tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post942996655134378628..comments2024-03-10T20:46:19.274-04:00Comments on In the Middle: Straight Outta the Newberry: Giant Uppity Women, Alexander, and the DanaidesCord J. Whitakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06224143153295429986noreply@blogger.comBlogger9125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-83380327100516414152013-06-08T04:05:14.415-04:002013-06-08T04:05:14.415-04:00Sorry - I know I'm coming to this several year...Sorry - I know I'm coming to this several years late! Really enjoyed this post, and am very grateful for the texts on Wonders and Alexander which it (and the comments) suggest.<br /><br />Two quick comments / questions. Alexander appears at the start of the Wonders as well, as the architect of 'miclan maertha' ('great ?wonders'), where he seems to be connected with the closest the text comes to settled civilisation. And I wonder if he's connected in some manner here to the Danevirke, the great monuments in Denmark to keep out the Germans - or indeed other great wonders closer in space and time in England and in the Beowulf manuscript. He also appears immediately after the monstrous women, approving of (and refusing to kill) some generous men. The text does seem to use him as some form of discourse marker / lens more generally than in just this instance.<br /><br />The post's commments on the Danaides (and subsequent discussion of the Amazons etc) makes me wonder about women in this manuscript more widely given the final story of Judith and the way she embodies many of the monstrous / murderous / invasive traits which mark out these ladies and GM as worthy of slaughter. What does her presence - her final, conclusive presence - have to say to the disturbing reactions to transgression earlier in the MS?Simon Thomsonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16304423957173278986noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-32029443990799776722007-01-31T13:58:00.000-05:002007-01-31T13:58:00.000-05:00In one of her two posts, Anhaga notes that:
". . ...In one of her two posts, Anhaga notes that:<br /><br />". . . the refusal of certain 'monstrous' women to fit in the narrative bounds to which they ought be held. Alexander can't capture the women alive, can't know their stories, can't effectively make them a part of his -- and so they must be eliminated."<br /><br />This reminded me of something that both Susan Kim and I both kind of realized at the same [aha!] moment when I was at the Newberry last Friday and we were discussing with her students this passage in the "Wonders"--in the text, the "women" exist in the present tense ["And then there ARE women. . ."] but Alexander's killing of them is past tense [he "killed" them]; therefore, even in the text, the women still elude complete capture and/or extermination. They *were* killed, but they *are* out there, somewhere, still existing, still threatening. It raises interesting questions, too, about the operations of temporality in a text like the "Wonders," which is based on classical exemplars yet situated in an Anglo-Saxon manuscript, and may have had a readership that, either *regardless* of tenses used in text, viewed it as a catalogue of *antique*, *past* marvels, or *because* of tenses employed, viewed it as a catalogue of still-living forms with antique genealogies. Or both.Eileen Joyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-68141810820544244552007-01-30T15:25:00.000-05:002007-01-30T15:25:00.000-05:00Jeffrey, thanks so much for reminding me of McCrac...Jeffrey, thanks so much for reminding me of McCracken's book, which I had forgotten about, but have now ordered.<br /><br />Anhaga--quick note for now as I am between classes: Robin Norris (Ph.D., Toronto; currently teaching at Carleton in Ottawa) has a fabulous dissertation on mourning--and even more specifically, mourning men--in Anglo-Saxon literature. She overturns A LOT of long-held assumptions in this dissertation, which is well worth a read. The title is "Deathbed Confessors: Mourning and Genre in Anglo-Saxon Hagiography" (Univ. of Toronto, 2003). Her Introduction deals with classical treatises on mourning, as well as "Beowulf," and the dissertation as a whole also makes use of contemporary thanatology and sociologies of mourning. It's an excellent study, and one I can't recommend highly enough.Eileen Joyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-79491161224446083492007-01-30T12:16:00.000-05:002007-01-30T12:16:00.000-05:00Oh, to finish the thought on Hrethel, I brought hi...Oh, to finish the thought on Hrethel, I brought him up because he's another element in <i>Beowulf</i> that doesn't fit what the narrative seems to expect of characters. Thus, like Grendel's mother, though in precisely the opposite way, he has to be eliminated -- in this case, by dying (and I think the broken heart part is my own interpretation of the poem, can't remember what the actual line is -- but he certainly dies and it's definitely related to his unresolved and unavenged grief).MKHhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11773335756057041042noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-30058608822912098532007-01-30T12:14:00.000-05:002007-01-30T12:14:00.000-05:00Fascinating discussion -- I've been working on the...Fascinating discussion -- I've been working on the Wonders quite a bit myself lately (since an Old English class last year in which my final paper attempted to think about the final section of the Wonders texts, unknowability, and contingency, with fairly interesting results), and the ideas being raised here -- when it is licit to kill women, and why -- are really interesting to try and think through. <br /><br />I don't have much to add, but two quick things that seem related. <br /><br />JJC, you brought up Mary Beard's blog post about rape. That made me think of Katherine Gravdal's discussion in <i>Ravishing Maidens</i> of the "custom in the Land of Logres," which even three or four years after my first encounter with it, still astonishes me. From Gravdal's translation of the relevant french passage of the Lancelot(p 66): <br /><br /><i>The custom and the policy at the time was as follows: any knight meeting a damsel who is alone should slit his throat rather than fail to treat her honorably, if he cares about his reputation. For if he takes her by force, he will be shamed forever in all the courts of all lands. But if she is led by another, and if some knight desires her, is willing to take up his weapons and fight for her in battle, and conquers her, he can without shame or blame <b>do with her as he will</b>."