle Ages, as Patrick Geary has written, the dead

“constituted an age class that continued to have a role and to exercise rights in society”

(36), but also due to the frequent outbreaks of the plague throughout the later Middle

Ages that made mass quantities of corpses a commonplace. Indeed, plague is a noteworthy contributor to the vicious circle of the popular conception of the revenant in

15

European medieval folklore. Revenants themselves are often thought to be responsible for outbreaks of miasma and disease, especially plague.6 Yet corpses that are not afforded proper burial rites, are buried in unconsecrated ground, or are buried in graves that are too shallow or that hold too many other bodies are considered to be prime candidates to return as revenants (Barber 124).7

The revenant is, significantly, an autonomous body, returning from the grave of its own volition and motivated by no other force than its own desire. Whatever circumstance has been responsible for its undeath—and there are many potential circumstances8—nothing moves it from the grave but itself. Medieval ecclesiastical authorities, however, unable to accept the reports of the autonomy of the motile dead with which they were confronted in panicked reports, devised an explanation. An

“unclean spirit,” they reasoned, possessed the corpse; in other words, a demon worked the flesh of the dead body as a puppeteer would a marionette (Caciola 11–14).

Jacqueline Simpson, synthesizing ecclesiastical responses such as the hypothesis of demonic possession of the corpse with the more common belief that revenants were simply crossing what was thought to be a semipermeable boundary between life and

6 See Barber (78); Bartlett (613); Simpson (391–92).

7 Barber writes: “In the Middle Ages, during one epidemic the bodies became such a problem that ‘in Avignon the Pope saw himself obliged to consecrate the Rhône, so that bodies could be thrown into it without delay, when the churchyards were no longer sufficient’” (78, quotation from Hecker [48]). Elsewhere Barber notes, “In Erfurt ... in the Middle Ages, it is said that, after the churchyards had been filled, twelve thousand bodies were thrown into eleven large trenches” (124). Barber’s work, it should be noted, is a fascinating confluence of folkloric accounts of revenancy and vampirism dating from the late Middle Ages through the early twentieth century with an explanatory framework of modern pathology and mortuary science; in other words, Barber endeavors to show how and why, at the physiological level of the corpse itself, medieval people were sometimes convinced that the dead had worked their way up out of graveyard earth and walked about.

8 For the array of circumstances thought to be responsible for a corpse returning as a revenant—which he categorizes as “(1) predisposition; (2) predestination; (3) events: things that are done to people, things that they do, things that happen to them; and (4) nonevents: things that are left undone”—see Barber (29–38).

16

death, asserts that ecclesiasts writing about revenants “were describing a genuinely ancient folk belief which was apparently quite widespread at that time, and which they were able to harmonise with their religion by claiming that it was Satan who reanimated the corpses” (394). Nancy Caciola writes somewhat more forcefully that

many [medieval] tales of the undead explicitly reject the demonic interpretation. The demonic-possession school of thought about revenants ... was strictly a minority viewpoint. Texts such as chronicles and histories, which lack the same didactic agenda as exempla collections or hagiographies, universally reject or ignore the possibility of demonic animation in regard to revenants. For these more historical authors, the transgression involved in a corpse coming back to life is one between life and death, rather than between flesh and unclean spirit. (19)

The revenant, however, does not have to have been possessed by a demon to play a didactic or prophetic role. Likewise, sans demon it is often still able to provide the frisson of the monstrous within the narrative space of certain exempla and romances, as is the case in The Three Dead Kings and The Awntyrs off Arthure at the Terne

Wathelyn, which I discuss at length in Chapter 2.9 In addition to this role of teacher as well as monster, we ought not overlook that the defining feature of the revenant, other than its embodied, fleshly state, is simply that it is always returning, always coming back, always re-presenting itself for our inspection even as it represents our introspection, our (re)turn inward, at various stages, to assess the state of our own too- brief lives. “No monster,” Cohen has written, “tastes of death but once. The anxiety that

9 Indeed, Caciola emphasizes the importance of the corporeity, the fleshliness, of these didactic revenants, writing that “contrary to the widespread belief that the danse macabre and the three living / three dead motifs depict skeletons, in fact the medieval iconography only rarely involved bony figures. Invariably the figures of the dead were shown as emaciated corpses, midway through the process of decay. ... This is a vital detail, for the dance of death and the three living / three dead motifs are iconographic counterpoints to revenant stories, intimately related to the same set of mental attitudes. These dead men are not insubstantial illusions, but corporeal revenants” (25–26).

17

condenses like green vapor into the form of the vampire can be dispersed temporarily, but the revenant by definition returns” (“Monster Culture” 5).

There and Back Again: A Brief History of the Otherworldly Body

If we can posit one overarching observation, one bit of information about the societies of Western Europe during the Middle Ages that we know to be true, it is that medieval society was enrapt in the fact of human death and the question of an existence thereafter. Effigies in paint, stone, and text act as representative fixtures of an age in which the drive to interrogate and come to terms with the “privee theef men clepeth Deeth” presented a pressing and ever-present concern.10 So pressing is this fascination with the presence of death that, in the Middle Ages, the dead walked. This is not a rhetorical flourish or melodramatic aggrandizement, but simply a recapitulation of widespread belief.11 One detects in the writings of the late-twelfth-century English chronicler William of Newburgh, for example, bewilderment intermingled with pragmatic reportage:

That cadavers of the dead, borne by I know not what spirit, leave their tombs to wander among the living, terrorizing them and annihilate them, then return to their tombs which open by themselves before them, is a fact that would be difficult to accept if in our age numerous examples didn’t prove it and if accounts did not abound. If such facts did occur in the past, it is surprising that we find no trace of them in the books of the Ancients, who did however put great effort into setting memorable things down in writing.

10 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Pardoner’s Tale, in The Riverside Chaucer, l. 675. For a concise overview of the representation of the macabre, or the semi-decomposed body, in Europe between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, see Ariès (110–123).

11 Caciola points out the commonly held medieval belief that “[t]here is a liminal period in which the death of the personality is absolute, but the death of the flesh is not yet complete. Psychic death and physical death do not coincide. It is only when the body has passed though its ‘wet’ enfleshed stage, and become ‘dry’ bones (to borrow categories from anthropological studies of death) that it is fully defunct. Dichotomies between flesh and spirit, as well as between living and dead, are broken down” (33). Regarding the blasé attitude to the strangeness of their material that some authors of revenant accounts display, she writes, “Although such appearances were invariably terrifying to the populace, the writers’ laconic tone suggests that revenants were not unique or unknown” (26).

18

Since they never failed even to mention the smallest detail, how could I let pass in silence something that, when by chance it occurs in this century, evokes so much astonishment and horror? Moreover, if I wanted to write about everything of this sort that as I have learned has occurred in our time, my task would be much too great and weighty. (477)

Perhaps the most marvelous aspect of this passage from William’s history is his frank awareness of its seeming impossibility, against which his insistence of its truth, based on the surfeit of evidence and the number of accounts of such happenings, produces an exquisite tension.12 A consummate historian of his age, he rues that to document every instance of the returned dead to which he is privy is not possible; there are too many, and many enough to insure that the impossibility is in fact a common thing.

The revenant’s wandering journey through the pages—and minds—of medieval writers was quite an odyssey. From its conceptual rejection in early medieval ecclesiastical writings, it went on to appear in the autobiographical accounts of dreams written by clergy in the eleventh century. It gradually diffused into tales penned by literate laypeople beginning in the thirteenth century, and from there rose to a starring role (and thus official validation by the Church) in clerical exempla. Finally, it was adopted wholesale into the Christian iconography of death in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, particularly as regards the memento mori and macabre traditions.

In the classical world, however, the returned dead were disembodied. The Greek eídôlon, or “image,” of a newly dead person might come back to trouble the dreams of those who knew and cared for him in life. Lucretius, in his On the Nature of Things,

12 It may be worthwhile to note, regarding William’s penchant for veracity in the accounts he relates, that of the chroniclers his is one of the most fervent investments in historical “truth.” Lewis Thorpe writes that William “condemned his fellow-chronicler [Geoffrey of Monmouth] out of hand”: “‘It is quite clear’, maintained William, ‘that everything this man wrote about Arthur and his successors, or indeed about his predecessors from Vortigern onwards, was made up, partly by himself and partly by others, either from an inordinate love of lying, or for the sake of pleasing the Britons’” (Historia ii; quoted in Thorpe 17).

19

writes of the Roman simulacrum, an illusory and incorporeal double of a deceased person that might appear before its living relatives, who would see and hear it face to face as though it were still alive. Lucretius equates this fantasmatic double of the dead with the sloughed skins or shells of snakes and cicadas (I, vv. 130–35, and IV, vv. 58–

62; quoted in Schmitt 12). For the Romans also there were shades of the unburied, restless dead, often the victims of violent ends (insepulti), of those who had died by their own hands (biothanati), and of women who had succumbed in childbirth (Schmitt 12).

For early doctrinal writers of the Christian church, such as Lactandus (c. 250–c. 325),

Tertullian (c. 160–c. 230), and Augustine (354–430)—pushing back against the popular belief that the dead returned in dreams—visions of the dead were neither the body nor the soul of the deceased, but only a spiritual “image” (imago), a mere “semblance of the man” (similitudo hominis), implanted by demons into the minds of sleeping people

(Schmitt 17, 21).

Manifestly corporeal dead, endowed with bodies invested with supernatural strength, return to wreak havoc on the living in the later representations we have of early Germanic warrior cultures. In the Edda, authored anonymously between the tenth and twelfth centuries (and referencing events as far back as the seventh century), and the Scandinavian and Icelandic sagas composed between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, the malevolent draugar return from their barrows to harass and terrify, killing humans and livestock alike and forcing the inhabitants of their former villages to flee like the refugees of a war between the dead and the living. Schmitt underscores the distinction between these new, problematic living-dead and those that appeared in the dreams of the ancient Greeks and Romans as well as the early Christians:

20

Unlike the ghosts of classical antiquity, these dead are not described as “images.” They seem to be endowed with real bodies, as if the cadavers themselves, having returned to life, had left their graves. ... What is striking ... is the terrifying violence and the “corporeity” of these ghosts, who could be definitively overcome only through the destruction of their cadavers.13 (13)

By the twelfth century in England, the revenant dead had moved out of their near-exclusive locus of dreams14 and had begun to attract the attentions of historians such as William of Newburgh, whose account of what might be described as a literal mass uprising of revenant dead in the final book of his history of England we have already seen. Schmitt notes that William offers this anecdote in concert with four other similar stories, which “form a little collection whose coherence William stresses before continuing with his chronicle” (82).15 Unlike the popular renditions of humble ghosts returning, in the Cluniac tradition of Peter the Venerable, seeking suffrage from their living relatives in order to ease their pains in Purgatory (an authorial practice then co- opted and expanded by the writers of the exempla), those of which William tells are very different indeed. Schmitt writes that these returned dead are “evil-minded,” rather like their corporeal counterparts in the Icelandic saga tradition, the draugar:

They terrorize their relatives and the entire neighborhood, make dogs howl at night, and are accused of corrupting the air, of causing epidemics, and even of drinking people’s blood. Two of them are explicitly called vampires (sanguisuga), and when their graves are opened, they are found stained

13 William Sayers writes that the “intense corporeality of the draugr has consequences not only for his actions but also for his disablement. Typically, a corpse was removed through a temporarily breached wall in the house, to prevent easy reentry, and interred at some distance from the cultivated area around the farmhouse, often under a cairn, to prevent resurgence” (244). For more on draugar, see Cohen ("Undead" 408–09); Barber (84–85); Simpson (390); Caciola (15–17). For more on apotropaic measures that people from the Middle Ages to the early twentieth century have taken to protect themselves from revenants and vampires, see Barber (46–65).

14 See Schmitt, chapters one and two.

15 For more on William of Newburgh’s accounts of revenants, see Bartlett (612–14); Caciola (21–23); Simpson (390–93).

21

with blood; the cadavers are all swollen, the faces florid, the shrouds torn apart. (82)

We should note here that while not all revenants are vampires (i.e., blood-drinkers), all vampires are revenants; in other words, “revenant” is the genus of ambulatory undead beings, and “vampire” is a specific class of beings within that genus who feed on the blood of humans or animals (Barber 2–3). Generally, accounts of revenants tend to be native to Western Europe, while those of vampires surface more often in Eastern

Europe, although the two traditions do occasionally overlap.

Two centuries after William’s collection, a French exemplum, set in Brittany, emphasizes the corporeity of the revenant and similarly ties the being’s nocturnal activities to its body in the grave by way of damning physical evidence, albeit in the form of mud rather than blood. A recently deceased baker returns in the night to help his family knead the dough for the next day’s bread; naturally, his frightened wife and children flee the bakery, and their clamor alerts the neighbors, who come to witness the apparition. Finding him still at work, they make a great commotion and succeed in temporarily scaring him away—he flees to a boggy wood, but soon returns, “covered in mud up to his thighs,” to throw stones at the assembled villagers. Exasperated, they open his grave and find the dead man’s corpse caked in mud to its thighs. They refill his grave, but he returns soon after; finally, they re-open the grave and break the cadaver’s legs, which finally puts a stop to the revenant’s nightly excursions. Schmitt points out that the key element of the story is the villager’s punitive action on the corpse, the corporeal remains, of the dead man: “By acting physically on the cadaver, the villagers

22

hope to fix the dead man in the grave. Everything occurs as if the ghost and the cadaver are one, as if the former brought into the grave the mud that soiled him” (147–48).16

Meanwhile, across the Channel back in Yorkshire at roughly the same time (c.

1400), an anonymous Cistercian monk at the abbey of Byland was in the process of adding a collection of stories to a two-centuries-old manuscript that, he had discovered, happened to be missing a few folios. In amongst works by such luminaries as Cicero and Honorius Augustodunensis, this writer included some dozen accounts ostensibly intended as exempla, judging by the juxtaposition in adjoining folios of a work on penance. Yet as Schmitt writes, “in all evidence, he above all gave in to a fascination with extraordinary and truly fantastic stories” (142). Indeed, the “fantastic character” of these stories is what sets them apart from other exempla, and Schmitt underscores that, as in the account found in William of Newburgh’s history and in the tale of the Breton ghost, in these exempla “it is never a question of ‘souls of purgatory’ but of very corporeal ‘spirits’ that rise out of their graves, spill out of the cemetery, and terrorize the villagers, who recognize them and attack with equal violence” (144).17

The problematic “spiritual corporeity” evidenced by tales such as the aforementioned points to the porousness of boundaries between spirit and flesh after death in medieval Christian doctrine. The soul, despite its immateriality, could feel—it was, after all, subjected to the purifying fire and ice of purgatory; and, as Schmitt points

16 See also Caciola (20). Schmitt’s interpretation of the actions of the Breton villagers here is reminiscent of Cohen’s evocative prescription for how to deal with the revenant’s inevitable return: “inter the corpse where the road forks, so that when it springs from the grave, it will not know which path to follow. Drive a stake through its heart: it will be stuck to the ground at the fork, it will haunt that place that leads to many other places, that point of indecision. Behead the corpse, so that, acephalic, it will not know itself as subject, only as pure body” (“Monster Culture” 4).

17 For more on the Byland stories, see Caciola (22–23) and Simpson (394–98).

23

out, such conditions were so “concretely” imagined by writers of the age “that they called these conditions ‘corporeal’” (197). “In fact,” Schmitt continues,

medieval Christianity was never able to resolve the contradiction between two of its profound exigencies: on the one hand, the desire to deny the body in order to better serve God, and thus the association of the ‘spiritual’ with the immaterial; and on the other hand, the necessity to imagine the invisible and thus to situate it in space and time, to conceive of the places, the forms, the volumes, and the bodies in the very place where they should have been excluded. (197, italics in original)

To that end, writers who dealt with the return of the dead—of the reanimated corpse— had to walk a delicate doctrinal tightrope in order to properly recognize the corporeity inherent in the spiritual and the spirit inherent in the corporeal. Thus, the soul and the

(dead) body together presented a kind of epistemological paradox, for they were divisible, yet inseparable.

The Revenant by Definition Returns: Chapter Summaries

The defining trope of the return is a particularly useful aspect of the idea of revenancy, through which I will read the four poems discussed in the pages that follow.

The Awntyrs off Arthure at the Terne Wathelyn, of course, deals with an obvious revenant, and the poem’s strange temporality folds back on itself in ways that ought to give us pause. The anonymously authored AA opens up questions concerning the problem of regnal succession and repetition even as it argues vigorously for a popular conception of what terrestrial good governance ought to look like. At the same time, it interrogates (certainly in a most didactic fashion) the problems of a Christian soul mired in its transition through the otherworld. It also, as I show through a recourse to various works by psychoanalysts and literary critics inclined to psychoanalytical approaches, models the perils of the mother-daughter relationship (another form of the uncanny

24

return) that psychoanalysis will later come to conceptualize as the “mother-daughter mirror.”

In his Prioress’s Prologue and Tale, a selection from the Canterbury Tales that is the focus of Chapter 3, I argue that Geoffrey Chaucer employs the figure of a murdered child returned from the grave to revisit a notorious event from English history, the death of Hugh of Lincoln, which resulted in Henry III sanctioning the mass execution of nineteen Jews. In revisiting this historical episode, I contend that Chaucer virtually requires his medieval audience to rethink the relative merits of religious conversion and martyrdom. In the bargain, his tale forces its contemporary audience to reconsider how and why we make ethical stands as critics of literature—and ultimately, whether it is appropriate for us to do so.18

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the subject of Chapter 4, is a poem characterized by a surplus of returns, on multiple levels of its text, narrative, genre, and cultural moment. The poem demonstrates a nascent English “literary nationalism” that seeks to overwrite the French Arthurian influence (and especially its version of Sir

Gawain, the representative emblem of English chivalry) on English letters. It figures also, I argue, a rejection of a renascent aristocratic chivalry as a tenable “technique of living” in the protocapitalist economic environment of late-fourteenth-century England.

These considerations join to form the agitating kernel at the heart of my thesis: that

Gawain himself spends much of the poem operating, within the poem’s thematics of revenancy, as a revenant himself.

18 I will note here that the reason for Chapter 3’s brevity is that I reproduce it in essentially the same form in which it appeared in the collection Turning Points and Transformations: Essays on Language, Literature and Culture, ed. Christine DeVine and Marie Hendry (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2011).

25

Finally, I return in Chapter 5 to Chaucer, even as he himself returns to the outmoded genre of courtly love in the magisterial Troilus and Criseyde—not to revitalize the genre, but to bury it. At the same time, Chaucer reinvigorates the near-exhausted topoi of Troy and Troilus alike by the quite unconventional means of rewriting the former’s life while largely ignoring its destruction, even as he writes the latter as a man utterly convinced of his own living death. For Chaucer, I argue, as for Troilus himself, the Trojan prince is a revenant. Crucially for Chaucer, Troilus is a revenant that may yet be redeemed.

John of Salisbury’s “Organic Analogy” and the Revenant as Wound

In 1159, John of Salisbury published his Policraticus, an immensely influential treatise on medieval statesmanship.19 Within it, and “constituting the framework on which a great part of the political theory of the Policraticus is hung,” he introduced a model of medieval society that correlated the social group or caste to which each individual belonged with the various appendages and organs of the human body, a model that became known as the “organic analogy” (Dickinson xxi). Here, Dickinson

(quoting from the Policraticus, Bk. V., c. 2) sketches the analogy, which, he writes, was

“launched” by John’s adoption of it into his treatise “on a new and triumphant career through the remainder of the middle ages”:

The “commonwealth” is a body “endowed with life by the benefit of divine favor.” The prince is its head, the priesthood its soul. “The place of the heart filled by the Senate, from which proceeds the initiation of good works and ill. The duties of the eyes, ears and tongue are claimed by judges and the governors of provinces. Officials and soldiers correspond to the hands.

19 In his introduction to the Policraticus, John Dickinson writes: “It is the only important political treatise written before western thought had once more become familiar with the Politics of Aristotle. It thus represents the purely mediaeval tradition unaffected by ideas borrowed from classical antiquity. ... it contributed a heritage of ideas whose momentum made them, in spite of the newer influences, the dominant force in political thought down to at least the middle of the sixteenth century” (xvii–xviii).

26

Those who always attend upon the prince are likened to the sides. Financial officers may be compared with the stomach and intestines. ... The husbandmen correspond to the feet which always cleave to the soil.” (xxi)

John’s analogy constituted a striking vision of unity and coherence for a society that, not unlike the problem of the corporeal spirit and the spirited corpse, operated under the terms of a paradox, continually pulled in two directions at its highest levels of governance between representatives of celestial and terrestrial authority.20 The organic analogy offers an elegant solution to a problem that had long been debated in earlier attempts to allegorize the state as a body of whether the head should stand in for the

Pope or the Emperor. If the terrestrial authority claims the head, seat of thought, reason, and logic, then the celestial occupies the home of faith, belief, and love of the divine: the soul. Moreover, John’s analogy extends earlier attempts at a state-as-body allegory with an impressive (if not quite complete) accounting of the remaining sectors of society.21

Politicians, functionaries, administrators, judges, valets, and even lowly (yet absolutely

20 The eminent nineteenth-century historian Otto Friedrich von Gierke, demonstrating the dilemma, writes: “According to the allegory that was found in the profound words of the Apostle—an allegory which dominated all spheres of thought—Mankind constituted a Mystical Body, whereof the head was Christ. It was just from this principle that the theorists of the ecclesiastical party deduced the proposition that upon the earth the Vicar of Christ represents the one and only Head of this Mystical Body, for, were the Emperor an additional Head, we should have before us a two-headed monster, an animal biceps. Starting from the same pictorial concept, the theorists of the imperial party inferred the necessity of a Temporal Head of Christendom, since there must needs be a separate Head for each of those two Organisms which together constitute the one Body. The ultimate Unity of this Body, they argued, was preserved by the existence of its Heavenly Head, for, though it be true that the body mystical, like the body natural, cannot end in two heads, still there is exactly this difference between the two cases, namely, that in the mystical body under its one Supreme Head there may be parts which themselves are complete bodies, each with a head of its own” (22–23).

21 But which society? Dickinson points out that John “gives no explicit answer” to the question “what ‘commonwealth’ or society did he have in mind in his comparison of the ‘commonwealth’ to an organic body?” (xxv). Dickinson does note, however, that John’s use of the term provincia—“the designation which the later middle ages came regularly to apply to the kind of political organization which we should call a ‘nation-state’”—seems intended to produce a correspondence between countries such as France and England to “provinces of the older empire,” i.e., of course, Rome (xxv). Despite this correspondence, Dickinson writes, John “makes no clear distinction” between political and non-political rulership, and that he intends his organic analogy to function as a representative model for any organization in which one person is charged with supervising numerous others carrying various responsibilities to the whole—such as, for example, a rich merchant and his household (xxvi).

27

necessary and vital) tillers of the soil are assigned a locale in the organic totality of

John’s analogous model of the nation-state as a human body.

There does not, however, seem to be a place in John of Salisbury’s organic analogy for the dead. This is perhaps not altogether a surprise, since the dead did not have much of a say in politics, and espousing political theory is John’s purpose for writing the Policraticus. Considering Geary’s perception regarding the status of medieval dead as an “age class” within their respective societies, however, and certainly what Caciola has written regarding the “social reciprocity between the living and the dead, and the continued influence that the latter exerted over the former throughout medieval society” (7), we might ask: what part of the “body” of medieval

English society would represent the restless, walking, living, or undead? Where is the revenant’s place in John of Salisbury’s organic model?

The answer to this question, I think, is literally no part, no place; the revenant constitutes a gap, a lacuna in the text of the analogy, one that virtually (and sometimes actually!) cries out to be noticed, countenanced, read, and interpreted. In this sense, we ought to consider that the revenant, placed within the schema of medieval English society represented by John of Salisbury’s organic analogy, constitutes a wound: an absence where before there was presence, a partial cleaving of the flesh of the social body. Except that, where an ordinary wound in an ordinary body will crust over, knit together, and eventually heal, the site of the revenant resists such closure. Its activity signals a wound that defies the body’s attempts to once again make itself whole. Its movements challenge attempts to suture the wound—which is to say, attempts at continuity, coherence, and hermetic enclosure, at safety; it continually exposes its

28

instability and unsafety, confronting us again and again with its presence. The revenant by definition returns. It does so as a way to draw our attention to the problems it represents, for the revenant is not the only wound in the social body of late-medieval

England. In the chapters that follow, I show that, by reading the otherworldly body of the revenant as it wends its way through four English textual bodies of the fourteenth century, we can perhaps gain some new insight into not only this fascinating creature of folklore, chronicle, exemplum, and ecclesiastical doctrine, but also into some of the most critical and pressing social and political issues of its day.

29

CHAPTER 2 “MUSE ON MY MIRROUR”: REFLECTION AND REFRACTION IN THE AWNTYRS OFF ARTHURE

Thought and its expression are but the two sides of the same prism …

—Archibald Henry Sayce The Principles of Comparative Philology

My mother’s worst fantasy is that she will end up like her mother. My worst fantasy is that I will end up like my mother, and I know that as soon as I have that fantasy, I am already trapped.

—Therapy patient, age 20 Epigraph, “The Conflict between Nurturance and Autonomy in Mother-Daughter Relationships and within Feminism,” by Jane Flax

A Distant Mirror

Contrary to the enduring perception that it is a critically neglected artifact of the

Alliterative Revival,1 the anonymously authored Middle English poem The Awntyrs off

Arthure at the Terne Wathelyn has been the subject of its fair share of recent scholarship.2 “Fair share,” in fact, may be an understatement. Leah Haught describes

“wad[ing] ... into the existing scholarship on the Awntyrs” (4), a deep and foreboding

1 Ralph Hanna III writes that the poem “deserves more than the slighting comments it has received in literary histories” (“Interpretation” 297). Virginia A. P. Lowe opens her essay on the poem with the declaration that it is “[a]mong the many minor Middle English romances that have attracted little serious notice” (199). More recently, Krista Sue-Lo Twu, addressing the “decidedly peripheral” nature of the poem within its own genre, summarizes the prevailing critical consensus that it

is a late-comer which appears to be derivative in all the worst ways ... [e]ven though scholars mention the Awntyrs in their treatment of the ‘alliterative school’, it has not enjoyed the same attention as such well recognized texts as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight or Piers Plowman. It comes to us from the margins of the margins. ... The general consensus has been that the poem is an overwrought, unwholesome remnant of a greater Arthurian tradition ... [it] has long suffered from critical neglect ... . (103–04)

2 Regarding the critical debate as to whether AA should be considered a unified tale of two distinct episodes authored by the same poet or two separate, only tangentially related tales authored by different poets (a problem that stems from the late nineteenth-century dissertation of Hermann Lübke), Helen Phillips points to the title: “If we accept that there is no solid evidence to suggest that the poem is the work of two authors and that therefore its final lines have always referred back to the whole narrative, then it is perhaps worth remembering that the first and last lines talk of an ‘aunter’, in the singular, that befell at Tarn Wadling in Arthur’s time. The modern title, with the plural ‘Awntyrs off Arthure at the Terne Wathelyn’, comes from a rubric in the Thornton manuscript” (“Structure” 73).

30

pool whose waters can at times seem as bereft of clarity (in the form of critical consensus regarding almost any given aspect of the poem) as those of the mystical

Tarn Wadling, the setting of the poem’s first episode. Despite AA’s short length—

Thomas Hahn’s 1996 TEAMS edition, based on the Douce manuscript,3 contains only

715 lines—the poem fosters, perhaps inevitably, this condition in its secondary scholarship. Haught writes that “critical opinions of the poem’s literary value reflect [an] embedded hermeneutic confusion” within AA itself: “It has been described as romance, exemplum, memento mori, as an instance of the chronicle or epic tradition, a mirror for magistrates, a tragedy, a political commentary on the border politics of northern

England, a theological exploration of baptism, and a deconstruction of chivalric ethos”

(4).4 AA, then, might be thought of as a distant mirror (à la Barbara Tuchman) that represents and reflects back at us our own anxieties of “hermeneutic confusion” as scholars and critics of medieval literature.

One imagines that the character perhaps central to the array of the poem’s scholarly approaches (if not the textual center of the poem itself, a distinction that belongs to Arthur5)—the mother of Gaynour (or, as we know her, Guenevere), returned from the dead as a ghastly revenant—might approve of this description of the text in which she appears. Despite Arthur’s literal holding of title, AA, we might argue, belongs to this strange and tragic representative of the otherworld who accosts Guenevere and

3 AA survives in what amounts to a relative proliferation (for the genre of alliterative romance) of four extant manuscripts, all of which date from the early to mid-fifteenth century: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 324; Lambeth Palace Library, MS 491.B; Thornton MS, Lincoln Cathedral Library, MS 91; and Ireland Blackburn MS, Robert H. Taylor Collection, Princeton, New Jersey.

4 See Haught 18n1 for references to the various scholarship she summarizes here.

5 A. C. Spearing’s theory that the poem’s two parts form a structure analogous to medieval diptych art hinges, literally and figuratively, on the fact that the poet “emphatically enthrones” Arthur, “þe soueraynest sir sitting in sete,” at line 358—“the precise centre” of AA (“Central and Displaced Sovereignty” 252).

31

her protector Gawain during one of the Arthurian court’s hunting sojourns in Inglewood

Forest. Prior to her disturbing prophecy of Arthur’s eventual fall from his position of primacy atop Fortune’s wheel, the grim figure commands her daughter:

takis witnes by mee! For al thi fressh foroure, Muse on my mirrour; For, king and emperour, Thus dight shul ye be.

(take witness; fur garments; think; so treated; ll. 165–69) 6

With this deceptively simple directive—“Muse on my mirrour”—Guenevere’s dead mother establishes her capacity as a device for reflecting both the temporal and likely eternal states of the woman whose present conditions she herself, as a former queen of great power and influence, has mirrored in the not-too-distant past. If we concede, as I have suggested, that AA is in fact “hers,” she also puts into play the possibility that the poem itself serves as a “mirror”—and indeed, Phillips writes, the structure of AA “is full of parallels or mirrors across time: the ghost offers a mirror to kings and emperors; she is a mirror of Guenevere’s future. Guenevere mirrors the ghost’s past. The dead queen’s loss of territory and power mirrors Arthur’s future loss” (87). The meaning of the command is further complicated by a linguistic chain anchored in the term “muse,” which acts as a synonym of “reflect” in the sense of “consider,” “mull over,” or (as Hahn notes in his marginal gloss) “think.” In this sense, Guenevere’s mother is asking her daughter (and her reader) to “reflect on her mirror,” and thus, in still other words, to

“mirror her mirror”—thereby producing a mise en abyme, a virtually infinite reflectivity.

6 All textual citations to AA are from Hahn’s edition, Sir Gawain: Eleven Romances and Tales (178–226), unless otherwise noted. When block quoted as above, I give Hahn’s glosses of words set in italics in parentheses below the Middle English lines.

32

And, as I have already touched upon, the poem seems to demonstrate an uncanny ability to reflect back at its modern-day critics whatever concerns each of us may bring to our study of it, by way of a broad range of interpretations its cryptic character has already produced.

A Prismatic Revenant

While the metaphor of the mirror fits both the power of Guenevere’s revenant mother to bodily signify and the signifying power of the greater textual body that she haunts, I would, however, like to suggest another figure by which we may metaphorically identify her and her function within the poem: the prism. While a mirror merely reflects—that is, gives back in a one-to-one correspondence an image of the object(s) placed in front of it—a prism has the capacity to refract: to divert, deflect, mediate, alter, and distort.7 Not only does the reanimated corpse of Guenevere’s mother serve as both mirror and reflection in the poem—such is the indeterminacy of her directive to her daughter, since (as Phillips notes) either she or Guenevere may serve as the mirror; that is to say, the mother is the prior reflection of the daughter, and the daughter the later reflection of the mother—but the knowledge she disseminates constitutes, as several critics have pointed out, a disruption of traditional Arthurian historical chronology.8 She supersedes not only the natural world, but also the flow of

7 See OED, s.v. “refraction” 2., 5.

8 See, for example, Rosamund Allen, who writes that AA

does not ‘fit’ the chronology suggested by the intertextual allusions to AMA: as in that text, Arthur has conquered France and is near Carlisle; by implication the Roman ambassadors are due to arrive any day now, and in AMA after four further weeks Arthur departs to conquer Rome, leaving Britain in Mordred’s hands. But in AA the one who will destroy all the Round Table (311) is still a child playing ball ‘In riche Arthures halle’ (309), and presumably the downfall is at least a decade away. (“The Awntyrs off Arthure: jests and jousts” 130)

33

time itself, thus demonstrating a textual and narrative ability to gesture in a number of directions at once, including toward the past and future. As Phillips writes, the poem’s

“forays backwards and forwards in history, together with the eschatological and liturgical motifs, make the whole narrative—two days’ awntyrs tucked away in Inglewood, far from the central events of the Arthurian saga—into a multum in parvo: the short tale contains within it the great dramas of its characters’ fates, in this world and the next”

(“The Ghost’s Baptism” 56).

Additionally, and perhaps more importantly as concerns the present argument, the revenant’s presence in AA has demonstrated the capacity to draw in the critic’s gaze and not only reflect it, but refract it in several directions at once, generating discord in the process. As such, she is the prismatic figure at the very center of the “embedded hermeneutic confusion” that Haught finds in the poem—and that many other critics have also found, as the breadth of their writings on it suggests (4). The two tropes of reflection and refraction are not mutually exclusive in AA; rather, they work in close concert to open the heavily stylized compression of the narrative to an expansive array of critical focus and interpretation. In what follows, then, I will endeavor to illustrate the effects of reflection and refraction in AA via an examination of the unique and uncanny revenant who provides the prophetic warning of the Arthurian court’s apocalypse that is arguably AA’s central concern. This examination, in turn, will open the way to a discussion of critical refraction—a word in which appears the participial stem fract-, “to break”—engendered by the poem. Here I will try to trace the ways in which examinations of AA that attempt to train their focus on textual events involving its

34

prismatic revenant sometimes seem to go awry. That is, in their refraction, they are sometimes fractured or broken.

I will then move from the discussion of critical refraction in the poem to a review of psychoanalytic theory and psychoanalytically informed literary criticism—some explicitly feminist in its methodology, some not—focusing on mother/daughter mirroring in order to underscore how critical assessment of the poem might benefit from such an approach. A reading of the encounter between Guenevere and her dead mother through an optic of psychoanalytic criticism that focuses on the daughter’s pre- and post-oedipal relationship with the mother, which is itself often expressed in the relevant psychoanalytic literature as a “mirror,” will be demonstrative of such an approach. The goals of such a review and reading are twofold. First, to place the reflective and refractive powers of AA’s revenant into perspective, if not conversation, with the critical refraction her presence in the poem seems to foster. Second, to re-center AA’s critical discussion on the otherworldly, prismatic body of Guenevere’s dead mother while illustrating just how difficult a task this might turn out to be.

The Progressive Hybridity of AA

AA is a progressively hybrid work not only in the unity of its two seemingly disparate episodes: an otherworldly visitation during a hunting trip in Inglewood Forest in the first, and a challenge from an aggrieved knight who arrives during a feast at

Carlisle in the second. The poem constitutes a formal textual embodiment of the tropes of reflection and refraction that I have introduced. As Hahn points out, it “emerges from a transitional cultural context, in which a literate author has fully exploited oral stylistics and techniques” (“Introduction” 169). The poet reflects back at the oral tradition—which,

Hahn reminds us, encompasses such works as The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame

35

Ragnelle, The Carle of Carlisle, The Turke and Sir Gawain, and the ballads—its own

“supernatural and chivalric storylines,” while his “complex rhyme scheme, narrative structure, written sources, allusions, and content” bend that tradition in new directions, in the process “demonstrat[ing] that Awntyrs was a distinctively literary effort” (169). The effects of the poem’s distinctive literariness are on display in the wide geographic spread of its manuscript production; none of its four separate manuscripts “is based upon any of the other extant copies,” and although “its language and meter indisputably indicate northern composition—perhaps in Cumberland, whose seat is Carlisle—the four copies were made in different parts of England, including Yorkshire, the Midlands, and the London area” (Hahn 169). Hahn argues, on the basis of the number and spread of the manuscripts, that “Awntyrs enjoyed a remarkable popularity outside (and also presumably within) the region in which it originated”; that popularity is “even more extraordinary” when one considers that the poem’s existence as a literary artifact rather than an oral composition ought to have checked its diffusion (169). So it seems that late fourteenth-century and early fifteenth-century aficionados of both the oral tale and the written narrative—and especially of the always-popular Arthurian setting—were well aware of AA, which on balance is not all that surprising in light of Hahn’s list of the poem’s self-consciously literary attributes.

By the Tarn in Inglewood: The Revenant Appears

As the poem begins, Arthur and his coterie are out hunting in Inglewood Forest when Guenevere and Gawain, lingering behind the main body of hunters, are caught in a sudden storm.9 Visibility dims as the day becomes “als dirke / As hit were mydnight

9 Hanna writes: “Three other surviving romances are set at the tarn or in the surrounding Inglewood Forest. All three poems suggest that the locale is conducive to magical events ...” (“Introduction” 32).

36

myrke” (ll. 75–76). Rain and stinging hail abruptly come hammering down, forcing the hunters to flee the forest and seek shelter in the rocky outcroppings of a nearby hill (ll.

80–82). Meanwhile, Gawain and Guenevere, cut off from their host by the inclement weather and its accompanying murk, await the storm’s passing near the shores of a mountain lake known as Tarn Wadling10 when they are greeted by an arresting sight.

Eldritch fire burns in the lake’s depths, and, rising to the surface, coalesces into “the lyknes of Lucyfere” before gliding off the waters to ominously block the path of the knight and his queen (ll. 83–85).

The apparition is not silent. It has already commenced an aural assault, screeching, gibbering, and crying: “Hit yaules, hit yameres, with waymynges wete”

(lamentations tearful; l. 87). It issues a heavy sigh (l. 88), then speaks its first words to the pair—a curse: “I ban the body me bare! / Alas! Now kindeles my care; / I gloppen and I grete!” (despair; wail; ll. 89–91). The thing’s “ban” initially seems self-directed—it curses the physicality (and former sensuality) of the body it bears, i.e. its own, for reasons that will later become clear—but its prismatic identity refracts this reading, since the prophecy it has come to deliver also contains a curse that will mar the life of the body it once bore inside its own: its daughter, Guenevere, standing before it on the

Phillips notes that two of the works to which Hanna refers—The Marriage of Sir Gawaine and The Weddynge of Sir Gawen and Dame Ragnell—“contain versions of the ‘Loathly Lady’ story, best known from Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale” (Modern Spelling 13). See also Patricia Clare Ingham, who connects the claim of Guenevere’s mother in AA that as a queen she exercised control “of pales, of powndis, of parkes, and of plewes” (l. 148, reference to Hanna’s edition) to John Gower’s loathly lady from “The Tale of Florent” in his Confessio Amantis, who keeps control “of land, of rent, of parke, or plough” (180-81).

10 The opening of the poem—“In the tyme of Arthur an aunter bytydde, / By the Turne Wathelan ...” (ll. 1- 2)—both fixes the setting of the “aunter” at the tarn and implies that, while it may occur “in Arthur’s time,” it does not prominently feature Arthur himself, since we soon learn that Gawain and Guenevere rather than Arthur will undergo a trial by the lake. While Hahn notes in his marginalia that “aunter” means “adventure” (178), Phillips defines the word as “an event that happens by chance or Fortune, rather than an ‘adventure,’” and notes that “[a]wntyr ... is a variant spelling” (Modern Spelling 22n1).

37

shores of the tarn. Yet another refractory interpretation of the line comes by way of

Phillips, who reads the “ban” as a curse on the apparition’s “own mother’s body for bearing her: she rues not only her existence but the Original Sin and common mortality she inherited through human generation” (Modern Spelling 28n89). It is possible, then, to interpret her curse as spanning not only three generations of women in her bloodline, but indeed the generations of all women and, as was a commonplace of medieval thought regarding feminine sexuality, their status as objects of lust and corruptors of men.

Guenevere’s First Question

Guenevere panics before the apparition, the poet presenting her fear in a mirrored concatenation of its mournful wail—“Then gloppenet and grete Gaynour the gay” (l. 92).11 In her distress, she asks her companion and protector’s advice: “What is thi good rede?” (l. 93). Gawain attempts to rationalize the sudden irruption of the otherworld into his and Guenevere’s reality with a worldly explanation: “Hit ar the clippes of the son, I herd a clerk say” (It is an eclipse of the sun, I’ve heard a scholar say; l. 94).

This is a curious diagnosis of the situation, to be sure, one that might be stretched to accommodate the sudden change in atmospheric conditions from noonday to midnight.

But how it would account for the cloudburst—to say nothing of the screeching apparition risen from the tarn’s depths to confront the pair—is less evident. The poet immediately contextualizes Gawain’s implausible attempt to soothe Guenevere’s nerves by a dismissal of the miraculous in favor of the merely astounding (a solar eclipse being no

11 Hahn notes that “Guenevere’s reaction here echoes the description of the fright Morgan Le Faye intended for the Queen in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: she hoped ‘to haf greved Gaynour and gart hir to dyghe / With gloppnyng of that ilke gome that gostlyche speked / With his hede in his honde bifore the hyghe table’ (She hoped to have grieved Guenevere and caused her to die from fright of that being that, like a ghost, spoke with his head in his hand before the high table; lines 2460–62)” (205n91).

38

less captivating for our having heard the astronomers’ explanations for it) with the line that follows: “And thus he confortes the Quene for his knighthede” (l. 95). Gawain’s chivalric status is partly contingent on his being prepared, at all times, to offer succor to a distressed lady, and here he attempts gamely to do just that.

In Defense of Gawain’s Reply

It is possible to read the spirit behind Gawain’s explanation quite differently. In an interpretive essay on AA predating his own edition of the poem by four years, Hanna takes the knight to task, writing that on the basis of the his response—delivered, Hanna writes, “quite pompously”—to Guenevere’s question, “it seems clear that, although a clerk may know about solar eclipses, Gawain does not. ... one may surmise that knightly qualities do not necessarily have to include intelligence” (“Interpretation” 291).12 Lowe concurs, writing that Gawain’s “lack of understanding” illustrates that “a clerk can have more knowledge of the real world than does one of Arthur’s best knights” (222n39).

Thus Hanna proposes, and Lowe agrees (222n39), that the poet presents Gawain here

“in slightly comic terms” (Hanna 291). So does Phillips, who writes that Gawain’s response to the question “seems comically inadequate,” but she addresses the narratological and cultural logic of the knight’s answer in this way: “Human responses to figures representing mortality in medieval literature are often absurd like this: for example, the revellers in Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale set out to kill death” (Modern

Spelling 28n94).

12 This admittedly genteel demur of Gawain’s intelligence and chivalry is but one element of Hanna’s extended, systematic, and hyperbolic attack on the characters of both Guenevere and Gawain within AA, to which I will return at various points throughout the present section.

39

If we try to read the scene not as a comedic interlude in the midst of a quite serious situation, but rather as a straight take on how a man like Gawain—who is

Arthur’s best knight, at least in the English romance tradition, not merely “one of” them, as Lowe describes him—might attempt to process and respond to a baffling turn of events and the panicked question it elicits from his queen, we can see the problem in the indictments handed down regarding Gawain’s behavior in this scene. For example,

Spearing’s interpretation of the passage is no less potent a corrective to readings such as Hanna’s and Lowe’s for its gentle delivery. While he finds the “comforting masculine superiority” of Gawain’s “scientific explanation” to be “all too clearly threadbare,”

Spearing also pointedly notes that “the poet’s explanation in the following line should prevent us from feeling too superior ourselves toward a knight who is doing his duty as best he can” (“Awntyrs” 192). Finally, Hahn’s reading of this particular moment in the narrative more explicitly spells out the chivalric code undergirding it (and its absurdist comedy, which may or may not have been the poet’s intent), spotlighting, as it does, that Gawain’s explanation—far from being a pompous and wrongheaded engagement of only the “mydnight myrke” (l. 76) around the pair that ignores Guenevere’s real source of concern, namely the apparition itself—is actually a “quick-witted and protective rationalization of the horrible apparition … [that] expresses the unfailing courtesy that upholds his ‘knighthede’” (205n94). In other words, Gawain understands, perhaps intuitively, that his duties as Guenevere’s protector extend to her mental and emotional well-being as well as her bodily safekeeping, and in this respect, he performs as he ought and does so admirably. After all, one cannot realistically expect the areas of

40

expertise of the clerk and the knight to overlap, yet Gawain marshals just enough scholastic knowledge to perhaps blunt the edge of Guenevere’s terror.13

The Otherworldly Body of AA’s Revenant

We must keep in mind that her terror is real and appropriate,14 for the poet’s description of the thing is indeed frightful:

Bare was the body and blak to the bone, Al biclagged in clay uncomly cladde.* Hit warried, hit wayment as a woman, But on hide ne on huwe no heling it hadde. Hit stemered, hit stonayde, hit stode as a stone, Hit marred, hit memered, hit mused for madde.** ...... On the chef of the cholle, A pade pikes on the polle, With eighen holked ful holle That gloed as the gledes.

*clotted with earth foully covered **It grieved, it murmured, it groaned as a mad person

13 Hahn provides another important bit of insight regarding the intricate discursive structures—and strictures—of the chivalric code: “In a chivalric context, all speech and gesture ... require a proper form and an immediate response, or insult follows; knightly conduct therefore resembles the closed code of military speech, where each act demands a prescribed response, and only the unchivalric—Sir Kay, the Carle, Ragnelle—dare to overstep its limits, or speak out of turn” (23). Gawain, having been asked by his queen for his “good rede,” must respond immediately, and his response must be relatively substantive—a simple “I don’t know” will not suffice. Under the conditions the poem describes, then, and as a knight bound by the discursive requirements of chivalry, Gawain’s “quick-witted ... rationalization” (Hahn 205n94) is indeed doubly impressive.

