Sex, Death, and Society: A Psychoanalytic Perspective of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

The conflict between civilization and nature is a well-known, and well-discussed, feature of the medieval poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. For example, in his essay “Nature and the Inner Man in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” William F. Woods discusses the juxtaposition between culture and nature and how this ultimately affects the development of Sir Gawain’s “inner man.” However, I think this idea of brutish, primal nature versus the moral, civilized society, when applied to Sir Gawain, can be looked at through a psychoanalytic lens, specifically focusing on Freudian theory. The id, ego, and superego are the components that make up Sigmund Freud’s famous tripartite theory of personality, and my goal within this essay is to expand psychologically upon Woods’ and other critics’ theory of culture versus nature to examine the characters of The Green Knight, Lord Bertilak, and Sir Gawain as physical representations of the superego, the id, and the ego, respectively and discuss how, through this approach, a new, unconscious motive for Sir Gawain’s quest appears.

In the middle of Fitt II, Sir Gawain has just set out on his journey to seek the Green Knight but he is met by a number of impediments, from fierce wild animals like wolves and bears to natural obstacles like huge mountains and the winter cold. Not until Gawain prays for safekeeping does Lord Bertilak’s castle appear to him. In most criticism, Lord Bertilak and his castle represent the court and the idea of chivalry and civilization, which would in turn represent the superego, or “the mental system that reflects the internalization of cultural rules” (Schacter 464). Even Woods points out in his essay that even though “wild nature is also part of this scene, the moat surrounded by trees whose boughs frame the castle. . . the emphasis of the passage is on the chivalric life that it shelters and reflects” (216). However, Lord Bertilak’s castle is not particularly enforcing these societal constraints, for Sir Gawain seems to be the one attempting to keep his morals while Lord Bertilak engages in hunting animals for sport and his wife hunts Sir Gawain for sexual gratification and they all participate in feasting and revelry. From lines 815 through 850, there are particular moments of haste that speed up Gawain’s entrance to the castle: the porter leaves but “came back at once” (815) to let him into the gates, “many hasty hands” (826) reach to grab Gawain’s helmet from him, he is “pressed forwards” (830) by nobles and knights further into the castle, and Lord Bertilak “quickly orders” (850) a servant to be assigned to Sir Gawain. Almost immediately after Sir Gawain enters the castle, he is redressed in the “choicest cloth” (863) and sat by servants in front of a huge fireplace with furs and a large feast just for him. Gawain is admired by the people of Lord Bertilak’s castle for being a famous member of King Arthur’s court and in the evening, he is met with “specially spiced cakes… and wine [that] filled each goblet again and again” (979-980). This hasty welcome to Bertilak’s accommodations represents how quick the ego, represented here by Sir Gawain, can fall victim to the id’s primal temptations. Gawain strays from his path outside, in this case the “real world,” to enter the “civilization” of Lord Bertilak’s castle, a dream-like, fantasy palace that delves in worldly and carnal desires, full of feasts, hunting, and the temptation of a beautiful woman.

However, since Gawain is the representation of the ego, it is his job to balance the id’s needs within the social standards of the superego. The ego works according to the reality principle which “enables the individual to delay gratifying immediate needs and function effectively in the real world” (Schacter, 464). There is a moment that blatantly shows this regulation in action at the beginning of Fitt IV when Sir Gawain is given one last temptation from his id. Gawain’s servant from Lord Bertilak’s castle tells him to run away and to give up his mission to seek the Green Knight:

Therefore, good Sir Gawain, let the man go,

and for God’s sake travel an alternative track,

ride another road, and be rescued by Christ.

… your secret is safe, and not a soul will know

that you fled in fear from the fellow I described. (2118-2125)

It is interesting that the servant tells Gawain that an alternative track will lead him to be “rescued by Christ” when in fact it may well do the opposite. Gawain declines the servant’s offer because he would be running away from a challenge that will in fact bring him closer to his chivalric values, and in turn his faith. This leads to the reasons why Gawain’s encounter with the Green Knight, instead of Lord Bertilak, is the representation of the superego, i.e. society’s rules and standards.

The Green Knight appears in Fitt IV in the same attire and manner as in Fitt I: “again he was green, as a year ago, / with green flesh, hair and bearded, and a fully green face” (2227-8). Aside from being physically located outdoors, the Green Knight is also literally the color of flowering nature. However, starting at line 151, there is a long description of the Green Knight’s clothing and how it looks just like any other court member’s garb, aside from being all green and gold. Woods comments on this contradiction, saying “the Green Knight’s array hints at the boundary area he inhabits between courtly and wild, or inner and outer nature” (212). If we take this analysis at face value, it almost seems as if the Green Knight is himself a representation of the ego, a border-rider between courtly values and wild nature. He becomes a complicated figure because typically one would associate nature and outdoors with the id since both seem to deal with primal motivations. However, the Green Knight remains solely the superego for a number of reasons. First, he is the one who comes into King Arthur’s court and demands a display of chivalry. One of the main jobs of the superego in the psyche is to push the individual towards reaching one’s ideal self, which is exactly what the Green Knight is hoping to achieve with his challenge: someone who can face him in a pure, chivalrous manner and overcome both the id’s desires and reality’s limits. Second, through the poem’s fantastical nature, the Green Knight is the image of the ideal knight: brave beyond measure, mighty in stature, and, above all, immortal. The Green Knight is Gawain’s ideal self that can never be achieved through realistic measures. In his essay “Moral Theology in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: The Pentangle, the Green Knight, and the Perfection of Virtue,” David Beauregard does not take a psychoanalytic stance in his analysis of the allegorical significance of the Green Knight, but he does point out that “perfection in virtue is the crucial issue in the poem and that such perfection is achieved by the Green Knight but not by Gawain” (149). This idea leads me to my last point: Gawain is forever made guilty by his encounter with the Green Knight in Fitt IV. Another function of the superego is to punish the individual when they think or do something wrong, and in the poem, the Green Knight nicks Sir Gawain on the neck for his lie about the girdle. This is another reason why the Green Knight does not represent the id: he could have easily chopped off Sir Gawain’s head in a fit of primal revenge (for both chopping off his head first and lying about the girdle), but since Gawain would have died from such a blow, the Green Knight punishes him realistically, as the superego would do, through guilt and a humbled ego.

