Headley’s The Mere Wife: Diffused Satire in a troubling piece of Beowulfiana

Focus on Grendel's Mother leads us to expect a feminist attack on male heroic narrative, but Maria Dahvana Headley offers us a complex and nuanced look at parent-child, upper-lower class, and male-female patterns of interaction in this novel symbiotic upon the Anglo-Saxon BEOWULF. Since the attacks sometimes seem contradictory, I use diffused satire theory to separate the various kinds of satire, show where contradictions and ambiguities occur, and show how they can be resolved. Headley makes the point that you need to hear from all the voices in an event, not just from the last one who writes the history. What she does is give us those various voices and goad us to work out our personal positions on the issues for which she offers no easy satiric answer.

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