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Michael Cherry
LITR 512
28 April 2008
Paper Castles, Painted Love
It is easy, and common, to look back at the Middle Ages with a sense of smug superiority.
The very term "Middle" implies a process of which our own period is the end and apotheosis, as if
we have finally and triumphantly found the answers to the questions which bothered the poets
and philosophers of the medieval era. In truth, we have at best abandoned the questions. More
likely, those questions burn us still, a hot poker up the arse of spiritual and emotional confusion.
Two important questions vex (I would say "plague," but that's too bad a pun) us as much as they
did the medievals: 1) How religious, or in what way religious, should we be? and the related
question 2) How should we love?
Despite the high profile of so-called "courtly love," everyone in the medieval era was not a
troubadour, a knight, or the lady of a troubadour or a knight, running around being chivalrous
and ideal. We can see from short lyric poems such as "Sumer Is Icumen In" that a bawdy down-to-
earth erotics was still important. The simple joys of spring (or summer, or whatever season it's
really supposed to be) and of bodily life have not, despite the best efforts of certain Church figures,
been lost. Though this is not a poem explicitly about love, the references to the renewal of natural
life would have been recognized as tropes indicating the more pleasant rites of fertility. The ease
with which a lower bodily function such as farting, "bucke uertep," is represented indicates an
openness to other lower bodily functions as well. The view here seems to be that the
otherworldliness of Catholic Christianity is not particularly necessary, a view that leads many
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readers today to identify more readily with this sort of work than with texts such as Piers Plowman,
Pearl, or even Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
But the medieval short lyric should not be equated with simple-mindedness; they were well
aware of the limitations of erotic play. Both the complexity and the pain of earthly love were well
known and accurately, even cynically, portrayed by medieval poets. In a poem such as "Jolly
Jankyn" and "Jack, the Nimble Holy-Water Clerk," we find a clear recognition of the exploitative
tendencies when mere physical pleasure is the goal of erotic pursuit. In the latter, the recurring
lament "thout y on no gyle" presents a sadly ironic comment on the narrator's treatment by Jack,
resulting in an illegitimate pregnancy. The narrator of "Sir John Doth Play" goes further: "I schrew
the fadur that hit gate" her unwanted child. The sensibility underlying such poems can be read as
Christian or merely pragmatic in their awareness of the consequences, for women at least, of sex.
Such poems offer a more sober account of eros and its dangers, implying the need for a better way
of loving while yet living fully in this world.
That, presumably, is the primarily motive underlying so-called "courtly love""so-called"
because the term is the invention of a nineteenth-century Frenchman actually named (believe it or
not) Gaston Paris. However, as others have noted, the phenomenon being named does seem to
have been real, at least for the authors of medieval romances. Bound up within the larger idea of
knightly chivalry, courtly love involves an attempt at synthesizing the purely selfless love of
Christianity with the worldy needs of erotic love, to offer a way of loving while still being an actual
earthbound person. "In essence, courtly love was a contradictory experience between erotic desire
and spiritual attainment ("Courtly"). A simplified version is that chivalry is pagan heroism plus
Christian love, and courtly love is pagan eros plus Christian love. Neither chivalry nor courtly love
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is as good as pure Christian love, but they are better than their pagan alternatives. There is much
disagreement as to the extent of the actual performance of these ideals, but I am concerned here
mainly with the value of the ideas themselves. It doesn't matter so much whether people actually
lived that way, but rather whether they wanted to, and why.
By the end of the Middle Ages, as notes, courtly love and chivalry were already pretty well
obsolete (Woods 211). Mercantile impositions were beginning to render both knightly behavior
and religious ideals relatively irrelevant. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, two of the greatest
poets in the entire period, if not in the whole history of English poetry, still felt it necessary to
think hard about what place chivalry could have in the late fourteenth century.
