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Discourses of Otherness: From Old English Poetry to Shakespeare

In his article Befriending the Medieval Queer: A pedagogy for Literature Classes (2002) Richard E. Zeikowitz proposes a pedagogical approach to medieval texts in which students are encouraged to examine the cultural codes of the text which affirm the normativity and naturalness of certain privileged identities, values and sexualities and which mark any behaviour, identity or form of desire that threatens the stability of the dominant norm as devalued Other. Drawing from Zeikowitz s approach, this essay aims to search for the discourses of Otherness developed in some English literary texts ranging from Medieval to Early Modern times, namely: Beowulf, The Wife s Complaint, Sir Gawain and The Green Knight, The Canterbury Tales, and The Merchant of Venice. Both Old English anonymous poems Beowulf and The Wife s Complaint deal with the medieval world of the comitatus, however, each poem reflects it as an inverted mirror image of the other. In the epic poem Beowulf, patriarchal homosocial relations are displayed as a source of security and joy. Beowulf, the hero in the poem, of all the kings upon the earth / he was the man most gracious and fair-minded, / kindest to his people and keenest to win fame (ll. 3180-82), who embodies the values of a male-centered, martial community preoccupied with bloodfeuds, revenge, war, death and heroism, will achieve fame and glory by risking his life, and ultimately losing it, in defense of the social, economic and political centre of his nation: the mead-hall. The hall becomes a metonymy for the society centered around it (Donoghue 2004: 29), and those who attack it, like Grendel, Grendel s Mother, and the Dragon, attack the very heart of the nation s identity and must necessarily be destroyed. In reference to Grendel, Zeikowitz remarks: the sin of Cain marks Grendel as the Ostracized Other while the men celebrating inside (the hall) are designated as good vulnerable to attack from the evil outsider(2002: 71). The establishment of a center inevitably entails the construction of a periphery and the margins. In contrast with Beowulf, it is from the borderland of this martial, homosocial society that the lyrical I Wife s Complain - whose husband, of the elegiac poem The misled by his kinsmen, has banished her to an

underground den far away from him. (Alexander 1966: 56) - utters her grievance: I have wrought these words together out of a wryed existence, the heart's tally, telling off the griefs I have undergone from girlhood upwards, old and new, and now more than ever; for I have never not had some new sorrow, some fresh affliction to fight against. ( Alexander 1966: 58)

Estela Vzquez 28 /02/10 Pgina 2 de 8 The poem is remarkable not only for its lyrical intensity but also in that, as opposed to Beowulf, in which the points of view of Grendel and his mother, who also live in an underground den far away from the hall, are never articulated, and in which women are only depicted in their role of peace-weavers - the females duty to maintain peace between tribes - and solely as they relate to the cohesiveness of the community of warriors (Gardner, 2006: 4), in The Wife s Complaint the female outcast manages to appropriate language and weep out the woes of exile ( Alexander 1966: 59), and complain for her situation: He would change his tune / if he lived alone in a land of exile (Alexander 1966: 59), rendering her own perspective of how it feels to be an abject outcast in the heroic world of Anglo-Saxon England. In reflecting upon the wifes linguistic representation of the world from which she has been exiled (Desmond, 1990:587), such as the terms she uses to refer to her husband - lord, chieftain, friendly lord which express her position as retainer to her lord/husband, Marylin Desmond (1990:587) , sharply observes: her language defines her as a subordinate if not marginal member of her culture, a cultural exile whose very expressions define the cultural reality of her marginality and her otherness. The Middle English Arthurian romance Sir Gawain and The Green Knight, written in West Midland dialect by the late 14th century, is also set in the medieval heroic world of kings, queens, retainers, warriors, halls and supernatural enemies. Yet, in this poem mead-halls into luxuriant merciless warriors have turned into courteous knights, and

