Anticipatory Trauma and Medieval Horror in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

This article challenges two conceptual—and periodizing—assumptions. The first is that trauma is an essentially retrospective category, as trauma theory following Caruth addresses how one responds to a past event. The second is that horror as a literary genre is the creation of modernity. Indeed, from the point of view of modernity, the Middle Ages as such are horrific; in such a situation, the logic goes, the horrors are too endemic to be recognized. Instead, drawing on the association of horror and trauma, and thinking through challenges to trauma theory from outside western modernity, I use Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to argue that aspects of medieval life were patently horrific to those who lived through them, and that they could be depicted as such. Horror as a medieval mode, then, reveals a category of anticipatory trauma, in which the recognition of impending doom produces a variety of affects in an attempt to deal with it. Specifically, the introduction of the Green Knight in the poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is the literary equivalent of a jump scare, which shatters the assumption of safety and security that had attended Arthur’s yuletide celebration, in so doing revealing chivalry to be a kind of everyday horror show.