A Burning Book of Wonders - "The Mere Wife"

Last year I listened to Renee Trilling's Great Courses series "Old English Literature: Language as History."  As I usually do, I looked at the bibliography in the back of the course guidebook and saw a novel called The Mere Wife which was described online as a modern retelling of Beowulf.   

I thought that sounded interesting so after my recent re-read of the epic poem I gave The Mere Wife a shot.   

I really liked it and have been thinking about it a lot.  It's an ambitious, interesting, clever, and beautifully written novel that is definitely worth reading and discussing.

Background

The Mere Wife is a 2018 novel by American author Maria Dahvana Headley.  The story takes place in 21st Century New York in the fictional Herot Hall, an isolated town about an hour from New York City.

The book's title comes from Beowulf, where one of the descriptors of Grendel's mother is "mere wif" (MEH-ruh-WEEF) which means "lake woman."  The lake, or "mere," that Herot Hall sits on the shore of figures prominently in the story.

In 2020, Headley published her own translation of Beowulf.

A "Retelling"

The Mere Wife is not a straight up retelling of Beowulf from a different perspective the way Circe by Madeline Miller or A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes are for the Odyssey and the Trojan War, respectively.  YouTuber Alex of All Trades in her Sunday Book Circle review video described The Mere Wife as "something that uses a previous narrative as a framework for a new narrative."

The Mere Wife is more along the lines of Ann Carson's The Autobiography of Red which takes the ancient poetic fragment Geryoneis, the story of Heracles taking Geryon's cattle for one of his 12 Labors, and reframes it as a modern coming of age gay love story.  Alex of All Trades gives The Mere Wife a perhaps more familiar reference: James Joyce's Ulysses.  (I have not read that one.)

The Mere Wife is predominately told from the perspectives of the women in the story. The two main point of view characters are Dana Mills and Willa Herot, the analogs for Grendel's mother and Wealtheow, a minor character who is the wife of Hrothgar in the poem.  Dana is more prominent than Willa; the novel opens and closes on her.

In the interview Myth and Masculinity: The Feminist Beowulf for the British Library, author Maria Headley describes her first encounters with Grendel's mother and, though this interview is primarily focused on her 2020 translation of Beowulf, as The Mere Wife came out 2 years earlier and was the gateway to the translation, I think it is salient when discussing the novel.  Headley says:

I was probably 8 years old, and I saw this picture of a woman coming up out of a pond with a sword in her hand, and she was pretty much naked. Like, she was a little bit sexy but more, more furious than sexy. ... She looked scary and like she was done with behaving. ...

I thought "that woman looks like she has power." And what I thought when I saw her was that she was the main character of whatever she'd come from.  There was no Beowulf in this picture. There was no Grendel in this picture. There was just Grendel's mother coming up out of the water.

In that interview, Headley goes on to point out how the poem uses the same descriptor for Beowulf, Grendel, Grendel's mother, and the dragon.  The Old English root word is aglæca (AH-gla-chah) which, while debated a little, means something like "formidable," "strong fighter," or "awe inspiring."   (Because Old English is an inflected language, when aglæca is used for Grendel's mother, it is the feminine version aglæc-wif.)

I've seen translations of aglæc-wif as "monster woman," "monstrous hell bride," and "monstrous hag."  Scholar and playwright Richard Trask translates it as "ugly troll-lady."

Headley instead makes Dana Mills a soldier who fought in Afghanistan and the novel uses the ambiguity of the poem's use of aglæca for both heroes and "monsters" as a jumping off point to explore the ways that people can be perceived as either, both by themselves and others.

Headley also notes that Grendel's mother tends to be described in translation as having claws or talons, despite the text using the word "fingrum" which just means fingers.  The Mere Wife explores this idea about how a female character outside of "acceptable society" gets framed as monstrous, either intentionally or because of internalized societal mores.

To quote Headley again:

Why the injustice of female warriors being depicted as monsters?

Tying in with the "fingrum" thing, the book has repeated imagery of people seeing claws on perceived adversaries, and the novel takes advantage of the potential unreliability of the narrators and the at times almost metaphorical feel of the events to really sell it.

