The Wife’s lament and wulf and eadwacer: an approach to the female poetic voice from the perspective of french difference feminism
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.32735/S0718-22012023000563040Keywords:
The Wife’s Lament, Wulf and Eadwacer, sexual difference, female discourseAbstract
This article aims to analyse the discourse employed by the female lyrical voices in the medieval Anglo-Saxon elegies The Wife’s Lament and Wulf and Eadwacer. Through the idea of female body self-awareness as the origin of écriture féminine proposed by Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous, leading figures in French feminism of the sexual “difference”, we will determine that the discursive use applied by female elegiac voices diverges from that used by male elegiac voices and that, thus, it provides a means to find a female identity beyond the patriarchal gender constructs of medieval Anglo-Saxon society.
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