The Mere Wife publishes July 18th with Farrar, Straus & Giroux. eNotes critical analyses help you gain a deeper understanding of The Country Wife so you can excel on your essay or test. I say finally because I think the world needs this book. The Mere Wife by Maria Dahvana Headley is available from: As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. “The Mere Wife is a book on par with Lidia Yuknavitch's The Book of Joan: electric, feminist, literary retellings of famous tales, but with dystopian spins. As Willa is put in handcuffs, she realizes all the people of Herot Hall are monsters. The Mere Wife reimagines Beowulf by setting it in a suburban landscape of intense economic disparity . Later, the cave was widened and pushed, tiled, tracked, and beamed to house a train station. An adaptation of a traditional Karen Hill tribe folk tale about the love triangle between the elephant, the mahout and the wife… Meanwhile, in a cave in the mountains just beyond the limits of Herot Hall lives Gren, short for Grendel, as well as his mother, Dana, a former soldier who gave birth as if by chance. The Mere Wife reimagines Beowulf by setting it in a suburban landscape of intense economic disparity . There’s a howl and then a whistle, and then a roar. The following is from Maria Dahvana Headley's novel, The Mere Wife.In a modern retelling of Beowulf set in suburban America, two mothers—one a housewife, the other a battle-hardened veteran—fight to protect those they love. The train it housed went back and forth to the city, cocktail cars, leather seats. The creation of this cover is built upon themes of dualism and polarity. In the source, aeglaeca, the word used for Beowulf and Grendel, and even for Grendel’s mother, are the same word (in her case, the feminine equivalent). Who would put a crazy neon ram’s-head-wolf-thing on the cover of a book—and then, naturally, have the type sprout fangs and fur too!—and think it would look anything but bonkers? It demands attention and rewards it with the kind of reading that is difficult to put down—intense, visceral, and unforgettable. New York Times bestselling author Maria Dahvana Headley presents a modern retelling of the literary classic Beowulf, set in American suburbia as two mothers—a housewife and a battle-hardened veteran—fight to protect those they love in The Mere Wife. There is both intimacy and power behind this delicate balance of light and darkness. Sean McDonald, publisher of MCD/FSG Books: Maria gave the cover designers a lot to work with—The Mere Wife is full of myths and monsters, blood and fangs and fur and… one perfectly dystopic American suburb. She is interrogated and ends up in a mental hospital from which she escapes. Listen. It’s furious without being terrifically graphic, which I appreciate. Showing all 1 items Jump to: Summaries (1) Summaries. The creation of this cover is built upon themes of dualism and polarity. The boy from outside hears a piano lesson echoing up from the home of the boy raised indoors. Her mother, Diane, forced her into a marriage with Roger Herot, a plastic surgeon and heir of the Herot development. And yet it’s perfect, elegant even, in its way—but mostly it’s beautiful and rich and weird and modern and mythic and utterly magnetic and irresistible, just like the book Maria wrote. The bones were pried out and taken to a museum, reassembled into a hanging body. Many of the themes discussed relate to PTSD, family drama and infidelity, and violence. She’s bone-thin but for her belly. Everything living needs somewhere to be. “The Mere Wife is a book on par with Lidia Yuknavitch's The Book of Joan: electric, feminist, literary retellings of famous tales, but with dystopian spins. Following this, police officer Ben Woolf goes searching for Dylan. It probably means fierce fighter. . The Mere Wife. Mere Wife (2008) Plot. We’re thrilled to reveal the cover and share an excerpt from Maria Dahvana Headley’s upcoming novel The Mere Wife. A panel in the ceiling moves out of position, and a woman drops through the gap at the end of an arch, falling a couple of feet to the floor, panting. . THE MERE WIFE By Maria Dahvana Headley 308 pp. They meet and kiss but are found by Ben and, running back to his childhood home, Dylan is brutally stabbed and murdered by Willa. Thanks! The nature of the book is that all these things are tangled together, despite the notion of separation between them. The Anglo-Saxon epic “Beowulf” has a historic place in English literature. From the catalog copy: From the perspective of those who live in Herot Hall, the suburb is a paradise. Inciting Incident The Rising Action in the story is when the wife starts to realize that in the night when everyone is She hides inside the mountain behind it, which has an abandoned train station and a lake; people think it is haunted. Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window), Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window), Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window), Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window), © 2021 Macmillan | All stories, art, and posts are the copyright of their respective authors. No one needs to love us for us to exist. Dana, who has been slipping further from reality, argues that the people of Herot are evil – they dug into the mountain and disturbed a graveyard where her mother was buried, turning it into a railway station and creating a museum full of her family's bones and belongings. She knows she is a member of the marines. Is an act of accurate translation, ram and wolf, transforming, entwining, finally being shown as two sides of the same entity. The Mere Wife is a sly satire of suburbia, wittily detailed and "[1] The Guardian noted, "The question in Headley's ambitious novel is why we need to cast anyone as a monster at all. Dana kills Ben, committing suicide in the process. . . . Earth’s a thieved place. Everyday low prices and free delivery on eligible orders. The gated community still has its back open to the mountain. In Headley’s hands, Beowulf is revealed to … It’d get a nice graphic R rating if it were made into a movie. We also may use affiliate links in our posts, as well. Despite his mother's instructions, as Gren grows older he wishes to meet the people in Herot and becomes friends with Dylan, a young boy in the town. Dylan runs away with Gren as Roger follows them toward the mountain. No train’s been through our territory in almost a hundred years. “The Mere Wife is a book on par with Lidia Yuknavitch's The Book of Joan: electric, feminist, literary retellings of famous tales, but with dystopian spins. Take a look. And into all of this comes Ben Woolf, a police officer who believes he’s the hero Herot needs. The station was a showpiece before it wasn’t. But for those who live surreptitiously along Herot Hall’s periphery, the subdivision is a fortress guarded by an intense network of gates, surveillance cameras, and motion-activated lights. Headley makes many references to modern police violence (especially against African Americans), social media usage, class differences, and feminine stereotypes. New York Times bestselling author Maria Dahvana Headley presents a modern retelling of the literary classic Beowulf, set in American suburbia as two mothers—a housewife and a battle-hardened veteran—fight to protect those they love in The Mere Wife. Rising Action Resolution The resolution is when the wife see's the white bloody man who was once her husband. Headley makes many references to modern police violence (especially against African Americans), social media usage, class differences, and feminine stereotypes. The union between a husband and wife is very different from mere sexual union, because marriage, according to Christianity, is a lifelong bond between two people. She ends up near Herot Hall, a development built on top of the town where she used to live. There’s a murder of matriarchs (can I just use that as the collective noun for this version?—I don’t usually feel that way about matriarchs, but these are pretty murderous) who have collective POV, and function as the soldiers of suburbia. The ram and wolf symbolize the classic struggle of predator versus prey, but instead of both sides directly opposing each other, they are woven and entwined together, until it’s difficult to see where the two sides meet in the middle. . We rose up from an inland sea, and now, half beneath the mountain, half outside it, is the last of that sea, a mere. She calls, to any god, to all of them. Fantasy and realism mix in an ambiguous, audacious genre-bender. Her face is scarred with a complicated pink line. And it’s wildness versus domestication, blood versus fleece, but not really even versus—it’s more a virtual representation of the way that these things are always inextricably braided together. Guest Rooms Select Your Room. The Mere Wife is clever and often funny, finding ingenious ways to update the Beowulf story, in a way that produces wry social commentary. She staggers, leans against our wall, and looks up at our ceiling, breathing carefully. Hwaet! Dana didn’t want Gren, didn’t plan Gren, and doesn’t know how she got Gren, but when she returned from war, there he was. The mere wife by Maria Dahvana Headley, 2018 edition, in English - First edition. Lewis’, Life, Death, and Coming of Age in Nnedi Okorafor’s, Six Stories for Fans of Beautiful Australian Gothic, Five Thrilling SF Stories About Patrolling Space. Five Stories About Generation Ships With Happy(ish) Endings, The Deplorable Word: Power, Magicians, and Evil in C.S. Each house has its own fireplace, each fireplace is fitted with a container of lighter fluid, and outside—in lawns and on playgrounds—wildflowers seed themselves in neat rows. MCD/Farrar, Straus & Giroux. We’re the snakes and songbirds, the storm water, the brightness beneath the darkest pools. Maria Dahvana Headley is a novelist, Nebula-nominated short story writer, and editor. Both sides of the tunnel are covered with metal doors and soil, but the gilded chamber remains, water pouring over the tracks. Long after the end of everything is supposed to have occurred, long after apocalypses have been calculated by cults and calendared by computers, long after the world has ceased believing in miracles, there’s a baby born inside a mountain. Gren vows for revenge and reconciles with Dana; together they attack Ben at Dylan's funeral. View The Mere Wife Analysis essay.docx from ENGLISH MISC at University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Book cover of the first edition, published in 2018, designed by Miranda Meeks. With picket fences, gabled buildings, and wildflowers that seed themselves in ordered rows, the suburb is a self-sustaining community, enclosed and secure. Our Privacy Notice has been updated to explain how we use cookies, which you accept by continuing to use this website. In it she gives birth to her son, Gren. . Discussion of themes and motifs in William Wycherley's The Country Wife. $27. They can lead full and vivid lives and can simultaneously be virtuous and faithful to their husbands. and fantasy, steps into the adult world with this spot-on reimagining of a classic of Old English literature. So, this cover, to my eye? No one needs to see us for us to exist. It conveys that life isn’t black and white; it’s messy, and broken, and the gray area is a lot more encompassing than people initially assume. Boulders avalanche and snow drifts, ice moans. 