Monsters and Mothers, Comparison and Contrast Medieval Characteristic - Essay Example

?Running Head: COMPARISONS OF MEDIEVAL, ANCIENT, AND ICAL Monsters and mothers: Belief systems as they are impeded by the female clinging to tradition Name University Class Monsters and mothers: Belief systems as they are impeded by the female clinging to tradition One of the pervasive themes throughout the history of the epic poem is that of the madly protective mother and her deformed and monstrous child. In contrast to this motif is the heroic male, his aim at protecting society in conflict with the individuated protection that the monstrous mother must provide for her mutated offspring. These conflicts can be seen to represent the feminine as a stunting presence that holds back the advancement of human knowledge and beliefs, while the male is the hero who releases society from those creations that hold it back from growth. One such epic tale is found in the medieval poem Beowulf in which the hero and his man face down the creature Grendel, only to find themselves subject to the grieving mother of the monster who comes to take her revenge. Another such example of this can be found in the story of the Minotaur, written about in Heroides by Ovid. Yet another form of this is found through the character of Echidna who appears in Theogony, writing by Hesiod. The conflict of mother and son against the bonding of men and their heroism can be seen as resolved when the rise of Christianity made divine the relationship between Jesus and Mary. Until this time, the conflict of belief systems is manifested in the monstrosities that female characters give birth to and the heroics that are defined by the relationships of men. John Gartner (1971) wrote a fascinating piece of work that took the monster of Beowulf and made him seem sympathetic, giving him personified motivations and reaching into his psychology in order to explain the behavior of the monster Grendel. The book allows the reader to see the perspective of a creature who had before this time created destruction merely for the fact of it, without an understanding that the creature could have been driven to its deeds through reasons and motivations for his behavior. In the poem of Beowulf, the structure surrounds the bonding and honor of men as they approach their challenges, the monster not given purpose or motivation for his deeds. However, in looking at the work by Gartner in contrast to that of the work of Beowulf, the motivations that are missing in the original poem become glaringly apparent as the nature of Beowulf begins to appear just as randomly destructive as is that of the monster. The underlying discourse can be defined through a different set of meanings. In all of the instances of the birth of randomly destructive monsters, the mothers are manifesting the imagery of their sins, their existence perpetuating the existence of belief systems that are associated with an old framework, where the heroism of the men is symbolic of the rise of a new set of beliefs that are stronger and have a greater sense of morality than those of the old. An example of this can be seen through that of the story of the Minotaur in Herodes. The Athenian hero Theseus is responsible for the destruction of the Minotaur and this break represents the death of the power of the belief systems of Crete in favor of the belief systems that grew in favor of the Athenian models of religious belief (Fulkerson, 2005, p. 32). The creature that is the Minotaur is the product of the arrogance of the King of Minos who decided to keep a white bull that had been sent by Poseidon as a sign of approval for his sovereignty in Crete. When instead of sacrificing the bull Minos kept the animal for its great beauty, Minos was punished for his arrogance as his wife fell madly in love with the animal and mated with it, the result being the child who was half bull and half human (Fulkerson, 2005). This concept of a mutation that is part human and part animal provides context for the evolution of human development. The creature required the sacrifice of seven boys and seven girls each year, signifying a hold over the human race until Theseus came to set them free of this hold, transitioning belief systems from Cretan to Athenian beliefs. The point of the female position in the advancement of human knowledge and belief systems seems to be either to try and hold back the male intellect through sin or weakness. As in the example of the story of the Minotaur, while the hero Theseus is assisted by Ariadne, she is portrayed as weak without male fortitude, her efforts shadowed against his eventual abandonment of her and her despair. The message seems to be that the female presence is intent on holding the hero back from increasing the knowledge and meaning of human existence and in doing so, taking from men the ability to evolve their belief systems (Smith and DeMorgan, 2002, p. 69). In defeating the female through her offspring, the old is shed and the way made clear for the new. The growth of this type of system of beliefs can be seen in the earlier writings that framed female power as either masculinized or full of sin. Echidna is one of the classic characters of early Greek mythology that symbolized the emergence of sexuality as evil, where male heroism was symbolic of good. Echidna was sensual and erotic with the body of a snake and of a beautiful and alluring woman. Her power was based in her intelligence