No Good Wife

There is an almost comical moment in chapter 11 of The Book of Margery Kempe when her husband asks her “whether you [Margery] would allow my head to be cut off, or else allow me to make love with you again, as I did at one time?” When she replies, “Truly, I would rather see you being killed, than that we should turn back our uncleanness,” it seems he is justified in telling her “you are no good wife.”

This small scene evoked from me two responses to Margery’s devotion to God. The first, and more likely intended response was: wow, that’s an intense love of God. However, my second though was: Well, she might resent this guy who got her pregnant 14 times, and not that she’s seeking revenge, but seeing him go might not be a heartbreaker. Of course in the end, Margery cares for her husband preceding his death, thus to a certain extent proving a defense to both my second reaction, and her husband’s allegation that she is a no good wife.

The Book of Margery Kempe seems as much about self-expression as it is self-defense. The third person provides an interesting lens through which to view her spiritual autobiography. While it appears to be a revealing third person account and the reader is aware of emotional struggles etc. the view of a third person narrator gives a sense of remove from Margery that a first person account would not provide. Rather than seeing through Margery Kempe’s eyes, we are focused on Margery Kempe. While I would not argue that this third person account is objective, it does seem to assert authority by at least posing as more than her personal view of the world.

Devout or Delusional?

Margery Kempe can either be called devout or delusional. In her own time, it seems many took the later rather than the former view. In her biography, those who witness her constant prayer and weeping think she is trying to get attention or is neglecting her duties. The few friends she has are frustrated with her. Even Jesus seems exasperated with her at times.

This is all typical for visionary literature of the medieval period. The visionary, especially if it was a woman, was often ridiculed. But the visionary took the scorn and derision as proof that her visions were valid. The more Kempe is criticized, the more fervently she prays and fasts and weeps for her sins. Her love for Jesus becomes more eroticised - she wishes he would come down from the crucifix and embrace her. She prefers her mystical lover to her husband. Again, this was common with such literature. Some of these female mystics would not even look at men so they wouldn't be distracted from their Lord. Some were nuns, literally called "the brides of Christ". The "prayers" and "mystical encounters" with Jesus could be read as love poetry or amorous dialogues. Jesus is all they desire.

For some of these female mystics, it is easy to see what might have caused them to break from reality (or have closer communion with Jesus, however one wishes to see it). For Kempe, I think it is less obvious. She comes from a wealthy family and has married well. It seems after she nearly dies in child birth that the change happens. Is this the effects of postpartum depression? Has her near-death experience caused schizophrenia (or conversion?)Or as with other mystics, did her visions (hallucinations?) come after a long period of extreme fasting, sleep deprivation, and bodily penitence?

What about the elephant in the room?

Our last set of readings arrived to one conclusion: there were homosexuals or gay people in the Middle Ages. Any other metaphor, poetic image or even any convention about using male pronouns to talk about women cannot keep our attention away from this fact: the elephant in the room. The idea of sex in the Middle Ages was strongly identified to intercourse, a possibility given by nature only to men, therefore, the absence of lesbianism in the discourse about (against) homosexuality should not surprise us.

The Catholic clergy has been always a common place of sexual tension: sex of any class was forbidden. One can think that many of men enclosed together and talking about love could find a lot of temptation, even though if they were not originally gay, as happens in our prisons nowadays. Young boys without secondary sexual characteristics were appealing to the old priests and the boiling activity of their adolescence was also an open door for temptation and consummation.

Women dressed as males are also a common place in the Middle Ages, beginning with Jean D'Arc herself. However, the male clothes on a woman often were justified by some higher purpose, but the question about the sexuality of those virgins in male garments is at least intriguing... or may be not, and the answer is more obvious than what The Romance of Silence wants to admit.

In both cases, male and female, friendship was in fuzzy place, and the terms to refer to it were quite ambiguous. Except in some poems, as in the Jewish poets studied in our last sessions, the terms to describe men are quite feminine, as Perceval's red lips. 

Personally, I think that sexuality of any kind is impossible to repress and that it finds always the ways for its consummation. The Middle Ages seems to be not an exception. However, was it not a veiled subject? The Roman of Silence did not talk about sex, except for Eufeme who was under a wrong impression. There were rules of alleged grammar that allowed the poet to use male pronouns to talk about women. Were not those a strategy to actually talk about men and make the poems pass as an stylistic innovation, even though if they were used to actually talk about women many times?

Probably sexual indiscretions were not weird, and only characters as this Allan of Lille were actually concerned about the offenses against Nature and not only about only keeping the face. Anyway, sex of any kind was illicit outside of marriage, and, if we believe our texts, Middle Ages were plenty of it!

Al Sharif al-Taliq and Lacan

I found Richard Serrano's article "Al-Sharif al-Taliq, Jacques Lacan, and the Poetics of Abbreviation," a little problematic because I wasn't sure exactly how his conception of the writer trying to conceal or cover "the original trauma of the poem" in Lacanian terms differed from the way poetry normally works. I also wasn't sure, moreover, how his employment of Lacan's theories differed from conventional literary interpretation.

