Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: An Anatomy of Chastity

Freud's interpretative stance is based on his discovery that the pleasure of the text is always linked to “the human body as a whole, parents, children, brothers and sisters, birth, death, nakedness—and something else besides” (Freud, 1916, 153). Consequently, a psychoanalytic reading of literature cannot rest simply on mapping the correspondence between characters and situations and the Oedipal configuration. One has to determine the specific libidinal field of force which structures a narrative. Freud insisted that we must approach a case as if we knew nothing; we must rediscover the Oedipus complex in the discourse we seek to understand. What is at stake in the text, as in free association, is always a specific form of object choice, a unique vicissitude of the capacity to love. What we say is a manifestation of our desire; we tell the stories that bring us pleasure. This insight leads Roland Barthes to the conclusion that the “relation to narrative (to representation, to mimesis) has something to do with the Oedipus Complex … if we managed to suppress the Oedipus Complex and marriage, what would be left for us to tell?” (, 121).

We want to suggest that the enduring power of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, an anonymous fourteenth century Middle English alliterative narrative poem, rests upon the fact that the poem evokes pleasure when it represents the fulfillment of infantile wishes: it situates the self, in the person of the hero, in a present situation that embodies a particular familial configuration and thereby restores, in the narrative present, the signs associated with an earlier experience of satisfaction. The poem takes up the imaginary figures of