Intersectionality in Maria Dahvana Headley’s The Mere Wife

Summary

Hwat – so goes the very first word of the famous Old English poem Beowulf. Translated variously as “Indeed,” “What ho,” “Listen,” and, humorously, “Bro” by Maria Dahvana Headley, among many other possible translations, it serves as a way for the speaker to “introduce or call attention to a statement,” in this case the tale of the heroic deeds and death of the poem's hero, Beowulf.

Hwat, or “Listen,” is also the first word and name of the first section of Headley's novel The Mere Wife, a modern re-interpretation of Beowulf that centers on the experiences of the women in the story: Dana Mills, the mother of Gren(del); Willa Herot, whose husband Roger is the heir of Herot Hall, the gated community that takes the role of Hrothgar's hall in the original; and the matriarchs, particularly Diane and Tina, the mothers of Willa and Roger, respectively. Besides shifting the focus from the men to the women and transporting the characters from the past into the present, Headley also introduces other changes that put the story into a new light and make it particularly interesting from not only a literary studies or feminist lens, but also an intersectional approach. This essay will apply the concept of intersectionality to the main characters of The Mere Wife, focusing particularly on Gren, but also extending the analysis to some of the others, namely Dana, Willa, Dylan, the mothers, and Ben Woolf, the novel's version of Beowulf. Before doing so, however, it is necessary to first define what intersectionality means.

Even though the term itself was coined in 1989 by Kimberle Crenshaw to give a name to the ways that Black women were (and still are) erased by the US government and legal system because of their race and gender, the concept of “multidimensional” oppression has been an integral part of Black women's theoretic thinking for much longer, going back at the very least to 1892. At its core, it refers to the fact that despite the tendency to view the categories of race and gender as completely separate, they are actually closely entwined. According to Crenshaw, Black women are discriminated against not only on the basis of their gender or race but also because of both factors in combination. Their experiences as Black women differ significantly from those of non-Black women on the one hand, and Black men on the other.