Blooms Literary Themes - THE HEROS ... - ymerleksi - home

196Sir Gawain and the Green Knighta code that demands its practitioners to act in ways that are generallybeyond the desires and capabilities of mere mortal humans. PiotrSadowski writes that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is “both aliterary expression and critique of the chivalric ideal of its age” (53).Thus Gawain becomes Morgan’s unknowing accomplice in personifyingthis critique; his failure ensures her success.In describing the questing nature of Gawain, Sadowski writes,“the story of Sir Gawain as a particular literary manifestation of thestandard epic heroic biography symbolically describes human lifeconceived as a pursuit of higher spiritual values, attained through aseries of tests and trials of physical, psychological, and moral nature”(52). It is through these trials that the questing hero finds fulfillment.Aaron Steinberg argues that fulfillment is connected to the “contentof [the] inner life” (191). Fulfillment thus adheres to a “psychologicalinner reality and structure,” reflecting the fantasies, desires, fears,and motivations of the quester (Steinberg 188). Richard J. Collier,however, also notes that fulfillment is dependent upon externalfactors as well as internal. In works like Gawain, there exists an overseeingfigure—in this case, Morgan le Fay, who “guided me . . . toyour great hall / to put pride on trial”—and it is this figure who hasessentially ordained the actions that are to follow (Armitage 2456–7). All that remains for Gawain to add to the chain of events is hisown struggle toward an internal sense of fulfillment; thus both theexternal will, the fulfillment of Morgan le Fay’s design by Bertilakthe Green Knight, and the internal motivations of Gawain himself,must come together to create the quest Sadowski describes. However,because of the type of quest Morgan has created, and because of themotivations and fears of the very human knight at the center of theepic, the quest itself is doomed to failure—a failure predicated by thelack of both external fulfillment (the inability of Gawain to completethe quest as promised) and internal fulfillment (the quest fails totransform Gawain into the type of celebrated hero he imagines whenhe accepts the Green Knight’s challenge at Camelot). Yet the quest’sfailure is what ultimately allows for the growth of the hero. In failure,Gawain finds only imperfection and the stunning recognition that heis only human.It is perhaps a bit unfair to suggest that Gawain’s quest is aresolute failure; after all, he does travel to the chapel of the Green