All Dressed Up with Someplace to Go: Regional Identity in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

All Dressed Up with Someplace to Go Regional Identity in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Rhonda Knight Coker College A theory of the border offers a method of historical analysis that confronts the paradoxes that inhere in limits and boundaries. The figure of paradox inhabits all boundary concepts because of the line of the limit seeks to institute an absolute difference at the place of most intimate contact between two spaces (or concepts, or peoples, or times, or . . .) Michelle R. Warren, History on the Edge Michelle R. Warren’s work on border historiography acknowledges that place—region, city, nation—is a principal factor in the constitution of cultural identity, but also points out the paradox: what is imagined outside the borders of any location is equally fundamental to the formation and maintenance of that same identity.1 Her analysis of border writing as a method to stake ‘‘territorial claims—over space, ethnicity, language and time’’2 enables us to think about borders in creative and productive ways: boundaries and borders need not impose binary thinking about the entities located on one side or the other. ‘‘The other’’ here is a loaded term because border writing challenges the dichotomy of self/other. The border as meeting place is a crucible where we can see the cultural work of identity being performed and negotiI am grateful to Marilynn Desmond, who read several incarnations of this article, for her comments and support. In addition, my thanks go to SAC’s editor and two anonymous readers for their insights. 1 Michelle R. Warren, History on the Edge: Excalibur and the Borders of Britain, 1100– 1300, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 2. 2 Warren, History. 259 ................. 10286$ $CH8 11-01-10 13:54:12 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER ated.3 Like Warren, Doreen Massey, in Space, Place and Gender, argues that what lies outside a border is paramount in understanding what lies inside. She explains: The identities of place are always unfixed, contested and multiple. And the particularity of any place is, in these terms, constructed not by placing boundaries around it and defining its identity through counterposition to the other which lies beyond, but precisely (in part) through the specificity of the mix of links and interconnections to that ‘‘beyond.’’4 In this study, I am interested in how the ideas of region and border inform Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (SGGK hereafter) and how the poem might demonstrate the fluidity and interdependence that Warren and Massey indicate. Many factors contributed to the development of regional identities throughout late fourteenth-century England. Historical invasions and settlement patterns influenced language, linguistic development, social customs, and legal codes. In the north and the west, contact with England ’s colonies, Scotland and Wales, along with the responsibility of guarding these colonial borders, significantly affected the disposition of those regions. Furthermore, geographical features rendered some areas centers of trade or transportation, giving these regions a very concrete sense of identity and purpose, while simultaneously ushering in outside 3 Warren’s book participates in an emerging conversation in medieval studies concerning colonialism, ethnicity, and nation. Yet these very words are loaded with modern and postmodern connotations that are in many ways incompatible with the medieval world we want to discuss. The following discussions explore the problems of thinking in terms of nationalism and colonialism: Patricia Clare Ingham, Sovereign Fantasies: Arthurian Romance and the Making of Britain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), pp. 7–10. In Ingham’s negotiation of the term ‘‘nation,’’ she rejects the idea of a ‘‘progressive chronology, imagining the history of ‘a people,’ as a teleological trajectory from early origins to a fully realized national present’’ (p. 9); Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ‘‘Introduction: Midcolonial,’’ in The Postcolonial Middle Ages, ed. Cohen (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), pp. 1–17; in which the author suggests that we need to think ‘‘midcolonially’’ rather than ‘‘postcolonially’’ about the Middle Ages. He offers an important list of ways to ‘‘open up what the medieval signifies’’ (pp. 6–7); see also the other engaging and important essays contained within this volume. The essays contained in Kathleen Biddick’s The Shock of Medievalism (Durham...