'The Mere Wife' Is An Epic Retelling July 22, 2018 • For too long the Old English poem has long been perceived as a "masculine text," says Maria Dahvana Headley. A New Statesman book of the year New York Times bestselling author Maria Dahvana Headley's fierce, feminist retelling of the classic tale of Beowulf. Excerpted from The Mere Wife, copyright © 2018 by Maria Dahvana Headley. There was once a tremendous skeleton here, rib cage curving the wall, tail twisting across the floor. It is important to recognize this coexistence within ourselves so that we might further develop deep and personal relationships with those we love. On her back, there are two guns and a pack of provisions. The book often plays with mirrors: there are two young boys, one living inside the mountain, one in Herot Hall, and two main female characters, one the war veteran Dana Mills, who is the Grendel’s mother character, and the other the very privileged former actress Willa Herot, who is the Hrothgar’s wife equivalent. And the gloriously furred and fanged text for both my name and the title, is just… well, I think, having seen it, I’ve always wanted my name to have claws. I wasn’t familiar with the art of Miranda Meeks before this cover, but now that I am, I can easily say that she could illustrate anything I’ve written. Headley’s prose doesn’t woo or coddle. The Mere Wife reimagines Beowulf by setting it in a suburban landscape of intense economic disparity . Whether you’re visiting for a weekend break or an overnight stay, The Mere offers a range of rooms with amenities to ensure a cosy night’s sleep. The word doesn’t mean hero, nor does it mean monster. To withdraw your consent, see Your Choices. We wait, and one day our waiting is over. Wind shrieks around the tops of trees, and sun melts the glacier at the top of the peak. From the perspective of those who live in Herot Hall, the suburb is a paradise. Cover illustration by Miranda Meeks; Design by Keith Hayes. Gren is killed by Ben; everyone realizes he is a boy, not a monster. She acts as the perfect housewife (hiding alcoholism, a likely eating disorder, an unhappy marriage, and copious quantities of stress) and quickly notices something is amiss when Dylan begins to talk about his "imaginary" friend Gren. “The Mere Wife is a book on par with Lidia Yuknavitch's The Book of Joan: electric, feminist, literary retellings of famous tales, but with dystopian spins. Learn vocabulary, terms, and more with flashcards, games, and other study tools. In our soil there are tree fossils, the remains of a forest, dating from the greening of the world. . I think this piece of art manages to encompass both things, the wrath of the book and the fluidity of it as well. Then they run back to the hills into the woods. Years later, Dylan runs away from the boarding school he has been placed in due to rebellious behaviors to find Gren. And as with all great covers, the designers distilled into it an utterly unexpected but instantly undeniable package. The cave’s walls are crumbling now, and on top of the stone the tiles are cracking, but the station remains: ticket booth, wooden benches, newspaper racks, china teacups, stained-glass windows facing outward into earthworms, and crystal chandeliers draped in cobwebs. Even stars sing. However, while The Mere Wife may occasionally veer into the realm of the grotesque, it does so no more than sacrosanct myths. Roger shoots a bear, thinking it is what took Dylan, but Dana believes that he has shot Gren, and so she murders Roger in retaliation. She enhances the themes of the classic with contemporary and feminist accents, creating a work that is both unique and worthy. The human brain relishes in categorizing people into two different groups: there are only good people or bad people. "The Mere Wife by Maria Dahvana Headley review – a modern Beowulf", "World Fantasy Awards℠ 2019 | World Fantasy Convention", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Mere_Wife&oldid=999298747, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, This page was last edited on 9 January 2021, at 13:40. Some sects say that divorce is permissible, while others do not; however, all sects see divorce as something unnatural—a kind of “surgical operation.” We’re an old thing made of everything else, and we’ve been waiting here a long time. Dana Mills wakes up unsure of what has happened to her or why she is pregnant. But it’s also full of poetry, because, um, it’s based on Beowulf! -- Kelly Link, author of Get in Trouble Each of the sections begins with a possible translation of "Hwaet", the word that begins Beowulf. Headley moves expertly between perspectives, with first-person narratives intersected by a chorus of voices from the suburban women who will do anything to protect their own. 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