The next day Gawain is to meet the Green Knight to seal the deal, so he puts on all his armor including the green sash from Lady Bertilak. When big, bad mister Green Knight tries to cut off Sir Gawain’s head he can’t do it. Eventually it is revealed that Lord Bertilak is actually the Green Knight himself and that the entire scheme was put together by Morgan Le Faye, the great ‘evil’ sorceress mentioned in many Arthurian legends. After this, Lord Bertilak and Sir Gawain have a bro moment about how much women suck, and then go on with their lives.
This leads me to my second point, throughout the entire text the women in the story are painted in a negative light. Lady Bertilak spends the whole poem attempting to seduce Sir Gawain, regardless of the fact that she has a husband or that Gawain is friends with said husband. This is regarded negatively by Gawain, and is illustrated by the language that talks about these scenes. Yet, Gawain is never once criticized for his part in the act of kissing Lady Bertilak, a married woman and the wife of his friend. The only negative impact of Gawain’s role in the courtly romance, is his own shame, but none of the other characters feel the need to call him out on his actions. In the end of the story, Sir Gawain and Bertilak lament about how manipulative and deceitful women can be; they go on to discuss how women have been the down fall of many a historical men, such as Adam, Solomon, and Samson, but Gawain is never reprimanded for his actions, only for his dishonesty about the sash.
The character of Morgan Le Faye is disguised as an old, ugly woman throughout the telling of the tale until the very end. Morgan is arguably an intelligent, yet cunning woman, because she came up the whole plot to test Gawain’s loyalty, but these characteristics are also played in a negative light.
Any trait that a women possesses in this text, whether good or bad, is written off as bad or turned against them in some way. The men in the story are too quick to shed the negative light on the women, and not take any of the blame for themselves. The text as a whole is very enjoyable, but when looked at from feminists prospective, has a lot of problematic and troubling content.