14 Spearing writes that Guenevere’s angry disavowal at this point of the courtesy, or gallantry, of four knights who are not present (they are with Arthur, engaging in the hunt)—Cadour, Clegis, Costardyne, and Cay—for the illogical affront of having abandoned her on her “dethday” (ll. 96–98) is an “hysterical exaggeration” and an instance of the poet observing her “with a more wholeheartedly critical eye [than he does Gawain]” (“Awntyrs” 192). We might consider, however, her brief, breathless tantrum an instance of the encounter’s poetic verisimilitude—for if there is ever a time for hysterics, it may well be in the heat of a moment such as this. Phillips notes that Guenevere’s protest “resembles Everyman’s surprise when his friends and wealth desert him at the approach of death,” and adds that the appearance of an apparition “In the likeness of Lucifer” is commonly believed to herald one’s imminent demise (Modern Spelling 28n98). Finally, Hahn considers a possible explanation, rooted in concerns of technique, behind the particular knights named in the queen’s role call of dishonor: what they all have in common is not a reputation for being “uncurtays,” but merely, rather, their alliterating names (205n96).

41

(cursed, wailed; skin, complexion, cover; stammered, was stunned; top, neck; toad bites into the skull; eyes sunken, hollow; glowed, coals; ll. 105– 10; 114–17)

The thing is a charnel horror, its body blackened by bone-deep rot and “clothed” only in the clotted earth of the grave. As though the grotesque toad it wears as a purgatorial accessory, its fiery aspect and empty, burning sockets, and the alternate caterwauling and mad, plaintive whispering it vocalizes were not already frightening enough, the poet continues:

Al glowed as a glede the goste there ho glides, Umbeclipped in a cloude of clethyng unclere,* Serkeled with serpentes all aboute the sides— To tell the todes theron my tonge were full tere.**

*Enclosed; shrouds unfathomable **To account [the number of] the toads clinging to her would be too tedious for my tongue

(she; Encircled, on all sides; ll. 118–21)

Finally, Gawain has had enough; he “braides oute the bronde, and the body bides”

(draws his sword, and the corpse stands still; l. 122).

Let us pause the poem’s rising action for a moment to take stock of what we have just witnessed. Perhaps the first thing we ought to recognize is that the poet refers to the creature initially as a “goste,” or ghost, in line 118, but then again as a “body,” or corpse, a mere four lines later. This vacillation between two seemingly incompatible states of otherworldly being—is the apparition spirit or flesh?—underscores the fundamental indeterminacy of the revenant’s presence. Like the poem it haunts, a cultural artifact in transition between the spectral (the oral storytelling tradition) and the corporeal (the nouveau-literary, written alliterative romances), the apparition is neither fully spectral nor fully corporeal, but somehow occupies a liminal space between.

42

Phillips writes that the “ghost combines elements of body and spirit: she is a warning both of the corruption of the body and the torments of the soul” (Modern Spelling

30n116). Ingham, applying pressure to any casual interpretation of this revenant as mere image, writes that its body “seems, in the vividness of its description, considerably more substantial a horror than its status as ghost would suggest”; through the implementation of such rhetorical vividness, such corporeal horror, the poet “imagines the woman as deadened and deadly. ... The feminization of the sinful splits the cloying dampness of fleshy putrefaction from the virtuous masculinity of warrior heroism” (184).

The Eclipsing, Reflecting Mother

We ought to take note of the revenant’s claim that virtually every aspect of her former queenship eclipses Guenevere’s (just as the moon blots out the sun in the eclipse by which Gawain explains her arrival), since the domineering maternal figure, as we will see later in this chapter, is often a fixture of problematic mirror-bonding in the psychoanalytic literature:

“Quene I was somwile, brighter of browes Then Berell or Brangwayn, thes burdes so bolde; Of al gamen or gle that on grounde growes* Gretter than Dame Gaynour, of garson and golde,** Of palais, of parkes, of pondes, of plowes, Of townes, of toures, of tresour untolde, Of castelles, of contreyes, of cragges, of clowes.”

*pleasures or mirth; occurs on earth **More [I enjoyed] than Guenevere; treasure

(formerly, in looks; those women; enclosures, estates; strongholds; lands, mountains, valleys; ll. 144–50)

The revenant ends her initial conversational sally by requesting of Gawain “onys ... a sight / Of Gaynour the gay” (ll. 155–56), and he acquiesces, bringing forward his queen to have an audience with the otherworldly body before them, who immediately reveals

43

their connection: “Welcom, Waynour, ... / Lo, how delful deth has thi dame dight!”

(Welcome, Guenevere ... behold how aggrieved death has left your mother; ll. 159–60).

She compares her former beautiful complexion to a rose and her face to a blooming lily.

In the genre of romance, this type of comparison is ubiquitous; it is standard figurative speech to signify feminine beauty. Here, in AA, it is conspicuously suggestive of

Guenevere’s own physical vitality while at the same time it suggests that the mother’s former beauty trumps that of her famously comely daughter. The revenant queen immediately contrasts the floral imagery by noting that now, she is sunk deep in the lake with Lucifer (ll. 161–64). She then issues the command to her daughter to muse upon and take witness by her mother’s mirror, warning that her high status and worldly trappings of luxury will not forestall death.

Phillips delineates the multivalent tropological function of the mirror for a medieval audience, noting that it contains “several related meanings. As traditional sign of vanity it may remind women of the transience of beauty. It often appears in book titles as a metaphor for a didactic summary. The ghost represents a mirror of what

Guenevere will become. Death sometimes offers a mirror in momento [sic] mori art and literature ...” (Modern Spelling 32n167). The macabre revenant’s “mirroring” of her living offspring here echoes the encounter in The Three Dead Kings between the titular dead monarchs and their living sons, the former interrupting a hunt to instruct the latter in the fleetness of life and the importance of shunning material trappings and sensual pleasures in favor of spiritual preparation for the hereafter.15 It is also reminiscent of The

Trental of St. Gregory, in which the ghost of Gregory’s mother, hellbound for bearing

15 See The Three Dead Kings, in Turville-Petre, ed. (148–57).

44

and then murdering an illegitimate child, appears before her son to plead for suffrage

(and, of course, to provide a vivid example of the wages of sin).16

Despite these influences, however, the encounter as depicted in AA is unique in several respects. Indeed, Schmitt writes that across the entire body of medieval ghost tales, “the case of a female ghost [is] extremely rare” (63). Not only does the meeting between dead and living queens in AA present an intrusion of the macabre into

Arthurian romance—“very rare ... at any date,” with AA the “one exception” (Tristram

237n22)—but it seems as well to be the only version of such an encounter to occur in the extant literature between a mother and daughter, rather than fathers and sons (as in

The Three Dead Kings) or a mother and son (as in Gregory’s Trental). A further intriguing refraction is the etymology and meaning of Guenevere’s name; in its early

Welsh incarnation, “Gwenhwyfar,” the name means “White Goddess,” “White

Enchantress,” or, in its most commonly translated iteration, “White Phantom” (Lacy and

Ashe 356–57). As Guenevere and her dead mother face each other on the shores of the tarn, we are therefore presented with not one but two “ghosts,” one ethereally bright with life, the other a corpse blackened by its mortal intransigence. They present the reader with a doubled, chromatically inverse version of the same image, like a photograph held up to its negative.17

As the scene continues, Guenevere’s dead mother warns her that she should practice charity toward the poor, although the motivation she describes behind such

16 See Gates’s discussion of the Trental (22–24) and Klausner (309–316).

17 Intriguingly, psychoanalyst André Green identifies “black or white” as “the colours of mourning,” which, as his translator Katherine Aubertin points out, makes more sense once the double meaning of blanc is restored for the English reader: “‘Noir ou blanc’—in French blanc can mean either ‘white’ or ‘blank’” (146n1).

45

almsgiving seems to be almost entirely self-serving. She delineates an economy of exchange, pointing out that once Guenevere has died, all her servants and friends will desert her (ll. 175–76), and then “the helpes no thing but holy praier” (nothing will help

[her] but prayer); such suffrage, “[t]he praier of poer,” might “purchas the pes” (the prayers of the poor, purchase [her] peace [in the afterlife]; ll. 177–78), but only in direct accord with “that thou yeves at the yete” (what [she] distributes [to the poor] at her gate; l. 179). The revenant contrasts her own dire situation in purgatory—she languishes

“[n]axte and nedefull, naked on night” (nasty and needful, naked in the night; l. 185), abused by a troop of fiends and burnt in a cauldron of brass and brimstone (ll. 186–

88)—with Guenevere’s earthly luxury, the “riche dayntés on des” with which her “diotes are dight” (rich dainties on a dais, feasts are furnished; l. 183). Guenevere’s mother bemoans her situation for several more lines, then warns her daughter “to mende thi mys” (amend your misdeeds; l. 193) and “[b]e war be my wo” (be warned by my woe; l.

195).

Hell or Purgatory?

The revenant’s status as an embodied soul undergoing purgation represents another point of critical refraction in the text. Certain of AA’s critics either state outright

(Hanna, “Interpretation” 290) or consider the possibility (Haught 10–11) that she is eternally damned, taking as evidence the revenant’s claims that she lies low in the lake with Lucifer (l. 164), is abused by a troop of hell-fiends (l. 186), and burns in a brass cauldron of brimstone (l. 188). However, Hanna himself, in his introduction to his edition of the poem that appeared some four years after his “Interpretation,” points out that

“Hell and Purgatory are frequently coalesced or confused in Middle English poetry.”

46

Amending his earlier assessment, he notes that “the latter seems a more likely dwelling for [the Awntyrs’ revenant]” (25–26).

Another point to consider is that, according to medieval Christian doctrine, hellbound souls are unable to seek suffrage from the living in the manner of the purgatorial visitant, due to the simple fact of their damnation. The magnitude of their sin places them beyond earthly succor. Accordingly, as Stephen H. A. Shepherd notes in his edition of AA, “given that the ghost ... speaks of the possibility of relief from her condition, ... she lingers in the purifying fires of purgatory” (Middle English Romances

225n2) and Richard J. Moll concurs that “the Awntyrs ghost is in purgatory, not hell”

(Before Malory 289n53). Haught qualifies her reading by claiming that the revenant’s words bear “too many potential meanings to enable audiences confidently to assert that we understand exactly what [she] is saying” (11). Yet amidst the many potential meanings, there are only two possible actual meanings: Guenevere’s mother’s otherworldly abode is either Hell or Purgatory. While the coalescence or confusion of these two markedly different conditions of sinners’ afterlives in medieval writers’ and audiences’ conceptualizations of the otherworld may have presented those writers and audiences with an interpretive or determinative impasse, we do not share their dilemma.

For us, it must be one or the other, Hell or Purgatory—it cannot be both. In a note appended to the text a few sentences prior to Haught’s assertion of the indeterminacy of the revenant’s metaphysical state, the former writes that the latter’s consignment to Hell

“would be consistent with several other versions of the ‘adulterous mother’ exempla in which no penance can bring the ghost relief” (22n24), citing Klausner (311–13) in support. Yet Haught here neglects to add a critical detail. In the early version of the

47

exemplum from which the other, later versions descend, the mother “damned for her adultery” is also culpable for the murder of the two illegitimate children that were its issue (Klausner 311), a crime of which Guenevere’s mother is not guilty, at least by her own admission (the otherworldly visitant’s admission of a catalogue of specific sins to those visited being a prominent feature of such visitations in the exempla). Haught is correct, however, in her assertion that in the later versions of the “adulterous mother” exempla, women judged to be adulterers are damned on the sole basis of that sin, although even these judgments of damnation are arguably complicated by the conceptual intermingling of the otherworldly states of Hell and Purgatory to which

Hanna alludes.

The Signum

Confronted with the ghost’s very serious claims and her ominous warning,

Guenevere chiastically mirrors her mother’s sadness—“Wo is me for thi wo” (l. 196)— and then, crucially, seems to ask implicitly for a signum, essentially proof that the ghost actually is not only a true representative of the otherworld but is also who she claims to be (i.e., Guenevere’s own mother).18 With just a hint of incredulity, she exclaims, “If thou be my moder, grete mervaile hit is / That al thi burly body is broughte to be so bare!” (If you are my mother, it is a great marvel / That the entirety of your boundless beauty has been stripped away!; ll. 202–03, my emphasis and trans.). The ghost replies, delivering her signum in the process:

“I bare the of my body; what bote is hit I layn? I brak a solempne avowe,

18 The signum, an assurance of the veracity of the vision and the apparition’s authenticity, was a commonplace in medieval accounts of encounters with ghosts; see Schmitt (46, 96, 104–105, 198, 267n8).

48

And no man wist hit but thowe; By that token thou trowe, That sothely I sayn.”

(bore, profit, conceal it; broke, vow; knows, you; believe; truthfully, speak; ll. 205–08)

Finally, the ghost reminds Guenevere that her desire—“luf paramour, listes and delites”

(sexual love and pleasure; l. 213)—led her to the spiritual wilderness in which she now resides.

A number of AA’s critics have used this moment in the poem to posit that the ghost’s chosen signum—“that token”—is actually Guenevere herself: that she is the unfortunate result of her mother’s broken vow, a child of an illegitimate and possibly incestuous union.19 What’s more, in order for this revelation to function as signum, or authenticating detail, both the visitant and the target of its visitation must know it; and so

Guenevere, as the mother confirms (“And no man wist hit but thowe”), is herself aware that she is literally ill conceived. As is often the case in AA, the refractive discourse of the prismatic mother-revenant opens more questions than it answers: if Guenevere is illegitimate, how and where was she raised? Did she reside with and know her mother as a child, or was she sent away to be brought up in secret? If she was raised in her mother’s royal household, was she cared for by surrogates and/or wetnursed—as was often the practice?20 If she was exiled to hide her status as the product of unchastity or

19 See Gates (22n34); Hanna (291); Klausner (73).

20 Shulamith Shahar writes that medieval wetnurses “were employed by the nobility and the upper echelons of the urban population, and there is no dearth of evidence for this. ... That noblewomen did not generally nurse their own children can be gauged from the fact that writers see fit to make special mention of those women who chose to nurse, and praise them for their action” (58, 60).

49

incest,21 how did she eventually manage to prove a noble bloodline in order to wed

Arthur? And if she wasn’t—if her mother was able to hide Guenevere’s illegitimate paternity from her own husband, himself presumably a king, and thereby keep her— then how did this poisonous knowledge that only they share, the foundational traumatic kernel of their relationship, affect Guenevere’s development?

Guenevere’s origins are essentially shrouded in mystery—Geoffrey of Monmouth writes only that she “was descended from a noble Roman family and had been brought up in the household of Duke Cador [of Cornwall]” (221 [ix 9])22—and so these questions have very few, if any, answers in the Arthurian corpus prior to the (anachronistic, for our purposes) creative flourishes provided by Sir Thomas Malory. Anyone seeking them must therefore necessarily engage in speculative psychobiography of a very probably

21 Gates notes that this particular royal response to the birth of an illegitimate child figures in an early version of the story of St. Gregory’s mother, a prose tale appearing in the Latin Gesta Romanorum. As he points out, it gives a very different account of Gregory’s mother’s sin than does the Trental. He summarizes the tale, but neglects to underscore its extreme oedipal character:

Gregory is the child of an incestuous relationship between the son and daughter of the Emperor Marcus. ... Before his birth Gregory’s father departs for the Holy Land, where he soon dies. His mother, now the empress, places the baby in a cask with gold and silver to provide for his upbringing. She encloses two tablets instructing whoever finds him to baptize him, and throws the cask into the sea. When he is grown, Gregory learns the secret of his birth and sets out for the Holy Land. However, he is blown by a storm to his mother’s country where she is defending her castle against a rejected suitor. They do not recognize each other, and when Gregory defeats the attackers, he is rewarded with his mother’s hand in marriage. One day she finds the tablets, and ... confronts her son with their evil fate ... . Gregory then goes away to become a religious hermit and is later made pope. At the end of the poem his mother travels to Rome, where Gregory endows a monastery and makes her the abbess. (21–22)

This version of the tale is, from a psychoanalytical standpoint, particularly intriguing in the way it foregrounds the generational transmission of the trauma of incest. Gregory’s mother is condemned to revisit her incestuous liaison with her brother in a quite literal return of the repressed—i.e., Gregory himself.

22 Wace, in his Roman de Brut, essentially echoes Geoffrey, writing that Guenevere “was beautiful, courteous and well-born, of a noble Roman family. For a long while Cador had had her brought up in Cornwall in excellent fashion, as befitted his close kinswoman; his mother had been Roman” (ll. 9641– 52).

50

fictional person. While it is not my intention to engage in such speculation here—to paraphrase Guenevere’s mother, what would a made-up story profit us?—what we can do is consider the import, in psychoanalytic theory and feminist criticism, of the figures of the mother and the mirror in the hope that such consideration may shed some light on the mother/daughter mirror as it stands in the Awntyrs. Such consideration is the work of the section to follow. At the moment, however, we return to the poem in order to detail further the revenant’s refractive influence on its criticism.

On the Question of the Revenant’s “Mynnyng”: Further Fractured Readings

Critical responses to the Awntyrs and its revenant, as we have already seen, undergo a number of such refractions en route to interpretation as the message from the dead (mother/queen) to the living (daughter/queen, knight, audience) seems to oscillate between clarity and inscrutability (the one, as we have seen, sometimes even mistaken for the other, so thoroughly faceted is the prism through which the critic’s interpretation must pass). Like the poet who notes that to count all the toads festooning the revenant’s body would weary his tongue, to detail all extant examples of such refractions, as I have termed them in this chapter, would take more space than is available to me here. In the remainder of this section, then, I will discuss only a few more particularly salient examples.

The first of these examples pertains to the specific, appropriate suffrage that the revenant suggests at her daughter’s request and the nature of the request itself. The second concerns the critical response to Gawain’s remarkable interjection into the dialogue between Guenevere and her mother. The third, and perhaps most pressing as it is a broader issue of genre rather than a specific textual one, is the controversy over whether or not it is appropriate for critics of the Awntyrs to discuss the poem in terms of

51

Arthurian romance when so much of the revenant’s message to Guenevere and Gawain clearly draws on events portrayed in Arthurian chronicle history, and particularly the alliterative Morte Arthure. I will close the section with two diametrically refracted critical readings of a scene from the poem’s second episode in an effort to illustrate just how far throughout the text its prismatic quality resonates.

The living-dead queen’s attempts to force her daughter’s recognition of the perils of neglecting the care of her immortal soul in favor of “fressh foroure” (l. 166) and “riche dayntés [of her] diotes” (l. 183) continue throughout their discussion. In other words, the revenant endeavors to serve as counterpoint memento mori to Guenevere’s preoccupation with the relatively innocuous earthly pleasures of sumptuous clothing and fine food, behind which lurks the more grave menace to her immortality, the carnal specter of “luf paramour, listes and delites” (l. 213). Guenevere herself, however, seems to be somewhat dazzled by her mother’s refractive power. Rather than discuss her mother’s explicit and implicit recommendations regarding what she should do in order to achieve grace, namely to give charitably to the poor (ll. 173–79) and to maintain her chastity (ll. 213–14), Guenevere thrice diverts the conversation. She first asks what suffrage the clergy under her command might be able to perform in order to relieve her mother’s purgatorial sufferings, wondering “If auther matens or Mas might mende thy mys, / Or eny meble on molde?” (goods on earth [the donation of?]; ll. 198–99), exclaiming in the bargain that she would be overjoyed if her bishops’ prayers might bring her mother to bliss (ll. 199–200). Following her mother’s confirmation of identity through the signum of “that token” (l. 207), which I have discussed above, Guenevere again steers the flow of discourse back to her mother’s potential suffrage, demanding:

52

“Say sothely what may the saven of this sytis / And I shal make sere men to singe for thi sake” (Tell me truly what might ease your pains and I will make many priests sing for your sake; ll. 209–10, my trans.). Her mother replies:

“Were thritty trentales don Bytwene under and non,* Mi soule were socoured with son And brought to the blys.”

*Between morning and afternoon (in one day)

(thirty series of masses said; aided immediately; ll. 218–21)

After the revenant issues a one-stanza primer on the succoring power of masses performed in remembrance of the dead, Guenevere vows to “make [her mother’s] mynnyng,” or preserve her memory on earth, thereby granting her otherworldly suffrage, with “a myllion of Masses” (ll. 236–37). She then asks two more questions, digging for critical information that only a representative of the otherworld could provide: “What wrathed God most, at thi weting?” (What sin, according to your understanding, angers

God the most; l. 238), and “What bedis might me best to the blisse bring?” (What are the best prayers to lead me to Heavenly bliss; l. 249).

Guenevere comes in for a critical drubbing from Hanna and Lowe, as does

Gawain, to whom we shall return shortly. Hanna’s vitriol toward the pair in his

“Interpretation” is of particularly epic proportion. Beginning dispassionately enough with a discussion of Guenevere’s indifferent personality as suggested by the richness of her clothing (284–85), he builds momentum quickly, launching a series of broadsides at the character of the Queen: her replies to the revenant’s statements are “shortsighted and naïve” (285); she “remains entrapped and dazzled by the brilliance of the individual moments of her existence” (289); her “responses to the direct injunctions of the ghost

53

clearly involve selfishness and lack of foresight” (289); she “[refuses] to perform any meaningful action in her own right” in order to alleviate her mother’s suffering (290). The shortsightedness and naïveté Hanna finds in Guenevere’s replies to her mother might be more profitably read as instances of the revenant’s refractive power at work. The same might be said of his argument regarding her self-absorption. It is not so much that

Guenevere “remains entrapped and dazzled by the brilliance of the individual moments of her existence,” which is an attractive (because relatively straightforward) claim to advance. Rather, again, she is entrapped and dazzled by the refractive power of her living-dead mother’s prismatic, prophetic discourse, so difficult at points to cognitively grasp and hold in its multivalent signification (as Haught argues).

Further, it is not at all “clear” that Guenevere’s responses to her mother’s “direct injunctions ... involve selfishness and lack of foresight.” After all, she does seem to be quite concerned, in her way, with the eternal—her mother’s attainment of bliss and her own ability both to avoid angering God and to secure her own pathway to eternal peace

(two sides, one might add, of the same coin) are pressing concerns for the young

Queen. Hanna’s insistence that Guenevere refuses to perform any meaningful action in her own right in order to secure an end to her mother’s suffering is odd indeed, since resorting to prayer herself would be inefficient and ineffectual—more on this in a moment, when we move to a discussion of the specifics of the revenant’s request for suffrage—and even more so when she has the combined sanctifying power of Britain’s clergy at her command. Equally puzzling, considering the rebuttal to his refracted and fractured argument that I have just offered, is Hanna’s insistence that Guenevere “fail[s] to comprehend the ghost’s message of Christian relevance,” and that said failure

54

“clearly should be understood as one of the elements which eventually produce the fall of the Round Table” (290). Guenevere demonstrates her comprehension of the

Christian overtones that circumscribe the revenant’s message through her repeated questions on the nature of God’s wrath and the redemptive powers of specific prayers.

Problematic as well is that Hanna fails to couple his condemnation of Guenevere’s incomprehension with a mention at this critical juncture of her plea, on the behalf of

Galeron’s lady, to Arthur that he stay Gawain’s sword and grant Galeron mercy at the poem’s denouement (ll. 625–37)—a Christian act of intercession indeed.

Lowe, following Hanna’s critique of Guenevere, offers a response complicated by an assumption built on an inaccurate reading. Much of her assessment of the Queen’s conduct echoes points within Hanna’s that I have already addressed, but there is one pressing issue with her commentary that must be noted. Lowe mounts an attack on

Guenevere (and, to a lesser degree, Gawain) based on her “spiritual sloth” (213), after first chiding the pair for their decision to “repose almost slothfully under a laurel” rather than “suffering the exhaustion of exertion” that would have resulted had they opted instead to participate in the hunt (210).23 Building on her claim that Guenevere’s “sloth” is both somatic and spiritual in nature, Lowe writes that the Queen’s mother requests of her to “prepare a mynning (a series of thirty requiem masses intended to shorten the time spent in purgatory) for her mother’s soul,” but that “rather than accept her spiritual obligations toward herself and others, Guenevere thrusts the burden onto those who are

23 Among the poem’s many inscrutabilities is that it does not address the question of whether, in this case, it would even be appropriate for Guenevere to participate in the doe hunt; and therefore, the decision to alight beneath the laurel may not have necessarily been hers or Gawain’s. Certainly Arthur himself offers no complaint when Guenevere and Gawain stop, for as the lines immediately following note, “And Arthur with his erles ernestly rides, / To teche hem to her tristres ...” (To assign them [his earls] to their hunting stations; ll. 33–34). Lowe, however, does not consider this possibility in her indictment of the pair’s “slothful” repose.

55

to perform the masses” (213). But this is not at all what the revenant requests of her daughter—she asks not for “thirty masses,” that is to say, a single trental, which a single person could reasonably be expected to complete in a half-day. Rather, she asks that thirty trentals be performed in this time span (ll. 218–19). Multiply thirty masses per trental by thirty trentals, and one arrives at a much larger figure: 900 requiem masses must be performed between morning, presumably sunrise, and noon, presumably midday, of one day, according to Guenevere’s mother, in order for her to be brought to bliss (see Hahn’s confirmation of this figure, 208n219).24 This, of course, is unlikely to be achieved even by the strenuous devotions of one person. Lowe’s assessment of

Guenevere’s “spiritual sloth” is constructed on a fractured foundation of misapprehension—of which Guenevere herself stands quite ironically accused throughout Lowe’s polemic.

In the immediate aftermath of the revenant’s lecture (answering her daughter’s probing questions regarding the most direct pathway to bliss) on the importance of the paramount Christian precepts of charity, chastity, and almsgiving (ll. 252–53), the former queen seems to speak from rueful experience when she warns her daughter that the latter “shal leve but a stert; / Hethen shal thou fare” (live but a short time; Hence; ll.

259–60). Then, suddenly, a brisk interjection interrupts the flow of discourse that, since the beginning of their discussion in l. 159, has included only the two queens. In an initial concatenation of l. 260, Gawain asks urgently:

24 The severe refraction engendered by AA’s prismatic quality is implied by Klausner’s note that the poem’s author may have confused even himself here: “the exact nature of the trental as a series of thirty masses seems to have become confused in Awntyrs, where it appears as ‘thritty trentales’ (l. 218)” (310). Regardless of possible authorial confusion regarding the exact doctrinal enumeration of requiem masses, however, “thritty trentales” does appear in the text, and the simple mathematical fact remains that 30 multiplied by 30 equals 900.

56

“How shal we fare ... that fonden to fight, And thus defoulen the folke on fele kinges londes, And riches over reymes withouten eny right, Wynnen worshipp in werre thorgh wightnesse of hondes?”*

*Achieve renown in warfare through prowess of arms

(warrior, undertake; put down, diverse, countries; enter, realms, any; ll. 261–64)

Even at first read, this is an astounding question, coming as it does from a man who has reached the heights of martial legend within his own time on the strengths of his courtesy and his sword. Gawain here seems to recognize that at least one of those strengths may have imperiled his immortal soul, if he puts stock in the majority of what he has heard the revenant communicate to her offspring.

But Hanna—to return once again to his “Interpretation”—disagrees with what seems to be a rendering of Gawain’s sudden anxiety. He writes that Gawain is

“[e]xulting in the beauty of conquest and despoliation,” and that he “fails to consider his own mortality, that he too may be victimized in battle, that mere ceaseless activity cannot protect one from the ravages of Fortune” (292). How Hanna arrives at such a interpretation when the opposite is more clearly the case—as Hahn points out,

“Gawain’s question to the ghost, had it originated with an actual medieval knight, would demonstrate a remarkable degree of self-consciousness and self-criticism” (210n261)— can, I argue, only be credited once again to the refractive power of a poem that bears at its heart the prismatic figure of a revenant, evidently capable of diverting, deflecting, mediating, altering, and distorting the criticism to which her otherworldly and textual bodies are subjected.25 Gawain’s question, infamous in the critical literature on AA, is

25 A possible cause of Hanna’s misinterpretation of this moment in AA lies in a similar description of Arthur’s sacking of Tuscany (and then a number of other lands) found in AMA:

57

not only subject to refracted interpretation. It also serves as a point of refraction within the otherworldly body of the revenant’s prophetic message, diverting her discursive subject from what Guenevere can do to ensure their ascent Heavenward to a reflection of the historical horrors of conquest that Gawain has just detailed. The revenant goes on to unfurl a bleak prophecy of doom for Arthur and his court—including Gawain himself, who is about to learn exactly where and how he will die—once Fortune sees fit to topple the king from his perch atop the heights of her wheel and dash him to the stony soil of Cornwall.

Chronicle, Romance, and the Specter of Lancelot in AA

Regarding the generic dominance of medieval romance over the literary traditions, historical perceptions, and indeed modern conception of the Middle Ages,

Geraldine Heng has written that “the genre is ... so indelibly marked by the Middle

Ages—when it was arguably the most prominent, sophisticated, and widely

Into Tuskane he tournez, when þus wele tymede, Takes townnes full tyte, with towrres full heghe; Walles he welte down, wondyd knyghtez, Towrres he turnes and turmentez þe pople, Wroghte wedewes full wlonke wrotherayle synges, Ofte wery and wepe and wryngen theire handis; And all he wastys with werre, thare he awaye rydez, Thaire welthes and theire wonny[n]ges, wandrethe he wroghte.

(Into Tuscany he turns, when thus well-timed, Takes towns with great speed, tall towers not withstanding; Walls he tore down, their best knights he broke, Turns over towers and torments the people, Made widows of worthies lamenting their woe, All keening and weeping and wringing their hands; And all with war he lays waste, wheresoever he rides, Their wealth and their dwellings, destruction he wrought; ll. 3150–57, my trans.)

The episode of “conquest and despoliation” is here described by the chronicler, not, critically, a martial character. While Hanna has not confused the two texts, he seems to have assumed that because the AA poet makes heavy use of textual events occurring in AMA, the tone of that earlier work must have been ported over as well, which is simply not the case—especially when one takes into account the context of the discussion into which Gawain interjects his query.

58

disseminated species of literary narrative—that romance seems virtually synonymous with medieval time itself, so that the entire Middle Ages, as John Ganim once put it, is characterized and depicted in later eras as if it were a romance” (2). Locating “the point at which a narrative shaped itself into the pattern we now recognize as medieval romance in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s audacious History of the Kings of Britain (Historia

Regum Brittanie),” Heng writes:

Geoffrey’s innovation shows how romance’s preferred method is to arrange for an apparatus of the infinitely familiar and pleasurable—figures of gender, sexuality, and varieties of adventure—to transact its negotiations with history, addressing what surfaces with difficulty, and exists under anxious pressure, through a loop of the familiar and the enjoyable: a lexicon that thereafter comprises romance’s characteristic medium of discussion. ... Out of exigency, then, the Historia performs a dazzling cultural rescue by successively passing historical trauma through stages of memorial transformation, so that historical event finally issues, and is commemorated, as triumphant celebration in the form of a romance narrative in which the spoor of history and the track of fantasy creation become one, inextricably conjoined. (2–3)

Heng’s focus, using Geoffrey’s Historia as representative model, is here on the ways in which history is appropriated and interpolated by romance, their respective venatic traces gradually intermingling and then melding together “under anxious pressure,” yet

“through a loop of the familiar and the enjoyable,” until the two—history and fantasy— finally become inseparable. This is an apt way to think about the remarkable generic hybridity of AA as well as the dividing line along either side of which arguments that either implicitly or explicitly address themselves to the poem’s generic distinction fall.

For, much like the critical anxiety regarding who decides what one may or may not say about Chaucer that I discuss in the following chapter, there lurks, within AA scholarship, a dilemma: can the poem be discussed legitimately in terms of Arthurian romance, or are our critical assessments bound by its near-exclusive reference—or more precisely,

59

the references contained within the prophecy of the Arthurian court’s downfall passed along to Guenevere and Gawain by AA’s revenant—to events as they occur in Arthurian chronicle? And why is the distinction, if indeed there is one to be made, between romance and chronicle traditions as echoed in AA narratologically and critically important? Why indeed might it be important that no such distinction be made?

A specter haunts the text of AA—and, as I have already demonstrated through my emphasis on the otherworldly embodiment of the revenant at its prophetic center, she is not it. Rather, the specter that haunts the poem and much of its criticism is in fact the figure of Lancelot, who in the Vulgate tradition is the knight with whom Guenevere betrays her marital and sexual fidelity to Arthur, thereby helping to initiate the downfall of the Round Table. The AA poet never references Lancelot. The only figure the text even tangentially connects to the possibility of Guenevere’s infelicity is Mordred, who is introduced in the revenant’s prophecy—during a moment in which the chronicle timeline folds, strangely, back on itself26—as a child still playing with a ball in “riche Arthures halle” (ll. 309–10). The connection is tangential because, following consistent roots back to events as depicted in AMA, the revenant’s prophetic claim that the “barne ... / That outray shall you alle” (child that shall undo you all; ll. 310–11) ought to indicate that, again following AMA, Mordred will take Guenevere as his wife and she will bear his illegitimate (and incestuous27) children. Yet the revenant’s prophecy ends at l. 311, in which she notes that the day upon which Mordred undoes them all will be a doleful one.

26 See n8 of this chapter for Allen’s review of the problematic chronology.

27 Hence, perhaps, the narrative logic behind the revenant’s hint at the possibility that Guenevere herself is the product of an incestuous union and that, in musing on her mother’s mirror, she should do everything in her power to avoid a similar fate in consequence of breaking the same “solempne avowe” (l. 205).

60

It does not follow through to describe Guenevere’s wedding to Mordred (AMA ll. 3550,

3575), her pregnancy by him (AMA l. 3552), and her eventual flight from York to a convent in Caerleon (AMA ll. 3916–18), at which point she exits the chronicle history.

The audience is left to connect the inferences and arrive at its own conclusions.

Despite his absence from the text of AA, however, critics sometimes invoke

Lancelot in their own various attempts to connect the poet’s inferences and arrive at interpretive conclusions regarding just what dalliance, exactly, the revenant is warning her daughter to avoid. Addressing the living-dead queen’s reference to her undoing by

“luf paramour, listes and delites” (l. 213), for example, Klausner writes that “the implications of that example could not be missed” (320). Takami Matsuda, whose take on the poem is otherwise focused on its preoccupation with Arthurian chronicle history, notes that “the figure of the ghost has an explicit connection with the sins of pride and lechery ... which in turn becomes an implied criticism of Guinevere whose illicit relationships with the knights of the Round Table precipitate the destruction of the kingdom” (51). Hanna even more specifically makes a connection to the Vulgate tradition of Guenevere’s affair: “In this warning must be implied a judgment upon the famous love of the queen for Lancelot, a love which leads to the weakening and dismemberment of the chivalric company” (“Interpretation” 290).

However, Richard Moll has issued a strenuous objection to these and other critics’ recourse to Lancelot in association with the revenant’s warning of love’s carnal pleasures (290n68). “More than any other English romance,” Moll writes, “The Awntyrs off Arthure clearly establishes its relationship to the chronicle tradition” (125). “Unlike the transi-tomb or tomb-stone epitaph,” he continues, Guenevere’s mother “is not simply a

61

mirror for any passer-by. Within the narrative she is placed specifically in apposition to

Guenevere, and the poet goes to great lengths to demonstrate their association” (130).

Moll further insists that the revenant’s narrative “is not based on the romance tradition, but on the chronicles, and this must be a conscious decision of the poet. The reader, therefore, is not presented with an image of Lancelot’s betrayal ... pushing the Round

Table to ruin” (131–32). Finally, Moll claims that the revenant’s warning to her daughter and Gawain

is made more ominous by its careful adherence to the chronicle tradition. A fifteenth-century audience would have recognized the ghost’s narrative as authentic Arthurian history. ... the prophecy carefully avoids romance elements, and thus the authenticity of the ghost’s narrative is assured. Failure to recognize this fact has caused some critics to lay undue emphasis on the ghost’s warning against ‘luf paramour.’ A reading of the poem which relies on the story of Lancelot, however, assumes that the Arthurian setting for the poem is drawn from the Vulgate cycle. In the Awntyrs the events of Arthur’s fall conform to the Brut tradition, and the prophecy relies on the audience’s knowledge of the historical Arthur not only for its narrative, but also for its theme of the cyclical nature of history. (134)

While I admire the rigor and erudition with which Moll lays out his case against readings of romance contexts into the poem based on the admittedly chronicle-centric events of the revenant’s prophecy, I do think that his argument contains a few blind spots. The first of these is that while AA does indeed establish a number of links with the chronicle tradition, it is itself, first and foremost, a representative of the romance genre, as Moll plainly admits, and as of course he must. The visitation not only of a representative of the otherworld to a knight of the Arthurian court while the latter lingers by an enchanted lake in a forest famous for such supernatural “awntyrs,” but also the visitation of an aggrieved knight seeking redress to that same court in the poem’s second half, mark it clearly as such. (And, by foreclosing on Hanna’s theory that AA is

62

actually composed of an A and a B text through his citation and support of Spearing’s refutation of that theory, despite his note that AA “remains structured around two distinct adventures” [125], Moll writes himself into a position in which he cannot possibly argue that the visitations of the revenant and of Galeron are contextually divorced from one another.)

Moll’s point that Guenevere’s mother “is not simply” a mirror for any passer-by is also a bit disingenuous. Her message is certainly directed at her daughter within the context of the narrative, but it also bears the clear hallmarks of theological didacticism delivered via a literary vehicle, much like The Three Dead Kings, St. Gregory’s Trental, or indeed any of the exempla, and so is therefore designed to be as instructive to the poem’s audience as it is to Guenevere. So, while her mother’s message may not be intended simply for any passer-by, any passer-by (to include the poem’s readership) can receive otherworldly guidance from the revenant’s emphasis on the salvific precepts of charity, chastity, and almsgiving. Further, I do not know that we can claim the existence of any such thing as an “authentic Arthurian history”—but perhaps I place less faith in the impermeability of the boundaries of a given textual corpus than does Moll.

What I find most problematic about Moll’s refusal to allow for any intrusion of the specter of Lancelot into the text—or critics’ extrusion of him from it—is that such a refusal seems to fly in the face of the melding of history and fantasy by which, as Heng makes clear, all medieval romance is marked. The current critical era takes as commonplace Lacy’s remarks on the intertextuality endemic to medieval Arthurian literature (“Preface” vii–ix). Donald Maddox’s statement that in “dealing with the question of generic intertextuality in medieval literature, there is constant tension

63

between works created according to the poetic canons of a remote age and the critical concepts one may bring to them from one’s own era,” followed up by his assertion that medieval poets “obviously did not adhere to a concept of genre like those entertained in the scholarly discussions of today,” should also never be far from the medievalist’s mind

(3). Moll’s formalist, separatist approach, determined as it is to hold Brut apart from

Vulgate, chronicle apart from romance, “history” apart from fantasy—as though, especially as regards the Arthurian tradition(s), there is no fantasy in the history, or vice- versa—seems critically recalcitrant in light of these now commonplace practices of medieval textual studies.

Beyond even this objection, there is the simple question: how is it that Moll can state so confidently what a fifteenth-century audience “would have recognized ... as authentic Arthurian history”? And who is to say—who could say, beyond any doubt— that those audiences would not have made the same speculative leap that Klausner,

Matsuda, Hanna, and other critics have made in associating the warning against “luf paramour” with Lancelot, even while recognizing the allusion to the Brut tradition? The audiences of the fifteenth century were highly literate and had for years fostered an appetite for all things Arthur; they would most likely have been equally familiar with the romances as with the chronicles. Indeed, Hahn writes that William of Malmesbury— himself, we recall, a chronicler—“mentions Gawain in a way that assumes his learned readers’ familiarity with this hero’s adventures” (5). In AA, it is not at all the case, I argue, that the revenant’s prophecy would have closed down an avenue of reading. On the contrary, her mere presence within it serves to open the poem to an almost infinite array of reflective and refractive interpretation, including recognition of the specter of

64

Lancelot lurking at the edges of the text. I contend that her effect on fifteenth-century audiences was much the same as it is on those of the twenty-first century.

Spectating through the Prism: Two Views of Chivalric Violence

To close out this section on refractive interpretation, I will demonstrate how far throughout the poem—toward its very end, in fact—the revenant’s prismatic power extends, even so far as to include a scene in which she does not appear and seems to have no bearing. The reader will remember, however, as I have argued near the beginning of this chapter, that AA belongs to her; and so when we muse on it, we do indeed muse on her mirror. As the fight between Gawain and Galeron winds down, the warriors bloodied by seemingly hundreds of cuts and staggering about in pools of their own blood, the corpse of Gawain’s horse (the victim of an errant sword-stroke from

Galeron) lying nearby, the poet tells us that a great number of the gemstones encrusting their ceremonial battle dress have been struck from their settings by the nearly equally matched knights’ relentless attacks (ll. 586–93). The jewels scatter the battleground, producing a queer incongruity with the patches of gore in which they lie. Two excellent critical readings of the scene, from Ingham and Christine Chism, approach it completely differently. First, Ingham’s:

Armor glitters; shields glisten with gold filigree; the violence of warriors literally showers the field with precious stones. Such a description foregrounds the pleasures of watching. Moreover, it suggests that warrior bodies explode in the heat of contest to produce showers of gold and gems, not bloody heaps of flesh. And if the wounds Gawain and Galleroun suffer are grievous and grisly, the splendor of this spectacle seems, in the context of this kind of poetic description, judged worth the price. This is the kind of military picture in which chivalric romance glories. (186)

Now Chism’s:

The battle is notable for the delirious intensity of the slow-motion blows exchanged by the two knights. Unlike many romance descriptions of single

65

combat, these achieve their impact by their scarcity and the relentless reciprocity of their exchange. After the battle, the tally gives a severed collarbone, two impalements, a debilitating blow from above, and a decapitated horse whom Gawain pauses to commemorate with a heartfelt but florid epitaph and flood of tears. Yet these murderous blows do not check the dogged battle as both knights continue scraping the decorations from each other’s armor ... . (255)

Through her own prosody, Ingham’s reading positions the poem’s message as one that accepts and perhaps even validates the spectacle of chivalric violence because it is, in its own dark way, a thing of intense beauty, and not less so for its production of showers of gold filigree and errant gems. Chism’s intentionally blunt rhythms spin the scene toward the slapstick, her summation of the knights’ wounds suggesting a condemnation of an episode that would be as silly as Arthur’s run-in with the Black Knight in Monty

Python and the Holy Grail (dir. Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones, 1975) were it not so deadly serious. Neither reading is right—nor wrong. Like the precious stones dislodged from the warriors’ armor scattered across the bloody ground, heliographing in the sun,

AA—whether read as history, fantasy, or some hybrid form of these (and the oral and literary traditions to which they belong)—acts as both mirror and prism. The poem scatters critical perception and assessment to the four corners of the cognitive map when not boldly throwing them back for reappraisal to whence they originated, with all their attendant anxieties of hermeneutic confusion in tow.

Psychoanalytic Readings of the Mother-Daughter Mirror

Sigmund Freud

The mirror-relationship between mother and daughter, as observed and recounted in the psychoanalytic corpus, tends to bear an uncannily spectral quality, as

66

Madelon Sprengnether has noted at length.28 Freud, for example, after considering the anomaly that a girl’s attachment to the mother (rather than the father, her opposite-sex parent) presents to his theory of oedipal attachment, writes: “Everything in the sphere of

[the girl’s] first attachment to the mother seemed to me so difficult to grasp in analysis— so grey with age and shadowy and almost impossible to revivify—that it was as if it had succumbed to an especially inexorable repression” (SE 21:226). Explaining this attachment in young boys is easy: the object is and remains the mother, and as the male child develops, his erotic desires strengthen and he gains “deeper insight into the relations between his father and mother,” leading him to cast his father in the role of rival for his love-object’s affections (SE 21:225). “With the small girl,” however, “it is different. Her first object, too, was her mother. ... How, when and why does she detach herself from her mother?” (SE 21:225). Freud goes on to consider the somatic sensations, no less powerful for their passivity, engendered in the girl child by her mother’s care: “It is suckled, fed, cleaned, and dressed by her ... . A part of its libido goes on clinging to those experiences and enjoys the satisfaction bound up with them; but another part strives to turn them into activity” (SE 21:236). He finds that the

very surprising sexual activity of little girls in relation to their mother is manifested chronologically in oral, sadistic, and finally even in phallic trends directed toward her. ... We find the little girl’s aggressive oral and sadistic wishes in a form forced on them by early repression, as a fear of being killed by the mother—a fear which, in turn, justifies her death-wish against her mother ... . It is impossible to say how often this fear of the mother is supported by an unconscious hostility on the mother’s part which is sensed by the girl. (SE 21:237)

Freud also notes that whether or not the girl child has a surrogate mother, such as a nurse, is ultimately of little import, as the child will cathect those sensations received

28 See Sprengnether, The Spectral Mother: Freud, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis.

67

from the surrogate’s care onto the imago of the mother: “girls regularly accuse their mother of seducing them. This is because they necessarily received their first, or at any rate their strongest, genital sensations when they were being attended to by their mother (or by someone such as a nurse who took her place)” (SE 21:238).

Jacques Lacan and D. W. Winnicott

A particularly intriguing confluence of mirrors, mothers, and mothers-as-mirrors occurs in two influential works by the post-Freudians Jacques Lacan and D. W.

