Gender, Adaptation, and the Future in David Lowery’s The Green Knight
by Usha Vishnuvajjala
David Lowery’s 2021 film The Green Knight transforms a narrative obsessed with the past into one that is concerned with the future. The film’s main character Gawain is first introduced to us not in King Arthur’s banquet hall, as in the film’s main source Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, but sleeping in the bed of his lover Essel in a brothel, where she wakes him up by throwing a bucketful of water at him and greeting his shocked gasps with playful laughter. When Gawain leaves her room and returns to his own rooms to dress for Christmas with the king, he is greeted by his mother. Like Essel, she speaks to him with a sort of affectionate mockery, responding to his evasion of her questions with “You do smell like you’ve been at mass. What, have you been drinking the sacraments all night?” In these two brief scenes, we learn about Gawain not through his interactions with the king or the court’s knights, but with the two main women in his life, both of whom are characters created for the film. It is ultimately his relationships with these two women that determine what futures are possible for Gawain and for Camelot.
Since the 1990s, feminist readings of the Sir Gawain and the Green Knight have argued for reading it as a text about women, but one in which that fact is not fully revealed to the reader — or to Gawain — until the end. Geraldine Heng, for example, argued in her 1991 article “Feminine Knots” that it was possible, with new methods of reading, to distinguish a feminine text in the poem, writing that “at the limit of the masculine narrative…appear the sediments of feminine desire.” Heng was departing here from a 1976 article by Derek Brewer in which Brewer argued that Morgan and Guinevere were marginal in the poem. In the last three decades, there has been a growing consensus on the importance of women (Morgana, Lady Bertilak, the Virgin Mary, and Guinevere) to the poem, and Lowery’s The Green Knight represents that importance in new ways.
The Green Knight takes this underlying feminine text and weaves it throughout the narrative instead of having it surface at the end, turning a narrative about a knight who fails to understand women into one about the women he fails to understand. The film expands the role of Guinevere, making her a caring and benevolent older aunt instead of a silent queen whose only feature is her beauty. It also doubles the roles of Lady Bertilak and Morgana: the same actor (Alicia Vikander) plays Gawain’s lover Essel and Lady Bertilak, and Morgana is conflated with Gawain’s mother, who is unnamed in the film and does not appear in the poem at all. It also adds women to the original narrative: Winifred of the well, a legendary figure associated with the area of north Wales which Gawain rides through, and the female giants he encounters who seem to want to help him but of whom he is afraid. It gives Gawain three sisters instead of his usual three brothers, something I didn’t understand until I saw the credits at the end of the film. The masculine community of knights, so important to the poem, recedes into the background of The Green Knight until it is all but invisible, replaced by networks of women whose magic, technology, and knowledge structure the world in which Gawain lives, even though he cannot see it.
What the film does, then, is make the presence of women, so easily overlooked and forgotten by the male characters in the poem, visible to the audience throughout its narrative. It does so without changing the depiction of Gawain as always almost-but-not-quite getting it; he repeatedly fails to learn what he is supposed to from these women. We see this, for example, when he attempts to touch Winifred to see if she’s a ghost, and she responds, “do not touch me. A knight should know better.” And the erasure or ignoring of women remains at the center of the kingdom’s weakness in the film; it is perhaps most poignantly portrayed in the flash forward at the end of the film, where the death of Gawain’s sole but illegitimate son, with Essel, is framed in a silent sequence as the final part of his long, long betrayal of her.
This flash-forward is structured around the life, from birth to death, of Gawain’s son. Essel gives birth to a baby she and Gawain conceived on his return, with Gawain’s mother and sisters in attendance at the birth. As Essel smiles at Gawain afterward, holding the baby, he stares back at her seriously and the camera returns to her face so we can see her coming to realize something is horribly wrong. An old bearded man — presumably Merlin — comes forward to take the newborn baby from Essel’s arms and drop some coins on her blood-stained bed (reminding her and us, perhaps, that she is a sex worker and that he feels he can “buy” her pregnancy and labor from her). The scene closes on a shot of Gawain’s mother and sisters reaching to restrain Essel as she crawls, weak from childbirth, towards the door through which her newborn baby has disappeared.
