Pull Your Self Together: The Dangers of Dissociation in Old English Poetry

This paper argues that one way of reading the portrayal of misery in Old English poetry is as an abjected state; something against which the not-miserable self and community is continually being defined. It argues that, to this end, otherness of different forms is constructed as inherently miserable; and that we should therefore be open to reading unhappy figures as inherently othered. Using a range of poetic case studies, it goes on to suggest that this might be because Old English poetic unhappiness is associated with dissociation and fragmentation, which poses a fundamental threat to the profoundly networked sense of selfhood and intersubjective social system prevalent in the same poetic corpus. The social function of performing the poetry of alienation, then, is proposed to be a communal therapy of abjection, inviting self-identification with traumatised figures in order to abject that aspect of the self.