castles.The hero of this romance, Sir Gawain, is essentially solitary and does not engage in combat for the purpose of protecting his lord and society so much as seek adventure with a view to proving himself (Hopkins,1990: 54), besides he is no longer flawless or infallible but rather he learns from his mistakes; whereas his adversary is the appalling and gracious Green Knight, a magical shapeshifter who, true to the playful tone of the romance, arrives at Camelot craving not for combat but for game, and is cordially welcomed to Arthur s court - as opposed to Beowulf s Grendel, whose exact appearance is never directly described and whose presence in the hall only represents the community s annihilation. However, the most outstanding difference between the homosocial aristocratic society depicted in the Old English poems discussed above, and the one depicted in this Middle English romance is, in my view, the new role played by women and love. As Andrea Hopkins in The Book of Courtly Love: The Passionate Code of Troubadours (1994) explains:
the knight-hero of romance would perform his deeds to prove himself worthy of his lady, to improve himself, to achieve his full

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potential as a man and as a knight. For the first time in postclassical Europe a man s status as a civilized being, a member of courtly society, was judged partly by his behaviour towards women. (1994: 13)

The admirable ladies of romance, though, are still defined by male desire and, thus, for men s profit. In Sir Gawain and The Green Knight women are central to the plot, but they are portrayed under the virgin/whore dichotomy. Sir Gawain s only Lady, whom he venerates as an object of worship and from whose image, etched on the inside of his shield, he draws his strength, is the Blessed Virgin. Whereas the evil sexual temptress is Lady Bertilak, the only female speaking character in the poem, who is in fact the ventriloquized double of Morgan Le Fay, the goddess responsible for the plot mechanism of the poem (Heng,1991: 503). These ladies will contend for Gawain s chastity, for his loyalty to chivalric homosocial values, and ultimately for his life. Although the Virgin will finally succeed, Lady Bertilak s seduction game will leave on Sir Gawain, apart from the nick on his neck, a permanent reminder of his sin, a green girdle: But as sign of my sin I (Sir Gawain) shall see it (the girdle) often/ Remembering with remorse, when I am mounted in glory,/ The fault and faintheartedness of the perverse flesh, / How vulnerable it is to vile advice and sin (Stone, 1959: 121). Read within these parameters, Sir Gawain and The Green Knight may be interpreted as a masculine narrative which explores the tensions between courtly love conventions and both clerical and chivalric ideals. However, Sir Gawain and The Green Knight, with its Chinese box structure - the Seductive Game is included within the Exchange of Winnings Game which is in turn included within the Beheading Game - and its shape-shifting characters - most notably the Green Knight / Sir Bertilak, who cannot be reduced to positive or negative, demonic or divine, pagan or Christian (Saunders, 2009:209)- is a particularly enigmatic text, which has allowed for diverse interpretations. Among them it is worth noticing Geraldine Heng s insightful article Feminine Knots and the Other Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (1991), in which she defamiliarizes the familiar outlines of the poem to distinguish a feminine narrative folding into and between the masculine, which sets forth a view that identity and desire, far from being fixed and stable, like Sir Gawain s pentangle and its endless knot of knighhood perfection, remain always multiple and unfinished, like the Lady s girdle, which is resignified from magical talisman, to love gift, to penitential sign and to mark of honour . Geoffrey Chaucer s The Canterbury Tales, written in the East Midland dialect of London by the late 14th century, is , like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a Middle English poem dealing with travelling and adventure. But unlike the romance s single, winter time