Winnicott, despite their fundamental theoretical opposition in other respects.29 For

Lacan, the child—at an age that Lacan fixes between six and eighteen months (“Mirror

Stage” 75–76)—who sees himself (Lacan only references the male child in this essay) reflected in a mirror jubilantly assumes that what he sees is himself in toto, where previously he has only caught fragmentary glimpses of his own body. He forms, around that self he sees reflected in the mirror, an identification “in the full sense analysis gives to the term: namely, the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image” (76). But, problematically, he has not yet mastered the image he sees; he cannot survive on his own, nor can he even exercise full control over his own body, “still trapped in motor impotence and nursling dependence” (76). “At the same time that the mirror image gives the infant the perception of itself as a unified subject,” writes

29 Lewis A. Kirshner has recently pointed out that the thought of Lacan and Winnicott, so often cast as theoretically opposite, even antagonistic, in the subsequent psychoanalytic literature may actually be more compatible than has been considered: “what may seem at first glance to be incompatible models,” he writes, “on closer examination come into focus as a crisscrossing of common themes and preoccupations” (335). Kirshner suggests that such a recognition may open a fruitful space between Lacanian and Winnicottian psychoanalysis, allowing theorists and clinicians to account for “their different theoretical approaches to subjectivity in a dual description or a dialectical process” (335). Mari Ruti also argues for bringing the work of both influential analysts together throughout her essay “Winnicott with Lacan: Living Creatively in a Postmodern World.” These approaches would seem to make sense, and even more so when one considers that writers on mothering and mirroring tend to juxtapose Lacan’s and Winnicott’s very different conceptions of ego-formation rather than employ only one or the other; see Sprengnether (183–86) and Scharfman (90–91) for examples of such juxtaposition.

68

Sprengnether, summarizing Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage, “it lies. The image is external, inverted, alienated, giving rise to a false comprehension of the self as integrated and whole. ... The ego, a product of misrecognition, is thus founded on a split in being that can never be healed” (184).

For Winnicott, on the other hand, the mirror in which the child sees its reflection and thereby begins to form an identification based on that image is no mirror at all; rather, it is the mother’s face (111). While Winnicott writes that Lacan’s “Mirror Stage”

“has certainly influenced me” (111), he posits that well before a baby gets a chance to look into a mirror, it has ample chances to look at its mother’s face, often during feeding at the breast (112). Winnicott goes on to suggest that when looking into the face of the mother, “what the baby sees is himself or herself. In other words the mother is looking at the baby and what she [the baby] looks like is related to what she sees there [in the mother’s face]” (112, italics in original). Problems occur when the “mother reflects her own mood or, worse still, the rigidity of her own defenses”; if babies who look into their mother’s faces “do not see themselves, there are consequences” (112).30 A baby may begin to set up defenses of her own against the “failure” of a mother whose face does not adequately reflect the baby’s own self-image; among these defenses may be the withdrawal of the expression of her own needs (113). Finally, the baby will begin “to study the variable maternal visage in an attempt to predict the mother’s mood, just

30 Sprengnether’s parsing of Winnicott here is again helpful:

The mother’s role as an agent in the process of reflection means that her responsiveness to her infant has a profound influence on its subsequent development. The more she resembles a mirror, in fact—passive, distracted, or withdrawn—the less her infant is able to use the image she provides. Such a circumstance, according to Winnicott, fosters the emergence of pathology. In an optimal situation, the infant perceives itself as organized through its mother’s attentive gaze, an essential step toward the condition of autonomy and the feeling of being in possession of one’s own reality. (185)

69

exactly as we all study the weather” (113). The inherent problem is that such an attempt at pathological “predictability ... precarious[ly] ... strains the baby to the limits of his or her capacity to allow for events,” which “brings a threat of chaos [i.e., the baby’s predictions will alternately succeed and fail], and the baby will organize withdrawal, or will not look except to perceive, as a defence” (113). “A baby so treated,” Winnicott continues, “will grow up puzzled about mirrors and what the mirror has to offer. If the mother’s face is unresponsive, then a mirror is a thing to be looked at but not to be looked into” (113). And so, despite their different conception of and approaches to the infant’s interaction with the mirror—whether it be an actual mirror that reflects a false image of the child’s specular, autonomous unity, or the mutable “mirror” of the mother’s face that threatens the child’s “creative capacity” (Winnicott 112) and freedom to look at her mother’s face in any way other than as a defense against self-annihilation—clearly, for both Lacan and Winnicott, the image in the mirror is fraught with potential peril and ought not be trusted unconditionally.

Other Readings

A number of psychoanalysts and literary critics working in psychoanalytic theoretical modes have followed, in the wake of Lacan’s pioneering work on the “mirror stage” and Winnicott’s evocative discussion of the mother’s “mirror-role” in child development, with their own various readings of mirroring and mothering. Critics who self-identify a predilection to conduct their scholarship through an optic of psychoanalytic feminist criticism have perhaps made the most of the correlation between mothers and mirrors since Lacan and Winnicott, and especially as concerns

70

the mirror-bond between mothers and daughters.31 I will briefly survey a number of these works in succession, noting particular passages that may benefit a discussion or help facilitate a reading of the relationship between Guenevere and her mother in AA.

Nancy Chodorow

Nancy Chodorow engages extensively with the complexity of the pre- and post- oedipal relationships between mother and daughter in her 1978 monograph, The

Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. Following

Helene Deutsch and Alice Balint, Chodorow underscores the “ambivalence” that is central to the mother-daughter relationship; mothers “desire both to keep daughters close and to push them into adulthood. This ambivalence in turn creates more anxiety in their daughters and provokes attempts by these daughters to break away. ... this spiral, laden as it is with ambivalence, leaves mother and daughter convinced that any separation between them will bring disaster to both” (135). The result is that girls oscillate “between total rejection of a mother who represents infantile dependence and attachment ..., between identification with anyone other than her mother and feeling herself her mother’s double and extension. Her mother often mirrors her preoccupations” (138).

31 Naomi Schor draws attention to what she considers the fractured bedrock, as it were, of psychoanalytic feminist criticism in her essay “Female Paranoia: The Case for Psychoanalytic Feminist Criticism” (204). For Schor, the root of psychoanalytic feminism’s “theoretical instability” lies in “a rather simple but far- reaching situation: those theoreticians who have contributed to articulating psychoanalysis and feminism are not necessarily or primarily interested in literary criticism (Mitchell, Dinnerstein, Irigaray); conversely, those who have contributed to articulating psychoanalysis and literature are not necessarily or primarily feminists (Felman)” (204). Schor identifies two distinct yet related methodologies that she claims can leave “those who are attempting to read texts in a psychoanalytic perspective and with a feminist consciousness in something of a theoretical vacuum, straddling two approaches: on the one hand, a psychoanalytic feminist thematics, centering on the Oedipal relationships (mother-daughter and, less frequently, father-daughter) as they are represented in works of literature; on the other, a psychoanalytic feminist hermeneutics, involving close readings of non-literary texts, essentially those of Freud, Lacan, et al., using the techniques of literary analysis (Irigaray, Cixous, Gallop)” (204–05, italics in original).

71

Jane Flax

Jane Flax—from whose essay on “The Conflict Between Nurturance and

Autonomy in Mother-Daughter Relationships and within Feminism” this chapter’s chilling second epigraph derives—emphasizes the necessity of a successful preoedipal

“symbiosis” between mother and daughter in order to stave off problems in the later processes of separation and individuation (172–76). An unsuccessful symbiotic bond between mother and daughter—one that fails, for example, due to the mother’s passivity, distance, or inaccessibility, as Winnicott theorizes—may result in a thwarted individuation of the daughter, which in turn produces a transgenerational vicious circle:

As an adult, the daughter repeats the process by thwarting her daughter’s moves toward autonomy. ... She thereby fulfills her own repressed wishes for autonomy and achievement. Her only source of emotional security is her daughter, whom she cannot allow to individuate. Thus her daughter ends up in the same situation as herself. Some mothers encourage daughters to escape; but often in the process they convey a double message of “be like me” but also “do not be like me.” (179)

“Some mothers,” Flax poignantly notes, “consciously encourage their daughters to succeed. However, even they are likely to convey another covert message: to be a woman means to make compromises, to fail, to give up one’s dreams, to settle for less than one wishes. Women who refuse to do this call into question the meaning of their own mothers’ lives and risk the hostility that arises from the mother’s own anger at her situation” (181).

Luce Irigaray

Psychoanalyst and writer Luce Irigaray’s stunning, possibly autobiographical fantasy of one daughter’s preoedipal relationship with her mother contains a number of arresting lines that fairly demand to be transposed onto the relationship—or, that is, what little we know of it—between Guenevere and her own commanding, demanding,

72

“deadened and deadly” mother (Ingham 184). From its first lines—“With your milk,

Mother, I swallowed ice. And here I am now, my insides frozen” (60)—Irigaray’s account imagines a captive daughter who struggles relentlessly against a prison she can only sense, but never see: “But what prison? Where am I cloistered? I see nothing confining me. The prison is within myself, and it is I who am its captive” (60). The ominous voyeurism of overzealous (s)mothering—“You take care of me, you keep watch over me. You want me always in your sight in order to protect me” (60)—and the daughter’s narrativized, but still uncannily Winnicottian, perception-as-defense ring true:

I look like you, you look like me. I look at myself in you, you look at yourself in me. ... But, always distracted, you turn away. Furtively, you verify your own continued existence in the mirror ...... You/I exchanging selves endlessly and each staying herself. Living mirrors. [W]ho would see that what bounces between us are images? That you give them to me, and I to you without end. (61–62)

The daughter of Irigaray’s “And the One” imagines the breast as fount of “blood, milk, honey, and meat (but no, no meat; I don’t want you dead inside me)” (62). She pushes this corpse-like mother away, gravitating toward her father, who seems “more alive,” who doesn’t constantly occupy himself with her feeding and care; “Farewell, Mother,” she sneers, “I shall never become your likeness” (62). Yet only a few lines later, she returns, desperately seeking her mother’s ... what? Recognition? Authentication?

Approval? Does her anguished self-fashioning into her mother’s image (even as she seems immediately to turn about and reject it again, here and gone, a fort/da power play) echo Guenevere’s—that beautiful and well-mannered Patrician daughter, brought up in another’s house, destined to gain (and lose) a queendom that, no matter how grand it may be, will never be the equal of her own (dead) mother’s?:

73

See how afar I move with measured steps, me, once frozen in anger? Aren’t I good now? A nearly perfect girl? I lack only a few garments, a little jewelry, some makeup, a disguise, some ways of being or doing to appear perfect. I’m beginning to look like what’s expected of me. One more effort, a little more anger against you who want me to remain little, you who want me to eat what you bring me rather than to see me dress like you, and I’ll step out of the dream. Out of my disorder. Out of you in me, me in you. I’ll leave us. I’ll go into another home. I’ll live my life, my story. (62–63)

Ronnie Scharfman

It may be that the narrativized theory of Irigaray represents an epistemological bridge between the psychoanalytic feminist hermeneutics of clinician-theorists such as

Chodorow and Flax and the psychoanalytic feminist thematics of literary critics such as

Ronnie Scharfman, Marianne Hirsch, and Terry Harpold.32 Scharfman reads two antipodal postcolonial novels, Simone Schwartz-Bart’s Pluie et vent sur Télumée

Miracle and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea—the former a black author’s exploration of “identity triumphant through female identification” (89) set during the collapse of the colonial system, the latter a white author’s “narrative of a subject’s painful inability to constitute itself as an autonomous identity” (99–100) also rooted in the traumatic aftermath of colonialism—through their depiction of mirroring between a daughter and her grandmother (Schwartz-Bart) and a daughter and her mother (Rhys). The two novels’ antipodal nature is evident, as Scharfman points out, not only in the “obvious” blackness and whiteness of their respective authors, or through the reversal of the expectations of readers familiar with the genre of “classics of colonial alienation” in that the story of triumph is the black author’s (and protagonist’s) and that of alienation the whites’—and Scharfman notes that “even these differences may be read in terms of mirror opposites”—but also in the way the two works respectively reflect the positive

32 I borrow Naomi Schor’s constructive opposition here; see n31 of this chapter.

74

and negative possibilities inherent in the mirror-bond between younger and older related women (89). For Télumée, the heroine of Schwartz-Bart’s novel, the successful mirror- bond with her grandmother Toussine allows her to “[reflect] on her own life as she had earlier reflected upon those that went before, and her identity is inscribed as an identification with a permanence” (Scharfman 99). But Rhys’s novel, by contrast,

“provides a striking version of an unsuccessful mirroring bond and its painful effects” on its heroine Bertha, whose failed bond with her cold, distant mother leads to disaster

(99). Scharfman’s exploration of the implications of both texts for approaches to literature based in psychoanalytic feminism works through her critical juxtaposition of them—thereby creating yet another mirroring between two mirrors, a mise en abyme not unlike the one created by the AA poet’s face-to-face meeting between white and black ghost-queens, themselves texts that invite and repay careful scrutiny, in the forest of Inglewood.

Marianne Hirsch

Hirsch proposes to read La Princesse de Clèves not as “the story of a young woman’s development in relation to two men, but as her apprenticeship to another woman, her mother”; she takes as her methodological approach “recent feminist psychoanalytic theory which sees the mother-daughter relationship as the dominant formative influence in female development” (68). Often enough in her account, the relationship between the Princess and her domineering mother uncannily reflects that between Guenevere and her own mother, not only diegetically but as regards its structuring function within the work as a whole. Hirsch, for example, writes: “The mother-daughter dyad and not the love triangle dominates the novel’s plot structure and language,” and that the “mother’s admonitions, especially those uttered at her

75

deathbed, represent a fixed point in its social, psychological, and moral topography, a fixed point which determines the heroine’s subsequent development” (73). She notes that, during Mme. de Chartres’ deathbed speech—which Hirsch considers “the novel’s key scene,” much as I argue that the revenant’s otherworldly directives to her daughter constitute the scene that anchors AA—the matriarch

is the first to verbalize her daughter’s passion, thus giving shape and reality to what so far has remained disordered and unnamable. Yet she does so only to emphasize the dangerous, even deathly nature of that passion ... . She commands her to ... spare no effort to keep from succumbing to her attraction. In addition to the abstract ideals of “virtue” and “duty” and to the concrete obligation to her husband and herself (and, by implication, to the mother who raised her), Mme. de Chartres adds yet another deterrent, a sense of damnation that extends far beyond their lifetimes: the mother’s very death would be troubled by the thought that her daughter might “fall like other women” (p. 70). (78)

The directives from mother (whether on the verge of death or well beyond its threshold) to thwart one’s desire, to reject “luf paramour, listes and delites” (AA l. 213) on pain of damnation, to try one’s hardest (and fail, as do both the Princess and Guenevere— although the latter’s infelicitous culpability is less emphasized in Arthurian chronicle tradition than in romance) to avoid “falling” into the destructive abyss of unsanctioned knowledge and therefore becoming a new Eve, might as well be grafted directly from

AA into La Princesse de Clèves. Finally, Hirsch writes that although “the mother’s lesson amounts to a death-warrant, it responds in a very real way to the limited possibilities for women in a male-dominated culture which is ruled by uncontrolled passions that further enslave women” (85), as apt a description of fourteenth-century

England (or ancient Britain in the aftermath of the Romans) as it is of the novel’s setting of mid-sixteenth-century France.

76

Terry Harpold

Harpold’s examination of seduction fantasy and the circulation of Mary Shelley’s unfinished novel Mathilda contains perhaps some of the most striking assessments in psychoanalytic literary criticism of the fraught relationship between mother and daughter, especially as concerns a daughter (like Shelley herself) whose mother died giving birth to her.33 “Too-close an identification with the mother,” Harpold writes, “leads to death, as the daughter must conclude from the evidence of her own birth” (57).

Harpold’s theoretical trajectory here aims to account for the seduction fantasy he finds in (and inherent to the circulation of) Mathilda, namely Mary Shelley’s own seduction fantasy of her widower father William Godwin, of whom she demanded a literary opinion of her novel of father-daughter incest. We might ask if such a deadly identification with the (m)other might also hold true for the Guenevere of AA, the illegitimate and possibly incestuous token of a m(onstrous )other who, rather than losing her life in the act of bringing her daughter into the world, damns herself in the act of conceiving her, only to return with an account of the horrors of expurgation. The repressed desire of the mother returns as the perturbation that reinscribes itself into Guenevere’s own desire. Harpold observes that “[a] longing for death can represent a desire to dissolve the self, to return completely to the mother. For Mathilda, death is a doubly effective return: the mother is already dead, and to be like her in that respect is to be more with her than is possible in life” (60). Might this help explain why Guenevere does not seem to heed her mother’s

33 There is a particular resonance between the daughter whose mother has died in childbirth and the daughter of an illegitimate and/or incestuous union, like AA’s Guenevere, whose mother visits her from beyond the grave; both daughters are haunted by a specter, a revenant who is never wholly present nor absent and who carries with her traces of a past traumatic event.

77

warnings (in the romance tradition, at least) of the dangers of concupiscence—because she too entertains this fantasy of dissolution and return?

No Way out of the Mirror

In many ways, for Guenevere, the multivalent imagery of the mirror in AA—the mirrors she and her dead mother present to each other and the near-infinite reflectivity they produce—is only a trap. Her mother (and here we recall Flax’s formulation of the mother who cannot afford to allow her daughter’s separation and individuation) says “be like me”; that is, be the good queen that I could not be (even though she makes it clear that, in magnitude at least, she was more queen than Guenevere is or could be). But she also, of course, warns her daughter “do not be like me”; that is, do not fall prey to your desire, deny yourself, avoid the liberation and confinement of sexual satisfaction, etc., leaving Guenevere literally no way out of the mirror. The young queen is doomed to replicate her mother’s experience—and her fate, of course, which the audience always already knows will mirror her mother’s.

78

CHAPTER 3 HISTORICAL TRAUMA, THE CRITIC, AND THE WORK OF MOURNING IN CHAUCER’S PRIORESS’S TALE

The death of a child is always a wound and an outrage, an improper death, a death that haunts parents, siblings, and sometimes entire communities.

—Gabriele Schwab “Replacement Children: The Transgenerational Transmission of Traumatic Loss”

Who Speaks in Chaucer’s Texts?

Of all Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, arguably none is more controversial than that of Madame Eglantine, the Prioress, one of the author’s most artfully drawn pilgrim-narrators. To this day, the Prioress’s Prologue and Tale together stand as a mark of the historical traumas of anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism and as the locus of one of the most intense—and intensely debated—collective anxieties in Chaucer studies.1 This anxiety, as R. Howard Bloch has noted, is rooted in questions of agency and voice, both that of the poet and that of the critic: “Who speaks? Who speaks in

Chaucer’s texts? … And, who decides what one can and cannot say about Chaucer?”

(204). In the particular case of the Prioress and her tale these questions give shape to the paramount cruces of its critical history.

PRT is a Marian miracle story in which the Jews of a ghetto in an unnamed Asian city fall under the influence of Satan, murder a devout young Christian boy who passes through their quarter singing a hymn to the Virgin Mary, cast his corpse into a latrine, and are then found out, tortured, and put to death when the Virgin causes the dead child to continue singing her praises from his filthy grave. The difficulty that arises is whether or not we should we trace the decidedly anti-Judaic and anti-Semitic thrust of PRT to

1 As to the distinction between medieval anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism, see Langmuir, Toward a Definition of Antisemitism.

79

Chaucer’s narrator, the Prioress, or to Chaucer himself. Is PRT a masterful pricking of a culturally prevalent anti-Semitism that persisted even in the general absence of Jews from England after the Jewish expulsion of 1290—or is it a straightforward propagation of prejudice? To put it simply, was Chaucer an artful satirist or a hateful bigot?

The question presents a false dichotomy, for Chaucer clearly demonstrates his satirical brilliance elsewhere in the Canterbury Tales, including those of the Reeve,

Friar, Summoner, and Merchant, and in many of his characterizations, especially the

Monk, the Pardoner, and the Prioress herself. What remains, rather than an establishment of Chaucer as satirist or Chaucer as bigot—as though he could be only one and not the other—is to indict Chaucer on charges of anti-Semitism or defend him from them in the specific instance of PRP and PRT. As Bloch implies, however, to attempt either one of these approaches can be professionally perilous. To do so is to enter a sharply contested critical quarter; one prominent Chaucerian points out that many of the tale’s critics “all but hate each other (and with some, get rid of the ‘all but’).”2

Hard and Soft Readings of PRT

Most critical treatments of PRT, as Lawrence Besserman has neatly summarized, fall into one of two opposing camps: “hard” and “soft” readings. The “hard” readings reject the idea that the tale constitutes a satire of late-medieval Christian antipathy toward Jews on the grounds that Chaucer, as a Christian himself, would naturally have shared such an antagonism. The “soft” readings attempt to establish Chaucer’s satirical view of the “bloody-minded antisemitism” of the tale, often by showing its narrator, the

2 R. A. Shoaf, email to author, 29 November 2009.

80

Prioress herself, to be a type of ecclesiastical caricature typically encountered in

Chaucer (Besserman 57). (These are not the only ways in which critics read PRT, as

Besserman himself points out; 57.) While at least one critic has astutely questioned the validity and value of readings that interrogate the ethics of the tale’s handling of Jews to the detriment of its literary attributes,3 we are left with a majority of PRT criticism that can be easily categorized under Besserman’s rubric of hard and soft.

I cannot claim that this chapter will escape the hard/soft rubric, and I recognize

Chaucer’s powerful talent and affinity for the satirical treatment of certain entrenched cultural institutions of his day, its less enlightened citizens’ penchant for maligning and mistreating Jews among them. His work is deeply invested with allegory and symbolism.

When we add to this what we know of his life experience, we should rightly conceive of

Chaucer as an educated, cultured, urbane, and extremely well traveled man of his age.4

However, it seems to me that any critical work on PRT that seeks merely to establish

Chaucer’s sympathy or antipathy for Jews misses an opportunity to explore an intriguing aspect of the tale and the historical trauma that at least partially informs it. That aspect is the role and work of mourning inherent in the tale and generated by it: Who mourns

3 Calabrese (73). Michael Calabrese uses PRT and its many critical respondents as a test case for examining the current prevalence of ethical criticism in medieval studies: “The problem is this: though a politicized criticism carries the weight and authority of an ethical commitment and the confidence of ethical certainty, all such criticism that foregrounds the history of violence and difference in an attempt to practice critical ethics risks reducing the text under study to a type of historical hate crime. Such literary criticism is, further, very difficult to critique because it shields itself in ethical surety, in the language of tolerance and social justice. When a critic performs ethics, who would dare oppose?” (69). See also Posner, “Against Ethical Criticism.”

4 Derek Pearsall points out that, thanks to the 493 extant documentary records of Chaucer’s life, a life spent “as a page, as an esquire to the royal household [of Edward III], and as a government and civil servant” as well as a poet, we know very much about him indeed—more so, in fact, than we do about Shakespeare (1).

81

within it? For whom does it mourn? For whom do we, its readers, mourn? Finally, and perhaps most problematically: What is the net effect of all this mourning?

Historical Trauma and the Blood Libel Legend

Before I move from the problem of the ethical dilemmas of the Chaucerian, the medievalist generally, and the literary critic writ large to the argument that follows, I should like to further lay its boundaries by defining and delineating another key term that appears in this chapter’s title. For Dominick LaCapra, the term “historical trauma” refers to an historical “limit event”—his example par excellence is the Holocaust—that blots indelibly a moment in the timeline of human history (7). The term also encompasses the cultural and psychic reverberations of such an event, which ripple forward in time to alter fundamentally and irreparably the myriad ways in which humans both perceive and attempt to come to terms with that history.5 It is the macroscopic equivalent of the

“severe mechanical concussions, railway disasters and other accidents involving a risk to life” and especially the violently kinetic shocks (and aftershocks) experienced by the returning veterans of the First World War that Freud noted as the cause of certain

“traumatic neuroses” (SE 18:10). The writing—and reading—of a traumatic history should be difficult, a working-through (as one “works through” one’s personal neuroses with one’s analyst6), and LaCapra insists on “the need for empathic unsettlement, and the discursive inscription of that unsettlement, in the response to traumatic events or

5 I should not be taken to infer here that LaCapra conflates the experience of trauma with the shock of history. From the beginning of his study, he is at pains to distinguish the stark difference between “victims of traumatic historical events and those not directly experiencing them” (ix). See n7 below.

6 See Freud, “Remembering, Repeating and Working-through” (SE 12:147–56).

82

conditions.”7 While the ways in which its survivors and historians remember, repeat, and work through the trauma of the Holocaust by way of interviews and the production of historical texts is at the center of LaCapra’s focus, he notes that “narratives in fiction may also invoke truth claims on a structural or general level by providing insight into

[historically traumatic] phenomena such as slavery or the Holocaust, by offering a reading of a process or period, or by giving at least a plausible ‘feel’ for experience and emotion which may be difficult to arrive at through restricted documentary methods”

(13).

The argument to follow, then, addresses the historically traumatic phenomenon of the legend of Jewish ritual murder widespread throughout Europe beginning in the twelfth century.8 It then moves to a discussion of fictional accounts rooted in that phenomenon, such as Chaucer’s PRT and its Latin analogues of Jewish-to-Christian conversion. Finally, it considers medieval studies’ own troubled history of critical responses to both the phenomenon of the Jewish ritual murder legend and its representations in the period fiction. PRT is a considerably adapted instance of the

Marian miracle tale—Chaucer substantially changes the traditional ending, substituting

7 LaCapra cautions, however, that “empathic unsettlement” must have its limits: “there is an important sense in which the after effects—the hauntingly possessive ghosts—of traumatic events are not fully owned by anyone and, in various ways, affect everyone. But the indiscriminate generalization of the category of survivor and the overall conflation of history or culture with trauma, as well as the near fixation on enacting or acting out post-traumatic symptoms, have the effect of obscuring crucial historical distinctions; they may, as well, block processes that counteract trauma and its symptomatic after effects but which do not obliterate their force and insistence—notably, processes of working through, including those conveyed in institutions and practices that limit excess and mitigate trauma” (xi).

8 Alan Dundes writes that the ritual murder, or “blood libel,” legend “refers to Jews killing Christians for some allegedly religious reason. … [The] Christian killed [is] usually a small child, typically male …” (vii). In drawing this parallel, while I certainly do not mean to imply that medieval Christian antipathy toward Jews was a LaCapran “limit event” on par with the Holocaust, it bears some relation in its creation of a permanent underclass subjected to harsh state controls. Some of those controls, in turn, are haunting precursors of similar measures taken against Jews by the Nazi state: “Severe restrictions were placed on them [after Jews were accused of the ritual murder of William of Norwich in 1144]. They were confined to Jewries, [and] from 1218 were obliged to wear badges steadily increased in size …” (Cannon 533).

83

a pogrom in place of the Jewish-to-Christian conversion that is the standard for the genre. The tale refers specifically to the death, in 1255, of Hugh of Lincoln and metonymically to the tragic legal proceedings that followed Hugh’s death. Given the evident adaptation and incorporation within it of reference to a specific historical occurrence, we can approach the tale as a meditation on martyrdom: not only of

Christian but, critically, of Jew as well. This approach, in turn, opens a dialogue that has the potential (although by no means the certainty) to lessen, if not close, the rift between critics committed to hard and soft readings of the tale. Additionally, Chaucer’s reconfiguration of its ending marks a turning point in the history of the Marian miracle tale. By constructing PRT as an optic through which to read the historical trauma of

Jewish as well as Christian martyrdom and not simply as a pat literary account of happy conversions of Jews to Christianity in the wake of the miracle, he breaks the constraints of the tale’s textual tradition and thereby effects a transformation of its entire genre.

The Labor of the Tale

In the appeal to the Virgin Madame Eglantine offers in her Prologue, she exclaims, “To telle a storie I wol do my labour,”9 establishing early on that the tale she will tell is no fabliau, no ribald jest or casual anecdote; it is a serious tale, a tale of pathos the telling of which will be work, rather than the play Harry Bailey intends for his time-passing road game. Clearly, for the Prioress herself, the “labour” of the story is the work of mourning, and its inherent pathos is so great that in her Prologue she asks the aid of the Virgin in its telling, as she does in lines 473 (“Help me to telle it in thy reverence!”) and 487 (“Gydeth my song that I shal of yow seye”). By the tale’s end, the

9 Chaucer, The Prioress’s Tale, in The Riverside Chaucer, l. 463. Hereafter, citations from The Riverside Chaucer will appear parenthetically within the body of the chapter.

84

work of mourning has been shared out, in some small respect, among the rest of her company; the Prologue of Sir Thopas, which immediately follows PRT in Fragment VII,

Group B2, begins with the lines, “Whan seyd was al this miracle, every man / As sobre was that wonder was to se” (ll. 691–92). The sobriety of the “emotional tableau”

(Fradenburg 97) formed by the members of the company is all the more striking when one realizes that no other moment of absolute unity occurs among the fractious pilgrims of the Canterbury Tales, whose more characteristic reaction to stories Chaucer describes in the Reeve’s Prologue: “Diverse folk diversely they seyde” (l. 3857).

An examination of the schoolboy’s murder and brief resurrection in Chaucer’s version of the tale will demonstrate how that ending deviates considerably from the standard conclusion of the Alma Redemptoris Marian miracle. The description of the clergeon’s death and the events leading up to it are certainly horrific—although, curiously enough, not as horrific as in the tale’s Latin analogues in the Marian miracle genre, which extend his torture and go into much more graphic detail.10 He learns the

Alma Redemptoris Mater, a hymn to the Virgin Mary, by rote and sings it constantly as he walks through the Jewish quarter to and from his school. One day, Satan—who, in the Prioress’s conception, “hath in Jues herte his waspes nest” (l. 559)—rises up within the collective body of the ghetto’s Jews to needle them regarding the clergeon’s violation of their “‘lawes reverence’” (l. 564). According to the Prioress,

Fro thennes forth the Jues han conspired This innocent out of this world to chace. An homycide therto han they hyred,

10 “The lamb was seized by the wolves; one of them set a knife to his throat, and his tongue was cruelly cut out; his stomach was opened and his heart and liver taken out. They imagined that they were offering a double sacrifice, first by cutting the throat from which had emerged the voice of praise, and secondly by tearing out the heart which incessantly meditated on the memory of the Virgin” (A.G. Rigg 441).

85

That in an aleye hadde a privee place; And as the child gan forby for to pace, This cursed Jew hym hente, and heelde hym faste, And kitte his throte, and in a pit hym caste.

I seye that in a wardrobe they hym threwe Where as thise Jewes purgen hire entraille. O cursed folk of Herodes al newe, What may your yvel entente yow availle? Mordre wol out, certeyn, it wol nat faille, And namely ther th’onour of God shal sprede; The blood out crieth on youre cursed dede. (ll. 565–78)

As the mother sits and grieves for her lost child next to the very pit in which his body lies, its “throte ykorven,” the boy quite incredibly begins to sing the Alma Redemptoris once more (ll. 605–06, 611–12). The Christians in the area, who have heard that the child had gone missing, send for the provost, who, upon observing the miracle, immediately orders that all Jews who know about the murder be placed under arrest (l.

620). The clergeon’s body is then conveyed to the nearest abbey, and when the abbot asks the child what compelled him to sing, he gives an impassioned account of his love for the Virgin and her intercession on his behalf: she had placed a “greyn” upon his tongue, bidding that he sing his song until it should be removed, at which point she would come to fetch him to heaven (ll. 645–69). The abbot removes the holy grain and the child dies once again (ll. 671–72).

Important Differences between PRT and the Trinity College Manuscript

In A. G. Rigg’s translation of the Latin MS Trinity College, Cambridge 0.9.38, compiled ca. 1450 from a number of analogues written much earlier, the story is much the same as Chaucer’s save for a few key details: the setting is Toledo, not a nameless city in Asia; and, crucially, the child does not die when the clergyman removes the grain from his tongue. Rather, he has the organs which the Jews have removed from his

86

corpse for ritual purposes restored to him and wakes as though “from a deep sleep”

(443). The congregation cries tears of exultant joy rather than grief, and even the guilty

Jews of the tale enjoy a vastly different fate than their counterparts in Chaucer. Only the murderer is indicted, and the boy turns the other cheek (after, of course, identifying him to the legal authorities), expressing his pious desire that the man who had killed him not be punished in any way, for he had only served to bring about the boy’s meeting with his beloved Virgin. The boy is reunited with his overjoyed mother and exits the story.

The murderer is so moved by the power of the Virgin that he asks to be baptized on the spot; he is absolved of the crime, converts to Christianity, and goes on to become a

“most pious devotee” of the Virgin. Another Jew who has witnessed the miracle, this one very wealthy, also converts and goes on to found a church in honor of the Virgin

(Rigg 444). The Latin analogues, therefore, exhibit happy endings all around.

Or do they? One should not overlook the intense focus of PRT on martyrdom, unlike the majority of its analogues which focus instead on miracle, or the idea that it is tied explicitly to the already burgeoning history of ritual murder accusation and its accompanying Christian martyrdom in England by the Prioress’s comparison of her tale’s little clergeon with “yonge Hugh of Lyncoln, slayn also / With cursed Jewes, as it is notable” (ll. 684–85).11 Of the Prioress’s linkage of the clergeon’s murder with Hugh of

Lincoln’s death and her assertion that Hugh’s death occurred “but a litel while ago” (l.

686), Gavin I. Langmuir writes:

11 Langmuir notes that “little Hugh’s story was vividly described by Matthew Paris, the most famous English thirteenth-century historian. His was probably the version known to Chaucer, Marlowe, Percy, and Lamb. … Yet Matthew should be suspected a priori because of his general carelessness, inaccuracy, unreliable dating of events within a given year, his stereotypy of non-English peoples and credulity about Jews, and his firm belief in the miraculous” (“The Knight’s Tale” 464).

87

The ultimate source of the prioress’ invocation was, of course, the events surrounding the death of Hugh of Lincoln in 1255, for which nineteen Jews were executed by King Henry III. Those events inspired two quite different literary and popular traditions. In the first place, the alleged ritual murder was described in three contemporary chronicles and an Anglo-Norman ballad, and Hugh’s shrine at Lincoln and these writings preserved the memory of his fate for centuries. The event did not seem distant to Chaucer some 135 years later. (“The Knight’s Tale” 460)

The Hugh of Lincoln legend, as Langmuir shows, had dire sociocultural repercussions for England’s Jews. It was the first time in English history that an allegation of Jewish ritual murder saw direct intercession by the monarch. “What distinguished the Lincoln affair from other accusations of ritual murder,” Langmuir writes, “was that the king took personal cognizance and had one Jew executed immediately and eighteen others spectacularly executed later” (“The Knight’s Tale” 477). The cultural resonance of the event contributed to a rising Christian paranoia regarding the presence of Jews and was probably still fresh in the minds of the ruling authorities only 35 years later when the

Jews were expelled from England in 1290 (Cannon 533).12

The Hugh of Lincoln Case

The story of the Hugh of Lincoln case is marked by a tragic confluence of people and events: a Christian child’s accidental drowning; a large gathering of Jews from all over England who had congregated in Lincoln to attend a wedding between two important families; an influential advisor to Henry III, John de Lexington, whose brother,

Henry, was the bishop of Lincoln’s cathedral; Bishop Henry and his subordinates’ desire to have a new saint for their cathedral; a monarch on progress through Lincoln; and finally—the key ingredient in any ritual murder fantasy—a generous seasoning of

12 See also Langmuir, who writes that the Hugh of Lincoln case “powerfully affected those predisposed to think evil of Jews then and for centuries to come” (“The Knight’s Tale” 481).

88

suspicion, innuendo, rumor, and outright fabrication (Langmuir, “The Knight’s Tale” 461,

468, 469, 477). John de Lexington, who personally obtained the initial confession of murder from a Jew named Copin through interrogation conducted “in diverse ways,” managed to get Copin’s confession to match up with the macabre details of ritual murder that the authorities had already concocted—including the accusation that the assembled Jews in Lincoln were present not for a wedding but specifically for the ceremonial starvation, torture, and dismemberment of a Christian child. The story gained traction despite the fact that Hugh’s body had been in a well for a month and was in such an advanced state of decomposition that the Jews who had just arrived in town could not possibly have killed him. Langmuir underscores the obvious temporal gap and willful cognitive dissonance between Hugh’s death and the arrival in Lincoln of the Jewish wedding contingent when he writes: “However embryonic medieval forensic medicine may have been, men should have been able to distinguish readily between a month old and a two-day old corpse, had they wanted to” (“The Knight’s Tale” 468).

Copin, therefore, essentially “‘confessed’ to a Christian fantasy”; and, with his written confession in John de Lexington’s hands, “the fame of Lincoln’s new saint was assured”

(Langmuir, “The Knight’s Tale” 478).

John de Lexington presented Copin’s confession to Henry III, who promptly ordered that Copin be hanged. The other eighteen Jews held on suspicion of culpability in the ritual murder were hanged in London on 22 November 1255, but the reason for their being sentenced to death is perhaps the most intriguing detail of the case:

Langmuir notes that they “refused to submit to the verdict of a jury to be composed only of Christians” (“The Knight’s Tale” 478). According to Langmuir, “a London chronicle

89

which pays no attention to the events at Lincoln gives a brief but vivid description of the execution—which must have strikingly spread Hugh’s fame,” as well as intensified

Jewish notoriety and pariah status all across England (“The Knight’s Tale” 478).

Kiddush ha-Shem and PRT

The eighteen Jews hanged by order of Henry III may have chosen death as their only way of refusing to submit to a Christian jury. If this is the case, and the evidence seems to indicate that it was, then their choice may in fact have been an historical instance of kiddush ha-Shem, the term

denoting the highest positive and negative standards of Jewish ethics, the one indicating that everything within man’s power should be done to glorify the name of God before the world, the other that everything should be avoided which may reflect discredit upon the religion of Israel and thereby desecrate the name of God. (Kohler n.p.)

While kiddush ha-Shem does not ordinarily encompass death by choice, Kaufmann

Kohler writes that “when the transgression is demanded as a public demonstration of apostasy or faithlessness the rule is that death should be preferred for the sake of the sanctification of God’s name.” Kiddush ha-Shem, under these conditions, is known by another name: Jewish martyrdom.

We must now revisit the accu(r)sed Jews of Chaucer’s tale and discover their fate in order to register its close correspondence with that of the Jews inexorably and unjustly drawn into the Hugh of Lincoln affair:

With torment and with shameful deeth echon, This provost dooth thise Jewes for to sterve That of this mordre wiste, and that anon. He nolde no swich cursednesse observe. “Yvele shal have that yvele wol deserve”: Therfore with wilde hors he dide hem drawe, And after that he heng hem by the lawe. (ll. 628–34)

90

The Prioress’s triumphant report that the provost passes a sentence of torture and death upon the Jews who know of the clergeon’s murder bears the curious echo of the innocent Jews hanged by order of Henry III in the Hugh of Lincoln case, and all the more so because the Prioress herself references that case in her final stanza. The innocent Jews of PRT can be connected to the practice of kiddush ha-Shem, or Jewish martyrdom, in that our knowledge that they committed murder comes only by way of the tainted testimony of the Prioress herself, much the same way that the Jews in the Hugh of Lincoln case were damned by the confession coerced from Copin by John de

Lexington, whom we now know to have been driven by ulterior motives. We might consider what Richard Rex has to say on the matter:

It is clear that Chaucer adopted a literary convention in order to heighten the sense of horror in the punishment inflicted upon the Jews. And the irony is inescapable: the Prioress condemns the “satanic” Jews to a vengeance as exaggerated as the evil being redressed—this in the name of the Virgin, whose aid she invokes in telling her tale and as an agent of justice. … But the supreme irony in this tale concerns the fact that equine quartering was a death traditionally associated with martyrdom, as frequently depicted in medieval art. One late fourteenth-century English contemplative work specifically refers to quartering as the death of martyrs. Thus, if Chaucer’s “drawn” means “pulled apart,” the Jews in this tale may be said to suffer a martyr’s death. (52)

So we can now see that the endings of the earlier Latin analogues of PRT—the schoolboy returned to life, the joyful conversions of Jews enraptured by the power of the

Virgin, their founding of churches, etc.—are not happy endings at all. Rather, they are debasements of the story’s Jews, for as the innocent Jews of Lincoln teach us, death is preferable to conversion or prostration under Torah law. And so, in Chaucer’s tale, the little clergeon has to ascend to heaven a martyr; he cannot be restored to life, because

91

the Jews must have their martyrdom as well. With martyrdom, naturally, comes mourning, and this is the work of PRT.

The Work of Mourning

I do not, however, intend this chapter to be a prescription for mourning or an injunction to mourn; such a prescription or injunction would be at odds with the theoretical goals of both Calabrese and LaCapra, goals with which I find myself very much in accord. Rather, I wish to underscore the way in which Chaucer, through the vehicle of PRT, recognizes the necessity (that is, on a humanistic level) of mourning as a way to acknowledge and come to terms with the death not merely of the Christian child, but of the Jewish martyrs as well, and the latter all the more tragically because their deaths are no accident.13 The Jews of Lincoln—compromised by a conspiracy of false accusation, political wrangling, and the broken ethics of men committed to bolstering pilgrim traffic to their town’s cathedral in order to improve their own station— become martyrs specifically because, mired in that untenable compromise, they make the only choice they can under the rigorous doctrine of the faith to which they hold. They choose kiddush ha-Shem: death before debasement, the rope before the cross.

We ought to consider the possibility that Chaucer embeds a reference to the

Lincoln affair in his tale of Madame Eglantine in order to hint at the propriety of mourning the death of the human, not merely the Christian or the Jew. His portrayal of

13 For all his admirable historiographic detail of the intrigue surrounding the Hugh of Lincoln case, Langmuir, perhaps unaware of the stark differences between the end of PRT and its Latin analogues in the Marian miracle-tale genre, fails to consider this possibility, coming instead to a rather pat conclusion: “Geoffrey Chaucer, after letting the legend of the singing boy slip from the prioress’ lips, would inevitably be reminded of England’s most famous proof of Jewish evil and conclude with an invocation of young Hugh—whose alleged fate neither he nor his audience were likely to question” (“The Knight’s Tale” 482). Such are the pitfalls of reading fictional narrative as historical commentary; while the former may be of some value to and in concert with the latter, they should never be treated as one and the same. See LaCapra—in response to Hayden White—on the potential for fictional narrative to involve “truth claims … which may be difficult to arrive at through restricted documentary methods” (13).

92

the Prioress, I would argue, is intended to ridicule those who share her literally and figuratively cloistered outlook. Trapped in the bubble of their provincial prejudice, ignorance, and unworldliness, they fail to understand or even willfully see that any death of any human is, at the level of humanity and of life itself, a loss to be mourned. Such a humanistic recognition might be of some help in reconciling the eternal contretemps of critics pledged to polarized readings of PRT and indeed of Chaucer the man as well as

Chaucer the author.

For those Chaucerians who remain unconvinced, I would offer one more piece of corroborating testimony from Chaucer biographer Derek Pearsall, who reminds us that

Chaucer, amid all the moving and pathetic circumstance of these tales[,] … remains aloof and uncommitted. This indeed is the whole point of The Canterbury Tales. … Hence the unease that most readers feel about Chaucer’s religious tales, interesting and enjoyable as that unease may be. One suspects, in a word, his sincerity. There always seems to be a space left for scepticism, for a superior otherness of viewpoint which will see pathos as sentimentality and religion as religiosity. (266–67)

We need to respect the space for skepticism that Pearsall opens here within Chaucer’s religious canon, whether we read those tales in ways hard or soft, whether we envision our own personal Chaucer as the laughing satirist or the Christian lay theologian. To do otherwise is to close off a potentially fruitful avenue of reading—in other words, to kill it, to martyr it to our own particular brand of ideological criticism—and to do so would be cause for us all, as critics of literature, to mourn indeed.

93

CHAPTER 4 THE CORPSE OF LAW AND THE CORPUS OF TRADITION: CHIVALRY, LITERARY NATIONALISM, AND SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT’S THEMATICS OF REVENANCY

The monstrous body is pure culture. A construct and a projection, the monster exists only to be read: the monstrum is etymologically “that which reveals,” “that which warns,” a glyph that seeks a hierophant. Like a letter on the page, the monster signifies something other than itself: it is always a displacement, always inhabits the gap between the time of upheaval that created it and the moment into which it is received, to be born again.

—Jeffrey Jerome Cohen “Monster Culture: Seven Theses”

Caxton and the “Use” of Chivalry

In the late fifteenth century, sometime between 1474 and 1480, the prolific

London translator and printer William Caxton produced his own translation of what had by then become an influential text—indeed, the standard of the time—on chivalry and its vicissitudes, Ramón Lull’s treatise Le Libre del orde de cauayleria, or “The Book of the

Order of Chivalry.” Lull’s Libre, probably composed during his decade in residence at the College of the Holy Trinity at Miramar in Majorca (1276–86), reflects back on its author’s former life as a knight and courtier of James II of Aragon.1 It is, in essence, a comprehensive guide to how one individual ought to go about the business of being a good knight. It is also a sociological, theological, and philosophical exploration of why knights are necessary for the maintenance of the contemporary social stratification upon which European chivalry depended, was based, and was charged to uphold.

Caxton’s postscript to his translation of Lull’s Libre illustrates why the Englishman felt it important to translate this immensely popular late thirteenth century work—there

1 The relevant dates and biographical information on Lull here are culled from Alfred T. P. Byles's Introduction to his Early English Text Society edition of Caxton's translation of the Libre, specifically pp. xii and xxiii-iv.

