The poem The Wife’s Lament has been critiqued variously, and Stanley Greenfield, writing in his critique essay "The Wife’s Lament Reconsidered", notes that none of the criticism is acceptable despite most of it being satisfactory. Greenfield’s use of the term obscurities shows that the poem is riddled with layers of ambiguities that make it impossible for a unified interpretation (907).
In Greenfield’s view, the ambiguities between lines 1- 41, in which the wife’s expression of her own banishment, lines 42- 47, in which she expresses her own deep-seated wishes, and lines 47- 5,3 wherein she refers to her cruel husband as an exile himself. To substantiate his claims, Greenfield mentions two major theories that explain this: that the story is merely about the plight of the husband and the wife, and that the presence of a young man has contributed to the estrangement of the couple (Greenfield 908). Theseforms the basis of the major conflict in his essay
Greenfield’s contention is based on line 42, in which the wife expressesa thinly veiled curse for her husband due to his cruel nature. This argument is placed early enough in Greenfield’s response in order to clarify his contention, which he deals with by the unveiling of what would be referred to as a reconsidered image of the wife. This image portends a woman who is still endeared to her husband despite his cruelty, and who wants him to go through physical torment as a way of making him understand the emotional tribulations he has caused her (Greenfield 912). This understanding helps in the reconstruction of the whole poem, from where we see a wife’s suffering through the exile of her husband.
Works Cited
Greenfield Stanley. The wife’s lament reconsidered. PMLA 68.4 (1953): 907-912. Print.