Chaucer's strategy was simply to delineate all of the competing views, separate them,
personify them, and then set them against each other. So, he begins The Canterbury Tales with The
Knight's Tale. V.A. Kolve in the chapter "The Knight's Tale and Its Settings" from his book Chaucer
and the Imagery of Narrative makes the very useful observation that, though the knight is himself an
English knight and therefore bound by an at least nominally Christian code of ethics, as well as a
general Christian worldview, he tells a tale set in the pagan world. "[I]t is . . . a strange choice of
tale to begin a Christian pilgrimage" (Kolve 241). Further, "[t]he tale the pilgrim company hears
first on its journey is dignified, eloquent, and serious in its intent, but it is, for all that, a strange
choice of tale to begin a Christian pilgrimage" because, "set in pagan Athens, . . . the deepest truths
known to the teller and his audiencethe very truths they have become pilgrims to honorcannot
be expressed" (241). Kolve concentrates on the limitations of settings such as the prison and the
arena, but this pagan limitation is in every aspect of the tale. The knights Arcite and Palamon are
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not especially chivalrous, the lady Emelye is not especially respected, and only gods (Venus, Mars,
and Diana primarily), not God, preside over human affairs.
Chaucer stresses the spiritual inadequacy of pagan life, of knighthood without real love of a lady,
which should be based on devotion rather than mere possession. Arcite and Palamon are really
rather brutal. Emelye can only be seen as a tragic figure, abandoned by the only divinity she prays
to, Diana. This is ironic because that other, later figure to whom a young woman might pray to
keep her virginity (begins with an M) would presumably have been more understanding. And yet
the Knight's tale feels like a romance, does it not? It has the style of a romance but the soul of a
mere heroic, pagan epic. Chaucer thus creates a sort of disconnect, which emphasizes the crucial
element of love by presenting a faux-romance in which love is absent.
That a knight tells this story without any apparent awareness of how it violates the ideals he
is supposed to uphold is revealing. After all, the Knight's only goal here, as far as we know, is to
tell the best yarn and win the contest. The stiltedness of the story compared to the one which
follows it is sometimes taken to show Chaucer's opposition to chivalry and courtly love, as the
Miller takes aim at the Knight and seemingly challenges the latter's inflated status. But the Miller's
interruption in fact interrupts the Knight's advocacy of non-chivalric knighthood and non-courtly
love. Chaucer has suggested not that courtly love is a hollow ideal but rather than men do not
follow it. Thus, The Miller's Tale extends rather than reverses what has already been said. We
know what the ideals are, Chaucer seems to say, but look how the world really is.
It's hard to know exactly what Chaucer had in mind with The Miller's Tale because it is
funny. We laugh, we want to like the tale, we want to like the Miller, we want to agree with
Chaucer. But what is he getting at? The Miller seems to think he's making fun of the Knight by
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making fun of courtly love, but really he is merely echoing the Knight in a different register. Both
The Knight's Tale and The Miller's Tale function as studies of a society in which love is seemingly in
short supply, because most of the characters in each tale are cruel. The Miller's is the crueller tale,
because there's really no one to sympathize with; at least the Knight gives us Emelye. The
mercantile pressures that are elbowing out both the court and the Church are clearly evident.
Consider the famous description of Alisoun:
Fair was this yonge wyf, and ther-with-al
As any wesele hir body gent and smal.
A ceynt she werede barred al of silk,
A barmclooth eek as whyt as morne milk
Up-on hir lendes, ful of many a gore.
