Creative and Critical Studies, Faculty of (Okanagan)
DSpace
UBCO
Kloosterman, Alison
Master of Arts - MA
University of British Columbia
This thesis offers a close reading of The Mere Wife (2018), Maria Dahvana Headley’s modernized adaptation of the Old English epic Beowulf. I argue that the monstrous, most immediately represented by the characters Dana Mills and Gren, is a social construction concealing cultural anxieties and the desire to preserve a sociocultural status quo. The characters who dwell within the gated suburban community attempt to preserve a status quo, treating those outside of the community, namely Dana Mills and Gren, as monstrous. However, in the dynamic of the novel, the monstrous is not simply what is excluded from the gated suburban community, but also something instantiated and veiled within it. I argue that the repudiation of the monstrous aims at preserving a suburban, homogenous, straight, and white sociocultural identity, but this very attempt at repudiation leads to this sociocultural identity’s annihilation, and reveals a monstrosity already lurking within the culturally specific status quo. I also argue that most of the characters initially judged as monstrous carry marginalized intersections of identity such as being Queer, feminine, racialized, lower class, and traumatized. I take particular interest in the ways that manifestations of trauma, when paired with these marginalized intersections of identity, are pathologized by the dwellers in suburban Herot and reduced to the monstrous, whereas their traumatized counterparts, who do not share these marginalized intersections of identity, do not suffer the same stigmatization. I analyze the temporally fragmented realities of the traumatized individual embodied in the monstrous, with particular attention to the work of Robert Stolorow, Richard Kearney, and Cathy Caruth.
Shattered Temporalities: An Investigation into Trauma, Time, and the Monstrous in Maria Dahvana Headley’s The Mere Wife (2018) by Alison Kloosterman B.A., Trent University, 2020 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in THE COLLEGE OF GRADUATE STUDIES (English) The University of British Columbia (Okanagan) September 2022 © Alison Kloosterman, 2022 ii The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the College of Graduate Studies for acceptance, a thesis/dissertation entitled: Shattered Temporalities: An Investigation into Trauma, Time, and the Monstrous in Maria Dahvana Headley’s The Mere Wife (2018) submitted by Alison Kloosterman in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Arts. Dr. Michael Treschow, Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies ______________________________________________________________________________ Supervisor Dr. Jodey Castricano, Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies ______________________________________________________________________________ Supervisory Committee Member Dr. Maria Alexopoulos, Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies ______________________________________________________________________________ Supervisory Committee Member Dr. Paul Milton, Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies ______________________________________________________________________________ Supervisory Committee Member Dr. Margaret Carlyle, Irving K. Barber School of Arts and Social Sciences ______________________________________________________________________________ University Examiner iii Abstract This thesis offers a close reading of The Mere Wife (2018), Maria Dahvana Headley’s modernized adaptation of the Old English epic Beowulf. I argue that the monstrous, most immediately represented by the characters Dana Mills and Gren, is a social construction concealing cultural anxieties and the desire to preserve a sociocultural status quo. The characters who dwell within the gated suburban community attempt to preserve a status quo, treating those outside of the community, namely Dana Mills and Gren, as monstrous. However, in the dynamic of the novel, the monstrous is not simply what is excluded from the gated suburban community, but also something instantiated and veiled within it. I argue that the repudiation of the monstrous aims at preserving a suburban, homogenous, straight, and white sociocultural identity, but this very attempt at repudiation leads to this sociocultural identity’s annihilation, and reveals a monstrosity already lurking within the culturally specific status quo. I also argue that most of the characters initially judged as monstrous carry marginalized intersections of identity such as being Queer, feminine, racialized, lower class, and traumatized. I take particular interest in the ways that manifestations of trauma, when paired with these marginalized intersections of identity, are pathologized by the dwellers in suburban Herot and reduced to the monstrous, whereas their traumatized counterparts, who do not share these marginalized intersections of identity, do not suffer the same stigmatization. I analyze the temporally fragmented realities of the traumatized individual embodied in the monstrous, with particular attention to the work of Robert Stolorow, Richard Kearney, and Cathy Caruth. iv Lay Summary This thesis offers an analysis of the social construction of monstrosity in modern society. Modern Western culture is no longer preoccupied with supernatural monster myths of Loch Ness monsters or vampires or dragons, but a preoccupation with monstrosity remains in our construction of the political monster. Monstrosity still presents itself as a threat to the borders of existence, and as a threat to the sociocultural status quo. This thesis examines the role manifestations of trauma play in the social construction of monstrosity through a close reading of Maria Dahvana Headley’s 2018 Beowulf adaptation, The Mere Wife. v Table of Contents Abstract........................................................................................................................................ iii Lay Summary…………………………………………………..………………………………. iv Table of Contents.......................................................................................................................... v Acknowledgements...................................................................................................................... vi Introduction................................................................................................................................... 1 Part 1 [De]constructing the Monstrous ...................................................................................... 4 Part 2 Trauma and Temporality in The Mere Wife ................................................................ 40 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................................73 Works Cited ................................................................................................................................ 76 vi Acknowledgments I am grateful to my supervisor Michael Treschow for his expertise, time, and encouragement during this project. I would like to thank the members of the supervisory committee Jodey Castricano, Paul Milton, and Maria Alexopolous for their insights and feedback, without which this project would not be what it is today. I also want to thank Jodey and Maria for their engaging graduate level courses which provided me with the necessary knowledge of trauma theory, monster theory, and critical animal studies to pursue some of these topics in this thesis. I am grateful to Tai for his unbridled encouragement during the last two years while I pursued an M.A. during a global pandemic. I am thankful for our dialogue on the topics of this project, and for being a safe person to bounce ideas off in their infancy. I am grateful to my parents whose lifelong support has given me the resources and confidence to pursue my goals. Finally, thanks to my animal kin for reminding me of the world outside of my office, and for being quiet confidants during times where I felt lost or discouraged. 1 Introduction A hero is not a champion of things become, but of things becoming; the dragon to be slain by him is precisely the monster of the status quo. - Joseph Campbell Robert D Stolorow describes an epiphanic moment in his psychoanalytic work with a patient, in his realization that “trauma destroys time” (434). In this thesis, I will explore the relationship between trauma and shattered temporality through the analysis of a single literary text. Using trauma theory and monster theory, with particular attention to Cathy Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, and Richard Kearney’s Strangers, Gods and Monsters, I will develop a close reading of a literary adaptation of the Old English epic of Beowulf: Maria Dahvana Headley’s, The Mere Wife. Through a close reading of Headley’s adaptation, I will analyze the temporally fragmented realities of a traumatized individual as embodied in the monstrous. Beowulf is a heroic tale of the Scandinavian warrior, prince, and eventual king, told in just over three thousand lines. This poem has become foundational to English literature and stands as an important monument in the history of English literature. There are many and varied translations of this epic into modern English, including a very distinctive one by and Maria Dahvana Headley herself. Headley’s novelistic adaptation of the original poem in The Mere Wife, however, precedes her translation and calls for its own analysis. I aim to explicate this novel’s socially constructed monstrous and its relationship to temporality. In my positing of the monstrous as the traumatized I situate Stolorow’s shattered temporality with Nietzschean eternal return theory in an archetypal sense. In doing so, I argue that the monstrous is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Insofar as the construction of the monstrous exposes binary based fear, those who become labelled as monstrous eventually come to 2 recognize themselves as monstrous and live in accordance with their socially constructed monstrosity. Monstrosity is a host to several paradoxes and contradictions which further illuminate fear. I examine and deconstruct these paradoxes within the monstrous and use trauma theory to further understand the complex temporal implications of the monstrous from an existential and psychoanalytic framework. I argue that certain manifestations of trauma are likely to produce experiences which either relate to or embody experiences of monstrosity. Adaptation disrupts the original. Its study requires renewed literary, psychological and cultural analysis. Headley’s adaptation, The Mere Wife (2018), sheds light on the temporal and existential ramifications of an embodiment constructed and recognized as monstrous undeveloped in mere translations. My project argues that a consideration of trauma, and its impact of fragmenting or shattering on temporal experience, aids in the deconstructing of monstrosity. This thesis argues that trauma manifests in different ways, and when coupled with intersections of marginalized identities, the traumatized individual is pathologized differently. I argue that Headley’s adaptation invites a consideration of the social construction of monstrosity. Maria Dahvana Headley’s The Mere Wife complicates and distorts time and space in her adaptation of the original Beowulf poem. The Mere Wife’s complicated temporality is often directly related to the characters’ traumatized nervous systems which leave them susceptible to flashbacks and hallucinations. The original epic is no doubt bound in liminality. Beowulf signifies a passage or a threshold between a pagan past and a Christian future. Headley’s adaptation similarly weaves a narrative with liminal content in terms of space, time, and even politics. It is in this very liminal sociocultural climate that I think an important discussion of monstrosity can arise: the monstrous as the antithesis to the status quo. 3 The desire to destroy the monstrous simply reveals a monstrosity that existed all along within the confines of the status quo. In the effort to destroy the monstrous, as it is revealed in the novel, the hero will in turn reveal the monstrous as inherent in the social order, despite its depiction as excluded. 4 Part 1: [De]constructing the Monstrous: Monstrous Representations in Maria Dahvana Headley’s The Mere Wife Maria Dahvana Headley immerses her work in a mythic past dating somewhere between 700 and 1000 AD through her translation of Beowulf. She also draws on some of the characters and themes and plot lines from that mythic past and recreates them in a fantasy version of the present in her adaptation entitled The Mere Wife. For instance, Grendel’s mother is no longer simply a hell-bride or a monstrous woman; she now has a name, or, as I will consider, two names. Most obviously, she is represented by Dana Mills; traumatized war veteran; ousted citizen of Herot Hall; and mother to her son Gren, whose father remains unknown. On the other hand, the reader can also interpret Grendel’s mother as, in part, Willa Herot. Willa Herot is a housewife who lives within the gated community called Herot Hall with her husband Roger Herot, the heir to the community, and her son Dyl. The two sons, Gren and Dyl, comprise two parts of the adapted Grendel figure: the revised and adapted Grendel is bound in duality through this representation. These two boys; the two parts of Grendel, become driven by friendship, lust, and love, to interact with one another, and in effect dismantle the separation between wilderness and civilization which their respective mothers work tirelessly to prevent, along with the urban planning of the gentrified community called Herot Hall. Headley’s 2018 adaptation, The Mere Wife modernizes the setting of the original epic and, through this re-imagination, challenges many of the binaries and dichotomies central not only to Beowulf, but to most epics’ heroic arcs or most heroes’ journeys. She pays particular attention to Grendel’s mother who is a character historically mistreated both in terms of criticism and interpretation. Renee Trilling in her essay, “Beyond Abjection: The Problem with Grendel’s 5 Mother Again” (2007), argues that Grendel’s mother “functions as a nexus for the representation of many dialectical tensions: male/female, human/monster, hall/wilderness, feud/peace, symbolic/semiotic” (1). The Mere Wife disrupts these tensions. Headley takes the dichotomous nature of Grendel’s Mother to a renewed adaptational position: literally splitting the character of Grendel’s mother into two separate characters: Willa Herot and Dana Mills, even while Willa Herot also represents an adaptational counterpart to Wealhtheow. This is, by extension, a play on the book’s title, The Mere Wife, wherein mere has both connotations of reduction; as in merely a wife, but also a play on the mere, or lake, where the original Grendeles Modor resides in Beowulf, not far from Heorot Hall. In The Mere Wife, Dana Mills lives in a cave, on the mountain, near a mere, outside of the gated community called Herot Hall. Headley also splits Grendel into two characters, Gren and Dyl, perhaps in another attempt to further complicate Beowulf’s dichotomous history. By dichotomous history, I mean a history bound up in dichotomy; one dependent upon those dialectical tensions Trilling so accurately defines. In these four characters, we see two pairs: Gren and Dana Mills, who live in the liminal outskirts of Herot Hall, atop a mountain, effectively cut off from society, and Dyl and Willa Herot, who are actively apart of Herot Hall’s gated community. In all four of these characters, their exhibited behaviours oscillate between volatility and repose: monstrosity and heroism re-orients as more of a continuum rather than a binary. In the original epic and its related translations, the aforementioned dialectical tensions are, at least seemingly, quite straightforward. For instance, Grendel, his mother, and the dragon are the monsters; Beowulf the hero; the mere is the wilderness; and Herot hall is civilization. These dialectical tensions are unsettled in Headley’s adaptation. Monstrosity dwells both within 6 the gated community of Herot Hall and its outskirts. As I mentioned before, good and evil are no longer a binary but a continuum. Richard Kearney writes in Strangers, Gods and Monsters: Most strangers, gods and monsters – along with various ghosts, phantoms and doubles who bear a family resemblance – are, deep down, tokens of fracture within the human psyche. They speak to us of how we are split between conscious and unconscious, familiar and unfamiliar, same and other. And they remind us that we have a choice: (a) to try to understand and accommodate our experience of strangeness, or (b) to repudiate it by projecting it exclusively onto outsiders. (4) Kearney notes that we have had a tendency as humans to choose the latter option: to repudiate our experience of strangeness by projecting it exclusively onto outsiders. This tendency plays out in both the original Beowulf epic and in Headley’s the Mere Wife. Headley’s adaptation problematizes this tendency in its modernized lens and engages with the ways in which dehumanization, ostracism, and Othering continues to proliferate in a modern, Western climate through instances of racial profiling, racism within the military-industrial complex, police brutality towards racialized citizens, and homophobia. The more the characters in The Mere Wife attempt to repudiate their experiences of strangeness by projecting them exclusively onto outsiders, the more adverse consequences occur as a result. Willa Herot, the heiress to Herot Hall, mother of Dylan Herot, and wife to police officer Ben Woolf, is the one who murders her son, Dyl and Ben Woolf is the one who murders Dana Mills’ son Gren. Gren, the child who the civilians of Herot Hall fear and describe as a monster, inflicts no harm upon anyone, and Dana Mills only uses violence as a reaction to crossed boundaries. These events reveal an important link between social acceptability and trauma, which I will discuss in my next chapter, Trauma and Temporality in The Mere Wife. For now, I will focus mostly on Headley’s disruption and 7 exploration of monstrosity in The Mere Wife and how these representations compare to the original Beowulf epic. In the Prologue, we are introduced to Dana Mills as a soldier in an unnamed war, perhaps a version of the U.S. war with Iraq. She has been taken captive by extremists but manages to escape death. She has committed terrible acts during her time as a soldier, and for that she seems to have remorse. She describes her time in the war as contrary to what had been advertised in her youth: “Instead, you march in