The adaptation is successful not just in its understanding of how irreverent and illogical the narrative space of medieval romance is and always has been, but also in how it captures Gawain’s failings as a knight concerning his interactions with women.
* * *
A24’s film production of The Green Knight reinvigorated interest in the centuries-old source material from which the movie derives its plot. But for those familiar with the late 14th-century Middle English poem, the question arises of why filmmakers opted for such a macabre tone? This inquiry overlooks the often grotesque and disturbing nature of the subject matter within the realm of medieval romance and medieval Arthuriana in particular. Most contemporary scholarship devoted to the Pearl Poet’s most famous work spills no ink on such considerations, and it would not be inaccurate to point to the bias against engaging in the academic discussion of the horror genre before the Gothic period for our justification as to why. However, conjuring horror within the Middle Ages requires an interrogation of the “barbaric” and “cruel” mental landscape most imagine when they picture the Middle Ages.
Modern medievalist scholars and enthusiasts are forced to reckon with the misguided projections of the European Middle Ages as a site of white, Christian hegemony – a period of nearly a millennium where the only cultural events of importance relate to the centuries-long Crusades and consolidation of the Catholic Church. A fabricated past where knights existed to save the destitute and complete noble quests. One where women had no role in public or intellectual spheres and men were expected to prescribe to hypermasculine gender roles. But these presuppositions ignore a rich, multifaceted reality in which knights actually proved to be one of the greatest threats to local communities and individuals like eunuchs, viragos, ascetics, and other clerical figures operated outside of a gender binary. Stripping back the layers of modern imprints of medieval culture, we can accurately assess what simultaneously terrified and captivated medieval audiences.
Typically, modern conceptions of Arthurian literature call to mind the bumbling and eccentric wizard Merlin, the tale of a young boy claiming his birthright, Arthur, and the defender of women, Sir Gawain. These characterizations stem from films like Disney’s 1963 adaptation The Sword and the Stone and books like T. H. White’s The Once and Future King. However, Middle English, Old French, and Middle Welsh texts stand in contrast to these more contemporary character interpretations. Within the medieval tradition, Merlin elicits the chagrin of local lords due to his parentage between a demon and mortal. In Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, he meets his end after attempting to rape Nineve, the second Lady of the Lake (the first had been beheaded a few chapters earlier).
Arthur does not fare much better in this tradition either. Canonically, he was conceived as a product of rape between Uther Pendragon and his mother, Lady Igraine. In later medieval Arthuriana, Arthur produces the seed of his own undoing, Mordred, by having sex unknowingly with his half-sister, Morgause. In an attempt to prevent Merlin’s prophecy of his future demise from coming to fruition, Arthur mimicked the biblical Herod’s slaughter of the innocents. He systematically rounded up all male infants in the immediate area to be killed at sea. Though he was unsuccessful in circumventing fate, Arthur’s mass infanticide presented no immediate consequences for him.
Sir Gawain’s depiction throughout the medieval period oscillates between a defender of women and children to an impulsive, sexual predator. Within Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, Gawain leans toward the latter of the two representations. Before he arrives at Arthur’s court and is subsequently knighted, he loses his temper and accidentally beheads the beloved of a man with whom he had an earlier altercation. Later, due to the violent and unhinged nature of Gawain’s behavior toward the young women of Camelot, his actions force King Arthur to issue a mass decree concerning proper conduct toward the weak and helpless. After the accidental death of his brothers near the end of the work, he blames Guinevere and pressures King Arthur into pursuing Sir Lancelot instead of defending his kingdom from Mordred.
This dissonance of Sir Gawain’s characterization comes to a head in the Pearl Poet’s Sir Gawain and the Green Knight when Lady Bertilak expresses her delight in having Sir Gawain all to herself. While her husband and his men are out hunting, she exclaims to Gawain, “ye are but a careless sleeper, since one can enter thus. Now are ye taken unawares, and lest ye escape me I shall bind you in your bed; of that be ye assured!” (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight ll.1209-1211). Her persistent advances place Gawain in the precarious position of trying to remain courtly toward her and maintaining his working relationship and game of exchanges with Bertilak, his host at the time. Gawain’s ultimate failing as a knight within this poem stems from him eventually giving in to her temptations.
Though one could argue that this ultimately produces a misogynistic narrative that exonerates Gawain’s actions, it is more productive to see it instead as the reactionary swing of the pendulum. Sir Gawain shifts positions from the predatory hunter to the hunted. His literary legacy of malicious actions toward young women finally comes back to haunt him. Not entirely out of step with the modern genre of rape-revenge films, the site of horror transitions from the body of women to Gawain’s. Misogyny kills but, in this case, it is not the women who suffer the consequences.
The cultural scope of Gawain’s medieval representations highlights the anxiety around sexual assault at the hands of males in authority positions at the time. Knights were not exclusively depicted as perpetrators of these actions. Numerous texts in poetry and prose characterize lords, friars, clerks, and other religious and noble figures as sexually deviant or even sexually violent. These tales of rape and sexual assault frequently stood in as extended metaphors for abuses of power from the Church or the sovereign powers that existed at the time. Matters of sex and sexual violence thus carried with it the potential for political and social commentary for disenfranchised groups of people.
This use of allegory to capture the terror of sexual violence and the terror of power abuses reflects one of the many nuances of medieval horror that challenges its stereotypical portrayal. To return to the most recent Green Knight film, the filmmakers acutely tap into this dynamic by putting front and center Gawain’s interactions with the film’s female characters. The adaptation is successful not just in its understanding of how irreverent and illogical the narrative space of medieval romance is and always has been, but also in how it captures Gawain’s failings of a knight concerning his interactions with women. Though he does explicitly attack any of the female characters of the film, undertones of sexual tension and violence circulate around the characters of Winifred and The Lady. In the future, it would behoove other filmmakers interested in adapting medieval source materials to take this kind of nuance into account, rather than reconstructing old paradigms of understanding the Middle Ages.
* * *
Unless otherwise noted, images are sceenshots from the trailer, courtesy of A24.