And on and on. The increase in opulence as the lines, and accessories, accrue assaults the reader
(or listener) with its heaviness. Some have posited that we don't really see Alisoun at all, but this is
true only in the most literal sense. Chaucer has written a little jewel of metonymy here, in which
we really do see Alisoun by seeing what she values. That John may also like having a well-dressed
wife does not mean Alisoun did not pick out all these clothes herself. Nicholas is a cunning
monster, and the Miller is dead-on in paralleling him with Arcite or Palamon. (I think the former
insofar as Arcite is Mars's boy and Nicholas is the more aggressive of these two). Nicholas's
clutching of Alisoun by the "quaynte" is simply a more economical version of Arcite grabbing hold
of Emelye through warfare. Brutality is brutality. Absolon tries a sweeter form of wooing, which is
certainly the Miller's way of making fun of troubadours. But there is no indication that Absolon
ever actually believes in the shineola he's selling. His literally fiery vengeance shows us that he
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really does not honor the self-sacrificing foundation of courtly love; he burns another's cheek*
rather than turns the other cheek. (*See endnote.) Thus, Chaucer again presents us with a figure
who is supposed to believe in the courtly tradition but does not, implicitly criticizing not that
tradition but the society which has perverted or rejected it. Two tales into The Canterbury Tales and
we've been introduced to two characters who are a lot farther from Canterbury than they realize.
This is not to say Chaucer does not sympathize with the Knight and the Miller; I read his
portrayal of them more as sympathetic lament than as condemnation. He does, after all, include a
character named Geoffrey Chaucer. Because the Tales was never finished, it's hard to know what
Chaucer's real "statement" might be. Certainly, the Parson's impossible utterance problematizes
the seeming antipathy Chaucer elsewhere shows towards religious figures. All we have is a sort of
literary collage, in which Chaucer renders the various pieces of the socio-cultural puzzle without
knowing how, or if, they fit together. He recognizes brutality and the absence of the love Christian
and courtly traditions taught was so necessary, and he sympathizes with all those who aren't sure
how to proceed.
The Gawain poet, as he is known, tries harder to bring it all together. If indeed he is the
same author as that of the Pearl, we shouldn't be surprised by a bit more sophistication with
regards to religious difficulties. Instead of Chaucer's proto-realist method of containing traditional
genres within the voices of the sort of real people one might actually meet, the Gawain poet
wrestles with the difficulties of the romance by actually writing a romance. But it's no ordinary
one. The same questions about religion, love, and what it is to be a human person animate Sir
Gawain and the Green Knight no less than The Canterbury Tales; even though there are no
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representatives of ordinary people, it is not so hard to relate to Gawain and his struggles. We are
not knights, but we have the same dilemma today that he has in the story.
Though it is Christmas when the story begins, it is not a particularly Christian environ to
which we are introduced. Arthur seems more like president of the frat house than King. As
William Woods notes, Guinevere is described metonymically, much like Alisoun. "Except for her
gray eyes, Guinevere is visible only through details of her setting" (Woods 210).
Whene Guenore ful gay, graythed in the myddes,
Dressed on the dere des, dubbed al aboute,
Smal sendal bisides, a silure hir ouer
Of tryed Tolouse, of Tars tapites in-noghe, . . .
We are placed within the same psychic setting of materialistic fixation as with Alisoun. These
people seem like royalty, but they do not seem particularly noble.
Only after the Green Knight enters do we get a bit of selflessness on Gawain's part, when
he offers to take Arthur's place: "I be-seche now with sayez sene, / This melly mot be myne." In
response to the suggestion that neither Arthur nor Gawain, when agreeing to this challenge, had
any fear of actually taking any blow, because they expected to simply kill the Green Knight and be
done with it straightaway, I suggest the following: He's a giant green guy! When a man is
unnaturally big and also, I emphasize, green, it is reasonable to assume that some sort of magic is at
work. That court has seen magic many times before, and I submit that Gawain had every reason to
think that some danger was actually very possible. At any rate, it works better for my thesis if he is
truly selfless here.
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William F. Woods, in "Nature and the Inner Man in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," calls
attention to the way Gawain takes over this danger from Arthur (Woods 213). First Gawain
speaks directly, man to man, not acknowledging he is a knight talking to a king. There's no time
for pleasantries; Gawain has to make his point fast to save Arthur. But then he reiterates his
proposal in elaborate courtly speech, as if trying to somehow transcend the very real danger of the
giant with the axe with the power of courtly language, as well as because he does not want to give
offense.
