Nature and the Inner Man in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Abstract

The great green horse and rider who invade Arthur's haven of polite cheer are icons of a world out-of-doors and a journey inward. Nature, rough and indifferent as it must be, remains throughout the poem a basis for understanding human nature, at first defining Gawain's smooth humanity by contrast, but finally revealing human nature as inextricable from its own elemental matrix. The action of the poem moves from culture to nature, from court to forest, and conversely from the outer, courtly Gawain to the impulsive inner man. For readers of romance, it is a familiar quest. Less familiar, I would argue, is that the narrative conveys a sense of Gawain's subjectivity by associating him with a series of surfaces and spaces, each drawn from a descriptive register dedicated either to exterior or interior experience. 1 Furs, silks, armor plate, bed curtains, castle walls and courtly rhetoric are surfaces, while spaces occur inside and outside of the courtly milieu. Yet this contrast turns inward upon itself: outer and inner turn out to be versions of each other, suggesting that man is always already in nature, and nature, forever in him. 2 That is a pretty good lesson (the Gawain poet has some traits in common with Chaucer's Parson), but getting there is the hard part, and the narrative's penetration of Gawain's armored sensibility--which is the focus of this essay--is at the same time subtle and relentless.