A Murdochian Reading of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight/Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Adli Eserin Murdoch Tarzinda Okumasi (Report‪)‬

Studies of the "re-invention" of the Middle Ages in popular culture have frequently focused on how and to what purpose this material is represented in modern adaptations. (See Frayling and Eco). Eco, especially, categorizes the medieval influences on different modern cultural products under various headings. One of Eco's categories on representation of the Middle ages is the use of this period "as the site of an ironical revisitation", which Frayling explains as "a way of commenting on today's less colourful mores" (Eco 69, Frayling 208). King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, a legend reflected in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, is the most popular medieval material for re-invention. Iris Murdoch's 1993 novel, The Green Knight, is among these modern adaptations of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. (1). Murdoch's re-invention of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in The Green Knight conforms to Frayling's definition as her purpose is to discuss morality-religion relationship by recreating the strong hold of morality in the Christian Age as oppposed to the Modern Age. Though Iris Murdoch alludes to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as an intertext in The Green Knight her main concern is not with its religious context as the culmination of Christian principles, but with de-contextualising its moral implications beyond religious boundaries. Through her modern characters, who try to cope with life in an age in which the existence of God is questioned, Murdoch asserts her belief in morality as essential to man's spiritual well-being. As an intellectual who studied and taught classics and philosophy at Cambridge and Oxford, Iris Murdoch believed in moral reality allied with metaphysics rather than religion. She presents the Platonic idea of "good" as an alternative to "God" in the modern world, and love as the basic human faculty that provides the spiritual energy to achieve good in the metaphysical realm. This paper aims to discuss Iris Murdoch's use of the Gawain story to explain the concept of love as real or illusory. By associating her twentieth-century characters to "Sir Gawain" and the "Green Knight" in the medieval romance, Murdoch acquires a larger scope to discuss her philosophy while reconsidering , at the same time, Gawain's moral quest in terms of personal self-realization rather than religious duty: even though my main aim is to read The Green Knight with reference to intertextual usage of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Murdoch's novel also provokes a different perspective on the original text as a trial of Gawain through love. Like Gawain who behaves unselfishly by taking the Green Knight's challenge to King Arthur's Court on himself, Murdoch's characters learn how to unself themselves. Like Gawain's selfish acceptance of the girdle to protect him, Murdoch's self-indulged characters fail morally until they are revived by the interference of Peter Mir in their lives, like the Green Knight.