Amended Texts, Emended Ladies: Female Agency and the Textual Editing of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight has been fortunate in its editors. Their painstaking labor has given us a lucid, intelligently glossed, and helpfully annotated text, and every critic who works on the poem is indebted to their efforts. A list of the poem's editors reads like a "who's who" of Middle English textual criticism, and their work fully deserves the praise that has been bestowed upon it. Yet the judgment of even the best editors is not infallible, and it behooves literary critics to scrutinize their decisions, particularly when it comes to emendations that affect the interpretation of the poem. There is always the danger, to borrow A. E. Housman's phrase, of not correcting the scribe but revising the author.¹

One problem that has received surprisingly little attention is how editorial decisions have shaped readers' perceptions of women in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Even as feminist critics have, especially in the past two decades, convincingly shown that women are central to the poem's action,² editors have obscured or even erased their role in the text. Such is the case not only in older editions, where it might be expected if not condoned, but also in the most recent and authoritative ones. Significant editorial changes are often passed uncritically from one edition to the next, with little evidence that the rationale and evidence for emending have been carefully weighed. The result of these interventions, though no doubt unintended, has been to seriously misrepresent the text and to distort the poem's attitude toward women. To illustrate the persistent and far-reaching nature of these changes, I will examine three representative cases of editorial intervention in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Each involves a different type of intervention and concerns a different woman or group of women. The common denominator for these changes is that they all reduce women's agency and subordinate them to men, even when the poem implies—or expressly states—that the opposite is true.

I

On the first day that Lady Bertilak visits Sir Gawain in his chamber, she urges him to woo her because Gawain excels all other knights. She extols his beauty, humility, honor, and courtesy, and says that, if she had to choose a husband, it would be him. Gawain claims to be unworthy of her praise and reminds the Lady that she is already married. As their conversation draws to a close, she reflects on her inability to sway Gawain: she cannot tempt him "‘Þaʒ I were burde bryʒtest,' þe burde in mynde hade" ("Though I were the most beautiful of ladies," the lady thought) (1283), because—as the text continues—he is completely preoccupied with his impending fate (1284–87). Most editors attribute this thought to Gawain by altering I to ho and changing the second burde to burne, so that the emended line reads: "Þaʒ ho were burde bryʒtest, þe burne in mynde hade."

This verse remains one of the most-discussed in the poem. Doubts about the emendations were already voiced by Oliver F. Emerson in 1922, and shortly thereafter the changes were rejected as unnecessary by J. R. R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon.³ In 1973, George Sanderlin made a detailed and persuasive argument for retaining the manuscript reading, as did Sharon M. Rowley some thirty years later.⁴ Nevertheless, most editors continue to emend.⁵ The following analysis will reinforce and extend the case against emending. At stake in this debate is the role critics attribute to Lady Bertilak: What are her motives for seducing Gawain? How much does she know about her husband's plans? Is she his obedient pawn or his co-conspirator?

Since some of the reasons for emending involve the immediate context of line 1283, it will be helpful to quote verses 1280–89. In order to defer, for the moment, questions about how best to punctuate these verses, they are cited from the facsimile:⁶

þus þay meled of muchquat til mydmorn pasteand ay...