Gawain’s Mythic
Penis: Castration Anxiety and the Problems of
Mastery in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Mastery in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Gawain suffers from castration
anxiety—a problem for the Arthurian figure whose virile penis is traditionally
the most active agent in defining his hyper-masculine personality. His anxiety
results in part from a touch, like Dinshaw’s “queer touch”—a touch of the
emasculating narratives of Pearl, Cleanness, and Patience. In each of the three other texts, homonyms, puns, and the
resulting equivocality of poetic language significantly undermine a mastery of
language, opening up possibilities for misreading,
for excess, for new possibilities, and thus for a space of desire. The poet
takes such a desire-focused poetics from his one named, non-biblical source,
the Roman de la rose, where desire,
figured by the goddess Venus, comes into being when Jupiter castrates Saturn, springing
from the spume of the castrated testicles, and simultaneously giving birth to
equivocal language. The Golden Age, defined by perfect sufficiency, comes to an
end at the same time that Saturn’s masculine intactness ends, and thus, like in
our own present Oedipal imaginary, desire and its relation to difference and to
language is born out of (the threat of) castration.
The
cutting that happens in SGGK happens
on New Years, a day commemorating the cutting of a different God’s genitals—the
Feast of the Circumcision of Christ. At the alienating threat of the Green
Knight’s presence, Gawain decides to take control, and rather than just a mere
slit on the neck (like circumcision), Gawain chops the whole thing off (like
castration); but only to discover that his castrating act has resulted in a
counter-chop. Gawain has misunderstood the game; he has taken seriously what
the Green Knight only meant playfully. Gawain’s too hasty attempts at understanding, at mastering his
situation without submitting to nuance or alternative possibilities (a very
masculine tendency), results in his feminization—a no-longer-virile Gawain
kissing Lord Bertilak while secretly wearing his wife’s clothing. “Are you
Gawain??” Lady Bertilak asks him, and he is no longer sure.
Each of these
texts offers a similar queer touch—the dreamer in Pearl learns that he must be a pearl-bedecked bride of Christ if he
wants to enter the New Jerusalem; the reader of Cleanness, whose ability to comprehend a “natural” definition for
the titular virtue is frequently undermined by “unnatural” poetic différance, learns to seduce Jesus as
his beloved in the same way that (the male) Amant seduces (the male) Bel Acueil
in the Rose; and Jonah, whose control
of language is challenged by a God who frequently undermines his notions of “truth”
and “justice,” learns that patience—or
even passivity—is sometimes more important than mastery. The Gawain who fears
castration, and who comes to realize that he has always already been castrated,
becomes the model reader for the other three poems, and he comes to reflect the
reader’s own desire for wholeness, a wholeness figured through the nostalgia of
Arthuriana (and the nostalgic framing of SGGK more specifically), but one that
is undone by the compilational reading of Cotton Nero A.x.