and roll down roads, close your eyes and shoot” (Headley 4). This reference to the unjust acts American soldiers commit against civilians which is euphemistically called “collateral damage.” Yet, she herself is captive in this moment of introduction to her character, where she tellingly remarks, “I hear the whetting of a blade. I don’t know who they are, whoever has me, but I’m their them and they’re mine. We are each other’s nightmares” (5). Headley is already complicating the human/monster dialectical tension that Trilling considers in her essay. Trilling argues that critical scholarship regarding Grendel’s mother requires more nuance than has hitherto been articulated. Grendel’s mother does not quite fit into many of the dialectical tensions of “male/female, human/monster, hall/wilderness, feud/peace, symbolic/semiotic” (1). Trilling instead sees her as ambivalent: “in most cases, her actions, like her titles, are similarly devoid of inherent monstrosity; as most of the critics acknowledge, and even as the Danes admit, she attacks Heorot only to perform the necessary act of vengeance for her kinsman’s death. Since both the men in the poem and the critics who read it are able to identify with her motives, the extent of her monstrosity is necessarily questionable” (6). By making Dana Mills both an American soldier who therefore belongs to a socially valourized category within American society, while also being responsible for violent acts against non-American civilians, all the while being a prisoner of war in this moment, Headley 8 reiterates and modernizes Grendel’s mother’s legacy as a critical aporia. She reiterates Gillian Overing’s reflection on Grendel’s mother, “‘precisely because she is not quite human, or rather, she has her own particular brand of otherness; her inhuman affiliation and propensities make it hard to distinguish between what is monstrous and what is female’” (1-2). As the narrative around Dana Mills unfolds, we learn that she has somehow escaped a near-execution and is pregnant. She is asked whose child it is, and whether the pregnancy is by rape or consensual. She thinks, “One answer means I’m a victim, and the other means I’m a collaborator, and I don’t know, so I don’t answer” (8). Evidently, the father of the child is not an American, and likely someone who she was technically at war with, and her unborn child is therefore already a racialized Other (there are also implicit passages which come later indicating that Mills herself is racialized and subject to racial profiling). On her return to America, she ventures to a cave atop a mountain outside of her hometown of Herot Hall to raise her baby there as outlaws from society. In America, we discover an animistic world-view through a new narrator which seems to be an environmental consciousness speaking: “No one needs to see us for us to exist,” says the environmental consciousness, “We’re the wilderness, the hidden river, and the stone caves. We’re the snakes and songbirds, the storm water, the brightness beneath the darkest pools. We’re an old thing made of everything else, and we’ve been here a long time” (15). This collective voice is not merely a personification of nature, but an expression of the environment as a living consciousness, a depiction of the natural world in an animistic mode. The collective voice is a witness to brutality, and a victim at the hands of colonizers and land excavators. This voice narrates a non-linear understanding of time who can see the events which will unfold ad infinitum. There is a further significance in this passage directly related to the social construction 9 of monstrosity. The original Grendel’s mother in Beowulf has been conceived as monstrous by readers, critics, and scholars in part due to her tendency to “dwell.” The aforementioned passage takes note of the perpetuity of the caves, water, snakes, songbirds, and mountains. Eternality is an important element in the construction of the wilderness and brevity in the construction of its antithesis, civilization. This rigid binary enables constructions of monstrosity. Those who dwell apart are therefore akin to nature, or the wilderness, while those who move, excavate, raid, pillage, conquer, and colonize are associative with and representative of so-called civilization. Dana Mills has been dwelling apart for a relatively long time, and this causes her attribution to the bestial or inhuman in the social construction of monstrosity. Trilling warns against following Acker and mapping Grendel’s mother directly upon Kristeva’s definition of the abject, which only “re-inscribes a static binary structure that has confounded readings of Grendel’s mother from the beginning” (4). Trilling suggests looking at Grendel’s mother instead as a character with a “constantly shifting signification” (4). Trilling argues that much of Grendel’s mother’s reception as monstrous is in part due to translations of the text. Trilling explains: Abject from human culture, acting outside of human language, Grendel’s mother is the figure who grounds the possibility of the symbolic order itself, as well as the society that it helps to uphold. Of all the poem’s characters, she is the most difficult to pin down. Aligning Grendel’s mother with the semiotic may help us to better understand her difference from the potentially disruptive women like Wealhtheow or Modthryth, as well as from the other monsters, Grendel and the dragon. (5) 10 Although Grendel is explicitly monstrous, Grendel’s mother is only referred to as his mother (modor) throughout the poem. She acts violently towards the Danes only to avenge the death of her son, and is not actually described in appearance as deformed, large, or any other characteristic which would lend itself to traditional conceptions of monstrosity. She is simply a “vehement mother [who] avenged her son and wreaked destruction” (Heaney 145). Grendel’s mother embodies the “[d]ramatic tension between fearing something as monster and understanding it as human” (Trilling 6). In Trilling’s analysis, her actions make her actually identifiable with the Danes, the men of Heorot, and by extension Anglo-Saxon readers in general: “Grendel’s mother has far more in common with the men of Heorot than she does with her son” (7). Jane C Nitzsche explains her monstrosity in terms of her behaviour, noting that “for a mother to “avenge” (2121) as if she were a retainer, he were her lord, and avenging more important than peace-making, is monstrous” (3). Indeed, all the women represented in Beowulf, other than Grendel’s mother, have the function of the peace-weaver, an archetype that Headley maintains in her adaptation, but not without complication. In Headley’s adaptation, the women of the novel take up different archetypical tropes. While some of the women of Herot Hall might seem upon first reading as antagonistic, their tendencies to manage the normative traditions of gated suburbia might also be read as an adaptive choice by Headley to preserve the peace-weaving trope represented in Heorot Hall’s women in Beowulf. As Nitzsche writes, “[t]he role of woman in Beowulf primarily depends upon “peace-keeping,” either biologically through her marital ties with foreign kings a peace-pledge or mother of sons, or socially and psychologically as a cup-passing and peace-weaving queen within a hall” (2). Dana Mills is the exception to the peace-weaver role exemplified in the suburban women of Herot Hall, just as Grendel’s mother is the exception in Beowulf. She is a 11 disruption as a traumatized war veteran, a vengeful mother, who lives outside of the restriction of the gated suburban community called Herot Hall. She does not simply dwell in another nearby town, but is completely isolated from all of society in an abandoned train station in a mountain looking over Herot Hall, the complete antithesis to gated suburban living. The women of Herot Hall, however, are governed by and perpetuate tradition within their gated suburban community, and by maintaining and perpetuating suburban propriety they perform a modernized peace-weaver role, though not without their own flaws and vices. Willa Herot is a suburban mother with substance abuse and alcoholism issues. Willa’s mother Diana is a critical and non-maternal mother. Tina, Roger’s mother, is similarly harsh. Willa’s neighbour is an adulterer. Willa’s friends are suburban women with fat-phobic, racist, and heteronormative values. None of these women can be interpreted plainly as peace-weavers, and none can be interpreted plainly as antagonists or monsters, but almost all have inclinations towards and share characteristics with traditional conceptions of monstrosity, even while still attempting to preserve the peace within Herot Hall through secrecy, repression, and substance abuse. In the original epic, the first woman introduced is Queen Wealhtheow, the wife of King Hrothgar. It is interesting, in terms of plot, that Wealhtheow is introduced shortly after an argument between Unferth and Beowulf- Wealhtheow graces the mead hall immediately after this, acting as a peace-weaver by creating a transition from conflict to feast, in addition to her role as a traditional female peace-weaver through: So the laughter started, the din got louder and the crow was happy. Wealhtheow came in, Hrothgar’s queen, observing the courtesies. 12 Adorned in her gold, she graciously saluted the men in the hall, then handed the cup first to Hrothgar, their homeland’s guardian, urging him to drink deep and enjoy it because he was dear to them. And he drank it down like the warlord he was, with festive cheer […] until it was Beowulf’s turn to take it from her hand. (610-624) Willa Herot, who is, in part, Headley’s adaptational counterpart to Wealhtheow, might seem nothing like Wealhtheow in terms of peace-weaving tendencies upon first reading. She is, however, a mother, and a wife to the heir of the land in which they reside: Herot Hall. She has the social standing of a princess. She does indeed attempt to preserve the peace within Herot Hall, despite her resentment and disdain for taking up such a constricting role within society. Her role and its complications find expression in her dream which resembles Wealhtheow’s first scene. Will sees herself serving wine to Beowulf’s counterpart Ben Woolf, with a disturbance that foreshadows Gren’s and Dana’s disruption at her Christmas party: Hundreds of people are at a party and I’m pouring red wine into plastic cups. I have a pitcher, but it has a leak, and so I’m spilling, drop by drop onto my dress until the whole front is red. I bring wine to that police officer, but he’s holding a goblet already, and it’s big and ugly, the king of think you might get on a wedding registry from a relative, or maybe from a fraternity. If he was part of a fraternity. He probably was. Just as I pour the wine into his goblet, something throws itself against the door— (84). 13 Willa experiences this dream as a nightmare, because of the blood, of course, and the strange entity throwing itself at the door, but also perhaps because she is pouring red wine into plastic cups before many people, rather than into a glass, and, what is more, spilling it onto her dress. Her failure as a hostess in this nightmare, underscores the stringent gender roles of Herot Hall, which are maintained not only by the men who dwell within the gates, but also by the women. The women of Herot Hall, and especially Diane (Willa’s mother) and Tina (Roger’s mother), ridicule Willa for her fear of an animal, thief, or other unwanted guest, who is actually Gren, who is visiting her son Dyl, and leaving behind traces including scratch marks (53) and a claw in the carpet. (59) Willa imagines worst case scenarios, to which the women of Herot Hall dismiss her. When Willa suggests the visitor is a bear, her mother gives her an “ice pick look” to remind her “who the hero here really is” (55). Roger’s mother Tina similarly teases, “I’ll wear my armour and bring my sword tonight… It seems someone’s imagined a monster” (55). Tina has just suggested that perhaps the scratch marks point to Willa having an extramarital affair: “A guest with a dog”? (54). With no support or understanding from the matriarchs, as the narrator calls them (93), Willa allows that what she had perceived as markings from an uninvited visitor or guest are instead simply a result of her son Dyl’s most recent playdate (55). That explanation allows the matriarchs to dismiss Willa’s concerns: “That narrative is their preferred. Willa failing, slightly, regularly. Roger is perfect. Willa is not. This is usual.” (55). Willa is subject to dismissal, disapproving glances, and judgement, especially from the women in the novel. Creating antagonistic women within the gated suburban community, the adaptive counterpart to the mead-hall and the monarchy, is an effective way in which Headley inverts the monster/human, civilization/wilderness tensions exhibited in the original epic. But perhaps, on the other hand, what seem like antagonistic tendencies in the women of Herot Hall 14 are not simply an inversion of the peace-weaver archetype, but once again, a modern adaptation. Despite their antagonism, each of the women of Herot Hall are working towards maintaining a suburban normative culture. Christmas dinner, Willa Herot’s New Year’s Eve party, and an eventual funeral – all are crucial events in maintaining a culture of suburban propriety. Although the women of Herot Hall attempt to maintain a form of peace in their gated community, their efforts can have adverse effects, especially for the reclusive Dana Mills, as I will discuss further in the next chapter. Secrecy is a core part of their peace-weaving. In the groundbreaking ceremony for the new railway, they reflect their role of keeping things buried. We know somethings about the mountain, about Herot Hall, about the way the first Dylan Herot built over the people who wouldn’t go. Some of it was eminent domain. Some of it wasn’t. Tina Herot’s secrets were our secrets. We’ve picked the locks on the drawers of the dead. We know things our husbands never knew. We are standing mountainside when the bulldozer’s claw rips up a section of earth that’s been hiding graves, the bodies of a hundred people, thrown into a hole, coffins broken, gravestones crumbling, covered over and planted upon, familiar vegetation in this section of the hillside, the kinds of planting Dylan Herot Sr. commissioned, deciduous trees, hedges. Recent graves and old ones like. Some the stones list decades we remember. We lead the charge to make certain the mountain isn’t categorized a graveyard. Recent stones go directly back to the gravel. (206-7). In their narration, they frame themselves as taking up an important diplomatic role in Herot Hall, and in this moment, they are responsible for concealing the truth— a recurring theme throughout the novel, and a role that Willa Herot often take s up. The wives’ collective voice narrates, 15 “Enough time has passed that a hidden graveyard full of bodies on ground destined to be developed is something we’ve figured out how to spin. We make a museum out of the problem” (206). As we shall see, this decision will have a deleterious impact on Dana Mills. The point at the moment is the role the women of Herot Hall play in the Herot Heritage Museum, which covers up the dead bodies and artifacts which once belonged to a graveyard. This extension of Herot Hall into Dana’s refuge, is one of the myriad ways that Headley shows the complications inherent in the monstrous. In their attempts to take up the peace-weaver role the women play in the original Beowulf epic, they reignite a cycle of trauma and distress for Dana Mills, which in turn has destructive impact on the dwellers in Herot Hall. Their attempt to extend the “peace” of Herot Hall, leads to conflict and disruption. This is a moment in which the reader can re-interpret binary dichotomies as spectrums or continuums. As the women of Herot Hall expand their gated suburban society, they contribute to the eventual collapse of the city and the destruction of its citizens. All this is a function of their projecting their fears onto outsiders, namely Dana Mills and Gren, immigrants, and homeless people. By the end of the novel, it will be revealed through Willa Herot’s eyes that the monstrous dwells within these women, and the boy that everyone has deemed monster is not a monster at all. When Dana Mills comes across the Herot Heritage Museum, she has an acute reaction to it. She sees “a wall of bones they stole from my family’s graves, turned up to build those houses, those picket fences, those years we hid here, afraid of being found, afraid of being killed by them. There’s something whipping up inside of me, something with teeth” (236). Her observation of violence behind colonialism and gentrification mirrors her earlier reflections on the initial construction of Herot Hall: 16 I don’t know how they got permission to build mini-mansions on top of a graveyard but I guess they did. The cemetery was almost two hundred years old. People never think, until it happens to their place, that all construction is destruction. The whole planet is paved in the dead, who are ignored so the living can dig their foundations. (32-33) The people of Herot Hall are colonizers, land excavators. Their gentrification of the land disrupts the monster/civilian binary. For no character is simply monstrous just as no character is simply heroic. Dana Mills’ later reflection on the Civil War exemplify this. She recalls the “accounts of a monster that came coursing over the battlefields on the Confederate side” (236). The monster is not individual but composite; it comes rushing like “a tsunami of transparent brown bodies, salt-drenched and cotton-worn, roaring up out of the fields, ghosts brought by blood, and suddenly the soldiers would see a line of them, and behind that line another line” (236). She contrasts this monster with the citizens of Herot Hall; “it’s the reverse in my head right now, not the victims rising as ghosts, but their murderers. I’m seeing everyone from Herot Hall and everyone they came from” (236). Her reaction to this reflection is rage, a prayer not “for salvation but destruction” (236). Her saint (her “hurt walking”) tells her that saints both kill and get killed. Both Dana and Gren begin to shift in their sense of the monstrous: “My son and I look into each other’s eyes, and for the first time in our life together, we both see monsters” (237). The monster/hero or monster/peace-weaver archetypes begin to dismantle. Willa’s abundant fantasies, dreams, and hallucinations provide fruitful insight into the stringency of suburban propriety and the expectations regarding gender-roles. As counterpart to Willa’s dream of pouring wine into plastic