Loss and Suffering in Anglo-Saxon Literature - Research Paper Example

Loss and Suffering in Anglo-Saxon Literature Introduction Literary historicism is relatively modern concept of literary theory developed in the 1980s through primary exponent Greenblatt1. The underlying basis of literary historicism is the study of literary texts in historical context and an attempt to better understand intellectual history through literature. Leading proponent of the theory Foucault posits that literary historicism provides clues to current association with the world and in this sense the literature of any period can be viewed as indistinguishable from the context in which it is written2. Moreover, literary historicism appears to divide two camps of interpretation. On the one hand, the Marxist driven concept that literature is part of a complex “superstructure” within which an economic base manifests3. Conversely, new literary historicists adopt a variable vision of power in historicist theory with wider social parameters such as Foucault’s view of society as consisting of texts relating to other texts with no fixed literary value beyond parameters in which societies apply them to specific situations4. The focus of this analysis is to critically evaluate the presentation of loss and suffering in Anglo Saxon literature, with a particular reference to the Wife’s Lament and The Wanderer. It is submitted that directly correlated to the presentation of these themes is the representation of Anglo-Saxon culture, which inherently requires a historicist approach to the texts. Moreover, I shall further consider this through a contextual discussion of Beowulf. 2. The Wife’s Tale & The Wanderer The Wife’s lament is an Old English poem commonly viewed as the “old woman’s song”. The Wife’s Lament is contextually unusual with the central protagonist being female and considered to be one of the few surviving Anglo-Saxon poems with a female narrative. The title is immediately indicative of a sense of loss and suffering and mirrors the story of the narrator who is an exiled woman as a result of a secret plot by her Lord’s relatives. The Wife’s lament is essentially a story of grief and underlines the themes of loss and suffering along with the “impermanence of human ties through a woman’s voice”. The sense of separation permeates the fluctuating tense usage in the poem, implying that death will end sorrow “I can never rest from my sorrow, nor from all the longing that troubles me in this life”. Through the consistent use of parataxis, the narrator creates a sense of immediacy between the reader and her confinement to an earth cave under an oak tree. The cave is further hidden by the thorns, providing an allegory to a fortress, highlighting her entrapment. This further serves to highlight her despair through the underlying message of punishment for women solely reliant on men and the vulnerability of women relying on love. Pat Belanoff assigns the Wife’s Lament to the genre of elegy and refers to Stanley Green’s definition of the Old English elegy as a “relatively short reflective or dramatic poem embodying a contrasting pattern of loss and consolation, ostensibly based on a specific personal experience or observation, and expressing an attitude towards that experience5”. Belanoff further posits that the Wife’s lament incorporates the central features of the Old English elegy, namely “personal loss of the lord, the exile, the transitoriness of life, the comparison of former luck to present ill luck”6. Indeed, the use of the female narrative arguably underlines this as whilst the Wife is trapped in her search for her Lord, the male Lord also in exile seems to be free.7 To this end, the cave symbolises the cultural position of women in the Anglo-Saxon era of being inherently reliant on the status of their husbands for societal status. The loss of her Lord, cements her exile from the world in addition to her separation from her love. Furthermore, Klinck & Rasmussen further list the themes of the Wife’s Lament is being “exile, loss of loved ones, scenes of desolation, the transience of worldly joys”8. The elegiac themes are presented through the use of the monologue paradigm, the repetition of grief and fluctuation between past to highlight the bleak predicament of the present9. To this end, the Wife’s Lament highlights the loss through elegiac characteristics. On the one hand, the narration suggests that she leaves her homeland of her own accord and not as an exile. This leads her on the journey to find her lord who is in exile as a result of a family feud. To this end, Belanoff comments that “her feelings of alienation thus grow out of a loss attachment to another human being, not a lost attachment to a particular place”10. However, this lost attachment is underpinned by her inability to find her lord and the cave symbolises her societal loss as a woman and personal loss as she is excommunicated. Indeed, at the end of the lyric, the narrator concludes “it is woe for him who must long for his beloved with a sad heart”. Belanoff posits that “although she speaks of her present and current life as an “exile journey”, her deprivation is not spelled out as formulaically as it is for so many of the male exiles; she does not name it by traditional collocations which might evoke traditional meanings; with few exceptions, she allows us an audience to deduce her state from the events and feelings she places before us”11. As such, it is submitted that the Wife’s lament whilst utilising elegiac traits to represent grief and suffering, nevertheless differs to the traditional English elegy through her inability to move from her exile. The cave locks her