Monsters, Gender and Sexuality in Medieval English Literature (review)

Abstract

DANA M. OSWALD, Monsters, Gender and Sexuality in Medieval English Literature. Gender in the Middle Ages 5. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 2010. Pp. 227. ISBN: 978-1-8438-4232-3. $95.00. Monsters make frequent appearances in medieval texts, and Arthurian narratives yield a trove: the spectacularly belligerent giant of Mont Saint Michel, the monstrous herdsman of Chretien's Yvain, Melion in his wolf's body, and the enigmatic Green Knight who so troubles Gawain, among many others. A source of fascination and fear, the monster matters. These uncanny and anthropomorphic creatures inhabit an ambivalent space. Yet they are also strongly gendered. Dana M. Oswald's intriguing book helps the reader to understand what is at stake in the complexities of monstrous masculinity and femininity. Monsters are a 'delicious terror' (3), the nexus of which is their embodied sexuality. In learned and readable prose Oswald surveys a temporally vast span of monstrous figures in English texts, from the Wonders of the East to Sir Gowther by way of Beowulf and the Book of John Mandeville. This arc also traces a change in the monster, from a figure of inassimilable difference ('undeviating strangeness' that is 'born not made') to a potentially transformable body. The analytical backbone of the book is wide-ranging, making use of Jacques Derrida on differance, Judith Butler on the performability of gender, Jeffrey Cohen on monster theory, and Gayle Rubin on women in circulation, among many others. Monsters, Gender and Sexuality does not lack for focus, however, especially because Oswald is extraordinarily sensitive to visuality's relation to monstrosity. Whenever possible, she reads texts with their images. Thus in a complicated chapter on the Old English compendium of monsters known as Wonders of the East, much of her evidence is archival. The three types of monstrous erasure she details are mainly derived from the interspace between texts and illustrations ('removal,' when a viewer scratches out something depicted; 'never drawn,' an erasure that applies when details of monstrous sexuality are omitted from a particular picture and knowable only through nearby text or from another manuscript; or 'revision,' when a detail is hidden within view and likewise recoverable through more reading or comparison). When manuscripts are not illustrated, Oswald reads texts for the monstrous images they provide-or refuse to provide. Thus Grendel's mother is just as actively vanished as some of the denizens of the Wonders of the East tradition. In every case, erasure both obviates and creates something new. …