cups and spilling it on her dress, Willa has waking fantasies of acting outside of prescribed behaviours; she thinks about “the neighbours […] 17 coming later for champagne, caviar, toothpick morsels, and ‘Auld Lang Syne’,” but then “thinks an evil thought: maybe she’ll order pizza instead, the stress of the past few days. She could serve gluten, dairy, and fat on New Year’s Eve. How would that be for monstrous?” (85). Several other times, Willa imagines acting against norms, reveling in the fantasy and its consequences. In her preparations for the funeral for her husband Roger Herot, in another one of her dark fantasies: Attend the social event of the season! Willa thinks, her brain filling in the tone of the announcer, TV, 1950s-style, and then stops that thought in its track, along with the luminaries and the hors d’oeuvres that want to come into her mind with it. Sour cream and lemons, caviar, or maybe stuffed mushrooms, the poisonous kind. (131) Evidently, Willa’s thoughts about suburban propriety, socialite expectations, and fashion choices occupy her more than grief over her husband Roger’s death. On the day of the funeral, she is wearing “black silk,” a “hat with a veil,” and she sees herself as “thinner and more beautiful than she was a week ago, more perfect, her body some sort of saintly relic” (131). However, Willa’s modernized attempt at acting the peace-weaver at her husband’s funeral is disrupted by the disclosure of his adultery and shame, as Willa’s mother Diane call it (137). Louisa, the woman who has had an affair with Roger, is at the funeral, and revealing too much, breaking the code of restraint: [W]eeping loudly and distractingly, her face covered in zebra stripes of mascara. Willa wants to hunt her, a safari for disallowed grief, and then it gets worse, because Louisa takes a ring off her engagement finger. The diamond glitters in the sun, larger than Willa’s, as Louisa drops it into the grave. She puts both her hands on her stomach, which, Willa sees now, is rounder than it ought to be. (137) 18 Louisa, pregnant by Willa’s late husband Roger, disturbs Willa’s composure, but her mother Diane pushes her to “Keep yourself together […] “Don’t fall apart. Don’t let go. Stand up straight. This isn’t your shame. It’s Roger’s” (137). Willa remembers her obligations, “picks up a shovel and starts heaving dirt onto the coffin, because all she wants to do is cover it all up” (137), not only his body, but the “shame” he has left her with, and her past with him. The other peace-weaver archetypes join in on burying Roger, “a small army of women sinking into the snow in their stilettos. This is a classic version. The men marry. The women bury” (137). She buries a loveless marriage and moves on to a new marriage with Ben Woolf in a repetition of enactment of her proper role. The maintenance and preservation of suburban propriety is one way in which Headley has modernized the peace-weaver archetype exemplified in the women in Beowulf. The role, with its burdens and its complications, is fulsomely described by the matriarchs as the narrative unpacks the life prescribed for Willa: We’re commuter wives. These are our commuter lives. We’re capable of carrying alcoholic husbands from the kitchen to the bedroom in a fireman’s grip. Between trains, we train to fight with enemies we haven’t met yet, battling against punching bags leaping like the world is made of stone walls and we’re storming them. There’s another version of commuting, of course, as in to commute a sentence. This is our sentence, these suburbs, the train that does not stretch to meet them. We have not been commuted. We haven’t slept in years. This is an advantage of menopause. Some nights, we meet for coffee at 4:00 a.m. We stand on the balcony of one of our homes, looking out over the river, itemizing 19 betrayals, watching the fools of this place waking from their dull dreams. We see plenty of things at that hour of the morning. (94) The men in Willa’s life, especially Roger Herot, also perpetuate these confining gender norms and expectations for Willa. Many, if not all of her son’s shortcomings are her responsibility; Roger experiences little to no responsibility for their behaviour. When Roger and Willa find a dead rabbit in their home, and assume it to be a result of Dyl’s hunting, Roger argues that Willa has been “feminizing [Dyl]” (88), and that “he needs sports” (89). He later argues that his son’s murder of a rabbit is the result of Willa’s “Santa tags” (89). Despite the multiple speculative reasons for Dyl’s behaviour, Roger blames each of them on Willa. Beyond just blaming Willa for Dyl’s behaviours and shortcomings, he also works to preserve certain narratives about the safety of the gated suburban community of Herot Hall. For instance, after Dana Mills disrupts the New Year’s Eve party, Willa wonders why “someone like her” (109) has come to their house, and what she’s doing in Herot Hall. Roger Herot’s naïve explanation is that “[m]ost of them are just mentally ill. Maybe the city put her on a bus and shipped her out for the holidays, keep the tourists from seeing her on the street. That happens” (109). The civilization/wilderness dialectical tension is compelling throughout the novel. There is something about the characters’ encounters with the mountains and its accompanying elements that provokes a response similar to an encounter with the abject or the uncanny. The mountain which neighbours Herot Hall, where Dana Mills and her son dwell, used to be a site of enjoyment, tourism, and healing. Dana Mills narrates, “The mountain was famous for its spring, and the mere was famous for being the place people came to be healed “(31). A train connected the mountain to the city until is “stopped coming” (31). Similarly, the suburbs have been built on top of sites of gravestones, including Mills’ mother’s. A complete gentrification and excavation 20 of the city that was, and the mountain that was, has been undergone. Now, the mountain, and the remnants of the train station are abandoned, desolate, and subject to many fearful observations by the civilians of Herot Hall. For instance, Willa refuses to drink the water associated with and coming from the mountain. We first encounter her disdain for the mountain water when Ben Woolf is called to investigate her home. When he asks for some water, she brings him “something not from the tap, but a bottle with a European label” (65). She says that the mountain water is “disgusting,” and that “[p]eople used to think this mountain was haunted, but now it’s just a mountain” (65). The reader, however, cannot be convinced that Willa really thinks the mountain used to be haunted. In a later passage, she has an encounter with the mountain water resemblant of an encounter with the abject: She turns on the faucet to wash her hands, and the coldness feels like fingers grasping hers. It’s water from beneath the mountain, and it’s full of the the taste of bones and rocks. She’s bought five cases of bottled to keep from having to serve this, even in ice-cube format. There’s something awful about it. It feels full of ghosts. (86) The inexplicability of the encounter with the mountain water is what makes it resemblant of an encounter with the abject or the uncanny. Ernst Jench describes the uncanny as an encounter in which “someone to whom something ‘uncanny ’happens is not quite ‘at home ’or ‘at ease ’in the situation concerned, that the thing is or at least seems to be foreign to him. In brief, the word suggests that a lack of orientation is bound up with the impression of the uncanniness of a thing or incident” (2). Similarly, Kristeva’s description of an encounter with the abject is dependent precisely upon the inexplicable nature of the encounter with the abject. In the same way that we cannot simply define an object as uncanny, we cannot define an object as 21 abject. Similarly to the way that particular experiences do not necessarily equate to a traumatic effect on all individuals, an encounter with the abject, or the uncanny for one person, might not be such an encounter for the next. “When I am beset by abjection,” Kristeva writes, “the twisted braid of affects and thoughts I call by such a name does not have, properly speaking, a definable object” (1). Whether Willa Herot’s encounter with the mountain water is properly abject or uncanny, it certainly has shared characteristics and is similarly not an experience shared with all of the civilians of Herot Hall. She is alone in this sensibility and response to the mountain water. Willa is introduced as a non-maternal figure with resentment towards not only her son, but towards the rest of the children of Herot Hall whom she refers to as the “toddler empire” (21), and therefore the people of Herot Hall who hold the most power. She feels “stabbed” (19) each time she hears her son practicing the piano. She fantasizes about “[breaking a] baby’s beck and [serving] the infant as a snack, surrounded by sippy yogurt and smashed peas” (21), and at another point explicitly states that “children are monsters” (20). She imagines herself as a “rabbit who eats its young,” her “womb […] a cave full of teeth” (40), and her son “a wild animal” (41). She also encourages her son to keep secrets from her husband, including frequent trips to the grocery store in which she takes a bite of ice cream and places the tub back on the shelves and subsequently “thinks with dark pleasure about the person who will buy this pint of ice cream, take it home and discover that someone else has been [there] first” (25). She is quick to imagine the worst in her son, Dyl, when he misbehaves (which, we later discover, mostly have to do with the gifts Gren has left him, like a dead rabbit in a gift box, or crayon on the wall): If you’re the mother of a little boy, you never stop finding stolen objects in his pockets, or in the bottom of the washing machine. If you go to the grocery store with a little boy, you’ll notice them dragging their hands along the bulk bins, 22 stealing beans, thinking to grow a beanstalk. Go to the zoo and they’re ready to leap in among the animals. Little boys are quick. They get older and become criminals of suburbia. (96) After finding the dead rabbit in Dyl’s room, not knowing that it is a gift from Gren, she imagines “the miserable next few months of therapists and family counsellors making sure that their son is not on a path to becoming a serial killer. But what if there’s nothing to be done?” (108). With every behaviour or perceived misbehaviour, she anticipates catastrophe, seeing little boys as potential killers and monsters. Her perception accords with her sense of herself, imagining, for instance, what it would be like to “be a dinosaur sometimes, and thunder across Herot Hall all teeth, claws, and irresponsibility” (85). While her imagination may align Willa with traditional conceptions of monstrosity (a common trope amongst female villains being non-maternal tendencies and secrecy), she also has a strong conception of the monstrous as distinct from herself, which, unsurprisingly, are habits, aesthetics, and lifestyles dissimilar to her own. Willa experiences landscapes other than suburbia as monstrous, in accord with the binary of the civilization against wilderness. She dwells within the gated suburban community of Herot Hall, with her husband Roger Herot as the heir to the city. (21) Her community is monotonous and every house looks the same, resembling “wildflowers [that] had seeded themselves in neat rows” (21). Whereas the town before, the town which Dana Mills grew up in, comprises “[o]ld Victorian monstrosities [which became] condemned messes” (21). Similarly, she looks back disapprovingly on the urban city in which she resided before moving to Herot Hall, as a place of “the guns, and the knives, and the lack of human compassion” (22). The Gothic and Victorian architecture of Herot Hall’s past is explicitly referred to here as monstrous; the city a place which lacks human compassion, and the final piece of landscape which Willa Herot dismisses as 23 dangerous as the mountain which backs onto her backyard, and the rest of her gated community: “I always thought it might be a mistake to leave the back of the houses unfenced… Who knows what’s on the mountain?” (54). Evidently, any landscape other than Herot Hall’s suburbia is a threat of some kind. Suburbia’s homogeneity is not, ironically, perceived as a threat, despite its own devouring and destructive tendencies. Good and evil are not such a rigid binary as in the original epic, nor are the monster and human. The dialectical contrast breaks down in Headley’ depiction of the civilization versus wilderness. She highlights the hypocrisy of such a stark juxtaposition, illuminating monstrous behaviours in both those who dwell within the walls, or gates, or Herot Hall, and those upon the mountain. Diane Landeau explains the conventional contrast between civilization and nature. European culture [has] been shaped by thousands of years of subduing nature. Quite literally, Europe at the time of Columbus’ voyages was at war with nature. “Wilderness” was not then the preservation of the world, as Thoreau called it, or something to lift the spirit. For the fifteenth-century European, wilderness was actively evil, the habitation of dangerous animals, monsters, and even the devil himself. The woods of fairy tales were the place where witches and giants abide — and it is not accident that Red Riding hood is saved from the belly of the wolf by a woodcutter. (7) This rigid binary or dialectical tension is certainly at work in Beowulf, but is disrupted in Headley’s adaptation: both the gated community of Herot Hall and the mountain are hosts to arguably monstrous behaviours, and in many cases, it is the collision between the two that results in violence and conflict. After all, Willa’s fear of the urban city indicates that it is no longer simply the wilderness that invites fear and terror. Dana Mills, by contrast, finds safety and solace in the isolation of the wilderness: “Lots of parts of the world have nothing in them. There are 24 places you could be a mother alone, trying to raise a boy into a man. There’s no piano on a rock in the middle of the ocean, and there’s no little boy to be his friend. There’s no one who’ll kill him instead of loving him. That’s enough” (100). Piano playing and friendship, the dynamics associated with civilization, are threats to Gren’s safety for Mills. Violence in the novel comes from encounters between suburbia and the mountain; civilization and wilderness, most of which are underscored by some kind of miscommunication or misunderstanding, therefore also breaking down the monster/hero and good/evil binaries. For instance, Dana Mills enters Herot Hall only because her son has started to enter its gates, quite in keeping with the original Beowulf poem. Previous to this, there has been no conflict. When Dana Mills finally comes into Herot Hall, strictly in an attempt to protect her son, who she believes is in danger, she is described as a “crazy woman [running] through a party” (107). Dylan is perhaps the only character in the novel other than Gren who can see the humanity in Dana Mills, and he attempts to explain her similarity to the other civilians of Herot Hall after she goes into Herot Hall. He tries to explain, “She’s Gren’s mommy, like you’re my mommy” (108). There is nothing about Dana Mills’ appearance that lends itself to monstrous characteristics unrelated to her scars and wounds from being a soldier in a war. Her “missing eye and […] long vine of scar down her cheek” does however give her a physical deformity which makes her appear monstrous, and as Willa describes, “dangerous” (111). Ben Woolf, however, also has an enormous size. As Willa describes him, “He must be seven feet tall” (110). Another inversion of the monster/other dialectical tension is in the character of Ben Woolf, the police office with mostly European physical traits, and a well-regarded occupation as a police officer in Herot Hall, the one who has the enormous size, of almost seven feet tall. The mothers similarly remark, initially disapproving of Willa’s hasty marriage and pregnancy with 25 Ben Woolf shortly after the death of Roger Herot, “We’ve never had a daughter bring in a wolf and call him her husband” (205). Shortly Dana Mills’ physical deformities are all the result of injury— but the civilians of Herot Hall don’t know that. She does, however, have another monstrous signification, she is racialized. It is no accident that Headley frames this adaptation within the specific context of post 9/11 U.S.A., during the U.S. war with Iraq or perhaps American invasion of Afghanistan. All of these events lead to not only an American war on terrorism, but a global war on terrorism. These events can only lead to a shifting conception of monstrosity, or a shifting conception of what menaces this identity. In Headley’s adaptation of Beowulf, the identity in Herot Hall is white, American, Christian, and cisheteronormative. Any departure from these characteristics renders someone other, or stranger, which in turn renders someone monstrous. Michel Foucault writes that monsters “form changes with the history of knowledge” (119). Kearney similarly states that “as our ideas of self-identity alter so do our ideas of what menaces this identity” (4). Headley, instead of perpetuating the tropes of the past, inverts these significations by showcasing “monstrous” tendencies in the white, suburban citizens of Herot Hall. We see these stereotypes at play after Dana Mills’ first entry into Herot Hall. Without certainty, Willa suggests that “She had a knife and a gun,” […] and instantly regrets it” (109). Louisa, the woman Roger is having an affair with (as Willa is beginning to realize after noticing her shade of red lipstick on Roger’s forehead and the corner of his mouth), suggests, “Do you think you might have misinterpreted because of—.” Willa reveals the implication of that lacuna as she reasserts her earlier claim and then declares, “It’s not racist to think that someone with a missing eye and a long vine of scar down her cheek might be a dangerous person” (111). Dana Mills, it appears is, racialized, and being racially profiled by the people at Willa and Roger 26 Herot’s New Year’s Eve party. For what immediately follows this assertion is a suggestion by Roger’s mother that she could be using “drugs” (111), evoking a racial stereotype. The citizens of Herot Hall perpetuate their negative perception of Dana Mills throughout the latter half of the novel to render her pathological, other, threatening, and malicious. As in Beowulf, the only thing that incites her violence or misbehaviour is a maternal obligation towards and protection of her son Gren. After thinking she witnesses Roger Herot murdering her son with a rifle, she takes up the sword that she has found in the mountain and draws it “in one clean motion, like I’ve been drawing swords my whole life” (118). Too late, she realizes that she had not witnessed the death of her son Gren, but the hunting and killing of a bear. (119) This misunderstanding leads to a fatal error, the death of Roger Herot. She thought that she was avenging the murder of her son: “This is the love that obliterates you. This is the love you die for” (118). Within the gates of Herot Hall, Willa, her mother Diane, and Roger’s mother Tina are in a panic. Tina, on the phone with the police, screams that “It took him, some kind of animal, my grandson, and ran off, some kind of animal my grandson I said a bear I said a bear a bear rabies I said goddamn you to hell I said a wild fucking animal” (121). She is describing Gren as both an it, and a wild animal all in one assertion, but is corrected by Willa, who quietly declares that “It was a monster” (121). She reasserts this a little later, and far more vociferously, as she watches the paramedics tend Roger’s corpse. “It wasn’t Dana Mills who took my son,” she says. “It was a monster. The monster killed Roger too.” Willa’s mother is making frantic beheading gestures. Slicing her hand across her throat over and over again. 