Getting Reel with Grendel’s Mother: The Abject Maternal and Social Critique

Summary

Recent film adaptations of Beowulf offer interpretations of Grendel’s mother that seem to defy any grounding in the text. In one retelling, a net-clad Playmate slinks into Hrothgar’s room while he sleeps and mounts him in a soft-core display of sexual delight. In another, Beowulf stands cautiously in a dark cave as Grendel’s mother rises naked from the water, voluptuous, gold, and buxom. There may be logic in adding a measure of sex to screen adaptations of the poem, since, as Roger Avary confesses, “in Hollywood […] Beowulf was considered something of a joke. A sword-and-sandal hoity-toity lesson in ancient literature.” A story associated with the pains of senior English left the book a punchline for producers seeking success in a competitive market. To some extent, casting Angelina Jolie adds a draw for the young male demographic. More substantively, however, the rather unorthodox re-imaginings of Grendel’s mother join scholarly attempts to interpret her role in the story.

While the above images of Grendel’s mother are, perhaps, the most eye-catching, each of the Beowulf adaptations rewrites the character in different ways, ranging from a grudge-holding beast or alien in the most recent adaptation, Outlander (2008), or the Sci Fi channel production Grendel (2007) to an “uncivilized” tribal leader of The Thirteenth Warrior (1999) or a magical, ancient being in the two films titled Beowulf (1999 and 2007). Despite that variety, they consistently foreground the character well beyond her role in the original poem. This article examines the way that representations of Grendel’s mother have changed in some recent film adaptations of Beowulf. It argues that each of the films constructs the character as a threat to masculine social structures, but that the films’ responses to that threat differ. John McTiernan’s The Thirteenth Warrior offers a monstrous image of destruction contained by male heroes, while two others, Robert Zemeckis’ Beowulf and Sturla Gunarsson’s Beowulf and Grendel, offer a figure that questions patriarchy and leaves it unsettled. Ultimately, however, only Gunnarsson’s film succeeds in using the maternal figure as a tool for critiquing hyper-masculine iterations of power. I will suggest that the films evince Julia Kristeva’s idea of abjection, with the latter films employing it as a position of active resistance.