Examining the fourteenth-century poem “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” and how it provides insights into the nature of masculinity and femininity in that century.
This paper examines the ways in which gender roles configured much of human behavior under the guise of chivalry for the real people whose lives were not unlike those depicted in the poem. The paper provides a summary of the poem and shows how the knight Gawain represents the true masculine figure of the time and the seductress, Guinevere, epitomizes one of the forms of female characters prevalent in that society.
“We are unaccustomed to thinking of knights as being selfish ” after all, isn’t it their job to dash off and risk their own lives to save people, especially damsels Yes but there is an important caveat to this view on chivalry, which is that the rules of this social system made it impossible for knights to be both chivalric and chivalrous in the modern sense of the term.
The code of chivalry was one that was written to benefit men within a militaristic society. Women, who are often held up as the beneficiaries of the chivalric code, were in fact ancillary to it.