To Prep or Not to Prep?

So, is reading Beowulf a prerequisite for The Mere Wife?  I think no.  (Though you should read Beowulf, just in general.)  There's nothing that hinges on prior knowledge of the poem's plot and, as it stands, the plot of The Mere Wife is only very loosely hanging on the framework of the poem.

Without a recent reading of Beowulf there would be some Easter Egg type things that you'd miss but none of them are load bearing.  I'm talking little stuff like Ben Woolf (aka the Beowulf character) getting stabbed in the neck during the climax, which is a reference to how the dragon of the poem "caught and pierced him right through the neck with his sharp fangs (2691-2692)"   (The phrase "Easter Eggs" has a more glib and cheeky connotation than I mean but I can't think of a better one.)

Honestly, the fascinating ways that The Mere Wife is in dialog with Beowulf, like the ideas around its use of "aglæca" and "fingrum," probably wouldn't be apparent after a plain reading of the poem anyway.  I learned all of that by reading supplemental material and listening to Headley's British Library interview about her Beowulf translation.

If anything, I'd recommend listening to that interview before reading The Mere Wife. I definitely think the novel would be valuable and interesting to a cold reader but its literary and conceptual ambitiousness justifies a little extra legwork.

A (Very) Brief Plot Synopsis

The prologue to The Mere Wife opens with Dana Mills in (probably) Afghanistan.  She'd been captured by the enemy and is now six months pregnant with no memory of what happened.  After finding American soldiers and being taken back to the States, she escapes the military hospital and makes her way back to her hometown which has been replaced by the gated community Herot Hall.  Traumatized by the war and potentially on the run from the US government, who suspects her of being a collaborator, she hides in the caves in the mountain behind Herot Hall and prepares to give birth to her son Gren.

Seven years later, the novel proper begins when Gren and Dylan, the son of Willa Herot, the rich "first lady" of Herot Hall, strike up a friendship to the consternation of both mothers.  The main conflicts are set in motion when Dylan runs off with Gren back to the mountain and Herot Hall rallies behind Officer Ben Woolf (aka the Beowulf analog) as he tries to find the boy.

I don't want to get into too many spoilers, so I'll leave the summary there.

Mechanics

The Mere Wife is structured in three parts:  Part 1 is The Mountain, Part 2 is The Mere and Part 3 is The Dragon.  This reflects how Beowulf itself is in three parts, the first being the fight with Grendel, the second the fight with Grendel's mother, and the third the climactic battle with the dragon.  The events of The Mere Wife don't map neatly or directly onto the poem but the structural parallels are pretty overt.

The novel is at times dreamlike and though not quite magical realist, it feels magical realist adjacent.  There were times when I thought it was slipping into the supernatural but there was some ambiguity as what was happening was sometimes intentionally a little fuzzy because of the biases of the maybe-not-reliable point of view characters.  Their perspectives can't always be trusted and these traumatized and broken people often struggle to see things clearly, which makes some of the events feel metaphorical or hallucinatory.

The Mere Wife can be pretty weird but I found it deeply compelling and it wasn't particularly hard to follow.  It has a thin layer of heightened unreality to it which, to me, made it feel like an epic poem in prose form.

The Writing

The writing in this novel is pretty remarkable.  It's very controlled and very purposeful with a lot of choices that show that Headley really gave a lot of thought to the novel's construction.  For example, Dana's chapters are in first person, but Willa's are in third which reflects how, though she's in hiding from society, Dana gets to be her own narrator whereas Willa, whose life as the first wife, hostess, and heir producer of Herot Hall is deeply circumscribed, is stifled by the roles chosen for her and she, in a sense, has to wait for an external narrator to relate what she's doing.  Dana's life is challenging but she seems far more alive than the numb Willa.

The complicated interplay between society, freedom, and gender roles is in part what this story is about and it's really great that it isn't just elucidated in the plot or dialog but is embedded in the language of the book itself.