into the present state, which is the essential difference from other elegies. Conversely, Greenfield posited that the Wife’s Lament symbolises the Old Elegy to the extent of depicting loss and consolation12. However, Belanoff argues that it is difficult to find the consolation in the wife’s lament, and rather the narrator “calls attention…. To the transitory nature of the pleasures of this world”, which is juxtaposed with the losses she suffers as she searches for her Lord. To this end, “the depth of her sadness outstrips that of all other elegies13” and goes beyond the elegy genre. This is further heightened by the stillness of the Wife’s Lament narrative and creation of static in the present. Through the narrative the protagonist juxtaposes clauses without conjunction, which “transfers interminable expanses of past time into the speaker’s present world, thus creating an eternal present”14. To this end, the lack of future references is stark in the Wife’s lament, thereby highlighting the loss of the present. Greenfield further comments that “the restlessness of the speaker’s mind and thoughts and the lack of a sequential narrative contribute to the image of a woman trapped in time and space”15. The earth cave further heightens this sense of the static present as whereas the male exile can move away from suffering, as a woman she cannot escape her imprisonment and “the picture of absolute passivity and hopelessness, of a person suspended in time, emerges strongly from the Wife’s lament and contrasts markedly to other elegies”16. The juxtaposition of the tense along with the references to the wife and the husband’s state are underlined in the introductory lines of the Wife’s Lament, where the narration introduces the “herenesess” concluded by “nowness” reinforcing the theme of confinement of her loss in the static present. The initial establishment of the narrator’s sorrow moves forward through alliteration of “niwes” “newly” further heightened by the tense change to the present17. The switching of tenses further heightens her loss and lack of “nu” “is now as though it never were”. Following this, the wife’s narration moves back to the past when she first was ordered into the cave. This then switches to the present to describe her current predicament “Eald is pes corosele, “old is this earthball”. The narrator is consistent in describing her predicament in the past to explain how she ended up in the present through switching the tenses. In utilising this lexical technique of repetition, the present tense further mirrors the consistent theme of the static present, which the wife cannot escape. This further correlates to the gnomic concluding statements that the wife can “never rest” from the sorrow of her love of the Lord. The inherent tragedy of the wife’s lament for her lost husband further supports the interpretation that the Wife’s lament implies death as a release from her imprisoned sorrow. Indeed, as the wife’s present is the same as her past as she is still in the place of confinement contributing he suffering “full often hardship/cruelty has befallen me here” She describes herself moving around the earth caves and Belanoff observes how “we can picture here while she recites this lament, as sitting in a cave imagining the only movement available to her: walking around the oak tree and around the caves, but then she sits and weeps all day”18. In contrast, whilst the Wanderer clearly follows the paradigm of the “touchstone elegies of the period”,19 the representation of loss highlights the dichotomy between societal status accorded to men and women in the Anglo-Saxon era. For example, in the Wife’s lament, her confinement is juxtaposed with the protagonist in the Wanderer, where the narrator laments his suffering as an exile alone on icy seas20. As such, the contrast between the freedom of the open air and sea with the wife’s imprisonment underground. Nevertheless, the ice of the open air appears to imprison the narrator with his memories of warmth. To this end, Belanoff comments how in the Wanderer “Years of experience, he says have taught him much and have demonstrated in particular that worldly joys and possessions crumble and fall.21” To this end, the conclusion of the Wanderer suggests that in recognising God one can find permanence thereby mirroring Greenfield’s concept of the traditional English elegy. In contrast, the Wife’s lament concludes with a sense of despair and distinct lack of consolation, thereby taking the poem beyond the traditional elegiac paradigm. However, similar to the Wife’s lament, the Wanderer “starts with a generalised introduction, but in this poem that introduction is spoken by someone other than the Wanderer himself. However, this voice is not identified and operates as the “disembodied voice” which provides reflection as opposed to immediate connotations of suffering. However, “once the wanderer begins to speak, the parallels with the Wife’s lament become immediate22. Similarly, the Wanderer makes reference to “nu” and describes suffering in the past tense to highlight his current anguishe. Moreover, the narrator moves from his expression of pain to an account of being in exile, which in turn contrasts with the imprisonment of the Wife’s lament in the earth cave. To this end, “the use of the third person in this section of the poem dilutes the “nowness” inherent within the present tense. The first appearance of par occurs in this description and separates him from the location he is describing23”. Within the similar format, the Wanderer refers to the waste of the “pisse worulde” and being without a lord in exile. The return to the present tense further serves to highlight