27 “It was a monster with a long tail, claws, and teeth, a huge monster with fur, but also not—like a bear, like a person, but also not like a person. The monster’s name is Gren. He’s Dana Mills’s son.” Her hands touch her husband’s body. A sob tangles in her teeth like thread. She’s biting through a known tapestry to make a new story, a hunt unraveling and being re-woven in midair. “Find Gren!” she shouts. It rings out in the frozen world. “Kill the monster!” (124) This is the moment where Gren is condemned to monstrosity. Diane’s frantic “beheading” gesture to silence Willa, is a moment of tragic irony that interacts with the text of Beowulf, when the hero brings Grendel’s head up from the mere. There are many other moments that reiterate Gren’s “monstrosity”: intersections of Gren’s identity which provide him with monstrous significations. Some of these include being racialized, dwelling outside the gates of Herot Hall’s suburban community, likely, (due to being born and raised on a mountain), being un-groomed, and being Queer. Each of these moments contribute to a construction and signification as monstrous. And Willa’s America agrees with her prognosis that Gren is a monster. We see this in the “dozens of emails of support from all over the country” that she has received, “people telling her they’re sorry she’s being blamed for something that’s clearly not her fault. She was only speaking the truth. Monsters, yes. Thugs, yes. Shoot on sight, yes” (134). There is a recurring utterance that comes to Dana, as it turns out from her “truck-stop saint, that is from her own hurt: “In some countries, you kill a monster when it’s born. Other places, you kill it only when it kills someone else. Other places, you let it go, out into the forest or the sea, and it lives there forever, calling for others of its kind” (6, 172, 189). 28 This statement accords with Kearney that we either understand and accommodate our experience of strangeness, or repudiate it by projecting it exclusively onto outsiders (4). In the case of Gren, he has experienced both. He was in effect killed at birth by his mother’s refusal to socialize him with the outside world; the death of Roger Herot served as justification for the murder of his mother and eventually himself. But he also experienced being let go, to find love with Dylan Herot, who, in the perspective of American civil society, is his antithesis: white, privileged, and from the gates of that suburban community. If Dana Mills or Gren were to be arrested, or even murdered, at the hands of Ben Woolf, this would be regarded as “trouble with a solution, trouble he can cuff and question and take back to the station, trouble that lets him go to bed tonight in the arms of his perfect wife, back to his perfect life. There is no other version possible” (253). There would not be any ramifications for Ben Woolf, a white, privileged, chief of police. Dana Mills begins to question why she has been keeping her son in hiding for so long. She begins to wonder whom she’s protecting. She has a sense of dislocation, perhaps a symptom of her PTSD from her time fighting in the war: “I sharpen my blades […] the whole time I’m doing it, I’m wondering who I’m planning to protect. Myself? Him? Someone else entirely?” (218). She remembers an early encounter, the first encounter where another human other than herself laid eyes on her son, and she wonders if she has misinterpreted it entirely: I think about long ago, the woman in the Army surplus store, me bringing my baby to see her, and her reaction was— Maybe her reaction wasn’t. Maybe I read between the lines of her silence. Maybe she was scared that I had a child and that I looked so broken. Maybe she was pitying me. Maybe I’ve been hiding for myself, not him. (232) 29 Dana Mills seems to have believed that she and her son can only be regarded as monstrous, until that sobering moment where she sees her son walking in civil society, and no one reacts with disgust: At first, I’m ready every second for someone to stop, to stare, to see him as something he’s not, to scream. We pass an old woman who moves aside for us. We pass a woman who nods at me. A police cruiser slows, and I clench myself, but it moves on around the corner. No one looks at him for more than a moment, and when they look, they look away. (232) Here, there is a shift, and Mills must reconcile with the fact that perhaps her parental choices to keep Gren in hiding his entire life have been in vain, and that he is not necessarily monstrous, but her decisions to protect him from the outside world have been informed by her own experiences of trauma and pain. There is, of course, some deception underscoring her decision-making as a parent to Gren. She lied to Gren. She lied that she grew up in the cave in the mountain when in fact she used to live in the civilization that is now called Herot Hall. She similarly lied about the people of Herot Hall who she refers to as monsters: “I told him stories about monsters below us, stories about how they eat people like us, stories of how you can’t go down the mountain. I never told him any part of why. I told him lies” (234). Gren, putting the pieces together, feels “confusion” and “betrayal” (235). In his disbelief, “You told me you were a soldier,” he says. “You said I was a soldier’s son. You said you came from the cave” (235). In this moment, Gren questions where he did come from, and in one of her final attempts to polarize Gren’s worldview, Mills tries to explain: “You came from the war,” I tell him. “Your father came from a town in the desert, and all of it got destroyed by people like the people in Herot Hall. People like Dylan. He’s one of 30 them” (236). Gren asserts that the only person who’s ever hurt him is her, his mother by keeping him in hiding (237), and that she is the only one who has made him think he was a monster (238), despite that she has done so for protective and loving reasons. But Mills lives in fear that her son will be perceived and interpreted through pathological, and racially charged lenses: My son stands there looking like a boy. Out there, I know it, I know it, my son running down a street would be my son confessing to a crime. My son shouting would be my son attacking. My son sleeping would be my son addicted. My son in love with the boy from down there would be my son hanging from a tree. People say the world is changing, but it isn’t changed enough. (238) These fears will later become fully realized, and the reader gains some confirmation that the civilians of Herot Hall do indeed feel antipathy to racialized minorities. It is evident in the opinions of Willa Herot’s dinner party guests after Dana Mills enters the party, and through some of Ben Woolf’s xenophobic, nationalistic, and anti-immigration values. In its most explicit iteration, Ben Woolf thinks: The world isn’t large enough for monsters and heroes at once. There’s too much danger of confusion between the two categories. Ben Woolf’s job is to defend this place against those from elsewhere. Every all-you-can-eat buffet eventually runs out of food, and it’s his duty to serve his own. A man must have his chance to fight change. Borders are shifting and people are rushing across them. Herot Hall is safe for now, but Ben imagines what could happen, any moment, the place full of criminals from the world outside. The world is made of enemies. (250) The monstrous remains a shifting signification: “as our ideas of self-identity alter so do our ideas of what menaces this identity” (Kearney 4). Within the context of The Mere Wife, the dominant 31 identity of those who dwell within Herot Hall is an identity predicated upon whiteness, heteronormativity, Christianity, and American nationalism. Gren and Dana Mills are two characters whose antithetical identities threaten the dominant identity of Herot Hall. Any departure from the dominant identity of the gated community is therefore constructed as monstrous, which Ben Woolf’s ideas against immigration, and against shifting borders, confirm. Ben Woolf’s belief that he must protect Herot Hall from this looming threat, which is in a sense embodied by Gren and Dana Mills, never ceases throughout the final chapters of the novel. If anything, his desire to protect Herot Hall grows pathological and obsessive. He is plagued with a ceaseless preoccupation with Gren and Dana Mills in his dreams: “Ben Woolf wakes up with a start, the sound of piano music ringing in his ears, but it isn’t real. His dreams are taking things over, and it’s not because of the dead. It’s because of the living. It’s the ones he didn’t kill” (249). In this passage, the reader gains an updated insight into whether or not Ben Woolf experiences remorse over the civilians he has killed during his time serving in the war. He is still not haunted by any remorse, but instead, preoccupations with who he has yet to kill. Despite that there have been no further interactions between Gren and Dana Mills and the citizens of Herot Hall since the night Woolf thought he had murdered Mills, but had actually only taken her arm. He has a sense that he did not in fact kill her, despite boasting about this to the people of Herot Hall. He reasons, “An arm in a heap of dirt does not guarantee a death. He knows that. He’s always known […] The only place Gren exists these days is in Ben’s head” (249). He cannot confirm whether Mills or Gren are alive, and he cannot rest until he is certain— they represent an embodiment of his epoch’s sociocultural anxieties. Ben Woolf’s preoccupation with preserving the safety of Herot Hall from this looming threat will be, both implicitly and explicitly, the cause of Gren, Dylan, and Willa Herot’s deaths 32 near the end of the novel. This preoccupation has become a part of his identity – so saliently that he wonder, “Who would he be if he wasn’t defending? Desk, doughnuts, disaster” (252). In his case the uncertainty underscores his narcissism. He equates ceasing to defend and protect to his own physical and mental demise. Woolf will hunt Dana Mills and attempt to kill her, but Dylan Herot, motivated by his love for Gren, fights back: “Dylan Herot, T-shirt off, mouth bruised, motivated to murder by love, lifts his knife and plunges it into his stepfather’s neck” (258). This moment, while it does not kill Ben Woolf, will lead to the next fatal altercation. Ben returns to his home in Herot Hall, and Willa Herot, once asleep, “drugged” on sleeping pills (260), wakes up to find her bloodied, injured husband, and believes Gren to be in her house. She “is sleeping when she stabs him in the back with a carving knife” (261). It won’t be until the next morning when she finally comes to the realization that the person she has fatally stabbed is actually her son, Dylan Herot. None of these events seem real to her: “She’s sleeping when her attacker’s heart stops. Is she? She’s sleeping when she cuts out the heart. Is she? Is this a mouse, is this her mouth? She licks her fingers. Does she?” (262). She questions the reality of every step she’s taken in killing her son Dylan. In another act at disrupting the monster/hero dichotomy so prevalent in Beowulf, Headley’s adaptation continues to reorient this dichotomy into a continuum which everyone is a part of, no one inherently monstrous, no one inherently heroic. Willa Herot, the adaptational counterpart to Wealhtheow, the peace-weaver of Beowulf, is the murderer of her own son, while Dana Mills, the adaptational counterpart to Grendel’s Mother, will die fighting to protect her son Gren. The Matriarchs’ comment as the carnage builds to a climax sums it all up: “Monsters. Some people believe they’re unusual. Others know that monsters are everywhere” (268). These women of Herot Hall, however, those modernized peace-weavers who serve to maintain the peace of their gated suburban community, and to preserve certain acceptable 33 narratives, will re-write Willa Herot’s fatal wrongdoing: “We take care of the details, because the details are always the devil, and this is our story now. We write it. We scream it. We belt it out into the winter air. “Ben Woolf!” We shout. “Find the monster!” (270). The culmination of the disruption of the monster/hero dichotomy takes place at the funeral for her son, where Willa Herot starts to understand her husband us a monster: The train is the memorial. Her son was the sacrifice. Her husband, the betrayer, the monster, is being hunter, FBI alerts, his own officers searching for him. Years of safety, now revoked. The fences and the windows and the gates, all irrelevant. Her enemy has been sleeping beside her, fathering her children, sharing her wealth, rising on her efforts. This is a performance of courage in the face of catastrophe (280). Despite the internalized recognition that perhaps her husband, Ben Woolf, is the monster of this story, she will still return to her peace-weaving tendencies; she will try to protect Woolf from the public scrutiny of Herot Hall at her son’s funeral; another attempt at the preservation of suburban propriety. She also will not be arrested yet. She has a team of peace-weaving women working to protect her image, and hide the evidence, that she is the one to blame for the death of her son. She also has the privilege of being an heiress to the gated suburban community, along with the privileges of an identity which is white, cisgender, able-bodied, and heterosexual. Instead, they’ve all blamed Dana Mills and Gren, the “monster[s]” (271). In her eulogy at the funeral, she recalls that ten years ago, her “husband encountered a woman who’d turned against the United States,” appealing to the nationalism of the civilians of Herot Hall, and framing Dana Mills as a traitor. She goes on to say “And this, the horrible thing that happened to my son? It can be blamed on her as much as on him,” blaming her husband and Dana Mills for the death of her son; 34 the murder she enacted. And finally, appealing to the emotions of her addressees, “Is it any wonder that my husband went back to those years of trauma and committed a crime motivated by it? I can only think that it was a horrific accident and I urge you to think the same. Today I grieve my son, and my husband both” (281), completely projecting the blame of this incident onto Ben Woolf and Dana Mills. She cannot, however, give this speech without remorse. Shortly thereafter, when the singer plays one of Dylan’s compositions, she questions if “she [is] a monster herself, flying out of her house and over the land.” Now, she sees her husband, who enters the station during this song, in the same way she once saw Gren: “Hulking, muscular, matted, and hairy. He’s something wild when nothing wild lives on this mountain” (283). We recall from Waterhouse’s essay, “Beowulf as Palimpsest,” some of the most fundamental characteristics which make up a monstrous signification are that a monster is not “natural or human,” has a physical or moral deformity, and an enormity of size (27). Now, the very characteristics which denote a monster are being applied to Ben Woolf, who only recently shifted as a heroic figure to a monstrous one. Ben Woolf, shortly before stalking Dana Mills and Gren, in an act which led to the murder of Dylan Herot by his own mother, had remarked that “Gren walks Ben’s dreams, and in them he’s a blur, running, huge and strong, angry. Ben has never seen his face, and doesn’t know what his enemy looks like. Big, he thinks, and that’s all he can say” (250). Gren’s enormity of size is the one thing Ben Woolf latches onto in his foggy memory of him in order to justify his signification as monstrous and therefore justify hunting him. In this scene, Willa Woolf questions her own monstrosity, and begins to believe that Ben Woolf is the enemy, although this thought is fleeting, until a moment where she “looks into [Ben Woolf’s] eyes and knows that he knows everything she is, everything she’s ever done, and that he has forgiven her sins and taken them for his own. She is flooded with love for him,” (284). 