Afternoon of Alterity - Nazareth College

An adherence to social convention, as Saunders suggests MiddleEnglish romance is mostly centered on, equates love with “socialorder and with larger issues of loyalty” (Saunders 48), but it is thisvery factor which begins to distort the perception of the “lover”.Such loyalty does not define the sort of “objective love…[which] isa reconciliation of seeming opposites” (O’Neill 108), and a form ofaltruism that “is a passionate affimration of an object but an activestriving and interrelatedness, the aim of which is the happiness,growth, and freedom of it’s object” (O’Neill 107), but rather createsboundaries defined by certain “dynastic line[s]…and the stability ofa nation” (Saunders 50), concepts which cultivate senses of alterityby drawing lines in humanity where there were none before. Theselines were used to assign “self-identity and sameness” (Kearney 65),and this assignment of identity along imaginary lines of “Good”and ‘We’ “define over and against the foreign ‘Them’” (Kearney65), thereby creating the fear and anger that create a monster.While these monsters may be nothing more than men and womenwho choose to be different from what is accepted by the dominantculture, it is that same culture which deems itself superior thatchooses instead to otherize these social “outliers” into inferiorsubdivisions of humanity.Throughout all of these subdivisions of humanity, an otherness ismaintained. This otherness can be ethnic, religious, or physical butin any case, it is these differences which translate into the monstrous,and more specifically, in the Romantic era, into monstrous giantsthe absolute picture of something that is “antithetical to civilization”(Hout 381), and it should be clear to readers that there is only oneway to deal with such alterity present in the “civilzed” world, “thatthey are to be killed”(Huot 375) and herein lies the problem of thesense of love granted by chivalric and courtly codes. Herein, too, liesthe genesis of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a dissenting voice inthe darkness of elitism, it could be postulated, the name of one of48 afternoons of alterity