the narrator’s despondent feeling of loss through philosophising about the world: “thus emphasising that it is the words about suffering which are the most conscious present element, not the suffering itself”24. Similar to the Wife’s Lament, the Wanderer refers directly to the absence of the lord however in contrast to the Wife’s lament, it is a bodiless lord and nevertheless the two “lords” in both poems assert the loss in both lives and the static present permeating both texts. This is particularly evident, if we consider the conclusion of both poems. For example, in the Wanderer, the language remains pontificating and philosophical in moving from exile to wise “earth worker” with the concept of consolation through the permanence of finding God to heal the loss. In contrast, the Wife’s Lament remains ambiguous, where the wife sees no escape from sorrow, further emphasised through her “repeated longing”25. As such, the Wanderer enables reflection of loss and suffering, whereas the Wife’s lament is darker in being narrated from a perspective that inherently limits reflection outside the Wife’s suffering. Additionally, Belanoff argues that the “Husband’s Message” provides another foil against which to analyse the wife’s lament.26” The Husband’s message is direct speech of a messenger who addresses a woman with whom the lord who sent him exchanged marital vows in the past. The messenger informers her that the lord lives prosperously and wishes her to join him and as such, Belanoff comments that “the inclusion of this poem within the genre of elegy is a matter of convenience only, for there is no sorrow here, no reference to a happier past, though the man expresses his desire for the lady to travel to him suggests a happier future”27. Similar to the Wife’s Lament, the Husband’s Message addresses loss and separation however the intrigue remains in the latter as we know nothing about the lady, the circumstances of the separation and her current predicament. On the one hand, some commentators have posited that the Wife’s Lament and the Husband’s Message are paired poems, highlighting the triumph of a departed lord with his lady. However, in the Husband’s Message, whilst there has been a separation, there is an element of hope and consolation through the assumption that the lady desires the same goals as the Lord. In contrast, the position of the narrator in the wife’s lament is precarious through the repeated emphasis of loss and sorrow. Indeed, the “wife’s lament in her loneliness thinks of lovers who share their bed…. While the lord in The Husband’s message declares through his intermediary his greatest happiness will be that he and his wife should distribute treasure together”28. To this end, both the Wanderer and the Husband’s Message indicate a sense of movement through the traditional elegiac paradigm, whereas the representation of female exile in the Wife’s lament addresses the permanency of loss and lack of future. On this basis, it is submitted that this further correlates from a historicist perspective to the concept of self, which is further underlined in a contextual discussion of Beowulf in section 3 below. 3. Beowulf If we consider Beowulf in its historical context in the Foucault sense, it is evident that the recurrent themes of war, tragedy and loss and military heroism are pertinent to historic patterns human behaviour whilst simultaneously providing a clear depiction of Anglo Saxon cultural norms. Moreover, French Historian de Certeau argues that “history aims at calming the dead who still haunt the present, and at offering them scriptural tombs29”. This line of argument suggests that history becomes a type of contextual knowledge and trajectory of history while the present remains untroubled, which is arguably reflected by the conclusion of the narrator’s wisdom in the Wanderer30. However, this somewhat dogmatic assertion ignores the relevance of themes in Beowulf. Furthermore, a growing body of literary historicists have attempted to address the tension between polarised views of history and argue that the past can be understood on its own ground with an awareness; due in part to the texts. A prime example of this is the use of words in the Anglo-Saxon texts, which De Certeau claims convey the notion of inevitability through “labor of death and a labor against death”31. This is further reflected in Beowulf by the denial of death and references to fear, loss and death. If we further consider the development of literary historicism, Foucault’s vision propounds that human behaviour is innately driven by motivation for power, which is clearly mirrored in Beowulf32. To this end, historicists base this assumption on evidence from literary texts and the wider notion that literature itself is written by those with the most power representing the people33. In context of the medieval period within which Beowulf is set, there is clearly a dichotomy between philology, which studies the words and new historicism, which considers the historicism context34. Moreover, Philology posits that to understand people, the literary language must be understood whereas historicism indicates that to comprehend the language, the people must be understood for example the Anglo-Saxon gift culture represented assertion of authority35. A prime example of this is in Beowulf when Hrothgar gives gifts to Beowulf not as payment for services rendered, but as an assertion of authority. I accept that you are king here and won’t oppose you or your signs. Additionally, Frantzen argues that the old English texts provide a direct correlative link to the ideas and values of authentic Anglo-Saxon culture and further asserts that: “how