35 During the funeral procession, a soprano singer sings one of Dylan Herot’s compositions. The piece, it turns out, is a composition made from the piano Gren once showed him when they were children; the piano, that symbol of civilization which instigates the meeting of Gren and Dyl, and of civilization and the wilderness, which Dylan has added lyrics to. Perhaps in an abject response to the piece, Willa “breathes in and out, listening to the song, and she feels a flutter in her heart, a rising that becomes a pounding. Nerves. Caffeine. Grief. Fear. Thole.” The song shifts and the singer sings, “Heroes in the mere / Heroes in the drear / Heroes who march down the hill to the hall” (283), perhaps showcasing that the heroes are no longer the ones who dwell in Herot Hall, but the ones on the mountain, and in the mere. The end of the novel radically disrupts the hero/Other dichotomy, rendering no one perfectly good nor perfectly evil. Ben Woolf, in his now pathological preoccupation with hunting and murdering Dana Mills and her son Gren, does not cease. In a final battle in the mere, Ben Woolf captures Gren in his arms. Dana Mills thinks: It doesn’t matter what form a child takes. He might be smoke and he might be a screaming monster flying across a mountain-top. He might be a boy with a tender heart picking up skeletons and trying to put them back together. He might be all that. You know he’s yours. He’s nothing but your son, whatever he appears to anyone else. (287) Each of Dana Mills’ vengeful and violent actions, at least after the war, towards the citizens of Herot Hall, have been in an attempt to protect her son, whose intersections of identity have rendered him monstrous, but for her, he is simply her son, who needs protection: I let all of my rage pour out of me. I let all the pain come through me, all the anger. I let all the blood of centuries of murders pour out of my hands, all the 36 agony of childbirth and all the panic of waiting for someone to find us on that mountain, all the fury of keeping someone safe in the dark when you should be bringing him out into the sun and giving him all the things he deserves. (287) But here she cannot protect him. The culmination of Dana Mills’ grief, rage, and anguish; the undoing of her attempt through Gren’s entire lifetime to keep him protected. Ben Woolf murders her son in front of her: “He has a hunting knife in his hand and he yanks and screams as he drives it into Gren’s throat, and — My son— I watch him die” (288). For Ben Woolf, on the contrary, this moment is the culmination of everything he has set out to accomplish. This moment is the moment where he can regard himself as the “man who saves civilization from horrors” (289). However, in this moment he is quickly sobered by the realization that, despite his belief that he has acted heroically, he will pay a price. He’s alone with the rest of his life, and his wife looks at him in horror, and he knows he will never see his sons again, he will never sleep in his bed again … All he’s done is save everyone. No one is thankful. No one respects him. He has blood on his hands and it’s spilling out. So it fucking goes” (290-1). It takes the murder of Gren Mills to demystify and deconstruct his monstrosity, expose Ben Woolf as a monster himself, and unravel the monster/hero dichotomy. Willa Woolf sees him differently now as well. She watches him emerge from the lake “dripping with darkness, his hair tangled, his muscles too large, his hands too big, his face a strange mask of hunger and joy” (293-4). In the same moment her understanding of Gren transfoms as well. Ben Woolf is “holding a monster’s head in his hand, his face blank and strange— And the monster is not a monster— […] The boy is just a boy— “(294). Her perspective on Dana Mills also shifts, as she “watches [Dana Mills], boarding the train, with longing, with something she finally diagnoses as 37 lust” (294-5). Is this a sexual or romantic lust? Or perhaps a lust for the freedom with which Dana Mills has lived her life? In any case, this is a radically different response to Mills; one we have not yet seen from Willa. But any opportunity to resolve these complex relationships cannot occur now. There will be neither healing nor diplomacy between these two women. Both of their sons have been murdered now; Willa has murdered her own son, and will now face criminal consequences. When someone tells her she has the right to remain silent, she finds it hard to take at first what is meant, but then “remembers it all now, everything” (295). She remembers what she has done and sees at last her own nature, which she shares with her neighbours: Willa looks down at her own hands and watches them change into something other than the hands she’s used to seeing. Speckled and withered, the talons long and curved, pearlescent. She’s not the only one. It’s everyone, all the people of Herot Hall, the police and babies, the men with their names all the same, the women with their perfect faces, all cracking and showing what’s underneath, what’s always been there, coarse fur and gaping maws, whipping tails, scales, claws and hunger, and teeth, and teeth, and teeth. (295-6) Climactic as this moment is, it is not quite the end of the story. The novel ends with Ben Woolf, standing on a bridge, Dana Mills, operating the new and improved train, driving it into Woolf’s body, obliterating him, then going off the tracks into the mere, killing all the peace-weavers of Herot Hall, and any other civilian aboard the train, and herself along with them. That final destruction leads to a new place, a transformation of these monstrous humans in their death:. “And here, a country of claws. A mob of monsters. Look at them as we fly, and look at all of us, the desperate, desiring humans of this place. No longer. The 38 story is shifting. Things are changing” (301). Their transformation brings them into unity with the totalizing environment: We are the wilderness, the hidden river, and the stone caves. We are the snakes and songbirds, the stormwater, the brightness beneath the darkest pools. We are an old thing made of everything else…I’m part of the fossils and the tunnels, the swords buried in mud … and all of it is us. We are the mere and the mountains. We are the dead and the bones they left behind. Beyond that transformation, the story ends with an ascension: “We walk past the fire and past the graves, under the starts, up the mountain, and up, and up” (304). It is an old motif, a way of realizing Headley’s echo of Julian of Norwich, that “All is well and will be well” (301). The Mere Wife successfully disrupts the dialectical tensions which Trilling suggests that Grendel’s mother represents: male/female, human/monster, hall/wilderness, feud/peace, symbolic/semiotic. By the end of the novel, Gren and Dana Mills are no longer viewed by Willa Woolf as monstrous. Instead, she feels a sense of desire for Mills, and recognizes Gren as simply a boy. Willa Woolf is responsible for the death of her son, and Ben Woolf is now recognized by Willa as the enemy, no longer valourized as the hero of the story. The choice made by the civilians of Herot Hall to reconstruct the train station atop the mountain, connecting the wilderness with the mountain, and to make a museum out of a graveyard results in the fatal ending for many of the civilians of Herot Hall, Willa Woolf, and Dana Mills: it is in fact the choice by the ‘civilization’, represented in Beowulf as the mead hall, to collide with the wilderness, which causes the fatal ending for many of the characters of The Mere Wife. The death of these characters is due, in many ways, to Ben Woolf and the rest of the characters of 39 Herot Hall’s xenophobia, and the projects of colonialism, gentrification, and destruction of the environment, all of which lead to the demise of the dwellers in and around Herot Hall. 40 Part 2: Trauma and Temporality in The Mere Wife Headley’s exploration of trauma in The Mere Wife serves to complicate Beowulf’s dichotomous history and to disrupt previous binary depictions of good and evil. Traumatic events have a long-term effect on the human mind; and while this may be difficult to represent in narrative form, Headley manages to do so through her portrayals of traumatized characters and the various temporal distortions they live with, especially through use of flash-backs and hallucinations. Consider the main characters of Dana Mills and Ben Woolf. Both have not only fought in the same war, but, even more, for the same cause. In our introductions to these characters, they are both represented as veterans, with the former being effectively shunned from society, and the latter being mostly valourized and therefore capable of climbing to the top of the social ladder in Herot Hall. Headley’s choice to differentiate their social experiences post-war interests my research on the ways in which trauma plays out in the adaptation. Why Ben Woolf and Dana Mills have such different lives after the war guides my inquiry into the role those various representations of trauma take in the novel, and why certain manifestations of trauma are more socially acceptable than others. At the outset of the novel we are introduced to Dana Mills during a war from which she is already traumatized. We also meet here our first encounter with one of Headley’s many translations of Old English Hwæt, the opening word of Beowulf: Say it. The beginning and the end at once. I’m facedown in a truck bed, getting ready to be dead. […] There’s a sack over my head, but I’m seeing the faces of the dead soldiers. I’m watching the war in slow motion, and then too fast, a string of men, a line of blood and baffled eyes (3). 41 In this opening passage we can already note the ways in which trauma acts to distort or shatter senses of temporality— a concept that has great importance in the novel and its ability to complicate the binary between good and evil so prevalent in the original Beowulf and its related scholarship and criticisms. “Trauma devastatingly disrupts the unity and linearity of temporality,” writes Robert D. Stolorow in”Portkeys, Eternal Recurrence, and the Phenomenology of Traumatic Temporality.” The impact of trauma, he explains affect one’s apprehension of of time: “Experiences of emotional trauma become freeze-framed into an eternal present in which one remains forever trapped” (434). Stolorow uses the language of portkeys, a concept borrowed from J.K Rowling’s Harry Potter novels, to illustrate the transportive power of trauma upon a person’s experiences of time. In the aforementioned opening passage to The Mere Wife, Dana Mills is opting out of one traumatic reality and being transported to a traumatic past. Here, she is still in the height of one of her most profound traumatic experiences while living in a recent traumatic past. Similarly, the speed at which she reviews her traumatic past shifts between “slow motion” and “then too fast” (3). We are introduced to Mills’ encounters with incommensurable losses and trauma during the war: “My guys are ghosts, and my girls too. My best friend Renee got killed a week ago, slipped on a step, made a noise, and bullets, fast as wasps. I had her in my arms when she died” (3). She has traumatic experiences not just of friends dying in her arms and witnessing another’s “body blow apart” (4), but also a near-execution (8), a pregnancy with a father whose name she can’t remember, (8) and from her expectations as a soldier in an unjust war: That’s how they sell it to you when you’re seventeen. Go out and save the war-torn, the children, and the women. Instead, you march in and roll down roads, close your eyes and shoot. Hungry people on rations, scared people, fucked up people, shooting by clothes 42 and color of skin, or by the way bodies send out heat. Bright blots on a map, hearts beating (4). Although at this stage we know very little about Dana Mills and her experiences of reality and temporality post-war by the end of the Prologue, there is no doubt that Headley sets up Mills’ character as someone already experiencing trauma, and living through events which would lead to PTSD, a disorder she later comes to name and recognize in herself. When we first meet Ben Woolf, on the other hand, we learn that he is also a war veteran. He does not, however, present himself as similarly afflicted by PTSD. This does not necessarily mean he is without trauma. It may rather suggest that he has suppressed it and found a way to live with it in socially acceptable or even glamourized ways. Woolf is introduced as a police officer who has “been up since five” (61) most days, has a strict work-out and hygiene regimen, and takes care of his nutrition. Woolf is introduced as someone who “[might be] forty, (face it, forty-four) but he’s in the best shape of his life,” but also as someone who believes that “Crime doesn’t sleep, and neither does he” (61). Most of Woolf’s daily habits seem conducive to the routines of someone socially recognized as successful, but his regimented routine and lack of sleep might also indicate someone living in a state of trauma or repression. We also know that Woolf’s childhood memories are implicated with memories of grief and implicitly trauma: “His childhood was orphanage to foster home, and [then] at last [he was] adopted” (63). Wartime in the military seems to have given him a kind of grounding and an identity, but through deadly aggression. It was his time of acheivement: His life was a series of almosts, until he joined the Marines and went to war, where the almosts became certainties. It’s been a long time since he’s killed anyone. He drives fast, 43 and, as usual, his brain’s full of the dead. He counts them like sheep. Some were killed by bombs, some by drones, some by Ben’s gun. He did okay. Better than here. Woolf does not seem to suffer from guilt or remorse in regards to his actions during the war. His reflection that he “did okay” and that he did “better than here” indicates that he regards his ability to kill as his success. It is something that cannot freely practice in his current work for the police force. He is haunted by killing, but his regret is that he had not killed even more: “His dreams are taking over, and it’s not because of the dead. It’s because of the living. It’s the ones he didn’t kill” (249). in Herot Hall, Woolf limited to rescuing “[c]ats in trees and old ladies on floors” (64). The tasks required of a police officer in a small town with little criminal activity are not enough for someone like Ben Wool, and only fuel his desire for conquest. This accords with his adaptive counterpart in Beowulf who seeks adventures – and monsters. And like Beowulf, who ascend to a throne, Ben has aspirations, which he likewise pursues in a self-effacing way: “It’s Ben’s job to make nice until he gets himself to the chief position, or higher yet, maybe running all the stations on this side of the river. State politics, even national” (64). In contrast to Dana Mills, we have a character who leans into expressions of hyper-masculinity as a way to cope with his trauma. Headley adapts the original Beowulf’s desires for conquest and recognition into a desire for military prowess, promotion, and eventually, conquest over the “monster” Gren. He is a character who fixates on his purpose rather than his mortality, fear, or even trauma, like his counterpart original Beowulf: I had a fixed purpose when I went to sea. As I sat in the boat with my band of men, I meant to perform to the uttermost what your people wanted or perish in the attempt, 44 in the fiend’s clutches. And I shall fulfill that purpose, prove myself with a proud deed or meet my death here in the mead-hall. (43) Headley plays on this “fixed purpose” to write a character who represses his traumatic memories and who is instead a career-oriented person with a meticulous daily regimen. Sigmund Freud’s 1915 essay entitled “Repression” succinctly writes, “the essence of repression lies simply in turning something away, and keeping it at a distance, from the conscious” (2978). If we apply the Freudian theory of repression to Ben Woolf, we must ask what memories Woolf is turning away and why this manifestation of trauma seems more palatable, and less pathologized, than the manifestations shown in Dana Mills’ character. The Freudian concept of repression first presents itself in the Preliminary Communication by Dr. Joseph Breuer and Dr. Sigmund Freud which is also a foundational text to the emerging misconceptions of hysteria at the time, and very importantly, the accredited origin of the “talking cure,” a method still used in psychological and psychoanalytic practices. It is important to note that the main objective of the Preliminary Communication is to discover the “causal connection between the causative process and the pathological phenomenon” (1). The pathological phenomenon they refer to at the time of their writing is “hysteria,” a mostly debunked and discredited term used for a host of psychological disorders and conditions which the scientific and medical communities now have more accurate names for. I want to make clear that Breuer and Freud’s choice to use the term “hysteria” does not, however, make the Preliminary Communication invaluable. Their conceptualization of “traumatic” hysteria is important to modern psychology and my interpretation of Woolf and Mills’ characters in Headley’s adaptation. 45 For instance, the notion that “the accidental factor plays a much greater part than is generally known and recognized” (1) is an important tenet of psychology and psychoanalysis today. Freud and Breuer also note the profound effect of “experiences of childhood” on their patients’ “more or less intensive morbid phenomena for all succeeding years”(2). They list several accounts from their work with patients, including the famous Ana O., where there seem to be clear causal connections between a patients’ irregular or idiosyncratic symptoms and behaviours and traumatic encounters in their childhood: “The memories, which appear in hysterical attacks or which can be awakened in them, correspond in all other respects to then causes which we have found as the basis of continuous hysterical symptoms” (10). In their assertion of the importance of hypnosis when treating “hysterical” patients, they make a discovery about repression and suppression. There are certain cases in which [T]he patient had not reacted to psychic traumas because the nature of the trauma precluded a reaction, or because social relations made the reaction impossible, or because it concerned things which the patient had wished to forget and which he, therefore, intentionally inhibited and repressed from his conscious memory. (7) It is important to note that, in this early and foundational text about the nature of pathological manifestations of trauma and their link to traumatic memory and repression, Freud and Breuer assert that there is something intentional about the patient’s choice to repress and suppress traumatic memory. This language is no longer consistent with the ways in which the psychological and psychoanalytical discourses of the present consider the nature of repression and trauma. The concept of ‘motivated forgetting’— “a proposed phenomenon in which traumatic memories are forgotten due to a defense or motivation to avoid those memories (Patihis and Place 619)”— which stems from this early work is being increasingly contested with 46 replacement theories which rely less upon the notion that someone autonomously chooses to forget a traumatic memory because there is motivation to do so. In order not to repeat the mistake of the misapplication of Freudian theory on repression, it is important to view Ben Woolf’s character through a nuanced and trauma-informed lens. Studies such as Lawrence Patihas and Patrcia J. Place’s “Weak evidence for increased motivated forgetting of trauma-related words in dissociated or traumatised individuals in a directed forgetting experiment” question and problematize the psychological phenomenon called ‘motivated forgetting’. In this study Patihas and Place “investigate the relationship between trauma, dissociation, and motivated forgetting within the directed forgetting paradigm using