PERFORMING SELFHOOD
Carolyn Dinshaw, ‘Ecology’ in A Handbook of Middle English Studies (2013).
‘Such leafy faces [of the medieval roof boss], as eerie mixtures of man and vegetable, can
provoke us to explore relations between ‘‘human’’ and ‘‘nature,’’ and to reckon with the
haunting interconnectedness thereof’ (p.349)
‘Roman sculpture from the second and third centuries featured foliate heads, some like
medusa masks, some associated with the mythical figures of Bacchus and Okeanos’ (p.349)
‘The Christian encyclopedist Hrabanus Maurus in the ninth century moralized foliage as the
lusts of the flesh; Christ, in contrast, represented himself metaphorically as a vine’ (p.350)
‘later Gothic leaf-man imagery suggests the frightening presence of ‘‘an inexplicable other’’:
writing of the latter he argues, ‘‘The image is itself liminal, evocative of processes unknown
and unknowable, located at the outermost edges of experience’’ (Woodcock 61).’ (p.350)
‘They often appear, after all, in places where people rest: they are carved on armrests and
on the ends of benches, and on misericords providing relief for the weary monk. Such
carvings become part of what may thus be regarded as temporarily personal or individual
spaces in the very public cathedral or church’ (p.350)
‘they merge what are supposedly separate spheres: the sacred and the worldly, the
vegetable and the man, the nonhuman and the human, the outside and the inside. They
evoke interrelations between these realms that might be sources of pleasure but that might,
in contrast, inspire fear, dread, horror’ (p.350)
‘The resultant shape is a creature both and neither man and plant. Begging the question of
what the ‘‘human’’ is’ (p.350)
‘the plant-man creature here illustrates the radical interconnectedness of all created things’
(p.351)
‘With what is supposed to be outside gushing from deep inside, we see in these vegetable
men the most basic conceptual boundary in the process of being deconstructed’ (p.351)
‘what was alleged to be definitively below humans on the great chain of being is instead
revealed by these leafy heads to be part of us’ (p.351)
‘Raising the question of what defines and delimits the human, ecocriticism concerns itself
with actively decentering the concept from its given, privileged place in the humanist
epistemology’ (p.353)
‘Ecocriticism shares with deconstruction a view of the porosity of boundaries between inside
and outside, between organism and environment, between human and nonhuman, between
living and nonliving (Morton, ‘‘Queer Ecology,’’ 275–276).’ (p.354)
‘The leafy faces do not allow for anthropomorphism, as I’ve argued above; they thus
problematize the concept of figuration or even representation’ (p.354)
‘the visitor’s strange intimacy with Camelot: the arrival is a stunning surprise, and yet it is at
the same time utterly predictable. Such an event is just what Arthur was waiting for’ (p.356)
‘‘‘The Gawain poem is about the outside world coming in,’’ Sir Harrison Birtwistle
commented keenly, a propos of his 1991 opera Gawain (Doel and Doel 122). And having
arrived inside, the outside is discovered to have been there all along’ (p.356)
‘The Green Knight, too, is simultaneously not-human and human’ (p.356)
‘With broad chest and trim waist, loud mouth and sneering aggressivity, this creature is at
once attractive and disgusting, welcome guest and nightmare. He evokes these
contradictory responses because he himself, intimate stranger, is the outsider at the heart of
Camelot at this moment. Queer indeed, this sexy inhuman man’ (p.356)
‘he manages to undo closure so thoroughly – he is so open-ended, as it were – that the
ultimate fragmentation, beheading, presents no problem for him’ (p.356)
,PERFORMING SELFHOOD
‘This queer body comes apart and functions perfectly without a sovereign at its top […] way
of being that refuses hierarchy’ (p.357)
‘Landscape, characters, plot lines: in this poem everything is interconnected, down to the
alliterative verse form whose narrative is ‘‘locked together with true letters’’’ (p.358)
‘Even more surprisingly, at the root of it all is Morgan, ugly Morgan, Arthur’s half-sister and
Gawain’s aunt. The blood that flows in her veins flows as well in Gawain’s, and it shoots into
his face when he learns of all this from Bertilak’ (p.358)
‘Even as all men must have been born of women – or must have been at least conceived
with female involvement – so masculinity’s hard closure is undone by its dependency on the
feminine’ (p.359)
‘the poem’s constant awareness of inextricable bonds’ (p.359)
Jill Mann, ‘Courtly Ethics and Courtly Aesthetics in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Studies in the
Age of Chaucer 31 (2009).
