Battling with Monstrous Grief

grendels-mother

I said in the last blog that I am kept fresh by the variety of ways that my students respond to the works that I teach. Sometimes their reactions are entirely unexpected and altogether marvelous. To make this point dramatically, I share here a Beowulf reading story. The student was a 19-year-old African American woman in my early British Literature survey class. I will call her Sharon.

We were studying the figures of Grendel’s mother and the dragon, which we were interpreting as monstrous forms that the process of grieving can take. To elaborate briefly, Grendel’s mother is distraught over the death of her son while the dragon occupies a funeral barrow constructed by “the last veteran,” a man who has seen all of his comrades die. We figured that grieving must have been a common occurrence in the violent Anglo-Saxon warrior culture and that Grendel’s mother and the dragon might represent two of the destructive (or monstrous) forms that grieving can take: when someone we love dies, we can become a raging mother who goes ballistic and lashes out or we can become a depressed dragon who hunkers down in a cave, becoming scaly hard outside (but nursing a poisonous rage inside).

Of course, there are healthy forms of grieving as well destructive ones, but Beowulf is in part about society’s fears of its members losing control. I think of these two responses to grief as the extrovert and introvert reactions. Elsewhere in the poem we have a vivid example of an introvert response: King Hrethel becomes a virtual dragon following the death of his son (killed accidentally by his second son), retreating to his bed to die. His depression is a frozen form of rage.

Sharon wrote an essay recounting a terrible tragedy in her life: when she was a girl (11 I believe) her twin sister died, at which point her father iced over. Sharon said that eight years later he had still not emerged from that iciness. When younger she figured that, if she could only manage to please him, his heart would open again, so she worked really hard on her studies. She was, in fact, an excellent student, but she carried around with her this deep scar. Beowulf provided deep and substantive comfort because the images it provided helped her articulate her pain.

And it did even more. In the poem, Beowulf dives into a lake where Grendel’s mother lives. This lake is icy on the surface (fed by cold mountain streams) but boiling inside. In other words, it worked as a metaphor for the mindset of Sharon’s father—and for that matter, for her own anger at his withdrawal of love. In that image, Sharon saw herself diving into her own pain, battling with sea monsters that were attacking her heart, and emerging whole. Suddenly she was presented with the idea that her suffering was a hero’s journey, something that she could move through and emerge triumphant. Whether or not her father stayed a frozen lake or a dragon, she herself did not have to be swallowed up by the deep mire.

I was dazzled by Sharon’s reading. The story also reminded me that Sharon is far from the only student carrying around a great weight (to borrow an image from Pilgrim’s Progress). Just because many of my students are privileged doesn’t mean that they haven’t been wounded by life, whether in the form of emotional or physical abuse, deaths in their family, divorced parents, experiences of being bullied, and the like. When I teach a work, I never know which students it will reach into and turn inside out. Constantly I find myself surprised. For instance, Beowulf generally engages male rather than female students so I could never have predicted that Sharon would respond as she did. Because such responses come as golden revelations, my teaching is geared towards helping my students identify and explore their reactions, the negative ones as well as the positive. Time and again I see literature work its magic.

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