About a decade after the end of second-wave feminism, precipitated by the intra-feminist sex wars of the 1980s, feminism rose again in the 1990s, this time in its third iteration. Third-wave feminism's emergence is bound up with the Riot Grrrl punk bands in Washington – and the feminist “zines” associated with them – and Anita Hill's accusations against judge Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment, which resulted in a wider discussion on the representation of women in leadership roles. Unlike second-wave feminism, third-wave feminism (and postfeminism) have been subject to a commercial uptake that has arguably been both damaging and advantageous for the cause. At the same time as feminism's recovery, the Old English poem Beowulf was witnessing a re-emergence in popularity, most notably in the 2000 translation by Seamus Heaney, and the numerous literary, televisual, and cinematic approaches to the poem in the 2000s. As with feminism, the 1990s and 2000s saw the Hollywood-ification of the poem, and thus, a complex variety of takes on the early medieval text.

This essay explores the intersections of these trends and argues that a number of contemporary Beowulf adaptations are bound up with both the championing of and resistance to third-wave feminism. This dialectic is further contextualized against the cyclical nature of feminism's “waves,” the characteristic peaks that signal a new wave, and the troughs that signal the backlash to it, as seen in the 1950s/1960s, 1970s/1980s, and, in this case, the 1990s/2000s. In a significant departure from Victorian portrayals of Grendel's mother as solely monstrous, each of the four adaptations discussed in this chapter is influenced by and responds to third-wave feminism, as evidenced by their similar depictions of Grendel's mother. All four of these texts depict her character as a shapeshifting being, both as a conventionally beautiful woman, and as horribly monstrous in her appearance. While these more recent adaptations depict Grendel's mother as a dichotomous figure, they do so to very different effect. Although she becomes a more significant character, I argue that some of the ostensibly more “empowering” depictions are nuanced attacks on women and female sexuality. Moreover, this oscillating representation of Grendel's mother can be understood as representative of the complex striations of third-wave feminism and postfeminism explored in this study, wherein female sexuality and its manifestation are often sites of contention.

Alexios I to Robert I of Flanders (Epistulae, no. I)

Heidelberg, Universitätsbibliothek, Pal. Lat. 962, fols 62r–64r (s. xv).

Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 4611, fols 50v–52r (s. xiii3/4).

Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. ser. n. 3607, fols 42r–44r (s. xiii1/4).

Anselm of Ribemont's first letter to Manasses of Reims (Epistulae, no. VIII)

Reims, Bibliothèque municipale de Reims, MS 96, fol. 1r–v (s. xiiin).

Anselm of Ribemont's second letter to Manasses of Reims (Epistulae, no. XV)

Barcelona, Biblioteca de Catalunya, MS 944, fols 292r–295r (s. xii).

Patriarch Symeon of Jerusalem and the other bishops to the people of the West (Epistulae, no. IX)

Heidelberg, Universitätsbibliothek, Pal. Lat. 962, fol. 62r (s. xv).

Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 4611, fol. 50v (s. xiii3/4).

Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, nouv. acq. lat. 310, fol. 226r–v (s. xii).

Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Pal. lat. 962, fol. 62r (s. xv).

Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. ser. n. 3607, fols 41v–42r (s. xiii1/4).

Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, Cod. Guelf. 354 Helmst., fol. 264v (s. xv2/4).

The crusade leaders to Pope Urban II (Epistulae, no. XVI)

Rouen, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 1390, fols 119v–120v (s. xii).

Daibert of Pisa, Godfrey of Bouillon, Raymond of St Gilles, and the crusader army to the pope and the Christian faithful (Epistulae, no. XVIII)

Erlangen, Universitätsbibliothek Erlangen-Nürnberg, MS 224, fols 150vb–153ra (s. xiiiin).

Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 211, fol. 174r–v (s. xii3/4).

Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 23390, fols 60r–62v, 57r (s. xiii1).

Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 28195, fols 114ra–115ra (s. xiii2/4).

Salzburg, Stiftsbibliothek St Peter, Codex S. Petri Salisburgensis b.IX.22 (XXXIV.7), fols 2r–3r (s. xv3/4).

Würzburg, Universitätsbibliothek Würzburg, M. p. th. q. 17, fols 90r–91v (s. xii).

Patriarch Daibert of Jerusalem to all the German people (Epistulae, no. XXI)

Erlangen, Universitätsbibliothek Erlangen-Nürnberg, MS 224, fols 153ra–153vb (s. xiiiin).

Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 28195, fol. 115r (s. xiii2/4).

THE Northcote–Trevelyan Report created and the Order in Council of 1870 confirmed a secular clerisy. Those “fit and proper persons” were the Victorian mandarins, some of whom settled into a re-formed Civil Service. They were a different kind of gentleman, quite unlike Lord Chesterfield and other landed and titled aristocrats of the eighteenth century. They differed also from the foppish dandies of the Regency period with their mannered and refined politeness. The 7th Earl of Shaftesbury warned against those from the unreformed Eton and other unreformed schools who merely prepared young men for the dining room and sophisticated salons. What Shaftesbury wished for was “nobler, deeper, and sterner stuff; less of refinement and more of truth; more of the inward, not so much of the outward, gentleman.” The Northcote–Trevelyan Report gave them to him. These “fit and proper persons,” this different kind of gentleman, this secular clerisy, were serious, earnest, and manly.

With their university educations certified by competitive examinations, the authority of the secular clerisy was indirect rather than political or partisan. Since, as Gladstone, Jowett, and Macaulay had prescribed, they held their positions as a result of success in competitive literary examinations, their authority was a cultural authority which depended on persuasion rather than coercion.

Accidents Austria

It was quite common for people to catch their finger in the paper machine. When you looked carefully you could find that many people were one finger short, Hermann had lost one, Norbert, Franzi and Edi the whole hand. If you were not able to perform your duties you would be placed somewhere else … Usually you would not get fired and it would go to the factory board. That is what we had the unions for, to protect people.

(Kopl, Regina and Leopold Redl, Das Totale Ensemble, Ein Führer duch die Industriekultur In südlicher Wiener Becken (Wien, 1989), p. 72)

Factory regulations in selected countries

Britain

• 1844: The Factory Act applied to textile factories. Women and young persons (13–18 years old) were allowed to work a maximum of 12 hrs/day, children under 13 a maximum of 6.5 hrs/ day, no children under 8 could be employed.

• 1847: Women and children (13–18 years old) were allowed to work a maximum of 10 hrs/day or 58 hrs/week (the shift system remained).

• 1850: Women and children (13–18) were only allowed to work between 6 am and 6 pm or 7 am and 7 am in textile factories, working time was increased to 10.5 hrs/day.

• 1866: Municipal authorities were required to appoint sanitary inspectors.

• 1871: The Civil Service reforms stipulated that positions were to be open to those who passed public examinations, from this point, a person was not to acquire a post through privilege and connections.

• 1874: Factory Act stipulated a minimum age of 10 years for employment in textile factories.

• 1878: Factory and Workshops Act specified the following:

Don't they want to be protected?

Factory and workshop owners, factory law and abidance

The intrusion of factory inspectors onto the premises of businesses in Britain was often not welcomed. Even before the advent of women on the scene, there are examples of local authorities forming a protective shield around a businessman against representatives of the central administration.

On 1 May 1885, Thomas Clarke, miller of Earsham, physically attacked inspector Hudson in the yard of his mill and on the road. The local magistrates held that the assaults were justified and did not issue any fine for assault. The excuse was that the inspector had not shown his credentials. As the miller appeared after the inspection had commenced and immediately proceeded with the attack, the producing of certificates had proved fairly difficult.

Bagehot's telling remark expresses the result of a consequential change in British political experience from what one historian has called a court-based culture to a club-based culture. This was a transformation from the gentleman who was a courtier unafraid to “proclaim his superiority, uninhibited in his conduct, bold in his demeanour, and proud of his homage” to the gentleman as mandarin who was “discreet in manner, unpretentious in appearance, reserved if not cold, keeping his warmth for his home and hearth, disdainful of men and their wants, devoted to public duties.” This transfor¬mation was not so much a decline of one group and their culture and the rise of a new one; it was a dynamic of differentiation in which a more pluralistic civil society with more secular values emerged.

“Fall” and “rise” are powerful and dramatic metaphors. They are provocative concepts and there might be much emotional truth to them. Two reservations might be raised against them though. First, they are metaphors of description which often reflect the anxieties of the times which produce them. They are often defensive expressions of people for, or against, changes that they wish for or oppose. They are often statements about the way they want the world to be rather than the world as it is (or was). Metaphors of this kind trap their subject in particular narratives. Would that historians could escape the captivity of that trap. Second, because of the drama and power of such metaphors, they express a binary world seemingly producing large-scale social movements. They deprive their subjects of agency and freedom. Lurking beneath these metaphors is a particular doctrine, part of the myths and traditions of modernity. This doctrine asks who fits the modern world. Who belongs? Who is “modern”? Historians have struggled with these questions of method and have, sometimes, recorded their places in this historiography lurching back and forth between synchronic and diachronic impulses.