‘Late medieval chivalric and courtly culture was characterized by display’ (p.231)
‘The court of Richard II was notorious for this kind of extravagant display’ (p.231-2)
‘Already in the early years of his reign, there were complaints about the costs of Richard’s
household’ (p.232)
‘Dymmok distinguished between two types of ‘‘necessity’’: first, there are those things
needed simply to sustain life, but second, there are those things necessary to live decently
(‘‘conuenienter’’) […] As far as clothing is concerned, he explains that ‘‘princes and nobles’’
(‘‘principes ac nobiles’’) should be distinguishable by their more elaborate dress’ (p.234)
‘As Dymmok’s defense suggests, the lavish display of Richard’s court was not simply the
result of a taste for soft living. It had a serious political purpose: it was designed to enhance
the prestige of the monarch’ (p.234)
‘the poet [of SGGK] is aiming to identify the raison d’eˆtre of courtly luxury in a far more
sophisticated and interesting way than Dymmok’ (p.235)
‘the poet sees it as a natural expression of the inner splendor of courtly virtues’ (p.356)
‘Outward display and inward virtues are mirror images of each other’ (p.236)
‘The king’s partiality for his Cheshire men was widely resented and criticized’ (p.238)
‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight similarly […] raises the specter of homosexuality only to
reject it’ (p.239) = see Carolyn Dinshaw, A Kiss Is Just a Kiss.
‘The poem establishes heterosexuality as normative’ (p.240)
‘The careful distancing of homosexual imputations assumes importance for the poem’s
context when we recall that Thomas Walsingham insinuated that Richard II had homosexual
relations with his close friend Robert de Vere’ (p.240)
‘the distinguishing feature of Robert de Vere’s heraldic arms was a five-pointed star […]
Although it lacks the crisscrossing internal lines of the pentangle, the ‘‘mullet’’ is otherwise
identical with Gawain’s own heraldic blazon, and it is hard to imagine that fourteenth-
century readers would have failed to note the resemblance’ (p.241)
‘I am not proposing that Gawain should be read as a roman a` clef, with Gawain himself as a
covert stand-in for de Vere, but simply that assigning him the pentangle as his heraldic
blazon might have been a graceful way of associating Richard’s beloved friend (or perhaps
his memory) with the romance hero’s virtues’ (p.241)
‘there seems to have been a fashion for pearls, perhaps stimulated by a spectacular crown
brought to England by Anne of Bohemia’ (p.241)
‘the courtly splendor represented by Arthur and his knights is not being satirized but
celebrated’ (p.243)
,PERFORMING SELFHOOD
‘vocabulary-sets in the poem that identify outer with inner, material splendor with moral
worth’ (p.244)
‘The image that this long passage presents is an image of the knight enclosed in his armor,
protected by its impenetrable and glittering surface’ (p.246)
‘The five virtues that are represented by the five lines of the pentangle are also described in
the vocabulary of enclosure’ (p.247)
‘The interlocking quality of the five virtues makes up Gawain’s truth (loyalty, fidelity,
integrity); the virtues are, as it were, loyal to one another, linked in mutual bonds of relation’
(p.248)
‘And since the adjective ‘‘clene’’ also means ‘‘complete, whole,’’46 it has the potential to
evoke enclosure itself, as represented in the impenetrable intactness of the pentangle’
(p.248)
‘The medieval French Livre de l’ordre de chevalerie contains a section on the significance of
the knight’s equipment and armor which provides an instructive contrast with this passage
[…] t its general procedure is to establish a set of metaphorical equivalents between the
material and the moral, in a manner that reads like an inversion of St Paul’s ‘‘armor of God’’
passage’ (p.248)
‘To uphold one’s renown is to prove oneself to be what one asserts one is. Chivalric virtue is
its own raison d’eˆtre; it is not supported by practical utility or even by divine command. Like
the pentangle, it thus stands clear of external support’ (p.249)
‘Stanesco’s account of the chivalric game makes clear: ‘‘Game is an activity which is
localized, and above all closed. The preliminary to every game is the delimitation of a precise
space or trajectory, which must be different from the rest of the world. It matters little
whether the limits of this space are material or imaginary, the essential thing is that the
player of the game finds himself in a protected space.”’ (p.250)
‘The Green Knight’s appearance has all the surface brilliance of courtly display. Nothing, it
seems, is hidden; there is no shabby ‘‘underneath.’’’ (p.253)
‘; there the language of moral worth emerges from, and is continuous with, the language of
courtly splendor. What we might say is that the Green Knight represents a dazzling surface
that it is Gawain’s task to round out with moral content’ (p.255)
‘The Green Knight presents Arthur’s courtiers with an unsettling mirror image of themselves,
