Monstrous Maternity and the Mother-Mark: Melusine as Genealogical Phantom

Abstract

If Richard Coer de Lyon draws attention to the ways in which the collusive effort to deny and marginalize maternal contributions enables and produces new formulations of masculine communal or national identity, the Middle English Melusine suggests the catastrophic potential for these same mechanisms to destabilize lineal structures and the communities that are defined through and benefit from these structures.¹ Like Richard Coer de Lyon, Melusine consistently draws attention to pervasive inconsistencies between the representation of normative structures of filiation and identity that work to exclude acknowledgment of the role of maternal transmission of identity in both the social and biological sense. However, in its exploration of this dynamic, Melusine highlights the ways in which the prioritization of patrilineal representations of identity depends on a pernicious abjectification of mothers, maternity, and maternal bodies that ultimately destabilizes and threatens lineage itself. Melusine points to the power of contemporary discourses that constructed maternal bodies as sites of danger and contamination to in effect create monsters not only out of mothers, but also out of the compromised products of their monstrous hybridizing bodies. This romance suggests that the evident fictionality of a strict model of patrilineal genealogy and the concomitant marginalization of maternal influence ultimately endangers the genealogical project altogether by marking all lineage as monstrously hybrid, and thus, according to its own logic, illegitimate and unstable.