the past is received, how aesthetic response shapes the reception of the past, is a process of filtering, of admitting into discussion some aspects of the past and prohibiting others. Presiding over this process of selection is figure of cultural significance – a scholar or politician – for whom the past had its uses. This figure functions as a gatekeeper, first as the author, and later as the readers who rewrite the text sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively by means of interpretation36 Frantzen further argues that it is possible to learn something useful about the past and how current critical practices and methodologies are connected to the social and political contexts within which the discipline has developed over time. The essence of Frantzen’s argument is that in understanding the past from an Anglo-Saxon perspective it demonstrates how the past has been used and refashioned according to a present need for it “instead of the past as it really was there were many pasts, all of them real, all of them relative”37. This indicates that new historicism is effectively a tool for highlighting recurrent themes in human behaviour and links to the present. As such, Howe and Niles argue that causative connections must be made with the past and the present moment “if we fail to make pre-conquest England a subject of interest, even in quietly modest way we risk trivialising ourselves as antiquarians who collect lore about the past as magpies collect bright shiny objects”38. Howe further posits a historicist model of “linguistic codes” of Old English texts, which “registers connections between various levels and sectors within cultural groups” and therefore would reveal “that culture’s vision of itself” while rendering a cultural criticism that attempts to understand the past on its own ground, at least as that ground is fashioned and negotiated in written texts”39. As such, he puts forward a cultural criticism which “relates the texts and contexts of our discipline to issues of our politically charged advocates of New Historicism: What does our crucial practice do to change the world in which we live?”40. Alternatively, Niles argues that Anglo-Saxon England could be considered on one plain as solely a “figure of speech, one that has lent that concept that it denotes the semblance of solidity thanks to centuries of reiterated use”41. Moreover, he asserts that “Anglo-Saxon England is nothing other than what it has been perceived to be by historically grounded human beings, from the time of the Anglo-Saxons to the present moment”42. “The importance of any historical period lies in its complex relation to other periods, emphatically including our own. A continuing sense of the presentness of Anglo-Saxon England can do wonders toward making us aware of our own place amid the discontinuities and effacements that form the greater part of history.43” In support of this assertion, he outlines the contemporary two tiered approach to analysing Beowulf within the historicist paradigm: “In a manner that has not been seen before, Beowulf will be found to have a relation to the discourses of power of a society whose institutions were very different from our own, and those discourses will be seen to be bound up in the whole text making enterprise…. It one task of old English scholarship will be to analyse how literary works like Beowulf created a culture by which they were created…. Another will be to investigate how, through a large system of education, such works continue to help shape the present day culture, that calls them to mind as past artefacts44. Additionally, Lerer highlights the way in which Beowulf has historical contingencies and the past cultural moments “meshed” in the Old English poem and Liuzza argues that Beowulf is not historical per se, but nevertheless signifies “a monumental exercise of the historical imagination”45. However, these studies have failed to consider the present relevance of Beowulf. In stark contrast Eagleton goes much further and emphatically dismisses the significance of Beowulf as being important in considering the relevance to contemporary culture46. In reviewing Heaney’s translation of Beowulf, Eagleton argues that Beowulf is no longer relevant as “we do not believe in heroism, or that the world itself is story-shaped, and we ask of literature a phenomenological inwardness which is of fairly recent historical vintage”47. However, Eagleton’s somewhat cynical view arguably misses the point of the need to consider Beowulf through its own past and relationship to theoretical and cultural postmodern humanities48. Robert Jauss refers to Beowulf as a “horizon – within the context of the question of the relationship between cultural memory and history of the representation of that always ambiguous but highly contested relationship in what might be called “high art” and the moral dilemmas posed by violent combat”49. The relevance of heroism throughout the past and the “present” Beowulf historicism model is further highlighted by Earl’s Beowulf studies, which refers to the demarcation of the poem as an expressional mode of idealised historical thinking and psychoanalytical study of social structures, which are equally relevant to the present50. Earl specifically Refers to the language and relevance of Beowulf thus: “we are ultimately powerless to control history and the strangeness internal to history – its radical ambiguity- is the very blank face of the epic hero himself, who could be all of us and none of us at all, and which invites a meditation on the unconscious themes of our own individual and cultural origins”51. This not only refers to the relevance of Beowulf to