In addition to its three public, signifying blushes, SGGK also depicts Gawain concealing his shame’s communicative function. On the first morning of the “exchange of winnings game,”
Gawain awakens to a “littel dyn at his dor,” which heralds the unexpected entrance of the Lady “loflyest to beholde” (1183–87). Upon her approach, “þe burne schamed, / And layde hym doun lystyly, and let as he slepte” (1189–90) [“the man grew ashamed, and laid down cunningly, pretending to sleep”]. Here, Gawain experiences prospective shame: the Lady’s approach sets off an emotional alarm signaling a heightened potential for disgrace. As Mark Miller points out, Gawain’s shame and concomitant feigned sleep is simultaneously defen- sive and prolonging:
Lying down and pretending to sleep is in some sense a defensive gesture: Gawain does not know what is going on, so he waits to see what happens before deciding what to do. But waiting to see what happens is also a “lysty,” desiring act here. One might think, on reading the further fact that as Gawain lies down in this way he does so in shame, that he is nursing some illicit sexual hope or goal, and that that is what he is waiting for and ashamed of. But that would be to miss the way both his desire and his shame are bound up in a gesture of deferral and prolongation. What Gawain does here [. . .] is to avoid anything that would confer a definitive meaning on his or the Lady’s actions, in order to remain in the delicious suspension of flirtatious innu- endo. (236)
Once again, Gawain’s shame functions to maintain the bonds of communal enjoyment, this time between himself and the Lady, whose company furnishes the knight considerable mirth. While prospective shame helps Gawain to enjoy the Lady’s presence without disgracing him- self, it leads him to feign sleep, thereby inhibiting his shame’s communicative function. Of course, if the Lady believes Gawain to be asleep, she cannot empathize with the sense of moral danger that her presence stirs in him. Then again, since her goal is to lure an unknow-
ing Gawain into an ethical double bind, she might well use an empathic recognition of his prospective shame to rhetorically disable the knight’s sense of danger without removing the “actual” danger—actual, at least, from the perspective of the chivalric order—that it fore- bodes. Indeed, the Lady repeatedly exclaims that Gawain ought to be ashamed of his unwill- ingness to discuss matters of love or offer her kisses. Just as his internal, prospective shame helps Gawain continue enjoying the Lady’s company; her external accusations of shame force him continue to do so.
While Gawain’s shame in the bedroom prolongs “the delicious suspension of flirta- tious innuendo” between knight and Lady, it also reminds the knight of his social bond with Bertilak and, by extension, the entire homo-social order of knighthood. In fact, Lawrence Warner posits that, when describing Gawain’s third day of flirting with the Lady in his bed- room, the narrator explicitly states that Gawain must avoid danger to his chivalric reputation by thinking more about Bertilak than his Lady (263–65). For Warner, lines 1768–69 of
SGGK—“Gret perile bitwene hem stod, / Nif mare of hir knyȝt mynne—which have long
taken to mean “Great peril stood between them [i.e. Gawain and the Lady] / Unless Mary is mindful of her knight,” actually mean “Great peril stood between them, / If he [Gawain] were not thinking more of her knight [Bertilak].” For SGGK’s narrator, it seems, the homosocial bond between Bertilak and Gawain ought to trump any heterosocial or heterosexual bond be- tween Gawain and the Lady.
As Carolyn Dinshaw points out, however, the exchange of winnings game’s rules al- low Gawain to enjoy heterosexual encounters with the Lady, so long as he also engages in analogous homosexual encounters with Bertilak. By eliding, but not foreclosing on, the fact that Gawain could rightfully have sex with both husband and wife, SGGK implies that the
knight’s rejection of this option “goes without saying” and thereby participates in “a broad heterocultural strategy of unintelligibility” (223). It is a tacit, prospective shame that forces Gawain to carefully only show the amount of physical affection to the Lady that his heter- onormative ideology allows him to show Bertilak later. Dinshaw’s Foucaultian reading of
SGGK recognizes both a containing, heteronormative ideology at work in the poem and an
opportunity to subvert this ideology “in the practice of reading, in constantly queerying the text” (223). One way of doing so, I think, is to point out the profound difficulty that an un- spoken, heteronormative ideology places on Gawain’s “shame system” during the exchange of winnings game. If SGGK’s narrator and the poem itself implicitly promote the constant use prospective shame to prohibit homosexual acts, the poem also exposes the manner in which prohibitive, heteronormative ideologies utterly complicate shame’s capacity to engen- der ethical behavior. After all, it is in the bedroom that Gawain lands himself in an ethical double bind by promising the Lady to keep the Green Girdle after he already promised Ber- tilak to exchange all of his winnings upon the latter’s return to Hautedesert. Had he not been so preoccupied using prospective shame to avoid a homosexual encounter with Bertilak, Gawain might well have used employed it to anticipate and avoid his monumental shame be- fore the Green Knight and, later, Camelot’s king and courtiers.