In a Fairy Castle, an Invitation to Life

Lamia, John William Waterhouse (1905)

Lamia, John William Waterhouse (1905)

On Saturday I wrote about how Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the 14th century Arthurian romance, demonstrates that our fear of death keeps us from living as fully as we could. The Green Knight’s promise to us is that, if we change the way we approach death, we will live life with heightened intensity and joy.

Today’s post, a companion piece, is about how we shy away from life. The poem shows us this through Gawain’s resistance to Lady Bertilak’s advances.

As I see her, the lady of the castle is Life, including sex, at its most insistent. Lady Bertilak feels unwanted by a Camelot knight who insists upon chastity, and she hunts him, as her lord hunts animals, to get him to acknowledge the preciousness of life. If Gawain thinks he can rise above or remain indifferent to his natural urges—well, she’s there to prove to him that he can’t.

Civilizations have created complex sets of codes and restrictions for dealing with sex. Gawain resorts to highly ritualized courtly love conventions to hold off Lady Bertilak’s advances, bringing to mind the Groucho Marx line, “We’re fighting for this woman’s honor, which is more than she ever did.”

But honor is Gawain’s game, not Lady Life’s. As someone that wants to do everything perfectly, Gawain is determined to play the game of courtly love exactly right—words of love that keep the body at a distance. He sounds almost terrified when Lady Bertilak accuses him of slipping up. In the end, however, Life triumphs over strict adherence to the rules: Bertilak gets Gawain to accept her girdle, which she says will save his life. Although he hides it from his host, despite their contract to exchange their winnings at the end of each day, the poem’s point is clear: Life, despite all our attempts to avoid it, is as relentless as death.

In the meantime, however, we may play coy with life, holding back rather than entering fully into its deep pleasures and surreptitiously hiding our inclinations from others. From the perspective of Life and Death, Gawain’s immense ingenuity at avoiding Lady Bertilak’s offers appear rather silly. There he is, lounging around in pajamas and pretending to be asleep as Lady Bertilak sits on his bed. When it is clear that she is not leaving, he pretends to wake up: he yawns, stretches, and then appears startled at the sight of her. He pretends not to understand her hints, even though she is practically throwing herself at him.

I don’t want to make light of Gawain’s dilemma. Given what an explosive force human sexuality can be, there are reasons that cultures (all cultures, not just Christian culture) tread carefully in its presence. In any event, we are too immersed in culture ever to act entirely natural, even if we knew what “entirely natural” looked like.

But the Lord of Death and the Lady of Life are not necessarily calling for Gawain to have sex with Lady Bertilak. Despite what such writers as D. H. Lawrence and Henry Miller contend, engaging in sex is not automatically an affirmation of life. I’ve written about how Prince Prospero in Edgar Allan Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death” holds desperate orgies when the plague is unleashed in his kingdom. This is panic in the face of death, not an embrace of life. The Bertilaks work as a tandem: we need to change our attitudes towards both of them.

It’s more as if the Bertilaks are calling upon Gawain to be straightforward with them—or rather (since they are his own nature) to be straightforward with himself. Stop with all the twists and evasions.

 

The poem shows us different forms these twists and evasions take. We hold off life parallel to the ways we close our minds to death, proving ourselves again to be like the deer and boars and foxes that Lord Bertilak hunts. Like the deer Gawain is caught unsuspecting in the first encounter, and the Lady talks of having captured him. Like the boar he is brisk and bold in the second encounter and confronts the “threat” directly. Like the fox he turns wily in the third encounter as the lady presses upon him. In none of these encounters does he directly acknowledge his natural desires.

 

Ask yourself whether you, or people you know, ever use any or all of these stratagems for staving off a rich happiness? Do you know “deer,” people who are so scattered and vague that they fail to live life fully? Do you know “boars” who find security in a certain fixed course of action that prevents them from opening up to other opportunities that present themselves? Or do you know the opposite, “foxes” who throw themselves into one activity after another—say, they move through a succession of hobbies—without committing themselves to sustained engagement.

And if life gets us in the end—when we finally admit that we value it—will we do so honestly and openly? Or will we accept the gift of life in a grudging, qualified, and backhanded way, hiding it as though we were ashamed?

Here’s a reflection exercise that mirrors the one I posted on Saturday. Try it out and see what kicks free.

Reflection Exercise – Evading Lady Life

Just as it is difficult to gage how we are dealing with death, it is also difficult to tell how intensively we are engaging with life. We can, however, examine some of our characteristic evasions. Thinking of Gawain as one of the animals, only hunted this time by life rather than death, ask yourself whether you recognize any of these ways for avoiding a sustained commitment to life:

Deer Response – You live without a center and seem to run in circles. Perhaps you tell yourself that you are” taking life as it comes” and are “going with the flow.” But the fact is that you are easily flustered and you react rather than act. To quote Thoreau, you do not live life deliberately.

Boar Response – You are so focused on how you have chosen to live your life that you are oblivious to the wonderful opportunities all around you. Perhaps you define your life in a fixed way—you “bore” through life like a drill, determining ahead of time what you will do and what you won’t. This is not living a deliberate life but a preset agenda.

Fox Response – You do one thing and then another and then yet another. You don’t suffer from the tunnel vision of the boar, but because your vision of living life is doing as many things as possible, you never settle on anything. You think you are going somewhere but, when death finally shows up, it’s not clear what all the activity has amounted to. In fact, the activity may have been a diversion to keep you from asking yourself what you really wanted from life.

Gawain’s responses to Lady Bertilak cue us in to some other strategies that people use for evading life. Are any of them familiar? Note that none of them ultimately succeed:

He laughs off her words as jokes and deliberately fails to pick up on her hints – Do you, through evasive maneuvering, refuse to take life seriously? Do you skate on life’s surface rather than engaging with it, using humor as a defense mechanism?

He declares himself unworthy – Do you feel that you do not deserve nature’s gifts, even though you are nature itself? Such feelings are not uncommon among perfectionists like Gawain.

He compromises through half measures – Lady Bertilak’s kisses are but a foretaste of the other sensual delights available. Do you hold off life by settling for a kiss, thereby telling yourself that you are in fact engaging with it in an attempt to end the discussion?

Accepting life grudgingly – Even when you accept life’s gifts, do you attempt to conceal your participation and experience a sense of shame?

To repeat what I said Saturday, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is all the more extraordinary because its author, in all probability, lived through the black plague.  His response to the event, however, was not pathological.  Rather, he is calling us to an honest acknowledgement of death and an open-hearted embrace of life.  It’s not easy but it’s well worth the effort.

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