Things Fall Apart: Decapitation and the Quest for Certainty in Early Modern English Literature

Abstract

This project considers the motif of decapitation in Early Modern English literature as an embodied metaphor for the quest for certainty. By investigating decapitation as a physical manifestation of the disintegrative and reintegrative process of the quest’s narrative structure, this project examines how Early Modern authors use the motif of decapitation as a way to work out, through an embodied metaphor, what it means to face, wrestle with, and ultimately come to terms with uncertainty. The texts that form the basis for this study include: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Sir Philip Sidney’s Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, and William Shakespeare’s Cymbeline. The recurrence of decapitation in these texts emphasizes the physicality of the knower and the physical dimension of the effect that knowing has on the knower. By associating the disintegrative and reintegrative nature of the quest for certainty with decapitation, these authors insist on an intimate relationship between the physical and the intellectual, the embodied experience and the epistemological process. Ultimately, this project contends that the consistent restoration of head and body is indicative of an Early Modern desire to find stability in the midst of upheaval, while remaining honest about the limitations of that stability.