I came across some lines in SGGK that reminded me of some current research I'm doing for my mentored scholarly essay on the presumed affinity between women and jinn in the medieval Islamic imagination; a lot of what I've read so far seems to position this affinity in women's presumed tendency towards "guile." It's such a funny word that the following SGGK lines really jumped out at me: "But no wonder if a fool should fall for a female / and be wiped of his wits by womanly guile - / it's the way of the world" (2414-16). The Middle English word used in the poem is "wyles" or wiles or trickery suggesting that women and trickery, or guile, go hand in hand.
The SGGK lines reminded me of the opening of The Arabian Nights where King Shahrayar, upset that his wife has been having an affair, leaves his kingdom with his brother. After he sets out, he comes upon an ifrit and a young woman; after the young woman tricks him and his brother into having intercourse with her, he swears off all womankind and claims that their "guile is great." This tendency towards guile, towards trickery, has become a conventional characterization of women in traditional Islamic literatures but it is, of course, a convention in traditional Western literatures as well with Eve functioning as the prototype.
It begs the following questions: What does it mean that this concept of "woman's guile" surfaces in a text like SGGK and Islamic literary texts, such as The Arabian Nights? What is it about women that makes them such easy targets for such characterizations?
One critic I have been reading for my mentored scholarly essay, Nawal El Saadawi, posits that, before patriarchal religions and systems took root, representations of strong female goddesses were common but that they steadily declined once patriarchal religions became more popular. You can see this a little bit with the clash between "Morgan the Goddess" and the Christian faith that Sir Gawain embodies. El Saadawi argues that, in order for patriarchal systems of thought to set itself against what came before, it had to discredit the competing ideologies and one way to do so was to rewrite representations of strong women as threatening or evil. We can certainly see this operating, to some extent, in SGGK and other texts whereby women are credited for introducing or maintaining evil in the world and, to be closer to God and Christ, is to also distance yourself away from women. It's one way to explain why such characterizations of women, as embodiments of guile and deception, were so popular.
You're right that women present a rather strong front of trickery in Gawain and the Green Knight, but I think it presents a positive side in addition to the negative connotations of guile. We have admired in other texts women who have free agency to choose their own lovers and to incite events without the aid of men. Bertolak's wife, for all that she seems to be complicit in a much grander scheme, has a lot of responsibility in the plot, particularly if women should not be trusted. She is much more independent in her seductive function than, say, the Carle of Carlisle's wife and daughter. Perhaps Gawain should not trust her... but Bertolak does not seem disadvantaged by doing so.
ReplyDeleteOh, I completely agree with you. I was just noting that women's agency is oftentimes misconstrued as something more sinister when, in actuality, if a man were to behave the same way he would most likely be applauded for his cunning.
ReplyDeleteIt's just the agenda behind the association of women with guile that I find so interesting - but I certainly don't agree with that assumption!