INTERIORITY IN A MIDDLE ENGLISH ROMANCE: THE QUEST INTO THE MINDSCAPE IN SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT

Considered as one of the most striking medieval English romances, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was composed by an anonymous poet in the fourteenth century. In tandem with the popular medieval quest-romances, Sir Gawain demonstrates the primary features of a conventional romance such as the nostalgic invocation of the past and the socially remote, the employment of the marvellous, the use of profusely sensuous language, the motif of the quest, the ritualised code of conduct and the courtly love tradition. However, regarded as an unconventional romance, Sir Gawain also interrogates and transforms the genre of the romance. Gawain is not an unblemished, gallant and pure knight; he is neither the paragon of virtue nor the incarnation of ideal perfection. He is portrayed as a flawed, imperfect, fallible human. He oscillates between the symbols of the pentangle and the girdle, representative of the male order and the female principle respectively. The hero has internal conflicts. This paper maintains that Gawain’s journey into the uncultivated landscape should be seen as a quest into the mindscape because of the dialectical oscillations between the pentangle and the girdle. This study investigates how the dialectical tension and the resultant internal conflicts in the psyche of the hero give the romance interiority.