This reversal of roles is a complicated one: Lord Bertilak’s civilization becomes Gawain’s source of temptation for an immediate, primitive satisfaction, and the Green Knight, the “wild man of the woods,” becomes his standard of moral perfection. This concept of “perfection of virtue,” also mentioned earlier in the Beauregard quote, is something that, at first glance, makes the three level system of the id, ego, and superego seem problematic when applied to Gawain, the Green Knight, and Lord Bertilak: where does Arthur’s court fit in? This also leads to the questioning of the analysis of Lord Bertilak and the Green Knight as separate beings, when in fact they are the same person. Arthur is not Gawain’s superego and neither is his court, but instead the entire concept of Arthur’s court represents the source of the social ideals from which the superego receives its standards for perfection. Since Gawain is technically a representative of King Arthur’s court, he has grown up and strived to obey the chivalric code, which states that a knight’s virtues are “friendship and fraternity with fellow men / purity and politeness that impressed at all times, / and pity, which surpassed all pointedness” (652-54). An important moment in the poem that displays the severity of the standards is in Fitt I when the Green Knight approaches the court of King Arthur and begins to issue his challenge:

    I’m not here to idle in your hall this evening.

    But because your acclaim is so loudly chorused,

    and your castle and brotherhood are called the best,

    the strongest men to ever mount the saddle,

    the worthiest knights ever known to the world,

    both in competition and true combat,

    and since courtesy, so it’s said, is championed here,

    I’m Intrigued, and attracted to your door at this time. (257-64)

According to Freudian theory, “the dynamics between the id ego, and superego are largely governed by anxiety” (465), which typically occurs when the id seeks gratification that can lead to potential dangers from the standpoint of the superego, leading the superego to elicit punishment. This idea of anxiety is thought of, by Freudian theorists, to be one of the driving forces behind personality. The Green Knight, Gawain’s superego, says Arthur’s knights are “the worthiest knights ever known to the world” (261), they are “the best” (259), and these standards are what causes both the Green Knight, the superego, and Lord Bertilak, the id, to create Gawain’s “anxiety” that shape his motives and values within the poem. Even though Lord Bertilak and the Green Knight are both technically the same person, when analyzed through a psychoanalytic point of view, it seems to make more sense to view them separately: even though the mind is technically one entity, Freudian theorists are still splitting it up into the three levels of consciousness, and analyzing each piece on its own. Gawain’s unconscious and subconscious mind come to life within the poem and readers see firsthand the ego’s dilemma.

Examining Sir Gawain and the Green Knight from this specific psychoanalytic perspective of the id, ego, and superego allows for a new perspective to be taken on the moral lesson in the poem. At the end of Fitt IV, Gawain reflects on his “cowardice and covetousness” (2508) and how his lack of perfection of virtue led to his downfall. Woods ultimately comes to the conclusion that “outer and inner [selves] turn out to be versions of each other, suggesting that man is always already in nature, and nature, forever in him” (209). A similar idea can be placed upon my psychological point of view, where nature represents one’s unconscious mind: even though we, as sentient beings, think we are deliberately making our own choices, just as Gawain believes he is solely responsible for his faults, it is in fact a combination of our unconscious and subconscious mind that motivate us to take the actions we do, either in response to a primal urge from the id or to a potential punishment or reward from the superego. This view is important because it changes the interpretation of the poem’s ending lesson that selfishness and cowardice lead to the destruction of one’s moral virtues. The Gawain poet knew that perfection of virtue was an impossible task, which is most likely why he wrote this satire of an Arthurian romance in the first place. Even though Lord Bertilak’s court, his id, praises and admires him as if he is a mythical being and the Green Knight pushes him to live up to the unrealistic ideals of Arthur’s court, at the end of the poem Sir Gawain comes to the realization he is merely human. Even though the Gawain poet was not aware of Freudian theory, since the poem was written in the 14th century and Freud wrote the three-model theory in the 20th century, he still manages to come up with a perfect representation of an ego attempting to regulate in a demanding world, in this case of knightly chivalry, the starkly different needs of his id and superego. This reading not only helps strengthen Freud’s theory but also offers a new point of view that may help modern audiences understand the moral in a more contemporary way.