the present in its presentation of themes such as war and heroism, Earl goes further to argue that Beowulf from a new historicism perspective effectively relates to psychological theory pertaining to the cultural subconscious and human evolution, which encompasses social, political, ethical and endlessly subjective52. Earl also posits that outside of this development history cannot be properly understood. This further delineates the poem as a paradigm of cultural mourning, with the familiar emotions of “love, devotion, obsessive memory, guilt, self mortification, anger, renunciation, and relief” that mourning entails as well as his insistence that the traces of our earliest cultural memories are deeply embedded in the present.53” Moreover, Earl’s assertion that the “system of relations – of us to Beowulf, of Beowulf to the Anglo-Saxons, and of the Anglo-Saxons to us – constitutes the meaning of Beowulf54” refers to the depiction of denial, fear, hunger and heroism. As such, “Beowulf t reveals and disguises some surprisingly familiar structures of our cultured, Germanic, Anglo-Saxon, English Speaking minds – our antifeminism, for example, our repression of effect, our materialism, and our denial of death55. This further underlines the foundation of new historicism that history provides examples of social structures and mentalities that persist recurrently over time, which leads to “stillness” in the present56. This further demonstrates how the present relies on the past to define memory in historical understanding. This is further heightened in the theme of war underlying Beowulf and reclamations57. In the time of Beowulf the audience related due to the age of terror and war and therefore Beowulf’s advocacy of courage and action in the face of enemies without fear of death and highlighting the importance of the individual can do in the present58. Moreover, the blanks in Beowulf and ambiguity in the character further links to the present culture and psyche of the reader. For example “poem shows us the world of the hall from the inside and seems totally indifferent to the rest of the human world outside”59. Furthermore, the “radical blankness” of Beowulf’s character leads to repetition “endlessly in our psychic lives by inviting us to enter a drama of controlled regression and development”60. This ambiguity further lends itself to the complex psychology that is inherently correlated to popular identification with a hero61. Earl refers specifically to the following point that “at the battle of Maldon, Byrhtnoth stumbled into one of those rare moments of lordships’ terrible responsibility, when even in his highly codified world he was actually free to choose between desperate alternatives, to fight, or not to die or not, to commit his men to death or dare to be more valorous and heroic even than the king62. Moreover, heroism is tested against the theme of death and Beowulf embraces fate freely without fear63. As such, Foucault argues “this opens a void, a moment of silence, a question without answer, provokes a breach without reconciliation, where the world is forced to question itself”64. In conclusion, it is submitted that the themes of loss and suffering clearly dominates Anglo-Saxon literature and thereby highlights Anglo-Saxon cultural norms and beliefs pertaining to loss, fear, death and heroism. Culturally, the Wife’s Lament and the Wanderer highlight through the concept of loss the dichotomy between female and male exile as the Wife’s lament alters the elegiac paradigm to emphasise the permanence of her sorrow. Moreover, these themes of loss and sorrow are further embodied in Beowulf as a consistent element of Anglo-Saxon literature and it submitted that from a cultural perspective, the texts discussed in this analysis highlight the relevance of new historicism in obtaining a better understanding of recurrent themes in human behaviour. In depicting the prevalent themes of war, insecurity, fear, complex emotions, loss and heroism are arguably just as pertinent today. Moreover, they highlight the correlation between history and the present self, which further directly links to the psychoanalytical evolutionary development of the self. BIBLIOGRAPHY Certeau, Michel de (1988) The Writing of History. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988 Eagleton, T (2005) Figures of Dissent: Critical Essays. Verso. Earl, James W (1994) Thinking about Beowulf. Stanford University Press Felluga, D (2006) General Introduction to New Historicism. 2006 Foucault, Michel.(1979) Discipline and Punish. Vintage Frantzen, Allen J. (1990) Desire for origins: new language, Old English and teaching the tradition. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990 Godden & M. Lapidge (1991). The Cambridge companion to Old English Literature.Cambridge University Press. Greenblatt, Stephen (2005)The Greenblatt Reader. Ed: Michael Payne, Oxford S. B. Greenfield (1953) The Wife’s Lament Reconsidered. Publication of the Modern Language Association of America, 68 1953, 907-912. Jauss, Hans Robert (1982) Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. University of Minnesota Press Anne Lingard Klinck & Ann Marie Rasmussen (2002). Medieval woman’s song: cross-cultural approaches. University of Pennsylvania Press Liuzza, Roy M. Beowulf: A new verse translation. Ontario: Broadview Press Niles, John D. (1997) Introduction: Beowulf, truth and meaning. In A Beowulf handbook, eds, Robert E. Bjork and John D Niles, 1-12. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Niles, John D. (1993) Locating Beowulf in Literary History. Exemplaria 5 Bonnie Wheeler (1993). Representations of the feminine in the Middle Ages. Read More