</i><br /><br />Gravdal goes on to talk about the context of romance and its <i>creation</i> of narratives of rape -- i.e., that women must be victimized, must be attacked, in order for men to act as heroes in Romance narratives. It's been years since I've read the text (though I found it on Google books and that's where I got the citation) but I wonder if Gravdal's ideas about rape and romance narrative might bear some import on the admittedly *very* different circumstances of the women we speak of here. <br /><br />I think where I want to go with that is the refusal of certain "monstrous" women to fit in the narrative bounds to which they ought be held. Alexander can't capture the women alive, can't know their stories, can't effectively make them a part of his -- and so they must be eliminated. Grendel's mother works, perhaps, in somewhat the same way -- her grief is given monstrous form as a woman seeking revenge -- a narrative not familiar to AS England, given that revenge is the province of men, not mothers. The other inversion of the "women mourn, men seek revenge" paradigm would be Hrethel -- unable to seek revenge for his son (by killing his other son), he dies, effectively, of a broken heart. <br /><br />The amazons are trickier, because you can marry them -- but I wonder if that's because their "deformity" is self-inflicted, and for an identifiable reason. I'm not very well versed in Amazon stories, but they were the ones who burnt off one of their breasts in order to shoot bows, correct? Thus there's a logic there -- one that's bounded by a story one could tell. They make sense -- and so can be reformed to find a place in the dominant discourse. <br /><br />Not sure all that make sense -- but just some thoughts I thought I'd throw out. Wonderful post, Eileen -- wish I could have been at the talk itself (not to mention the seminar -- Susan Kim has done a lot of work with my grad adviser, and her articles have been endlessly useful to me in the past few years), and looking forward to hearing more thoughts on monsters (and perhaps some of what Mittman has to say in his lecture).MKHhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11773335756057041042noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-18218958127381441922007-01-30T08:47:00.000-05:002007-01-30T08:47:00.000-05:00The "licit to kill" question isn't easy to answer,...The "licit to kill" question isn't easy to answer, is it? That's why I brought up the Amazons: why is it better to marry them than murder them, considering they also have non-normative bodies. Or, say, the snake-woman Mélusine: why does she make an adequate founding mother, while a monster like Grendel's mom needs to be killed off? <br /><br />I guess what I'm driving at is that it is incredibly tough to make large pronouncements about toleration versus eradication of the feminine monstrous. I kind of get at that point <a href="http://www.h-france.net/vol3reviews/cohen2.html">here</a>, but it's one that is difficult to theorize in large terms.Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-89377088837124377662007-01-29T21:40:00.000-05:002007-01-29T21:40:00.000-05:00I should have mentioned in my original post that a...I should have mentioned in my original post that another person who has recently worked on the "Wonders" text is Lisa Verner, whose dissertation was recently published by Routledge, "The Epistemology of the Monstrous in the Middle Ages" [I have only just now myself picked this up, and haven't thoroughly reviewed it yet].Eileen Joyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-46255111294928007672007-01-29T21:34:00.000-05:002007-01-29T21:34:00.000-05:00Thanks for comment, JJC. The earliest versions of ...Thanks for comment, JJC. The earliest versions of the stories about Zeus/Io/Hera and also about Io's descendants, the Danaides, definitely has something to do with incest, as well as with an incest prohibition [as Kristeva does, indeed, point out]. In Aeschylus's play, it is the *father* of the fifty sisters who is encouraging their resistance to marrying their cousins, and who also guides them to Argos, where they will be virgin-suppliants of Zeus [that's the idea, anyway, until their angry cousins show up, at which point, it's the father, again, who encourages and hatches the murder plot, whereas in the Albina stories you relate in your book, the sisters are disobedient daughters from the get-go; but, in both versions, they are women who would rather flee/kill than marry cousins, or anyone]. In some versions of the classical myth, the gods actually "cleanse" the sisters of their crime of murder, but in other versions, as I stated, they are condemned to carry those leaky water jars, OR, they are ordered to marry Greek men [perhaps a story, then, promoting exogamy--in that version, anyway]. The question, finally, for me, regarding the women of the "Wonders," isn't just why are some women licit to kill, but why is it seemingly *necessary* to kill them, yet not any of the other, even potentially more threatening figures in the text?Eileen Joyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-6941895038026798082007-01-29T13:43:00.000-05:002007-01-29T13:43:00.000-05:00I just wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed this ...I just wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed this post, Eileen. You've used some of my work so I'll refrain from saying much more, but I do think you've posed a key question: why are some women licit to kill? Why do these women as a group seem like a race. Cf. the very different fate of the Amazons, who likewise wear their difference on their bodies and seem a race apart ... but who wind up transformed by the conquistador Theseus into proper housewives. You'd have thought an Amazon wouldn't be amenable to such transfiguration.<br /><br />Yet Albina and the women of the Wonders ms. seem too set apart to allow that incorporation. Is there a hint of incest around them? (Kristeva implies that answer). Of feminine self-sufficiency? (at least the Amazons kept men as breeding stock). "Remember to yield" indeed.<br /><br />On a related note, Mary Beard has <a href="http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/2007/01/no_sex_please_w.html">an interesting discussion of rape on her blog</a>. She even links to her own rape story.Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.com