The Ethical Agency of the Female Lyric Voice: The Wife's Lament and Catullus 64

Despite, and partly because of, the persistent philological doubts that have hovered over the poem, the Old English Wife's Lament has consistently inspired critical fascination. Scholarship on The Wife's Lament has generated copious critical commentary tying the poem to a range of literary traditions, from Old Norse sagas to Christian allegory,¹ in an attempt to provide a reading context for a poem that seems deliberately enigmatic.² Brushed with mysterious references to pagan burial mounds, the poem teasingly hints at unexplained relationships to folk belief and Germanic cultural norms, and yet it is written in an artful style that suggests a skillful poet comfortable with literary creation, not simply miming an oral tradition.³ Despite the evident skill of the poet, the prevalent trend in critical commentary on the poem has been to avoid central literary questions—of style, of tone—in favor of re-describing the poem through external cultural norms, particularly the speaker's "situation" in relationship to her presumed social identity.⁴ This commentary has elucidated key moments in the poem, including the speaker's description of herself in the language of the household retainer ( folgað secan [9]); her relationship to her husband's blood-feud ( fæhðu [26]); her place in what one might call the "spiritual geography" of England, as she occupies what seems to be a pagan burial mound; and her status as an exile.⁵

The poem, however, does not announce itself as an authentic expression of a Germanic culture, nor does it circulate in a book context that would restrict its meaning to Germanic cultural norms. In its first line, the poem announces itself quite self-consciously as a constructed literary artifact ("Ic þis giedd wrece") by using a term, giedd, echoed throughout the Anglo-Saxon corpus to describe the artful song of the scop and the speech of the wise man.⁶ Jane Chance has pointed out that both Wulf and Eadwacer and The Wife's Lament emphasize the connection between the speaker and the scop tradition, resulting in poems that demonstrate, in her reading, the failure of women in the peace-weaving role.⁷ While her study stresses the self-conscious allusion to the scop tradition, she has inverted the importance of the literary evidence, which tells us less about Germanic cultural attitudes toward women and more about the role of the female voice in an evolving literary tradition. The two poems look and sound like scop performances precisely because the poets who wrote them were artfully referring to this tradition, while using the female voice to mark substantial innovations. Indeed, in the case of The Wife's Lament, the text itself serves to highlight the improbability of the dramatic situation and thus its implausibility as personal expression: the speaker, being in total isolation, is not speaking to an audience and thus does not participate in a community of response like the dramatized scop in Beowulf. Rather, the poet as artificer has recuperated what is, in essence, a lost voice. The dramatic implausibility of the speaker, who asserts a right to speak in a context void of audience, is an intrinsic feature of the poem's structure. This fundamental premise applies whether the speaker is living or dead, perhaps more provocatively if she is dead. While it is true that women are described as performing giedd in Beowulf, the salient example being Hildeburh's mourning song, their songs themselves are not included as literary artifacts, but merely referred to in the sweep of narrative. These "women's songs" are instances of indirectly represented speech, fully assimilated to the literary values of the narrative, and not objects of literary attention in their own right.⁸ Lois Bragg has argued that there is something "clearly very particular" about the speaker's situation in The Wife's Lament, perhaps better known to "the poet's intended readership," echoing a venerable critical tradition that has assumed the poem is a fragment of a lost longer work.⁹ But even if we could retrieve that...