English Literature (Taylor’s Version): Seminar 2

In English Literature (Taylor’s Version) seminar 2 – titled ‘This Ain’t a Fairytale: Chivalry and the Knight in Shining Armour’ – we looked at the anonymous 14th century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, written in Middle English (though we used the excellent Simon Armitage poetic translation). Students had also watched the 2021 film The Green Knight – a very free adaptation of the poem by filmmaker David Lowery and starring Dev Patel – in advance of the seminar, and were asked to write either a short opinion piece on the film, or their thoughts on the idea of chivalry.

We discussed four Taylor Swift songs – Love Story, Today Was A Fairytale, White Horse, and Miss Americana and the Heartbreak Prince – and looked particularly at the role of fantasy in these songs, related to the tropes of the knight in shining armour and the damsel in distress. White Horse, for example, charts the breaking down of the chivalric fantasy, while Miss Americana and the Heartbreak Prince maps that broken fantasy onto a different kind of (political) disillusionment. We also noted that some of Swift’s later work (Call It What You Want, for example) explicitly renounces the notion of the damsel in distress and the need to be saved. The tropes of chivalry are subject to interrogation and subversion in Swift’s work, particularly her later songs. Chivalry exists today in a context far removed from its medieval origins, and its pervasiveness demands that we examine its legacy and how we continue to engage with this centuries-old concept.

We then moved onto an overview of chivalry in the Middle Ages, coming to the conclusion that it was a complex and contradictory concept even during its heyday, pervaded by tensions and ultimately dressing up brutal violence in acceptable (elite) clothing. We explored the presence of these tensions in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, particularly in relation to the medieval concept of courtly love, whereby the woman is placed on a metaphorical pedestal and almost worshipped by her male lover, for whom the love is doomed to remain unrequited and unconsummated. Gawain, ultimately, is a man torn between multiple contradictory social, sexual and political expectations, who can never win no matter how hard he tries. Lowery’s film makes this explicit.

We also discussed the possibility – evident in some medieval literature – that women were able to manipulate certain chivalric ideals in order to acquire power in a patriarchal society where it was frequently denied them (the entire plot of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is ultimately planned and orchestrated by a woman), connecting this with Swift’s feminism and later subversion of the damsel in distress and ‘white knight’ tropes. We can draw an invisible string, then, between Swift’s work, which juxtaposes certain idealistic and fantastical notions regarding gender and ‘sensual politics’ with the more fraught and complex reality, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which recognised the problematic contradictions inherent in chivalry even as it sought to promote and glamourise the knightly endeavour.

For a more detailed overview of our discussion, see these excellent notes from one of my students (thank you Tara!)