Also there are beautiful, interesting, and unexpected passages throughout the entire work.  Like this one:

Everything in me says, Get away from here, but I know what I am. I’m a stack of broken dishes in the shape of a woman, and this is a flight response. (p29)

Or this:

Willa shuts her eyes and looks into the darkness inside herself, a room with doors that open onto nothing, a theater, and in it red velvet seats and harnesses for flying, trapdoors that lead to the secret chambers beneath the stage. She feels something in there, something that can’t be trusted. Her fingers sting with the slap, and she feels the creature rising, horns and claws, a tail lashing, making its way through spotlight and shadow. It feels good to be angry. It feels good to let go. (p90)

There's also some really cool stuff like how the subsection titles are all words that the poem's opening "Hwæt" have been translated as.  Like "Listen," "So," "Sing," "Hark," or "Lo" and the chapters in those subsections all begin with that particular word.  It's obviously noticeable but doesn't feel forced and I never found it distracting.  It's another one of the things that make the novel feel like an epic poem.

Some chapters are narrated in first person plural by kind of a Greek chorus commenting on the events.  One of these choruses is the mothers of Herot Hall, the formidable matriarchs enforcing the social order behind the scenes.  The nature of the other main chorus is a little more amorphous; they're sort of the watchers from the mountain behind Herot Hall, maybe the spirits of those who lived there throughout time.  In their own words:

Time passes for lost objects, and it is not time at all. Centuries after a burial, bogs turn up the murdered, and foundations turn up the sacrificed, and beneath this very house, there are a thousand nights ending in tears, the salt of those tears part of the soil now. Not enough to ruin the possibility of crops, but enough to change things. We know it. We’ve been watching the world. (p146)

Also, strangely, one chapter is narrated by a chorus of the dogs leading the search party looking for the lost Dylan.  I don't really know what to make of that one.

Themes

The Mere Wife offers a lot to think about.  Catherine Gilmore described it as "an origami novel where each turn of the page leads to another level."  I'm just going to touch on a few of the ideas that the novel explores.

Impermanence and Cycles

Like Beowulf, The Mere Wife is deeply and explicitly concerned with impermanence.  At one point Dana says:

You don’t really own anything. Nothing is yours forever, not your body, not your youth, not even your mind. (p213)

This reminded me very directly of Hrothgar's warning to Beowulf after he defeats Grendel's mother:

Then it finally happens, the body decays,

his life-house fails him, only a loan; (1753-54)

...

Soon in their turn sickness or war

will break your strength, or the grip of fire,

overwhelming wave, or sword's swing,

a thrown spear, or hateful old age;

the lights will darken that were your eyes.

Death overcomes you all at once, warrior. (1763-1768)

In addition to just the impermanence of the body, the novel also deals with the impermanence of community and society, whether through the vicissitudes of time and entropy or because of deliberate destruction.  Herot Hall itself is built on the now forgotten town Dana grew up in:

I don’t know how they got permission to build mini-mansions on top of a graveyard, but I guess they did. The cemetery was almost two hundred years old. People never think, until it happens to their place, that all construction is destruction. The whole planet is paved in the dead, who are ignored so the living can dig their foundations. (p33)

This paving over is not just a destruction of physical landmarks but also of the stories of the ones who came before.  There's a pointed moment when Ben Woolf, while looking for Dylan, finds Gren's paintings on the wall of the train station they are hiding out in and almost casually moves to erase it:

He wets his hand in the mere and obliterates the paintings on the walls, the faces of monsters and women, the smiling child, the blur of joy that stands beside him. He blackens his hand removing all of this, erasing it until there is nothing left but gray... (p179)

This is the same kind of obliteration that Roger's family did when they erased the previous town's gravestones to build Herot Hall and whether it was through deliberate malice or distracted indifference doesn't really matter.  It's still erasure.

The Mere Wife is not as bleak as Beowulf, though, and there is a thread of hope in renewal:

Listen. Long after the end of everything is supposed to have occurred, long after apocalypses have been calculated by cults and calendared by computers, long after the world has ceased believing in miracles, there’s a baby born inside a mountain. (p15)

Dana's final narration strikes a weirdly comforting note and is the counter to Beowulf-the-character's ethos that long lasting fame is the only memorial for a man.

