Gawain’s Five Wits
“Rereading Gawain’s Five Wits.” Whiteford, Peter. Medium Aevum, Fall 2004.
There are arguments among scholars as to what the wits represent and whether they are important to the understanding of Gawain and the Green Knight. Even those scholars who agree that the pentacle is important often disagree about the meanings of each of those points (1). The Gawain-poet explains three of the five rather simply; they represent the five wounds of Christ, the five joys of the Virgin and the five virtues. The virtues especially have caused a lot of disagreements over the different interpretations between scholars (1). It is the five wits that Whiteford concentrates on.
There is some agreement that the five wits do represent the five senses and some argue that there is a connection between the senses, the wounds of Christ and the joys of Mary (1). But Ackerman’s theory is flawed because he uses examples in which there is confession or warning about misuse of the senses (1). The pentangle is intended to be a symbol of perfection, not of repentance and to suggest that it represents “’penitential doctrine,’ jumps too readily to an interpretation that the poet is far from forcing upon us” (1). Additionally, the examples that Ackerman uses as a connection between penitential doctrine and the pentangle are weak and would indicate that Gawain was sinless as well as flawless, and it is unlikely that the Gawain-poet would have characterized any of his characters as such (1). Whiteford argues that instead of sinlessness, the pentangle more likely represents a statement about Gawain’s flawless reputation in King Arthur’s court.
Gawain’s five senses play no large part in the events of the story, and subsequent uses of the word “wyttez” do not indicate that this interpretation of the wits as a part of the pentangle or his senses is applicable (1). It is first used when he wakes up the morning of his third temptation, used again as his “five wits” when looking at the Green Chapel and finally said by the Green Knight when he explains Morgan le Fay’s role in the deception.
Other scholars argue that the five wits are not the senses at all but five inner wits identified as “will, mind, imagination, understanding, and reason” (1). This usage would make more sense as used within the text. The Aristotelian theory was that “inner senses were seen as providing a bridge between the external senses and the intellect, or between sensory perception and abstract thought” (1). Additionally, Dante and Aquinas make use of the pentangle as representative of the rational soul (1). Whiteford argues that with this in mind the pentangle represents the physical, social, intellectual, moral, and spiritual aspects of Gawain, which would fittingly adhere to the sense of unity that the poet prescribes for the pentangle (1). Because he is clearheaded Gawain is able to resist the temptation of his guide for him to run but the seduction of Lady Bertilak distracts him and he is deceived, which Spearing believes explains Gawain’s extreme reaction to the knowledge that he was tricked (1).
The major complaint against Whiteford’s article is organization. He never writes out a thesis or any kind of essay map by which one can know what his argument will be. Instead he begins by introducing the idea of the five wits, dismissing previous claims of scholars about what the five wits represent, and finally laying out his own argument of what they mean. There was hardly any introduction to the article besides the introduction to the pentangle as a symbol and that made it very difficult to write a proper critical summary on the article.
I thought that his introduction of other arguments was very helpful to me as an inexperienced medieval scholar, but it hurt his argument more than it helped because he wasted about half of his article discussing and discarding previous theories on the meaning of the pentangle. Whiteford would have been better served if he had used that space to describe his own theory in greater detail. Additionally, Whiteford mostly addressed the interpretation of the wits as the five senses and discussed nearly no other popular theories of what the wits represented (besides his own, of course).
A complaint I have with many of these articles is that when they introduce a quotation in medieval English they expect the reader to be capable of reading and understanding that quote. Some of the articles did the same with medieval French, which even fewer readers would know. This leads me to believe that the intended audience of most of these articles is lifelong medieval literature scholars. The average university student would find it difficult to read the original language of the Gawain-poet, and impossible to understand any of Marie’s Lais if the reader was not a French student as well.
