Producing Sir Gawain: The Three "Confessions" in _Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

When Alexander Pope wrote, "Know then thyself; presume not God to scan/ The proper study of mankind is Man," he communicated that self-knowledge is restricted in scope. For Sir Gawain of _Sir Gawain and the Green Knight_, however, self-knowledge is a fluid, limitless, and unmappable as the chaos of _Paradise Lost_. The three "confessions" concern Gawain as produced by three sometimes mutually-exclusive bodies of knowledge, leaving him with the exhaustive and irresolvable task of negotiating between the three in perpetuity. The process so described suggests deep anxieties over the instability of self-knowledge and the competing demands of those institutions producing the self.

Each of the three "confessions" concerns Gawain's perceived infractions against a system of values. Each confession, in turn, produces Gawain as a subject. His first confession, a formal auricular confession performed in Bercilak's castle for a priest, represents his account of his misdeeds against God and His laws as taught by the Church. The exchange that Burrow termed the second confession, Gawain's admission that he has defaulted on his obligations in a courtly game, registers his infractions against his gentleman's agreement. The scene that Anthony Low calls the third confession, Gawain's recounting of the events on his journey before the court, I contend represents his understanding of his infractions against knighthood and, by extension, the ruler and court who extend the honor and the reputation. He constructs embodied virtue much as he constructs his body: one spot and it is gone. This construction of knightly embodied virtue conflicts with the notion of theological and moral virtues as depicted by Aquinas: those virtues were considered "operative habits" and reflective a process of selfhood. Gawain, charged with the task of operating in proliferating and sometimes mutually exclusive technologies of self, inhabits a fluid, unstable self-knowledge.