If something’s happened once, we could all find love again. If something’s happened once, none of us are done for. None of us are the last of us. The story is all of the voices, not just the voice of the one who tells it at the end.  (p304)

In The Mere Wife the stories have value because they happened, not just because someone still sings them.  Ben may have, consciously or not, tried to erase Gren and Dylan's story from the walls, but ultimately he can't obliterate it completely.  The watchers know, the world itself remembers.

Mothers and Children

Another big theme of The Mere Wife is motherhood.  Dana fanatically shelters Gren from the world and is willing to kill to keep him out of it.  She is convinced he will always be an outcast that the outside will try and destroy.  This comes, of course, partially from her own trauma but also from her undeniably fierce love:

I hear the sound of my son crying for the first time after he was born, his voice telling me, wordless, that I’d brought him into the world, that he’d made it out of my body alive. I’ve only loved someone like that once. This love is the love that obliterates you. This is the love you die for. (p118)

Dana has to contend with their changing dynamic as Gren grows up and she eventually sees him undistorted by her terror, not as an outcast, not as someone the world will dub monster, but the young man he actually is.  He leads her outside into the world, and in a touching scene, to a library where the librarian treats her like a person and kindly offers his assistance.  And this, in a sense frees, her.

It doesn’t matter what form a child takes. He might be smoke and he might be a screaming monster flying across a mountaintop. He might be a boy with a tender heart picking up skeletons and trying to put them back together. He might be all that. You will know he’s yours. He’s nothing but your son, whatever he appears to anyone else. (p287)

Willa Herot is on the opposite end of the spectrum and is a bit harder to empathize with, as she says stuff like this with regards to Dylan:

If he insists on letting himself go, let him. Everyone has a child they wish they hadn’t had. Willa knows that from her own mother.  (p198)

Unlike Dana, Willa does not come to see her son as his own person, consistently thinking of and treating him as an annoyance.  She has also suffered trauma, in her case at the hands of her domineering mother and her husband who dismissively cuts her down and treats her like an object.

Both women are burdened by their motherhood due to a brokenness that was inflicted on them by a world of betrayals. Dana responds with overprotectiveness and Willa with detachment.

Trauma and War

Brokenness and trauma pervade the novel.  Both Dana and Ben are haunted by the war they both served in and in Dana's case its a war she never stopped fighting.  The war's politics or justness never comes up and it's mostly characterized through its reverberations; a horror of people killing people.   Dana says:

I hold my breath to keep from screaming out the losses, tallying up the dead, all the people I’ve killed, all the family I can’t find, all the rest of the lives no one got to live. Is this the guilt of being a soldier? Is this what you’re left with after a war, when you follow orders, when you’re not the one in charge? I see the dead all around me. The cave is full of them, and I’m full of them, and they’re not just the ghosts I’m responsible for making. They’re the ghosts of this place too, my ancestors and the people here before them.  (p169)

She's very strongly portrayed throughout as someone suffering from some form of PTSD and she is almost totally severed from who she was before.  And even for the much less reflective Ben, the narration says "his brain’s full of the dead. He counts them like sheep." (p63)

The world of The Mere Wife, like that of Beowulf, is permeated by war but it lacks the poem's veneration of battle and its returning soldiers don't feel like heroes.  The book says of Ben:

He went to war to be a hero, and he failed at it, never mind the body count. None of that was glory. Glory should feel good. (p161)

The novel evokes the poem's persistent blood feuds and cycles of conquest.  The building of Herot Hall over Dana's childhood home is one of those conquests.  And under Herot Hall's veneer of civilization there are waiting knives, even if those knives aren't literal.  It is a place of viciously enforced social order and the retributive justice of the matriarchs is always ready to burst out.

As Ben says:

Peace is written in blood, and has been and will be. (p290)

Seeing and Perception - Monsters and Heroes

Given how Headley honed in on how Beowulf uses the same word "aglæca" for both monsters and heroes it's not surprising that The Mere Wife really plays with the fuzzy boundary between the two.