94

are extant versions in Catalan, French, and Scots in addition to Caxton’s English, and evidence that points to the existence of a Latin version—for the edification of his contemporaries some two hundred years later.2 He notes that Lull’s Libre “is not requysyte to euery comyn man to haue / but to noble gentylmen that by their vertu entende to come & entre in to the noble ordre of chyualry,” an order which “in these late dayes hath ben vsed accordyng to this booke here to fore wreton but forgeten / and thexersytees of chyualry / not vsed / honoured / ne excercysed / as hit hath ben in auncyent tyme / at whiche tyme the noble actes of the knyghtes of Englond that vsed chyualry were renomed thurgh the vnyuersal world …” (MS p. 77b; Byles 121). Who, one might ask, are these fabled, ancient knights of England? To what historical, martial examples does Caxton hold up their contemporary descendants, who so fail to use and exercise chivalry in the time-honored fashions of old? Caxton goes on to reveal them:

“[B]yhold that noble kyng of Brytayne kyng Arthur with al the noble knyʒtes of the roūd table / whos noble actes & noble chyualry of his knyghtes / occupye so many large volumes ...” (MS p. 78; Byles 122). Caxton, then, would hold contemporary English knighthood to the seemingly untenable standard set by figures that are nothing short of legendary.

2 Certainly, Caxton's translation was motivated in part by the pay he would have been due to receive from the “gentyl and noble esquyer” (MS p. 77b; Byles 121) who he claims commissioned it. (Worth noting here is the doubt that one of Caxton's biographers casts on the existence of the “esquyer”; see N. F. Blake, William Caxton and English Literary Culture 177.) Even so, as Blake points out, printing under patronage was a widespread practice in the fifteenth century that lent a patina of distinction to the work (thereby helping to sell it); that a given book happened to have been printed under patronage should be considered a black mark against neither the printer nor the material (Caxton and His World 64). Furthermore, Caxton's assertions in his postscript to his translation of Lull regarding chivalry's general ill health bear up that he found the work to be nothing less than essential reading for English knighthood and nobility.

95

As the passage from his postscript continues, Caxton subjects England’s contemporary knights to a stern thrashing before offering a few more examples from the pages of romance that he advises them to emulate:

O ye knyghtes of Englond where is the custome and vsage of noble chyualry that was vsed in tho dayes / what do ye now / but go to the baynes & playe att dyse / And some not wel aduysed vse not honest and good rule ageyn alle ordre of knyghthode / leue this / leue it and rede the noble volumes of saynt graal of lancelot / of galaad / of Trystram / of perse forest / of percyual / of gawayn / & many mo / Ther shalle ye see manhode / curtosye & gentylnesse ... . (MS p. 78; Byles 122)

Among the Grail cycles, the profligates who loll away their days in bathhouses and dicing halls will find the exempla of true knightly behavior—of manhood, courtesy, and gentleness—they require in order to reform and become worthy of the title they hold.

Make yourselves like those men of legend, Caxton urges: be like Lancelot, Galahad,

Tristan, Perce’forest, and Percival. Last in that calling of the legendary roll, perhaps because he was and had long been the personification of English chivalric ethos par excellence, Caxton implores his own time’s diminished examples of knighthood to be like Gawain.

Caxton goes on to include such historical notables in his list of exemplary chivalric figures as Richard the Lionheart, Edwards I and III, Henry V, and a variety of well-known knights such as Sir Robert Knolles, Sir John Hawkwood, and others (MS p.

78; Byles 122–3). But the figures from romance, Arthur’s mates at the Table Round, are given pride of place. They are the ones upon whom Caxton would heap the burden of perfection, serving as the benchmarks by which those who “used, honored, and exercised” that most doctrinally inflexible of medieval cultural and moral codes would be judged. Of those paragons of perfection, Gawain is arguably the most perfect—at least in the hearts and minds of the English audience.

96

It is ironic, then, that the writer of what would become the single most prominent

Arthurian narrative of the fourteenth century3 envisions a Gawain who is decidedly less than perfect. While no evidence exists to support a claim that Caxton had read or was aware of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, there is, conversely, no proof that he had not encountered the poem.4 He seemed, by his own admission in the postscript to his translation of Lull’s Libre, to have been something of an aficionado of Arthurian narrative—and this is not even to take into account his engagement with Malory’s Morte

Darthur—so it is easy to envision a William Caxton at least passing familiar with Arthur’s nephew’s misadventures at Hautdesert and the Green Chapel. Let us suppose for a moment that Caxton had read SGGK. What would he have thought of it? Would the poet’s Gawain have squared with the Gawain that Caxton apparently knew—or thought he did?

Reading the Revenant in SGGK

In the chapter to follow, I want to read SGGK with an idea in mind that might seem initially to be rather strange: that we can read revenancy into the poem—or perhaps even more transgressive, we may be able to tease a latent revenancy out of it.

Which is to say: what if the real “monster” of SGGK is not the Green Knight at all? What if the monster the poem sets up for its hero to knock down is, in fact, the very idea of chivalry? Gawain, the synecdoche for English chivalry at large, is the representative

3 Charles Moorman writes that “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is in the manner of Chrétien and is the last great flowering of that tradition” (60); the poem, Laura Hibbard Loomis rhapsodizes, “moves over an almost flawless structure as smoothly as supple skin over the bones of the hand. With the exception of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, no other Middle English romance approaches its artistic and spiritual maturity, its brilliant realism, its dramatic vigor, its poetic sensitivity to nuances of word and mood, its humor, its nobility of spirit” (3).

4 That is, so long as one does not consider the proof to be that no printing of SGGK bearing Caxton’s stamp exists.

97

focal point of a poem that seems intent on exposing the structural weaknesses of the code to which he ostensibly adheres. What if, then, the immediate embodiment of a monstrous chivalry within the poem is the man who both seeks to structure his life according to its impossible dictates and simultaneously, through his all-too-human impulses and drives, dooms it to fail—none other than Gawain himself? The question I wish to explore in this chapter is: Can we read Gawain, and by extension the hollow edifice of late-medieval chivalry that is the encompassing, constraining whole to his part, as a revenant, an embodied dead thing that somehow, against all the laws of nature, defies eternity and goes on living? I believe that we can, by conceptualizing the revenant as a point of textual, traditional, and generic instability, the pivot of a received narrative that reveals the narrative’s untenability—which is its generative matrix as well.

It will not be too difficult to conceptualize and recognize a revenant Gawain in

SGGK once we understand a few things about the Gawain of the poem and the profession of arms in the later Middle Ages. But first, it is crucial to understand why the revenant is a paradoxically vital figure for a reading that seeks to dig into what the author of SGGK may have been signaling about the problem of chivalry. The revenant—like the generalized monster, of which the embodied living-dead is an ontological and categorical subset—figures a boundary line between what we know and cannot know.5 Unlike the monster writ large, though, the body of the revenant does not

5 As Jeffery Jerome Cohen writes: “A product of a multitude of morphogeneses (ranging from somatic to ethnic) that align themselves to imbue meaning to the Us and Them behind every cultural mode of seeing, the monster of abjection resides in that marginal geography of the Exterior, beyond the limits of the Thinkable, a place that is doubly dangerous: simultaneously ‘exorbitant’ and ‘quite close.’ Judith Butler calls this conceptual locus ‘a domain of unlivability and unintelligibility that bounds the domain of intelligible effects,’ but points out that even when discursively closed off, it offers a base for critique, a margin from which to read dominant paradigms. Like Grendel thundering from the mere or Dracula creeping from the grave, like Kristeva’s ‘boomerang, a vortex of summons’ or the uncanny Freudian- Lacanian return of the repressed, the monster is always coming back, always at the verge of irruption”

98

engender in us the signal anxiety of the outsized, or the deformed, or the alien body.

The revenant’s body, by contrast, is unsettlingly familiar. Like the exquisitely sculpted decomposition of a transi-tomb effigy, the revenant is a memento mori, an insistent reminder that we are merely flesh, destined to someday fail and fester. However, the living-dead body, whether motile or conversant or both of these hallmarks of the simply living body, is something else besides: it is out of its right place. In escaping the eternal home of the grave and presenting itself to the living, the revenant becomes the uncanny—a thing that perturbs us so because it is us, and though we can recognize ourselves in it, we cannot recognize it—that both cements us in and distances us from ourselves simultaneously.

The Resurgence of Chivalry in Fourteenth-Century England

The people of fourteenth-century England were, by and large, rather susceptible to anxieties about bodies—both literal and figurative—out of place. Many have commented on the great upheavals of that hundred-year span; A. R. Bridbury writes, for example, that “the century witnessed, in the unprecedented famines and epidemics that marked its course, an assault on the social system at its base which was infinitely deadlier than any which it had sustained at its apex by way of military loss or political subversion” (577). Outbreaks of the plague decimated the population, much of it the serf

(20). In an intriguing conjunction of geographical and conceptual loci between the boundary figure of the monster/revenant and the figure of Gawain, Margaret Robson points out that in many of the anonymous Arthurian romances (including SGGK), Gawain figures and represents the marginalized border regions in counterpoint to Arthur’s central position in both the “linear narrative” of Arthurian chronicle and romance as well as his geographic provenance: “Sir Gawain is a northerner; his father is Lot of Orkney, and Gawain is consistently associated with the border regions of Scotland, Galloway and Dumfries, or with the area that reaches from Carlisle down through Lancashire and Cheshire to the Wirral and North Wales ... . And Gawain is presented, most notably in John Boorman’s film Excalibur, as a type of hairy Celtic side- kick (played by Liam Neeson) to Arthur’s southern, civilized self, at home in Camelot and Winchester and London. What is most important about these narratives, though, is that Gawain belongs to these marginal areas and texts while Arthur does not” (86, my emphasis).

99

class whose toil on the estates of the nobility ensured the latter’s lives of ease and prosperity, resulting in a mercurial rise in the demand for and price of land labor and, in some cases, the collapse of demesne-farming families who found themselves suddenly either terminally short of landbound peasantry or unable to afford to have their fields tilled and tended. The Crown pursued war against France; border strife flared with

Scotland, Ireland, and Wales; and at home, the populace dealt with the internal roil of rebellion, monarchical deposition, and regicide. The England of the fourteenth century saw what could be characterized as some of the most drastic and rapid reconfigurations of the social body in the history of the nation.6

Among these tumultuous changes was a destabilization in the class structure as those laborers who had survived the onslaught of the plague, formerly tied to estates by barely subsistence-level land allotments and wages, found themselves in a new and strange position of power, able to break their social and economic bonds and seek out employment in the pay of the highest bidder. Conversely, and either paradoxically or completely sensibly, depending on how one reads the tenor of the nation as a whole, chivalry—which, of course, had never truly gone away—was experiencing a resurgence. Or at least, that is, the allure of the idea of chivalry, if not its rigidly codified practice, began to fire the imaginations of English society’s upper echelons more intensely. As Arthurian narratives came back into vogue in the courts—although they, like the idea of chivalry itself, cannot truly be said to have faded into obscurity—chivalric societies began to spring up amidst the disorder of a rapidly changing social body (not to mention the decomposition of rapidly moldering, deceased human bodies) made up

6 For a concise overview of the “violent contrasts” that characterized the fourteenth century in England, see Bridbury (577).

100

of the noveau riche and newly destitute almost in equal measure. The Most Noble Order of the Garter, founded by Edward III at some point in time around his claim to the

French throne (the usual shorthand date given is 1348,7 although the Complete

Peerage lists the date of its institution as 23 April 13448), is but the most prominent of these; lesser orders bloomed, like flowers in the charnel-yard of a parish church, in impressive numbers. Could it be the case that the founding of many such chivalric orders constituted an overdetermined reaction formation on the part of the ruling class to the accelerating change in the socio-cultural conditions of the mid-to-late fourteenth century in England?

Marie Borroff, in her introduction to her translation of SGGK, that crowning achievement of the anonymous writer whose works also include Cleanness, Patience,

Pearl, and perhaps Saint Erkenwald9, points out that “the poem is a product of the late fourteenth century in England, at a time when the relationship of devoted loyalty between a knight and a single lord was becoming somewhat old-fashioned, slowly giving way to rootless military professionalism” (3). This is certainly true; the change in relationship between lord and knight can be accounted for to some degree by what I

7 See, for example, the official website of the British Monarchy. It may or may not be a coincidence that the official founding year of the Order of the Garter was the same year that the Black Death crossed the Channel from Europe and landed on English shores (Platt 1).

8 See Cokayne, Complete Peerage (1:276).

9 While SGGK, Cleanness, Patience, and Pearl are all found in the same manuscript, MS Cotton Nero A.x, Art. 3, Saint Erkenwald appears in British Library Ms. Harley 2250. Casey Finch points out that while we cannot “say conclusively that the same individual is responsible for all five poems” and that assertions of the five works’ common authorship have long been disputed, “it is now the prevailing opinion that all five poems were written by the same person” (2). See Finch (1–11) for an overview of the debate regarding the poems’ common authorship and for a summary of their shared characteristics. It is worth noting that Saint Erkenwald is an exemplum concerning a corpse that is revived by the prayers of the titular saint in order to tell the story of its life as a just and impartial judge prior to the coming of Christ, and which is then granted salvation, the saint’s tears dissolving the body to dust. In other words, it would seem that the Gawain-poet (perhaps) writes at least one poem in which appears an explicit example of a revenant.

101

have already noted regarding the rapid social change brought on by the major outbreaks of plague in England in 1348 and 1361, as well as the many intermittent flare- ups of the disease and its aftermath throughout the remainder of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries (Platt 1). (Chaucer’s Knight, of course, is one such rootless military professional.) Borroff writes that its meaning “consists in its affirmation of an old ideal threatened by change” (4). The “old ideal” to which she refers is chivalry; and so, for Borroff, the Gawain-poet is as committed to affirming the value of chivalry in the face of shifting social conditions, conditions in the midst of which he no doubt lived and to which he almost certainly bore witness, as his fellow versifiers in the anonymous,

Arthurian romance tradition.

I do not share Borroff’s view regarding the Gawain-poet’s “affirmation” of the old ideal of chivalry.10 Rather, I will contend, through a strategy of reading revenancy into and/or extracting a latent revenancy from the text of SGGK—arguing that the figure of

Sir Gawain in the poem is, throughout much of it, a walking dead man—that the

Gawain-poet does not seek to shore up the obsolete cultural construct of chivalry.

Neither does he seek to tear it down, but to show for the careful reader of the poem how and why chivalry cannot sustain its own immense weight. In this respect, the Gawain- poet’s project might be conceptualized as a kind of Derridean thread-pulling exercise, a deconstructionist’s treatment of chivalry some 600 years prior to the advent of French critical theory. The Gawain-poet, in the midst of universally trying times, is perhaps able

10 Suzanne Fleischman points to a “critical revolution” in which “scholars of courtly literature by now take as a given the notion that medieval writers often departed from straightforward and idealized presentation of chivalry”; to said revolution in critical understanding, she notes, “we owe a number of reassessments of texts traditionally viewed as glorifications of courtliness and chivalry ...” (101).

102

to recognize what many of his peers cannot: that chivalric codes of conduct run counter to the very instincts that make those who endeavor to adhere to them human.

An Untenable “Technique of Living”

Chivalry might be thought of as a “technique of living,” to borrow the term that

Freud uses to describe the psychoanalytic subject’s construction of neuroses as a reaction to the intense exterior and interior pressures of life (SE 21:35). Chivalry is not, however, a tenable technique of living, because of the impossible demand to be infallible made of fallible (because human) knights that represents the conditions of its own possibility. I will attempt to establish and undergird through readings of key moments in the poem that the Gawain-poet understands this and would communicate it at some level of the text of SGGK. In the late fourteenth century in England, chivalry is functionally dead—and yet it is born again, risen from the grave in the form of chivalric orders, the most illustrious of which is conceived in the very year in which the plague comes to England. And while chivalry as conceptualized and practiced in the space of

Arthurian narrative is no sustainable “technique for living,” one might argue that the late- medieval phenomenon of chivalry’s revenant return in the form of the chivalric order is just such a thing. The order offers the comfort of ritual and communion to its inductees,

“substitutive satisfactions” as opposed to real; “the man who sees his pursuit of happiness come to nothing in later years,” Freud writes, “can still find consolation in the yield of pleasure of chronic intoxication” (SE 21:35–36). The chivalric order, at least in the context of the late fourteenth-century English social body, can be conceptualized as a mass neurosis of the aristocratic collective unconscious, a “(mal)adaptive strategy of a fantasy of or presentation of self by which is narrativized the expression of desire in a

103

way that covers over truths difficult to confront directly: [in other words,] a way of denying certain of the conditions of desire.”11

At the root of the chivalric order is the system of chivalry itself. While it was arguably the dominant value system of the Middle Ages in Europe for half a millennium—and this is only arguable due to the degree with which it finds itself inextricably intertwined with that other dominant cultural and imaginative system,

Christianity—chivalry, as it turns out, is a conceptually evasive term, the meaning of which is near-protean in its propensity to shift and evolve, as Maurice Keen here explains:

It is a word that was used in the middle ages with different meanings and shades of meaning by different writers and in different contexts. Sometimes, especially in early texts, it means no more than a body of heavily armed horsemen, a collective of chevaliers. Sometimes chivalry is spoken of as an order, as if knighthood ought to be compared to an order of religion: sometimes it is spoken of as an estate, a social class—the warrior class whose martial function, according to medieval writers, was to defend the patria and the Church. Sometimes it is used to encapsulate a code of values apposite to this order or estate. Chivalry cannot be divorced from the martial world of the mounted warrior: it cannot be divorced from aristocracy, because knights commonly were men of high lineage: and from the middle of the twelfth century on it very frequently carries ethical or religious overtones. But it remains a word elusive of definition, tonal rather than precise in its implications. (2)

If the multiplicity of signification of the central idea to which he and his brethren give form and shape like cells in a body is disorienting, then behold the man: for the knight, unlike chivalry, is not too conceptually complicated. Keen draws his outline and fills it:

“One can define within reasonably close limits what is meant by the word knight, the

French chevalier: it denotes a man of aristocratic standing and probably of noble ancestry, who is capable, if called upon, of equipping himself with a war horse and the

11 Terry Harpold, email to author, 21 June 2012.

104

arms of a heavy cavalryman, and who has been through certain rituals that make him what he is—who has been ‘dubbed’ to knighthood” (1–2). The knight is the long arm of the noble, of the monarch, of the Church, of God. At its most basically defined level, his raison d’être is twofold: he must either kill or die when called upon to do so or when a specific event requires it.

Chivalry’s “Revenant Logic”

We are probably familiar, and strangely comfortable, with the former of the two professional demands of knighthood. We know that the knight, after all, is a mounted soldier, trained in the lethal use of lance, sword, and shield. His tools are instruments of pain and death, and he becomes skilled at wielding them through a long training period during which he serves as squire to a senior knight, then, following his own dubbing and elevation to knighthood, continually practices with them both in warfare and during the organized, controlled violence of the tournament. But what of the latter demand: that the knight is required to die? Certainly, Western knights did not quite raise this requirement to the heights of ritual and art that their medieval counterparts in the East, the Japanese samurai, did, with their code of bushido and its ironclad prohibition against defeat or shame of any kind, in the face of which the luckless warrior could only either become a monk or commit seppuku—suicide by disembowelment. But the European male’s entry into the confraternity of knighthood was marked off by a ritual intensity of its own, as

Keen points out above, and that ritual—the dubbing ceremony—was designed to highlight that the new knight’s former life was over. Upon entering knighthood, a man died—and was born again. To claim this aspect of the dubbing ritual is no hyperbole.

Jean Claude-Schmitt writes: “The ritual of entering into knighthood was a rite of passage, thus a sort of symbolic death through which the young man ‘died’ in his first

105

‘state’ to be ‘reborn’ into the order of knighthood under the direction of his elders and the invocation of the lineal ancestors” (176).

At the macro-level of socio-cultural currency, however, the “dying to the world” undergone by the squire and his return to it, so to speak, as a newly-dubbed knight are not particularly surprising. In the overwhelmingly Christian culture of the later Middle

Ages in Europe, if all knights are in a way revenants—having died and returned to life— then they are doubly so; for they have, as Christians, already pledged to eschew the worldly in favor of the eternal. Is there a religion that, in some of its core narratives of origin and holy power, makes more use of the condition and structure of revenancy than

Christianity? Christ tells Martha, the sister of Lazarus, “I am the resurrection and the life: he that believeth in me, although he be dead, shall live,” before calling forth the dead man from his sepulcher, still shrouded in his burial wrappings (John 11:25, 44, Douay-

Rheims). Christ himself, of course, dies on the cross, lies in his tomb for three days, and then returns—an event that the Pharisees foresee, warning Pilate to set a guard over the tomb “lest perhaps his disciples come and steal him away, and say to the people: he is risen from the dead” (Matt. 27:64). In his exhortation to the body of the faithful on the necessity of avoiding earthly sin, Paul writes of Christ that “we are buried together with him by baptism into death; that as Christ is risen from the dead by the glory of the father, so also may we walk in newness of life” (Rom. 6:4). Finally, the Apocalypse of

Saint John depicts a vast field of the risen dead, come again from the grave, the sea, from hell, and explicitly from death itself, to have their souls weighed and judged (Rev.

20:12–13).

106

I intend the scriptural examples given here to underscore that the notion that a human being can die and come back from the grave was foundational to the worldview of medieval Christian culture. It is this biblical certainty in the possibility of not only eternal, but crucially, earthly, life after death that undergirds what Kate Koppelman has termed the “revenant logic” of the Middle Ages: an ingrained belief in the inevitability of death and the real potentiality of return; that the dead are capable of making their way back to the land of the living possessed of their bodies, if not their souls.12 And if one objects that the “death” of the Christian and of the knight are, in the main, only symbolic—hence the quotation marks with which Schmitt brackets his key terms when discussing the death and rebirth of the knight during the dubbing ceremony—then it is perhaps instructive to recall Dale Randall’s description of the Middle Ages as the

“golden age of symbolism” (479), and to remember that in an era reliant on symbolic value, as Johan Huizinga points out, “the tendency to symbolize and to personify was so spontaneous that nearly every thought, of itself, took a figurative shape” (190, quoted in Randall 479n1). In such a time, the symbol is the rule, not the exception, and the culture’s reliance on the symbolic to illustrate, clarify, and reify effects a powerful transmutation of the symbol that allows it to cross an epistemological boundary into the realm of the real. In fact, the symbol in such a culture effectively is more actual than is reality itself. So it is that we can assert that the squire dubbed a knight does not “die” only to be “reborn”; he dies, only to return immediately as a knight.

12 Koppelman, “The Revenant Logic of the Middle Ages,” at the 44th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, 8 May 2009.

107

The Green Knight’s Arrival

To die, eventually to live again: only one knight in Arthur’s hall—other than Arthur himself—recks enough, and is reckless enough, to bet those odds (intentionally or no) when the massive, ill-tempered green stranger interrupts the merry idyll of Camelot, halting the court’s Yuletide games and feasts so that their king may bear witness to the feat he so desires before he will consent to enjoy his supper. But to digress for just a moment: the overdetermined intensity of the court’s celebration of the holiday—the hermetic interiority of their preoccupation with the lavishness of the board, the barely- checked violence and hedonism of the tourneys and dances, as their entire world scales itself to Camelot—ought to signal something amiss here. As John M. Ganim writes,

“The nature of holidays is such that the necessities of everyday life—food, clothing, meeting, and talking—become heightened and ritualized into feasts, costumes, parties, and speeches, and hence assume an importance that exceeds their function. What is dismaying about the society portrayed here is that it seems to live every day as a holiday” (379).13

Arthur’s young court has (at least in the poem’s early portrayal of its monotonous holiday revelry) distilled its guiding ethos, chivalry itself, into a tincture that is toxic by nature of its incessant, cloying richness and sweetness. The poet writes of the court’s

“rych reuel oryʒt and rechles merþes, / ... / With all þe wele of þe worlde þay woned þer samen” (rich revel aright and wild mirth ... with all the pleasures of the world they while

13 See also Gregory J. Wilkin, who writes that “the poet presents this picture of a somewhat dangerously ‘childgered’ court and does nothing to alter it. As far as we know, they are always like this. Joy is, of course, expected at Christmas, but it must be to a degree circumspect and based on proven worthiness” (115).

108

away their days).14 A surfeit of pleasure leads to corruption, and it seems as though

Camelot has, in this particular Yuletide season, become Xanadu. If there is transgression to be found here, however, it is simply, as I imply above, that of a withdrawal of the court from the goings-on of the world outside the gates of Camelot—a sealing-off and sealing-in that primes the scene for the arrival of the foreign body who breaches the court’s barrier between itself and the lands that Arthur ostensibly rules and administers.

When the Green Knight suddenly arrives, blowing through the doorway of the hall—one imagines, on a gust of bitter winter wind—he does so ironically as a sobering reminder of the realness of the world outside of Camelot’s privileged inner sanctum: a brisk shock to a courtly body drunk on revelry that one has reason to suspect (as

Ganim’s and Wilkin’s comments make clear) is only nominally of the season. Behind the immediately obvious fact of his and his mount’s near total greenness—the word “grene” repeats no less than twelve times in the 70 lines (ll. 150–220) devoted to his initial description—other, more subtle aspects of the Green Knight’s appearance invite the careful scrutiny and consideration of both the court to which he presents himself and of the poem’s audience. Chief among these is the fact that, while he enters carrying an intimidating ax, he is not otherwise rigged out for war; both the speaker of the poem and the Green Knight himself underscore his lack of helm, hauberk, plate, spear, shield, or other accoutrements of battle (ll. 203–05, 267–71). (As the Green Knight states rather matter-of-factly, “Bot for I wolde no were, my wedez ar softer” [Because I do not come

14 T. McAlindon points out that rechles might be read as both “carefree and reckless” (134). The quotation in Middle English here is from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, eds. J. R. R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon (ll. 40, 50). Subsequent references to this edition of the poem will appear parenthetically within the text. The translation here and elsewhere is my own unless otherwise noted.

109

seeking a fight, my garments are softer; l. 271].) The gargantuan, boisterous, and threatening—because alien, otherworldly—presence of the Green Knight ought to be somewhat softened in the eyes of the court by not only this detail, but also by his bearing (in the hand that does not carry the ax) a sprig of holly, a symbol that the Green

Knight claims represents his friendly intentions (ll. 265–66). In fact, the poet mentions the presence of the holly at line 206, prior to noting that of the ax in the following line; but it is understandable that the latter’s menace, its promise of bodily mayhem, might eclipse the former’s suggestion of peace.

Perhaps the court at large (and their representative member, Gawain) mistake the Green Knight’s brusque manner for disguised or restrained hostility, for he is not a polite guest. He challenges the bravery, manliness, esprit de corps, and knightly élan of

Arthur and his assembled warriors at several points in his address to the court (ll. 272,

280, 282, 309–315). Arthur and his knights, as the poet points out, are justly infuriated by the Green Knight’s mocking dismissal of the Round Table’s claim on their outsized reputation once it has become clear that his challenge to play a stroke-for-stroke round of the Beheading Game will not be answered immediately (ll. 318–20). Because the king is the final arbiter of all affronts to his court’s honor and his own, Arthur does what he both must and must never do—such is the nature of chivalry’s impossible double- bind, of the untenable demands it makes upon its adherents—when he puts himself forward in mortal danger by calling for the stranger to hand over his ax: the king accepts the challenge to play the deadly game (l. 326).

Gawain’s Speech

The knights of the court must recognize almost immediately that this development cannot stand. Arthur should not have been permitted by his retainers to be

110

bracketed into a position where the honor of the collective body over which he presides rests solely on his action, given that, despite its characterization as a “gomen” (game; l.

273) by the Green Knight, this action carries an obvious and ample risk.15 Yet none of the assembled body—a body that the poet describes as “stouned” (stunned, astonished; l. 242) and enfolded in a “swoghe sylence” (a silence [like a] swoon; l. 243) when they are first addressed by the Green Knight—is able or willing to break the trance and do their manifest duty to step in for the enraged king, to take his place as a player of the game. None, that is, except Gawain.

The speech that Gawain makes justifying why he should, in fact must, be the knight to intervene on Arthur’s behalf as a participant in the Beheading Game is one of the perfect pivot-points of the poem. There is no finer piece of individual rhetoric in

SGGK, nor arguably throughout the corpus of fourteenth-century English literature:

“Wolde ʒe, worþilych lorde,” quoþ Wawan to þe kyng, “Bid me boʒe fro þis benche, and stonde by yow þere, Þat I wythoute vylanye myʒt voyde þis table, And þat my legge lady lyked not ille, I wolde com to your counseyl bifore your cort ryche. For me þink hit not semly, as hit is soþ knawen, Þer such an askyng is heuened so hyʒe in your sale, Þaʒ ʒe ʒourself be talenttyf, to take hit to yourseluen, Whil mony so bolde yow aboute vpon bench sytten, Þat vnder heuen I hope non haʒerer of wylle, Ne better bodyes on bent þer baret is rered. I am þe wakkest, I wot, and of wyt feblest, And lest lur of my lyf, quo laytes þe soþe— Bot for as much as ʒe ar myn em I am only to prayse, No bounté bot your blod in my bodé knowe; And syþen þis note is so nys þat noʒt hit yow falles, And I haue frayned hit at yow fyrst, foldez hit to me; And if I carp not comlyly, let alle þis cort rych bout blame.”

15 See Walker on the commendability and impropriety of Arthur’s acceptance of the Green Knight’s challenge (115–16, 119).

111

(“Would thee, worthy Lord,” said Gawain to the king, “Bid me break from this bench and stand by you there, That I without villainy might void this table, And if my liege lady16 like it not ill, I would come to your counsel before your rich court. For I think it not seemly, truly let it be known, That a request such as this when received by such knights Might tempt none so bold as the king to respond While so many brave souls sit the benches about. Under heaven I know of none harder of will, None so quick to the clash when battle is born. I am weakest, I’m certain, and feeblest of wit, And the loss of my life no great loss, it is true— My sole point of praise is in calling you kin, No boon but your blood can be claimed by my body; Since this odious task ought fall not to you, I ask first in humility: relegate it to me; And if my words are unworthy, let this court find them foul”; ll. 343–61)

Critics have pointed out that the speech is noteworthy for the way in which it draws attention to Gawain’s command of the virtue of courtesy, which is important within the grid-and-group confines of the court. Fox, for example, writes that Gawain assumes the role of the representative of the court, and meets the Green Knight’s

“violent, natural, and inescapable” challenge with an “extremely courteous speech,” and by so doing does nothing less (or more, which is part of the problem with Fox’s conceptualization of the role of the speech within the poem at large) than rescue

“civilized courtesy,” which otherwise would have had to be considered “no more than a trinket ... [to] be abandoned in an emergency” (“Introduction” 9). D. S. Brewer pays tribute to Gawain’s “supreme courtesy,” noting that his speech at this critical juncture

“expresses his own self-control and ‘mesure’, his deference to Arthur and the Queen and the ways of the court, his boldness and defiance towards the ‘aghlich mayster’

16 Guenevere, Gawain’s partner at table.

112

[terrible master], all at once—a living expression of courtesy” (69). Hanning pinpoints exactly the source of disquiet felt by the poem’s audience at this point, noting that “when unanimous reticence greets [the Green Knight’s] proposal, we share the visitor’s skepticism about the ‘renoun’ of Arthur’s company of knights, and with him wonder to what extent the court’s exalted reputation is a misleading embellishment of a less noble reality” (15). Hanning, however, underestimates the power of the speech itself, the

“extreme self-deprecation” of which to him “seems as much a rhetorical exercise in false modesty—a verbal counterpart of courtly games and ornaments—as an accurate assessment of [Gawain’s] true worth” (15).

Fox’s, Brewer’s, and Hanning’s readings aren’t precisely wrong, nor are the readings of the many other critics who have addressed Gawain’s speech in this vein.17

The speech is an example both of extreme courtesy and extreme self-deprecation.

These readings, however, stop short of explaining why Gawain chooses to make the speech that he does in the way that he does. He does not do so, as Fox claims, to validate the practice of courtly courtesy. Contrary to Brewer’s assessment, the speech is not intended to demonstrate his own mesure to the king, queen, or court, all of whom are already well aware of it and thus need no such demonstration—which would verge in fact on desmesure. Neither is the speech, as Hanning muses, an opportunity for

Gawain to engage in a playful but otherwise pointless round of verbal posturing. Why, then, does Gawain choose to deliver this precise set of words at this moment and in this company? The answer is that his speech is perfectly pitched to call attention to his and his colleagues’ transgression of chivalric law in failing to meet the Green Knight’s

17 For a short list of some of the most prominent readings, see Walker (126n1).

113

challenge immediately. Gawain meets the challenge and redeems his own honor by virtue of his request that Arthur relinquish his role in the game to his nephew.

The goal of the speech, then, is threefold. First, it removes from Arthur the burden of having to uphold his and his court’s honor by competing with the Green

Knight; it has the direct effect of extracting the king from a potentially dangerous contest. Second, in its extreme deference to the wishes and commands of the king, it restores Arthur’s honor, whittled down as it is by the Green Knight’s barbs and the failure of the other knights to respond. It also redeems Gawain’s honor—which must be redeemed, for he is the most recognizable emblem other than Arthur himself of, as the

Green Knight observes, a court and a company who are counted the best, stoutest, worthiest, most courteous, and peerless the world over (ll. 259–63, Borroff’s trans.).

Third, it demonstrates for all who hear it, including the Green Knight and the poem’s audience, that Gawain possesses a deep and intrinsic understanding of the way in which shame operates as a motive force that draws and enforces the behavioral boundaries of courtly culture and dictates the ways in which those constrained by said boundaries may and must act.18

Shame and Chivalric Law

Gawain shames his fellow knights for their inaction in the face of an uninvited guest’s rudely delivered challenge without directly insulting them. He indirectly calls into question their hesitation, pointing up how unseemly it is for their king to have been

18 Donald Ward, employing the work of Margaret Mead on “guilt cultures” and “shame cultures” as a touchstone and here paraphrasing Mead’s apprehension of the shame culture, writes that within it, “social control and the accompanying sanctions were accomplished not so much by playing upon feelings of individual guilt as upon the act of public shaming. … In such a setting, a man’s personal honor is equated with his public image. Accordingly, in such societies the notion of honor attaches not so much to a man’s inner world (e.g., to his heart or soul [as is the case in the guilt culture]), but rather to externals such as his name …” (3).

114

challenged amid so many of his martial retainers. However, he immediately praises their unmatched abilities in battle, which the Green Knight has disavowed by referring to the assembled knights as “beardless children” and claiming that if he had come for a fight, none in the hall could hope to match him due to their collective weakness (ll. 280–82).

Gawain’s self-deprecation is indeed extreme. His claims that of the company, he is the weakest and dullest, that his would be the easiest loss for the Round Table to bear, and that his only redeeming quality is the entirely incidental fact of his familial relation to

Arthur constitute a reductio ad absurdum of his own prodigious abilities. Such an inversion of his legendary persona is the only way that Gawain can drive home—without mentioning it outright—the lance-tip of shame into the assembled body of fellow warriors that surrounds him.

Gawain says what he cannot say, yet what must be said, by proclaiming its literal inversion during the court’s first encounter with the Green Knight. This discursive structure—giving voice to a repressed thought or idea by putting its opposite into words—bears the hallmark of what Freud, writing on the discourse of the analysand, terms verneinung, or “negation” (SE 19:235). Freud notes the presence of negation in the analysand’s speech in a number of his seminal case studies and essays. Perhaps the most iconic example is the patient who, when asked to elaborate on the content of a dream, replies: “You ask who this person in the dream can be. It’s not my mother.” The analyst’s immediate thought is of course, as Freud writes, “So it is his mother” (SE

19:235, italics in original). In his essay devoted to negation, Freud writes:

The content of a repressed image or idea can make its way into consciousness, on condition that it is negated. Negation is a way of taking cognizance of what is repressed; indeed it is already a lifting of the repression, though not, of course, an acceptance of what is repressed. We

115

can see how in this the intellectual function is separated from the affective process. With the help of negation only one consequence of the process of repression is undone—the fact, namely, of the ideational content of what is repressed not reaching consciousness. The outcome of this is a kind of intellectual acceptance of the repressed, while at the same time what is essential to the repression persists. (SE 19:235, italics in original)

Gawain’s rhetoric of negation is not, as Hanning muses, illustrative of his “false modesty,” but rather represents how one might enforce the code of honor and its opposite, shame—in other words, the operative dictates of the chivalric code—in a gathering of fellow members of the knightly caste, where slights of personal or collective honor can have severe repercussions.19 Had Gawain proclaimed that the challenge ought to be his by virtue of his many sterling qualities, his superiority to every other man present save Arthur, he would have committed a gross display of social desmesure, or excessive, immoderate behavior unbefitting a chevalier—in other words, a shameful speech-act worthy only of the court’s censure. He would perhaps also have been deemed guilty of treasonous language, since he would have been understood as staking a superior claim to Arthur’s own.20

In the medieval court throughout Western Europe, the conduct of the knight was governed by the twin parameters of honor and shame.21 This was certainly the case

19 Thomas Hahn writes: “In a chivalric context, all speech and gesture (including, for example, laughter) require a proper form and an immediate response, or insult follows; knightly conduct therefore resembles the closed code of military speech, where each act demands a prescribed response, and only the unchivalric—Sir Kay, the Carle, Ragnelle—dare to overstep its limits, or speak out of turn” (23).

20 W. R. J. Barron notes “the important role played by law in the lives of the feudal nobleman for whom [romance] literature was originally produced, men whose ruling function required them not only to administer justice but to interpret and even make the law” (36). Barron goes on to point out that felony treason, “a fundamental breach of the feudal bond between lord and man, figures largely in romance as the characteristic crime of chivalric society,” and that throughout the Middle Ages, “many distinct forms [of treason] were defined in terms of the various aspects of that bond,” including its social aspects, as I underscore here (36).

21 J. G. Peristiany, considering honor/shame societies in Mediterranean cultures, writes: “Honour and shame are the constant preoccupations of individuals in small scale, exclusive societies where face to

116

within the courts of fourteenth-century England, on which the culture of the Arthurian court is modeled in its depiction by English alliterative poets of that era. Such poetic depictions of court life became, in turn, the textual authorities to which English knights and courtiers turned for a cyclical reification of courtly and chivalric ideology.22 Every ideal action of the knight is calculated to uphold or increase his honor, his reputation and standing in his society. Conversely, any transgression of the chivalric code, the dictates of which a knight must adhere with an inflexible spirit, even as the letter of its law is often flux and open to shifting interpretation, brings varying degrees of shame— defined as a measure of public infamy that significantly reduces one’s standing within the social group—down upon the transgressor. Honor is the ideal for which one strives within the culture, the reward for correctly interpreting the dictates of the code and conducting oneself accordingly. Shame, by contrast, is the punitive measure, the brand that marks the knight who strays, intentionally or otherwise, from the path of right living.

Shame, in this sense, can be considered the negative consequence of the functioning of the chivalric code as though it were law. The shorthand formulation of this, then, is that within the constraints of medieval chivalric and courtly culture, shame is the law.

face personal, as opposed to anonymous, relations are of paramount importance and where the social personality of the actor is as significant as his office”; he adds that it is impossible to consider honor and shame as it functions in the Mediterranean “without making frequent mental excursions and involuntary comparisons with the gesta of chivalry” (11; indeed, Wasserman foregrounds her essay on honor and shame in SGGK with a reference to Peristiany [78]). “As regards medieval Europe,” Ward points out, “all the documented evidence indicates that it was a society in which the shaming principle reigned supreme” (4).

22 John Leyerle writes that “the fictions of chivalric literature are close to the realities of late medieval aristocratic life precisely because that society tended to pattern its chivalric conduct on literary texts” (131). In a similar observation, specific to the action and audience of SGGK, on the ways in which chivalric life draws from chivalric literature, Peter L. Rudnytsky notes Arthur’s early demand to hear an “‘vncouthe tale’ (l. 93),” then reminds us that by the poem’s end, “Gawain’s own adventures have been set down in ‘þe best boke of romance’ (l. 2521) (‘the best book of romance’), that is, transformed into exactly the sort of ‘vncouthe tale’ destined to be recounted at subsequent feasts” (373). SGGK, writes Loretta Wasserman, “is a romance of the high Middle Ages, when the manners and conventions of the aristocratic life were being molded by romances as well as reflected in them” (90).

117

If shame is the law—because without shame, chivalric culture could not function as such, since it would lack a punitive measure—and Gawain is a masterful wielder of shame as a chivalric precept, then in much the same way that a sheriff or a judge is both emblem and representative of the law and thus is the law, Gawain is himself the law. Not only this, but in establishing his mastery of shame through the speech to

Arthur, the court, and crucially, although he does not yet know it, to Bertilak, Gawain cannot claim later in the poem to be ignorant of the law, because he shows himself to be the law. Gawain is chivalry, both its most recognizable emblem and symbol as well as a living representation of chivalry as both behavior-dictating code of conduct and as mode of overarching socio-cultural practice.

When Gawain breaks the law—as he does by withholding the girdle during the exchange of winnings and, I argue, by wearing it to his meeting with the Green Knight— he breaks himself; moreover, he breaks chivalry. If Gawain, the superlative English knight who has already shown himself in the poem’s first fitt to possess a powerful understanding of the systemic functions of honor and shame, cannot operate perfectly within the imperfect strictures of chivalry—cannot live by the unlivable demands of the law—then chivalry itself cannot stand. In spite of its resurrection and return to prominence in the courts of the late fourteenth century, the very courts in which a writer under patronage such as the Gawain-poet presumably found himself working, chivalry is a dead hand, the chivalric order a revenant body. The law is a corpse that won’t stay in its proper place.

The Poem’s Thematics of Revenancy

Throughout my reading of key scenes in the remainder of SGGK, I will underscore what I term the thematics of revenancy that I read within it. I term these

118

signifiers of embodied not-quite-life-after-death a “thematics” of revenancy because of their subtlety; one of the great gifts of the Gawain-poet is his ability to communicate so many of the important concerns of his time between his lines. I hope to show, however, that Gawain’s acceptance of the Green Knight’s challenge, his travels through the wild country of the north to find the otherworldly space of Hautdesert, the experiences he undergoes there, the lessons he learns, and the character of his journey back to

Camelot can be read as a narrative of revenancy. Reading SGGK in this way can in turn suggest the Gawain-poet’s intentions regarding the corpus of tradition into which he writes himself and his hero. It can also give us insight into his regard for the corpse of chivalric law that he has seen once again become the eminently fashionable yet utterly impracticable technique of living in the aristocratic courts of his day.

Of the critics who have considered the provenance of the Green Knight, A. H.

Krappe, in attempting to argue that the otherworldly intruder into the Arthurian court is none other than “Death itself” (208)—some of the poem’s critics have tried to show that the Green Knight is either Death personified or a type of demon23—produces some intriguing scene-setting information that ought to provide valuable context for a reading of the poem’s thematics of revenancy. Krappe underscores the significance of the poem’s setting—both its beginning and, a year later, its main action—in the Christmas season, “that festival being, all over Europe and in the Near East, an ancient feast of the dead” (213). The poem, as Laura Hibbard Loomis notes, has roots in the early Irish saga of Bricriu’s Feast, in which the beheading game motif first appears; Loomis writes that when the legend passed out of Ireland, “it lost its most primitive and savage elements, and, somewhat rationalized and simplified, it passed eventually into several

23 See, for example, Randall.

119

Arthurian romances” (7). According to Krappe, “in the lost Irish archetype the time of the action was All Hollowe’en, the Old Celtic New Year’s Eve and at the same time a feast of the dead (of which the mediaeval and modern All Souls is merely the Christian successor). On that night the fairy hills and elves’ knolls stood open, and the dead walked abroad …” (213). We cannot be certain how Bertilak, in the guise of the Green

Knight, comes to arrive at Arthur’s court; the magical powers with which Morgan has endowed him may extend to flight or even teleportation. While this can only be extraliterary speculation, all the same, his preceding Gawain on the trek between

Camelot and Hautdesert, which the poet casts as a particularly arduous pilgrimage, does not seem to fit his station. We do know for certain that Gawain, in the manner of a revenant, walks abroad during the feast of the dead when he finally undertakes his own journey.

Krappe also pays considerable attention to the holly bough that the Green Knight carries in his off hand, which I have already noted has often been read (and which the

Green Knight himself casts in lines 265–66) as a symbol of his generally peaceful intentions. (Bertilak’s admission at the end of the poem that the purpose of his mission is to cause the queen to die of fright notwithstanding, of course.) His discourse on the holly is lengthy, but it contains a number of noteworthy assertions. Holly is an evergreen, “one of the few evergreen shrubs in Northern Europe,” and this status explains its frequent appearance in folklore, in which it is generally considered to possess “many apotropaeic characteristics” (Krappe 214). It has long been associated with Christmas, especially in the British Isles and Brittany, and up until late in the reign of Queen Victoria, which saw the importation of the Christmas tree from Germany, it

120

was considered to be the plant most symbolic of the Christmas season—according to

Krappe, this symbolic value is due to its being an evergreen; it would have been one of the very few plants still widely available in the depths of winter. Beside these practical concerns, however, Krappe points to “an ancient association of evergreen trees with death,” noting the frequent occurrence of yew trees—also evergreens—in cemeteries both medieval and modern (214). The holly, Krappe argues, is no different: “It is a well- known English superstition that holly carried into a house before Christmas betokens a death in the following year” (214; Krappe’s italics). Once we know this, the Green

Knight’s holly bough takes on a symbolic weight perhaps even more sinister than that of his great green ax.

