Compare Gawain And The Forms Of Seduction, By Geraldine Heng

In her article, A Woman Wants: The Lady, Gawain and the Forms of Seduction, Geraldine Heng she mainly explains the sexuality in the poem. She argues that although there was no sexual intercourse in the poem, through the grammar, and dialogue that occurred, there are sexual implications in the conversations between Gawain and Lady Bertilak. Speech then occurs not in place of sex, but in the place of sex, in the sexual position, and acts as the form and medium of sexual relation: love-making composed as speech-making. In addition there was a form of sexual relation through the girdle that Gawain is given by Lady Bertilak. Lady Bertilak is a woman who plays as a man and is equally a woman. But she is able to get what she wants through her masculine

The dual character of her sexual impersonation announces that all sexual identity is enacted as to disguise ones self. As s result of her performance, sexed identity in the seduction scenes is represented as a series of gestures and moments that dispense now femininity, now masculinity. Her indecisiveness between genders necessarily subjects to the site of gender division to continual movement, and under pressure the bipolarity it customarily becomes unstable (Heng 123). Through close analysis of the seduction scenes and all the temptations of Lady Bertilak, there are many sexual connotations in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, hidden behind the characters dialogue, gestures, language, and physical objects including the girdle. Men and also Knights stood as a chivalric symbol during the late 14th century, but with the exception of Gawain, he loses his virility through Lady Bertilak. Another angle in which this poem can be seen through, Lady Bertilak is given the masculinity Gawain looses and with that, she is given power. As we know women during the 14th century were marginalized and were not given the same rights as men had. In the poem she is able to get what she pleases and desires. Through my precise analysis of Heng’s article and others, now several questions have evolved while developing this paper such as: under what circumstances is a “knight” or a “lady”? What is a woman or a man? What positions are available to each, in the disguise of sexual identity? Thus it would go on forever and I think that is what draws my interest in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Although some answers and arguments are set valid, there are many questions that are still unanswered and that is the beauty of it because it keeps us on our toes trying to figure out answers through recent literature and literature that were written centuries