Psychoanalytic Approach to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight :: Sir Gawain Green Knight Essays

Its easy to feller Sir Gawain and the Green Knight with one of Jungs archetypal motif patterns the title-holder and the quest. Through lots of difficulties or challenges, Sir Gawain reaches the higher ground of knighthood, and also proves himself beseeming of a courtly masculine identity. It still seems quite daring and questioning to apply psychoanalytic approach into the text itself, especially it comes with the Oedipus complex. But if we throw off Freuds three psychic zones and Sir Gawains conflict together, or link up his fear of castration with his fear of being be stoped, the applying of psychoanalytic approach is acceptable. indoors the connections mentioned above, we can see how the get under ones skin figures function and how a knights masculinity is maintain by abstaining from sexual desire in medieval period. Sir Gawain is similar to any other hero we see in mythology, who is dispose to response any obstacles coming upon them, and is thus getting mature twain physically and mentally. So the process of being a real knight is similar to the process of being a real man in FreudStheory of child development. A boy in the process of being a man will confront a threat of being emasculate by his father for to engaging in sexual relation with his Mother. Submitting to the ingenuousness principal, the boy represses his incestuous desire, identifies with his father, and is led to the manhood. One of the father figures in spite of appearance this text obviously is the Green Knight, who appears as the authority of the nature military unit to test Sir Gawains ability in masculinity and ability in abstaining from sexual temptation. Before the Green Knight is qualified to test Sir Gawain, he must prove that he is more a man than Sir Gawain. If we pretend that being beheaded here is the a nonher form of castration. That he lets his head cut off by Gawain first is the showing of his superiority in masculinity. After Green Knights head is cut off, he seized this splendid head and straightway lifted it. From the passage, we see he is not less a man, and is never afraid of being castrated by his son, which reinforces the Green Knights father figure. Since the Green Knight, a father authority is under the disguise of Bertilak, we can assume that his mistress becomes the puzzle figure. While the Green Knight is out there hunting, Sir Gawain has to decide whether to deposit aside his fear of castration and give in the sexual conquest or to repress his own desire.