“If þou redez hym ryʒt”

It is not the holly bough, however, but the ax that Arthur hands his nephew, advising him as he does so: “Kepe þe, cosyn, … þat þou on kyrf sette, / And if þou redez hym ryʒt, redly I trowe / Þat þou schal byden þe bur þat he schal bede after”

(Keep, cousin … what you cut with this day, and if you rule it aright, then readily, I know, you shall stand the stroke it will strike after; ll. 372–74, Borroff’s trans.). This advice has proven to be one of the more enigmatic passages in a poem packed with enigma, due, one might suspect, to its susceptibility to being read in ways that conform to whatever vision of the poem a particular reader may bring to it. Victoria Weiss, for example, sees in it “a suggestion ... that Gawain is free to choose how he will wield the ax, and a hint that there may be more to the acceptance of the challenge than simply demonstrating one’s strength” (“Gawain’s First Failure” 364).24 The advice is opaque enough that it is

24 Weiss also delivers a particularly impressive reading of the challenge itself, pointing out that the Green Knight merely offers to exchange one stroke—or “strok,” which, Weiss notes, the OED defines as “an act

121

even possible to see within it a conspiracy between Arthur and the Green Knight, as

Linda Gowans demonstrates: “What of Arthur’s early statement that he believes Gawain will survive the Green Knight’s return blow? … Just how many people have been in from the start on another plot targeted, not at the full Round Table, not at Guenevere, but specifically at Gawain?” (101).25 In his counsel to “rule [the ax] aright,” the king seems to be directing Gawain to take a full stroke (rather than a feint) in order to remove the seemingly suicidal interloper’s head; then Gawain can be sure that he will stand the ax’s return stroke because, of course, no such answering stroke will be forthcoming. But perhaps Arthur intends something else; perhaps he means for Gawain to proceed with caution and prudence, and perhaps, in the heat of the moment, Gawain simply misinterprets his uncle’s cryptic command.

So: Gawain masters the ax and is mastered by the Green Knight. His stroke is indeed prodigious, sundering flesh and bone, the ax head’s downward arc finally checked only by the floor of the hall (ll. 424–26). The stroke he takes is not the stroke of a man playing a Yuletide game, even one so morbid as the beheading game. As the

Green Knight demonstrates toward the poem’s end, it is possible to complete one’s

of striking: a blow given or received,” and “a blow with the hand or a weapon (occasionally with the paw of an animal, the claws or beak of a bird, etc.) inflicted on or aimed at a living being”—for another; he does not specify that those strokes must be taken with the ax, which is itself offered up primarily as the prize to whomever is bold enough to accept the challenge (see ll. 285–90; Weiss, “Gawain’s First Failure” 362). Conceivably, then, Gawain might have chosen to deliver his stroke with his hand, or, as S. L. Clark and Julian Wasserman point out, with the holly bob, which would be “an apt instrument for the execution of the contract” (16n7).

25 Gowans’s suggestion that the Green Knight, Arthur, and indeed the entirety of the court at Camelot are all “party to [Gawain’s] testing” is unfortunate (101). Too many other details of the text—Arthur’s rage at the Green Knight’s taunts (unless this is all an act, but the narrator never so much as hints that this is the case), the sadness and worry of the court over Gawain’s departure, the scheme to kill Guenevere, and even the eagerness with which Arthur and company gloss over Gawain’s shame upon his return home (for if there really were a lesson being taught, would not the teachers desire to review and reinforce it rather than hurriedly sweep it away?)—belie the possibility of such an all-encompassing plot to put the Round Table’s finest and proudest knight in his place.

122

stroke without killing or even seriously wounding one’s opponent.26 Gawain’s stroke is not playful; it is not taken in a spirit of hospitality. It is a killing stroke. Yet the Green

Knight is unfazed—he retrieves his head, reminds Gawain that the two have a standing engagement in a year’s time, and gallops from Arthur’s hall with as much brio and bluster as he had entered.

A Forfeiture of Life

The Green Knight leaves nearly as whole as he arrived, but for Gawain, something has profoundly changed—although, like Arthur and Gawain, the poet is careful not to make this change too obvious. The king and his nephew “laʒe and grenne” (laugh and grin; l. 464) in the Green Knight’s immediate wake, making sport of the uncanny sight they’ve just witnessed.27 A few lines later, we learn that the Green

Knight’s miraculous reconstitution has struck Arthur’s heart with a wonder that he hides from Guenevere as he bids her not to be dismayed, downplaying the episode as just so much Christmas craft (ll. 469–71). That the king finds it necessary to buttress the queen’s spirits, however, points not only to the life-and-death stakes of the beheading game but also signals that the king (and presumably Gawain himself) recognize them as such, no matter their masks of jocularity. Gawain is changed because he has forfeited his own life in the Green Knight’s game. To put it simply, he is already dead,

26 While the beheading game motif appears in a number of medieval poems and romances, I have been unable to locate any evidence that it was an actual game played between knights at court. One can envision, though, this hypothetical beheading game as an ideal pastime by which warriors might test one another’s courage and resolve: any swing of the weapon would be made to seem as potentially lethal and impressive as possible for the benefit of onlookers, but would end in a feint, with each knight taking his turn at alternately swinging and kneeling.

27 Ad Putter writes that expressions of joy in medieval romance—especially those of aristocratic characters reacting to strange, unforeseen, or shocking events, as do Arthur and Gawain here—are not always to be trusted, since to show distress openly is usually seen as uncourtly and unseemly. In a situation such as the Green Knight’s abrupt recovery from his own beheading, an overt show of joy on the part of noble onlookers works as a social defense mechanism, “a quality that can be acted … to cover up an inner turmoil” (Putter 73).

123

and some part of him must know this—he sealed his fate the moment he struck the

Green Knight’s head from his body. Gawain lives: he drinks, he feasts, he jokes and makes merry with the rest of Arthur’s court, yet he has already been consigned to death. He is both living and dead, a walking corpse. Gawain, in another word, is a revenant. The ax is hung high on the wall for display, and the holiday meal continues on, but in the wheel of the first fitt’s final stanza, the narrator cannot restrain himself from sounding an almost gleeful note of anticipatory dread: “Now þenk wel, Sir Gawan, /

For woþe þat þou ne wonde / Þis auenture for to frayn / Þat þou hatz tan on honde”

(Now take care, Sir Gawain, that your courage wax not cold when you must turn again to your enterprise foretold; ll. 487–90, Borroff’s trans.).28

If a blithe Gawain is at first able to set aside any concern over his return engagement with the Green Knight, it is because his journey to the Green Chapel is slated to take place the following year. The flow of time may seem to move more slowly for the young, but its current cannot slow enough to keep the young knight from his obligation; the poet writes that

Gawan watz glad to begynne þose gomnez in halle, Bot þaʒ þe ende be heuy haf ʒe no wonder; For þaʒ men ben mery in mynde quen þay han mayn drynk, A ʒere ʒernes ful ʒerne, and ʒeldez neuer lyke, Þe forme to þe fynisment foldez ful selden.

(Gawain was glad to begin those games in hall, But if the end be harsher, hold it no wonder; For though men are merry in mind after much drink, A year passes apace, and proves ever new: First things and final conform but seldom; ll. 495–99, Borroff’s trans.)

28 As Kathleen M. Ashley points out, “In a work where the narrator taunts his hero with the threat of cowardice at the onset of the adventure we are in a very different literary universe than one where the narrator exists to celebrate valorous deeds” (7).

124

The brilliant passage that follows compacts the year into a mere two stanzas, cycling through four seasons with a rush of imagery and a time-lapse effect that illustrates just how quickly a year can pass when a dreaded event comes at its end. This compression of the year between Gawain’s acceptance of the Green Knight’s challenge and the coming of the time at which he must leave Camelot to uphold his end of the bargain does not mention Gawain until the last two lines of the second wheel and then does so only as an afterthought, fixing him in place at Michaelmas like a specimen pinned to a board.

In the two brisk stanzas in which a year passes, we read nothing of the goings-on at Camelot, or indeed of any human undertaking. Instead, the poet concerns himself with the flow of time as manifested in nature alone (albeit with a few sparse references to the liturgical calendar).29 Ironically, the two stanzas dealing with the year’s passage seem to represent a diachronic moment within the narrative progression of the poem, an aside-out-of-time (the concern of which is time itself, hence the irony), the briefest moment of respite for Gawain prior to the commencement of his reckoning. For the audience, almost no time at all has passed, and we reencounter Gawain only a few moments on from where we left him. One effect of this diachronic aside—if not a potential reason for the poet to have written it as such—is that we know nothing whatsoever of Gawain’s life during the year bookended by the Green Knight’s visit to

Camelot and Gawain setting out for the Green Chapel. By eliding not only Gawain’s activities, however, but his very existence during that purgatorial stretch, the poet

29 Regarding this passage, Clark and Wasserman write: “It is a world where the poet’s apocalyptic concept of history is borne out in that all is born only to grow, flourish, and be harvested, and that which is not harvested grows only to die and rot” (12). Without belaboring the point, the sentence’s final clause would seem to perfectly realize a revenant Gawain, whose “harvest” is yet to come at the ax of the Green Knight …

125

reinforces the condition of revenancy in which he leaves his protagonist at its beginning.

We learn nothing of Gawain’s life during the year he waits to go to the Green Chapel because he no longer has one.

The mood at Camelot during the All-Hallows’ Day feast that Arthur holds in honor of his nephew’s departure—a last meal for the condemned, of sorts—is marked by a surfeit of false cheer masking “much derue doel” (secret mourning; l. 568). The knights and ladies in attendance, mired in grief that they cannot show, make jokes to try to lighten the atmosphere (ll. 539–42). Later, after the meal, Gawain receives a long line of his famous comrades whom the poet name-checks in a canny metanarrative bid to establish Arthurian authenticity and authority.30 The big names duly file by, “þe best of

þe burʒ,” among them Yvain and Eric, Lancelot, Bors and Bedivere, all of them offering counsel and kind words (ll. 551–57). The impression that one receives, however, is of a line of mourners at a viewing of a body.

The poem proceeds through the meticulously detailed arming scene, as fetishistic in its way as is the later scene in which Bertilak’s game wardens dress the deer taken in the first hunt. Perhaps the paralleled “dressings” of the Green

Knight’s/Bertilak’s rich quarry are not a coincidence. Read with an eye toward the sepulchral, the scene of his attendants carefully, reverently strapping piece after piece of burnished armor to Gawain’s body—a body whose perfection is signified by the poet’s intricate delineation of the symbolic function of the pentangle that appears on

Gawain’s shield (ll. 640–64)—is as reminiscent of a noble warrior’s corpse being

30 See The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript, in which editors Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron argue that the other knights made famous in romance are introduced by name “in order to invest the story with authenticity for readers conversant with the Arthurian background” (228n551ff).

126

prepared to model for its tomb effigy as it is of a warrior being prepared for battle.31

When the time finally comes for the knight to depart, the poet makes certain that the audience is aware of his fatalism: Gawain says farewell to the assembled court “He wende for euermore” (he is sure for the last time; l. 669). Even Gawain thinks of himself as already beyond saving, a dead man walking; as McAlindon writes, “Had Merlin himself predicted his unfortunate end, it could not have seemed more certain” (9). As he rides away from Camelot, Gawain’s friends finally drop their strained facade of goodly cheer and, through copious weeping, spontaneously eulogize the man they now consider lost (ll. 674–86). Arthur’s nephew has essentially just departed his own funeral.

To the High Hermitage

The three bob-and-wheel stanzas that follow address the wondrous nature of

Gawain’s journey, an early travel epic packed tightly into some 60 lines. Despite that relative brevity of description, the impression that we are left with is that the trek is lengthy and arduous. Perhaps it is significant to any conceptualization of Gawain’s revenancy that his is a journey into a northern landscape that is both inhospitable and otherworldly.32 One wonders how Gawain survives exposure, considering that he sleeps

31 Paul F. Reichardt pinpoints the mortuary feel of the scene when he notes “the increasingly ominous undercurrent of impending doom that weaves its way into the lavish and celebratory account of the hero’s arming” (154). Rachel Ann Dressler notes that carved tomb effigies “addressed the body’s afterlife by imaging for the living the ideal state of the dead” and points out that the “perfection of an effigial body … denied the revolting decay of the corpse [it] covered” (67). On the noble’s preparation for death and the treatment of the corpse, see Daniell and Westerhof.

32 Randall claims that the places the poet names along Gawain's journey are far northward of Camelot’s probable location around Windsor and that the direction in which Gawain travels is relevant because “‘both in biblical tradition and in Germanic mythology the North is associated with the infernal regions’” (F. N. Robinson 705, quoted in Randall 487). Randall also notes that the Gawain-poet’s audience is likely to have recognized the association between the northern and infernal regions due to its appearance in a number of ballads, in the morality play The Castle of Perseverance, in Piers Plowman, and in the Friar’s Tale (487). Ganim points out that “the icy landscape suggests not only age and winter, but death” (378); John Speirs writes that it is “a landscape from which God ... appears to have withdrawn, a landscape desolate of humans, inhabited by un-human creatures, beasts and monsters” (90). Stephen Manning

127

outdoors in only his armor night after night in freezing temperatures, plagued by rain and sleet, “in peryl and payne and plytes ful harde” (ll. 729–34).33 Then again, neither the depths of winter nor the preponderance of wild things—serpents, wolves, satyrs, bulls, bears, boars, and giants (ll. 720–723)—that Gawain encounters and battles on his way can truly hazard an otherworldly body—in other words, one that is already dead.

Out of the cold and within the welcoming walls of Hautdesert, which has suspiciously appeared from the barren and inhospitable wilderness almost in direct answer to Gawain’s prayer to the Mother and Child for some harbor where he might hear mass and matins the following day,34 the knight errant is feasted and feted appropriate to his rank and reputation (ll. 753–56; 889–94; 903–14). With the “wyn in his hed þat wende” (wine having gone to his head; l. 900), Gawain answers the quiet and respectful, but nevertheless insistent, questions of his host’s retainers regarding his court of origin and his identity. As modestly as he can, he confesses that not only does he come from Arthur’s famed courtly brotherhood, and not only is he kin to the king himself, but that he is Gawain—that Gawain, of whose exploits they have heard many tales (ll. 901–14). The delighted master of Hautdesert greets the news that such a storied personage is in their midst with a burst of laughter (l. 909). There is, however, as

J. A. Burrow points out, an element of menace just beneath the surface of the scene’s pleasant domestic camaraderie, for the guest and host are now on unequal footing.

Bertilak knows Gawain’s name, but Gawain does not know Bertilak’s (indeed, even the sees, in the Gawain-poet’s descriptions of the frozen world through which his protagonist travels, a resemblance to “the approach to the Other World” (284).

33 Loomis writes that the Gawain-poet is one of the first poets prior to 1400 to describe the harsh rigors of the winter landscape in detail (19).

34 On the otherworldly qualities of Hautdesert and its inhabitants, see Puhvel (13, 27–28, 34, 35).

128

poem’s audience will not know Bertilak’s identity until much later on); and Burrow writes that this discrepancy

does—or should—affect our opinion of Gawain’s situation. Proper names, in romance as in other medieval writing, are instruments of knowledge and power. A knight who reveals his identity to others gives them, as in the modern metaphor, a ‘handle’—something to get hold of. They may know his strengths and weaknesses by report ... . So in Sir Gawain one must feel that Gawain’s ignorance of his host’s name involves ignorance of ‘the man’, and further that this ignorance is a potential source of advantage to the host and danger to the hero. (59–60)

Moreover, while Gawain does not know the man within whose castle he has sought succor, the courtly body of Hautdesert knows exactly whom they have taken in.35 The

“fyne fader of nurture,” Gawain is famed throughout the land for his proficiency in the courtly art of “luf-talkyng,” and Bertilak’s courtiers hope to gain fruitful lessons in both manners and wooing from the itinerant master beneath their roof (l. 919, 924–27).

Gawain’s Identity and the Stakes of Literary Nationalism

The question of Gawain’s identity—so concretely, it seems, asked and answered in Hautdesert’s feast-hall—is actually the axis on which the action of the poem’s third fitt turns. For Gawain’s identity, as the poet seems to reference and problematize in this section of SGGK, is not merely a courtly identity or even a legendary identity, but is crucially a literary identity, one in which are vested dueling stakes of lettered nationalism. Morton W. Bloomfield points out that while Arthurian narrative had generally fallen out of favor in France and Germany (or that French and German authors “at least only treated it in debased fashion”) by 1350, somewhere around that time English writers developed a fresh interest in it and began attempting to produce a

35 See also Peggy A. Knapp, who writes that there is “perhaps just the barest hint of danger in the fact that, although Gawain’s name is known to everyone in the castle, he (and we as audience) know the name of no one, not the host, the lady, nor the old woman” (300).

129

wholly English Arthurian literary canon (34). Edward III’s intense nationalism and a corresponding resurgence of English nationalism under his rule, Bloomfield writes,

“must have been an important factor in this matter. There is evidence that Edward deliberately strove to rehabilitate chivalry and knighthood. The Arthurian legend provided England with a ready-made aristocratic myth of its past glories. Unlike France which could look back at Charlemagne, England could only offer the misty and ambiguous figure of Arthur” (34).36

I will propose, throughout the remainder of this chapter, that the Gawain-poet is himself invested in Edward’s deliberate project to rehabilitate (to use Bloomfield’s word)

English chivalry and knighthood, but toward ends that differ radically from Edward’s own. It seems to me, however, that the author of SGGK is more concerned with reanimating the English chivalric narrative corpus of tradition than with rehabilitating it, and that he attempts such a reanimation in order to problematize it, to expose chivalry’s intractability as a “technique of living.” To do so, he needs a thoroughly English chivalric literary corpus. A Francophone version will not do. Since, in the English tradition,

Gawain is the premier exemplar of English chivalry within the Arthurian corpus, it stands

36 See also Knapp (290–91) on the “wave of exhilaration triggered by the military victory at Crécy and the pride of a reasserted national tradition” that bore up the aristocracy in 1348, the probable inaugural year of the Order of the Garter. Knapp goes on to assert that “the King was asking his subjects to revive the distant image of Camelot and act out a sort of ceremonial feudalism in the interests of national unity and strength. His thus asking, at a time when feudalism was obviously on the wane and England looked more and more to an urban, mercantile economy and a strong national government, gave chivalry the aura of a moral obligation. The chivalric code became, for fourteenth-century England, a vision of the world which is properly called mythic” (292). Mythic indeed, and the immediate myth of the militarily ascendant nation was, as Scott L. Waugh points out, hollow at its core: “The Black Death marched through Europe between 1348 and 1350, killing as much as a third of the population and making military campaigning unrealistic” (17). In the later, successful military actions of 1355–60, however, “Arthurian romance and chivalry were woven into the realities of war as knights strove to win reputations for themselves” (Waugh 17–18). But by the last third of the century the Edwardian reality could no longer keep pace with its Arthurian mythography as losses abroad coincided with unrest at home, and “English fortunes crumbled. … The incredible triumphs of [Edward’s] early years had given way to defeat and disillusionment” (Waugh 19).

130

to reason that the Gawain-poet requires a thoroughly English Gawain. To obtain this, he needs to do away with any French version, or even French echoes, of this legendary chivalric figure.

As it turns out, Gawain’s identity in the poem is not quite so fixed as the reaction to its revelation during the feast would have us believe. Rather, it is fluid, and it remains in play through the events of the temptation scenes that comprise Gawain’s second great test (following the beheading game) within the poem, the so-called “exchange of winnings” that Bertilak proposes near the end of Fitt II. The host will venture out on a hunt for each of the three days that Gawain will sequester at Hautdesert, and when he returns to the castle each evening, he will trade his catch to Gawain for whatever the knight has obtained during his day’s repose (ll. 1105–09). Gawain, having already properly bound himself to do the lord’s bidding while within his walls, acquiesces to

Bertilak’s wish that he not accompany the master of the castle on his hunts so as to rest and recuperate from his physically exhausting journey through the wilderness (ll. 1093–

104). Not coincidentally, this represents a fine narrative contrivance on the poet’s part to keep his protagonist indoors where temptation, in the form of the lady of the castle, can find and exploit him.

If, as Wilkin suggests, Lady Bertilak expects overt “eroticism” from Gawain during the three bedroom scenes in which she makes him her quarry—paralleling the hunts for deer, boar, and fox that her husband carries on outside the castle walls—it is because the knight is preceded by a reputation as a legendary “womanizer”—“a reputation,” however, that is “seemingly known to everyone but himself” (109, 117). The catalyst for that reputation is the “single-minded devotion to physical conquest, in combat and in

131

love” that Thomas Hahn pinpoints as the hallmark of Gawain’s character in the twelfth- century romances of Chrétien de Troyes and his various emulators and imitators in the

Old French textual corpus (5). As B. J. Whiting notes, “episode after episode” of the

French verse and prose romances “makes plain that the concept of chastity was foreign to [Gawain],” who is “the casual, good-natured and well-mannered wooer of almost any available girl” (53, 61). Thomas E. Kelly remarks that in the Perlesvaus, Gawain’s penchant for female flesh is symbolic of luxure, the sin of lust (8); in the anonymous Le

Chevalier à l’épée, he risks death and is twice wounded in order to engage in coitus with a willing maiden despite the enchanted sword protecting her.37 So it goes in the

French Arthurian romance tradition, in which Gawain is more often than not portrayed

“as lover and sometimes rake” and will later only become further devalorized and devalued.38

Gavains Contrefez

Gawain’s prowess as a lover—not, however, a courtly lover39—is legendary in the Arthurian tradition. Word spreads from hamlet to hamlet across the countryside:

“Because of Gawain’s reputation as a lover,” Whiting writes, “he is the secret passion of many maidens who have never seen him in the flesh” (77). Women far and wide are on

37 See Johnston and Owen (30–60) and Ross G. Arthur (85–105).

38 Hahn 6n9. “In later French medieval narratives,” Hahn writes, “[Gawain’s] character varies from comic inadequacy to moral imperfection ... to complicity in the downfall of the Round Table, to outright villainy” (6). On the gradual French tradition of “burlesquing” Gawain—that is, of portraying him as a philanderer, an incompetent, or a fool—see Johnston and Owen (5–7).

39 “Certain it is ... that Gawain is not a courtly lover. He is ordinarily too polite and too considerate to be described as animalistic, but he almost never becomes emotionally involved. No one ever found Gawain bewailing to the trees or stars the indifference or cruelty of a lady fair. He is never enmeshed in a long drawn out passion, nor, unlike Arthur, Lancelot and Tristram (twice), is he ever guilty of adultery. The most courteous of knights, he is a foil to the courtly lover through elasticity rather than chastity” (Whiting 60).

132

the lookout for the famed lothario. In the later French romances, ladies who hope to experience the joys that Gawain has on offer employ various totems that bear his image or experts by which to identify him should he make an appearance in their locale, including statues, engravings, and “servants who are conversant with all the faces of the

Arthurian knights” or “the expertise of local inhabitants to spot the hero and to report his whereabouts”; as Putter points out, these means are “the medieval equivalent of the

‘wanted’ photograph and the bounty hunter” (111, 111n12).40 One such seeker of

Gawain’s affections in the First Continuation of Chrétien’s Perceval carries an embroidered likeness of the knight; upon his arrival in her village, however, she refuses to believe that he is who he claims to be (Putter 110).41 When Gawain manages finally to convince the girl that he is her idealization made flesh, as the unknown poet of the

First Continuation writes, the two “‘laughed and played together until she had lost the name of “maiden”, and had become lover and lady’” (ll. 2699–716; Putter’s trans., 110).

Putter notes that 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” (110)—but it will not be the last.

Larry D. Benson recounts an episode in the Perlesvaus in which Gawain, journeying through a forest, encounters two ladies within a pavilion who request that he choose one of them to be his bed partner for the evening. He demurs, opting to sleep instead.

The ladies then assume that he is “Gavains contrefez”: a “counterfeit Gawain,” an imposter (221; see also Putter 101 and Whiting 80). They, of course, have been led by

40 According to Putter, these methods of identifying Gawain “are used in Hunbaut, the Non-Cyclic Lancelot, L’Atre périlleux, and the Perlesvaus respectively” (111n12).

41 At this point, it is particularly arresting to recall—if only for the way in which it sets the identities and concerns of the French and English versions of Gawain in stark relief—that the Gawain of SGGK, like the hopeful, lustful maidens of the French romances, also carries an idealized, totemic likeness on his person: the image of the Virgin painted on the inward-facing surface of his shield (ll. 648–50).

133

his outsized amatory reputation to expect a Gawain who will immediately choose one of them and commence to “play.” When he does not, they overlook the obvious (he may, for example, simply be exhausted and saddle-sore from his forest ride) and jump to the conclusion that he must not be who he claims—and who they have assumed him (which may or may not be one and the same)—to be.

By now, two things will have become clear. The first is that in the Old French

Arthurian romances, Gawain is an inveterate lover, a man of prodigious carnal talents and experience who rarely declines an opportunity to couple with a woman; and, due to the extensive spread of his reputation in the bedroom, just as rarely lacks the opportunity to do so. He does not even need to seek out willing partners—they seek him out, often with the aid of representations of his image or by employing those who claim to be able to recognize him on sight. The second is that there is already in the French textual corpus a nascent anxiety among women who yearn for Gawain’s affections that they may, in the intensity of their desire to feel his touch, offer themselves to the wrong man. This is an understandable concern, perhaps only somewhat allayed by the reassuring visages painted on, embroidered, or carved into the talismans at which, one imagines, the hopeful ladies squint as they hold them up for comparison with the knight’s own surely smiling face.

However, behind this concern is another, darker fear, one a bit more difficult to fathom. As we have seen in the examples from the First Continuation and the

Perlesvaus, the women of Old French romance assume the existence of imposter

Gawains. These recreant counterfeits would trade on the “real” knight’s reputation as a lover in order to style themselves as Gawain and perhaps obtain the fruits of that

134

reputation with disturbingly equal ease. The knight for whom these women harbor an overwhelming sexual desire—or rather, as Putter points out, the idea of that knight—is as much protean construct of legend as actual man made flesh. His identity is fluid, constantly in play. The anxiety attendant on the women’s desire is that even if they do succeed in finding a knight calling himself “Gawain” to take into their beds, they can never truly be sure whether he is that Gawain or a doppelganger. There will always be a whispering kernel of doubt.

“I be not now he þat ʒe of speken”: The Gawain-Poet’s Agenda

With our conception of the ways in which Gawain is portrayed in the Old French romances as firmly fixed in mind as is possible considering the instability of his identity in this canon, let us now turn to an examination of the bedroom scenes of SGGK. Since much detailed and intricate analysis of the wordplay between Gawain and Lady Bertilak has already been written, I will avoid quoting their repartee at length. Instead I will focus on the points of their dialogue at which the problem of Gawain’s identity (re)surfaces.

The Gawain-poet was himself eminently familiar with, as Johnston and Owen describe it, the “store of narrative material, in French for the most part, that he had at his disposal” (203). In this familiarity he was almost certainly not alone; Putter writes that in the fourteenth century “French Arthurian romances were still being read in bulk in

England” and that they were “quite simply the most popular form of literary entertainment for the higher strata of society” (2).The author of the crown jewel of the

Alliterative Revival in England was no dilettante or dabbler, no mere seeker of courtly entertainment, however. He knew his Perceval from his Perlesvaus, his Chrétien from his Continuations. He was, as is apparent in his work, not simply a reader of Old French

Arthurian romance, even an ardent one—rather, he was a scholar of the genre’s “forms

135

and styles” as well as its narrative content (Putter 3–4). If it is true that all scholarship bears within it an agenda, then the remainder of this chapter will seek to further delineate and illuminate the agenda of the Gawain-poet.

Critics have noted, with varying degrees of emphasis, that the Gawain of SGGK is not fully equivalent to the Gawain of the Old French tradition.42 What is more intriguing than their recognition of the difference between the Gawain of the French romances and the new, English-authored Gawain, however, is that characters within the poem—particularly Lady Bertilak, the Green Knight, and, rather astonishingly, Gawain himself—are given to making the same reflexive observation. During the first of the temptation episodes in the poem’s third fitt, the Lady enters Gawain’s chamber and starts him from sleep, then insists that he remain in his bed when he asks her permission to rise and dress (ll. 1182–1223). She informs him of her plan to keep him captive (l. 1224) and tells him that she is well aware of who he is:

“For I wene wel, iwysse, Sir Wowen ʒe are, Þat alle þe worlde worchipez quere-so ʒe ride; Your honour, your hendelayk is hendely praysed With lordez, wyth ladyes, with alle þat lyf bere.”

(For as certain as I sit here, Sir Gawain you are, Whom all the world worships, whereso you ride; Your honor, your courtesy are highest acclaimed By lords and by ladies, by all living men; ll. 1226–29, Borroff’s trans.)

42 Michael Foley writes that “the Gawain-poet de-emphasizes Gawain’s reputation as a seducer as established in the French romances” (79n21). Putter notes that the Gawain of SGGK “refus[es] to merge with the ‘Gawain’ of earlier works” (103); his use of scare quotes here—and from this point forward in his monograph when referring to the twelfth- and thirteenth-century French iterations of the character—is evocative in its effect of drawing a distinction between the two versions of Gawain and perhaps even suggesting that the English renders the French obsolete. According to Johnston and Owen, “We may be sure that the Englishman [who authored SGGK] was ... slily and deliberately contrasting Gawain with his alter ego in the French romance” (195). See also Wilkin (110).

136

In the lines that follow, Lady Bertilak makes it clear to Gawain that she is familiar with his reputation as a lover. She points out that they are alone; that her husband and his attendants have left for the hunt; that the servants are asleep; and that the door to the chamber is shut and bolted (ll. 1230–33). Then, in the wheel of the stanza, she finishes her opening gambit in the verbal chess match they have begun:

“Ʒe are welcum to my cors, Yowre awen won to wale, Me behouez of fyne force Your seruaunt be, and schale.”

(My body is here at hand, Your each wish to fulfill; Your servant to command I am, and shall be still; ll. 1237–40, Borroff’s trans.43)

Doubtless this is an offer that Gawain’s predecessor in the French tradition would be hard-pressed to refuse—but we are no longer in the French tradition.

Gawain courteously replies that he is the luckier for the Lady’s company and discussion (making no mention, as is appropriate, of her proposition that he use her body to fulfill his every wish) and then says something unexpected: “I be not now he þat

ʒe of speken; / To reche to such reuerence as ʒe reherce here / I am wyʒe vnworþy, I wot el myseluen” (I am not he of whom you have heard; to arrive at such reverence as you recount here I am one all unworthy, and well do I know it; ll. 1241–45, Borroff’s trans.). Gawain, warily parsing the Lady’s meaning, replies openly to the more

43 Borroff notes the ambiguity of the term “servant” as Lady Bertilak uses it: the word “could have its innocuous modern meaning (‘one who would be glad to be of service’) in the poet’s Middle English. But it also meant specifically ‘a professed lover’” (77n17). Additionally, “cors” does lexical double-duty in the passage—it can mean both “a course of a meal” (certainly Gawain has partaken of the Lady’s hospitality at table and will do so again) and “body” (Tolkien and Davis 173). The net effect of the double meanings inherent in the words “seruaunt” and “cors” is that the Lady Bertilak can have it both ways: she can issue an implied (yet simultaneously rather explicit) sexual proposition to Gawain while at the same time communicating her desire simply to be a good hostess to him, thereby saving face should he decline her offer of “service.”

137

innocuous portion of her address, viz., that he has earned great fame as an honorable and courteous knight, and at the same time guardedly answers the reputation to which she only alludes, viz., that he has also achieved widespread renown as a lover. In attempting to assert a humble and courteous modesty, to deny that he could be as far- famed for his demeanor and his deeds (clothed or otherwise) as the Lady claims, however, he essentially negates his own identity: Gawain, in other words, denies outright that he is Gawain, or at least the Gawain with whose prodigious reputation the

Lady is familiar. When the lady continues to extol his legendary virtues—including “Þe prys and þe prowes þat plesez al oþer” (The well-proven prowess that pleases all others; l. 1249, Borroff’s trans.)—Gawain again insists that the Lady describes him in error, agreeing that while “oþer ful much of oþer folk fongen bi hor dedez” (the fame of fair deeds runs far and wide; l. 1265, Borroff’s trans.), the Lady’s praise comes only from her warmth of feeling for him and does not reflect his true self (ll. 1266–67).

This rhetorical episode represents a particularly noteworthy turn in the chivalric literature. For the knights depicted in romance (as well as those of the flesh-and-blood world of the fourteenth century—the intended audience, or part of it, for SGGK), name, reputation, and selfhood are bound together in an “endless knot” reminiscent of the pentangle that the English poem’s Gawain displays as his signifying device. Benson writes:

in medieval romance one’s fame, his “good name” (the survival of the idiom shows the tenacity of the ideal), and his identity are closely related. Since renown implies a pattern of conduct, to lose one’s fame is to lose one’s identity, to become a different person who acts in a different way. Thus a knight’s name, which is at once his identity and his fame, is an “augur and a program for life,” a sign of what his future conduct might be. ... Gawain was especially proud of his name. He never concealed it ... . (222–23)

138

We should attach one caveat to Benson’s observation. The Gawain he describes as taking a particular pride in his name and never concealing it—as does, for example,

Bertilak, who withholds his name (and therefore his reputation and identity) from both

Gawain and SGGK’s audience until very late in the poem’s fourth fitt, when Gawain finally asks it of him (ll. 2443, 2445)—is the Gawain of the French tradition, not the

English Gawain. The example that Benson gives is from Le Chevaliér à l’épée:

“Sire,” fet il, “j’e non Gauvain. Et suis nies au bon roi Artur. De ce soiez tot aseür, Que onques mon non ne chanjai.”

(“Sir,” he said, “I am named Gawain, and I am nephew to the good King Arthur. Of this be entirely sure, that I never change my name”; vv. 742–45, quoted in Benson 223, Benson’s trans.)44

Gawain does not fail to give his name to Hautdesert’s host and his retainers when he is first at Bertilak’s feast-table. But later, in his private chambers in the castle, face to face with a willing woman who, as the poet tells us, excels even Guenevere herself (l. 945)—the very measure of femininity, grace, and beauty in the romances, no matter their provenance—Gawain goes much further than declining to reveal his name in favor of retaining anonymity. He denies his reputation, and as Benson demonstrates, the reputation of the knight is inextricably associated with his name and, in turn, with his identity, the conceptual boundaries by which he and others apprehend and define his being. Yet Gawain makes a conscious effort to place himself outside of those boundaries: as he calmly explains to Lady Bertilak, “I am not he of whom you have heard.” Why might this be? What reasoning can Gawain have for negating his own

44 See also Whiting: “in contrast to the knight errant’s frequent passion for anonymity, Gawain does not conceal his name” in the French romances (52).

139

selfhood? Why does he not act as the Lady (and perhaps even the poem’s audience) has been conditioned to expect?

Gawain’s parry of Lady Bertilak’s attempted seduction by informing her that he is not the man of whom she has heard has less to do with Gawain himself than with the poet writing his dialogue. Gawain does more than distance himself from the rakish reputation of his earlier embodiment in the French Arthurian corpus; he outright denies that he is that character. The Gawain-poet here draws a sharp line of distinction between the French tradition’s Gawain and the English version whom he is writing into being. The Gawain of the twelfth-century romances is (at least in the earlier entries in the tradition) renowned as much for his honor, his courtesy, and his martial prowess as he is for his skills in the bedchamber and the ease with which he is able to procure partners in love; this much is true.45 The carnal aspects of the French Gawain, however, are precisely those that allow more problematic facets and treatments to surface in later depictions. Notable among these are his gradual “burlesquing,” his occasional lapses into misogyny, and eventually the near-destruction of his character in the French prose romances.46 The Gawain-poet is not interested in imbuing his Gawain with the personality flaws endemic to the Gawain of the French tradition. The English iteration, despite his pentangle sigil’s symbolism of his overdetermined “perfection,” will have weaknesses with which he must come to terms—but they will be his own.

When Lady Bertilak asks of Gawain and is granted his leave to depart his chambers at the close of the first of her incursions, she laughs at him, for he has been

45 See Whiting (49–53).

46 On Gawain’s burlesquing in the French tradition, see Owen (125–145); on his misogyny, see Dove (20–26); on occasions in which his behavior to ladies is improper or lacking, see Whiting (53–59); on his “degradation” in the prose romances, see Whiting (61–64).

140

so preoccupied with not reenacting the episodes of the French romances that he has failed to do what the Lady claims any well-born knight in his place would have: he has not claimed a kiss (ll. 1290, 1297–98). In drawing his attention to this slight, committed as a result of his caution to not engage her physically, she remarks, seemingly offhandedly, “Bot þat ʒe be Gawan, hit gotz in mynde” (But our guest is not Gawain— forgot is that thought; l. 1293, Borroff’s trans.), thereby ratifying Gawain’s own assertion that he is not the Gawain she has been led to expect from the lingering reputation of his

French progenitor. Gawain is flustered by her agreement that he is indeed not

Gawain—but only because he misinterprets her comment to mean that he has committed some conversational mistake and has therefore sullied his reputation for courtesy, not because he fears that he has withheld the physical display of affection that would demonstrate the skills in seduction native to his French namesake (l. 1295).

Relieved that his reputation for fine speech has not been called into question, he claims his kiss as the Lady desires and thereby obtains the first of his winnings, which he is bound to submit to Bertilak at their exchange (l. 1306).47 Later, during her visit on the hunt’s second morning, the Lady reintroduces the possibility that Gawain is not Gawain

47 When Gawain and Bertilak exchange their winnings and Gawain busses Bertilak in trade for the venison he receives from Hautdesert’s master, Bertilak notes that his prize would be even better if Gawain would but tell him its origin (l. 1394). But Gawain demonstrates an intriguing depth of knowledge of medieval contract and covenant law, refusing to disclose the source of the kiss—Bertilak’s wife— because, as he protests, “Þat watz not forward”—in other words, the two parties are not obligated to discuss where or how they have come upon their winnings because such disclosures were not a part of their binding agreement, or “forward” (l. 1395). See Robert J. Blanch and Julian Wasserman, who write that the knight’s response “prefigures Gawain’s legal literalism at the end of the poem [during his confrontation with the Green Knight, when he leaps back after having been grazed with the ax and angrily points out that the cut is the tangible result of the agreed-upon single stroke] and delineates the bargain as a formal contract with well-defined perimeters of responsibility” (“Medieval” 603–04). Blanch and Wasserman’s excellent article on medieval contract and covenant law within SGGK details just how complicated is the extensive legality on display and also clarifies Gawain’s considerable savvy in operating within its byzantine confines. Whatever else we may be able to say about the English Gawain, he is not, as Blanch and Wasserman point out here, a legal naïf; but Bertilak’s—and our own—knowledge of just how much Gawain knows about the law will not serve him well when it comes time for his reckoning.

141

when he again fails to greet her with a kiss (ll. 1481–86). As before, her skepticism regarding his courtly and chivalric identity leaves him scrambling to assert it. Yet, as has been and will continue to be the case—as when, during the third morning’s hunt, the

Lady probes Gawain to discover whether he has “a lemmen, a leuer, þat yow lykez better” (a mistress, a lover, that pleases you more [than does the Lady]; l. 1782) and he swears by Saint John that he neither has a lover presently “Ne non wil welde þe quile”

(nor none will I have for some time; l. 1790–91)—the identity he asserts as his own fails to conform to that which both Lady Bertilak and the audience will recognize.

The Gawain-poet thus effects a radical departure from the French Arthurian romance tradition in the depiction of his hero’s character and especially of his identity.

Gone is the sexual opportunist of the earlier continental tales; in his place is a man whose still-vaunted courtesy with women is of a purely linguistic nature, never (at least within the narrative space of SGGK) a physical one. Yet the English Gawain’s brilliant way with words, his ability to woo Lady Bertilak even while he has no intention of submitting to her persistent requests for his physical attentions (see, for example, ll.

1536–48), recalls the skill in “luf-talkyng” at which the French iteration of Gawain was known to be particularly adept and, indeed, of which the courtly body of Hautdesert anticipates instruction in the finer points when the knight errant reveals to them his name.48 These trace elements of the earlier Gawain show through in the palimpsest the

48 Thomas L. Wright reminds us that the English Gawain's courtesy, as symbolized by the “endeles knot” (l. 630) of the pentangle, is composed of various distinct qualities, “none separable from the others” (79): his military prowess, his devotion to the Virgin, and his clannes or “cleanness”—his spiritual purity—in addition to his unimpeachable “fraunchyse and felaʒschyp” (l. 652). Therefore, “the acclaim Gawain hears [when he tells the courtiers of Hautdesert his name] must ... sound slightly awry in its emphasis on manners and courtly cheer” (Wright 80). Robert W. Hanning concurs, pointing out that “we have seen nothing in the poem thus far to corroborate the court’s assessment of Gawain’s skill in courtly-love conversation” (20). During the temptation scenes, Wright notes, “Gawain is trapped in a narrow net of

142

Gawain-poet has created out of the raw narrative and formal material of the French romances, overwriting the character in those still-read and still-popular texts with his own thoroughly English version of the legendary knight. It is as though the French

Gawain had died and risen again, a literary revenant, in the form of the almost-but-not- quite-recognizable Gawain of SGGK. In writing this palimpsestic treatment of Gawain, the knightly epitome of martial prowess and courtly chivalry for his English audience, the

Gawain-poet has performed a neat and necessary trick in successfully subsuming the earlier French Gawain beneath the figure of his new English Gawain. In so doing, he has removed a key obstacle—a provenance in lettered French nationalism—in the way of his critique of English chivalry through the focal lens of the Arthurian knight considered to be its operative literary signifier.

Of course, to refuse a lady is tantamount to a serious courtly faux pas. Gawain, however, cannot but refuse Lady Bertilak’s advances—he is, after all, pledged to exchange any winnings with her husband.49 He acquiesces to her kisses (and passes them along to Bertilak in turn) because he harbors a grave fear of offending the Lady and thereby being guilty of faulty courtesy. There is the sense that the Lady’s unfulfilled expectations of him as a lover have destabilized his own sense of self and that, should the most significant hallmark of his being—his courtesy—be found wanting, he might not sustain the resulting blow to his self-conception. This is why he takes the initiative to

courtesy woven from strands of his own reputation—luf-talkyng, merry manners, and fondness for women” (81).

49 In my experiences teaching SGGK, it is inevitable that a student wonders aloud: what would Gawain have had to do during his nightly exchange with Bertilak if he had succumbed to the Lady? While the question opens up the pedagogical potential to queer Gawain and Bertilak, I remind the class that whether or not the exchange of winnings pact is ironclad, Gawain does not, for whatever reason, on whatever level of cognition, seem to recognize it as such—he does, after all, retain the green girdle.

143

bespeak his self-negation on his own terms, as when he tells the Lady that he is not the man of whom she has heard. It is also why he remains so vigilant as regards his own courtly speech with the Lady; because he has refused her his body, his words must never fail.

A Jewel for the Jeopardy: The Lady’s Trap, the Pentangle, and Sleʒt

Indeed, Gawain’s words never do fail—in his exchanges with Lady Bertilak, the knight’s spoken courtesy is impeccable. His employment of the full power of luf-talkyng as a defensive strategy, deftly parrying the amorous Lady’s thrusts while simultaneously praising her skills in arts of love, is reminiscent of the fox who dodges and doubles back on the pursuing hounds in the hunt of the third morning (ll. 1540–45; 1707–08).50 As

Wright points out, however, while “her physical beauty and her provocative gestures are well deployed, the lady’s most dangerous resource is her skill with words—those

‘spechez of specialté þat sprange of her mouth’ (1778)” (81–82). Gawain’s fine speech may have allowed him to avoid the Lady’s pursuit, but he will be unable to escape her most cunning snare when she sets it in the midst of their discussion regarding gift- giving.

Gawain’s courtesy and by extension his chivalry are initially flawless in this arena. Lady Bertilak asks for a token by which to remember him and suggests his glove.

He justifies his refusal by noting that it would not be appropriate for her to carry his glove as a symbolic favor of his affection and that, because he is on a martial errand and is traveling lightly, he has brought no other gifts (ll. 1801; 1805–09). The Lady then

50 Wright underscores the degree to which the “undertone of menace” and similarity of specific phrases in the poet’s description of the Lady’s pursuit to those he employs in the hunting scenes “ties the muted sounds of droll civility to the horn blasts and shouts in the quests and kills of deer, boar, and fox that enclose the bedroom scenes” (81). “Like the fox Bercilak hunts,” writes Denton Fox, “Gawain eludes every pursuit until he is suddenly faced with a danger from a totally unexpected direction” (12).

144

insists on giving Gawain a gift, a gold ring set with a brilliant red stone. He declines again, this time because as he has no gifts to offer, neither can he take any (l. 1818–

23). She remarks that her ring must be too rich for him to accept and that she will give him her girdle of green silk instead—yet he still refuses, begging her pardon and claiming that he is ever her servant but firm in his resolve to take nothing until he has met his fate at the Green Chapel (ll. 1827–38). The Lady, seeming to sense the gap of his will to self-preservation in the armor of his courtly courtesy, immediately tells him not to brush aside her offer of the girdle. It is worth much more than it seems, she claims, for its wearer cannot be slain “for slyʒt vpon erþe” (by any craft on earth; l. 1854,

Borroff’s trans.).

“Þen kest þe knyʒt”: Gawain begins to consider what a length of green lace with apotropaic powers might mean for him (l. 1855):

Hit were a juel for þe jopardé at hym iugged were: When he acheued to þe chapel his chek for to fech, Myʒt he haf slypped to be vnslayn, þe sleʒt were noble.

