From Bad to Bitching: Reorienting Domestication in Sir Gowther

Category: Best Undergraduate Writing About Literature (up to 15 pages) at Marquette University Department of English Undergraduate Writing Awards, Spring 2020

Can a dog really be taught new tricks? The Middle English romance Sir Gowther is well known for its drastically redemptive narrative arc, and its eponymous protagonist oft-studied for his quintessentially monstrous character. For murderous Gowther to discover his own self and seek salvation, he undertakes a uniquely prescribed Christian penance. As a process of domestication, he becomes a dog — so he can become human. Many literary scholars consider the poem a reform romance; I cautiously propose a genre of reorientation. The ‘reformed’ Gowther exchanges demonic bloodthirst for the Eucharistic blood of Christ, but he remains in the ambiguous social space he has always inhabited. He continues to spurn any form of community-imposed domestication. He has no interest in celebrating his innate hyper-virility, suddenly fashionable; he stubbornly rejects religious authority; and he disrupts multiple dimensions of reproduction. Even when he seems to have changed the most, Gowther persists outside the margins of gender roles, humanity, culture, and society.

Gowther is born into a culture of sex and violence, as well as sex as violence; with sex as violence against women, and brutish murder the equivalent against men. Gowther lives simultaneously outside and in defiance of chivalric norms. Using Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s definition of chivalry, as “the code which regulates the proper construction of masculinity within the domain of bourgeois and aristocratic relations” (225), Gowther embodies what is excluded from this code. Even in this barbaric society deemed ‘chivalrous,’ Gowther far exceeds cultural expectations of proper gender-based violence, exploding past any semblance of social acceptability.

As a truly wild child, Gowther fails to be properly domesticated as he should. His first attack is on maternal nurture, a supposedly essential element of correct child-rearing. In a recent critical analysis of Gowther and redemption, Gillian Adler examines this anti-formation: “Gowther’s act of tearing at his mother’s breast symbolizes his refusal to accept not only his natural food, but also

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moral nourishment at a formative time in his youth” (54). Adler contrasts the parental spheres of nourishment in Gowther’s development: paternal figures influence tendencies for violence and sin while maternal figures are supposed to nurture and nourish him. This a blasphemous contortion of popular Medieval metaphors for a Maternal Christ and living in imitatio Christi, “centered on the body and empowered an intimate relationship between women and God,” (Adler, 51). Gowther’s impulse to destroy feminine bodies is diabolical. Gowther’s insatiable appetite for non-maternal foods signify not only his social error; but even more awful: his own spiritual error, right from infancy.

Nevertheless, Gowther experiences the humbling of a lifetime in an unorthodox way. The closest Gowther comes to becoming a man is by becoming a dog. As Karl Steel writes in the epilogue of How to Make a Human, Gowther’s first experience of canine feeding is a moment of unexpected tenderness. Both the pope and Gowther consider his penance — to eat exclusively from the mouth of a dog — to be degrading. Yet, for the first time in his life, Gowther willingly accepts the gentle gift of sustenance from a fellow living creature. On this road from Rome, Gowther briefly exists outside the boundaries of all organization and civilization, nameless even to himself. Steel calls this an “inhabitation” of a space that interrupts economy, referencing Derrida’s sense that bread is a gift. This generous feeding by the (never named) greyhound is perhaps one of the most wholesome and humane actions of the entire story, ironically occurring where dehumanization ought. Here is an informal allusion to an unconventional Eucharistic communion, and there is a glimpse of humbling promise for a life outside of the toxicity of human constructs. Here, Gowther experiences a domestication that nurtures. Canine training is more suitable for wild young Gowther than traditional maternal rearing by human women.

This greyhound, as well as all the other unnamed canines, play similar roles to female characters. Women, like these dogs, embody traditionally Christian virtues of silence, passivity and

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obedience. In particular, they are seen and not heard; which is only fathomable to Gowther when his own penance requires a vow of muteness. Only in silence does Gowther first witness the imago dei, the image of Christ, in the generosity of the greyhound. Cohen goes so far as to classify the relation of Gowther and the hound as masochistic; what seems simple imitation is “in fact a more complex process of intersubjective embodiment” (232). It’s bestial and weird, but makes quite an impression.

It seems just the right type of domestication-cum-nurture needed for Gowther to become palatable to the human world. His impulsive violence towards humanity is overcoded with these gentle forces transmitted through the canine body. For a human, he remains extremely bizarre, but instead of terrorizing like a maniacal serial predator, he acts like a docile pet. Despite obviously looking human (usually warranting the customary identifier of “who”), Gowther acts so animal that upon seeing him, the Emperor remarks: “what is that?” (ll. 338). While not convincingly human, but significantly less monstrous, his personality has reoriented into a different pariah. Gowther just doesn’t quite fit into the criteria for canine treatment: as Cohen observes, “…the penitential knight retains a strange dignity even as he maps the trajectory of his becoming” (230). While the steward is “quick to enter the drama of resemblance,” and beat Gowther with a stick like the dog he pretends to be, Gowther paradoxically seems dignified, even attractive. Writing on transformative anthropophagy, Angela Florschuetz specifies this momentous shift, not only in how Gowther feels, but suddenly appears: “His handsomeness is noted for the first time at this point in the romance, and his strange eating habits no longer function as a sign of his excessive and arrogant appetites” (57). He just isn’t as gross and scary as he used to be, and so he is granted a special place as the Emperor’s beloved pet. Suddenly, Gowther-the-pet-dog is one good boy. But is Gowther good now? Does reoriented violence lead to redemption?

