Monsters and cultural others (those who depart from normative cultural standards) often become a projective space for the dominant culture’s fear, anxieties, excesses, and flaws. The monsters/others, in their transgressions, may also challenge (or help to define) the dominant culture’s norms. Choose one of the monsters from our reading thus far—Grendel, Grendel’s mother, the Dragon, the Green Knight, or define your own cultural “other.” What do the outsiders (literal or cultural) in these texts tell us about the dominant culture’s values? Do they reflect them, critique them, destroy them? Is the gulf between the normative and the monstrous as wide as it seems? Are the monsters ever heroic?