90 per cent of the 300 female students in the ‘high school for young ladies’ came from lower middle-class families. The fathers were craftsmen or kept small shops. They did not want their children to participate in state-run education. Their idea was that attending ‘a higher school’ was better. The question of what occupation their daughter should aim for did not arise. Generally the children of workers did neither attend the higher school for ladies nor the secondary schools preparing for the Gymnasium (and the baccalaureate). Our school was the exception … I used to read in the morning before school about the debates in parliament and the regional assembly on issues related to women's education. My mother thought I was mad.

(Karin Roi Frey, Wenn alle Stricke reissen, dann wird sie noch einmal Lehrerin, Lehrerinnen in biographischen Zeugnissen (Bochum, 2001), p. 115)

We understood that we lived in a time of change, that we as female students were creating a new type of woman with independence and freedom but that we still were stuck in the old family structures. When we came home it was necessary to take on the role of ‘daughter of the house’. Instead of spending time with our books and seminar papers in the holidays we had to help with the housework from morning to night, we were there to serve other family members. When I once tried to get out of these duties my brother said with friendly superiority, ‘Learning to serve makes a good wife’, and gave me his clothes for ironing.

(Karin Roi Frey, Wenn alle Stricke reissen, dann wird sie noch einmal Lehrerin, Lehrerinnen in biographischen Zeugnissen (Bochum, 2001), p. 122)

When you look back did you always want to be a teacher or would you have liked to do something else?

I would have liked to study law.

Why did you not ask your father if that would be possible?

He would never have paid for that. He went to his brother who was the one who made decisions in the family and said ‘Can you imagine, she wants to go into higher education and university!’

Research on the subject of women and work has for decades underlined that women were underpaid in relation to men, and that women not only had tasks with less respect but were also forced to labour under inhuman conditions, particularly in factories. This might inspire the question, if factory work was so horrible for women (unlike for men?) why did women enter the factories?

In retrospect there is never a shortage of good ideas and suggestions about what would have been a sensible choice, and the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries supplied their fair share of social reformers and people with views about how the working classes should live and the need to get women out of the factories.

Working-class women and families of the past were painfully aware of their need to eat, and the differences in male and female earnings were not restricted to factory employment. Whatever work a woman chose to do, she would earn less than a man. Today we talk about equal pay, which even though guaranteed by law, is not actually a reality in Western countries. In the past, women had to take reality into consideration and deal with whatever choices were available. In such a situation the factory might not have been the worst option. Middle-class social reformers considered domestic service as a suitable job for young women: it was safe and in a family, under control of ‘respectable people’ and girls would acquire domestic skills that would be useful when they married and became wives and mothers. In actual fact, the work was badly paid, had terrible hours, no freedom and privacy, no job security and in case of pregnancy, resulted in loss both of employment and home. While farm work was also badly paid, the social distance between employer and employee could be a lot closer. In addition, in many parts of Europe, rural society handled the question of pregnancy more smoothly; there were even regions, most prominently in German-speaking parts of Europe and Iceland, where mothers could keep their children with them when employed as live-in farm workers.

DAWES's praise for the Northcote–Trevelyan Report pointed toward Frankfurter's conclusion about the history of liberalism as the history of processes and procedures. The Northcote–Trevelyan Report (1854) and the Order in Council of 1870 created a secular clerisy which filled the consti¬tutional vacuum opened by the repeal of the Test and Corporations Acts, Catholic emancipation, and the removal of Jewish disabilities. A generation ago, scholarly literature was filled with ambitious research programs to consider the role of the state and its interventions into social life during a period of industrial change between 1825 and 1875. Taking their starting point with A.V. Dicey's influential Law and Opinion, scholars assiduously pursued various leads to track the growth of government which, in scholarly retrospect, seems now more limited than it did then. Whatever its shape and contours, the state in the middle quarters of the nineteenth century was constrained by “a highly pluralistic, patrician culture of authority that was committed to free trade, local self-government, voluntary service, and philanthropy.”