3 - Crying Wolf: Gender and Exile in Bisclavret and Wulf and Eadwacer

Summary

In the eleventh century, the sentence of exile was codified in English law with the famous decree, caput gerat lupinum: let his be a wolf 's head. This particular designation for the outlaw is commonly attributed to statutes from both before and after the Conquest and was retained for centuries, feeding into a sprawling pan-European literary tradition of exile and animality along the way. In this chapter I look at two texts connected to this tradition: Marie de France's Bisclavret and the Old English elegiac poem Wulf and Eadwacer. They are also texts that depend for their narrative force on the effects of the abject, the suspension of linguistic norms or organised language, and the return of the outside/r.

The unspeakable has so far been explored as the space between: the distance between language and what it represents – between signifier and signified – and the figurative ground left undetermined by the conditions of socio-historical norms or categories. As such it becomes a repository for a diverse collection of unvocalised, conflicting descriptions, and (for the advocate of the hegemonic order) the defining characteristic of the wayward, transgressive body or pattern of behaviour. However, in looking at the various epistemological positions in which the concept of the unspeakable appears to be rooted, it also becomes clear that what cannot be captured in words does not cease to exist, but is present in these very epistemes. While the unity of theological or socio-economic or gendered or any other class of cultural norms is maintained through a systematic process of abjection, the abjected does not disappear, nor can it be allowed to do so; the paradox of the unified, regulated centre is the marginal, uncontainable, fragmented outside to which it is diametrically opposed but upon which it is fundamentally reliant.

The unspeakable, then, points not only to a space between but to a place beyond; yet in both these cases it is, crucially, nevertheless inextricably bound up in the workings of those supposedly cohesive forces between or beyond which it is found. Present both within and outside the prevailing order, the continued manifestation of the unspeakable serves as a constant reminder of the formative exclusion upon which the spoken – the nameable, the representable portion of reality – is founded.