Estela Vzquez 28 /02/10 Pgina 4 de 8 rider, The Canterbury Tales pilgrims choose to ride in group, and in the season of Spring, when nature is renewed. Literary characters are also renewed in Chaucer s poem, in which people from the rising middle class are given voice and allowed, by the motif of the pilgrimage, to engage on equal terms with members of the nobility (Wetherbee, 2004:2). However, far from glamourizing the values of this newly empowered bourgeoisie , Chaucer, the author, casts a critical eye on the bourgeois by bringing into relief their lack of spiritual ideals, their vanity, their greediness, their corruption, their lechery, their inmorality: There was a Merchant (...)/ In solemn tones he harped on his increase /of capital (Coghill,1951:10); There was a Franklin (...)/ he lived for pleasure and had always done (Coghill,1951:12); A Doctor too emerged as we proceeded/ He therefore had a special love of gold /(Coghill,1951:14) ; There was a Skipper hailing from far west;/The nicer rules of conscience he ignored/(Coghill,1951:13); The Miller was a chap of sixteen stone / His was a master-hand at stealing grain (Coghill,1951:18). Referring to the characters of the Miller, the Manciple, the Reeve, the Pardoner and the Summoner, Stephen Knight in Geoffrey Chaucer (1986:166) remarks: Mobility, personal and social, was shaping people into behaviour that, from an oldfashioned point of view seemed as selfish and as revolutionary as that so vividly described by Chaucer in the case of these churls. Seen in this light, this emerging class may well be conceived of , in the text, as an Other who is decentering the political, cultural and economic hegemony of the privileged aristocracy. The text also hints at sexual queerness in the description of the Pardoner, who rode with the Summoner and had the same small voice a goat has got/ His chin no beard had harboured, nor would harbour,/ Smoother than ever chin was left by barber/ I judge he was a gelding of a male (Coghill,1951:21); sexual references abound in the Pardoner s dialogue with the Host that underscore the potency of the Pardonner s queer sexuality (Zeikowitz, 2002: 74), as when he tells the Host: Come forward, Host, you shall be the first to pay/ and kiss my holy relics right away. (Coghill,1951:257), to which the Host replies: No, no [said he ], not I, and may the curse / Of Christ descend upon me if I do!/ You ll have me kissing your old breeches too / And swear they were the relic of a saint / Although your fundament supply the paint! (Coghill,1951:257), the pun on fundament is particularly suggestive since it may be interpreted either as theoretical basis or buttocks. There is as well in the poem the literary newness of the powerfully subversive female voice of the Wife of Bath, who in her very first words makes the following stand: If there were no authority on earth Except experience, mine, for what its worth, And thats enough for me, all goes to show

Estela Vzquez 28 /02/10 Pgina 5 de 8 That marriage is a misery and a woe; (Coghill,1951:258)

In this categorical declaration the Wife of Bath resolutely asserts herself as an agent of knowledge and authority, and by doing so she radically challenges the legitimation of patriarchal authority and enunciation (Straus,1988:531). As she proceeds to enlarge on her story she gradually pulls down all the pillars of male authority, the discourse of Church, government and the written word, (which) depend precisely on sequestering experience to the domain of private talk among women (Straus,1988:530): For take my word for it, there is no libel On women that the clergy will not paint, Excep when writing of a woman-saint, But never good of other women, though. Who called the lion savage? Do you know? By God, if women had but written stories Like those the clergy keep in oratories, More had been written of man s wickedness. Than all the sons of Adam could redress. (Coghill,1951:277) Who called the lion savage? Do you know? This rhetorical question is priceless in how it denounces and subverts phallocentric point of view. Still, there is another question the Wife of Bath puts into circulation through her tale: What is the thing that women most desire?, which has an incalculable liberatory potential for women, of all times, as it raises our awareness against any construction of our identity that is not grounded on our own desire. As strong a voice as that of The Wife Of Bath, is Shylock s, the Jew Other in the Early Modern English comedy The Merchant Of Venice, by William Shakespeare. Despite being classified as a comedy, i.e. a play with a happy ending - usually marriage- for the main characters, in which all the plots are reconciled in harmony (Nelson Thornes Shakespeare 2003:8), The Merchant Of Venice is clouded over with Shylock s fate and that of Antonios, its title character. Nothing are we told about the cause of Antonios melancholy. Rather than his words, it is mainly by his actions - such as Antonio s willingness to risk his life and fortune for Bassanio s happiness (I,i,135), (I,iii,149), (IV,i,114-118; 270-278) or his tears when Bassanio sets sail for Beltmont to woo Portia (II,viii, 36-50) that we may be lead to believe that Antonio s sadness arises from an unrequited secret love for Bassanio. Shylock , on the other hand, is the villain of the play and there is not one single positive attribute about him: he is miserly, greedy, prejudiced, merciless, vindictive. His very first womens

