Quote:
Originally Posted by Rhun charioteer
To be entirely frank, I don't see the problem here. Its a European piece of literature centered around a male(and white) hero. If it were say Mulan, or Oroonoko that deal primarily with non Europeans, then sure you can read that in the context of their culture.
Beowulf isn't intended to be understood from Grendel's perspective or his mother's perspective.
The very idea that "marginalized" voices must be given center stage is one of the most pernicious aspects of critical theory and postmodern "thinking" in general.
|
I think this is pretty much what I said when I first responded, so yeah.
There's nothing
wrong with reading and analysing Beowulf from a perspective close to that of its protagonist. What would be wrong would be if Tolkien had insisted that there was no other way to read it. Of course there are other ways! What does it tell us about the Geats' attitude towards strangers that their big story is about monsters? What does it tell us about the Saxons that
their big story is about Geats? What can we speculate might be the Geats' attitude towards women, or disabled persons, based on the information contained in Beowulf (and the information
not contained in it - if there are
no women in prominent roles, for instance, that tells us something about both the mythic society, and the society of the people who preserved it). There's a dozen dozen ways of looking at it.
But one of those ways, and the one that
should be the foundation of study, is the question of what the writer thought about what they were writing about. And that, as far as we know*, was indeed a white, male gaze.
hS
*I think? Wikipedia talks about monks, so... I guess male. Almost certainly white.**
**The question here is 'would a woman or an ethnic outsider have composed a poem about a big burly man killing an ethnic outsider and a woman?'