(It was a jewel for the jeopardy he judged himself in: When he drew up to the chapel to be paid his due stroke, Might he escape a head-cleaving, the trick were noble; ll. 1856–58)

Ralph Hanna III points to the problems that immediately arise from the poet’s language here. Gawain, for the first time in the poem, is thinking outside of the precise intersecting lines of the geometric figure that supposedly bounds and binds his chivalric persona. Hanna writes that “far from visualizing his activity as that of a disciplined and codebound knight, Gawain now sees his hope as ‘slipping,’ as escaping from the locked organization of his blazon”—the pentangle—“into some other realm of action” (292).

145

The pentangle’s five lines represent the perfection of the knight’s “five fives.”

These are Gawain’s five senses, indicative of his superlative physical nature; his five fingers, a metonymy standing in for his sword hand and therefore representative of his martial skill; the five wounds of Christ and the five joys of Mary in the Savior to which he owes his Christian obeisance; and the five courtly and chivalric virtues of which he is the paramount living expression: benevolence, brotherhood, spiritual purity, courtesy, and pity (ll. 640–655). There is no place in the interlaced, hermetic schema of the pentangle for sleʒt, or “trickery,” however.51 In fact, one would be correct to think that the virtues cited as constitutive of the pentangle and their coming together into that sealed and theoretically inviolable form would serve as a shield against sleʒt, actively holding cunning, trickery, falsehood, and subterfuge—practices in contrapuntal opposition to those attributes symbolically encompassed by and in the pentangle—at bay.52 This, of course, turns out not to be the case, and Gawain finally, eagerly accepts the Lady’s proffered gift, which comes with a caveat: he must hide it so that her husband will not know that she has given it to him (ll. 1861–65).

Gawain agrees to stash the green girdle—and as quickly as that, the Lady’s trap has sprung and he is caught in a double-bind. He will be forced to violate an oath: he

51 It is worth noting that the Lady herself points up the danger that sleʒt and slyʒt (variant spellings of the same word and concept) presents to the knight: it is literally the thing that does the killing, the thing against which the girdle is intended to defend its wearer (l. 1854).

52 See R. A. Shoaf, however, who points out: “Supposedly faultless in his five senses, Gawain in fact suffers deceit because of and through them: it is through his five wyttez, especially the wyt of hearing, that Bertilak’s Lady persuades him to break his covenant with his host … ” (The Poem as Green Girdle 27). If one of his “five fives,” the ostensibly incorruptible attributes of chivalric knightly perfection that Gawain is said to possess and that comprise his symbolic pentangle, can be shown to be so corruptible, so imperfect, then the single, unbroken unity of the pentangle itself is an illusion. If one set of fives can be so compromised, what of the others? On the basis of this gap in Gawain’s armor of combined spiritual ideal and cultural self-identification, it is not out of line to suggest—as the Gawain-poet seems to imply— that the cancer of sleʒt is already present within the seeming perfection of the metaphorical body of chivalry as a whole.

146

cannot render all his winnings in the castle (three kisses [ll. 1868–69] and the girdle) unto Bertilak during their exchange without breaking his vow to the Lady that her Lord will remain ignorant of her gift to him. Likewise, he cannot uphold his promise to Lady

Bertilak without withholding the girdle from her husband, thus violating the covenant into which they two have entered. No matter what he chooses to do, no matter which path to take, his honor is already compromised. Shoaf observes that in accepting the girdle,

Gawain “exchanges his very definition as a knight—‘my kynde ... / Þat is larges and lewté þat longez to knyʒtez’ (2380–81)—for a green girdle that is a kind of money displacing and representing his life” (The Poem as Green Girdle 44).

Becoming Chivalry: Gawain’s Self-Conceived Apotheosis

Gawain’s acceptance of the girdle exposes a problematic development in his evolving self-conception. In that act Gawain reconceives himself: he transforms from a mere creature whose life can be taken into something different best described as apotheotic; and that which is apotheotic is, like the revenant, otherworldly and by definition deathless. He becomes “the Creator, Creator of himself,” an authority over his own life and death (Shoaf, The Poem as Green Girdle 69). In short, Gawain recreates himself in the image of the divine and so grants himself salvific power. “Properly a creature and therefore a sign of chivalric ideals,” Shoaf writes, “Gawain in his confusion comes to think that he is the Creator of the ideal—that he is chivalry itself. Properly a particular instance, Gawain comes to believe himself the source, since, for example, he can determine that accepting the green girdle is chivalrous” (The Poem as Green Girdle

69). The Gawain-poet shows us Gawain’s inner conviction that the “trick” of wearing the girdle to his meeting with the Green Knight is not only an imperative act, but a noble one—“Myʒt he haf slypped to be vnslayn, þe sleʒt were noble” (1858). He does so to

147

underscore a supreme irony: Gawain has convinced himself that in order to validate and justify—in other words to save—chivalry, of which he now understands himself to be the living embodiment, the Alpha and Omega, the source of the thing and the thing itself, he must act in a way that violates the very conditions of its possibility.53 Ultimately Gawain, at the Lady’s suggestion, convinces himself that saving his own life means saving chivalry. In fact, it means quite the opposite. As Shoaf makes clear, “The human

Gawain cannot be the ideal Gawain who is chivalry. The human wants to live—names and ideals be damned” (The Poem as Green Girdle 70).

Confessions, Withholdings

Gawain’s ecclesiastical confession at Hautdesert—as opposed to his confession of an arguably different sort at the Green Chapel, or even the third confession that, I propose at the close of this chapter, Gawain offers up to his ultimate corporeal judge and “father,” Arthur, upon his return to Camelot—has been so often and vigorously recounted and debated in the critical literature that little would be profited by doing so here. We still do not have a critical consensus regarding whether or not Gawain is fully shriven when he leaves Bertilak’s priest.54 He does not wear the girdle to confession—in fact, he hides it before he leaves his chambers, but as Shoaf notes, he “apparently thinks nothing of it”—nor does he mention it to his confessor (The Poem as Green

Girdle 17). Whether or not this is appropriate Christian behavior is beside the point, for

53 As Rudnytsky points out, “In the world of Sir Gawain, there is no such thing as a ‘noble sleʒt’ or lawful deception …” (381).

54 A small sampling of critics who have addressed the validity of Gawain’s first confession includes: Burrow (106–10); Foley (73–79); Barron (85–109); Wilkin (119); Blanch and Wasserman (“Medieval” 605, Pearl 40–41, 138); Shoaf (17–19); Morgan (1–12); Clark and Wasserman (7); Putter (Introduction 94–95).

148

he is bound by the covenant he has made to exchange anything he receives during the day with Bertilak, a covenant that he has already decided not to honor and fulfill.

Here we find two of the several facets of the sleʒt Gawain plans to commit yet does not seem to regard as in any way sinful or otherwise in violation of the chivalric precepts by which he is realized. He will trick the Green Knight by arriving at the Green

Chapel a fundamentally different being than the one with whom that “aluisch mon” (l.

681) made his pact: Arthur’s mortal nephew thinks to come to the Green Chapel as both a deathless man and the embodiment of what has been, prior to his transformation, an intangible and, he thinks, equally deathless set of ideals. In order to realize this lifesaving trick, Gawain will violate his agreement with his temporary lord, tricking

Bertilak by withholding the “winnings” that will allow the knight to cheat his own dissolution and destruction: namely, of course, the girdle itself. Whether or not he has technically sinned by either withholding or planning to withhold the girdle—and both continue to be debated—is less important.55 What is more important is whether

Gawain’s actions and plans are in fundamental opposition to the symbolic referents of the pentangle he displays on his shield, the supposed determinants of his very character as a man, a knight, a literary construct, and the exemplar of an ethos. It seems rather obvious that this is so.

Gawain does not forget to don the girdle prior to leaving Hautdesert “for gode of hymseluen,” as the narrator makes plain (l. 2031). Whether or not the length of lace had

“slip[ped] from [his] conscience” when he sought out the confessional, it is on both his

55 Rudnytsky argues that “it is not necessary to enter into the theological debate over whether (or how severely) Gawain sinned in failing to confess his concealment of the lace to the priest. Suffice it to maintain, psychoanalytically, that the poet’s depiction of Gawain’s conduct is a masterful study in unconscious guilt” (378). On Gawain’s manifestation of his guilt regarding withholding the girdle from Bertilak during the exchange scenes, see Rudnytsky (378–79).

149

body and his mind as he prepares to seek the Green Knight (Putter, Introduction 95).

The narrator forecloses on the assumption that Gawain has discounted the Lady’s testimony of its apotropaic power and is wearing the green lace simply for sartorial reasons:

Bot wered not þis ilk wyȝe for wele þis gordel, For pryde of þe pendauntez, þaȝ polyst þay were, And þaȝ þe glyterande golde glent vpon endez, Bot for to sauen hymself, when suffer hym byhoued, To byde bale withoute dabate of bronde hym to were oþer knyffe.

(Yet he wore not for its wealth that wondrous girdle, Nor pride in its pendants, though polished they were, Though glittering gold gleamed at the ends, But to keep himself safe when consent he must To endure a deadly dint, and all defense denied; ll. 2037–42, Borroff’s trans.)

Certain critics, the girdle seeming to slip from their consciences, have asserted that Gawain still exemplifies the tenets of chivalry by virtue of his bravery in upholding his initial compact: that is, despite his trepidation, his courage is what allows him to leave the comforts of Hautdesert and seek his destiny at the Green Chapel. Some have read a further manifestation of his knightly courage in his heartfelt dismissal of his guide’s suggestion that he simply disappear rather than face the Green Knight (the guide offering to paper over such an act of self-preserving cowardice by swearing never to speak of it) (ll. 2118–31).56 This conviction seems misplaced, however, for Gawain wears a garment that he seems to believe actually does represent the key to his survival. If Gawain takes the Lady’s claim at face value and trusts his life to the girdle’s protection as the narrator indicates, then he is aware that no matter what happens at

56 See Blenkner (375, 382–83) and Morgan (“Significance” 783); for dissenting viewpoints that cohere with my own reading of the scene, see Ashley (10); Shedd (9n1); Soucy (172).

150

the Green Chapel, he will not—indeed cannot—be killed. (Whether or not the green girdle actually is invested with protective powers is not necessary to consider; the point is that the poet would have us conclude that Gawain believes that it has these powers.)

If Gawain believes, as he rides away from Hautdesert and later stands at the head of the Green Knight’s valley with his guide, that he is under the magical aegis of the girdle’s power, then any action he takes in the succor of that belief cannot strictly be said to have been performed bravely. This is not to say that Gawain is not, under all conditions save certain of those in which he finds himself in SGGK, inherently a brave man. Nor is it to suggest that the trip to the Green Chapel would not be somewhat disquieting even for a knight swaddled in the green girdle. Simply put, however, Gawain is a man with an insurance policy, not a man who has his life to lose but who nonetheless walks into the void because the chivalric code says he must.

The Knight’s Restoration and the Collapse of the Law

One of the intriguing effects of reading Gawain as a revenant figure is that this section changes considerably in light of such a reading. Gawain need not fear for his life, not because he wears the girdle—which, after all, we strongly suspect is not in any way magical but is in fact simply a fine specimen of green cloth—but because he already exists in a condition of otherworldly deathlessness. What he has to fear from the

Green Knight, then, is not what the Knight might take (his life), but what he might withhold or decline to restore (again, his life). It follows that reading Gawain as a revenant sets up the real narrative consequence of his chivalric confession, absolution, and rebirth at the Green Chapel, which are indeed the events that play out there.

Gawain forfeits his life to the Green Knight during the beheading game at Camelot and later, in his decision to accept the girdle from the Lady, fully realizes his apotheotic,

151

deathless state in his improper identification with chivalry itself. The only one who can now rectify his revenancy and restore him to life is the one who holds that life in abeyance: namely, the Green Knight. Therefore, the revenant Gawain’s journey to the

Green Chapel is not at all a queasy rendezvous with his own destruction requiring extreme bravery to undertake. Rather, when read in this way, it can be seen—beginning when Gawain sets out from Camelot—as a pilgrimage, the goal of which is nothing less than Gawain’s reunion with his own earthly life, a bridging of the otherworld and this one.

Gawain will flinch, like the fox from Bertilak’s sword, before the Green Knight’s first aborted stroke; the second feint finds him kneeling “stylle as þe ston”; he will see his blood darken the snow when the tip of his tester’s ax grazes the skin of Gawain’s neck on the third (ll. 2267, 2293, 2315). The knight quails, then masters himself; feels the blade’s touch; and ... remains. His furious leap backward and immediate readiness to fight in the wake of the third stroke may indicate that he has yet to understand one of the lessons of the Green Knight’s visit to Camelot, namely that a martial response is perhaps not always the best solution (ll. 2316–26). He resorts immediately to the language of the law in proclaiming his debt to the Green Knight paid: “Bot on stroke here me fallez— / Þe couenaunt schop ryȝt so, / Fermed in Arþurez hallez” (One stroke acquits me here; so did our covenant stand, in Arthur’s court last year; ll. 2327–29,

Borroff’s trans.). Through the vehicle of the much earlier scene in which Gawain asks of

Arthur the privilege of taking a stroke with the Green Knight’s ax, chastising and shaming the entire body of knights in the hall as he does so, the reader has already been made aware of his mastery of words and his understanding of their capacity to

152

encode and police chivalric behavior.57 It is the scene in which Gawain first understands and reveals himself to be an arbiter of honor and shame and therefore an embodiment of the chivalric law. That scene ought to be read as a precursor to his justification for taking the girdle, which is illustrative of his own identification with chivalry itself—his effectively becoming chivalry, as Shoaf underscores (69). His ability to comprehend and operate rhetorically within the textual boundaries and strictures of the law serves to reinforce his status as such: Gawain is himself the law.

At the site of the Green Chapel the law is judged and found wanting. That it is

Gawain and not some lesser knight who, as the Green Knight points out, violates a legal agreement between himself and his lord because he values his life over and above the system of law that makes possible his very existence, does not bode well for chivalry (l.

2366–68). Wilkin writes that Gawain “is not some kind of ridiculous fop. If he were there would still be hope. He could improve himself. But he does already possess the knightly attributes which make heroism personally feasible, and it is humiliation in spite of them that most demonstrates the low-ceiling on fourteenth-century knighthood, its limited capacity for traditional chivalric heroism” (119). Gawain has crossed the boundary between death and deathlessness; he has allowed himself to be elevated through the

Lady’s seductive regard of his chivalric auctoritas to the status of Creator of the ideal of chivalric law and has thus transcended his own ontic boundaries, becoming the law itself.58 The pressing question is that if not Gawain—“the ideal embodiment of the

57 See Wright, who notes Gawain’s “indignation at the cowering silence of ‘bolde’ knights on the bench” and that “he seems justified when he ends his speech with his own challenge to the court” (82).

58 Shoaf writes that “Gawain would prefer to be a text, an auctoritas, so entitled to its referent that rather than signify the referent, and therefore suffer the crisis of mediation, it would be the referent—author and text, father and son, Lord and creature in one” (The Poem as Green Girdle 74; italics in original).

153

values of Arthurian civilization; ... the measure, the standard for all knights and ladies who would participate in that civilization, live in its world, draw on its store of meaning”

(Shoaf, The Poem as Green Girdle 7)—then who is to be the ideal, the measure, the standard? Who if not Gawain can be the Pentangle Knight? The answer, of course, is that no one can. There can be no human benchmark of perfection.59

Critics have occasionally delineated Gawain’s two confessions in SGGK by their respective sacral and secular character: the priest at Hautdesert hears Gawain’s transgressions against Christianity while the Green Knight hears those against chivalry.60 As perhaps we expect, Gawain, when finally he is let in on the details of the greater gomen that the Green Knight has played with him, rails against his own

“cowarddyse and couetyse” and notes correctly that in exhibiting these traits he has forsaken the “larges and lewté” (largesse and loyalty) that are ostensibly among the defining traits of chivalric knighthood (ll. 2374, 2381). Following his second confession and his absolution by the Green Knight, however, we do not at all expect him to shift the blame for his transgression from himself to Lady Bertilak—indeed, to all women by virtue of their duplicitous nature, evidence of which Gawain offers from the Bible (ll.

2414–26). Gawain comes to the Green Knight a revenant, and the Green Knight’s absolution of his sins against chivalry revokes his revenant status, in essence restoring to Gawain the life that the Green Knight has held in pawn ever since the stroke at

59 As Shoaf points out, “no one in Arthur's court is worthy to bear the shield because [none] can withstand the desire to own the significance of the shield. It is as if in bearing the shield a knight would become the shield. But this is not the way to put on the armor of God; the temper (and the tenor) of that armor is always elsewhere” (The Poem as Green Girdle 71).

60 See Soucy (166) and Foley (73, 78).

154

Camelot.61 But if Gawain originally forfeits his life to the Green Knight as something more than a man, he receives it back from him and is reborn as no longer a symbol, the embodiment of an ethos, but merely a man. The knight wastes no time in showing just how banal is his humanity when he pronounces that he really ought to be excused on the basis of his having been deceived by a woman like so many doting dullards before him (ll. 2427–28).62

The Sign of Surfeit: The Girdle and Gawain’s Final Confession

In concluding their encounter, the Green Knight offers the green girdle to Gawain as a gift—not as a magical, life-saving talisman, but as a memento of the latter’s experiences at the hands of the Bertilaks.63 Gawain gratefully accepts the token, swearing that he will wear it not for its wealth, winsome hue, or fine workmanship, but rather as a sign of his “surfet,” or excessive pride in and concern for his own life, that will force him to remember “[þ]e faut and þe fayntyse of þe flesche crabbed” whenever he looks upon it (the faults and the frailty of the flesh perverse; ll. 2432–33, Borroff’s

61 Nancy Caciola notes that “those revenants who we are told were put to rest through the absolution of their sins must not only have led improper moral lives, but also presumably died without proper confession” (28). Gawain’s case is somewhat inverse in that the offenses he has committed are not against morality but chivalry, and it is the Green Knight’s juridical power as judge and secular, chivalric confessor to absolve him that fully restores his life both literally (the Green Knight, after all, merely marks him and does not behead him) and figuratively. Because privacy is the custom of the confessional, the events at Hautdesert and the Green Chapel remain unknown to anyone but the Green Knight and Gawain—that is, of course, until Gawain, still afflicted with guilt and shame that will not subside, later blurts them out in Arthur’s hall and they are subsequently set down in “þe best boke of romaunce” (ll. 2502–21). The failure of (his) chivalry also remains unknown—or at least the severity of the breach is not fully countenanced by the king and the court—allowing Gawain to remain the Gawain whom everyone else recognizes as its embodied emblem even if he can no longer abide his own chivalric ubiquity. It is as though chivalry itself programmatically resists Gawain’s reduction to the status of merely human within its confines: at the close of the poem, even his most intimate companions, his fellow knights and his king, fail to credit his confession of failure and instead celebrate what they interpret as the supremely chivalric character of his adventurous deeds.

62 See Borroff’s translation of the given lines.

63 Whether or not the green girdle actually has the power that Lady Bertilak ascribes to it has been long- debated. I tend to follow Puhvel in considering the girdle to have been magically inert all along for a number of reasons rooted in narrative logic (see 37–44).

155

trans.). Soon thereafter, Gawain undertakes his journey home. When he arrives at

Camelot sometime later (after a series of adventures that the narrator declines to relate), the wound in his neck has closed, but he still wears the girdle as a baldric that betokens his failure (ll. 2475–89). Whatever else it may signify, the girdle also acts as a badge of Gawain’s former revenancy; like the revenant itself, it is an artifact that moves between the otherworld and our own.

The final stanza of SGGK is perhaps the poem’s most enigmatic. Gawain, who the court assumed had gone to his death, is welcomed back to Camelot as a conquering hero. His king, his queen, and his comrades all desire to hear what had transpired on his journey into the unknown. Gawain’s reply practically insists upon being read as the poem’s third confessional scene (ll. 2489–500). Here we see an aggrieved man: the narrator relates that he is “tened” or tormented, that he groans, animal-like, and that his face flushes with shame during the telling (ll. 2500–04). Finally, Gawain brandishes the girdle and explains to his king exactly what it means:

“Þis is þe bende of þis blame I bere in my nek, Þis is þe laþe and þe losse þat I laȝt haue Of couardise and couetyse þat I haf caȝt þare; Þis is þe token of vntrawthe þat I am tan inne, And I mot nedez hit were wyle I may last; For mon may hyden his harme, bot vnhap ne may hit, For þer hit onez is tachched twynne wil hit neuer.”

(“This is the blazon of the blemish that I bear on my neck; This is the sign of sore loss that I have suffered there For the cowardice and coveting that I came to there; This is the badge of false faith that I was found in there, And I must bear it on my body till I breathe my last. For one may keep a deed dark, but undo it no whit, For where a fault is made fast, it is fixed evermore”; ll. 2506–12, Borroff’s trans.)

156

The reader is not privy to the details of Gawain’s first confession at Hautdesert; we know only that “Þere he schrof hym schyrly and schewed his mysdedez, / Of þe more and þe mynne ...” (There he shrove himself with shame and showed his misdeeds, from the worst to the least; ll. 1880–81). While the knight is explosive in castigating his own shortcoming during his meeting with the Green Knight, the vehemence of his second confession there is motivated at least in part by the shock and surprise of learning that he has been set up to fail and that all parties at Hautdesert have been privy to this all along. His last confession, however, is far different in character from the first two. For one thing, Gawain has traveled long distances and had many more adventures along his way home, as the narrator tells us; yet his failure at Hautdesert seems still to be as open a wound as the tell-tale scar on his neck is closed. The confession in the court at Camelot is not a rote, perfunctory one, nor is it exclamatory and bombastic. Rather, it is the fruit of long, slow, tortuous self-examination. For another, it is painfully earnest in its detail, indicative of a man who—and Gawain says as much—has learned that no transgression can ever truly be undone. Kept hidden, it must be experienced afresh every day, every moment, by the person who harbors it.

Even in a culture in which a man’s good name is all and shame is tantamount to death, better to make one’s failure known and to do so on one’s own terms; the more likely it will then become a burden to be shared out across the breadth of the community, the transgressor no longer having to carry its leviathan weight in solitude. Gawain understands exactly the potential consequences of confessing his imperfection to the courtly body at Camelot. As we have seen in his speech to Arthur during the events of the Green Knight’s challenge, he comprehends the chivalric compact of honor and

157

shame thoroughly enough to be the arbiter of its law, and indeed, to function as the law itself. He knows that by telling what he has done he risks a loss of face and standing before the entire body of the court. He also knows that he has no choice but to do so.

Neither the burden nor its cost is his to bear alone.

Perhaps Gawain expects the expressions of Arthur and his comrades to dim upon hearing what their exemplary knight has done. Perhaps he expects admonition or castigation. I would suggest that Gawain not only expects his standing in Arthur’s court to diminish, but that he needs his uncle and king to confirm for him that he has dishonored his bloodline and his court and has tarnished the ideals of the very system and ethos by which he lives. This would be painful for Gawain to experience—but it would be a satisfying pain, a healing pain; the kind of pain one feels in a wound knitting itself together. But if this is what Gawain expects—indeed, what he needs to heal the dehiscent wound of his “vntrawthe”—what he actually receives from his king and his counterparts will be the furthest thing from it. The court instead greets Gawain’s outpouring of self-loathing with laughter. Before the knight can respond, they decree that all members of the Round Table shall thenceforth wear a green baldric in his honor.

The Court’s Laughter—and Gawain’s Silence

Two things stand out. First, the remainder of Arthur’s chivalric company, honored and happy to adopt the green baldric as their emblem commemorating their knight’s journey and return, seem not to have understood the severity of Gawain’s message.

Second, we do not know how Gawain reacts to their sudden establishment of his token of failure and shame as their new badge of honor and renown, because the poet declines to show us. The poem ends 18 lines after Gawain furiously—and ominously, for those familiar with the arc of the Arthurian legend—reminds his contemporaries that

158

within the binding constraints of secular chivalry, unlike those of the Christian worldview to which it is yoked yet from which it remains distinct, there can be no forgiveness; faults made fast are forever affixed to one’s character (l. 2512). He does not speak again, nor do we receive any hint of whether he is relieved or chagrined at the court’s decision to thus inscribe his misadventures into their best book of romance.

The powerful enigma of the poem’s ending is this: whether to read the court’s reaction to Gawain’s last confession in an essentially positive or negative light. There is, of course, a third option, which is to opt out of passing judgment one way or another and to simply point to the passage’s ambiguity as constitutive of its message.64 Critics have engaged the end of SGGK in each of these ways. Some are relieved to return

“safely” to “the solid ground of a happy ending” in the poem’s denouement (Bloomfield

55). Some hear tolerance in the court’s laughter and read their adoption of the green baldric as indicative of “a society satisfied that its best representative has done the very best that a man can do” (Weiss, “Medieval” 187). Some see the baldric’s adoption as the appropriate way for his colleagues to display and revel in Gawain’s “unsurpassable display of human virtue”; or that it is indicative of their co-opting the “new grace” to which he has come through the gauntlet of his shame, thereby achieving for themselves a covalent “new nobility”; or that it constitutes their insistence on reifying Gawain’s identification as their “noblest knight” (Morgan, “Validity” 18, “Significance” 788; Loomis

23). Some see in the “free agreement of the Arthurian court to invest the sign of the green lace with an alternate and positive meaning” nothing less than the creation of “a new society, one qualitatively different from the youthful and high-spirited court of the

64 For examples of such critical opting-out regarding the poem's final stanza, see Knapp (303–04); Soucy (175); Wasserman (89).

159

poem’s opening” (Ashley 17). Readings like these paper over the marked uncertainty of the poem’s concluding stanza—why, after all, should the Gawain-poet leave us with so dour a portrait of Gawain as that brought into the mind’s eye by his final, compulsive, anguished confession of his mistake if not to establish a certain ambiguous tension—in favor of, to reiterate Bloomfield, the safe, solid ground of a happy ending. Critics who rest their interpretations of the poem on such deceptively safe and solid ground, however, run the risk of straddling an unstable fault line.

Other readers of the poem have drawn different conclusions regarding the last act of the Arthurian court that the poem portrays. For them, the best that can be said of the green girdle/baldric is that it is merely the symbol of an individual’s experience with chivalric folly that is inappropriately adopted as the signifier of a group ethos. In other words, the court simply, perhaps willfully, misapprehends the girdle’s significance

(although how this could be possible given the wrenching clarity of Gawain’s explanation of why he wears it is unclear), and they take rather than have earned the right to assign its meaning. In assigning that meaning, they seek to distance themselves from the significance that Gawain has already ascribed to the girdle; as Wilkin writes, “In taking it upon themselves to pardon him, they are denying their own participation in their champion’s embarrassment” (120). Still other critics issue more damning indictments.

For Clark and Wasserman, the “ape-like imitation” of the court in its adoption of the baldric—“an essentially thoughtless act”—combined with their inability to “grasp the girdle’s real significance” signifies that while Gawain can describe to them the events at

Hautdesert and the Green Chapel, he cannot communicate the learned, corrective experience of his own shame (14, 16–17n8). Without that experience to guide them, the

160

court and the society at large of which they are the axles are essentially doomed. In answer to Benson and Burrow, who read respectively the court’s laughter as indicative of newly acquired wisdom and the poem’s ending as reflective of the reincorporation of the hero into the chivalric body at large, Rudnytsky writes: “Far from revealing their superiority to Gawain, the laughter of the courtiers and their decision [to adopt the green girdle as a piece of livery intended to connote group honor] ironically contaminates them with Gawain’s ‘token of vntrawþe’ … and opens an unbridgeable gulf of incomprehension between the initiated hero and the complacent society to which he returns” (382).65 Gordon M. Shedd also recognizes “the indefinable but undeniable gulf that now separates the knight from his peers”; for him, the court’s laughter

is well-meant, intended to comfort Gawain while making light of the Green Knight’s verdict, but its effect on us is to underscore the insensitivity of the listeners. Though unwittingly so, it is heartless laughter, because it signifies a refusal to take the hero’s shame and sorrow seriously. And as a final incongruous touch the Round Table adopts the Green Girdle as a token of the renoun which Gawain has brought to the group, thus unconsciously making a parody of the knight’s experience. (12–13)

Finally, Moorman reads an intentional silence, acquiescence, and acceptance of chivalry’s inherent imperfection (and hence corruption) in the Gawain-poet’s refusal to afford Gawain any reaction to the court’s adoption of his token of penitent shame as a badge of honor. “Like Erec and Yvain,” he writes, “[Gawain] returns bearing the saving gift from beyond the forest, but he allows the green girdle to become the green baldric without protest and so, unlike Erec and Yvain, is willing to accept again the false standards of Arthur’s court, renouncing the values that might have saved both himself and his entire society” (74). Indeed, for Moorman, Gawain’s failure at Hautdesert and

65 See Benson (205) and Burrow (152) for the conclusions Rudnytsky counters here.

161

his failure again to reinforce the lesson of his experience for his comrades foreshadow

“the imminent downfall of the chivalric system in literature as well as in life” (73).

Chivalry Does Not Consent to Be Used

As should be obvious by this point, I share the misgivings of critics who hesitate to cast Gawain’s return as an affirmative, transformative, or redemptive experience for him, for Arthur’s court, or for the technique of living that governs them. I have intended this chapter to illustrate not that the Gawain-poet intentionally writes his hero as a revenant, a walking dead man—a trope that, as we have seen in this dissertation’s introductory and second chapters, is a durable one. Rather, I have tried to show that reading the poem with a thematics of revenancy in mind can be a fruitful strategy by which to conceptualize and contextualize the Gawain-poet’s ideas regarding a nascent

English literary nationalism. The focus of that nationalism is on overwriting—or perhaps killing and bringing back to something like life—a traditionally French literary construction of the thoroughly English legendary chivalric figure. Because the Gawain- poet intends that figure, Gawain, to fail from the outset, and Gawain is the recognized, embodied emblem of nationalized English conceptions of chivalry, the poet signals the inevitable failure of chivalry to function as a technique of living for both the character’s and the poet’s contemporary aristocracies.

In this chapter’s introductory paragraphs, I related William Caxton’s late-fifteenth- century admonitions of knights of his era who, he writes, do not “vse” chivalry in the ways in which it is intended. Caxton’s problem—and Gawain’s, and that of Edward III and Richard II, as the Gawain-poet can be read to indicate—is a fundamental misunderstanding of chivalry’s most problematic characteristic: that it is not, indeed cannot by definition be, a thing to be “used.” Chivalry cannot be mastered; it masters.

162

Rather than consent to be used, chivalry uses those who bind themselves impossibly to abide by its unforgiving strictures. In their use, it breaks them, as it does Gawain and indeed, in the end (not of SGGK, but of the Arthurian mythos), as it does his entire society. In its propensity to break those who try to live by its law—a law impossible to live by because it is not, at its core, coherent with human fallibility—chivalry shows itself to be a dead code that lives on into the late fourteenth century, when the Gawain-poet sets down his deconstructive critique. Chivalry is both the impossible stricture and its impossibility: simultaneously the law, its limits, and its rupture. The law is in its very structure both binding and broken, a moment of dual impossibility.

163

CHAPTER 5 ASCENDING SPIRALS: REFINEMENT AND TRANSFORMATION IN TROILUS AND CRISEYDE

What lean pickings the body: like— oh, wood-char, ochre, burnt coriander.

It was never like us.

—Francesca Abbate Troy, Unincorporated

A Body in Stasis

Perhaps the most problematic aspect of the revenant is that it is a body in stasis, trapped between two ontological states. No longer a being fully of this world but not yet one of pure spirit or soul able to traverse the afterlife, the revenant is neither here nor there. Stuck in this “space between,” it longs for a purely noumenal existence yet is bound to earth by the dross of its fleshly, formerly human body, a chrysalis it cannot shed. As we have seen in the foregoing chapters, certain conditions must be met before the revenant is released from its bondage. She must lodge an appeal to a surviving relative for memorial masses to advance her through purgatory in the hope of eventually attaining paradise, as is the case with Guenevere’s mother in AA. He must feel the intercessive, merciful touch of the Virgin lift him up from the place of squalor in which lie his physical remains, silencing his plaintive song, as does the schoolboy of PRT.

Ostensibly a living legend, he must fail a test of his most basic values and come to know, at great cost, his own fallible humanity in order to pass back into the world of life as he knows it; so it is for Gawain in SGGK. There must, in other words, be some act or occurrence—be it quotidian, wondrously divine, or inexplicable save by magic—to serve as catalyst for the revenant’s transformation. Prior to such an act or occurrence, one in

164

which the conditions of its very existence at the nexus of this world and the other undergo what might be termed refinement, the revenant is mired in a state of being that simply cannot change.1 It is stagnant, exhausted, used up—yet it continues to be. Only through an act of refinement can another transact its transformation.

The City and the Man: Ascending Spirals

In this final chapter, I return to that seminal poet of vernacular English, Geoffrey

Chaucer, and this time to what is perhaps his greatest poem, Troilus and Criseyde. My goal is to consider the arc of the story of Troilus, which Chaucer reconstructs from multiple auctores while simultaneously shaping and forming it through his own additions and embellishments, as a narrative of revenancy. This consideration can in turn, I think, lend its own shape and form to some ideas I have about the ways in which Chaucer apprehended and revitalized two topoi that seem to have been on the brink of exhaustion, if not already beyond it. These topoi occupied a unique place in the medieval collective consciousness, having risen from the hazy distance of classical antiquity yet simultaneously bearing immense contemporary import to the “transnational courtly culture”2 in which Chaucer found himself enmeshed in the late fourteenth

1 While I have no doubt that anyone reading this dissertation will be operationally familiar with the verb refine, its multiple shades of meaning dictate that I give a selection of its definitions from the OED, which I hope will begin to illustrate why I have chosen refinement here: “1. trans. a. To free from impurities; to purify, cleanse; to separate from something base or inferior. ... d. To purify morally; to raise to a higher spiritual state. ... 2. trans. a. Metall. To purify or separate (metals) from dross, alloy, or other extraneous matter by removing oxides, carbon, and dissolved gases, generally at high temperature ... . b. fig. and in figurative context. ... 3. trans. To polish or purify (a language, composition, etc.); to render in a more cultured or elegant aesthetic style. ... 4. trans. To free (something, as a practice, system, method, product, etc.) from imperfections or defects; to bring to a better state; (now esp.) to make minor changes so as to improve or clarify. 5. a. trans. To free from roughness, coarseness, or crudeness; to imbue with cultivated feelings, instincts, etc.; to make (a person, faculty) more cultured or polished. Also intr. with object implied. b. intr. To become more polished, elegant, or cultured. 6. intr. To become purified; to grow clear or free from impurities. ... 7. trans. To bring into, raise to, a certain state by purifying or making more subtle, elegant, distilled, etc. 8. trans. To clear away, or out of, by refining. 9. intr. To improve on or upon something by introducing refinements” (all italics in OED).

165

century. Both were intertwined in the self-consciously literary scene of writing, so concerned with auctoritas, of the later European Middle Ages.3 These topoi were the story of the besieged and ultimately razed city of Troy as foundational mytho-historical bedrock for the medieval West and the figure of Troilus as protagonist, doomed to a continual cycle of death and return in the literature beginning with Homer’s Iliad and carried forward through that of near-countless imitators and redactors.

I propose in this chapter that Chaucer was aware that the stories of Troy and of

Troilus were extraordinarily shopworn, subject to such depletion at the hands of the many prior who had engaged them so as to be nearly emptied of value. Yet Chaucer, through the vehicles of his Troilus and TR, was able to infuse them with a vita nuova (to borrow from one of Chaucer’s most potent poetic influences and progenitors in the vernacular—though not vernacular English, of course), to restore them to a central position of importance—of life—within his scene of writing and eventually the canon at large. In short, Chaucer was able to refine and transform the very ideas of Troy and

Troilus in the body of TR in such a way as to rescue them from an imminent bankruptcy of meaning. What I will conceptualize in the chapter to follow as Chaucer’s recognition, reinforcement, and use of Troilus’s revenancy—a first in the myriad retellings of the story of Troy—is itself a paradoxically vital factor in the poetic refinement and transformation of these concepts that Chaucer achieves.

Before I begin making my case for a Chaucerian project of refinement and transformation of these topoi within his own scene of writing in late-fourteenth-century

England, however, I would like to offer an explanation for and brief rumination on the

2 The phrase is Edmondson’s; see his Troilus and Criseyde Between Two Deaths (6).

3 See Curtius (52, 57ff).

166

chapter’s title. During my early researches into secondary scholarship on TR, I was arrested by one scholar’s comparison of the respective courses that Chaucer plots for his two protagonists:

If Criseyde is best understood in terms of her cyclical or seasonal progression through the poem, Troilus is best understood in what may be seen as an ascending spiral. And as Criseyde’s character is more easily accessible in terms of life—because she is representative of a principle of life—death, toward which he moves from the beginning, tells us more about Troilus. (Durham 9)

Troilus, Lonnie J. Durham proposes, propels himself toward oblivion—to be forgotten in death4—from the poem’s inition. His death drive marks him out as the antithesis of his eventual lady, who is geared pragmatically toward survival. Some readers of the poem may argue that Troilus’s fixation on his own death does not begin until after he feels the sting of Love’s arrow in Athena’s temple during the festival of the Palladium. It is not until over 300 lines into the poem’s first book, after all, that Troilus seems to detect the cessation of his own heartbeat as he looks upon Criseyde, “She, this in blak” (1.306–07,

309); and it is later still, in the second stanza of the first Canticus Troili, that Troilus sounds his first apostrophic utterance to his revenancy: “O quike deth ...” (1.411).5

4 See OED, s.v. “oblivion,” n., 2. a.

5 The primary definition of Middle English quike (and its many variant spellings) in the MED, and the sense in which Chaucer uses it here, is “living, live, [or] animate”; s.v. quīk, adj., 1a. The apostrophe “O living death” (“O viva morte”) appears in the Filostrato and, prior to Boccaccio’s treatment of the Troy story, in Petrarch’s sonnet “S’amor non é” (numbered 88 or 132 depending on the edition in which it appears), which Boccaccio reproduces from whole cloth as Troilo’s song and which Chaucer, in turn, translates as the Canticus Troili (see Barney, “Introduction” 29n7). However, while the Italians are merely exercising the “paradoxes and oxymorons … typical of late medieval lyric” that are “especially a signature of ‘Petrarchan’ poetry” (Barney, “Introduction” 31n9), Chaucer’s establishment of Troilus’s “quike deth” runs much deeper than the simple play of opposites for the sake of lexical juxtaposition typical of that poetry, as we will see. References to Troilus and Criseyde are from the edition by Stephen A. Barney. While the current reference standard in scholarship on TR appears in the third edition of The Riverside Chaucer (471–586), I employ Barney’s Norton edition for two reasons. First, Barney himself is the editor of the edition of TR that appears in Riverside, and he notes in the Norton that the text of that edition is reprinted from Riverside with corrections (9). It therefore constitutes a more up to date version of the standard reference edition, although it admittedly lacks Riverside’s extensive textual notes, which I have consulted independently. Second, the Norton edition also contains on facing pages the standard

167

However, as I will demonstrate later in this chapter, Durham’s assessment that Troilus’s movement toward death—his “ascending spiral”—is already present at the beginning of the poem is quite correct.

What of this “ascending spiral”? How are we to reconcile these strangely antipodal-sounding words, words that ought to invoke in the attentive reader a moment of—for lack of a better descriptive phrase—the lexical unheimlich? If one attempts to track this sense of being unhomed in language to its source, one might determine that we tend to think of the spiral as a movement of descent. Hence the expression, to be in a “downward spiral,” which brings to mind a wounded bird or disabled aircraft plummeting to earth in an uncontrolled spin, and which in metaphor figures some person, institution, or other entity suffering from a steadily worsening decline in their status or faculties, be those emotional, financial, or of some other nature. But all one must do to find one’s way back to the lexical home—the place where language once again aligns with perceived meaning—is to envision a spiral staircase, or perhaps a machine spring: in these objects, the path of the spiral both ascends and descends.6

However, we must consider a further complication (in language, there is always a further complication). According to the OED, in its figurative usage—in other words, as metaphor—a spiral is “a progressive movement in one direction (esp. upwards or

reference edition of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato, translated, from Pernicone’s 1937 Italian text, by Robert P. apRoberts and Anna Bruni Benson and originally published as Giovanni Boccaccio: Il Filostrato, making it extremely useful in direct, literally side-by-side comparisons of the differences in language and narrative between the Filostrato and TR. I have also consulted and found to be very useful R. A. Shoaf’s and Barry Windeatt’s editions of TR, and will note the use of these editions in the text where appropriate. All references in the text to Chaucer’s various other works are from The Riverside Chaucer.

6 See OED, s.v. “spiral,” adj.1 and adv., 1. b.: “Of an ascending or descending course or path.”

168

downwards, and marking a relentlessly deteriorating state of affairs).”7 So we find that, metaphorically, the spiral’s path is always a retrograde motion—a “progressive movement,” whether up or down, that is always entropic, always proceeding toward decay, dissolution, and ultimately destruction.

I chose and pluralized Durham’s arresting phrase in the title of this chapter because having read it, an image implanted itself in my mind that to me signifies what this chapter (and, not coincidentally, Chaucer’s poem) is about: an interlocking dyad, a double helix, winding ever upward toward ... what? Fame? (Chaucer would certainly have something to say about that.) Infamy? Infinity? Or oblivion, the eventual passing out of memory—the siren song of release from earthly cares that Chaucer’s Troilus so desires?

Troy and Troilus, the city and the man, spiraling ever upward—but in retrograde, having been so thoroughly pressed to serve as hallmarks of any number of political and literary scenes over the centuries that their trajectory, ever more unstable, labored under a continual threat of failure. That is, until Chaucer found Giovanni Boccaccio’s Il

Filostrato—perhaps in the extensive personal library of Bernabò Visconti, the lord of

Milan, during a diplomatic visit to Lombardy in 1378—and brought a copy of the manuscript back home with him to London.8 There Chaucer undertook what I have come to think of as a rescue of this mytho-historical, literary, and socio-cultural double helix, an attempt to stabilize its “relentlessly deteriorating state of affairs.” What he accomplished was a revitalization in the literal sense of the word, masterfully and ironically realized at least in part through the vehicle of a living-dead Troilus—or,

7 s.v. “spiral,” n., 2. d.

8 See Pearsall (106–09).

169

perhaps more to the point, a Troilus who is convinced that though he yet lives, he is already dead.

Lollius and The House of Fame

When the narrator of Chaucer’s House of Fame finally makes his way to Fame’s hall, among the many personages he finds standing atop iron and lead pillars indicating their high status as “they writen of batayles” (1441) are the chroniclers of Troy: Homer,

Dares Phrygius, Dictys Cretensis, Lollius, Guido delle Colonne, Geoffrey of Monmouth, and Virgil (1464–85). Their fame, the narrator muses, is “So hevy ... / That for to bere hyt was no game” (1473–74). Among this group of historians united by the weight of their subject matter there are two who do not seem to belong and, if Benson is correct that The House of Fame was written between 1378–80 (Riverside xxix)—after the poet’s diplomatic missions to Italy—two who are rather conspicuously absent. The first anomaly, as Chaucer’s narrator makes clear, is Homer, whom another of the group (he does not indicate which) indicts on charges that “Omer made lyes, / Feynynge in his poetries, / And was to Grekes favorable” (1477–79).9 The rest of the assembly envies

Homer’s fame, but his unnamed accuser holds him in the low esteem that a producer of mere “fable”—in other words, fiction or myth rather than proto-historiography—is thought to merit in that company (1480).

9 See Gordon (xi) for an explanation of the charges against Homer that were commonplaces of the medieval scenes of reading and writing. Without access to his works, which had only just begun to circulate in Italy—the first country to resuscitate, in the mid-fourteenth century, the knowledge of the Greek language, which had been lost in Western Europe “for the best part of a thousand years, since the end of the Roman Empire”—medieval readers and writers generally “knew” Homer by reputation alone (Knox 5–6).

170

More problematic than the inclusion of Homer among the writers on Troy is that of Lollius, the man who Chaucer will go on to claim as “myn auctour” in TR (1.394). In the introduction to his edition of TR, Barney writes:

We have good evidence that medieval writers, misunderstanding a passage in Horace, actually thought that there was a classical authority on the Trojan War named Lollius. But no such author existed, and Chaucer is simply being sly. He both claims for himself an authentic ancient source, and, while characterizing his narrator as a plodding and hapless intermediary, manages to defer the question of his actual source ... . (xi)10

Lollius’s presence among the Troy historians depicted in The House of Fame opens intriguing questions about Chaucer’s authorial process and the ways in which he planned his writings. If, as Barney claims, Chaucer was aware that there really was no

“classical authority on the Trojan War named Lollius,” then why did he include him in the group of writers on the Troy story that his narrator finds in Fame’s hall? Even discounting Homer, whose credibility we have seen that Chaucer is careful to undermine, the presence of Dares and Dictys—both of whom medieval readers believed to be eminently credible authorities on Troy—would have assured readers of

Chaucer’s serious intentions regarding the matter.11 This is not to mention Guido, the writer of a thirteenth-century account of Troy in Latin prose; Virgil, arguably the classical poet that the Middle Ages revered the most; and Geoffrey, who produced what he purported to be no less than the originary narrative of Western European history and of which only very few of his contemporaries—such as William of Newburgh, whose objections to Geoffrey’s History I note in this dissertation’s second chapter—suspected was largely fictionalized. If Chaucer didn’t need the auctoritas of a Lollius, then, was he

10 See also Pratt (183–87).

11 Indeed, Patterson points out that as far as Isidore of Seville was concerned, Dares’ place as the first pagan historian was on par with that of Moses as the first sacred historian (91).

