3 - Mothers and their Children

Summary

Just as the daughter has been characterised in some critical discourse by absence, so too has the mother, who is, after all, only a daughter who has reached a later stage in life. Julia Kristeva linked the mother to her understanding of the Abject, ‘the “object” of primal repression’ which we are compelled to cast away from ourselves to preserve our own sense of identity. Paul Acker points out that ‘patriarchal culture will have a stake in this form of abjection in its attempt to control the means of reproduction. The mother line may be effaced in the system of patronymics’. His observation, made with reference to the abjection of the maternal in Beowulf, chimes with Sinclair's identification of an ‘ideological “writing-out” of the feminine in the medieval articulation of its own social ideal’ in the French chansons de geste and with Jochens’ remarks on the absence of the kvennkné (female link) in medieval Norwegian conceptions of royal genealogy. In fact, Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski argues that medieval texts of all modes, ‘legal and canonical as well as literary […] strangely neglect women's role as mothers’. Nikki Stiller talks even more dramatically of the ‘total obliteration of the mother's role found in medieval works’ since ‘in medieval times, all children were their father's children’. Certainly, the vast majority of mothers in Old Norse legendary literature are peripheral figures who do not intrude on the all-male genealogy, but sit invisibly in what Sinclair, following Sarah Kay, calls the ‘white space’ of the text where they function as an empty conduit for the male dynastic line, filling in ‘the interstices of a tale told between men’. However, this position, she suggests, can allow apparently marginalised mothers to ‘undercut the very system they apparently seek to maintain’, which has relegated them and their contributions to absent status.

If maternity is conspicuous by its absence, receiving ‘scant attention in the sagas’, it has still been noted that when mothers do appear ‘they are more likely to be callous or indifferent’, than devoted and affectionate. Jochens argues that the depiction of motherhood in Old Norse literature only reinforces the assertions of recent scholarship that ‘love and self-service (beyond the demands imposed by biology) are not universal and “essential” features of maternal behaviour’.