I didn’t read Beowulf until graduate school, when I was teaching it (the Heaney translation) in a humanities core course on the epic.* And I loved it. It’s like an anti-epic — a world-weary, melancholic story of about how heroic values are a thing of the past, gone forever, but perhaps also somewhat ruinous even in their own time. In that sense, it seems like a text that would be hard to modernize — it’s already quasi-modern! But I also loved John Gardner’s Grendel — indeed, it has so thoroughly nestled into my conscious that it’s become hopelessly entangled with the original. So I knew it could be done.
And so I was excited to read The Mere Wife. I started it last winter, when it was just starting to get really cold and dark all the time, but I quickly realized that it was too much for me at the time. Too much cold and dark and terror. Because The Mere Wife is intense. It’s fundamentally a story of two strong-willed, ruthless women, and the complex relationships they have with their children, and with society. One of them is Dana Mills, former Marine who was kidnapped in the desert, mutilated on camera, and now lives in a cave in the hills where she’s from with her son Gren, and remembers her time in war, and ruminates on ancient family histories of poverty and exploitation. The other is Willa Herot, society queen, trophy wife, mother of Dylan. Dylan and Gren become secret friends, and everyone’s precarious world begins to unravel, under the watchful eye of police officer Woolf.
Knowing Beowulf, I knew, or could surmise, that things wouldn’t end well, and especially, that the two boys were in danger. And the novel really hones in on matters of maternal ambivalence and protectiveness, with such intensity that it was just more than I wanted to engage with, just then. So I had to set the book aside for awhile. But I returned to it in February, after a conversation with a student who was raving about Headley’s new Beowulf translation (which I haven’t read yet) and finished it, and was largely impressed with it.
To me, the task of the modern re-telling is to find some brilliant balance between identity and difference — that is, the new work should strive to be the original in some fundamental way, but it should also be meaningfully, interestingly, different from it, such that a parasitic relationship emerges between the two, producing a new understanding of the original work both in terms of the values it celebrates, and the formal devices it uses to do so, AND a meditation on how those values exist in our own moment, AND a chance to think about how the ‘modern’ form works differently from the older one. Which is a lot to ask! But that’s how I feel, sorry.
The Mere Wife is brilliant for the way that it restores a feeling of terror to the Beowulf story, weaving an image of a dark and uncertain world, with various threatening and cruel forces at work, and the frightening violence that emerges in response to them. It wonderfully invites us to consider how ideas of war, heroism, wealth, and the role of women have changed (or not) over the centuries. It also offers an interesting study of how epics work as opposed to novels, in particular, through the leaps in time (which the older text also has!) and shifting perspectives. The novel is a skillfully drawn collection of character portraits — most of the central cast feels vitally, powerfully real, which is certainly not the case in the original.** And it’s a gripping read.
The ending, I thought, faltered a bit. Which is actually appropriate to a Beowulf retelling, because that also has a somewhat surprising finale, but nonetheless, it felt unsatisfying. It was interesting, though, to stop and think to myself, as the text moved into its third act, how could it possibly end in a satisfying way? Which is notable, actually — it doesn’t happen to me often, when I’m reading.
All in all, it’s a work I recommend, even for people not familiar with Beowulf (but seriously: go read Beowulf), though I do think it’s somewhat uneven. It would be great fun to read in a class, and delve more deeply into. And it makes me all the more excited to read Headley’s Beowulf translation!
* I’ve taught quite a few ancient epics, some of them (like the Iliad) numerous times, thanks to the traditional structure of the humanities core. And I love doing it. The apex was a comparative class on epic and identity that I really want to teach again someday.
** Grendel is sort of fascinating for the way that it doesn’t seize on this power of the novel; instead, like the epic, the only character that we really get connected to is the narrator. Though as I recall, there’s also some cool play with narrative voice in the dragon bits. In a way, Gardner brings the novel (or novella?) form much closer to the epic — Headley’s work feels more obviously novel-like.
Kasia Reads 