This scene makes literal the implied violence against women in many Arthurian texts and evokes a number of written depictions of Merlin taking a newborn Arthur away from his mother Igrayne, including that in Thomas Malory’s fifteenth century Morte Darthur. It also very much echoes the cinematic translation of Malory’s scene in Jon Boorman’s 1981 Excalibur, where the young Morgan le Fay listens from below as her mother Igrayne screams for her baby to an uncaring Uther. Boorman portrays this as Morgana’s villain origin story — much later in the film, she tells Merlin that she is avenging what was done to her mother, unlike the Morgan in Malory’s Morte, who is avenging her father. The Morgan in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight does not explain her motives in her own words, but Bertilak describes her first as the daughter of the Duchess of Cornwall and only then as Uther’s daughter (ll. 2465).
This scene in The Green Knight, then, is evoking other cinematic representations of Merlin taking a newborn away from its mother, setting in motion a series of tragic events. The baby in The Green Knight is important in the same way Malory’s and Boorman’s Arthurs are; he is born after Arthur and Guinevere have died, leaving Arthur’s nephew Gawain as heir. Although Gawain marries another woman–an aristocrat like himself–in an arranged marriage soon after the baby’s birth, he and his new wife have only daughters, making Essel’s son Gawain’s only male heir. Gawain and the bearded man I’m identifying as Merlin both consider the baby important as an heir. They fail to see that he is important to Essel as her son, and as the son of the man she loves, Gawain, who cuts off contact with her after this. Their son dies on the battlefield as a teenager; Gawain dies later on (more about that below); and in the easter egg after the film’s credits, his young daughter picks up his crown and puts it on. Gawain’s mother — who takes on elements of two different characters in medieval Arthurian literature, Morgana and Morgause — looks on throughout these events, tying them back to what was done to her mother in texts like Malory’s Morte Darthur and Boorman’s Excalibur and suggesting that Gawain is perpetuating the cycle of gendered violence that sustains Britain’s line of succession.
The importance of children and heirs underscores the film’s depiction of Arthur’s kingdom as teetering on the brink of extinction. Rather than the “berdles chylder” (beardless children) of the poem, Arthur and his knights are aging and frail, against the backdrop of a decaying Camelot surrounded by ruins, with only Essel and Morgana and her daughters providing signs of life at court. In this way, it seems like a film very much concerned with the future — or the possibility of a future — for Arthur’s Britain, unlike the poem, which is so deeply concerned with the past. The poem begins and ends with the siege of Troy. Although the film references this with the flames in its opening sequence, it is otherwise not particularly backward-looking, not nostalgic, not concerned with how anyone got where they are, but rather with whether there is a future.
We see this in the concern over children and heirs, which is not really present in the poem, and in Arthur and Guinevere’s words to Gawain about being ready for the future. And rather than bits and pieces of the past being present, as they are in the poem with its claims to a Trojan lineage and its references to the history of Gawain’s and Arthur’s family, we instead have the future popping up in the use of photography and the frequent presence of babies and children. Even the presence of ruins in the very long take of Gawain riding out of Camelot to seek the Green Knight seems to suggest a possible future for Camelot if he fails, rather than bringing the past into the narrative. In orienting its narrative toward possible futures rather than the past, The Green Knight is also speaking to very contemporary concerns about whether nostalgia or a backwards-looking way of understanding our place in the world is precluding possible futures.
Usha Vishnuvajjala is currently a lecturer in English literature at Cardiff University. Her work focuses on Middle English literature and literary, cinematic, and political medievalisms. She is completing the monograph Feminist Medievalisms: Embodiment and Vulnerability, to be published by Arc Humanities/Amsterdam University Press in 2023 and recently co-edited, with Karma Lochrie, the volume Women’s Friendship in Medieval Literature, forthcoming this July from The Ohio State University Press.
