REPRESSION IN BEOWULF

      Our group’s goals and focuses evolved significantly over time. At first, we were bogged down in the minutiae of archetypes and were exploring all of the different paths of the characters. We became especially concerned with the role of Grendel’s mother. India stumbled upon an article that significantly changed the course of our thinking. We discovered the lack of incest in the poem Beowulf was due to the monks disgust with inbreeding, however common of the time. This led to our thinking that monks may have oppressed the feminine role of Grendel’s mother, for this Germanic poem lacked the strong female roles frequent of that time. Therefore, we later explored the sexualization woman over time and led to many interesting conclusions.

        Maddie was most fascinated with the current sexualization of Grendel’s mother and other women of the 20th and 21st centuries. She thought that Angelina Jolie’s portrayal of Grendel’s mother being a seductress was an interesting insight into what a man sees as evil. In the poem, she was an old hag just out to avenge the death of her son, whereas the movie made her out to be a home-wrecking temptress that could not help but be sexual. Other women that Maddie and the group researched during their studies turned out to become more and more sexualized in their powerful roles as time went on. Maddie found this extremely interesting and delved into this topic the most. Maddie ended up finding the poem and annotating it while also helping with the additional genre powerpoint to highlight her strong views of the wrongness of the portrayal of Grendel’s mother.

       Alexandra was interested in the changes made to the text by the author in order to distort the lifestyle of the Nordic and Germanic people of the time. She found it fascinating that there were so many layers to the distortion and how many ways it could be related to todays bias issues. After the original research into the exclusion of information by the monks Alexandra and the group found that there was even more exclusion in concern to the culture of the time. Alexandra thought that the way the religious aspects of the story were portrayed were similar to the way religion and interest groups change the information we get today. While writing the abstract Alexandra focused on the lack of cultural information in the poem in order to highlight her interests, as well as helping with the extra genre to get get her point across about the injustices that groups and people have to deal with when someone else is writing their story.

       India was most intrigued by the bias of the author and how this affected the narrative. Once I found the article on the expungement of incestual themes, this guided the group’s focus and peaked my interest in the project because the omission of so much culturally relevant material was shocking to me. By considering how much was actually left out, I was amazed at how little shame the author had with completely christianizing the story to fulfill his literary and religious ambitions. Though the group originally started out considering archetypes in Beowulf, they quickly realized that this convenient editing of the text was far more interesting. India ended up writing the rationale for the extra genre detailing the connection between the group’s main focus and how this relates to the sexualization of female power.

      Kit was captivated by the forms of indirect and direct oppression throughout the poem. From the articles that Kit read, there was extensive evidence of female oppression throughout literature and history. Constructing the annotated bibliography allowed Kit to fully realize how oppression and the expectations of women in power have shaped the way women are portrayed. Researching the cultural aspects of this time provided the roles of women in Germanic culture and how the time period affected them. By looking at the history, Kit recognized the different forms of oppression through history.