a list method directed forgetting task with both trauma-related words and positive words” (619). They cite both scholars whose research aims to indicate the causal relationship between trauma and motivated forgetting, dissociation and memory loss, but also: [a] sociocultural theory of trauma and dissociation [which] posits that there may not be such a strong causal link between trauma and dissociate symptoms (e.g., Lynn et al., 2014), and that the relationship between trauma and dissociative amnesia may be explained by social and cultural factors, as well as suggestion, memory distortions, and fantasy proneness (Giesbrecht et al., 2008; Pope, Poliakoff, Parker, Boynes, & Hudson, 2007) (620) Other scholars like J.R. Mcnally also suggest, through various studies with participants including “sexually abused women with PTSD, self-reported survivors of childhood sexual assault (CSA), and women without a history of sexual abuse,” that traumatized individuals were more likely to “recall trauma-related material, not less” (620). Other researchers find that avoiding “traumatic reminders can lead to the event becoming more persistent and intrusive” (620). Pathis and 47 Place’s findings in their own study and through analysis of other psychologists’ studies and experiments shows that “some researchers [emphasize] how trauma can lead to suppression and/or dissociative amnesia, while others emphasize how trauma is more likely to be remembered all too well and warn about the possibility of memory distortions that might result from a belief in dissociative amnesia, motivated forgetting, or repressed memories” (630) The trauma-dissociation model is being increasingly contested within psychological and psychoanalytic schools of thought and I believe that this is important to keep in mind in our understandings and interpretations of Ben Woolf in The Mere Wife. We later gain more insight into the manifestations of Ben Woolf’s traumatic childhood and the impact on his adulthood self and choices in The Mere Wife. He lives, despite an outward appearance of bravery and courage, in fear. He raises his sons, whom he regards as born warriors, in response to his own fears. He raises them to hide or subdue what he sees as his warrior nature, perhaps an expression of hyper masculinity: “He’s taught his sons to eat their meat bloody. He’s taught them to pretend their eyesight is duller than it is, their strength less. He’s taught them to respect their mother” (250). Despite this parenting, the twins are prone to violence and, on one occasion, beat a boy up badly at school. (251) Their actions are a repetition of Ben Woolf’s own childhood behaviours; and likely the behaviours which he had hoped to repress or dispel in them. An orphan raised with no knowledge of his family history, one day: When he was fifteen, he started a fight with a kid who had a string of names inherited from his grandfathers. Something about that pissed Ben off, made him feel as though his own name was a broken thing, no lineage, no history. He isn’t even Benjamin. He’s just Ben, an orphan’s name. It ended in the centre of a river, two boys challenging each other to a contest. Together, they tried to swim against 48 the current, and they ended up exhausted, in rapids. The other boy eventually went under. Luck was what Ben called it when he got to shore. Luck was what he said, when he knew that part of what had taken the other boy down was Ben’s elbow. (251-2) Ben Woolf’s tendency towards killing begins at a young age, and as we read on, we see the cycle being repeated through his twin sons’ violent dispositions. Beowulf also recalls and boasts about his youthful heroic exploits in his swimming contest with Breca, which for him turns to monster fighting and the affirming joy of victory. His recollection also leads to a discussion of fate, similarly to Ben Woolf’s shift to a discussion of luck: Time and time again, foul things attacked me, lurking and stalking, but I lashed out, gave as good as I got with my sword. My flesh was not for feasting on, there would be no monsters gnawing and gloating over their banquet at the bottom of the sea. Instead, in the morning, mangled and sleeping the sleep of the sword, they slopped and floated like the ocean’s leavings. From now on, sailors would be safe, the deep-sea raids were over for good. Light came from the east, bright guarantee of God, and the waves went quiet; I could see headlands 49 and buffeted cliffs. Often, for undaunted courage, fate spares the man it has not already marked. However it occurred, my sword had killed nine sea-monsters. (559-75) Headley adapts this passage in such a way to rewrite the heroism of Ben Woolf’s exploit in the sea, and to make it instead a menacing act. It is directly related to his childhood trauma. His victim is a child with many names, and a known family history, two traits which fill Ben Woolf with envy. Luck seems to be the justification that Ben Woolf uses for prevailing over the boy who drowned. Dana Mills is the only person in the novel who sees Ben Woolf as he truly is: motivated by fear. In one of their final altercations, during which Dana Mills takes one of his fingers with her teeth, she says “I can feel his fear, and I know, all at once, that he’s not the man he pretends to be. Maybe he fought over there, but maybe he hid himself in alleys, up staircases, waiting for other soldiers to throw themselves out into the ward and die for him. I knew men like him. They’re all dead now. Cowardice didn’t save them” (257). Mills sees a coward, and feels his fear. Despite Ben Woolf’s more socially manifestations of his trauma, by virtue of his whiteness and hyper masculinity, his “luck” will also shift, and his untreated trauma will manifest in adverse ways. Despite the contestable nature of the trauma-dissociation model and the causal relationship between traumatic experiences and “motivated forgetting,” what we can be certain of is that there is a link between trauma, memory, and experiences of temporality, despite certainty as to the clear causal connection, or whether any of these experiences are dependent 50 upon or even produced by socio-cultural factors. Trauma, as we define it today in medical and psychiatric literature, can be understood as a wound inflicted not upon the body but upon the mind, … not, like the wound of the body, a simple and healable event, but rather an event that, … is experienced too soon, too unexpectedly, to be fully known and is therefore not available to consciousness until it imposes itself again, repeatedly, in the nightmares and repetitive actions of the survivor (Caruth 3-4). In this definition offered by Caruth, we can note the explicit connection between trauma, memory, and experiences of temporality. In this definition, trauma is not a simple or healable event precisely because it is not always already available to the survivor, but instead exists in the recesses of their memory. Trauma is always on the cusp of provocation. Perhaps there is also an experience of trauma embedded within the environmental consciousness in the novel. In Part One, we first encounter Headley’s choice to give a voice, or voices, to elements of nature. As I have briefly discussed in my chapter entitled “[De]constructing the Monstrous in The Mere Wife,” this collective voice is an expression of the environment as a living consciousness, a witness to brutality, and a victim at the hands of colonizers and land excavators. This voice narrates a non-linear understanding of time who can see the events which will unfold ad infinitum. The voices stemming from Headley’s decision to endow the environment as a living consciousness, taking into consideration an animistic world view, like Dana Mills, seem to have a cyclical understanding of time. The environmental consciousness is multiple and plural. They stay hidden, beholden to none, and speak in a first-person plural voice. No one needs to see us for us to exist. No one needs to love us for us to exist. … We’re the wilderness, the hidden river, and the stone caves. We’re the snakes and songbirds, the 51 storm water, the brightness beneath the darkest pools. We’re an old thing made of everything else, and we’ve been here a long time. (15) The animistic environmental consciousness observes Mills as she gives birth to her son alone, and “washes him with our water” (17) in the cave that will become their home. When names her son “Gren,” the voices in the natural space give narrative context to the moment: “In our history, the history of the mountain, of the land that surged up out of the darkness at the bottom of the sea, this is only an instant, and then it will be dark again” (18). By noting the sheer ephemerality of this moment, they anticipate the darkness that is to come: “The mountains citizens look at the infant for a moment, listen to his mother for a moment, and then dive back into the depths (18). Headley’s recognition of an animistic world view is important for her articulation of history as something non-linear. They too seem traumatized from something – a war, the violence of human against nature, civilization against wilderness, the imposition of a train station within a mountain. The environmental consciousness does not describe the Earth it dwells in warmly, but instead as “a thieved place” that is full of expression “Everything living needs somewhere to be. There’s a howl and then a whistle and then a roar. Wind shrieks at the tops of trees, and sun melts the glacier at the top of the peak. Even stars sing. Boulders avalanche and snow drifts, ice moans” (15). Everything that is a part of the Earth —the wind, the glaciers, the stars, the boulders, the snow, and the ice— is alive and therefore capable of experiencing both pain and pleasure. Is it the experience of trauma that yields them ability to see the world in a non-linear framework? Is the Earth itself living in traumatized time? These are questions Headley’s choice to supply consciousness to the environment provoke. This pluralized environmental consciousness as a narrator returns near the end of the novel. At this point, the gentrification of Herot Hall has gone further and the residents have dug 52 up a sacred burial site and graveyard, created a museum out of the graveyard called the Herot Heritage Museum. They have restored the original train line connecting the mountain to the city, calling it the Herot Heritage train line (223). It redounds to Willa’s benefit, as her “acquired rights to places beneath the earth (223). The new “houses at Herot sell moments after they hit the mark, and the community ripples down from the mountain like a Christmas tree skirt” (223). The environmental consciousness responds to this accelerated gentrification, construction, and destruction, near the ending of the novel with anger: “Yes: times are changing and we change with them. The mere is brimming over, deeper than it was, bitter water and heat, fury and fire. Excavations into our mountain spilling salt into sweet. We are angry. We are breached and boiling” (243). At the same time, they also bear witness to Gren and Dyl reuniting, fully charged with insight: “We know his memory. We read his heart” (244). They are like an oracle, knowing the depths of things, not only the actions of the people who dwell near the mountain, but also their emotions. They are the witnesses. As Dylan returns to the mountain, “the water looks up at him. We are everywhere. We look out of the trees and the sky, out of the lake and the shore” (245). Strangely, they express more resentment towards Dylan Herot than to Ben Woolf, Dana Mills, and Gren. They say that “He’s the murderer, not his stepfather. He’s the reason anyone from out here went into the mountain, the reason anyone found the cave and he’s the one who tunneled out with his bare hands.” (245). For them, the worst thing that could happen is the collision between civilization and the wilderness, which calls forth the darkness and destruction that they foretell at the outset of the novel. Early in the novel Dana Mills chooses to live out her days in the cave with her son Gren in a perpetual state of fear and preparedness for combat. But her son begins to notice and take interest in the people below the mountain in the gated community called Herot Hall. He hears a 53 piano playing, which we know is coming from the little boy Dyl, the son of Willa Herot. Mills immediately becomes apprehensive of disaster: “This is how the war begins: a piano lesson echoing up the mountain. This is how I start to lose him” (27). Most of Mills’ parenting choices will be fear-based rather than trust-based. The deleterious impact of trauma on Mills’ ability to parent Gren limits him to a life of alienation, estrangement, and an increasingly unavoidable yearning to discover the world outside the cave, which also happens to be Mills’ greatest fear for her son. “Only one other person has ever seen my son. You figure out what you can do for love, and the answer, it turns out, is anything. You can hide for love. You can stay hidden” (27). The one other person, up until this point, who has seen Gren is a cashier clerk in a grocery store. It is worth noting that when Mills recalls this encounter, she quickly reflects on the expression on the cashier’s face in comparison to expressions she’s seen in the war. “The look on her face was a look I’d seen in the war, soldiers bending to admire babies, knowing that in a week, a day, an hour, those babies might be dead. I saw bombs falling and obliterating my son, and I saw guns aimed at him” (28). The look the cashier gives Gren could be, and we will later find out, simply innocuous, and Mills’ trauma is distorting her sense of reality. Just so does Stolorow describe the traumatized experience of time; it is “an experiential world felt to be incommensurable with those of others” (435). This possibly innocuous facial expression on the cashier clerk aids Mills in the determination to keep Gren in hiding. It feeds into her fear: “I saw his body categorized as an enemy body, and I couldn’t breathe. I wrapped him up again. I held him tighter” (28). Mills will do anything to protect Gren from an outside world she sees as harsh, and with good reason, for she herself has been subject to its cruelty through the war, and also through racial-profiling and racially charged micro aggressions; an experience that is implied in Mills, and explicitly named in reference to Gren: “To me, he looks like my son. To everyone else? I don’t know. A 54 wonder? A danger? A boy? A boy with brown skin? Any of those things will make him a target. I know the world. I’ve been in it” (28). This passage explicitly names that Gren is a person of colour in a predominantly white world, and would seem to reflect on Mills’ as well. Her race is important to note because it contributes to her myriad experiences of lived trauma. She is also a veteran who fought in an unjust war, and she was a prisoner of war who became pregnant in captivity. Her trauma itself seems racialized, since hers becomes pathologized, unlike that of her white counterparts, Willa Herot and Ben Woolf. After Dana finally leaves the mountain to protect her son Gren, Willa Herot reflects on the aftermath: “What happened? A crazy woman runs through a party, and afterward everything feels wrong (107).” Mills, upon her first introduction with the world outside the mountain is already being pathologized and referred to as “crazy.” Another piece of insight into Mills being racialized is revealed through Willa Herot’s narration. Herot suggests that Mills has been carrying a gun, but her party guests are not convinced. As I mentioned in my earlier analysis, the suggestion that one of Willa’s dinner guest makes that she has imagined a gun due to her appearance is reassured internally by Willa that “It’s not racist to think that someone with a missing eye and a long vine of scar down her cheek might be a dangerous person” (111) provides the reader confirmation from the white characters who dwell in Herot Hall that Dana Mills is a racialized woman. This is an important insight because it will directly impact the ways in which Mills is signified by the largely white population of Herot Hall, and her trauma pathologized in vastly different ways than her traumatized white counterparts. There is one more traumatized character whom I have referred to in this chapter, but have not yet analyzed. Like Ben Woolf, she has found ways to cope with her trauma in socially acceptable ways. And also, like Ben Woolf, she is white, and not subject to the same 55 pathologizing as Dana Mills. Willa Herot is the mother of Dyl and the wife of Roger Herot. While these characters might seem to map onto the traditional Beowulf characters, Wealhtheow and Hrothgar, Willa is also the mother of Dyl, one half of the two characters who become a composite of Grendel: Gren and Dyl. It follows that Willa would therefore comprise one half of the original Grendel’s mother. Willa, therefore, takes up two adaptational roles: one part of Grendel’s mother and one part Wealhtheow, the Queen of Heorot. On first glimpsing Willa, we might think, as with our first introduction to Ben Woolf, that she has her life together, with a seemingly functional family, a wealthy husband (21), a healthy child (19), a large home (21), a regular pilates regimen. But she has some very acute struggles, strange fantasies, dependence upon substances, disdain for her life, a hidden (perhaps repressed) past life, and, as I will analyze, traumatic life experiences. Our first glimpse into her past life is revealed when she “looks into the mirror she keeps on the kitchen wall and assesses herself, thinking about a pair of fishnet tights she once owned “ (20), something she would never wear now. The suggestion is a conflict between her past-life with her role as a suburban housewife and mother: “It is a competition, even though she pretends it not to be” (20). She is haunted by her non-maternal side with several violent and, at times, murderous fantasies. She views children as “monsters” (20). She feels “stabbed” (19) each time she hears her son practicing the piano. She views children as inherently violent and prone to devolution, calling them “little lords of the flies” (21), referring to her own baby as a “bird of prey” (25), and resenting the children part of the “toddler empire” (21) of Herot Hall who in her view are the ones with all the power (21). When a neighbouring baby at the Herot playground latches “unexpectedly onto her breast,” she has “a momentary escapade” in her head, “a bad adventure during which she broke the offending baby’s neck and served the infant as a snack, surrounded by sappy yogurt and smashed peas” 56 (21). There is a telling scene later in the novel regarding where, in a reflex effort