Estela Vzquez 28 /02/10 Pgina 6 de 8 words in the play are: three thousand ducats well (I,iii,1), and immediately later in his first aside he confesses: How like a fawning publican he(Antonio) looks./ I hate him for he is a Christian;/ But more, for that in low simplicity/ He lends out money gratis and brings down/ The rate of usance here with us in Venice. (I,iii,32-36). He is so loathsome that not even his own daughter, Jessica, can speak on his behalf, in fact she overtly declares: Alack, what heinous sin is it in me/ to be ashamed to be my father s child! / But though I am a daughter to his blood, I am not to his manners (II,iii,15-18). Shylock s only motivation in the play is his hatred for Antonio, which wins over his love...for his ducats. But Shylock is a Jew, and as such he is scorned and ridiculed all throughout the play; he is spat and kicked; he is addressed as devil, evil soul, misbeliever, cut-throat dog, villain Jew, infidel; he is robbed and abandonned by his daughter; his wealth is confiscated by the State of Venice, and he is forced to renounce his religion and convert to Christianity. When he last appears in the play one act before the end, his words are: I pray you ( Duke) give me leave to go from hence (the Court) / I am not well- (IV,i,387-88). However, Shylock s monologues about Antonio s abuses (I,iii,97-120), about Jew s Otherness (III,i,40-54), about the institution of slavery (IV,i,89103) - are the most powerful and disturbing in the play. Concerning Shylock and Antonio, Richard Jacobs (2001), in Shakespeares the Merchant of Venice: Framing the Outsiders, points out: They are both aliens, though the play only treats one of them as literally alien. The alienation is, for one of them, public, externalised in form, a matter of loud expressing and equally loud mocking; for the other its private, internalised, silenced.(...) Shylock had nothing, in an antagonistic Venice, but his daughter and his money. Antonio, in Solanios uncharacteristically observant words, only loves the world for Bassanio. The publicly branded outsider is a version of what the other calls himself later: a tainted wether of the flock, the weakest fruit that falls earliest to the ground (IV.i.11415). This play locks together two versions of being outsiders: the public escapegoat, the private self-exile; the Jew, the silent homosexual. (2001: 19) However, the reason for Antonio s detachment is a gap of indeterminacy which allows for Jacobs s interpretation but which resists closure. The oppressiveness of sex-gender hierarchies are explicitly addressed in the play by the female characters who complain for patriachal authority, as when Portia says: I may neither choose who I would nor refuse / who I dislike, so is the will of a living daughter curbed / by the will of a dead father. Is it not hard, Nerissa, that I / cannot choose one, nor refuse none? (I.ii.22-25). Portia and Shylock `s

Estela Vzquez 28 /02/10 Pgina 7 de 8 daughter Jessica will only be able to transgress their geographical and cultural boundaries by resorting to cross-dressing, that is, acquiring a male identity. In all the texts analyzed above we have come across various representations of Otherness. In the epic poem Beowulf the monsters represent alienation from God and civilization, they are the powers of darkness that surround life and announce its destruction. Their silent and shapeless nature, though, has allowed for interesting intertextual narrations, such as John Gardner s Grendel (1971), in which through the point of view of Grendel the Danish society, which becomes Grendel `s Other, is defined as monstrous and its heroic ideals and morality are effectively called into question. Women s cultural Otherness in this heroic world is brought into relief by their role of holy servant(s) of common good (Gardner,1971:86), and sensitively attested by the Wife s Complaint. In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Otherness has the, apparently, clearly defined shape of the fearful though attractive Green Knight, who poses a challenge to chivalric values, but in the end this giant becomes completely humanized and we learn that the real threat in the romance lies in the elusive, changeable, mysterious and magical female identity. In the Canterbury Tales, traditional, deep rooted male fears concerning the alluring powers of female sexuality are embodied in the large-hipped, gap-toothed figure of the Wife of Bath. But, as opposed to Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, in which women represent a role rather than express themselves, here the female voice of the Wife of Bath strongly argues against the exclusion of female desire in patriarchial societies. Also viewed as a threatening Other is the will of power of emerging social groups. The queerness of male same-sex desire, both in The Canterbury Tales and in The Merchant of Venice, is subtly suggested but not directly addressed, as if it were kept in the closet - just as it still happens in our day and age. Clearcut gender boundaries in The Merchant of Venice become blurred both by crossdressing and by the fact that female characters were performed by male actors; and the role of women as the rival Other in homosocial male bondings is turned upside down, as it is the male Antonio- who becomes displaced. Religious Otherness receives in Shakespeare s text a controversial treatment, which has led many critics to consider The Merchant of Venice a racist play, pure and simple. However, Shylock `s development in the play from victimizer to victim - he ends up alone and deprived of everything allows, in my view, for a reading sensitive to Shylock `s stigmatization which turns a critical eye on the values of a society that so mercilessly condemns the Jew as a repulsive Other.