rendered unfamiliar and alien by his green color, implicitly challenging the courtiers with the
question of whether their brilliant surface does make visible an inner truth, whether their
dazzling reputation (‘‘los’’) is matched by reality’ (p.255)
‘The Green Knight’s description associates courtly splendor with the idea of the public gaze’
(p.255)
‘Gawain’s testing in Bertilak’s castle, where it might seem to have disappeared entirely. For
of course this testing is carried out when he is completely divested not only of his armor but
also of his courtly clothing, as he lies naked in bed’ (p.256)
‘she sits on his bed and waits for him to wake up. Gawain’s initial role as watcher is thus
neatly inverted; he is now conscious of being watched, and I think that this sense of scrutiny
persists throughout the encounters with the lady. Gawain watches himself constantly,
sensitive to any suggestion that he may have failed to live up to his outward reputation’
(p.256)
‘The moment at which Gawain stops watching himself is of course the moment when he
accepts the green girdle. He assumes that this action can be hidden, unaware that it is as
available to the lord’s gaze as his rejection of the lady’s advances. In that sense he betrays
the obligation to be always on display, to make himself fully manifest’ (p.256-7)
, PERFORMING SELFHOOD
‘For Gawain, of course, any breach of his knightly integrity destroys the perfect enclosure
represented by the pentangle. His inner self no longer matches the brilliant perfection of his
outer display. The ending of the poem is taken up with a series of moves designed to restore
the intimate connection between interior and exterior’ (p.257)
‘Gawain’s hidden fault becomes susceptible to healing precisely as it comes to the surface in
the form of the nick that makes it visibly manifest’ (p.257)
‘Gawain’s confession has also restored his moral wholeness, his integrity, in the etymological
sense of that word’ (p.258)
‘By the time Gawain returns to Arthur’s court, the nick in his neck has healed; it is ‘‘hole’’ as
the Green Knight says his ‘‘harme’’ is. But Gawain insists on wearing the girdle as a
permanent sign of his shame’ (p.258)
‘They therefore determine that if Gawain wears the green girdle as a surface manifestation
of the disgrace that is inwardly ‘‘attached’’ to him, they will wear it likewise, but as a token
of honor. They thus re-create the significance of the girdle by making it a courtly adornment’
(p.259)
‘Enclosure is here realized not only in the form of the knotted girdle but also in the form of
the unbroken circle of community that unites the members of the Round Table’ (p.259)
‘It should by now be clear how great a difference there is between the Gawain-poet’s
conceptualization of courtly display and Dymmok’s notion of its role as political stratagem, a
way of awing the lower classes into submission or surrounding the king with a mystique that
will enhance his prestige and power’ (p.259)
‘what we have in this poem is a truly imaginative spiritualization of courtly splendor, an
attempt to read it as a material manifestation of the ethical qualities embodied in the
courtly life and as itself constituting a challenge to be lived up to’ (p.259)
‘Though its initial motivation was probably a celebration of the courtly magnificence
cultivated by Richard II, it goes far beyond that aim, forging an ideal of knightly virtue as
dazzling as the luxury of any court’ (p.259)
‘The implication in this poem is that the holder of earthly power needs the cleric to guide his
life. In inflecting courtly culture with clerical values, the poet is enhancing his own prestige
and importance [the Gawain-poet may have been a cleric]’ (p.260)
‘On the other hand, he can also be seen as enhancing the prestige of knighthood by
associating it with the mystique of religious sanctity’ (p.260)
‘the courtly hero can control his desires as well as any saint […] invests the courtly hero with
the prestige that accrues to the saint, showing him as set apart from the common run of
men’ (p.262)
‘His allegiance is not to an earthly lady but to the Virgin Mary’ (p.262)
‘Saintly chastity is inflected with courtly manners’ (p.263)
‘If, on the one hand, clerical values find a lodging place in courtly life, on the other hand,
religion itself is reconceived in aristocratic terms’ (p.263)
‘So far from being an indication of extravagance and excess, the poet seems to be saying,
courtly splendor incorporates self-discipline and self-control’ (p.263)
‘What Gawain conspicuously rejects is the warrior ethic that defines heroism as fighting. In
its place it sets the gentler and more sophisticated virtues that rule the civilized and courtly
life, celebrated and articulated in courtly display. In the context of Richard’s court, this
would align the poet with the rejection of the war party represented (among others) by the
Appellants, and with support for Richard’s more conciliatory attitude to his ‘‘cousin’’ the king
of France’ (p.264)