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Not quite. He may have seen the image of Christ and experienced humility, but Gowther still attacks with ferocity, like a rabid dog. Gowther’s reorientation to Christian penitential violence, fighting Miles Christi, is clear in his demographic change of victims. Still using his childhood weapon of choice — his beloved falchion, stereotypical of Medieval Islam — but now uses it to defeat Saracens with bloodshed, effectively turning the invention against its associated peoples. Much like his monstrous former self, he delivers merciless brutality, dismembering (ll. 425), and causing helmets to crack in two (ll. 479); only now, it is proof as his ‘bravery’ (ll. 480). He becomes a satisfactory Soldier of Christ, instating a socially-acceptable, and socially-celebrated, chivalric human place in the patriarchal hierarchy. Gowther’s bloodiness finally becomes warranted when he valiantly slays the Saracen army.

Nevertheless, he is an outsider. Society welcomes him as a killing machine, but he finds no joy in torture anymore. After battle, while his comrade soldiers revel their success for Jesus at a party, Gowther prays in silence with the princess and the dogs, haunted by his sins. He ought to be socially included with his fellow soldiers, but remains a spiritual outsider from the society of violence he was born into. It is a direct challenge to normative narratives of masculinity (Adler, 71). With his natural penchant for ferocity, he is part of the winning team but will never belong to the larger patriarchal order. Even though he fought in this collective victory for European Christianity, he has no interest in participating in the dominant culture. His monstrosity on the margins continues. He is forever excluded from the masculine hierarchy, forever rejecting the imitations of Christ in the people surrounding him — and ultimately, his wife.

The nameless princess not only imitates Christ and ministers Eucharistic feeding; she becomes Christ in her resurrection, returning to life with authority allegedly even holier than the pope. Gowther marries her, but she is not mentioned again, except for the implication that the two do not procreate. “…the romance buffers the princess against biological maternity as she disappears from

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the romance altogether as soon as she is given to Gowther and presumably becomes sexually active” (Florschuetz, 63). Gowther is married to a miraculous female incarnation of Christ, but does not assist in her anticipated maternal role. He claims the power of her royal birthright, bars her biological opportunity to bear children; and by doing so, effectively usurps the few merits of his bride’s femininity. Her circulation in the marital economy is disrupted, and both of their family lineages are broken, cancelling any potential for biological progeny or spiritual heirlooms of this new-and improved moral inheritance. Adler suggests the reason for Gowther embracing “a family in the holy Church,” is consolation for resisting familialism in the court and his own biological family; but I must disagree. Gowther continues to exclude himself from any normative lifestyle, which all but terminates any available role for his wife; and yet by his betrothal into her royal family, he becomes Emperor. Gowther continues his stubborn subversion to social, and even divine, constructions around him. He claims his wife’s femininity for his own. Forever reorienting, Gowther still dances around authority. The pope and his Christ-wife deem him absolved of his most heinous actions, but he still devotes his life to memorializing past sin. For self-imposed rehabilitation, Gowther rebuilds the abbey he destroyed and cloisters the nuns he raped long ago. Even in perceived penance, the traumatic legacy of his prolific cruelty is literally built into a place of worship.

Gowther’s canine animality renders him over-domesticated and over-feminized. Using derogatory contemporary slang, he might be called a “bitch.” Unlike the “man” he ought to be, Gowther is perennially excluded and non-procreative, impeded from chivalric masculinity and sexuality forevermore. He aligns himself with women at the end of the poem, but remains at the margins of any sense of community or belonging. He brings his mother back into his life just to marry her away. His wife is never heard from again. He goes from hypersexual demon to obedient dog-soldier to an overly-pious creature who all but wins the lottery, only to denounce currency. He is an eternal outlier from humanity, never authentically living in imitation of, or as soldier of Christ;

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no more human than the day he was born. Gowther is not reinvented; he is reoriented. His identity, values, and morality have shifted, but none are quashed. In the epic pursuit of penance (usually done to realize one’s own humanity), Gowther ultimately fails, swapping his innately demonic heritage for

betrothal into the family of the Holy Church. Gowther never truly becomes human, because Gowther’s being is inherently vague; holy miracles apparently over-code any opportunity for purely human nature. In failing to fit into any domestic spaces, Sir Gowther seems to finds a salvation that satisfies…from bad boy to bad bitch.

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Works Cited

Adler, Gillian. “Canine Intercessors and Female Religious Metaphor in Sir Gowther.” Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, vol. 48, 2017, pp. 49–71.

Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “Gowther among the dogs: becoming inhuman c. 1400.” Becoming Male in the Middle Ages. Eds. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome and Wheeler, Bonnie. The New Middle Ages; 4;. New York: Garland, 1997. 219–244.

Florschuetz, Angela. “‘That Moder Ever Hym Fed’: Nursing and Other Anthropophagies in Sir Gowther.” Marking Maternity in Middle English Romance: Mothers, Identity and Contamination. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 33–67.

Sir Gowther in The Middle English Breton Lays, ed. Anne Laskaya and Eve Salisbury. 1995.

Steel, Karl. How to Make a Human. Columbus, The Ohio State University, 2010.