ABSTRACT
The greenwoods of the Robin Hood tradition are narrative mirrors: the woodlands are the spaces in which the outlaws challenge existing social norms and create improved versions of the societies that have cast them out. These greenwoods are simultaneously space and place. As space, the greenwood becomes a zone of freedom and personal transformation for the outlaws who inhabit it. As a place, the greenwood participates in a recursive and cyclical process of imaginative construction and appropriation, using the freedom of the greenwood-as-space to transform into a “place of the imagination.”2 This function reveals how a generic and unnamed greenwood setting, largely considered in terms of its symbolism, can reveal a complex interplay between imagination and perception. One effect of this interplay is that the greenwood-space, by participating in an ongoing cycle of imaginative transformation, becomes a space of transformation, or liminality. Robin Hood scholars have embraced this view of the greenwood-space, and the narratives reect a permeable interplay between constructed binary categories such as civilization and wilderness, town and wood, order and disorder. The greenwood-space’s transformative power is a key component in understanding the transhistorical subversive potential long recognized as integral to the Robin Hood tradition.3 Greenwood-space provides the outlaws (and audiences) of the Robin Hood tradition an opportunity to expose and even correct deciencies in the normative social order that exists outside the boundaries of the narrative greenwood. However, the medieval and early modern greenwood is consistently presented as a universal space of freedom and exploration. This assumption is incorrect, and I will argue that the narratives establish gender-based standards and penalties for entry into the greenwood and outlaw brotherhood. Women characters and audiences pay a price in the variety and types of representation within these stories. Men, as characters and audiences, are the assumed gender and
consequently are granted easy access to these freedoms through the simple fact of varied representation. I will trace the interactions of women and greenwood-space in three early Robin Hood tales to demonstrate that early texts directly inuence modern audiences’ understanding of women’s access to the greenwood.
