The Horrors of A Patriarchy: The Final Girl and The Finnsburg Episode
Abstract
In Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, Carol J. Glover asserts that the remaining girl in a horror film survives because of her moral superiority to her friends, thus the surviving woman embodies certain patriarchal and puritanical ideals that the killer (a cultural body) is trying to enforce. This girl is called the Final girl and she dominated the slasher franchises of the 1980s. While the final girl trope has been popularized with both fans and scholars of horror film, female resilience and patriarchal standards are not only displayed in the horror movies of the 1980s. In the Old English poem Beowulf, the poem creates a number of female characters who must— and do— survive the more quotidian horrors of feud, death, and loss. Notably, the character of Hildeburh, who watches all of her loved ones kill each other, and becomes the last surviving Finn. Despite her survival, actions committed by a larger cultural body cause Hildeburh’s story to end in tragedy thus rendering her attempts to adhere to her societal role as futile. By taking Clover’s idea of this final girl beyond the slasher film and applying it to Alice Hardy from Friday the 13th and Hildeburh from “The Finnsburg Episode†in Beowulf, I will examine how gendered violence in a narrative structure simultaneously places women in a position of reward and punishment and how the female characters who live reveal the impossibility of adhering to the patriarchal standards of their world.
Keywords:
English Literature, Feminism, Film, Medieval Literature
Status
U
Department
English
College
Honors Tutorial College
Campus
Athens
Faculty Mentor
Hurley, Mary Kate
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
The Horrors of A Patriarchy: The Final Girl and The Finnsburg Episode
In Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, Carol J. Glover asserts that the remaining girl in a horror film survives because of her moral superiority to her friends, thus the surviving woman embodies certain patriarchal and puritanical ideals that the killer (a cultural body) is trying to enforce. This girl is called the Final girl and she dominated the slasher franchises of the 1980s. While the final girl trope has been popularized with both fans and scholars of horror film, female resilience and patriarchal standards are not only displayed in the horror movies of the 1980s. In the Old English poem Beowulf, the poem creates a number of female characters who must— and do— survive the more quotidian horrors of feud, death, and loss. Notably, the character of Hildeburh, who watches all of her loved ones kill each other, and becomes the last surviving Finn. Despite her survival, actions committed by a larger cultural body cause Hildeburh’s story to end in tragedy thus rendering her attempts to adhere to her societal role as futile. By taking Clover’s idea of this final girl beyond the slasher film and applying it to Alice Hardy from Friday the 13th and Hildeburh from “The Finnsburg Episode†in Beowulf, I will examine how gendered violence in a narrative structure simultaneously places women in a position of reward and punishment and how the female characters who live reveal the impossibility of adhering to the patriarchal standards of their world.