The notion of the ideal reader is incorporated in Reader-Response or Reader-Reception Criticism. Steven Lynn, author of “Texts and Contexts: Writing About Literature with Critical Theory” offers the description of this form of criticism as focusing how the reader interprets the text rather than what is stated within the work itself (18-19). He goes on to refer Stanley Fish’s concept of an ideal reader within a work as the way the reader is expected to respond and how the reader’s experience with the work is controlled by the text itself (Lynn 65). This view is being applied to “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” as translated by Simon Armitage in the Norton Anthology of English Literature. More specifically, focusing on how the reader is manipulated
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Although Gawain has deflected the Lady’s advances thus far, he succumbs to the temptation of her green girdle that she claims the one who wears “will be safe against anyone who seeks to strike him, and all the slyness on the earth wouldn’t see him slain” (Sir Gawain p. 224 lines 183-184). In this case, Sir Gawain easily falls prey again but for a different reason. Moving past his ideals of knightly honor, Gawain simply wants to save his life desperately enough that he believes her: a sentiment that a reader would have a hard time faulting him for. Suddenly there’s hope that he may survive, and the both Gawain and the reader are caught up in the marvel that there is little pause to question whether or not the sash is indeed magical. A very important, though at the time seemingly minute, detail is overlooked: the girdle is of “green silk… trimmed with gold” (p. 224 line 1832). If the situation had not been written so that the ideal reader would be fixated on the new optimism of the task, one could easily make the connection that Sir Gawain has always been described in red whereas his adversary is a man the color of “green enamel emboldened by bright gold”; an easy indicator that the lady’s gift is not what it seems (p. 191 line
Although Gawain has deflected the Lady’s advances thus far, he succumbs to the temptation of her green girdle that she claims the one who wears “will be safe against anyone who seeks to strike him, and all the slyness on the earth wouldn’t see him slain” (Sir Gawain p. 224 lines 183-184). In this case, Sir Gawain easily falls prey again but for a different reason. Moving past his ideals of knightly honor, Gawain simply wants to save his life desperately enough that he believes her: a sentiment that a reader would have a hard time faulting him for. Suddenly there’s hope that he may survive, and the both Gawain and the reader are caught up in the marvel that there is little pause to question whether or not the sash is indeed magical. A very important, though at the time seemingly minute, detail is overlooked: the girdle is of “green silk… trimmed with gold” (p. 224 line 1832). If the situation had not been written so that the ideal reader would be fixated on the new optimism of the task, one could easily make the connection that Sir Gawain has always been described in red whereas his adversary is a man the color of “green enamel emboldened by bright gold”; an easy indicator that the lady’s gift is not what it seems (p. 191 line