Annotation: M. Wendy Hennequin - "We've Created a Monster: The Strange Case of Grendel's Mother"

Rounding out the trio of articles that most clearly question the monstrosity of Grendel's Mother, it's interesting to note the progression the arguments have made. Alfano expanded on Carlson's examination of language, and Hennequin does the same with respect to Alfano. As Hennequin and Alfano abandon Carlson's attempt to parse out the Christianity, they reveal that in the case of Grendel's Mother Carlson didn't need to do that and that her critique holds true of her. Hennequin's approach brings Butlerian gender theory into the picture, something Alfano probably could not do (Gender Trouble was published in 1990, while Alfano's article was published in 1992, so likely submitted in 1990-1991). So each of these articles iterates in some way on what the previous has done and brings new techniques to bear on Beowulf, all to roughly the same conclusion: reading Grendel's Mother as a monster is not well-supported by the text. It is scholars and translators who have perpetuated that image. Hennequin blames literary scholars, lexicographers, and lastly translators (whose work depends on that of the lexicographers and literary scholars) for making a monster out of Grendel's Mother. Carlson and Alfano's articles should have marked tidal shifts in the scholarship of Grendel's Mother, but as evidenced by Hennequin's article sixteen years after Alfano's, not much has changed in that interim. Nor, I suspect, has much changed in the last twelve years.

Unrelated to the project, I've been rather enjoying playing Horizon: Zero Dawn again, and the other day its sequel was announced. I don't know what I'll experience in Horizon: Forbidden West, but I do know there's a lot to unpack about nature, technology, capitalism, hubris, and extinction in the original game. My favorite thing in the entire game is the collectible sets of metal flowers, each of which has a poem in it. I might take the time to do short close readings of those poems at some point here. I think those would be well worth doing.

Anyway, on to the annotation:

Hennequin, M. Wendy. “We’ve Created a Monster: The Strange Case of Grendel’s Mother,” English Studies 89.5 (2008): 503-23.

Hennequin takes up what Carlson first brought up, the question of Grendel’s Mother’s monstrosity, and advances the discourse brilliantly. She briefly goes into Butlerian gender theory early on, which becomes quite useful later on as it becomes clear that the construction of Grendel’s Mother as monstrous is largely due to her flying in the face of scholarly predisposition about the appropriate roles for women in early medieval England, and that she must thus be, as Butler says, “fail[ing] to do [her] gender right“ in the eyes of scholars (505). Like Carlson, Hennequin dives into the diction of Grendel’s Mother, providing a table of translations (useful – I’ll certainly base a much expanded table off this), and concludes that the poem offers no compelling reason to find Grendel’s Mother monstrous. Grendel, yes. Unlike Carlson, Hennequin does not filter out all concepts from Christianity, and she interprets Grendel’s blood melting the giant-forged sword, correcting Puhvel’s erroneous claim that her blood causes the melting (514-15). In short, “The text clearly makes her frightening and threatening, but it does not associate her with monsters (except Grendel)” (513). Hennequin goes far beyond Carlson’s reading of translators as adding monstrosity where none existed, and implicates the entire field of Old English studies in the misogynist monsterization of Grendel’s Mother, as scholars took the association with Grendel and likely inferred her monstrosity on the basis of his (and yet, there is no indication she has a connection to Cain like Grendel does) (514; 518-21). I can only hope that this project results in a study of the representation of Grendel’s Mother that does Hennequin’s conclusion to this article proud.