Though The Mere Wife generally handles this elegantly, it is occasionally too blunt about just stating this idea, sometimes explicitly repeating something like the sentiment of this passage:

The world isn’t large enough for monsters and heroes at once. There’s too much danger of confusion between the two categories. (p250)

The book shows how perception, including self-perception, can move a character between those two roles. In effect, the characters in the novel do the same thing Beowulf translators have always done in assigning the label "warrior" or "monster" based on their own biases, perspectives, and expectations.  Because of this, and how strongly the narration is always from a character's point of view, the act of seeing is a very important aspect of the drama.

The novel actively dodges around what Gren actually looks like until late in the story and there is the repeated imagery I mentioned earlier of people seeing someone with claws, claws that later turn out to maybe not have actually been there.  This goes back to the word "fingrum" as "claws" versus "fingrum" as "fingers" idea that Headley mentioned in the British Library interview.

Willa refuses to really see her son Dylan, dismissing what he is telling her and chalking Gren up to being just an imaginary friend and then refusing to see him as anything other than a monster when she deigns to believe he is real.  She can't even consider that Dylan is telling the truth that Gren is his friend and not a fiend who is there to destroy their "perfect" life.  Willa’s always seeing what she wants to see in people, not what is really there.  She never gets a moment of clarity with regards to her son like Dana did, and her inability to see Dylan as he is leads to one of the biggest tragedies of the book.

Dana also comes to see that she isn't trapped or irrevocably defined only by the version of her life that she is currently living.  She may feel like a monster, but her other roles can't, and shouldn't be, killed by the present:

I want my life back, unbroken. I want to start over, but that isn’t a thing people can do. I breathe in, feel the chill of the wind and hear birds singing, all my selves together at once, soldier, daughter, wife, victim, mother, monster. (p190)

(This is a nice prefigure of the later line I quoted earlier: "The story is all of the voices, not just the voice of the one who tells it at the end."

At various points in this story Dana has elements of the poem's Grendel, Beowulf, Grendel's mother, and the dragon.  She can be, and is, all of those things.

WIlla in Herot - Gender Roles

One last thing I think is really interesting about The Mere Wife is how it shows Herot Hall's contempt for yet utter dependence on its women to function.

It’s always the mothers who are hated. The fathers are too far away, home at 5:30, off the train, perfume on their jackets. The mothers are the clay pigeons children want to shoot out of the sky. Imagine being a target for fifty years, from your moments of first nubility to moments of humility, when your skin feels like paper and you stop sleeping forever, unacknowledged as being the armed guard of civilization. (p268)

The men are distant and disengaged yet expect to be waited on, fawned over, and have their desires given priority.  Willa didn't even get to weigh in on her son's name; Roger just decided to name Dylan after Roger's father while Willa was asleep post birth, taking her assent as a given.  A woman's needs and thoughts are secondary to her husband's or son's and vigilance is a survival strategy.

In an interaction with Ben the narration says of Willa:

He doesn’t say anything, but she can feel his thoughts now. They’re the thoughts men always have. She’s spent her life anticipating those thoughts, working around them, pouring their drinks and patting their shoulders, sewing their buttons on tightly so that they can feel secure while they undo everything. (p152)

I don't think this is meant to be a case of singular men being jerks to their wives but a larger dynamic that I suspect the men themselves wouldn't be able to articulate or even notice was happening.  I think it's also interesting, and depressing, how Herot Hall's society co-opts and weaponizes women against each other to enforce social norms and serve the men.

Both Willa and the chorus of matriarchs speak with such venom about their fellow women.  For example, after Ben Woolf disappears for eight days in the mountain looking for Dylan and is presumed dead, Willa is blamed for his "doomed quest" because she...inspired him too much with her beauty.   

This, it follows, means everything is the fault of Willa Herot, temptress, and everyone understands that. It’s a thing that happens, even to good men, even to the best of men. (p192)

This idea is easy to universalize out of Herot Hall and see in our own society where women's unpaid labor is not valued as labor, their actions are to be policed by social judgement from both men and women, and men should both be deferred to and yet somehow not trusted to behave if a woman is present.

