Gawain's Mythic Penis

Gawain’s Mythic Penis: Castration Anxiety and the Problems of
 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.