171

there simply as a sop to readers who might recognize his significance—especially if they wouldn’t recognize it as false? Or is he rather placed in that company of auctores as a signal to those who would know him as an empty name, thereby winkingly undermining the others? A third possibility: perhaps Chaucer is already planning TR, mulling over the sources available to him, considering their relative heft and impact on his readership, and thinking about the kind of foundation on which he will construct his own tale of Troy.

Benoît, Boccaccio, and the Problem of Auctoritas

For TR is undoubtedly Chaucer’s, even if it is based upon the works of two writers whose exclusion from Fame’s hall constitutes a glaring omission in The House of Fame.

The first of these absent scribes is Benoît de Sainte-Maure, whose early-twelfth-century

French Roman de Troie describes a love triangle between the characters of Troilus,

Briseida, and Diomede; whether this confluence of lovers is or is not Benoît’s invention, it is, as Gordon writes, “the earliest form of the story that has come down to us” (xiii).

Benoît’s vernacular (and thus, in the eyes of medieval readers, far less historically authoritative; see Barney, “Introduction” xi) Roman is adopted by the thirteenth-century

Sicilian judge Guido delle Colonne. His emended translation into Latin, the Historiae destructionis Troiae, in which he “tried to absorb and domesticate Benoît’s poem by rewriting it according to the familiar norms of medieval historical writing,” earns him a place on a pillar in the house of Fame (Patterson 123). Benoît himself, however, is left by the wayside, unrecognized (in the world of Chaucer’s poem, if not that outside of it) by Fame, at least in part because he writes in French rather than scholarly Latin. One might speculate another reason for his absence: that Chaucer—working at the forefront of an emerging English national literary culture like his contemporary the Gawain-poet—

172

would rather not elevate such an influential French writer to those heights of recognition in his own poem.

Chaucer bars Benoît’s entry to his House of Fame; he denies him a rightful place among those writers who take Troy as their subject; but he cannot lessen the impact of the Roman de Troie on Western literary culture. It is, as Francis Ingledew writes, “the first great, exclusively Trojan, medieval book” and “a founding moment in the entry of eros into medieval narrative” (695). For some writers, it represents a way in which to bridge the epistemological gap between sacred and secular history; Patterson notes that “Jean Malkaraume, for instance, goes so far as to insert the [Roman’s] thirty thousand lines ... into his versification of the Bible, appropriately introducing it after

Moses’s Pentateuch” (91). It is also the work that fires the imagination of Giovanni

Boccaccio, who bases his Filostrato upon it (Barney, “Introduction” xi–xii). Boccaccio is the first writer to detail the meeting and courtship of Troilo and his lover, whom he renames Criseida—Benoît’s Roman does not pick up their story until Briseida is due to be sent to the Greek camp, and so his readers know only of Troilus’s sorrow at her departure and his bitter denunciations of women that follow in the wake of her betrayal with Diomede. Boccaccio’s innovation is to tell the whole story and to do so in a way that depicts Troilo and Criseida as engaging in what Chaucer, in his translation and expansion of Il Filostrato, will have his narrator call “Th’olde daunce”: the practiced rituals of courtship within the setting of the court itself, one of the necessary components of what the Occitan troubadours named fin’ amor (3.695). Despite his innovative extrapolation of Benoît, and despite the integral part it is to play in Chaucer’s own version of the Troy story, Boccaccio’s Filostrato—which Chaucer has read by the

173

time he composes his House of Fame—does not merit him a perch in Fame’s hall. It, also, is too modern, too vernacular, to carry the necessary weight of auctoritas with the readership that Chaucer had anticipated for his poem.

Although Chaucer declines to acknowledge two of his most important vernacular sources of the Trojan lovers’ story—to do so would undermine the auctoritas of his own history—the narrator of TR issues something of a disclaimer. Readers who have come to his poem seeking the blow-by-blow accounts of battle found in others’ narratives of the siege—accounts that win those writers places of honor on the pillars in Fame’s hall—will be disappointed. In the very first stanza, the narrator lays bare his “purpos”:

“The double sorwe of Troilus for to tellen, / ... / In lovynge, how his aventures fellen / Fro wo to wele, and after out of joie” (1.1–5). Later on, the narrator begins to describe the ebb and flow of battle between the Trojans and Greeks, but arrests himself after only one stanza and corrects his course, offering any disappointed readers recommendations for more martial bibliography in the bargain:

But how this town com to destruccion Ne falleth naught to purpos me to telle, For it were a long digression Fro my matere, and yow to long to dwelle. But the Troian gestes, as they felle, In Omer, or in Dares, or in Dite, Whoso that kan may rede hem as they write. (1.141–47)

Ironies abound in the narrator’s bait-and-switch commentary on the tradition of the Trojan chronicle here. Prior to Benoît’s introduction of the Troilus-Briseida-Diomede love triangle into the story, the central intrigue of, and thus interest in, Troy for aristocratic Western European readers was in seeking to legitimate their lines of

174

ancestral descent by rooting them in the genealogies of Trojan refugees.12 Thus, those readers’ collective focus was squarely on the destruction and fall of the city rather than its life, the day-to-day urban goings-on of its citizenry. Chaucer recognizes and neatly redirects this typical readerly focus on the end of Troy rather than its domestic vitality during the ten-year siege. He points readers who desire the same old accounts of pitched engagements fought outside the Trojan walls not only to Dares and Dictys

(“Dite”), but to Homer, indicted in The House of Fame for his mythmaking “lies.”

Chaucer, however, knows that his readers—much the same as he himself—will lack direct access to those materials, and wouldn’t be able to read Homer even if they could find a manuscript of his Iliad (Barney, “Introduction” 17n3). Hence his sardonic line that closes out the stanza as well as the matter or question of his sources’ auctoritas: he welcomes his readers to turn to them, “Whoso that kan” (1.147).

The Desire for Troy: Between History and Fantasy

Chaucer is the son of a wine wholesaler and, by the time he writes TR, a reasonably successful midlevel court bureaucrat, but by no means an aristocrat nor a man with pretensions to establishing the blood credential of one; he has no real stake in justifying or reinforcing Troy as a genealogical point of origin. (He is, after all, busy making his own indelible mark on English letters and will be acclaimed as having done so even within his own lifetime.) In the social circles he orbits, however, he is the exception. Within those circles, including the court of Richard II, the desire for Troy—for its classical glory and the legitimation of a genealogical connection, no matter how

12 Ingledew writes that the “astonishing” rate of increase in historical and narrative material on Troy throughout the later medieval period “proceeds from Troy’s establishment as the seedbed of European history” and that “the production of the Book of Troy was intimately bound to the definition of an aristocratic textual culture” (666, 669).

175

tenuous, to the nation-founding survivors celebrated in its mythography—is for the minor and major aristocracy an obsession. For the common people, however, and especially those who inhabit urban London, it is an anxiety that threatens them with a kind of cultural elision. Chaucer, cosmopolitan poet and pragmatic administrator, a man of both the court and the street, arguably has ties to each of these very different worlds.

The tensions between the English aristocratic desire for Troy and the citizenry of

London’s rejection of identification with the ancient city play out in the late 1300s in a number of documented instances. Two of the most telling happen within only a few years of one another. The first is the execution of Nicholas Brembre in 1388. Brembre, the former mayor of London, associate of Richard II, and “well known” acquaintance of

Chaucer—the poet’s childhood home was down the street from Brembre’s house13— was charged with treason by the Lords Appellant and hanged. “Rumored among his purported crimes, as narrated by Thomas Walsingham in the Historia Anglia,” writes

Sylvia Federico, “was that he had thought to destroy the name of the Londoners by renaming the city ‘Little Troy’ ...” (1). Federico goes on to contextualize the severity of the charge against Brembre:

The Trojans were considered a noble society, but they also were considered lecherous and traitorous; their ultimate defeat was but the natural result of their unnatural desires. The troubling implication of this aspect of the Trojan legacy was that London, too, was full of deviant rulers whose passions would lead to the destruction of the city. The Appellants’’ charge that Brembre had thought to destroy the name of the Londoners (“nomen Londonarium delevisse meditatus fuerat”) by calling the city “Little Troy” (“Parva Troia”) can be seen as a capitalization on this other, unsavory association of Troy with destructive passion and a mobilization of this association for political gain. Although it is impossible to say what the former mayor hoped to achieve for himself or his king by using the name “Little Troy,” or even, for that matter, if he really said it, the volatile signifying

13 On the association between Brembre and Chaucer, see Brewer (24, 114).

176

power with which the idea of Troy was invested made it possible for Trojan deviance and destruction, and not the glory of a new Trojan empire, to adhere to him. (2)

The “irrepressible volatility” of the idea and ideal of Troy in late-fourteenth-century

London, Federico notes, arises out of its conceptual topos, problematically situated in the space “between history and fantasy” (3). There is no Troy; there never was; for the medieval West, it is “always already obliterated, always only a place-name and never a place” (Federico 3). Troy’s omnipresence in absentia allows it to function, as Federico points out, as “a textual phenomenon, a voided signifier open for multiple re- inscriptions”—re-inscriptions that can bear, as we see in Brembre’s case, very real implications and repercussions in the contemporary social and political scenes (3).

In October of 1390, a scant two years after Brembre’s execution for planning to literalize Geoffrey of Monmouth’s vision of London as Trinovantum, or New Troy,

Richard II held a great tournament at Smithfield. A central element of the tournament festivities was Richard’s renaming London, as Sheila Lindenbaum writes, “in his own chivalric language, ‘le neufu troy’” (10). George Edmondson, following Lindenbaum, notes that while Richard considered London’s rechristening for the tournament “an important act of ‘genealogical’ identification” with the ancient city that “signified the epitome of chivalry,” he had perhaps already forgotten the circumstances that had lead to Brembre’s appointment with the hangman (7). Informed by proclamation of their new identity as denizens of “le neufu troy,” the “alienated” people of London, Edmondson writes, “appear to have resented the fact that the aristocratic fantasy of ‘New Troy’ meant eliding the very real London of which they were citizens” (7, 8). Edmondson’s sketch of the “paradox inherent in the concept of Troy” is particularly illuminating: if, for the aristocratic division of the London social body at Smithfield, Troy served as “a

177

signifier of transnational courtly unification and imperial aggrandizement, [it] was equally, to the ears of ordinary citizens, a signifier of exclusion and erasure, with powerful overtones of lust run catastrophically amok” (8).

Chaucer and “le Neufu Troy”

All of this is to say that Chaucer’s feelings about and stance on Trojan mythology, history, and historiography is an ambiguous, shifting, evolving one, as evidenced by the differences in the ways in which he writes, or doesn’t, about Troy and its chroniclers and narrative voices between the genesis of The House of Fame and TR.

Such a protean apprehension of Troy and what it signifies in and for late-medieval

England does not seem to square with the dominant aristocratic perception of Troy as the seat of ancient martial chivalry and London as its inheritor of imperial ambition via the translatio imperii. Rather, it suggests the division in the social body of London when it comes to the subject of Troy. The aristocracy believe it to be the early apogee of the chivalric system itself and the guarantor of their blood privilege, and thus as nothing less than their very birthright. Nearly everyone else, however, apprehends Troy as a foreign legacy that their cultural elite would seek to graft onto a resistant London, producing what they sense would be a disturbing vivisect, an unnatural creation. While the aristocracy would exult in a New Troy, the citizenry can only reject it, like cells in a body

(which, in a sense, is exactly what they are, if one accepts John of Salisbury’s analogy of the fourteenth-century English social body that I introduced in this dissertation’s introduction) driving away an invasive element threatening its integrity. While it is true that Chaucer most likely composes TR in the first half of the 1380s, prior to Brembre’s execution and the tournament at Smithfield, anxieties regarding London’s status as a new Troy were in the wind well prior to these admittedly quite dramatic events, and

178

Chaucer, sensitive as he was to his zeitgeist, would have been aware of them. If a “New

Troy” is really possible in late-fourteenth-century England, it is not to be found in the foolhardy pretensions of a former mayor with aspirations to royalty (for another of the charges against Brembre was that he desired, following the renaming of London as

Parva Troia, to be named its duke), nor in the blinkered proclamations of an embattled king desperately seeking legitimation and relevancy through the vehicle of a lost classical inheritance. Rather, the new Troy was already there, in the manuscripts of

Chaucer’s finest poem—for Chaucer’s is a Troy that finds its vita nuova precisely within the vagaries of the city’s life rather than the banality of its death. The citizens of

Chaucer’s Troy apprehend the presence of the Greeks outside their walls almost as an afterthought; they, or all but one of them at any rate, are too busy living to be overly concerned with their proximity to their own eventual doom. The Trojans of TR attend festivals (1.160–61) and social gatherings (2.81–84); they make merry together (3.652–

53); they sing, beautifully and rapturously, of the power of love (2.825–75); they dream

(2.925–31). In so doing, they, and the author who gives them the life they embody within the text, refine and transform the topos of Troy as a staple of the English scenes of writing and of reading.

Troilus Is Always Already Dead

To claim that Chaucer is able to refine and transform the place, the idea, of Troy as it stands in the English literary imagination through a focus on the city’s vitality rather than its destruction is one thing. To claim concurrently that a key aspect of that process of refinement and transformation is Chaucer’s writing of Troilus as a revenant, a dead man who yet lives, is certainly another; and while the two interrelated claims may seem paradoxical—or at least severely ironic—one does not cancel out the other. In fact,

179

Chaucer, through the immense breadth and depth of his program of reading, must be aware of the classical function of Troilus, his raison d’être in the story of Troy: as Piero

Boitani writes, “Ancient Troilus must simply die” (“Antiquity” 19).14 Boitani himself emphasizes, however, that while the myth of Troy requires “simply” the death of Troilus, the circumstances of that death, the ways in which later literary traditions apprehended and interpreted it, and the condition of Troilus’s own fraught existence within the eschatological requirement of the textual traditions he inhabits are all extraordinarily complex. “From the very beginning,” Boitani writes, “Troilus is an epic figure who lives in an exclusively tragic dimension. It is his death, and his death alone, that interests classical art and that part of the medieval tradition which is directly or indirectly influenced by it” (“Antiquity” 2).

For the ancients, the fate of Troilus—his very name, of course, a diminutive of the city for which he stands and from which his own life and death are inextricable15— was directly linked to Troy’s fall. Scenes of his slaying at the hand of Achilles appear on artworks as culturally and temporally diverse as a Greek amphora dated to c. 550 BCE and a Roman sarcophagus dated to c. 180 CE; appearing on the reverse sides of each of these works, “as if logically following the first, is Priam’s death, one of the last scenes of the ‘Iliupersis,’ the destruction of Troy” (Boitani, “Antiquity” 5). When I note above the

14 Throughout the remainder of the chapter, I rely heavily on the scholarship of Boitani and Edmondson (in addition to line citations from the text of TR) to make my case regarding Troilus’s revenancy. Some readers might consider my reliance on Boitani and Edmondson to verge on overuse. However, of the significant quantity of extant secondary criticism on the Troy story or TR that I surveyed for this chapter, only Boitani and Edmondson do more than note in passing Chaucer’s copious textual linkages of Troilus and death. While Boitani’s focus is on the classical homology between Troy and Troilus and the necessity that Troilus must die in order for the city to fall, as we see above, Edmondson, employing the work of Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek, theorizes the interstitial gap in which Chaucer encounters Troilus—the Lacanian “zone between two deaths”—at the close of Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato, as we will see.

15 For a number of etymological considerations of Troilus’s name, see Boitani, “Antiquity” (4–5).

180

necessity of Chaucer’s awareness of Troilus’s “function” in the classical understanding of the Troy myth, I follow Boitani verbatim: “‘Troilus’ contains both the beginning and the end of Troy. In this sense he is not primarily a character but a ‘function’. He is his death and the fall of Troy ...” (“Antiquity” 5, my emphasis). The condition or state of Troilus’s very being anticipates his death; in other words, even while alive, he is already dead, and in terms of his function within the myth of Troy, he is always already dead, indeed must be so in order for Troy to be razed and its refugees to go on to found much of

Western Europe. According to ancient prophecy, if Troilus lives to full manhood and begets children, Troy itself will concurrently survive the Greeks’ siege—and if this happens, Western Europe as we (and the aristocratic upper echelons of Western

European society) know it will never come into being (Boitani, “Antiquity” 5). Troilus is, then, already dead in the textual tradition that sustains his memory and his seeming life.

Chaucer is aware (for how could he not be?) of the requirement inherent in the myth of Troy and the subsequent founding of Western European civilization that Troilus is, functionally speaking, his own death—that he must be always already dead, never surviving past the age of 19. Given his wide-ranging reading in the Troy myth, he is almost certainly aware that Troilus is afflicted with another problematic ontological condition that only reaffirms his revenancy. The condition is independent of Troilus’s classical function within the Troy myth; rather, as Edmondson points out, it is created by the narrator of Boccaccio’s Filostrato, Chaucer’s immediate predecessor and greatest vernacular influence in the scene of medieval Troy-writing. In the texts of Benoît and

Guido from which Boccaccio draws the majority of his source material for his Filostrato,

Edmondson writes, Troilus’s identity as a signifier, his place within the symbolic order of

181

the tradition of the besieged and fallen city, is kept intact by his graphically-depicted slaying (he is decapitated and his corpse defiled), by the emotional reactions to his death of those who care for him, and by their observance of the proper funerary rites:

“Troilus, the fierce warrior, dies a fierce warrior’s death, and his sacrifice is honored accordingly, as Guido will later put it, with ‘anguished lamentations’ and a ‘rich tomb.’

Simply put, Troilus fulfills his given function, his symbolic mandate, and is laid to rest”

(55).16 The Troilus of traditional mytho-historiographic writing on Troy, in other words, dies for the cause of Troy; that Troy falls in the aftermath of his death regardless in no way invalidates the heroic immensity of his sacrifice’s symbolic value. But no such interment, whether physical or symbolic, is to be found in the Filostrato, Edmondson argues; Boccaccio’s narrator merely notes, almost offhandedly, that “avendone giá morti piú di mille, / miseramente un dí l’uccise Achille” [Achilles one day slew him wretchedly after he had already killed more than a thousand] (8.27; Edmondson 56). There are no lamentations or rich tombs for Troilo.

The Problem of the Filostrato and the Zone between Two Deaths

For Chaucer, familiar as he was with the traditions of Trojan historiography and, in this specific context, with the end of Troilus, encountering Troilo’s end in Il Filostrato would have been profoundly disturbing. Boccaccio refuses Troilo the bodily interment that he must have in order to take his place in the symbolic order as he whose death ends Priam’s line and opens the way not only to Troy’s destruction but also to the concurrent founding of the medieval West by Trojan refugees. To add insult to injury,

16 Here, Edmondson’s admirably concise gloss of the complex functioning of the symbolic order, as conceptualized within Lacanian psychoanalysis, will serve: its operations “force subjects to assume different positions vis-à-vis the signifier and the object” (4n5). The quoted reference to Guido delle Colone’s Historia Destructionis Troiae is from the edition by Mary Elizabeth Meek (27.4–8).

182

the Filostrato’s narrator in effect denies Troilo his rightful symbolic interment in order to usurp his position as the classical hero made prostrate by love (Edmondson 57).

Edmondson points out that “instead of mirroring himself in Troilo and recoiling, the narrator identifies with the counterpart’s suffering to the point that he takes the other’s place—becomes the new embodiment of the suffering” (57). In the Filostrato’s concluding book, the narrator addresses his poem:

[O]h, te felice che la vederai, quel ch’io non posso far, lasso dolente! E come tu nelle sue man sarai con festa ricevuta, umilemente mi raccomanda all’alta sua virtute, la qual sola mi puó render salute. ...

Se tu la vendi ad ascoltarti pia nell’angelico aspetto punto farsi, o sospirar della fatica mia, priegala quanto puoi che ritornarsi omai le piaccia, o comandar che via da me l’anima deggia dileguarsi, per ció che dove ch’ella ne daggia ire, me’ che tal vita m’é troppo il morire.

(O happy you who will see her which I, sorrowing wretch, cannot do! And when with joy you have been received into her hands, humbly commend me to her high worth, which alone can give me salvation.

If while she is listening to you, you see that her angelic face shows a little charity or she sighs for my toil, pray her as much as you can that it may please her to return here now or to command my soul to take itself away from me because, wherever it must go from here, death is much better for me than such a life; 9.5, 9.7)

The narrator’s overblown, emotive display here is particularly problematic in the context of the events it follows. “Unlike Benoît or Guido,” Edmondson notes, “the narrator of Il

Filostrato doesn’t desire the comforts of historiography. Instead, he seems to desire the very suffering and death of the other; and in this he could be said to enjoy beyond

183

measure, to get off, as it were, in a manner unsanctioned by historiographic tradition”

(58).

At the close of Il Filostrato, Troilo, counter to the tradition of Trojan mytho- historiography, remains uninterred, his body unburied, his power to signify unmoored within the symbolic order. Following Boitani, Edmondson writes that “if the traditional meaning of the Troilus-figure is his death, then Boccaccio has changed that meaning so as to make it illegible within the medieval tradition” of writing on Troy (58). The effect of this, Edmondson continues, is to strand Troilo in “the zone between two deaths,” the nether-space of identification and implication that Jacques Lacan introduces in his seminar on Sophocles’ Antigone.17 Edmondson glosses the zone between two deaths largely via Slavoj Žižek’s interpretation in the latter’s Sublime Object of Ideology, writing that it

has come to denote the troubled space one enters between actual, physical death, on the one hand, and some form of symbolic death—be it banishment or entombment, vilification or lamentation, the satisfaction or denial of last rites—on the other. Indeed, one’s body need not have died yet to enter the zone between two deaths; one might also enter it before one physically dies, by undergoing any act or ritual that registers one’s final definition within [the] symbolic order. But however one happens to enter it, the zone between two deaths remains, as its name implies, a kind of border zone: a place where one is neither fully alive nor yet entirely dead. Less a physical location one occupies than a structural position one assumes, the space between two deaths is a traumatic space, and to inhabit it is to become, as it were, a thorn in the side of the symbolic order: a revenant, a righteous outcast, a member of the walking dead refused, or refusing, the right to rest in peace. (30–31)

This is the state in which Boccaccio leaves his uninterred hero at the close of his poem; and this is the state in which Chaucer—who understood that Troilo, by virtue of his name, “contains both the beginning and the end of Troy”—found him when he first

17 Lacan, Seminar VII (320).

184

encountered Il Filostrato in Italy (Boitani, “Antiquity” 4–5, quoted in Edmondson 64).

Edmondson argues that Chaucer would have recognized the violence done to the Trojan historiographic tradition by the events of Troilo’s end and the narrator’s assumption of the mantle of his romantic suffering, his “identification with the dead pagan Troilo,” in the Filostrato and would have instinctively “recoiled” from such violence (21). Furthermore, Chaucer would have extrapolated its most pressing conundrum: that, as Edmondson writes, “Troilo’s continued suspension between two deaths would have amounted to the destabilizing intrusion, at the level of the signifier, of

Troy, the mythical foreclosed origin of the medieval West, within a late-fourteenth- century, Christianized symbolic order” (64). If Edmondson is correct that Chaucer would have apprehended the distortions of the Trojan mytho-historiographical tradition present within Il Filostrato, then it stands to reason that one possible motivation for his own repurposing of Boccaccio’s poem was to set matters right. But to do so, in order to achieve poetic continuity with his problematic source material, Chaucer first had to establish for his English audience that his hero was, following from the end of

Boccaccio’s poem in which Chaucer found him to the beginning of his own treatment of the Troy story and beyond, a man trapped in the zone between two deaths. Chaucer needed to establish that Troilus was an otherworldly body out of its right place, a textual revenant in search of its eternal home. He set out, I will argue, to do just that, with the ultimate goal of refining and transforming Boccaccio’s uninterred Troilo back into

Troilus, thus reestablishing him in his right place within the Christianized symbolic order of the medieval West.

185

Chaucer’s Troilus Suspects that He Is Always Already Dead—

It has become a commonplace of critical writing on TR to note the looming presence of death in its language.18 One reader points out that among Chaucer’s most notable emendations to Boccaccio’s poem, “he vastly extends the references to death he finds” in Il Filostrato (Arthur 67). Despite the poem’s numerous illustrations of the day-to-day life of the citizens of Troy that I highlight earlier in this chapter, a careful reader might indeed sense the inevitability of the city’s fall through the pervasive eschatological references sown throughout Chaucer’s narrative. The poem’s

“vocabulary of death,” as Karen Arthur terms it, is not exclusive to Troilus or his ontological state. It is important to recognize, however, that an overwhelming majority of

TR’s eschatological referentiality, its evocation and invocation of last things, manifests in the prince’s nagging sense that he is, throughout much of the poem, living his own death while the city around him lives its collective life (67). One might muse on the metatext at work here—i.e., that Chaucer’s Troilus possesses a vague, uncomfortable awareness of what we have seen Boitani term his “function” within the myth of Troy: that he “simply die.” Following this perception of TR’s metatextual commentary on the versions of the story that have come before it, it also seems likely that this textual iteration of Troilus lacks what Edmondson describes as Troilo’s “pitiable ... imposed amnesia,” his lack of awareness that “he has already been killed, repeatedly, in Virgil, in

Benoît, and in Guido, to name but the most prominent examples available to Chaucer”

(63). In other words, on some level of cognition—perhaps an unconscious one—

Chaucer’s Troilus seems to be aware that not only must he end the poem as a dead

18 For some examples of the trend, see Durham (1–11); Arthur (67–87); Windeatt, Oxford Guides to Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde (234–38).

186

man, but also that he has begun it as one. Furthermore, the uncanny sense of Troilus’s revenancy does not seem to be isolated in Troilus himself, but is shared by the narrator and Pandarus as well, as we shall see.

Granted, some readers may be resistant to the portrait of an authentically revenant Troilus that I am sketching. These readers would deny that Troilus is always already dead not only at the poem’s beginning but throughout its narrative arc; that is to say, that Troilus exists within the textual space of TR as a character whose status as a living being is complicated by his own sense that he is, in fact, a dead man. But even these resistant readers would have to give some credence to the claim that Troilus experiences what he apprehends as a series of deaths as the poem’s events unfold.

Earlier in this chapter I noted the first of these—which are not near-death experiences, but rather are instances in which Troilus feels as though, indeed is convinced that, he has known what it is to die—occurring in the temple of the Palladium, when Troilus’s phallic, penetrating gaze is “stente” by the vision of Criseyde; “the subtile stremes” of her eyes, in which the God of Love has made his home, causes him to have the following immediate reaction:

That sodeynly hym thoughte he felte dyen, Right with hire look, the spirit in his herte ... (1.273, 305–07)19

Chaucer’s language, his poesy, in TR is uniformly rather precise. Although one would not want to place oneself in the camp of the critics who, as Gayle Margherita has written, problematically “find Chaucer in perfect control of his social and political consciousness,” here we are not dealing with an issue of ideological control (103).

Rather, this particular textual crux is a question purely of Chaucer’s poetics. We can

19 For an incisive parsing of medieval optical theory as it relates to and is reflected in and by this scene, see Stanbury (224–38).

187

take his phrasing as literal rather than figurative, especially since it represents only the first in a long chain of associations of Troilus sensing, experiencing, or knowing his own

(living) death. Indeed, Windeatt, reinforcing the passage’s literality, writes, “The moment when Troilus is first smitten by Criseyde’s look is represented as a kind of death …”

(Oxford 235).

As Barney observes in wry understatement, “Troilus ... tends toward the metaphysical” (“Troilus Bound” 3). From the moment in Troilus’s first song that I have already noted in which, through the rhetorical vehicle of the apostrophe, he ratifies his own “quike deth,” throughout the remainder of the poem (excepting only the majority of

Book 3, in which he consummates his relationship with Criseyde) Troilus exists in a state of near-constant and vocal consciousness of his own static, liminal ontological state, rooted between life and death.20 Chaucer simultaneously reifies and interrogates the medieval literary tradition of amor hereos, or illness manifesting out of erotic love, by having his Troilus associate his self-proclaimed status as a living-dead man with his unrequited feelings for Criseyde (1.420, 469, 728, 875).21 Later in the poem, Troilus’s sensation that his heart has died recurs at points when Criseyde weeps, castigates him, or when he fears that he has fallen from her favor (3.1070–71, 1081, 1171). Confronted with the imminence of Criseyde’s departure from the city, Troilus, in an anguished soliloquy, wonders why Fortune has not seen fit to fully and finally end his life, but rather forces him to linger on, “evere dye and nevere fulli sterve” (4.250)—reduced, as

Windeatt writes, “to a kind of living death” (237).

20 Regarding Troilus’s apostrophe in the first Canticus Troili, Barney himself writes, “A part of [Troilus] is already dead, as he acknowledges in the song from Petrarch, ‘O quike deth’ ...” (“Troilus Bound” 11–12).

21 On the amor hereos tradition, see Wack and Gilles.

188

—And So Do Other Characters in TR

If Troilus were the only character in the poem to associate the intensity of eros, the assault on the core of his being that constitutes the love he bears Criseyde, with his own death, one could perhaps write off his assertions of revenancy as the histrionics of a very young man experiencing such feelings for the first time.22 In the literature of amor hereos, after all, bombastic displays such as the assertion that one is prepared to die or feels that he (the stricken lover is always male) must die for love are commonplace. As

Shakespeare’s Rosalind observes with weary cynicism, “these / are all lies: men have died from time to time, and worms have / eaten them, but not for love” (As You Like It

IV.1.1885–87). Troilus, however, is not the only speaker in the poem to comment on or allude to his unique ontological condition. Early on, the narrator affirms that in the person of Criseyde, “Lo, here his lif, and from the deth his cure!” (1.469). Pandarus tries to convince Criseyde of the effect she has on Troilus by noting that “I se hym dyen, ther he goth upryght” (2.333), and later, finding Troilus languishing in his room, half-jests

“Who is in his bed so soone / Iburied thus?” (2.1310–11). During the scene in Helen’s chambers that bridges Books 2 and 3, Pandarus, as Criseyde approaches Troilus’s bedside, calls out to his friend, “Se who is here yow comen to visite: / Lo, here is she that is youre deth to wite” (that is to blame for your death; 3.62–63). A few lines later, the narrator notes that Troilus, hearing Criseyde pray for his patronage, “wax neither quyk ne ded” (3.79). When, during a conversation with her uncle in Book 3, Criseyde

22 Unlike Boccaccio’s Troilo, who by his own admission is an experienced lover before meeting Criseida (1.23), Troilus has merely “herd told” of the “lyvynge” and “lewed observaunces” of lovers prior to his encounter with Criseyde (and the God of Love) in the temple (1.197–98).

189

suggests sending Troilus a ring as a token of her constancy, Pandarus rejects her gesture as insufficient to the magnitude of Troilus’s dilemma:

“A ryng?” quod he, “Ye haselwodes shaken! Ye, nece myn, that ryng moste han a stoon That myghte dede men alyve maken; And swich a ryng trowe I that ye have non. ...” (3.890–93)23

The instances I have recounted of Troilus and other speakers in the poem referencing or otherwise alluding to his status as a man who is neither alive nor dead but exists in some liminal space—trapped, as it were, in “the zone between two deaths”—are merely representative, by no means exhaustive. I do not wish to belabor the point.24 But one more example is worth emphasizing. When, in Book 4, Troilus learns to his agony of “the chaungynge of Criseyde,” of her defection not merely to the

Greeks in her person but to Diomede in her affections, the narrator shows us the prince in his bedchamber—so often in TR the scene of a static Troilus—which here seems to double as his sepulcher:

He rist hym up, and every dore he shette, And wyndow ek, and ... this sorwful man Upon his beddes syde adown hym sette, Full lik a ded ymage, pale and wan ... (4.231–35)

James J. Paxson’s reading of this moment in the text underscores that Chaucer’s narrator here exposes Troilus, ontologically speaking, in his most naked form, sealed into his chamber like a corpse in its tomb: “Such a condition of [characterological]

23 Barney notes that the expression “Ye haselwodes shaken!”—read as either “You shake hazelwoods!” or “Yea, hazelwoods shake!”—“seems to imply a mocking skepticism,” although its precise meaning is uncertain (“Introduction” 179n1). Chaucer’s familiarity with the romance staple of a magical ring that resurrects the dead—much like his nod to twelfth-century ecclesiastical explanations for graveyard revenants (i.e., that they are corpses reanimated by demons who tempt the living to sin) in the Friar’s Tale (ll. 1504–10; see p. 12 of this dissertation)—should leave little doubt that he is aware of the longstanding folkloric tradition of the revenant in the medieval West.

24 See the Appendix for a complete list of line references in TR that specifically link Troilus and death.

190

diminishment was called dorveille, and in rhetorical terms it equates to the implementation of the trope reification or pragmapoeia—the figural conversion of the human character into an object. As a ‘ded ymage,’ Troilus has been reified or ‘thingified’ into an aphasic, nonsentient, nonhuman thing; he becomes a nonliving simulacrum of human form” (210).

The moment at which Troilus entombs himself in his bedchamber represents the apogee of his essentially static presence throughout TR. In the context of the events of the poem as they play out within the walls of Troy, he is obsessively prone to the investigation, consideration, and extrapolation of his own complex interior life. Simply put, Troilus is a man who tends to think rather than act, relying on Pandarus’s machinations to advance him toward his ultimate goal of attaining Criseyde’s love

(through the decidedly lesser goal of merely placing himself in her service as a man of the court).25 Troilus’s characteristic paralysis, his inability to act on his own behalf— signaled early in Book 1 by the narrator’s figuring of Troilus as bird whose feathers have been limed by Love (1.353)26—aligns metaphorically with that of the typical revenant of exemplum and chronicle: the embodied dead who returns seeking suffrage from the living, unable to advance its own cause in the afterlife without the intercession of its earthly survivors.

25 Barney writes that in contrast to Criseyde, who weighs alternatives and then acts decisively, and Pandarus, who “leaps from practical solution to practical solution, cheerfully contradicting himself,” Troilus “performs a mental activity that we may call thinking. ... [but his] intellect and his desire are at cross purposes, and he constantly complains—except when he has his love—of disorientation. ... Troilus is trapped by love, constrained in his body, bound to the wheel of Fortune, and enmeshed in the cloth of destiny” (“Troilus Bound” 2–3, 13). Windeatt points out that Troilus’s “reliance on the game being conducted through Pandarus leaves him in a state removed from direct action, risk, and responsibility which fits with the passive disposition of his character” (276).

26 For an important, extended rumination on the poem’s avian thematics, see Shoaf, “Troilus and Criseyde: The Falcon in the Mew.”

191

(Chaucer’s) Troilus’s Refinement

The intensity of Troilus’s consciousness of his own interiority does not, however, constitute a diminution of Troilus on Chaucer’s part. Rather, it serves to broaden and deepen the character of the Trojan prince over and above the depictions offered by

Chaucer’s progenitors.27 By deadening Troilus, Chaucer accomplishes the paradoxical feat of making him seem more alive than the iterations of the character who have come before, be they Benoît’s, Guido’s, or Boccaccio’s. The principal effect of Chaucer’s writing of Troilus as a character who is relentlessly fascinated with, in fact convinced of, his own death, then, is that such focus and conviction, born out of a fully-realized psychic interiority, serves to make him more recognizably human and curiously modern.

It is not only accurate but appropriate, I think, to consider this achievement Chaucer’s principle refinement of the character of Troilus; were the multitude of instances in which

Troilus is absolutely convinced of the ontological fact of his own death to be abstracted from TR, it would not be possible. But if Troilus’s propensity to plumb the depths of his consciousness coupled with his assuredness of his status as a man who “lives” at the very edge of his own death represents his characterological refinement, what then, it is fair to ask, completes his equation as I have laid it out at the beginning of this chapter?

At what point is Troilus transformed?

As I have shown, Troilus—in terms of his place within the textual tradition of the

Troy story—is always already dead. He has been most ill-served by Boccaccio, who, as

Edmondson points out, leaves the prince both physically and symbolically uninterred at the close of Il Filostrato, stranded in the zone between two deaths. Chaucer’s Troilus

27 Indeed, Boitani writes that Chaucer's “lyrical, meditative, paralyzed Troilus” nearly matches Hamlet in his considerations and investigations of his own infinite space (“Eros and Thanatos” 285).

192

seems to recognize that he is neither alive nor dead, neither here nor there, as evidenced by the myriad references to his own death that he and others make at regular intervals throughout TR. He has been allowed a mere glimpse of what it means to feel truly alive in a few brief stanzas of Book 3, when he finally attains the love of Criseyde, only to lose both again to the political maneuverings of the Trojan state, the courtly yet somehow base interventions of Diomede, and of course, Criseyde’s own shifting affections. In Book 5, Troilus finally becomes Death itself, ranging far outside the walls to terrorize and strike down seemingly infinite numbers of Greek soldiers in his hunt for the one Greek responsible for usurping Criseyde’s love (5.1751–57, 1800–02). But this evolution, from embodied dead to the embodiment of Death, is not yet the transformation to which I refer. Troilus’s transformation is effected once he meets the one Greek capable of overmatching him in battle, the terrible Achilles, who, the narrator tells us, cuts him down without remorse (5.1806). This moment, of course, is where

Boccaccio ends his poetic involvement with Troilo, his own troubled hero. It is not so with Chaucer.

Achilles’ Gift

While Achilles wields his spear “despitously”—with cruelty and disdain—he actually does Troilus a great service. The prince’s desire to find his way back to life fled with the realization that not only was his lover unable to return to Troy but that she no longer desired to do so. The strike of Achilles threshes the chaff of Troilus’s deadened earthly flesh away from his “lighte goost,” allowing its ethereal form to ascend far above the blood-drenched fields to the “holughnesse of the eighthe spere,” where he harkens, we presume with wonder, to the celestial harmony—the music of the spheres (5.1807–

13). In essence, Achilles’ wrathful act is the catalyst that finally transacts revenant

193

Troilus’s passage out of the earthly plane and into what lies beyond. In this pivotal moment near the end of Book 5, Chaucer properly charges Achilles with the responsibility for enacting Troilus’s ultimate refinement, which allows Troilus’s transformation to take place when he ascends to the eighth sphere, surveys those who grieve for his loss below, and, on the threshold of the infinite, laughs at the triviality of all earthly doings. While the same act occurs in Il Filostrato, there it is merely one soldier murdering another, as Boccaccio writes, “like so many thousands before.” Boccaccio’s narrator abandons the prince’s body at the scene, denying Troilus the symbolic closure of his role in the Troy story that would have been brought about by depicting the interment of his physical remains. He does so in order to turn his gaze inward, reflecting on the loss of his beloved in an act of narrative usurpation that is somewhere between narcissistically untoward and emotionally monstrous. The narrator of the Filostrato’s immediate abandonment of Troilus’s body and his redirection of his own and the reader’s attention here robs Troilus’s death of its symbolic function and import: rather than it being the catalyst for the prince’s characterological refinement, it simply turns him into so much dead meat. Chaucer, however, recognizes the potential narratological and symbolic power of the act and the moment. Because he shows us the escape of

Troilus’s “light ghost” from the dross of his earthbound body at the moment of his death, he transforms Achilles’ act from one of simple murder to one of liberation: for it is the spear of Achilles that finally frees Troilus from the zone between two deaths in which

Boccaccio’s narrator has stranded him.

“Th’ende is every tales strength”: At the Heart of the Revenant’s Desire

Finally freed from the purgatorial zone between two deaths, what is the destination of Troilus’s spirit—that is to say, his soul? He ascends to the “holughnesse”

194

or concavity of the eighth sphere, but this is a mere way station.28 Not only can he pause here to listen to the sweet music of stellar and planetary movement, but he is also afforded the chance to view earth from on high and, from this literally and figuratively lofty perspective, to finally understand its smallness and relative insignificance (5.1814–19). In his last act in the poem prior to passing out of it, Troilus looks down upon his slain body and those who mourn him and laughs at the earthly folly of caring for the dead (5.1820–22). Then, issuing a condemnation of human lust— whether because it is ultimately futile or because it impedes humankind’s progress toward whatever afterlife it is that he is experiencing and is about to experience is unclear—he proceeds onward to wherever it is that Mercury, in charge of deciding the destinations of pagan souls in the afterlife, decides that he must (5.1823, 1826–27). I employ the necessarily vague “whatever” and “wherever” in the preceding sentence because Chaucer’s narrator doesn’t know where that is, and because he does not, neither do we. Where Troilus ends up, exactly, remains something of a mystery.

There is and has long been a wing of TR criticism devoted solely to debating whether Troilus’s ending is a pagan or a Christian one—and, beyond this relatively simple distinction, whether the impassioned, contemptus mundi rejection of worldly ills

(eros, predominantly) to which the narrator gives voice following his protagonist’s exit points to the possibility that Chaucer and the narrator he creates are at odds about what

28 Regarding Troilus’s exact location within the medieval cosmological apprehension, Barney in a note to his edition of the text writes: “The details are controversial, but probably the sphere is that of the fixed stars (rather than the moon), from which Dante also looked back at the earth, and everich element probably means ‘every movable astral body (the planets, sun, and moon)’ rather than each of the four elements (earth, water, air, fire)” (423n6).

195

it all means.29 If this perceived disagreement between the poet and his (perhaps) representative voice-persona in the poem seems narratologically paradoxical, then that may be precisely its desired effect. After all, one of Chaucer’s favorite gambits is to employ the medieval “poetic modesty” topos—in which the writer claims that he is but a simple composer of verse, not a thinking man, and so cannot predict the ramifications for the world outside the text that result from the actions of his characters within it—in order, ironically, to create complexity and ambiguity of meaning.30 After three decades of critical wrangling over the question of whether Troilus’s ascent to the firmament and his escort into the afterlife by Mercury constitutes a true (viz., a Christian) apotheosis, it seems to me that to pin down the exact character of his final moments in the poem as

Christian or pagan does not particularly matter. What matters is that long-suffering

Troilus finally ascends: spiraling upward out of Troy, out of the traditional homology that pairs him, ever diminutive, with the doomed, ancient city from which he takes his name.

At the heart of the revenant’s desire is, at long last, to depart the void of the middle distance, to be freed from suffering and despair, and to achieve grace. By the end of TR, Chaucer’s much-refined Troilus is transformed. He is released from the living death of his existence within the poem. Beyond its confines, in the broader tradition of the literature of Troy, he has achieved another kind of ascendency, a supremacy of character that will not see an equal in other writers’ versions of his story. If it is true that, as Pandarus tells Criseyde much earlier, “th’ende is every tales strength” (2.260), then—despite the irony embedded in the quotation and its context—the cathartic end of

29 See, for example, Bloomfield, “Distance and Predestination” (19–21, 26); Donaldson (85–101); Conlee (27, 36); Gallagher (44–66); Steadman (esp. Chapter VII); Kirk (257–59); Pugh (395–96). 30 See Donaldson (84–86).

196

the prince and his “double sorwe” (1.1) indeed serves to strengthen Chaucer’s treatment of the tale of Troy. Whether or not Troilus’s transformation constitutes an apotheosis, in it, both he and we may find something not unlike grace.

197

APPENDIX EVERY LINE REFERENCE LINKING TROILUS AND DEATH IN TROILUS AND CRISEYDE

The following represents every instance in which Chaucer links Troilus and death throughout the complete text of TR (quotations are from Barney’s edition). I provide this data as further primary textual support for a key element of the argument of Chapter 5: that Chaucer envisages a Troilus who is so closely associated with his own death as to perceive himself to be a man who, though he appears to live, is in fact already dead.

* * *

Book.Line(s) Speaker Quotation 1.306–07 Narrator That sodeynly hym thoughte he felte dyen, / … the spirit in his herte 1.411 Troilus O quike deth (living) 1.420 Troilus For hote of cold, for cold of hote, I dye 1.427 Troilus But as hire man I wol ay lyve and sterve (ever live and die) 1.460 Troilus Ye wolden on me rewe, er that I deyde! (take pity, before) 1.461–62 Troilus My dere herte, allas, myn hele and hewe / And lif is lost, but ye wol on me rewe! 1.469 Narrator Lo, here his lif, and from the deth his cure! 1.483 Narrator That the Grekes as the deth him dredde 1.526–27 Troilus God wold I were aryved in the port / Of deth, to which my sorwe wol me lede! 1.535–36 Troilus O mercy, dere herte, and help me from / The deth 1.543 Narrator Til neigh that he in salte teres dreynte (drowned) 1.572–73 Troilus for certes my deyinge / Wol the disese, and I mot nedes deye 1.579 Troilus Which cause is of my deth, for sorowe and thought 1.600 Troilus Yet wole I telle it, though myn herte brest (should burst) 1.606 Troilus That streight unto the deth myn herte sailleth 1.608–09 Troilus That to ben slayn it were a gretter joie / To me than kyng of Grece ben and Troye 1.616 Troilus And lat me sterve, unknowe, of my destresse 1.723 Narrator But long he ley as stylle as he ded were 1.726–28 Narrator in feere / Was Pandarus, lest that in frenesie / [Troilus] sholde falle, or elles soone dye 1.758 Troilus Ek I nyl nat ben cured; I wol deye 1.799–800 Pandarus What may she demen oother of thy deeth, / If thow thus deye, and she not why it is (knows not) 1.805 Pandarus ‘The wrecche is ded, the devel have his bones!’