to rescue her son, as he chokes on a lego piece (in the likeness of a king, no less), but then she finds herself doing the opposite: “She locates the point of the crown with her fingertip, and [pushes it deeper into his throat, like she’s pushing a toy train into a toy tunnel. Deeper, deeper, into the dark” (114). Someone else comes to his rescue, but in the chaotic aftermath we find her projecting monstrosity onto the invader Gren: “Claws, she remembers. Fur. Monster, she remembers. Monster (116). Later we find her thinking to herself that “Everyone has a child they wish they hadn’t had. Willa knows that from her own mother” (198). Headley’s representation of Willa Herot as a non-maternal mother with murderous fantasies towards children and infants, is no mere repetition of the evil mother trope prevalent in literature and film, but instead, an exploration of a modality directly linked to trauma. Her character expresses an inheritance of her own childhood and upbringing. The cycles of trauma repeat themselves as a kind of metaphor of the eternal return, ad infinitum. We know that Willa Herot was set up to marry Roger Herot by her mother Diane. (23) We know Willa was previously married to a musician named Richie in New York where Willa was working towards becoming an actor. We know that she “woke up the morning after [her wedding with Richie] with her mother standing over her wedding bed” (22). We know Diane took Willa to have an abortion. (23) We know that Diane forbids her from returning to New York (23), and that she places constant pressure on her daughter to maintain a positive reputation and appearance in Herot Hall. (24) Four days after giving birth to her son, “two of her mother’s friends arrived with a clenching device for revising her vagina” (24). Willa gives up an artistic lifestyle in New York, where she had pursued her interests and held feminist values and resigns herself to an upper class suburban life and all the expectations that come with it: Kegels shortly 57 after childbirth (24), a cocktail poured for her husband every day at 5:30pm (20), maintaining beauty standards (56), and taking the blame for any wrongdoings or imperfect behaviours exemplified in her son (42). While having an abortion is not considered an inherently traumatizing experience amongst the psychological community, the coercion we see played out in the novel, with Willa forced into having an abortion by her mother Diane, who instructs her not to tell her father because it will “disgust him” (22), an experience leading to adverse post-abortion symptoms seems inevitable. When Willa does eventually give birth to her son, within a marriage approved of by her mother, she is “passed out post-delivery” (24), while Roger proceeds to name her son Dylan without her involvement. Her routine of taking “her temperature every morning” is to avoid further pregnancy (40). Her “bad moment two years ago” that she “managed to keep a secret” would seem to have been a pregnancy scare (40). She sees herself as monstrous sort of mother. She “wonders if she’s like a rabbit who eats its young. What if her womb is a cave full of teeth?” (40). Willa seems to have trauma stemming from childbirth and reproduction and this trauma likely plays into her resentment towards her son Dyl and towards the many children of Herot Hall. She also recalls, after having a nightmare in which she wakes up screaming, that “her mother told her that if she didn’t stop waking up, she’d tie her into the bed every night, and how would Willa like that?” (85). After her mother threatens her, “she stopped dreaming entirely” (85), which would seem to be a trauma response. Willa negotiates her trauma through excessive drinking and dependence upon pharmaceutical drugs: two forms of substance abuse which tend to be treated and signified differently by virtue of the socioeconomic class their users fall into. A wealthy woman like Willa who regularly takes vodka shots, drinks vodka martinis and wine (57), pops pills (41), but still seems to maintain an outward appearance that would seem “put together” 58 receives much less backlash than substance-abusing counterparts belonging to different socio-economic classes or racialized communities. Willa spends a lot of her time with dark, and even suicidal imaginings. She seems to want to escape the suburban life she feels entrapped in, often drifting into dark imaginings such as “considering the way dying attacked by a mystery animal would absolve her of every carpool, every cocktail hour, every day as a daughter and mother and wife” (55). She has continuous murderous fantasies throughout the novel, she “thinks about the chef’s knives in the kitchen” (57), and fantasizes about being a warrior: she wants a stallion, and she want to ride it into battle on, swinging her own sword” (58). In all this, she is humoured. Her friends seem to think she is crazy. Ben Woolf, on answering her phone call that leads to the long hunt for Gren, initially registers her as “entirely crazy” (64). But he is quickly told by another officer that even “if she’s calling about an imaginary tiger stuck in a powder room, you’re still going out to Herot Hall, Woolf, Merry Christmas to you. They donate” (62). Quite explicitly here, we see an instance where a white woman of wealth, despite an initial signification as “crazy” (64), will be attended to, politely, by the police force of Herot Hall, by virtue of her socioeconomic class, and her whiteness. This special treatment is quite contrary to the treatment of her racialized and therefore pathologized counterpart Dana Mills, despite the fact that they both share some, albeit different, traumatic experiences and a similar desire to protect their children from the outside world and the threats they feel are imposed against their children. She does seem to struggle with some of the temporal implications of trauma that Stolorow highlights, especially after the murder of her husband Roger. She does not have flashbacks per se, but she certainly has an implicated conception of temporality, embodied in Headley’s adaptation of Beowulf’s dragon as a figure on her watch, whose face she turns “in toward her skin, like time doesn’t exist,” a watch with a 59 “slender gold Chinesey dragon ticking the seconds, making its way in endless circles around the diamond-numbered face,” a watch that was “a present from Roger in a moment when he couldn’t remember which anniversary it was and bought her time instead of paper” (135). And in a culmination of her grief and trauma, of both the recent events of the murder of her husband, her discovery of her husband’s infidelity, and her son gone missing, and a lifetime of traumatic events which have left her dissatisfied and disillusioned, she begins a romantic and sexual relationship with Ben Woolf. It begins as an expression of her physical, mental, and emotional distress: So Willa, bruised biceps, scraped lips, spits out the pillow and screams, her body wracked, unexpectedly seized with something that isn’t pleasure and isn’t pain and isn’t even human. She’s fucking this man because her son is dead. She’s fucking this man because her husband was fucking the neighbour. She’s fucking this man because she’s never gotten anything close to what she wants (151). It is a transformative moment in the cycle of her grief and trauma: “Willa Herot is up a flight of stairs from her history, and her last name is hardly Herot now” (152). While Dana Mills’ trauma routinely transports her past into the present, Willa Herot’s trauma drives her towards the future. She wants to abandon her trauma by transcending it, overcome it, as she cover up her. No longer Roger’s wife, and she is already preparing for the for her third wedding (152). Preparation, after all, seems to be Willa Herot’s most often used coping mechanism. Her manifestations of trauma, grief, and loss are much more socially palatable than those Dana Mills. Willa’s desire for preparation sometimes interferes with her ability to express or even experience authentic emotion. Her son Dylan grows up and into an afflicted and traumatized 60 young adult, having been confined to the stringent expectations of a young heir to Herot Hall, problematically involved in the murder of his father, and denied visiting with his friend, and lover, Gren, all while believing that Gren’s mother Dana Mills was murdered by his new stepfather. He also lives a closeted life. When he goes to find Gren as a young adult, “He was on his sixteenth bed, with his sixteenth girl, and isn’t even straight” (244). He receives “plastic surgery to repair his face [and a] psychiatrist to repair his mind, but apparently he left parts of it shut.” In his trauma, he seems to continue to be preoccupied with his past, and with the memory of Gren and Dana Mills on the mountain, the mountain remains “Paradise,” and “everything else, no matter how expensive, is inferno” (226). He grows into a troubled youth, “kicked out of private school for biting” (226), “screaming curses in the grocery store” (226), stealing “Ben’s car” (227), “scarring all the neighbours’ doors with fake claw marks” (227), and so, eventually being sent away to “boarding school” (227). He has developed a sense of justice, standing against police brutality with a sign that reads “I AM THE PROBLEM” (227). His departure for boarding school comes as a great relief for Willa. Returning a call from the school, and wanting to check in with Dylan to confirm that he will not be attending her wedding with Ben Woolf, she is transferred from the secretary to the headmaster. In this moment of being transferred, she experiences “an ominous pause” in which she contemplates a string of possibilities: 1. Suicide a. Pills? b. Noose? c. Gun? 2. Call to Ben a. Grief, seven stages. 61 b. What to tell the little boys? c. Their brother is gone to a better place? 3. Press conference a. “The worst that could happen to a parent.” b. Ben or Willa. Probably Ben. 4. Funeral a. “A time for the family to reflect.: b. Good photography, like JFK’s funeral. The little boys in matching suits. She and Ben, in black, her face in her hands. (227-8) She reflects here that “preparation saves suffering” (228). Instead comes the news that her son is missing, which he has been many, many times throughout Willa’s life, and which she is not worried about. Instead, “she’d like to dissolve her maternal bond to Dylan like gelatin in hot water” (229). Dana Mills, on the other hand, is subject throughout the novel, and the bulk of her life, to pathologization. Her experiences of trauma are acute, and she lacks the “relational contexts of deep emotional attunement and understanding” (Stolorow 436) to support her through living with trauma and in traumatized time. Her own sense of her damage, she describes thus: The damage that shows: One eye. There’s a part of my hair coming in white instead of black. The damage that doesn’t show? PTSD, amnesia. Brain, shaken by explosions. Sight, full of shadows. Some people had it worse than me. Some people are dead. I’m alive and I think I’m thirty-four. (31) Shattered temporality informs her experiences and even suggests a disruption or estrangement from her life before her trauma. In one instance she explains, “When I was alive, we thought 62 those bones were dragons, but nobody ever saw a dragon in the real world” (69). It is a reflection on her own life now, wherein she lives in traumatized time and doesn’t really feel alive, as she was therefore alive before her traumatic experiences. While the war almost certainly contributes to Mills’ PTSD and amnesia, there is also another potentially traumatic experience from her childhood: the death of her mother, bearing witness to her mother’s hallucinations and her demands (related to her illness), and being responsible, at a young age, for her burial. She prepared her mother’s body, “dressed her, and put her favourite things around her, like she’d have any use for them after she was dead” (33). The site of her mother’s gravestone became the built over by the suburbs of Herot Hall. It is ambiguous whether Mills’ hallucinations are the direct result of trauma or perhaps inherited by her own mother. It is also ambiguous whether her mother’s hallucinations were the direct result of chemotherapy, radiation, and her illness, or something more like clairvoyance. Regardless, they leave a legacy of fear of the “outside world”; its threat upon children is fixed in Mills’ mother and instilled in Mills. It is another instance of the recurrence playing out in the narrative. Her mother’s illness and anxiety confined Mills (32); and Mills will herself repeat this practice of fear-based parenting until Gren grows too independent to be contained any longer. The cycle repeats itself until Gren is a young adult: “Listen to me, I want to say, but he’s done listening. He’s me at this age, and I am my mother, broken, injured, walking behind him” (231). Her brokenness and injuries are multiple and enduring, but of special note is the loss of her arm. Her experience of this injury intersects with her war injuries. As she struggles to recover from this loss, she loses her sense of time: Tell me I’m going to make it, I’m thinking, but no one knows to tell me. I’m in the dark. It’s like I’m in a palace. Golden bathtubs and beheadings. There are too 63 many things that happened in the dark, and too many things I can’t remember. I open my eyes. I don’t know how many days we’ve been down here. I’m made of pain and heat, clammy skin, jaw tight, and I’m scared of tetanus, of gangrene, of every horrible way to go. Another thing the war gives you. (167) She doesn’t know how many days she’s been in the cave since her arm was taken from her by Ben Woolf. She will ask Gren to make the cut clean. The truck-stop saint reappears during this traumatizing moment. She comes with a message: “Everyone, holy and not, good and not, ends up a series of relics in the end.” But Dana Mills says that the presence of her saint is “a reminder that I’m still alive” (170). After the loss of her arm she dissociates in a a flashback to the beginning of the novel as we find her during her near-death experience: Gone things aren’t gone forever. They float up. They rise. I’m not gone, I’m— No, God, I’m facedown in a truck bed, getting ready to be dead. (186) The cycles and attendant recollections of trauma and death repeat themselves throughout the novel. Each time there is a traumatic experience for Dana Mills, she flashes back to another traumatic memory of the past in an endless cyclical temporal experience. Stolorow describes of trauma’s impact on temporality: Trauma devastatingly disrupts the ordinary unity and linearity of temporality, the sense of stretching along from the past of an open future. Experiences of emotional trauma can be freeze-framed into an eternal present in which one remains forever trapped, or to which one is condemned to be perpetually returned through the portkeys supplied by life’s slings and arrows. In the region of trauma, 64 all duration or stretching along collapses, past becomes present, and future loses all meaning other than endless repetition. (434) [Again, Alison, you need to close this paragraph off follwong the block quotation and transition into the next paragraph] An important piece of insight into Dana Mills’ experiences of time in relation to her PTSD comes from her encounters with her saint, a woman who talks to her in what seem like visions. She appears during times of great trauma and anguish. Dana also experiences the repetition of a quotation out of Julian of Norwich’s thirteenth revelation in her Shewings: But Jesus, that in this vision enformid me all that me nedyth, answerid by this word, and seyd: Synne is behovabil, but al shal be wel, and al shal be wel, and all manner of thyng shall be wele. (936-8) This famous revelation is shown to Julian of Norwich during a time of sickness in which she is on the verge of death, perhaps perhaps afflicted by the plague. During this illness she receives the sixteen revelations or shewings in relation to Christ’s Passion. These words from the thirteenth shewing are repeated several times in The Mere Wife, again during moments of trauma and distress. We first encounter it on the first page of the prologue: Say it. The beginning and the end at once. I’m facedown in a truck bed, getting ready to be dead. I think about praying, but I’ve never been any good at asking for help. I try tosing. There aren’t any songs for this. All I have is a line I read in a library book. All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well. (3) Just as Julian of Norwich believed she was on her death bed, so Mills is about to survive near-execution when this passage comes into her head, as she also pointedly thinks about praying. While it might seem that Headley’s adaptation of Beowulf attempts to reorient or disperse the 65 Christian morality so central to the Old English epic poem, there are certainly invocations and repetitions of Christian ideas and perhaps encounters with a divine presence, perhaps an expression of Christian thinking in this novel, or as a secular adaptation of it. Though Julian suggests providential care, luck and fate also play an important role in The Mere Wife, as they also do in Beowulf. Shortly after the first use of Julian of Norwich’s comforting words in The Mere Wife, Mills asserts that “Living is luck, not anything special. You’re not magic. You’re just lucky” (4). Ben Woolf will also mirror these musings about fate and luck. There seems to be some tension between luck and divine providence throughout the novel, similarly to the tension between the pagan backdrop and the Christian morality of Beowulf. Fate plays an important role in Beowulf. Fate is first introduced in Beowulf after Beowulf arrives to Heorot Hall and gives accounts of his heroic exploits, namely, battling and binding five sea beasts, raiding a troll nest, and slaughtering sea-brutes (420-2). Unferth, in his envy towards Beowulf, suggests that Beowulf had been fabricating or embellishing his heroic exploits, to which Beowulf replies, “often, for undaunted courage, fate spares the man it has not already marked” (572-3). It is a taunting suggestion towards Unferth, that fate can come to one’s protection if one is courageous enough, or, perhaps that a hero acts as an agent of fate, or even, as in Beowulf’s case, an agent of divine providence. Later in the novel, Beowulf’s counterpart Ben Woolf echoes the sentiment in his initial belief that he has defeated Dana Mills: “In the end, I got lucky,” says Ben Woolf, “We learned that in the war, Dana Mills and me both. Living is luck … I managed to turn that luck back on her at the last moment” (194). This passage mirrors the narrator of Beowulf’s assertion that “[Grendel’s] glee