Courtly Love in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: Anamorphosis, Language, and Power

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is an important text on courtly love in the tradition of Arthurian romance. It not only represents that tradition but also significantly subverts it. To understand how this subversion takes place, it is important to have a clear conception of courtly love, medieval romance, and Arthurian legend.

There are at least six ways in which these overlapping concepts can be analyzed.

1. Romance as Anamorphic Discourse

Romance as a discourse on courtly love resembles anamorphic art. Consider, for example, the skull in Holbein’s The Ambassadors or the pipe in Magritte’s This is Not a Pipe. Anamorphosis distorts reality—sometimes positively, sometimes negatively—and requires an alternative perspective or device to unveil the truth (or lack of truth) hidden in reality.

2. Courtly Love as a Semblance of Lack

The discourse of courtly love is a semblance that both represents a lack and contains a lack. Its anamorphic distortion derives precisely from the representation of what is “not there” in reality. What is absent in life is made present in the discourse of romance.

For Lacan, discourse is always a semblance: a deceptive or distorted representation of reality. In this sense, the discourse of courtly love not only represents lack but also inspires awe toward it.

3. Love as a Language-Game

Discourse can also be understood as a set of speech acts or language-games characterized as “love-talking.” In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, both Gawain and the lady engage competently in this language-game through temptation and counter-temptation.

What is love in this context? It is a game—a game of language.

4. Courtly Love as Wish-Fulfillment

The discourse of courtly love may be seen as a wish-fulfillment for the feudal lord in the same way that a dream is a wish-fulfillment for the dreamer. It portrays an idealized world, a utopia the feudal class longed for but could never fully realize.

Love as a social contract—structured through gift-giving—was meant to civilize desire and sustain relationships between lord and knight, lady and knight, and lord and lady. Ideally, faithful observance of the rules of love could create a healthy social order.

Yet reality was different. As shown in Roman de la Rose, such rules were frequently disrespected, contributing to the decline of medieval society, as Johann Huizinga notes in The Waning of the Middle Ages. The glorification of chivalric values, then, was itself an anamorphic wish-fulfillment: it represented what was not actually there in reality.

5. Courtly Love as Chivalric Duty

Courtly love also forms part of the wider system of chivalric duties. Chivalry included obligations to the feudal lord (warrior chivalry), to women (courtly chivalry), and to God (religious chivalry).

Courtly romance (romans courtois) combined language, literature, and love. The concept of “courtly love” (amour courtois or fin amour) was defined by Gaston Paris in 1883 as a service, an ennobling experience, and a path to moral and spiritual growth. It reinforced nobility, courtesy, and morality, sustaining both value systems and dominant ideologies.

6. The Rules of Love

Courtly love followed specific rules, as outlined by Andreas Capellanus in The Art of Courtly Love (1185). Some of these include:

• "When made public, love rarely endures."

• "Every lover regularly turns pale in the presence of the beloved."

• "The thought of love causes loss of appetite and sleep."

• "A true lover considers nothing good except what pleases the beloved."

• "A true lover is constantly and without interruption possessed by the thought of the beloved."

These rules made love not simply an emotion but a disciplined code of conduct.

How Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Subverts the Courtly Love Tradition

While the poem draws on the tradition of courtly love, it also subverts it in three significant ways:

a) The Feminine Gaze in the Temptation Scene

The usual roles of desiring subject and desired object are reversed. Who is in love—the knight or the lady?

b) Gawain’s Misogynistic Outbursts

Gawain is sexually attracted to the lady, and when he feels fooled by her, he lashes out. His anger stems from injured male vanity, and his misogynistic outbursts reveal both sexual guilt and the denial of truth. This tension between fear of death and the delights of life is central to understanding Gawain.

c) "Is a Kiss Just a Kiss?"

Does the lady cross the boundaries of the rules of love when she kisses Gawain? What if she has genuinely fallen in love with him while only pretending to do so? Moreover, is the kiss Gawain receives from the lady the same as the kiss he later gives to her husband? The merging of the social and the erotic destabilizes boundaries, even hinting at disruptions of heteronormativity.

Courtly Love and the Paradoxical Empowerment of the Lady

Courtly love often appears to empower the female beloved, but this empowerment is ambiguously undercut by male agency. In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, this paradox plays out in several ways:

a) Power and Mastery

Like the women in Chaucer who desire mastery over their husbands, Lady Bertilak seems to exercise real power over Gawain. She is certainly not the damsel in distress.

b) Woman as Function, Not Character

Yet she is presented not as an individual but as a function: “the lady,” a universalized feminine figure. She is denied a name, and thus denied selfhood. The misogynistic diatribe is directed not at her husband but at her.

c) Morgan le Fay as Instigator

Morgan le Fay also appears to dominate the plot, but she is cast as a sorceress, even a devil. The poet may be using Morgan not as a character but as a function—a narrative device. Her power is diffused, and she is marginalized in the story. By presenting her as an old, unbeautiful woman, the text contrasts her with the youthful Lady Bertilak, emphasizing vanity, the transience of beauty, and the inevitability of death.

d) Guinevere’s Shadow

Finally, the relationship between Gawain and Guinevere hovers in the background. The hyperbolic description of Guinevere and the weight given to her potential objections remind us that she too plays a role in shaping the meaning of the tale.

Conclusion

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight both embodies and critiques the tradition of courtly love. It draws on its rules, rituals, and ideals while simultaneously exposing their contradictions. In doing so, the poem raises questions about desire, power, gender, and the fragility of chivalric values at the close of the Middle Ages.

Note: This write-up is based on notes I prepared for my lectures and is intended as an accessible introduction rather than a full scholarly article.