The ends of enchantment: colonialism and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

By the thirteenth century, the English had learned that the Welsh were treacherous and fickle. (1) In the last quarter of the fourteenth century, the English trembled when the Welsh both raided English territory and produced an alarming increase in the number of settlers migrating into English border counties. (2) After the widespread Welsh uprising in the first decade of the fifteenth century, the English realized that the Welsh were not the submissive and deferential natives they had feigned to be, but were a perfidious people, on par with the wild Irish. (3) These "insights" into the nature of the Welsh were widely held perceptions among the English in the late Middle Ages. Lest the English forget that the Welsh possessed these characteristics, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (SGGK) was prepared to remind them.

SGGK was thoroughly tied to England's colonial project in Wales when the poem was composed. SGGK is typically dated between 1350 and 1400 (a common ascription being the last quarter of the fourteenth century), a period during which the English were attempting to complete their colonization of Wales, while the Welsh violently opposed such domination. Resembling several Arthurian histories from medieval Britain, (4) SGGK is structured by these colonial conflicts and, appropriately, arises from a border culture: the poem is conventionally believed to have been composed in northwest England, alongside the Welsh border, and employs a northwest midlands dialect, specifically, the dialect of Lancashire and Cheshire. Appropriately, the bulk of SGGK's narrative action unfolds in the English-Welsh borderland. This location is specified at the beginning of Gawain's quest to find the Green Knight. Gawain initially journeys through the realm of Logres (England, south of the Humber) (5) and eventually reaches northern Wales. Gawain passes the Anglesey Islands, fords rivers near the headlands, crosses at Holy Head, and lands "In [thorn]e wyldrenesse of Wyrale" ("In the wilderness of Wirral," 701), (6) a peninsula just inside England, by the northeastern border of Wales. Gawain is in Wirral when Bertilak's castle magically appears, making SGGK a border romance.

This article investigates SGGK's participation in colonial struggles between the English and the Welsh in the late fourteenth century. As the models of ideology employed in British cultural studies attest, a text does not simply reflect the political climate in which it is composed but intervenes in the political terrain and participates in the production of the social formation. Hence, using a methodology in dialogue with Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams, Louis Althusser, and Antonio Gramsci, (7) this article examines how the ideologies speaking through SGGK attempted to reformulate readers' conceptions of themselves and of their neighbors and thus shape their perceptions of how to negotiate English-Welsh conflicts.

The defining work of SGGK in relation to England's colonization of Wales is that of Patricia Clare Ingham, and we disagree dramatically about how to understand the English-Welsh negotiations embedded in the poem. Ingham argues that, as the poem unfolds, the issues surrounding colonization raised early in the text disappear and that the ethnic and geographic disparities between the English and the Welsh in the first half of the poem collapse to be replaced by gender difference. (8) I maintain that SGGK insists throughout the entire poem--as did, in general, the English and the Welsh in the late fourteenth century--that the two peoples differed greatly. Ethnic and geographic incongruities are not effaced as SGGK unfolds, but are reinscribed at the locus of gender--more precisely, at the site of female sexuality--in a conventional move that acts to further elaborate and consolidate colonial power by buttressing ideologies of colonialism with ideologies of gender.

This divergence points to a more fundamental disagreement between Ingham's work and my own. We understand the English colonization of the Welsh, and hence the poem's colonialist politics, very differently. Ingham writes,

 
  Welsh and English interaction in march towns, at regional 
  marketplaces, on the battlefield, or in the narrative tropes of a 
  Middle English poem become the multiple places where unity is forged 
  from ethnic heterogeneities. Colonial union becomes an act of cultural 
  synchronicity, a coordination of capitulation ... Rhetorics of 
  distance and differentiation-the desire to separate "Welsheries" from 
  "Englishries" in late medieval histories, or in the case before us to 
  determine once and for all which parts of Gawain are Welsh or 
  English--efface the familiarities, shared dreamings, common spaces of 
  household and story. (9) 

Ingham views the intermixing of the Welsh and English (in the poem and in Wales) as the creation of a hybridity, a conflation which is, for the most part, a reasonably pleasant cultural and geographical commingling. Rhonda Knight's work on SGGK and colonization also centers on hybridity, insisting that Gawain's identity is a "cultural collage" and that Bertilak embodies Anglo-Welsh hybridity, reflective of the border region. (10) Knight acknowledges the harshness of England's seizure of Wales but claims that by the time SGGK was composed, the intensity of conquest and occupation had subsided to be replaced by a more settled coexistence. (11) Hence, both Knight and Ingham seem unaware that the English conquest of the Welsh in the late fourteenth century was frequently bloody: many Welshmen and women were dispossessed of their lands and livelihoods; and many were killed by the invaders. Focusing more strongly on consensual relations than coercive ones, Ingham roots her discussion in the dialectical (specifically in Homi Bhabha's formulation of mimicry); (12) but when discussing a dialectic, it is important to emphasize that two disparate groups do not approach their convergence on equal terms, as Ingham's work frequently seems to imply. As Antonio Gramsci and Stuart Hall argue, when a dominant group seeks to produce hegemony, there is a dialectic, where, in order to be effective, the ruling group must take account of the interests and tendencies of the subaltern groups over whom hegemony will be exercised. However, such compromise does not imply equity, and the two groups do not contribute equally to the production of the new social formation. (13) Ingham and Knight make the power relations in the poem and in Wales seem more equitable and especially more palatable, I would argue, than they indeed were. As the historical discussion in this article will demonstrate, relations between the Welsh and the colonizing English--including in northeastern Wales and in the Marches in the southeast (14)--were generally bitter in the second half of the fourteenth century. Accordingly, rather than arguing for the leveling of dissimilarities and the liquidation of "ethnic heterogeneities ... into nothing more than the differences of an extended family," as Ingham holds (15) or for some collage of identities as Knight maintains, this article argues that SGGK insists that the Welsh and the English are two distinct groups and that the poem promoted England's conquest of Wales.