was demonic, picturing the mayhem: before morning he would rip life from limb and devour them, feed on their flesh; but his fate that night was due to change, his days of ravening had come to an end” (730-5). The plight of the 66 monsters in Beowulf comes through a combination of God’s will and the warrior’s heroism: “Grendel had cruelly killed earlier— as he would have killed more, had not mindful God and one man’s daring prevented that doom” (1055-56). Trauma’s impact on temporality is endless repetition, which is exactly what we see playing out for Dana Mills. When a new traumatic experience presents itself, she steps into a new portkey, as it were, and is transported to another traumatic memory of the past. Shortly after this passage she asks someone from her past, perhaps Gren’s father, “Are you some kind of god?,” and then grows even more uncertain: “I don’t know if he’s a man or a monster, or something made of fire. I don’t know about me either. I could be all of that too, a woman, a monster, or someone made of flames” (187). She encounters the hint and possibility of this divine presence from the outset of the novel during her traumatic experiences – she thinks about praying at the outset of the novel, and now, she thinks she sees some kind of god. Later, her saint reappears; “She’s with me, my truck-stop saint, chest open, candle inside it lit for Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and anyone else” (189). There is one other character who utters the thirteenth revelation, Dylan Herot. It comes in the moment when Dyl finally reunites as a young adult with Gren, after their declaration of their love for one another: “‘All is well,’” says the boy from Herot. “‘And all will be well.’” (248). There is shared experience, including trauma, between them as well – “there is nothing but history between them, and history is enough to make a future” (248). The saint, perhaps a hallucination, or a personification of Mills’ trauma, who describes herself as Dana’s “hurt walking” (238), also appears during traumatic experiences for Dana, and sometimes in association with Julian of Norwich’s thirteenth shewing. Perhaps the thirteenth shewing is simply a consolation which Mills latches onto during distressing and traumatic moments in her life; a fragment of writing that remains in the recesses of Mills’ memory, and 67 reveals itself after distressing moments, and provides some consolation to Mills. During traumatizing moments, the words from Julian of Norwich’s thirteenth shewing sometimes come up: I feel the wind of the blade swinging back, and I’m in a thousand cities at once, all shall be well, and in a thousand counties, and I’m on a ship coming across an ocean, and all shall be well, and I’m an old woman dying on a mountain, the last of my family, the last of my line, and all manner of thing shall be well, and there’s blackness, and in the blackness, there’s a bright start, and it gets bigger, and bigger— (6) During this near-death experience, we see a shattered experience of temporality at play here for Dana Mills, coupled with the fragmented passages from Julian of Norwich’s thirteenth shewing, and then darkness, and then a bright star, which is likely some kind of experience with a divine presence. Shortly after this moment, the saint first appears, but not in a traditional saintly form. She is an injured war veteran, perhaps, or an hallucination; a woman without legs, struggling with phantom limb syndrome, and suicidal ideation, in a hospital bed. This woman becomes the ground of the experience of the saint: “So, are you crazy?” She asks, without fanfare. “I am. I see things. Mostly I see my legs. Why am I alive, anyway? Is that what you’re thinking? That’s what I’m thinking.” I’m in the middle of replying when I see something light up in the centre of her chest. A flicker. A flame? (7) She continues to appear throughout the novel during distressing and traumatic experiences for Dana Mills. During a shift in the novel, where Gren is discovering the truth about his history, and reconciling with the fact that his mother has lied to him about his origins for his entire life, the saint takes up a more malevolent force. It is here that refers to herself as Dana Mills’ “hurt 68 walking” and assumes a vengeful note (237). This occurs during Gren and Dana’s discovery that Herot Hall’s newly constructed Herot Heritage museum has Dana’s ancestors and her mothers’ goblet on display. My saint is back, standing beside me. “Sharpen your knives,” the saint says. “Kill them all.” “I thought saints didn’t kill people,” I say, and she laughs, the candle in her chest flickering. “Some of us kill hundreds, and others got killed.” “Why are you with me?” “I’m not with you,” she tells me. “I’m just your hurt walking.” Her fingernails are long and dirty, but her teeth are perfect. She has clear eyes and twisted hair, and that candle in her chest has been burning for years. There’s a skull in her hand. (237) The saint is malevolent in the moment when Mills is also angry and vengeful. The saint embodies those feelings, as Mills’ “hurt walking.” She finally prays, mirroring the first passage of the prologue in which she thinks about praying. She’s praying “not for salvation but for destruction. Take it down. Take it down and blow it apart” (236) We also finally discover here that when the saint appears, Mills is speaking out loud. Gren, in his anger, shakes his mother and tells her to stop talking to herself, and that she is not a saint. (237) Mills is also afflicted with flashbacks throughout the novel – flashbacks to her near-execution and flashbacks to her mother’s death. Overcome by the pain of the discovery that her mothers’ bones and possessions, among many other civilians who lived in Herot Hall before it was Herot Hall, have been put on display in the newly built Herot Heritage museum, Dana Mills is taken into another of Stolorow’s portkeys of trauma, and remains trapped in conversation with her mother. She is also taken back to other sites of trauma, in particular to the site of the trauma 69 of the war: “I’m flashing into that goddamn white room. Stitches crawling up my face, Gren in my womb, my body torn up, my brain torn up. Where was I? A good city? A bad city?” (237). After this recollection, Dana Mills stops talking to her saint, although the saint will return again shortly. She shifts to talking to her late mother: “Yes, I’m whispering to her. I’m the daughter you raised. I’ve grown into someone as tough as you were” (255). Repetition, in relation to early childhood traumatic memory perpetuates itself in Willa, just as it does in Ben Woolf. As I discuss earlier in this chapter, Mills’ childhood is traumatic: she spends much of it as a caretaker for her sickly mother, who is battling cancer and chemotherapy, bearing witness to her myriad hallucinations, and, similarly to Gren’s childhood experience, being kept in hiding, under strict curfew and prevention from socializing with other children. She tells her mother in this passage that she has grown into someone as tough as her mother, perhaps a reference to her similarly fear-based parenting techniques. Now she is the one keeping her child in hiding, and the one being resented by her child over her hallucinations. Cycles repeat ad infinitum. This moment of conversation with her late mother is abruptly paused by the entrance of Ben Woolf, stalking, and hunting her. In another disruption of linear temporality, Ben Woolf raises his gun to Dana Mills. In the moment of this threat, Dana Mills experiences time unfolding: I can see my future, the bullet leaving the chamber and going through my body, the way my flesh will try to hold it, the way I’ll sag, the way he’ll drag me into the mere, weigh me down, drop me to the bottom of my own history. I hear him take the safety off. There have been so many clicks in my history, so many last seconds of my life. (256) 70 This passage is rich with temporal distortion, in a testimony to that notion illustrated by Stolorow of shattered experiences of temporality as a result of trauma. The concept of the future for Dana Mills here is an endless repetition of being killed, something she has been so close to experiencing so many times, beginning with that first scene in the Prologue which showcases her near-death experience. As Stolorow suggests, “In the region of trauma, all duration or stretching along collapses, past becomes present, and future loses all meaning other than endless repetition” (434). The meetings between Dana Mills and Ben Woolf similarly perpetuate a traumatic cycle. Ben Woolf has taken Mills’ arm ten years prior, so Dana Mills “tear[s] a finger from him, and spit[s] it out” (257). The only thing that seems to halt this intergenerational cycle of trauma and repetition is annihilation or obliteration. Perhaps Headley’s choice to end the novel with the death of all the characters is a recognition of this fact. In the culmination of a lifetime of trauma, isolation, and grief, and many attempts in vain to protect her son from society, Dana Mills encounters Ben Woolf one final, and fatal time: I let all my rage pour out of me. I let all the pain come through me, all the anger. I let all the blood of centuries of murders pour out of my hands, all the agony of childbirth and all the panic of waiting for someone to find us on that mountain, all the fury of keeping someone safe in the dark when you should be bringing him out into the sun and giving him all the things he deserves. (287) Mills surrenders herself to her overwhelming rage and experiences catharsis in this final battle with Ben Woolf. Perhaps the most traumatic moment for Dana Mills, who has already endured a lifetime of trauma, occurs shortly after this collision: Ben Woolf murders her son Gren by asphyxiation. 71 This grief will lead to the conclusion of the novel; a loss of the will to live on Mills’ part, followed by a murder suicide in which Mills drives the train off the tracks, killing Ben Woolf, Willa Herot, and all of the other citizens of Herot Hall. As the train descends off the tracks and towards the death of all of the novel’s remaining main characters, Mills’ seat-mate, which could very well be a hallucination; perhaps the saint, or someone else, says, “If something’s happened once, we would all find love again. If something’s happened once, none of us are done for. None of us are the last of us. The story is all of the voices, not just the voice of the one who tells it at the end” (304). The theme of repetition is at play throughout the novel, especially during times of trauma. The novel ends with an ascension which seems to imply a movement towards some kind of afterlife like Christianity’s heaven: I’m in a crowd and we are all walking together, my mother and my grandmother, my husband and my heart, my son and his beloved, my ghosts, the soldiers I fought beside, the people we killed, and the people who killed us. My saint is back with her breasts on fire, and my strangers with their hands out, telling me to listen. The sun is setting, and the town is a skyline, black as the back of a whale coming up out of the ocean. My skin is cold, but the last rays heat me, making this soul into steam. We walk past the fire and past the graves, under the stars, up the mountain, and up, and up. (305) This final ascension from up into the mountain marks a cataclysmic shift from the temporal, finite, and mortal towards the eternal; the transcendent. Only through this annihilation, obliteration, or perhaps apocalyptic moment can the cycle of the eternal recurrence and of intergenerational trauma come to a halt. The move upwards into the mountain marks a 72 completion or respite from the existential anxieties, grief, and trauma which are inherent to a terrestrial existence. 73 Conclusion I have argued through a close engagement with Maria Dahvana Headley’s The Mere Wife that the monstrous emerges as a continuum rather than a binary in this adaptation of Beowulf. The monstrous reveals cultural anxieties: from Grendel and Grendel’s mother in Beowulf representing the Anglo-Saxon cultural anxieties such as, in Grendel’s case, being a monster who dwells in one location for an extended period of time, being murderous without a clear cause, and being abnormally large in size, and in Grendel’s mother’s case, being a woman, and a mother, with vengeful and murderous tendencies in The Mere Wife represents the cultural anxieties of modern, post 9/11 suburban U.S.A., as outsiders to the gated community of Herot Hall, in Dana Mills’ case, being a racialized woman with PTSD, and in Gren’s case, being a Queer, racialized boy. The monstrous shape shifts into the most prominent threats to the ego of a cultural moment or epoch. By the conclusion of The Mere Wife, however, the narrative shifts to make all of the prominent characters in the novel, both inside and outside of the gated suburban community called Herot Hall, monstrous, and, in another shift, Willa Herot begins to perceive Gren as innocuous, finally, after his death, he is regarded as simply a boy; no longer a threat. A final epiphany by Willa (Herot) Woolf reveals, “It’s everyone, all the people of Herot Hall, the police and the babies, the men with their names all the same, the women with their perfect faces, all cracking and showing what’s underneath, what’s always been there, coarse fur and gapping maws, whipping tails, scales, claws and hunger, and teeth, and teeth, and teeth” (288). By the conclusion of the novel, it is finally revealed that the monstrous was always already within, and that any attempt to project monstrosity onto outsiders, Others, or the exiled will instead manifest the monster within the subconscious. The attempt to expel the monstrous is simply an attempt to 74 maintain rule, order, identity, system, or status quo. The disruption of the status quo dissolves the monster/hero dichotomy into a continuum; into degrees of monstrosity. I have also examined the text’s themes of trauma and temporality, arguing, through use of Stolorow’s theory of trauma’s impact on temporality as endless repetition, a kind of expression of Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence theory, that trauma shatters linear experiences of temporality. I have also demonstrated that there are certain manifestations of trauma which are more socially acceptable than others. When expressions of trauma are manifested in less socially acceptable ways, and coupled with intersections of identity such as being racialized, Queer, lower class, disabled, etc., the person afflicted is pathologized in a way different than their less marginalized, traumatized counterparts. I argue that this pairing contributes to social constructions of monstrosity. In The Mere Wife, the characters whose manifestations of trauma were socially acceptable at the outset of the novel, such as Willa Herot’s dependence on alcohol and other substances, eventually leads to a habit which cannot be controlled. Their more culturally accepted expressions of trauma eventually supersede themselves— in the case of Willa Herot, her manifestations of trauma shift when she murders her son in a drug-induced stupor. Ben Woolf’s trauma, which originally manifested in culturally and socially valourized forms due to a seemingly pristine regimen, and his embrace of hyper masculinity in response to his trauma, leads to a somewhat pathological preoccupation with hunting Gren and Dana Mills, and this preoccupation leads to his death. Dana Mills’ trauma which has gone unmedicated and untreated for so long eventually leads to the final climactic murder suicide. In all of these cases, the characters whose manifestations of trauma were socially tolerable at the outset of the novel shift to having grave consequences and manifestations. The Mere Wife complicates the U.S.’s and 75 other “Western” culture’s social treatments of trauma and highlights the temporal distortions that result with traumatic afflictions. 76 Works Cited Alfano, Christine. “The Issue of Feminine Monstrosity: A Reevaluation of Grendel’s Mother.” Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, vol. 23, no. 1, 1992. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/39g6c6rm Breuer, Joseph and Freud, Sigmund. “The Psychic Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena (Preliminary Communication).” Studies on Hysteria, translated by James Strachey, 1-13, 1983. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. John Hopkins University Press, 2016. Cohen, Jeffrey J., editor. Monster Theory: Reading Culture. University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. Translated by A.M. Sheridan Smith. Pantheon Books, 1972. Hannequin, Wendy M. “We’ve Created a Monster: The Strange Case of Grendel’s Mother.” English Studies, vol. 89, no. 5, Sept 2008. https://doi.org/10/1080/00138380802252966 Headley, Maria Dahvana. The Mere Wife. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018. Heaney, Seamus. Beowulf. W.W. Norton & Company, 2000. Jentsch, Ernst. “On the Psychology of the Uncanny (1906).” Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities, vol. 2, no. 1, 1997, pp. 7–16, https://doi.org/10.1080/09697259708571910. Kearney, Richard. Strangers, Gods and Monsters. Routledge, 2003. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez, Columbia University Press, 1982. 77 Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Translated by Walter Kauffman, Random House, Inc., 1974. Nitzsche, Jane C. “The Structural Unity of Beowulf: The Problem of Grendel’s Mother.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 1980. Landau, Diana. “The Earth and Myself are of One Mind; Animals Within and Without (Singing of the Earth).,” edited by Joseph Bruchac and Diana Landau, Nature Co., 1993. Patihas, Lawrence and Place, Patricia J. “Weak evidence for increased motivated forgetting of trauma-related words in dissociated or traumatised individuals in a directed forgetting experiment.” Memory, vol. 26 no. 5, Oct. 2017, 619-633. https://doi.org/10/1080/0965211.2017.1387666 Stolorow, Robert D. “Portkeys, Eternal Recurrence, and the Phenomenology of Traumatic Temporality.” International Journal of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology, vol. 6, no. 3, 433-436, Jun 2011. https://doi.org/10.1080/15551024.2011.582936 Trilling, Renée Rebecca. “Beyond Abjection: The Problem with Grendel’s Mother Again.” Australian and New Zealand Association of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (Inc.), vol. 24, no. 1, 2007, 1-20. https://doi.org/10.1353/pgn.2007.0059
Thesis/Dissertation
eng
English
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Graduate
Treschow, Michael
Shattered temporalities : an investigation into trauma, time, and the monstrous in Maria Dahvana Headley’s The mere wife (2018)
Text