Thus, early in the story the Gawain poet introduces the division between what today we
would call "the real world" the ways in which people try to embellish or improve upon that
foundation. But is the embellishment, the cultural overlay, civilization, really less real? The
Gawain poet spends the whole tale engaging this very question. It is easy to regard Bertilak's castle
as illusory and magical based on the way it is initially described, "So mony pynakle payntet watz
poudred ay quere, / Among the castel carnelez, clambred so thik, / that pared out of papure
purely his semed," as well as because of what we later learn of Morgan's enchantments. However,
it is also necessary to remember that this castle, as far as we are led to believe by the poet, without
question provides Gawain real shelter from the very real storm. The nature he escapes is brutal
and wears him down, and the castle's shelter does actually protect him.
This consideration of the relationship between brute nature and civilization's protection
against that brutality is best illustrated by means of the ingenious parallelism between the scenes of
the hunt and the scenes of attempted seduction. That there are hunt scenes, and detailed ones at
that, is actually not unusual according to Ad Putter in "The Ways and Words of the Hunt: Notes
on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Master of Game, Sir Tristrem, Pearl, and Saint Erkenwald."
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Manuals detailing (and I do mean detailing) the proper methods of hunting were popular at the
time, providing aristocrats with more ways to ritually distinguish themselves from the lower classes.
It is no surprise that similar details would show up in poems written by poets dependent upon said
aristocrats for a living.
What is important here is rather the parallelism itself. Though at this time the hunt was
popular and PETA a far off dream, surely the animal mercilessness of the hunt must have been
apparent to all listeners and readers, especially from passages such as this:
Ther myght mon se, as thay slypte, slentying of arwes,
At vche wende vnder wande wapped a flone,
That bigly bote on the broun, with ful brode hedez,
What! they brayen, and bleden, bi bonkkez thay deyen. . . .
What wylde so at-waped wyyes that schotten,
Watz al to-raced and rent, at the resayt.
However ritualized, this is aggression, pure and simple. These scenes are complemented by the
scenes in which Mrs. Bertilak tries to seduce Gawain. Both use elaborately complex and nuanced
language to either seduce or elude seduction; howevermuch based upon the allure of physical
pleasure, theirs is a primarily cultural intercourse.
"I woled wyt at yow, wyye," that worthy ther sayde,
"And yow wrathed not ther-wyth, what were the skylle,
That so yong and so yepe, as ye at this tyme,
So cortayse, so knytyly, as ye are knowen oute . . ."
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Gawain tries his best to refuse all her offers, but does finally accept the belt. It might, after all, save
his life; why not take the chance? He upholds the chivalric code almost perfectly, almost selflessly.
He's not much of a courtly lover, but he's almost a perfectly noble knight.
Does the Gawain poet want us to see what nonsense the whole chivalry thing is, or is he
trying to argue for its preservation? Though it is possible to read the story cynically and read
Gawain as entirely selfish, I think that by humanizing the classic romance knight, showing him to
be flawed, the poet is trying to argue that there is a place for chivalry in an increasingly humanistic
world. It is possible to be noble even if one is the sort of person who flinches when the axe comes
down. He does, after all feel genuinely ashamed of himself: "So agreued for for greme he gryed
with-inne, / Alle the blode of his brest blende in his face, / that al he schrank for schome, that the
schalk talked."