198

Book.Line(s) Speaker Quotation 1.823 Narrator That for to slen hymself myght he nat wynne 1.825 Narrator And of his deth his lady naught to wite (would not be to blame [if he were to take his own life]) 1.875 Narrator And wel neigh with the word for feere he deide 1.1014 Troilus Now blisful Venus helpe, er that I sterve 1.1034 Troilus For dredeles me were levere dye (beyond doubt I would rather) 1.1053 Troilus My lif, my deth, hol in thyn hond I leye 1.1057 Troilus To hire that to the deth me may comande 1.1083 Narrator Dede were his japes and his cruelte 2.201 Pandarus He was hire deth, and sheld and lif for us 2.319–20 Pandarus The noble Troilus, so loveth the, / That, but ye helpe, it wol his bane be (destruction) 2.322 Pandarus Doth what yow lest to make hym lyve or deye 2.323 Pandarus But if ye late hym deyen, I wol sterve 2.334–36 Pandarus I se hym dyen, ther he goth upryght, / And hasten hym with al his fulle myght / For to ben slayn, if his fortune assente 2.339 Pandarus That of his deth yow liste nought to recche (are pleased to care nothing) 2.384–85 Pandarus So lat youre daunger sucred ben a lite, / That of his deth ye be naught for to wite (Let your haughtiness be sweetened a little) 2.432–34 Pandarus I se wel that ye sette lite of us, / Or of our deth! Allas, I woful wrecche! / Might he yet lyve, of me is nought to recche (you care little for us; If only he may live, care nothing of what happens to me) 2.439 Pandarus But sith I se my lord mot nedes dye 2.441 Pandarus That wikkedly ye don us bothe deye (both Troilus and Pandarus) 2.446 Pandarus For certeyn I wol deye as soone as he 2.487 Criseyde Of yow, though that ye sterven bothe two 2.536 Pandarus Thorugh which I woot that I moot nedes deyen (This line is reported by Pandarus as having been spoken by Troilus, but may be part of an invented episode) 2.566 Pandarus Unnethes myghte I fro the deth hym kepe 2.1050 Troilus Than were I ded: ther myght it nothing weyve 2.1074–75 Narrator So hardy was to hire to write, and seyde / That love it made, or elles most he die (brave; That love made him) (These lines are paraphrased by the narrator as having been included by Troilus in his letter to Criseyde) 2.1127 Pandarus He may nat longe lyven for his peyne 2.1152 Pandarus And whethir that he lyve or elles sterve 2.1209 Pandarus Of his good wille, and doth hym nat to deye (cause) 2.1279 Pandarus A womman that were of his deth to wite

199

Book.Line(s) Speaker Quotation 2.1310–11 Pandarus Who is in his bed so soone / Iburied thus? 2.1509 Pandarus ‘Yet hadde I levere unwist for sorwe die’ (Pandarus is here telling Troilus how not to think during his encounter with Criseyde) 2.1530 Troilus So that wel neigh I sterve for the peyne 2.1593–94 Narrator For who is that ne wolde hire glorifie, / To mowen swich a knyght don lyve or dye? (To be able to cause) (The narrator is here speaking of Criseyde) 2.1666 Pandarus God have thi soule, ibrought have I thi beere! (bier) 2.1736 Pandarus Sle naught this man, that hath for yow this peyne! 2.1754–55 Troilus O Lord, right now renneth my sort / Fully to deye, or han anon comfort! (destiny) 3.63 Pandarus Lo, here is she that is youre deth to wite 3.78–79 Narrator This Troilus, that herde his lady preye / Of lordship hym, wax neither quyk ne ded (was neither alive nor dead) 3.100–04 Troilus I have … / … / Ben youres al, … / And shal til that I, woful wight, be grave! (be buried) 3.108 Troilus That shal I wreke upon myn owen lif 3.110 Troilus If with my deth youre wreththe may apese (wrath may be appeased) 3.112 Troilus Now recche I nevere how soone that I deye 3.119 Pandarus Or sle us both at ones er ye wende (before you go) 3.123 Pandarus For Goddes love, and doth hym nought to deye! 3.153 Pandarus But youre honour, and sen hym almost sterve 3.282 Pandarus The preie ich eft, althogh thow shuldest deye (I entreat you again) 3.362 Troilus How neigh the deth for wo thow fownde me 3.374–75 Troilus And if I lye, Achilles with his spere / Myn herte cleve 3.379 Troilus That rather deye I wolde, and determyne (come to an end) 3.388–89 Troilus al myghte I now for the / A thousand time on a morwe sterve (die in one morning) 3.392 Troilus For evere more, unto my lyves ende 3.707 Troilus And evere bet and bet shal, til I sterve 3.891–92 Pandarus Ye, nece myn, that ryng moste han a stoon / That myghte dede men alyve maken 3.905 Pandarus That with his deth he wol his sorwes wreke 3.1006–08 Criseyde For therwith mene I fynaly the peyne / That halt youre herte and myn in hevynesse / Fully to slen (mean, intend; holds; slay) 3.1069–71 Narrator But wel he felt aboute his herte crepe, / For everi tere which that Criseyde asterte, / The crampe of deth to streyne hym by the herte (escaped from; constrict) 3.1081 Narrator He felte he nas but deed (was nothing other than) 3.1100–01 Pandarus Nece, but ye helpe us now, / Allas, youre owen Troilus is

200

Book.Line(s) Speaker Quotation lorn! (unless; lost) 3.1116 Narrator And to deliveren hym fro bittre bondes (bitter bonds [of death]) 3.1171 Narrator Lest she be wroth, hym thoughte his herte deyde (it seemed to him that his heart died) 3.1240–45 Narrator And right as he that seth his deth yshapen, / And dyen mot, … / … / And from his deth is brought … / … / Was Troilus (sees; destined) 3.1270 Troilus … ther I likely was to sterve 3.1292 Troilus To do me lyve, if that yow liste, or sterve (cause; it please you) 3.1301 Troilus For love of God, lat sle me with the dede (deed) 3.1483 Troilus That I am ded anon, but I retourne (unless) 3.1607 Troilus Whos am I al, and shal, tyl that I deye (shall be) 3.1613–14 Troilus For thorugh thyn help I lyve, / Or elles ded hadde I ben many a day 3.1697 Narrator For which hem thoughte feelen dethis wownde (they seemed to feel death’s) 4.151 Narrator As he that with tho wordes wel neigh deyde 4.162–63 Narrator Love hym made al prest to don hire byde, / And rather dyen than she sholde go 4.233–35 Narrator and tho this sorwful man / Upon his beddes syde adown him sette, / Ful lik a ded ymage, pale and wan 4.239–42 Narrator Right as the wylde bole bygynneth sprynge, / Now her, now ther, idarted to the herte, / And of his deth roreth in compleynynge, / Right so he gan aboute the chaumbre sterte (bull [in a sacrifice]; lunge; pierced; lunged) 4.250 Troilus O deth, allas, why nyltow do me deye? (cause me to) 4.274–280 Troilus Allas, Fortune, … / … / Why ne haddestowe … / … / … slayn myself, … / I, combre-world, that may of nothyng serve, / But evere dye and nevere fulli sterve (I, an encumbrance on the world, who am good for nothing) 4.300–01 Troilus But ende I wol, as Edippe, in derknesse / My sorwful lif, and dyen in distresse (Oedipus) 4.305–06 Troilus O soule, lurkynge in this wo, unneste, / Fle forth out of myn herte, and let it breste (leave your nest) 4.319 Troilus But whan myn herte dieth 4.322 Troilus Forthi no fors is, though the body sterve (Therefore it doesn’t matter) 4.327 Troilus But whan ye comen by my sepulture 4.376 Troilus Lo, Pandare, I am ded, withouten more (further ado) 4.428–29 Narrator Thise wordes seyde he for the nones alle, / To help his frend, lest he for sorwe deyde (for the nonce) 4.432 Narrator But Troilus, that neigh for sorwe deyde (nearly)

201

Book.Line(s) Speaker Quotation 4.440 Troilus But do me rather sterve anon-right here (forthwith) 4.444 Troilus Shal han me holly hires til that I deye ([She] Shall have me wholly hers) 4.447 Troilus But as hire man I wol ay lyve and sterve 4.455 Troilus thow sleest me with thi speche! 4.470–71 Troilus The deth may wel out of my brest departe / The lif 4.474 Troilus Whan I am ded, I wol go wone in pyne (dwell in torment) 4.500 Troilus Withouten wordes mo, I wol be ded 4.501–04 Troilus O deth, that endere art of sorwes alle, / Com now, syn I so ofte after the calle; / For sely is that deth, soth for to seyne, / That ofte ycleped, cometh and endeth peyne (you who bring to an end; happy; invoked) 4.505–11 Troilus Wel wot I, whil my lyf was in quyete, / Er thow me slowe, I wolde have yeven hire; / But now thi comynge is to me so swete / That in this world I nothing so desire. / O deth, syn with this sorwe I am a-fyre, / Thou other do me anoon yn teris drenche, / Or with thi colde strok myn hete quenche (slew; paid ransom [to death]; on fire; May you either cause; drown; heat) 4.515–16 Troilus Delyvere now the world—so dostow right— / Of me 4.517 Troilus for tyme is that I sterve (it’s time; die) 4.524 Pandarus What! Parde, rather than my felawe deye (By God) 4.565 Troilus And me were levere ded than hire diffame (I’d rather be; defame) 4.580 Troilus So weilaway, whi nyl myn herte breste? 4.595 Pandarus [Better to restrain Criseyde forcefully and suffer blame] Than sterve here as a gnat, withouten wounde 4.623 Pandarus And if thow deye a martyr, go to hevene! 4.636 Troilus At shorte wordes, though I deyen sholde (To speak briefly) 4.880–82 Pandarus But how this cas dooth Troilus moleste, / That may non erthly mannes tonge seye— / As he that shortly shapith hym to deye (causes harm to Troilus; prepares himself) 4.884 Pandarus That into litel both it had us slawe (nearly/too soon; slain) 4.919 Pandarus He wolde hymselven sle (slay) 4.920 Pandarus platly he wol deye (plainly) 4.950–51 Narrator Ful tendrely he preyde and made his mone, / To doon hym sone out of this world to pace (moan, complaint; pass) 4.955 Narrator That outrely he shop hym for to deye (utterly; prepared himself) 4.1081 Troilus Rewe on my sorwe: or do me deyen sone (Have pity; cause) 4.1185–86 Narrator His swerd anon out of his shethe he twighte / Hymself to slen (drew; slay) 4.1189–90 Narrator Syn Love and cruel Fortune it ne wolde / That in this worlde

202

Book.Line(s) Speaker Quotation he lenger lyven sholde (didn’t wish) 4.1197 Troilus Ther shal no deth me fro my lady twynne (separate) 4.1200–01 Troilus Shal nevere lover seyn that Troilus / Dar nat for fere with his lady dye 4.1205 Troilus And Atropos, make redy thow my beere (bier) 4.1211 Narrator With sword at herte, [Troilus was] al redy for to deye 4.1228 Narrator [Troilus told Criseyde] how hymself therwith he wolde han slawe (slain) 4.1234 Criseyde “Ye wolde han slayn youreself anon?” quod she 4.1238 Criseyde After youre deth … 4.1446 Troilus I wol myselven sle if that ye drecche (slay; delay) 4.1447 Troilus But of my deeth though litel be to recche (care about) 4.1475–76 Troilus And Troilus, of whom ye nyl han routhe, / Shal causeles so sterven in his trouthe! (won’t have pity; die) 4.1482 Troilus Til we be slayn and down our walles torn 4.1498 Troilus So thenk I n’am but ded, withouten more 4.1516 Troilus Til into tyme that we shal ben dede (until) 4.1657 Troilus Was fals, ne nevere shal til that I dye 4.1692 Narrator As he that felte dethes cares colde 4.1700 Narrator Which that his soule out of his herte rente (tore) 5.6–7 Narrator Troilus shal dwellen forth in pyne / Til Lachesis his thred [of life] no longer twyne (torment; may spin no longer) 5.40 Troilus Were it nat bet atones for to dye (better at once) 5.84 Troilus Now holde youre day, and do me nat to deye (keep your appointment; cause) 5.204–05 Narrator And ther his sorwes that he spared hadde / He yaf an issue large, and “Deth!” he criede (restrained; gave full vent to) 5.227 Troilus As wolde God ich hadde as tho ben sleyn! 5.231 Troilus Se how I dey, ye nyl me nat rescowe! (if you will; rescue) 5.297 Troilus I trowe I shal nat lyven til to-morwe (believe) 5.299 Troilus To the devysen of my sepulture (you describe; burial) 5.302–03 Troilus But of the fir and flaumbe funeral / In which my body brennan shal to glede (burn; embers) 5.305 Troilus At my vigil, I prey the, take good hede (wake) 5.309 Troilus The poudre in which myn herte ybrend shal torne (ashes; burnt) 5.318 Troilus Al certeynly that I mot nedes dye (must needs) 5.530 Narrator Hym thoughte his sorwful herte braste a-two (would burst) 5.545 Troilus and I to dye 5.559 Narrator [Troilus told his sorrow] So pitously and with so ded an hewe (hue) 5.574 Troilus That to the deth myn herte is to gire holde (beholden) 5.593 Troilus And lyve and dye I wol in thy byleve (believe) 5.627 Narrator [Troilus imagines that everyone he passes in the street

203

Book.Line(s) Speaker Quotation thinks] I am right sory Troilus wol deye 5.641 Troilus Toward my deth with wynd in steere I saille (astern) 5.1211 Narrator But for to shape hym soone for to dye (prepare himself) 5.1215 Narrator For which, by cause he wolde soone dye (because he wished) 5.1231–32 Narrator [Troilus] seyde he felte a grevous maladie / Aboute his herte, and fayn he wolde dye (gladly) 5.1246 Troilus I n’am but ded; ther nys noon other bote (remedy) 5.1272 Troilus Myselven slowh alwey than thus to pleyne ([It would be better that] I slew myself at any rate rather than to lament thus) 5.1273 Troilus For thorugh the deth my wo sholde han an ende 5.1370 Troilus [I am] Al redy out my woful gost to dryve (spirit, life) 5.1393 Troilus That deth may make an ende of al my were (war, struggle) 5.1400 Troilus With hope, or deth, delivereth me fro peyne 5.1410 Troilus But wheither that ye do me lyve or deye (cause) 5.1413 Troilus As she that lif or deth may me comande! (As a woman who) 5.1418 Troilus The day in which me clothen shal my grave (clothe, cover) 5.1568 Narrator Ful ofte a day he bad his herte breste (bade; burst) 5.1648 Narrator Of hire for whom he wende for to dye (thought) 5.1670–71 Narrator And after deth, withouten wordes moore, / Ful faste he cride, his reste hym to restore (to) 5.1685–86 Troilus So cruel wende I noughte youre herte, ywis, / To sle me thus! (thought; slay) 5.1718 Troilus Myn owen deth in armes wol I seche (seek out) 5.1763–64 Narrator But natheles, Fortune it naught ne wolde / Of oothers hond that eyther [Troilus or Diomede] deyen sholde (the other’s; had to die) 5.1802 Narrator For thousandes [of Greeks Troilus’s] hondes maden deye (caused to die) 5.1806 Narrator Despitously hym slough the fierse Achille (Cruelly he was slain by) 5.1807 Narrator And whan that he was slayn in this manere 5.1820 Narrator Ther he was slayn his lokyng down he caste (Where; gaze) 5.1822 Narrator Of hem that wepten for his deth so faste (wept) 5.1834 Narrator As I have told, and in this wise he deyde (manner)

204

LIST OF REFERENCES

Abbate, Francesca. Troy, Unincorporated. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 2012.

Allen, Rosamund. “The Awntyrs off Arthure: jests and jousts.” Romance Reading on the Book: Essays on Medieval Narrative Presented to Maldwyn Mills. Ed. Jennifer Fellows et al. Cardiff: U of Wales P, 1996. 129–42.

Andrew, Malcolm, and Ronald Waldron, ed. The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript: Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Exeter: U of Exeter P, 1996.

Ariès, Philippe. The Hour of Our Death. Trans. Helen Weaver. New York: Vintage, 2008.

Arthur, Karen. “A TACT Analysis of the Language of Death in Troilus and Criseyde.” Computer-Based Chaucer Studies. Ed. Ian Lancashire. CCH Working Papers 3. Toronto: Centre for Computing in the Humanities, U of Toronto, 1993. 67–87.

Arthur, Ross G., ed. Three Arthurian Romances: Poems from Medieval France. London: Everyman, 1996.

Ashley, Kathleen M. “‘Trawthe’ and Temporality: The Violation of Contracts and Conventions in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” Assays. Vol. IV. Ed. Peggy A. Knapp. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1987. 3–24.

Barber, Paul. Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1988.

Barney, Stephen A. “Troilus Bound.” Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde “Subgit to alle Poesye”: Essays in Criticism. Ed. R. A. Shoaf and Catherine S. Cox. Binghamton, NY: Pegasus, 1992. 1–16.

Barron, W. R. J. Trawthe and Treason: The Sin of Gawain Reconsidered. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1980.

Bartlett, Robert. England Under the Norman and Angevin Kings 1075–1225. Oxford: Clarendon, 2000.

Benson, Larry D. Art and Tradition in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1965.

Besserman, Lawrence. “Ideology, Antisemitism, and Chaucer’s ‘Prioress’s Tale.’” The Chaucer Review 36.1 (2001): 48–72.

205

Bishop, Kyle William. American Zombie Gothic: The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of the Walking Dead in Popular Culture. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2010. Cited in Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, "Undead: A Zombie Ontology," Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 23.3 (2012), 407–08.

Blake, N. F. Caxton and His World. New York: London House and Maxwell, 1969.

_____. William Caxton and English Literary Culture. London and Rio Grande, OH: The Hambledon Press, 1991.

Blanch, Robert J., and Julian N. Wasserman. From Pearl to Gawain: Forme to Fynisment. Gainesville et al.: U of Florida P, 1995.

_____. “Medieval Contracts and Covenants: The Legal Coloring of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” Neophilologus 68 (1984): 598–610.

Blenkner, Louis. “Sin, Psychology, and the Structure of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” Studies in Philology 74.4 (Oct. 1977): 354–87.

Bloch, R. Howard. “Critical Communities and the Shape of the Medievalist’s Desire: A Response to Judith Ferster and Louise Fradenburg.” Exemplaria 2.1 (March 1990): 203–20.

Bloomfield, Morton W. "Distance and Predestination in Troilus and Criseyde." PMLA 72.1 (Mar. 1957): 14–26.

_____. “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: An Appraisal.” Critical Studies of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Ed. Donald R. Howard and Christian Zacher. Notre Dame and London: U of Notre Dame P, 1968. 24–55.

Boitani, Piero. “Antiquity and Beyond: The Death of Troilus.” The European Tragedy of Troilus. Ed. Piero Boitani. Oxford and New York: Clarendon/Oxford UP, 1989. 1– 20.

_____. “Eros and Thanatos: Cressida, Troilus, and the Modern Age.” The European Tragedy of Troilus. Ed. Piero Boitani. Oxford and New York: Clarendon/Oxford UP, 1989. 281–305.

Borroff, Marie, ed. and trans. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Patience, and Pearl: Verse Translations. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Co., 2001.

Brewer, D. S. “Courtesy and the Gawain-Poet.” Patterns of Love and Courtesy: Essays in Memory of C. S. Lewis. Ed. John Lawlor. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1966. 54–85.

Bridbury, A. R. “The Black Death.” The Economic History Review, New Series 26.4 (1973): 577–92.

206

Burrow, J. A. A Reading of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1966.

Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge, 1993. Quoted in Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Monster Culture: Seven Theses,” in Monster Theory: Reading Culture, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 1996), 20.

Caciola, Nancy. “Wraiths, Revenants and Ritual in Medieval Culture.” Past & Present 152 (Aug. 1996): 3–45.

Calabrese, Michael. “Performing the Prioress: ‘Conscience’ and Responsibility in Studies of Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale.” Texas Studies in Language and Literature 44.1 (Spring 2002): 66–91.

Cannon, J. A. “Jews.” The Oxford Companion to British History. Ed. John Cannon. Oxford/New York: Oxford UP, 1997. 533–34.

Caxton, William, trans. The Book of the Ordre of Chyualry, Translated and Printed by William Caxton from a French Version of Ramón Lull’s “Le Libre del Orde de Cauayleria” together with Adam Loutfut’s Scottish Transcript (Harleian MS. 6149). Ed. Alfred T. P. Byles. London: Early English Text Society (Oxford UP), 1926.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Riverside Chaucer. Ed. Larry D. Benson et al. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.

_____. Troilus and Criseyde. Ed. Barry Windeatt. London et al.: Penguin, 2003.

_____. Troilus and Criseyde. Ed. R. A. Shoaf. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State U P, 2000.

_____. Troilus and Criseyde. Ed. Stephen A. Barney. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Co., 2006.

Chism, Christine. Alliterative Revivals. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2002.

Chodorow, Nancy. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: U of California P, 1978.

Christie, Deborah, and Sarah Juliet Lauro, ed. Better Off Dead: The Evolution of the Zombie as Post-Human. New York: Fordham UP, 2011.

Clark, S. L., and Julian N. Wasserman. “The Passing of the Seasons and the Apocalyptic in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” South Central Review 3.1 (Spring 1986): 5–22.

207

Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “Monster Culture: Seven Theses.” Monster Theory: Reading Culture. Ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 1996. 3–25.

_____. "Undead (A Zombie Oriented Ontology)." Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 23.3 (2012): 397–412.

Cokayne, George Edward. Complete Peerage of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain and the United Kingdom, Extant, Extinct or Dormant (A to Bo). 1. London: George Bell & Sons, 1887.

Conlee, John W. “The Meaning of Troilus’s Ascension to the Eighth Sphere.” The Chaucer Review 7.1 (1972): 27–36.

Curtius, Ernst Robert. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Trans. Willard Trask. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1983.

Daniell, Christopher. Death and Burial in Medieval England, 1066–1550. Routledge: London and New York, 1997.

Dickinson, John. “Introduction: The Place of the Policraticus in the Development of Political Thought.” The Statesman’s Book of John of Salisbury. New York: Russell & Russell, 1963. xvii–lxxxii.

Donaldson, E. Talbot. Speaking of Chaucer. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1970.

Dove, Mary. “Gawain and the Blasme de femmes Tradition.” Medium Aevum 41 (1972): 20–26.

Dressler, Rachel Ann. Of Armor and Men: The Chivalric Rhetoric of Three English Knights’ Effigies. Aldershot, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004.

Dundes, Alan. “Preface.” The Blood Libel Legend: A Casebook in Anti-Semitic Folklore. Ed. Alan Dundes. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1991. vii-viii.

Durham, Lonnie J. “Love and Death in Troilus and Criseyde.” The Chaucer Review 3.1 (Summer 1968): 1–11.

Edmondson, George Thomas. Troilus and Criseyde Between Two Deaths. Diss. University of California-Los Angeles, 2003. Ann Arbor: UMI, 2003.

Excalibur. Dir. John Boorman. Perf. Nigel Terry, Helen Mirren, and Nicholas Clay. Orion Pictures Corporation, 1981. Cited in Margaret Robson, “Local Hero: Gawain and the Politics of Arthurianism,” Arthurian Literature XXIII, ed. Keith Busby (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006), 86.

208

Federico, Sylvia. New Troy: Fantasies of Empire in the Late Middle Ages. Medieval Cultures Series. Ed. Rita Copeland, Barbara A. Hanawalt, and David Wallace. Vol. 36. Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 2003.

Finch, Casey, trans. The Complete Works of the Pearl Poet. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and Oxford: U of California P, 1993.

Flax, Jane. “The Conflict between Nurturance and Autonomy in Mother-Daughter Relationships and within Feminism.” Feminist Studies 4.2 (June 1978): 171–89.

Fleischman, Suzanne. “‘Jaufre’ or Chivalry Askew: Social Overtones of Parody in Arthurian Romance.” Viator 12 (1981): 101–29.

Foley, Michael. “Gawain’s Two Confessions Reconsidered.” The Chaucer Review 9.1 (Summer 1974): 73–79.

Fox, Denton. “Introduction.” Twentieth Century Interpretations of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Ed. Denton Fox. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968. 1–12.

Fradenburg, Louise O. “Criticism, Anti-Semitism, and the Prioress’s Tale.” Exemplaria 1.1 (Spring 1989): 69–116.

Freud, Sigmund. “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” 1920. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (hereafter SE). 24 vols. Ed. James Strachey. Trans. James Strachey et al. London: Hogarth, 1953–74. 18:3– 64.

_____. “Female Sexuality.” 1931. SE 21:223–43.

_____. “Negation.” 1925. SE 19:235–39.

_____. “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through.” 1914. SE 12:147–56.

_____. Civilization and Its Discontents. 1930. SE 21:64–145.

Gallagher, Joseph E. “Theology and Intention in Chaucer’s Troilus.” The Chaucer Review 7.1 (1972): 44–66.

Ganim, John M. “Disorientation, Style, and Consciousness in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” PMLA 91.3 (May 1976): 376–84.

Gates, Robert J. The Awntyrs off Arthure at the Terne Wathelyne: A Critical Edition. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1969.

Geoffrey of Monmouth. The History of the Kings of Britain. Trans. Lewis Thorpe. New York: Penguin, 1966.

209

von Gierke, Otto Friedrich. Political Theories of the Middle Age. Trans. Frederic William Maitland. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 1987.

Gilles, Sealy. “Love and Disease in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 25 (2005): 157–97.

Gordon, R. K., ed. The Story of Troilus. New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1964.

Gowans, Linda. “Lamenting or Just Grumbling? Arthur’s Nephew Expresses His Discontent.” Arthurian Literature XXIV. Ed. Keith Busby. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2007. 91–103.

Gower, John. Confessio Amantis. Ed. Russell Peck. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1981. Quoted in Patricia Clare Ingham, Sovereign Fantasies: Arthurian Romance and the Making of Britain (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2001), 181.

Green, André. “The Dead Mother.” Trans. Katherine Aubertin. On Private Madness. Madison, CT: International UP, 1986. 142–73.

Guido delle Colone. Historia Destructionis Troiae. Ed. and trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1974. Quoted in George Thomas Edmondson, Troilus and Criseyde Between Two Deaths, diss. University of California-Los Angeles, 2003 (Ann Arbor: UMI, 2003), 55.

Hahn, Thomas. Sir Gawain: Eleven Romances and Tales. Ed. Thomas Hahn. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1995.

Hanna, Ralph III. “The Awntyrs off Arthure: An Interpretation.” Modern Language Quarterly 31 (1970): 275–97.

_____. “Introduction.” The Awntyrs off Arthure at the Terne Wathelyn: An Edition Based on Bodleian Library Ms. Douce 324. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1974. 1–55.

Hanning, Robert W. “Sir Gawain and the Red Herring: The Perils of Interpretation.” Acts of Interpretation: The Text in Its Contexts 700–1600: Essays on Medieval and Renaissance Literature in Honor of E. Talbot Donaldson. Ed. Mary J. Carruthers and Elizabeth D. Kirk. Norman, OK: Pilgrim Books, 1982. 5–23.

Harpold, Terry. “‘Did you get Mathilda from Papa?’: Seduction Fantasy and the Circulation of Mary Shelley’s Mathilda.” Studies in Romanticism 28 (Spring 1989): 49–67.

Haught, Leah. “Ghostly Mothers and Fated Fathers: Gender and Genre in The Awntyrs off Arthure.” Arthuriana 20.1 (2010): 3–24.

Hecker, J. F. C. Die grossen Volkskrankheiten des Mittelalters. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1964. Quoted in Paul Barber, Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1988), 78.

210

Heidegger, Martin. Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Perennial, 2001.

Heng, Geraldine. Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy. New York: Columbia U P, 2003.

Hirsch, Marianne. “A Mother’s Discourse: Incorporation and Repetition in La Princesse de Clèves.” Yale French Studies 62 (1981): 67–87.

Huizinga, Johan. The Waning of the Middle Ages. London: 1924 (no publisher given). Quoted in Dale B. J. Randall, “Was the Green Knight a Fiend?”, Studies in Philology 57.3 (Jul. 1960), 479n1.

Ingham, Patricia Clare. Sovereign Fantasies: Arthurian Romance and the Making of Britain. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2001.

Ingledew, Francis. “The Book of Troy and the Genealogical Construction of History: The Case of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae.” Speculum 69.3 (Jul. 1994): 665–704.

Irigaray, Luce. “And the One Doesn’t Stir without the Other.” Trans. Hélène Vivienne Wenzel. Signs 7.1 (Autumn 1981): 60–67.

Johnston, R. C., and D. D. R. Owen, ed. Two Old French Gauvain Romances. Edinburgh and London: Scottish Academic Press, 1972.

Keen, Maurice. Chivalry. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1984.

Kelly, Thomas E. “Love in the Perlesvaus: Sinful Passion or Redemptive Force?” Romantic Review 66 (1975): 1–12.

Kirk, Elizabeth D. “‘Paradis Stood Formed in Hire Yën’: Courtly Love and Chaucer’s Re- Vision of Dante.” Acts of Interpretation: The Text and Its Contexts 700–1600: Essays in Honor of E. Talbot Donaldson. Ed. Mary J. Carruthers and Elizabeth D. Kirk. Norman, OK: Pilgrim, 1982. 257–77.

Kirshner, Lewis A. “Between Winnicott and Lacan: Reclaiming the Subject of Psychoanalysis.” American Imago 67.3 (Fall 2010): 331–51.

Klausner, David N. “Exempla and The Awntyrs off Arthure.” Mediaeval Studies 34 (1972): 307–25.

Knapp, Peggy A. “Gawain's Quest: Social Conflict and Symbolic Mediation.” Clio 6.3 (1977): 289–306.

Knox, Bernard. “Introduction.” Homer: The Iliad. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin, 1990. 3–64.

211

Kohler, Kaufmann. “Ķiddush ha-Shem.” Jewish Encyclopedia.com: The unedited full- text of the 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia. N.d. 11 March 2014. Available in print as The Jewish Encyclopedia, 12 volumes, edited by Isidore Singer et al. New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1916.

Koppelman, Kate. “The Revenant Logic of the Middle Ages.” 44th International Congress on Medieval Studies. Western Michigan University. Kalamazoo, MI. 8 May 2009. Conference presentation.

Krappe, A. H. “Who Was the Green Knight?” Speculum 13.2 (Apr. 1938): 206–15.

Krishna, Valerie, ed. The Alliterative Morte Arthure: A Critical Edition. New York: Burt Franklin & Co., 1976.

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1982. Quoted in Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Monster Culture: Seven Theses,” in Monster Theory: Reading Culture, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 1996), 20.

Lacan, Jacques. “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience.” 1949. Écrits. Trans. Bruce Fink, Héloïse Fink, and Russell Grigg. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2006. 75–81.

_____. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959– 60. Trans. Dennis Porter. New York: Norton, 1997.

LaCapra, Dominick. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 2001.

Lacy, Norris J. “Preface.” Text and Intertext in Medieval Arthurian Literature. Ed. Norris J. Lacy. New York and London: Garland, 1996. vii–ix.

Lacy, Norris J., and Geoffrey Ashe. The Arthurian Handbook. New York and London: Garland, 1988.

Langmuir, Gavin I. “The Knight’s Tale of Young Hugh of Lincoln.” Speculum 47.3 (July 1972): 459–82.

_____. Toward a Definition of Antisemitism. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: U of California P, 1990.

Leyerle, John. “Conclusion: The Major Themes of Chivalric Literature.” Chivalric Literature: Essays on Relations between Literature and Life in the Later Middle Ages. Ed. Larry D. Benson and John Leyerle. Studies in Medieval Culture XIV. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1980. 131–46; 173–74.

Lindenbaum, Sheila. “The Smithfield Tournament of 1390.” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 20.1 (1990): 1–20.

212

Loomis, Laura Hibbard. “Gawain and the Green Knight.” Critical Studies of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Ed. Donald R. Howard and Christian Zacher. Notre Dame and London: U of Notre Dame P, 1968. 3–23.

Lovecraft, H. P. “Pickman’s Model.” The Best of H. P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre. New York: Del Rey, 1982. 33–44.

Lowe, Virginia A. P. “Folklore as a Unifying Factor in The Awntyrs off Arthure.” Folklore Forum 13 (1980): 199–223.

Lübke, Hermann. “The Aunters of Arthur at the Tern-Wathelan, Teil I: Handschriften, Metrik, Verfasser.” Diss. U of Berlin, 1883.

Lucretius. On the Nature of Things. (No publication information given.) Quoted in Jean- Claude Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1998), 12.

Maddox, Donald. “Generic Intertextuality in Arthurian Literature: The Specular Encounter.” Trans. David S. King. Text and Intertext in Medieval Arthurian Literature. Ed. Norris J. Lacy. New York and London: Garland, 1996. 3–24.

Manning, Stephen. “A Psychological Interpretation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” Critical Studies of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Eds. Donald R. Howard and Christian Zacher. Notre Dame and London: U of Notre Dame P, 1968. 279–94.

Margherita, Gayle. The Romance of Origins: Language and Sexual Difference in Middle English Literature. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania Press, 1994.

Matsuda, Takami. “The Awntyrs off Arthure and the Arthurian History.” Poetica 19 (1984): 48–62.

McAlindon, T. “Magic, Fate, and Providence in Medieval Narrative and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” The Review of English Studies, New Series 16.62 (May 1965): 121–39.

Mead, Margaret. Cooperation and Competition Among Primitive Peoples. New York: (no publisher given), 1937. Quoted in Donald Ward, “Honor and Shame in the Middle Ages: An Open Letter to Lutz Röhrich,” Jahrbuch für Volksliedforschung 27./28. Jahrg., Festschrift für Lutz Röhrich zum 60, Geburtstag (1982/1983), 3.

Moll, Richard J. Before Malory: Reading Arthur in Later Medieval England. Toronto, Buffalo, and London: U of Toronto P, 2003.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Dir. Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones. Perf. Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin. EMI Films, 1975.

213

Moorman, Charles. A Knyght There Was: The Evolution of the Knight in Literature. Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 1967.

Morgan, Gerald. “Medieval Misogyny and Gawain’s Outburst against Women in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” The Modern Language Review 97.2 (Apr. 2002): 265–78.

_____. “The Significance of the Pentangle Symbolism in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” The Modern Language Review 74.4 (Oct. 1979): 769–90.

_____. “The Validity of Gawain's Confession in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” The Review of English Studies, New Series 36.141 (Feb. 1985): 1–18.

Night of the Living Dead. Dir. George A. Romero. Perf. Duane Jones and Judith O’Dea. Continental Distributing, 1968.

“Order of the Garter.” The official website of The British Monarchy. The Royal Household of the United Kingdom. N. d. 9 March 2014.

Owen, D. D. R. “Burlesque Tradition and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” Forum for Modern Language Studies IV (1968): 125–45.

Patterson, Lee. Chaucer and the Subject of History. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1991.

Paxson, James J. “The Semiotics of Character, Trope, and Troilus: The Figural Construction of the Self and the Discourse of Desire in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde.” Desiring Discourse: The Literature of Love, Ovid through Chaucer. Ed. James J. Paxson and Cynthia A. Gravlee. Selinsgrove: Susquehanna UP and London et al.: Associated UPs, 1998. 206–26.

Pearsall, Derek. The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography. Oxford/Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992.

Peristiany, J. G. “Introduction.” Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society. Ed. J. G. Peristiany. The Nature of Human Society Series. Ed. Julian Pitt-Rivers and Ernest Gellner. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1966.

Phillips, Helen. “The Awntyrs off Arthure: Structure and Meaning. A Reassessment.” Arthurian Literature XII (1993): 63–89.

_____. The Awntyrs off Arthure at the Terne Wathelyne (Arthur’s Adventures at Tarn Wadling): A Modern Spelling Edition. Lancaster: U of Lancaster Dept. of English, 1988.

_____. “The Ghost’s Baptism in The Awntyrs off Arthure.” Medium Aevum 58 (1989): 49–58.

214

Platt, Colin. King Death: The Black Death and its aftermath in late-medieval England. Toronto and Buffalo: U of Toronto P, 1996.

Posner, Richard A. “Against Ethical Criticism.” Philosophy and Literature 21.1 (1997): 1–27.

Pratt, Robert A. “A Note on Chaucer’s Lollius.” Modern Language Notes 65 (1950): 183–87.

Pugh, Tison. “Christian Revelation and the Cruel Game of Courtly Love in Troilus and Criseyde.” The Chaucer Review 39.4 (2005): 379–401.

Puhvel, Martin. “Art and the Supernatural in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” Arthurian Literature V. Ed. Richard Barber. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1985. 1– 69.

Putter, Ad. An Introduction to the Gawain-Poet. London and New York: Longman, 1996.

_____. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and French Arthurian Romance. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995.

Randall, Dale B. J. “Was the Green Knight a Fiend?” Studies in Philology 57.3 (Jul. 1960): 479–91.

Reichardt, Paul F. “Gawain and the Image of the Wound.” PMLA 99.2 (Mar. 1984): 154– 61.

Rex, Richard. “The Sins of Madame Eglentyne” and Other Essays on Chaucer. Newark: U of Delaware P and London: Associated UPs, 1995.

Rigg, A. G., trans. “The Story of the Alma Redemptoris Mater.” The Canterbury Tales: Fifteen Tales and the General Prologue. By Geoffrey Chaucer. Ed. V. A. Kolve and Glending Olson. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2005. 439–44.

Roach, William, ed. Continuations of the Old French Perceval of Chrétien de Troyes. Vol. I. The First Continuation: Redaction of MSS TVD. Philadelphia, 1949. Quoted in Ad Putter, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and French Arthurian Romance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 110.

Robinson, F. N., ed. The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Boston: (no publisher given) 1957. Quoted in Dale B. J. Randall, “Was the Green Knight a Fiend?”, Studies in Philology 57.3 (Jul. 1960), 487.

Robson, Margaret. “Local Hero: Gawain and the Politics of Arthurianism.” Arthurian Literature XXIII. Ed. Keith Busby. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006. 81–94.

Rudnytsky, Peter L. “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: Oedipal Temptation.” American Imago 40.4 (Winter 1983): 371–83.

215

Ruti, Mari. “Winnicott with Lacan: Living Creatively in a Postmodern World.” American Imago 67.3 (Fall 2010): 353–74.

Sayce, Archibald Henry. The Principles of Comparative Philology. London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. Ltd., 1893.

Sayers, William. “The Alien and the Alienated as Unquiet Dead in the Sagas of the Icelanders.” Monster Theory: Reading Culture. Ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 1996. 242–63.

Scharfman, Ronnie. “Mirroring and Mothering in Simone Schwartz-Bart’s Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle and Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea.” Yale French Studies 62 (1981): 88–106.

Schmidt, A. V. C. “‘Latent Content’ and ‘The Testimony in the Text’: Symbolic Meaning in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” The Review of English Studies, New Series 38.150 (May 1987): 145–68.

Schmitt, Jean-Claude. Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society. Trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1998.

Schwab, Gabriele. “Replacement Children: The Transgenerational Transmission of Traumatic Loss.” American Imago 66.3 (Fall 2009): 277–310.

Seabrook, W. B. The Magic Island. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1929.

Shakespeare, William. As You Like It. The Complete Works of Shakespeare. Ed. David Bevington. New York et al.: Pearson Longman, 2009. 298–332.

Shedd, Gordon. “Knight in Tarnished Armor: The Meaning of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” The Modern Language Review 62.1 (Jan. 1967): 3–13.

Shoaf, R. A. The Poem as Green Girdle: Commercium in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Gainesville: U of Florida P, 1984.

_____. “Troilus and Criseyde: The Falcon in the Mew.” Typology and English Medieval Literature. Ed. Hugh T. Keenan. Georgia State Literary Studies Series. Vol. 7. New York: AMS Press, 1992. 149–68.

Schor, Naomi. “The Case for Psychoanalytic Feminist Criticism.” Yale French Studies 62 (1981): 204–19.

Shahar, Shulamith. Childhood in the Middle Ages. Trans. Chaya Galai. London and New York: Routledge, 1990.

Shepherd, Stephen H. A., ed. Middle English Romances. New York and London: W. W. Norton and Co., 1995.

216

Simpson, Jacqueline. "Repentant Soul or Walking Corpse? Debatable Apparitions in Medieval England." Folklore 114.3 (Dec. 2003): 389–402.

Soucy, A. Francis. “Gawain’s Fault: ‘Angardez Pryde.’” The Chaucer Review 13.2 (Fall 1978): 166–76.

Spearing, A. C. “The Awntyrs off Arthure.” The Alliterative Tradition in the Fourteenth Century. Ed. Bernard S. Levy and Paul E. Szarmach. Kent, OH: Kent State UP, 1981. 183–202.

_____. “Central and Displaced Sovereignty in Three Medieval Poems.” The Review of English Studies New Series 33.131 (1982): 247–61.

Speirs, John. “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” Twentieth Century Interpretations of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Ed. Denton Fox. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968. 79–94.

Sprengnether, Madelon. The Spectral Mother: Freud, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1990.

Stanbury, Sarah. “The Lover's Gaze in Troilus and Criseyde.” Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde “Subgit to alle Poesye”: Essays in Criticism. Ed. R. A. Shoaf and Catherine S. Cox. Binghamton, NY: Pegasus, 1992. 224–38.

Steadman, John M. Disembodied Laughter: Troilus and the Apotheosis Tradition. Berkeley et al.: U of California P, 1972.

Thorpe, Lewis. “Introduction.” The History of the Kings of Britain. By Geoffrey of Monmouth. Trans. Lewis Thorpe. London and New York: Penguin, 1966. 9–45.

Tolkien, J. R. R., and E. V. Gordon, ed. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Rev. Norman Davis. London: Oxford UP, 1967.

Tristram, Philippa. Figures of Life and Death in Medieval English Literature. New York: New York UP, 1976.

Tuchman, Barbara W. A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century. New York: Ballantine, 1987.

Turville-Petre, Thorlac, ed. Alliterative Poetry of the Later Middle Ages: An Anthology. Washington, DC: Catholic U of America, 1989. 148–57.

Twu, Krista Sue-Lo. “The Awntyrs off Arthure at the Terne Wathelyne: Reliquary for Romance.” Arthurian Literature XX (2003): 103–22.

Wace. Wace’s Roman de Brut/A History of the British. Ed. and trans. Judith Weiss. Exeter: U of Exeter P, 1999.

217

Wack, Mary F. “Lovesickness in Troilus.” Pacific Coast Philology 19.1/2 (Nov. 1984): 55–61.

Walker, Greg. “The Green Knight's Challenge: Heroism and Courtliness in Fitt 1 of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” The Chaucer Review 32.2 (1997): 111–28.

Ward, Donald. “Honor and Shame in the Middle Ages: An Open Letter to Lutz Röhrich.” Jahrbuch für Volksliedforschung 27./28. Jahrg., Festschrift für Lutz Röhrich zum 60. Geburtstag (1982/1983): 1–16.

Wasserman, Loretta. “Honor and Shame in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” Chivalric Literature: Essays on Relations between Literature and Life in the Later Middle Ages. Ed. Larry D. Benson and John Leyerle. Studies in Medieval Culture XIV. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1980. 77–90; 164–66.

Waugh, Scott L. England in the Reign of Edward III. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991.

Weiss, Victoria L. “Gawain's First Failure: The Beheading Scene in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” The Chaucer Review 10.4 (Spring 1976): 361–66.

_____. “The Medieval Knighting Ceremony in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” The Chaucer Review 12.3 (Winter 1978): 183–89.

Westerhof, Danielle. Death and the Noble Body in Medieval England. Rochester, NY: Boydell, 2008.

Wilkin, Gregory J. “The Dissolution of the Templar Ideal in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” English Studies 63 (1982): 109–21.

William of Newburgh. Historia Rerum Anglicarum. Ed. R. Howlett. Chronicles of the reigns of Stephen, Henry II and Richard I (Rolls Series), 1884–5, proemium I. Quoted in Lewis Thorpe, “Introduction,” The History of the Kings of Britain, by Geoffrey of Monmouth, trans. Lewis Thorpe (London and New York: Penguin, 1966), 17.

_____. Historia rerum anglicarum usque ad annum 1198. V. Chap. XXIV. Chronicles of the Reign of Stephen, Henry II, and Richard I. Vol. 1. Ed. R. Howlett. London, 1884. Quoted in Jean-Claude Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1998), 61–62.

Windeatt, Barry. Oxford Guides to Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde. Oxford and New York: Clarendon/Oxford UP, 1992.

Winnicott, D. W. Playing and Reality. New York: Basic Books, 1971.

218

Wright, Thomas L. “Luf-Talkyng in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” Approaches to Teaching Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Ed. Miriam Youngerman Miller and Jane Chance. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1986. 79–86.

219

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Matthew J. Snyder earned his Associate in Arts degree from Palm Beach

Community College (now Palm Beach State College), his Bachelor of Arts degree summa cum laude with a major in the Liberal Arts and Sciences and a concentration in

English from the Harriet L. Wilkes Honors College of Florida Atlantic University, and his

Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy degrees in English from the University of

Florida. His undergraduate honors thesis on David Jones’s In Parenthesis was recognized as a distinguished thesis by the faculty of the Wilkes College. While at the

University of Florida, Matthew served for three years under Peter L. Rudnytsky as the

Assistant to the Editor of American Imago, the journal of psychoanalysis and the human sciences founded by Sigmund Freud and Hanns Sachs in 1939. During that time, he also coordinated and moderated the Stammtisch Graduate Talk Series for the UF

Medieval and Early Modern Studies certificate program. In 2010, the essay that would become this dissertation’s chapter on the Prioress’s Tale was awarded the Darrell

Bourque Prize for the outstanding paper given at the Louisiana Conference on

Language, Literature and Culture, and an expanded version of that paper was published in 2011 in an edited collection from Cambridge Scholars Press. Matthew was a Robert

Bowers Fellow in Medieval and Renaissance Studies at UF in 2011–12, received the

Department of English award for excellence in graduate teaching in 2012, and from

2012–13 served as a Mentoring Fellow in the University Writing Program, supervising new graduate teaching assistants in first-year writing courses. Matthew, his wife Christy, and their son Kieran reside in Gainesville, Florida.

220