Styling Texts: Dress and Fashion in Literature
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Styling Texts: Dress and Fashion in Literature By Cynthia Kuhn an ...

Chapter 1:  The Clothes Make the Man: Transgressive Disrobing and Disarming in Beowulf
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[b]ecause fashion display has the ability to communicate relevant information about contending individuals’ respective status and power, it has the concomitant ability to mediate and ultimately substitute for such interpersonal violence. Fashion sense, as it pertains to weapons, is a pillar of internal social stability and a stimulus for cultural evolution. (43)

A hero’s weapons display can function, then, as a “substitute” for violence against other humans in a socially stable and civilized arena; Beowulf chooses what only seems to be the moral high road by seeking a fair fight against Grendel. Brewer interprets this scene differently, claiming that the

inversion of the topos [in Beowulf] is of great originality and power, of a kind hard to describe. Perhaps it is designed to show Beowulf’s fundamental lack of aggressiveness, in that he is attacked as a defenseless sleeping man before moving to the offensive himself—though he knows very well how to be heroic when need be, and is then heroically armed. (228)

While Brewer properly identifies the symbolic power of this “inversion of the topos,” he appears to overlook Beowulf’s conscious, deliberate boast that he will fight and defeat Grendel without arms. Beowulf’s arrogant disarming signifies offensive aggression, not defenseless passivity. His supine posture at the moment of Grendel’s attack is an aggressive trick, part of his strategy to defeat the monster on its own terms. Lawrence Langner argues in The Importance of Wearing Clothes that “there is…no such animal as Naked Man…only a composite creature who should be designated as Man-and-His-Clothes” (4). Beowulf’s inappropriate disarming and disrobing violates then not only common sense, but the cultural boundaries dividing human and monster. Beowulf intuits (he does not yet know that Grendel is immune to weapons) that the chaos Grendel brings to Heorot can only be defeated outside the rules and manners of warfare that mark him, his men, and the Danes as human.