which manifested in an ability to seduce, her mind negated because of her focus on her procreative functions. Her offspring, the Sphinx, was represented in Egypt as male, but in Greece as female and also devoured human beings if they could not answer its riddle. The Sphinx represented “a deadly threat against human culture and Greek culture in particular”, thus her/his destruction, as in the destruction of the Minotaur, represented a stage of belief systems destroyed in order to support the rise of a new set of beliefs (Panourgia & Demokritos, 2008, p. 239). The text of Beowulf, while firmly situated in the pagan belief systems of the Germanic time period, was translated by Christian monks. Gwara (2008) contends that “The suppression of flagrant paganism – the reluctance to name pagan gods, to report (invent if you will) any details of potentially offensive rituals, to parade the term haden as consummately disparaging,- lies in the poet’s ambition to evoke a moral or religious proximity between Beowulf’s world and that of the audience” (p. 7). Gwara (2008) goes on to describe the shedding of the old world through the triumph of Beowulf and his men as descriptive of the shedding of the pagan world for that of the Christian. The mother of the monster and the monster are the end of their line, the last of this kind to be a part of the human world and the heroics of the men decisively take them from the world, leaving the future open to the new belief systems that will wipe out the world of monsters and forever rise through a mother and son that are revered and made divine. In examining the nature of the hero in all three works, the relationship of the hero to the human and the monster to the world outside of the human world is a common theme. According to Shippey and Haarder (1998) the female is representative of dragging the hero back from the advancement of his good works, “the tears of the abandoned spouse drag back the transfigured hero…the psychologically deep representation of the irresistible force of love entrances and delights the morally disapproving reader” (p. 312). In other words, the nature of love and sex is in its power to disenfranchise the hero from his purpose, the female representing tradition and mundane in which growth of society is trapped, stagnant and without forward movement. Through the act of birth, the tethers that hold a culture to old beliefs that keep them tied to systems that fetter them against advancement, the female represents the greatest sins that can possibly committed by mankind; that of cultural stagnation. Therefore, as put in contrast by Gartner (1971) who explored the motivations of the monster Grendel, the epic poems specifically did not address the motivations of the monsters, the creatures representing the manifestations of the wicked intent of their mothers. The focus of the motivation can be seen upon the intentions of the female in holding back the advancement of men as they try to work towards freeing society from the old belief systems. The men are seen as human, but each one of the heroes that free society from the constraints of the devouring monster, the monster that consumes human victims. The men have power that is suggestive of the divine, but never crosses the line into fully divine empowerment. As Oedipus solves the riddle of the sphinx and helps to make way from the old Greek myths to the pantheon of the Olympian gods, he is human as is Theseus and Beowulf, although their strength and the chronology of events seem driven by a fate that is divinely written. The development of the three stories within the epic poems Heroides, Theogony, and Beowulf, have created a commentary on the position of women as obstacles to the advancement of human belief systems. Mothers are seen to give birth to monstrosities that devour human beings, ending their lives and strangling the societies that they impact. The creatures have little motivation for their destruction, thus the focus of this motivation lies within the female, the mothers procreating offspring that manifest the constraints on society that hold back men from freely moving about and advancing cultural growth. The Minotaur held back the Greeks from moving past the belief systems of the Cretans and the Sphinx held back the Greeks from moving from the old beliefs towards those of the new Olympian based gods. As the pagan belief systems were being shed from the European continent and the traditions of the epic poem of Beowulf were being transcribed by monks, the story began to reflect the emergence of a new set of beliefs. The female presence in each of these works suggested that women cling to the beliefs of old, with men setting society free to move on to the new. References Fulkerson, L. (2005). The Ovidian heroine as author: Reading, writing, and community in the Heroides. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. Gardner, J. (1971). Grendel. New York: Ballantine Books. Gwara, S. (2008). Heroic identity in the world of Beowulf. Leiden: Brill. Panourgia?, N., Marcus, G. E., & Kentron Pyre?nikon Ereuno?n "De?mokritos.". (2008). Ethnographica moralia: Experiments in interpretive anthropology. New York, NY: Fordham University Press. Shippey, T. A. & Andreas Haarder. (1998). Beowulf: the critical heritage. New York: Routledge. Smith, E. L., & DeMorgan, E. P. (2002). Evelyn Pickering De Morgan and the allegorical body. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press. Read More