Voice and Monstrosity

            On Thursday morning halfway through yoga I put on a scarf, my hoody, my jacket, my boots and gloves and helped my upstairs neighbour David carry his suitcases down to the taxi. Last year we had to wait at least fifteen minutes but this time it was there before we’d gotten all the luggage onto the sidewalk. I put the two big suitcases in the trunk and David put the rest in the back seat. He connected with the African cabbie right away, who said, “You travel the way I travel!” David left me his keys and a bag of some food items like onions, garlic, two tomatoes and a piece of fruit cake. 

            I memorized the third verse of “Glass securit” (Security Glass) by Serge Gainsbourg and worked some more on revising my translation. 

            I played my Martin acoustic guitar during song practice for the third session of four. My G string is frayed and will break soon. The strings have lasted a long time on this guitar. 

            I weighed 86.2 kilos before breakfast. I looked at my five year diary and saw that now I’m seven kilos lighter than I was then. I haven’t weighed over 90 kilos for a long time. 

            I worked on the presentation that I have to do tomorrow: 

            In the novel The Mere Wife by Maria Dahvana Headley, Dana is introduced as a victim speaking in the reader’s “I” voice. From then on we identify with her as a victim even when she is the aggressor. Because of her first person singular voice one is less likely to view her as a monster. It is Dana who establishes who the monsters are in the novel when we learn on page 48 that she has told her son Gren that the settlers at the foot of the mountain are “monsters”. In the ancient poem Beowulf , on which The Mere Wife is based, we are told by the narrator that Grendel comes from a race of monsters. The narrator’s voice is the only authoritative one in the poem. 

            I weighed 86.2 kilos before lunch. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back. I would normally stop at Freshco on the way home on a Thursday but I didn’t want to take time away from my assignment. I’ll go there on the way home from class on Friday. 

            I weighed 85.9 kilos at 17:30, which is the most I’ve weighed in the evening in a week. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 18:22. 

            I worked on my presentation until dinner. I had a potato with gravy and the last of my pork ribs. I finished my assignment and then submitted it at around 22:45. What I wrote was great but I thought afterwards that it’s probably not what the professor expected. I think it was supposed to be a critical summary of Paul Acker’s essay, “Horror and the Maternal in Beowulf”. I included a bit of Acker’s essay but I started writing and liked the direction I was going and lost interest in Acker. It wasn’t even a critical summary of The Mere Wife and Beowulf but more like a mini essay. Anyway, here it is: 

                                     Voice and Monstrosity in Beowulf and The Mere Wife 

            In the novel The Mere Wife by Maria Dahvana Headley, the author uses the Modernist technique of deepening the narrative through the use of multiple voices. Dana is introduced as a victim speaking in the reader’s “I” voice. From then on we identify with her as a victim even when she is the aggressor. She is the only first person singular narrator in the novel and because of that “I” voice one is less likely to view her as a monster. Other voices in the story are an objective narrator who tells us what other individual characters say and think; as well as the “We” voices of the collective consciousnesses of the matriarchs, the dogs, and of the mere. 

            It is Dana who establishes who the monsters are in The Mere Wife when we learn on page 48 that she has told her son Gren that the suburban settlers at the foot of the mountain are “monsters”. In the ancient poem Beowulf , on which The Mere Wife is based, we are told by the narrator that Grendel comes from a race of monsters. As the narrator’s voice is the only authoritative one in the poem the reader is somewhat trapped in that voice’s negative view of Grendel and his mother. What aids the narrator most in promoting the idea that Grendel and his mother are monstrous is the choice of not giving them a voice. If the authors of Beowulf presented Grendel or his mother as first person speakers as Headley does for Dana, it would be an entirely different story. 

            In The Mere Wife the agenda of propriety and appearances conveyed by the “We” voice of the collective consciousness of the matriarchs of Herot Hall renders them as a singular monster. The reader is outnumbered by each “We” voice but only threatened by that of the matriarchs. The “We” voice of the mere is haunting but patient and calm and therefore not threatening. The “We” voice of the dogs is innocent and also not monstrous. 

            In Beowulf, although Grendel and his mother are not given speaking voices, the mother’s sword that Beowulf uses to kill her serves the symbolic function of being a collective voice similar to the “We” voice of the mere in The Mere Wife. Paul Acker on page 7 of his essay “Horror and the Maternal in Beowulf” implies that the sword appears before Beowulf during his battle with the mother as a type of divine intervention. But in The Norton Anthology of English Literature and in The Broadview Anthology of British Literature the translations of Beowulf by F. Klaeber and R.M. Liuzza respectively say that Beowulf was granted by grace the perception to see the weapon hanging on the wall of the cave (1557, 1661-1663). That does not mean that the sword materialized before him as Acker implies but simply that he noticed the sword that was already there. This makes more sense poetically because this "best of weapons ... ring-marked ... bright with gems" that is presented as the symbol of the greatness and superior craftsmanship of the "wonder-smiths" that the Giants were, dissolves after Beowulf has used it to kill the last member of that race (1557-1562,1564,1606-1610,1614-1616,1681). That the sword is a collective voice of Grendel and his mother’s race is shown in its description in Beowulf, which says that on "the hilt of the old heirloom ... was written the origin of ancient strife" of "the race of giants"(1687-90,1694-1697). So Grendel and his mother do indeed have a voice after all that speaks through the craftmanship of the sword and the literature of its inscription of the history and culture of their lost race. In a similar way, in The Mere Wife the “We” voice of the mere holds and speaks of Dana’s lost history. 

            In The Mere Wife no females die until Dana kills the matriarchs of Herot Hall and herself. But it is such a non violent death that it is as if it is not a death at all and they accept it peacefully. Their voice dissolves like Grendel’s mother’s sword and they merge into the collective mere voice with Dana’s ancestors in a way that renders them no longer privileged, and no longer a monster.