Gallimaufry

• In Myth and Masculinity: The Feminist Beowulf, Headley is interviewed by Natalie Haynes, the author of A Thousand Ships.  I liked that novel a lot and in the interview Haynes herself seems like an absolute treasure.  She's a good interviewer and is quite funny.

• Headley's Beowulf translation is fairly colloquial, starting with the word "Bro."   She describes the poem as a story of "bros bragging" that would be likely shouted by a scop (aka a bard) over a room of drunk people and so a really formal register didn't feel appropriate to her.  Beowulf at one point says:

Anyone who fucks with the Geats fucks with me.

• The Mere Wife's cover art by Miranda Meeks is really awesome.  To quote Headley from a Reactor Magazine article:

The Miranda Meeks piece that Keith Hayes chose for The Mere Wife reminds me, appropriately, of something from an illuminated manuscript. It’s furious without being terrifically graphic, which I appreciate. And it’s wildness versus domestication, blood versus fleece, but not really even versus—it’s more a virtual representation of the way that these things are always inextricably braided together.

• The Howell D. Chickerling, Jr translation I read translates aglæca as "monster" for Grendel, "monster-woman" for Grendel's mother, "fearsome warrior" for the Germanic hero Sigemund, and "terrible fighter" for both Beowulf and the dragon.

• I like that The Mere Wife as a title is not only a reference to Dana, in an Old English "mere-wif" sense, but also to Willa, who is "merely" a wife for most of the novel, a trophy and events coordinator for the men of Herot Hall.

• Notre Dame's Medieval Studies Research Blog has an interesting article about the use of "aglæca" in Beowulf, titled "Aglæca: Awesome Opponent or Uncanny Invader?".  It's worth a read.

• A couple of the small plot details in The Mere Wife reminded me of the 2007 film, like Ben Woolf lying about killing Dana or his marriage to Willa after Roger's death.  While I was reading I wondered if Headley had maybe seen the movie but then I found out that she was the co-editor of a book with Neil Gaiman, who wrote the screenplay, so I wouldn't be surprised if she was familiar with it.  Whether those details were partially inspired by the film or a coincidence I don't know, not do I think it matters.

• Ben Woolf certainly isn't the Beowulf from the poem or the film:

In the war, he dodged bullets, hid in alleys, pressed himself back and away from the line of fire. He went to war to be a hero, and he failed at it, never mind the body count. (p161)

• There's a neat moment when Willa finds her gingerbread cookies, which Dylan shared with Gren, with all their heads bitten off.  In Beowulf, Grendel eats people and is often portrayed in adaptation as biting off heads like in a pivotal and intense scene in John Gardner's novel Grendel.

• This is a hell of a line from Willa:

Now that Roger’s gone, Willa can see exactly where Dylan got all his tendencies. He’ll grow up to be someone’s cheating husband.

Yikes.

• I like when Willa says of Ben as he's relating the partially fabricated story of him rescuing Dylan:

She polygraphs his breath and beats, and finds him to be veering away from truth and into myth. She needs him to be a hero right now, but not historically. She’ll change him into the man she wants. The past doesn’t matter. (p151)

That last sentence is the complete opposite of the conclusion that Dana will eventually come to.

• In that British Library interview, Headley talks about her response when people ask if her colloquial translation doesn't last:

[E]ven if it doesn't last like right now, tomorrow, still that's okay. ... It's not an emergency for a text to not last a 1000 years. ... William Morris did the translation of Beowulf in the 1890s, and it is really crazy. It's like full of archaic words, but also full of the kind of William Morris entangled language. And it's fun.

It didn't last. Like, it's a messy, crazy thing. But looking at it as a product of the Victorian era, it's really interesting. Looking at the idea of looking through Beowulf through that lens of Victorian ideas is pretty cool, and I think looking at each of these translations of classic texts, through the lens of the time the translation happened, is something that's worth doing.

Conclusion

The Mere Wife is a great book and provides a lot of stuff to think about.  I would absolutely recommend it.

I feel old things running around this place, like we’re in the center of the smoke of a burning book of wonders. As though all the pages have gotten stuck together and now it’s a world of everything at once. (p302)

Happy reading.

-m