The clue to the poet's real view of Gawain, it seems to me, is found mid-tale within the
description of Gawain's shield. On the outside, true, he displays the pentangle symbolizing good
knighthood. This is the face all knights show the world. But Gawain has an image of Mary on the
"inore half of his schelde," which only he sees. This is not a display of the image he wants to present
to the world; this is something that's there for his benefit alone, to remind himself of the man he
wants to be. By showing Gawain to be somewhat vain, as well as selfish enough to deceive his host
and flinch when receiving his blow, the Gawain poet is in some sense trying to democratize
chivalry: it's not just for nobles anymore. The image of Mary is just an image, something painted
on the hard surface, as the courtly rituals of seduction allow Gawain an alternative to the hard
reality of the hunt. Religion and courtly life may be mere poetry, this poems suggests, but they
allow us to live differently, less brutally, and are worth maintaining as a result.
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Perhaps all our philosophies of love are nothing but paper castles, ephemeral
enchantments, illusions painted on the inside of the shield. But as any poet knows, we are cultural
beings; we live by symbols. Poems such as the ones discussed here, especially Gawain, demand that
we are discriminating as to which symbols we live by. As Gawain discovers, it doesn't matter if the
castle is real as long as it provides shelter. There is an alternative to the hunt.
Sigmund Freud, no champion of religion and no believer in love, admits at the end of
Civilization and Its Discontents, after acknowledging the many reasons one might want to abandon
such old-fashioned ideals, that "[t]he fateful question for the human race seems to be whether, and
to what extent, the development of its civilization will manage to overcome the disturbance of
communal life caused by the human drive for aggression and self-destruction" (Freud 81). He had
no idea how much more relevant that warning would become. But he allowed that, faced with the
overwhelming awareness of our capacity to kill with undreamed-of effectiveness, "the other of the
two 'heavenly powers,' immortal Eros, will try to assert himself in the struggle with his equally
immortal adversary. But who can forsee the outcome?" (82). What all of these poets show us is
that we live as we imagine (or as we sublimate). So, ask not whether the castle is real. Just ask
whether it works.
Endnote (no pun intended ) #1: It does seem to me that Absolon merely brands Nicholas's buttocks, rather
than actually inserting the poker up the rectum. It is, after all pitch black; this is why Absolon has to call
out for a sound from Alisoun, thus precipitating the fart. Hitting the bullseye in the dark seems unlikely.
Also, at the end of the story Nicholas is up and around, busy lying to people about John. A hole in one on
Absolon's part would presumably cause severe internal injury. Nicholas would not be up and around. He
would probably be dead. Though that's not to say that Absolon doesn't mean to effectively rape Alisoun
with the poker.
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Endnote #2: I don't know how to make all those medieval letters on my computer, so please forgive my
alteration of some words in the middle-English quotations, to match my keyboard capability.
Works Cited
Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Miller's Tale. Middle English Literature. Ed. Thomas J. Garbaty. 1984. Long
Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 1997. 455-474.
"Courtly Love." Encyclopedia Britannica. 2008. Encyclopedia Britannica Online. 25 Apr. 2008
Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. Trans. David McClintock. London: Penguin,
2002.
"Jack, the Nimble Holy Water Clerk." Middle English Literature. Ed. Thomas J. Garbaty. 1984. Long
Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 1997. 664-666.
Kolve, V.A. "The Knight's Tale and Its Settings." 1984. Chaucer (Blackwell Guides to Criticism). Ed.
Corinne Saunders. London: Blackwell, 2001. 239-250.
Putter, Ad. "The Ways and Words of the Hunt: Notes on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The
Master of Game, Sir Tristrem, Pearl, and Saint Erkenwald." The Chaucer Review, 40.4 (2006):
354-385.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Middle English Literature. Ed. Thomas J. Garbaty. 1984. Long
Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 1997. 254-332.
"Sir John Doth Play." Middle English Literature. Ed. Thomas J. Garbaty. 1984. Long Grove, IL:
Waveland Press, 1997. 669-70.
"Sumer Is Icumen In." Middle English Literature. Ed. Thomas J. Garbaty. 1984. Long Grove, IL:
Waveland Press, 1997. 633.
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Woods, William F. "Nature and the Inner Man in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight." The Chaucer
Review, 36.3 (2002): 209-227.