“Women in the Textual City: Performative Politics in Cynewulf’s Elene and in the Old English Genesis A”
Robin Waugh

When the Old English Genesis A uses the compound ‘city-wife’ to describe Loth’s wife in her moment of disobedience, and when Cynewulf’s Elene depicts its heroine in debate with Jewish intelllectuals who refuse to reveal the whereabouts of the cross, these works present the speaking power of these women as subversive to male ideas. As the word ‘city-wife’ suggests, the undercutting power of these female voices comes from their usurpation (for the moment) of civic authority, a political concept that Peter Brown has associated with early saints in late antiquity--so why notfemale saints?

Elene is certainly both a saint and a political authority: she conquers Jerusalem and uses her political clout as the emperor’s mother (she thus represents Rome) to dictate much of the action of the poem from her position just outside of the city walls. Nevertheless, she is in the rebellious tradition of Loth’s wife, whose figure, frozen in time, looks over the destroyed cities of the plain, as if she once dominated them. I shall argue that the cities in these poems put forward a kind of textual authority, sometimes quite literally, that Loth’s wife and Elene, each in their individual ways, can briefly overturn through their explicitly feminine desires and uses of language. There is therefore much ‘play’ in these poems between histories, genders, and traditions, and these compositions present their heroines as performers of (usually male) political attributes, while these performances both affirm and deny the (usually male) languages of ancient scripture and civic law.