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ABSTRACT
Beginning with a consideration of double identity that the Gawain-poet develops for Aeneas and his band of Trojan exiles — on the one hand, a scattered and traumatized people marked by the loss of their ancestral homeland; on the other hand, a colonizing force establishing dominance throughout Europe — this article examines the mingled diasporic and colonial formations of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (SGGK) through the lens of Avtar Brah’s concept of “diaspora space,” as well through overlapping ideals of the neighborhood and neighboring. I propose that the Gawain-poet generates in his work a fictive diaspora space defined by hybridity and mutual benefit, one that insists on the productive presence and interpenetration of indigenous, diasporic, and colonial groups within the region of “Norþe Walez.” This sunny vision of the Anglo-Welsh borderlands, however, is strikingly at odds with the realities of the Anglo-Welsh relationship in the fourteenth century, one that may indeed have been defined by hybridity but that was hardly mutually beneficial, at least not where the Welsh were concerned. I argue here that SGGK not only willfully misrepresents the Anglo-Welsh relationship in its fictive diaspora space but that, in so doing, it tacitly provides literary cover for the English subjugation of the Welsh and implicitly supports England’s nascent colonial ambitions.
Notes
1. All quotations from SGGK, as well as all accompanying prose translations, are from Andrew and Waldron, eds., The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript: Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Henceforth, they will be cited parenthetically in the text by line number.
2. The identity of “Þe tulk þat þe trammes of tresoun þer wroȝt” [the man who framed the treasonable plots] (3; emphasis added) is wilfully unclear, and readers have diverged on which Trojan leader the poet condemns for betraying Ilium, Aeneas or Antenor. Mueller’s (Citation2013) brief survey of past critical positions (173) is useful here, as is his suggestion that the Gawain-poet, following Guido delle Collone’s Historia destructonis Troiae, places the lion’s share of the blame on Aeneas himself (173–4).
3. This process is developed most influentially in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain (Citation2007), which provides a proto-history for Britain that traces back to Troy itself. The Trojan opening of SGGK draws its basic outline from Geoffrey’s work, though it compresses it greatly, a narrative decision that allows diaspora and imperial line to blend seamlessly into one another.
4. The idea of translatio imperii et studii is influentially discussed by Jacques Le Goff in Medieval Civilization (Citation1988, 171–2) and further developed in Copeland (Citation1991). Its implications for the relationship between Troy and England have been further examined in Federico (Citation2003), as well as many of the critical texts I discuss in the body of this article. Also important here is Sharon Kinoshita (Citation2008) on the Mediterranean contexts implicit in Arthurian texts. Kinoshita’s analysis of Chrétien de Troyes’s Cligés in particular shows how even the casual mention of important sites in the Mediterranean — sites that were, in the twelfth century, defined by the economic and intellectual vibrancy of their diasporic populations — work to trouble any stable “vision of the historical migration of both political and intellectual hegemony … as a linear transmission from Greece to Rome to the West” (52).
5. Such a return-centered model is one that SGGK’s Trojan diaspora initially seems to instantiate; however, it eventually subsides as Brutus and his fellow exiles turn their attention away from Troy and toward Britain itself.
6. While Brah develops her concept of diaspora space within the immediate context of post-Thatcher-era Britain, it overlaps important ways with contemporaneous studies of the Black Diaspora in the United States. Earl Lewis in particular considers the historical development of African-American communities against “the complexity of racial construction and the degree to which people lived in interconnected worlds demarcated by race, class, color, and other factors — a world of overlapping diasporas” (Citation1995, 779, emphasis added). That phrase insists upon the same pivotal intersectionality as Brah’s diaspora space. Eve Dunbar likewise articulates the essential multiplicity of the black diaspora in terms that comport with Brah’s work: “Rather than lumping communities into a single diasporic experience, overlapping diasporas acknowledge the multiplicity within the diasporic experience as well as the way differing ethnic, cultural, and national diasporas intersect” (Citation2008, 361).
7. Discussions of the Green Chapel as a barrow or burial mound are ubiquitous in criticism of SGGK. Of particular interest is Battles (Citation2013): “The entire terrain of the Green Chapel, including its remote, wild location, the cold starkness of the setting, the unnatural ‘boiling’ water, and the expectation of death at the hands of a monster who owns giant weapons, all suggest powerful associations with Anglo-Saxon literary tradition” (94).
