Sir Gawain the Fair and Medieval Misogyny
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| Sir Gawain, son of Lot, King of Orkney |
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| A medieval imagining of the Round Table |
But I’d forgotten about the ending. In line with the rules that govern folk tales, Gawain must endure three trials in his quest for the mysterious Green Knight he’s promised to meet. Wandering in the wilderness in search of the rendezvous he is offered refuge from the winter weather at a luxurious castle. During his three day visit, Gawain promises his jovial host to offer up any gifts he receives while his host is out hunting, in return for lavish hospitality. But Gawain breaks his word on the final day and omits to disclose the protective golden belt his host’s beautiful wife has tempted him to accept. It will, apparently, save him from death. He’d had no trouble deflecting the young woman’s sexual advances, but fear for his own life had drawn him into deceit. So, when he faces the terrible Green Knight at the pagan Green Chapel, the demon is revealed as his host – the man whose hospitality he’s breached. Gawain is punished by a cut on the neck that creates a scar he will carry forever as a record of his failure to honour a promise to another man.
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| Gawain faces the Green Knight |
Gawain begins his lament with a prayer to god to protect him from women and their vile temptations. He had given in; like Adam yielding to Eve and damning the whole of humanity; King David tempted by Bathsheba’s naked form; Samson, betrayed by Delilah; Helen whose beauty caused the Trojan wars (an account of the Fall of Troy opens the poem in the original); and so the list grows – not of men who were betrayed into wrongdoing by their own desires and weaknesses, but the names of the women they blamed for ruining them and mankind for all eternity. According to the tale, women were entirely to blame for the catastrophes that have engulfed humanity. And we still are.
Stories matter. We are all brought up on the legends of the Holy Grail, fairy stories, Greek mythology, the tales handed down from generation to generation. In our culture, these stories are changed and tainted by the way they’ve been transmitted – oral tales written down by Christian monks and male scholars (because in almost every case they are) who’ve sought to impart a moral slant into a pagan inheritance. It’s religious and literary colonialism. If you can’t stop people telling the old stories, make sure you give them a twist that suits your own culture and beliefs.
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| The Wright Manuscript |
Christianity has not been kind to women. Neither have the other Abrahamic religions (Judaism and Islam) that come from the same ancestor – the prophet Abraham who supposedly lived several thousand years ago. Remember him from Genesis? He was going to sacrifice his son – his elderly wife’s only child after decades of marriage – because he heard voices in his head telling him to do it. Fortunately he heard another voice telling him not to do it just as he was about to light the pyre. And then there’s his treatment of his other two wives, the slave Hagar (driven out into the wilderness) and the concubine Keturah. Only the names of the sons they ‘gave’ him are recorded.
A lot of work has been done by feminist (both male and female) historians to explore the origins of these patriarchal narratives. The stories may date back to approximately 2000 BC or the more recent Iron Age. They are of their time – a time when women’s lives were not valued except as fruitful wombs or the property they brought with them into marriage. But the message these stories carry has lingered for four millennia. We carry them in the marrow of our bones, they’re around us everywhere in books, films, television adaptations – we breathe the misogyny of mythology in our daily lives.
No wonder we’ve struggled to change it. We need new stories, a kinder narrative of our relationships to each other and to the natural world.
The fictional Gawain translated by Jesse Weston
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