Styling Texts: Dress and Fashion in Literature By Cynthia Kuhn and Cindy Carlson

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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Chapter 1

The Clothes Make the Man: Transgressive Disrobing and Disarming in Beowulf

Elizabeth Howard

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you. —Friedrich Nietzsche

Sadly, Nietzsche was not around to issue this warning before Beowulf sailed off to Heorot. While I am not certain that Beowulf is the “story of consolidation then dissolution of social structure” as S. L. Dragland would have it (606, emphasis added), I do suggest that one of the major themes of the poem is the consolidation and dissolution of Beowulf and his legacy as warrior hero. This process leads to Beowulf’s gradual monsterization, his degeneration from masculine human warrior to feminized dying monster.