Nature and the Inner Man in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

The great green horse and rider who invade Arthur's haven of polite cheer are icons of a world out-of-doors and a journey inward. Nature, rough and indifferent as it must be, remains throughout the poem a basis for understanding human nature, at first defining Gawain's smooth humanity by contrast, but finally revealing human nature as inextricable from its own elemental matrix. The action of the poem moves from culture to nature, from court to forest, and conversely from the outer, courtly Gawain to the impulsive inner man. For readers of romance, it is a familiar quest. Less familiar, I would argue, is that the narrative conveys a sense of Gawain's subjectivity by associating him with a series of surfaces and spaces, each drawn from a descriptive register dedicated either to exterior or interior experience. ¹ Furs, silks, armor plate, bed curtains, castle walls and courtly rhetoric are surfaces, while spaces occur inside and outside of the courtly milieu. Yet this contrast turns inward upon itself: outer and inner turn out to be versions of each other, suggesting that man is always already in nature, and nature, forever in him. ² That is a pretty good lesson (the Gawain poet has some traits in common with Chaucer's Parson), but getting there is the hard part, and the narrative's penetration of Gawain's armored sensibility--which is the focus of this essay--is at the same time subtle and relentless.

The initial surface, indeed the first object of any kind to come into focus at Arthur's court, is Guinevere, "grayþed in þe myddes" (74). ³ She appears at the end of two stanzas summarizing the high mirth and easy grace of a court which seems to occupy a charmed space above or beyond the effort and irony of felt experience. Jousting, dancing, this folk is "e hapnest vnder heuen" (56), but following in the wake of many happy superlatives, "hapnest" seems to mean more than simply "fortunate." Despite the opening lines, where chivalry is translated from ancient Troy to--one would suppose--an even more world-weary Bretayn, Arthur's court seems transcendently simple and practically Edenic, in their "first age / On sille" (54-55). Yet when this court sits to dinner, their idealized vitality dwindles to the equivalent of a still life. Guinevere, "grayþed" ("placed") at the center of the feast, is brilliant, fixed and passive as a crown jewel:

Whene Guenore ful gay grayþed in þe myddes,
Dressed on þe dere des, dubbed al aboute:
Smal sendal bisides, a selure hir ouer
Of tryed tolouse, of tars tapites innoghe
at were enbrawded and beten wyth þe best gemmes
at myt be preued of prys wyth penyes to bye
In daye.
e comlokest to discrye
er glent with yen gray;
A semloker þat euer he sye
Soth mot no mon say.

(74-84)

Except for her gray eyes, Guinevere is visible only through details of her setting. Her place at the high table is adorned ("dubbed"), but also sheltered: curtains on both sides, over her head a canopy of red Toulouse silk, and--the ultimate luxury--ample tapestries from Turkestan, inset with jewels. The best ("comlokest") gems are of course the aristocratic gray eyes themselves, nested within priceless fabrics demonstrating the exclusiveness of her position at court. That her presence is both amplified and muffled by the expensive cloth, which privileges yet conceals, even displaces her, is less a comment on the queen than it is a visual expression of how sheltered the court itself already seems, this "hardy" company so remote from the shock of battle, or even--at the present time, at least--malicious gossip. Guinevere, silk shrouded, is the heart of this gentle court, and Gawain is sitting close beside her. Consequently, we are encouraged to see him too as a sheltered presence...