10 - Dismembering Gender and Age: Replication, Rebirth and Remembering in The Phoenix

Summary

The Anglo-Saxon literary record presents an excellent opportunity to interrogate and utilize modern feminist theory, while simultaneously paying heed to the early-medieval context of that literary production. The often-spectral presence of women in the poetic, legal and social record presents obvious comparisons to late-twentieth-century critical theories with respect to the social and linguistic construction of ‘woman’. Indeed, much Old English literature has proven useful to readings that focus on gender, sex and sexuality, and the role and place of women. While female figures are everywhere in the corpus of extant Old English poetry, the hazy or incomplete presence of the female figure makes readings of gender especially difficult. If read differently, however, the haunting presence of the almost-erased woman can be productive, as Elizabeth Cox has demonstrated in her essay on Beowulf’s women in this present volume and as I argue here in a new reading of the Old English Phoenix. A reworking of at least three versions of the Latin physiologus of the phoenix, the poem offers a nuanced view of age and time, troubles the traditional link between age and wisdom that is found in several places within the extant Old English corpus, and follows its source traditions partially in seeing the bird as either neuter or female, before settling on a masculine gender.

In light of this palimpsest of gender, I pinpoint the spectral role of the phoenix’s female sex in the Old English Phoenix and discuss that formulation within the poem’s construction of time, memory and old age. Old age is an appropriate theme through which the poem’s manoeuvrings on gender may be interrogated, as the construction of old age in the poem suggests both a masculinizing scheme of time and lifespan, and a non-linear view of years that challenges this masculine telos. As a reflection not only on linear time but also on cyclical rhythms of time in the poem, this unusual depiction of old age allows both for the end of the phoenix’s life and for its renewed youth, with no interruption in wisdom or knowledge. The Phoenix presents, without resolution, opposing views of time, gender and age which the Phoenix poet attempts to synthesize, an effort reflected through the role of memory and knowledge through time in the poem.