8. Edmondson’s Lacanian reading of the neighbor, it should be noted, comports in powerful ways with the earlier work of Aranye Fradenburg, who reads the neighbour as similarly situated within a complex system of symbolic exchange: “The idea that ‘I’ have a neighbor who is just like me and to whom I must give will inevitably recast ‘me’ into symbolic interchange (being a signifier), and undermine that aspect of giving that depends on belief in the difference between donor and recipient. ‘I’ projects the self-rescuing structure of subjectivity outward only to find that its vicissitudes with respect to the neighbor (who is so difficult to improve) do not improve on its vicissitudes with respect to care for the ‘I.’” (Citation2002, 39).
9. The metaphor apparently draws from the decorative paper cut-outs that were sometimes used to adorn food at late-medieval feasts. See Andrew and Waldron (Citation2007, 238, n. 802).
10. For the Norman architectural and stylistic aspects of Hautdesert’s central hall, see Battles (Citation2013, 77); Thompson (Citation1997) also offers a brief history of machicolations (120–1).
11. The moat’s description as a “double dich” is probably a reference to width rather than number (Thompson Citation1997, 125). For its incongruous presence atop rather than around the castle’s defensive mound, see Cockcroft (Citation1978, 468).
12. See Battles (Citation2013, 93).
13. Pounds (Citation1994) provides a salient overview of how castle architecture promoted colonial hegemony.
14. “Al-Khidr — green, immortal, teacher of divine grace through actions that initially seem hostile, master of disguise, unexpected host in the wilderness, and representative of countries ancient and sophisticated in comparison to the relatively young England — seems a better fit that green men. It is thus possible that the Green Knight combines a Celtic tradition with Islamicized legends of Saint George” (Ng and Hodges Citation2010, 267).
15. For Morgan as a Sheela-na-gig, see Stock (Citation2001); for Morgan’s association with the militarized culture of the fourteenth-century Midlands, see Schiff (Citation2011, 84–93); for Morgan as trickster see Williams (Citation1985).
16. For Morgan as informed by a range of Insular and Continental intertexts, see Twomey (Citation1996)
17. Andrew and Waldron (Citation2007) translate “frenkysch fare” as “refined manners”; however, the phrase also has the sense of “French food.” See MED, s.v. Frē̆nsh, 1(a).
18. Dinshaw (Citation1994) explores the hazy but stridently patrolled borders between the homosocial and the homosexual in SGGK, showing how “the poem both produces the possibility of homosexual relations and renders them unintelligible” (206).
19. In the first bedroom scene, the lady questions Gawain’s identity after he fails to kiss her, saying “‘Now He þat spedez vche spech þis disport ȝelde yow, / Bot þat ȝe be Gawan hit gotz in mynde!’” (1292–3); The Green Knight offers a more direct assessment in the poem’s fourth fitt after Gawain shrinks from the first blow of the ax: “‘Þou art not Gawayn’” (2270). See also Godden (Citation2016, 153).
20. Andrew and Waldron (Citation2007) translate this phrase as “aloud, as I have heard it in the court.” The word “toun,” however, more commonly signifies “a town or city.” See MED, s.v. tǒun, 1(a).
21. Warner (Citation2014), who analyzes Morgan’s status as “goddess” along largely editorial lines, is particularly relevant here, especially pp. 345–51.
22. See, for instance, Elliott (Citation1997), who proffers the “stupendous cleft” (116) of Luddchurch as the historical analogue for the Green Chapel and Thompson (Citation1997), who suggests Beeston Castle, Cheshire, as the inspiration for Hautdesert (122).
23. Elliott (Citation1997) provides three.
24. For a more detailed discussion of the Welsh ‘squirearchy,’ see Frame (Citation1990, 208–11) and Davies (Citation1987, 416–18).
25. See especially Davies (Citation1987, 420–3).
26. Davies (Citation1987) tellingly refers to Wales as “one of the favourite hunting-grounds of the empire-builders of medieval English politics” (408).
27. For the adjectives, mostly damning, applied to the Welsh by the English, see Arner (Citation2006, 79) and Davies (Citation1990, 116–17).
28. Tintagel, the legendary site of Arthur’s conception and Morgan’s own childhood, is in Cornwall, a portion of the British Isles that was, much more than Wales, firmly integrated into structures of English Law, a point that Ranulf Higden drives home in his Polychronicon: “Þan Cornwayle is in Engelond, and is departed in hundredes, and is i-ruled by þe lawe of Engelond, and holdeþ schire and schire dayes, as oþere schires dooþ” (Citation1869, II.1.91).
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Notes on contributors
David K. Coley
David K. Coley is Professor of English at Simon Fraser University. He is the author of Death and the Pearl Maiden: Plague, Poetry, England (Ohio State University Press, 2019) and The Wheel of Language: Representing Speech in Middle English Poetry, 1377-1422 (Syracuse University Press, 2012), and his articles have appeared in such journals as Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Chaucer Review, JEGP, and Exemplaria.