Abstract
The paper is devoted to the study of three post-2000 novels appropriating Beowulf, whose common denominator is the amplification and humanization of the figure of Grendel’s mother and the reconstruction of her potential personal history. The paper argues that multiple ambiguities concerning Grendel’s mother in the poem render her a perfect vehicle for exploring modern assumptions concerning monstrosity, humanity, and femininity. By foregrounding the fact that the canonicity of Beowulf legitimizes the status quo that it represents, the paper elucidates the reasons for which modern female writers look to such an old and culturally remote text. They seem to recognize Beowulf as a carrier of cultural memory and, in their herstories, they often attempt to present the values that it espouses as the foundations of persistent objectification and oppression of women. The female authors also strive to point to the male appropriation of history and memory by presenting mechanisms leading to the dehumanization of Grendel’s mother such as defamation, exile, and oblivion. Identifying Beowulf as a text written by a man, for men, and about men, they offer its feminist reclamations written by women, for women, and about women. The paper also discusses the alternative morality and wisdom represented by women in these modern novels as well as their criticism of traditional gender roles as social constructs which fail to appreciate female self-efficiency, resourcefulness, individualism, psychological strength, and stamina.
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Notes
This paper employs the definition of appropriation developed by Julie Sanders in Adaptation and appropriation (2016), in which appropriation is understood as a completely new cultural product displaying a broad spectrum of distance from the original, often transporting its hypotext to a new genre, and including critique (even to the point of constituting a “hostile take-over,” p. 25), interpolation, and/or admiration for the source text. In contrast, adaptation is understood by Sanders as a cross-generic rendering indicating its close relationship with the hypotext, and engaged in its interpretation through the introduction of, e.g., a novel point of view or updating some point. Liedeke Plate’s important study of the phenomenon of feminist recycling of classical texts (Plate, 2011) akin to this study consistently uses the word “rewriting” as a more general and encompassing term but also notes that female writers’ new versions of popular stories often evince a tendency to transform culture rather than preserve it, which categorizes them as appropriations in Sanders’ taxonomy (2016, p. 8). The novels discussed in this article are new cultural products offering cross-generic versions of Beowulf (the poem is reworked into novels) aimed at criticizing their hypotext through the introduction of multiple changes to the story. In point of fact, the nature of their relationship with Beowulf may be made clearer in reference to the term transfictionality defined by Richard Saint-Gelais as the “phenomenon by which two texts, of the same author or different ones, relate together to the same fiction, whether by reprising the same characters, continuation of a foregoing plot, or sharing the same fictional universe” (after Marciniak, 2015). The analyzed novels do not aim at retelling the story presented in the poem but focus on one of its minor characters, whose story they expand and continue. As examples of transfictional practice, they share with their hypotext certain elements of its secondary world (characters, settings, names), but their plot is radically different.
All quotations from Beowulf are cited from Klaeber’s Beowulf (Fulk et al., 2008).
Female otherness has been commented on, e.g., by Simone de Beauvoir who observes that “humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him […]. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute—she is the Other” (1956, pp. 15–16).
Although Kristeva connects the concept of the abject with maternity, scholars do employ her terminology to discuss the gender relations in which women function as the abject for men, see, e.g., E. J. Lawless’ Woman as abject: Resisting cultural and religious myths that condone violence against women (2003).
See M. Fisher’s chapter I in Medievalism: Key critical terms (2014) for a discussion of the idea of archive in medieval studies, where the scholar sketches a vision of archive as a site of potential meanings for the present.
According to my research, by June 2023, at least nine retellings of Beowulf for adults written by female writers and displaying strong feminist beliefs have been published; including Sister of Grendel, quoted in the title of the article.
For the full account of the story of Offa’s queen, see lines 1931–1960 of Beowulf.
See, for example, Recent advances in false memory research by C. Laney and E. F. Loftus (2013) for a brief discussion of the history of research into individual false memory.
Spelling preferred by the author of the novel over the manuscript’s “Wealhtheow.”
See J. A. Weinstock’s A genealogy of monster theory (2020), especially pp. 5–13 for a discussion of the development of the medieval understanding of monstrous births.
For the description of Signý’s contribution to the avenging of her father and brothers, see, e.g., Vǫlsunga saga (1965 pp. 8–10).
For a discussion of the postmodern approach to monstrosity see, e.g., Asma (2009, p. 252).
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Myśliwiec, K. “You are the spawn of Cain!” Grendel’s mother’s literary appropriations. Neohelicon (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-024-00732-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-024-00732-1