Chivalry: You're Doing It Wrong (Series, Part 6)

Part 6: Sir Gawain the Chaste

Warning: Spoilers

The treatment of chastity in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is highly contradictory.  For instance, abstinence is highly prized, but kisses are don’t seem to matter at all.  King Arthur’s court plays kissing games, and Sir Gawain gives and takes kisses like they are dollar bills.  Even the sex and status of the recipient doesn’t even seem to matter when it comes to kissing.  Sir Gawain goes from kissing Lady Bertilak to Lord Bertilak without a second thought.  Basically, kisses don’t matter.

Likewise, while actually having sex with a married woman would have definitely been against Sir Gawain’s moral code, apparently flirting with her, kissing her, and generally getting her hopes up, but then never satisfying them is perfectly acceptable.  This doesn’t seem fair at all.  For Sir Gawain, chastity doesn’t require positive actions such as removing himself from the situation so much as negative ones like not actually having sex.  And this is mostly because Lady Bertilak is Lord Bertilak’s wife.  Otherwise, bedding her wouldn’t even have been an issue.

You would think that since the chivalric code doesn’t require much of Sir Gawain when it comes to chastity, it would be easy for him to remain chaste.  Actually, though, the ambiguity of the chivalric code when it comes to sexuality makes it very difficult for Sir Gawain to fend off Lady Bertilak’s advances while still remaining courteous.  He is only barely able to resist her, and it is partly because of the weakening of his moral defenses that he takes the magic girdle (ribbon).  Though the idea of chastity should be pretty unambiguous in principle, in practice it actually confuses the issue for Sir Gawain because it doesn’t make clear which behaviors are o.k. and which are not, or allow him to withdraw from the situation, and this moral state of confusion is what allows him to take the seemingly innocent gift of the girdle.