Textual Studies, Feminism, and Peformance in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

The social construction of identity has been a central concern in the criticism of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (SGGK) for at least the last thirty-five years. In Art and Tradition in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Larry Benson observes that "a knight's name, which is at once his identity and his fame, is 'an augur and program for life,' a sign of what his future conduct will be." ¹ More recently, John Plummer has argued that the poem "illustrates" how identity "is essentially a social construct. We are the 'person' (as opposed to the purely biological object) that, simultaneously, we claim to be and our contemporaries accept us as being." ² According to such readings, the Green Knight and the Lady test Gawain's ability to inhabit his identity fully, that is, to "be" the seamlessly perfect knight his pentangle and reputation claim him to be. Although the Lady and her husband play multiple roles as they test Gawain, critics have subordinated the significance of their performances to the dominant function of testing and producing Gawain's identity. Geraldine Heng provides a notable exception in "A Woman Wants: The Lady, Gawain, and the Forms of Seduction," where she focuses on the simultaneous production of both characters' identities in the bedroom sequence. ³ Drawing on a psychoanalytic feminist formulation of identity, Heng argues that "identity is exposed as a discursive construct" in the bedroom sequence. ⁴ For Heng, the Lady's manipulation of gender roles in the bedroom scenes destabilizes traditional categories of the masculine and feminine, leaving her irreducible feminine desire.

Most such analyses of performance and identity in the text, however, have been quietly compromised by editorial interventions in the first bedroom scene, at lines 1283-87. ⁵ Although the debate over the grammar of these lines has long been familiar to editors and textual critics, the degree to which editorial interventions in this passage have influenced literary interpretations of the scenes has been underestimated. ⁶ The passage, which alerts the audience to the Lady's knowledge of Gawain's upcoming ordeal, has been emended in a variety of ways, all of which suppress an early clue about the Lady's role in the plot. The emendations ostensibly restore suspense to the story and reduce the ambiguity of the situation. They allow the Lady to appear as if she were seducing Gawain because of her own desire, until Bertilak reveals the whole plot to Gawain at the very end of the poem—an act that famously invites a final reassessment of the evidence. ⁷ When allowed to stand, however, the manuscript reading at lines 1283-87 works together with the narrator's questioning of the Lady's purpose (1550), his equivocal statement about her "luf" (1733), and Bertilak's final explanations. These moments create tensions in the text that demand a continual assessment and reassessment of the action, and that emphasize the opacity of the Lady's motivations and desires. Consequently, the Lady's performances of her gendered courtly identity can neither be read as unquestionably grounded in her body and her own (feminine) desire, nor be reduced to the command of her husband.

In a text preoccupied with identity, then, the Lady's performances do more than test Gawain's "trawþe." They provide a complex counterpoint to the question of whether Gawain can fully inhabit his own name, and they extend the text's interrogation of the relationship between actions and identity to include the other characters. As the Lady enacts the testing of Gawain, her multiple and shifting roles work in conjunction with other characters' performances and the thematic ambiguity of the poem to suggest that all of their identities are purely performative.

My argument arises as much from the related editorial and critical histories of the poem as from a literary analysis of it. I believe there is a relationship...