Women General Flashcards
Patricia A. Belanoff
Women’s Song, Women’s Language
Wulf and Eadwacer and The Wife’s Lament
Besides these two, ‘all female words expressing grief are filtered through the undeniably male voice of a narrator’
A.S. version of frauenlieder- women’s courtly songs
Show separation from conventional literary styles of the time, with more short sentences than is expected.
‘the language is different because the poems are women’s songs, a genre which inevitably entails a differentness of language.
some element of formulaic expression: ‘winless wræcca ‘friendless exile’, ‘ofer yþa gelac’ ‘over the rolling of the waves’, ‘mourned mod’ ‘mourning spirit’, and also those of the heroic code, such as ‘beaducafa’ ‘battle-bold one’, ‘flogað scan ‘to seek service’.
However, abundance of first person pronouns shows physical presence of speaker.
Also possessive pronouns: (12 ‘min’ mine in The Wife’s Lament) connects narrator to her life. W&E = ‘min wolf’
The Wife’s Lament reads ‘full oft wit beatedan / þæt und ne gedælde nemne deað ana ‘very often we-two promised that nothing except death alone wouldd divide us-two’. The final part lacks dual pronouns, which marks separation.
‘What resonates throughout the two Old English poems is that men not currently present are responsible for emotions which are current.
There is criticism that ‘wine’ flaford’ etc, are inappropriate epithets for a wife to use for her husband
The Wife’s Lament has a much looser structure, contibruting to an ‘emotional rather than an intellectual or a philosophical statement’.
‘The power of the emotion in these poems demonstrates that suffering and separation are not subordinate to the heroic ethos and cannot be judged solely from that point of view’
‘Heroic poems, whether having male or female protagonists, portray their heroines/heroes confrontation overwhelming odds. Such poetry appeals to its audience by depicting the resulting action. But frauenlieder makes a different appeal; they ask their audiences to share emotions with them, to be present at the creation of meaning which can never be fully articulated. Far form being weak, these women triumph because they have created emotional and psychological bonds with their audiences.
