Good Example Of Essay On Games In Sir Gawain And The Green Knight

If you think that the use of sex to charge up storytelling is a modern conceit, then it is time to take another look at the medieval saga Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Lady Bertilak launches a seduction game that is every bit as convoluted and tense as anything that one might find on an episode of Billions or even a reality program such as The Bachelor. It is true that, unlike in a more modern program, the actual sex between Gawain and Lady Bertilak never takes place, but the placebo for Gawain is a magic girdle that he must wear that, supposedly, will deny any sort of blade that is intended to pierce his flesh. The sexual game that Gawain and Lady Bertilak play in this game runs parallel with the “game” that Bertilak carries out each day when he goes out for the hunt, bringing home animals to slaughter. The contrast casts a comment on the way humans perceive reality and the “game” at work in social relations – then and now – but it also provides an image of the larger sexual antics that go in the natural world that ensure that life will continue, even in the mortal, lost cosmos.
This is, of course, where the Green Man in the tale comes in. He is this story’s representation of a shadowy semi-deity who appears in a number of other stories that come from the same time period. Indeed, he is a seasonal figure who represents, in large part, the fecund and fertile parts of nature. In the medieval period, there was a strong belief that the Fall of Man brought sin and death into the world for the first time. However, after that, Nature took a stand against death through the act of procreation, which created the uneasy truce between death and life that represented the mortal world. In our world in which so many men live long enough at such a level of leisure that they need one type of drug to keep their hearts healthy and another type of drug to fight erectile dysfunction, it is difficult at times to empathize with the medieval fear of death, which lurked around every corner. The diseases which we now often treat with over-the-counter medications, if not routine prescriptions, often killed people within a matter of weeks (or even days). What we know as viruses and bacteria were to the medieval world mysterious killers, more likely than not sent by God as vengeance for an untold multitude of sins. So this interplay between death and life was an important dynamic in life, and attention was paid to animistic beings like the Green Knight and his analogues in other stories, as well as the dynamic that the sex act created as far as staving off death.
Consider how the temptation of Sir Gawain progresses throughout the sag. In his last test, Gawain experiences severe testing of his conscience, as he believes that death is coming, and Lady Bertilak appears to be giving him more than enough opportunity to take part in procreation. However, he has to balance this ostensible opportunity with the laws of God, which appear on his shield (with the image of the Virgin Mary) as well as with the laws of courtesy as a knight in that time period. This is one reason why it is fairly simple to find that the Green Knight resonates sharply throughout this poem, not only because of its symbolism that medieval readers would have instantly recognized as a natural deity but also because of the conflicts between the demands of nature and the laws of God. In modern times, we tend to think about sex as a sort of buffet that sits before us, much like the smorgasbords that groan throughout the day and much of the night on cruise ships. In a time period where day-to-day survival was much less of a certainty than it is in our own time, opportunities to procreate were much less frequent – and much less a certainty. First of all, death was much more likely on a mundane basis then than it is now, and then the laws of courtesy and theology made the journey to procreation a much more arduous one for men and women to follow without running afoul of the eye of God.
In those times, though, the idea of nominalism was what created a barrier between humanity and God that was all too real for the people living under it. Nominalism had to do with the fact that people could know things, but they were not certain that what they knew was actually correct. This is the central problem that Gawain faces in his sexual games with Lady Bertilak (and, ultimately, the Green Knight), because he thinks he knows what is going on, but if he had fallen prey to his natural desires, the outcome would have been much different for him.
Nominalism teaches that the games of thought and language that we engage in on a regular basis are social constructs rather than universal foundations. Instead, we come up with temporary agreements about what things mean, but those agreements have no expiration date, which means that discourse can shift radically without warning at any given time. In a situation such as the one where Gawain is so carefully treading a dangerous line set by the Green Knight and through the machinations of Lady Bertilak, he only has his network of memories and beliefs to guide him. Fortunately, he makes the right choices when negotiating that web. However, there is nothing to say that the choices are right because they are universally moral. Instead, they could simply be the outcomes that the mores of his society has declared to be the ones that are correct. When Gawain was working his way through this dilemma, of course, he was centuries earlier than another noble puzzling over morality; Shakespeare’s Hamlet would eventually conclude that the only source of morality or ethics is the thinking process, that one’s opinion guides moral judgments rather than an actual set of useful precepts that apply to everyone.
Ultimately, the game in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight teaches Gawain the lesson that no one lasts forever. However, the fertility at work in nature is another form of life, which contains the power of the individual but also lasts much longer, stretching out through the end of time, and is pushed forward by the continuous act of procreation, which causes generation after generation to appear. The fact that life persists no matter what the individual might say or think about it simply means that the social constructs that we use to place so much importance on niceties are ultimately superficial and transitory, no matter how important we might think they are. In the final analysis, then, the games in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight are nothing more (and nothing less) than a comment on the complex that people play in order to promulgate the belief that their concept of the world will always be the only concept. The laughter of Lady Bertilak and the Green Knight put a lie to those delusions of grandeur.