Beyond Abjection: The Problem with Grendel's Mother Again

Abstract

Traditional critical paradigms have generally failed to come to grips with the character of Grendel's mother in Beowulf. As a monster in the heroic order, and as a female in a masculine world, she confounds simple definitions and crosses the boundaries that define the limits of agency. Grendel's mother functions as a nexus for the representation of the many dialectical tensions – male/female, human/monster, hall/wilderness, feud/peace, symbolic/semiotic – that both underwrite and critique the poem's symbolic order. As a result, the character offers insight into the symbolic process and the ways in which readers approach the distant world of the medieval text.

(Re)viewing the Warrior Woman: Reading the Old English “Iceberg” Riddle from an Ecofeminist Perspective

“…Renée Trilling's (2007) discussion of Grendel's Mother suggests that, for Anglo-Saxon writers, the idea of a physically active woman was inconceivable. Trilling asserts that "an active body in [the Anglo-Saxon] cultural economy is, by definition, a masculine one" (2007: p. 15).…”