『가웬 경과 푸른 기사』 : 가웬의 시험 = The Test of Gawain in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

A fourteenth-century alliterative romance, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is peculiar to a highly sophisticated "courtly" romance. Sir Gawain, the emblem of the Arthurian chivalric ideal, undergoes the Green Knight's testing of the courtesy to lady on the one hand and of the knightly prowess on the other. The Green Knight admits that Gawain passes the test more satisfactorily than any other knights in the world, and the Arthurian knights also applaud Gawain's return to Camelot. Nonetheless, Gawain alone is left with the "green girdle," the notion of limitation in his own knightly ability and, possibly, in the Arthurian chivalric community.
The chivalric ideals--heroic prowess and courtesy, i.e., the "traw p e" towards lords and ladies--are often seen as being in conflict with the penitential ideals of the late medieval period. This conflict appears in Gawain to be epitomized in the testing of Gawain: the ones between courtesy and chastity and between the fulfillment of heroic reputation and the sacrament of penance. These seeming contradictions, when actualized in romance literature such as Gawain, however, are mitigated in such a way that they are reconciled with the ideals for a Christian knight as the natural man to abide by.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight excludes current socio-economic conditions indicative of the decline of feudal society; Gawain confines itself to the young Arthurian court as a monolithic community. This aloofness of Gawain implies the romance's awareness of the rise of the non-courtly classes of bourgeoisie and gentry, which is found to be threatening to the established aristocratic culture of the time. By keeping itself within the self-contained space of courtly members alone, the romance represents the desire of the upper class for the "unitary" discourse of feudal nobility. This desire is none other than that of a "mirror-image" identification among the members of the chivalric institution; and the desire for collectivity is more urgently felt in Gawain where there is suggested a potential discord even within the courtly community. Facing the dissolution of feudal community, therefore, Gawain as a courtly romance provides in its literary space the means of an "imaginary" resolution of the dangerous and unsavory contradictions to the feudal interest in control.