| Chapter 1: | The Clothes Make the Man: Transgressive Disrobing and Disarming in Beowulf |
|
|
The theme plays out as Beowulf voluntarily relinquishes not only his armor and weapons, but also the traits and habits that distinguish humans from other creatures. Simultaneously, he acquires the traits and habits that traditionally identify the possessor as monstrous.
Monsters are symbolic examples of what humans ought not to be and warnings against becoming less than human. In her introduction to The Epistemology of the Monstrous in the Middle Ages, Lisa Verner quotes Isidore of Seville’s definition of monster as follows: “Monsters, in fact, are so called as warnings, because they explain something of meaning, or because they make known at once what is to become visible” (3, Verner’s translation).1 The Anglo-Saxon text Liber Monstrorum does “distinguish between monster and beast and serpent in its general prologue” and “the prologue to book two seems to distinguish beast from monster” (Verner 3), though there is some confusion. The final implication seems to be “that a beast or a serpent can also be a monster if sufficiently fierce or unusual” (Verner 4). The list of traits that divide humans from beasts is short: possessing reason, using tools, having language, and “creating and wearing clothes” (Langner 4). Elizabeth Wilson argues in Adorned in Dreams that
Monsters are trapped in the middle—neither fully human nor fully beast but possessing traits of both. They blur the boundary, occupy that liminal space in which choice is both limited and unlimited: monsters could choose the human way, and many try but fail; their fundamental bestiality separates them forever from humanity. Similarly, monsters could choose the bestial way, but their fundamental humanity separates them just as much from the animal kingdom.