The Wife's Lament (#2)

I truly enjoyed reading "The Wife's Lament" mainly for the fact that it changes the perspective of women a bit from previous readings. In the other readings that we read in class, specifically Beowulf and "The Looking Glass," women are portrayed as being constantly sad, weepy, and weak. In "The Wife's Lament," the expectations shift a bit, but not necessarily in a positive way. The adjectives used to describe the expectations are laid out in the text. “A young woman must always be stern, hard-of-heart, unmoved, full of belief, enduring breast-cares, suppressing her own feelings. She must always appear cheerful, even in a tumult of grief.” I think that even though this text is from the Anglo-Saxon time period, these expectations for women are pretty synonymous to those of women in today's society. For example, women are always told to suppress their feelings. This is striking to me because women are typically described as being overly-emotional. Another point that the text makes is saying that women should always be stern. This ties into what we discussed earlier in the semester about "male emotions" and "female emotions." When naming them, anger was typically associated with men while sadness goes with females. The author makes a point to say that women should be stern which is quite the opposite to what typical emotion labels are. Finally, in this text, are we able to see a woman truly get angry and upset for rightful reasons. "Now, like a criminal exiled to a distant land,
groaning beneath insurmountable cliffs, my weary-minded lover, drenched by wild storms and caught in the clutches of anguish, moans and mourns, reminded constantly of our former happiness." This quote really stuck out to me because it discusses her loss of happiness rather than the loss of a man. I think this is revolutionary because for once a woman can express grief for a feeling rather than just a person. She is really able to show her distress and curse her ex-lover, which seems like something women in literature, and in society, could not do previously. Although this poem still has the typical "weeping widow," it seems like it is a step in the right direction of changing the roles of women.

Comments

  1. UnknownSeptember 16, 2017 at 3:23 PM

    I also enjoyed how this text varied from the pervious texts we had read. The women had more personality but instead of the normal upset and weak they are seen as stern and unmoved by emotions. I found this interesting because normally these are characteristics shown by men. It was an interesting to compare and contrast the woman described in this story to the men described in the other works we have read so far for this class. I think this story did this on purpose to show how people would react to a woman who possessed the charcterics of a stereotypical male.

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  2. Paige ShrevesSeptember 17, 2017 at 6:31 PM

    I also agree that this poem shows a different expectation for what emotions woman should express. In the previous texts from class, women are supposed to express feelings of grief and be borderline emotionally unstable in certain situations. I also like this text because women are painted in a more rational light. I believe this poem may feed a stigma that has stuck around to this day. I believe there is a stigma that women who express their feelings are automatically considered ‘over emotional’ or ‘irrational’. Finally, I believe that this poem has helped produce the stigma regarding how women are culturally expected to express their feelings.

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