Hunting Does

I don't know about anyone else, but when I read the lines: "the lord of the land had laid down a law / that man should not maim the male in close season. / [...] and the din drove the does to sprint for the dells" (1156-1157, 1159), in "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" this weekend, I wasn't thinking about the actual hunting--I was just really preoccupied with why they could hunt the females and not the males. I don't actually go hunting, so maybe this is like a supply/demand reproduction thing, but it struck me as a little (okay, maybe a lot) misogynistic. Tied in with some of the other telling parts of this poem--like Bertilak's wife being a kind of sex-crazed temptress unworthy of a name and the section where Gawain recounts all the times in the bible that women have led men astray (2416-2421)--this definitely seems like a poem that is saying something about "the fairer sex." I would not classify that something as "complimentary."

What I thought was interesting about this is that the mentality that these characters have about women is really similar to a book I'm reading right now--a book set in the Iranian Republic from 1979-1997. The chador and other types of veils are recurring images in this book not because they are repressive in themselves but because the way that the regime imposed them on all women, regardless of preference or religion, was a symbol of power and control. One woman in Reading Lolita in Tehran is thrown out of school because her chador didn't cover her shoulder, which aroused an influential male member of the student body (Nafisi 251). In this case, of course, it is the woman's fault for tempting the man, much as it was Bertilak's wife's fault for tempting Gawain and Eve's fault for tempting Adam.

Anyway, I suppose my reason for comparing Reading Lolita in Tehran and "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" is just to think about how similar they are in thought process--and how different they are in publication year. "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" is from the fourteenth century or so, and Reading Lolita in Tehran is set in the twentieth century. Nevertheless, both seem shockingly "unmodern" in their approach to women. Sure, that's certainly understandable in "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight"'s case--it's not modern--but I think that the fact that we understand and recognize these tropes is very telling. Sure, we think, when Bertilak's wife waltzes into Gawain's bedroom, she's going to tempt him and he's going to have to refuse her. These mentalities still exist in a modern-day context, as shown by the events in Reading Lolita in Tehran. While they may seem extreme, they are not new, shocking, or different. Similarly, I didn't even notice that Bertilak's wife didn't have a name until I was trying to write this blog post. For most of the poem we just think of the women as the pretty one and the ugly one, and those are totally normal ways for us to think.

I'm not trying to say that we live in a disgusting sexist society. I just wanted to note that these throwaway comments about hunting and bedroom seduction and biblical history betray a mentality that doesn't seem all that foreign to us and the world we still live in. That's not surprising--our culture comes from somewhere, and "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" certainly represents a huge part of our cultural heritage. I think it's interesting to see which aspects of our culture (courage and to some extent the view of women) translate really well to medieval texts and which ones don't (leaders giving away all of their riches). Part of reading literature is determining how texts affect and influence not just their time, but ours as well. Anyway, watching the evolution--or non-evolution--of views towards women might be interesting as we continue to make our way through English literature.