Estela Vzquez 28 /02/10 Pgina 8 de 8 Analyzing critically how queer/normative boundaries are constructed in literary texts and examining how our own cultural backgrounds influence our own response to monstrous Others favour the creation of a society more accepting of difference (Zeikowitz, 2002). As Zeikowitz himself puts it in Befriending the Medieval Queer: A pedagogy for Literature Classes (2002:79): Queering the Middle Ages works hand in hand with queering the present a process that may pave the way for a society that genuinely engages difference. References 1. Zeikowitz, Richard E. (2002). Befriending the Medieval Queer: A Pedagogy for Literature Classes. College English, Vol. 65, No. 1, Special Issue: Lesbian and Gay Studies/Queer Pedagogies, pp. 67-80 2. Anonymous. Heaney, Seamus (2000). Beowulf: A New Verse Translation. New York and London: Norton & Company Ltd. 3. Anonymous. Alexander, Michael (1966) The Wife s Complaint The Earliest English Poems Penguin Classics. 4. Donoghue, Daniel (2004). Old English: A Short Introduction. Hong Kong: Blackwell Publishers. Chapter 2. The Hall. 5. Gardner, Jennifer Michelle (2006) The Peace Weaver: Wealhtheow in Beowulf. A thesis presented to the faculty of the Graduate School of Western Carolina University. Director: Associate Professor Dr. Brian Gastle 6. Desmond, Marilynn (1990). The Voice of Exile: Feminist Literary History and the Anonymous Anglo-Saxon Elegy. Critical Inquiry, Vol. 16, No. 3, pp. 572-590 7. Anonymous. Stone, Brian (1959) Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Penguin Books. First Edition. 8. Hopkins, Andrea (1990). Knights. New York: Artabras 9. Hopkins, Andrea (1994) The Book of Courtly Love: The Passionate Code of Troubadours. Singapore: HarperSanFrancisco. 10. Heng, Geraldine (1991). Feminine Knots and the Other Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. PMLA, Vol. 106, No. 3, pp. 500-514. 11. Saunders, Corinne (2009) Religion and Magic The Cambridge Companion to the Arthurian Legend. Edited by Elizabeth Archibald and Ad Putter. Cambridge University Press. 12. Chaucer , Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales, Translated by Nevil Coghill (1951) Published by the Penguin Group. 13: Wetherbee, Winthrop (2004) Geoffrey Chaucer , The Canterbury Tales. Cambridge University Press 14. Knight, Stephen (1986).Geoffrey Chaucer. Oxford: Blackwell. 15. Straus, Barrie Ruth (1988). The Subversive Discourse of the Wife of Bath: Phallocentric Imprisonment of Criticism. ELH, Vol. 55, No. 3, pp. 527-554. 16. Shakespeare, William. The Merchant of Venice Ed. Nelson Thornes Shakespeare, 2003 17. Jacobs, Richard (2001). A Beginners Guide to Critical Reading: An Anthology of Literary Essays. London and New York: Routledge. Chapter 2. Shakespeares the Merchant of Venice: Framing the Outsiders. 18.Gardner, John (1971). Grendel. New York: Ballantine Books.