He states that the trauma is an event that exists beyond or before language, behind the "accessible Symbolic Order," and that attempts to describe or relate trauma via language also, necessarily, obscure it. He writes, "Attempts to account for this moment - and, simultaneously, to hide it - result in language that constantly obscures the original trauma yet relentlessly points back to it" (141). So - if I'm understanding this right - if I attempted to relate via writing a traumatic experience, I would simultaneously obscure the original traumatic episode with imperfect language and, at the same time, still refer to it because it is the point of my writing.

But how does this differ from the way poetry normally works? Metaphors, similes, figures of speech, etc. all operate to point to an experience but, since they cannot perfectly render the experience for us, they could also be said to obscure said experience at the same time. And, of course, we measure a poet by how well he employs metaphors, similes, figures of speech, etc. which ties into Serrano's idea that the "cover up" functions as a mechanism for self-glorification for the poet. My point is, though, that you can get to his conclusion without having to resort to Lacanian theory or employ such terms as "trauma" or "psychoanalysis."

I just had a lot of "duh" moments as I was reading the article and I got the feeling that Serrano was hiding behind the buzz word "Lacan" whilst performing good, old-fashioned literary interpretation.

The Irrelevance of Gender

Like Parzival and Silence, the poems in these excepts emphasize an ideal of beauty that is not gender specific. The young men of the Hebrew love poetry and the cup-bearer of Al-Sharif al Taliq's poem are both described in what we would now consider to be feminine terms - the lips, flushed cheeks, slender thighs and thin waist are all physical attributes that we would not consider fully masculine today. Rather, they are signs of youth, boyishness, or femininity - all qualities that make the young man of the poet's gaze an object of desire to the presumably older man.

(This makes me wonder if there is much poetry celebrating masculine beauty from this time. I would think that objectifying a full-grown man would be seen as transgressive, as would the expression of female desire, but I could be wrong.)

What I thought was most interesting was Serrano's comment that the sex of the beloved in Al-Sharif al Taliq's writing is actually not known, nor is it important: "The use of the masculine pronoun in referring to the beloved...does not necessarily mean that he is male. Love poems of this period sometimes addressed women with masculine pronouns and masculine forms of nouns. The gender of the addressee here is ambiguous and probably irrelevant" (153).

According to Serrano, all extra-marital desire was considered illicit, so the desire of a man for a young man instead of a young woman would not have been thought of as any more scandalous to express. Where we would now view the divide between homosexual and heterosexual desire as stark, the line between marriage and non-marriage was the primary consideration.

The Desire of the King

Our final class discussion on Silence, during which we noted that Silence seems to be a character devoid of desire, made me question our reading of King Evan's desire. We assume, that because he chooses at the end to marry his young and beautiful great-niece, that he desires her sexually and we see him as a creepy old man because of it.

If we look more closely at the end of the poem, however, we can see that the poet never mentions Evan's physical attraction to Silence. Instead, when she is revealed to be a woman, he praises her only for her loyalty to her father's wishes: "Indeed the price of your loyalty / is far above that of my royalty. / There is no more precious gem, / nor greater treasure, than a virtuous woman" (Lns 6630-6634). Though he is comparing her to a "gem," his language is hardly romantic - the virtue of loyalty is one shared by men and women. Silence's loyalty to the king was, in fact, probably best demonstrated when she was a knight and fighting the rebellious counts on his behalf. He could also be emphasizing her loyalty in comparison to the disloyalty of his wife; perhaps after being betrayed by Eupheme, he desires a new wife who will be as loyal as a knight.

Still, his final decision to marry Silence is seen as a result of much consultation, rather than personal feelings: "Then the king took her to wife - / that's what it said in the book where I found this story - / on the advice of his / most loyal and trusted advisers" (Lns 6676-6680). The advisers seem to have an interest in Silence being married off, in being silenced and brought back into proper gender roles. Perhaps marrying her to the king would mediate the scandal produced by her successful knighthood? She could no longer be perceived as such a threat once she is allied so closely with the king.

Whether the final marriage was a political solution devised by the king's counselors, or the king's decision to marry a more knight-like bride, or the poet's attempt to re-inscribe Silence into a feminine role, it appears far removed from the courtly love of Silence's parents.

Cross Dressing

The motives of Silence seem to be almost as pure as Joan of Arc’s. The debate between nature and nurture is at least weird: it is about Merlin and his veganism and not plainly about Silence. In the case of Silence, nurture has some altruist reason, as preserving her inheritance –it does not seem that altruist now, but it is some family duty at the time. The story is far from sexual motivations and, as always in feminine transvestites, the clothes are for some other purpose different of a sex or gender matter. The Eufeme affair is just collateral damage and a tool to put a little of drama in the story.

The male transvestite in the “Silence” impersonates a nun and his disguise is a trick to get to Eufeme, the queen, who is not precisely a trustable woman. For a male dressing as woman could be only a trick or joke; women transvestism obeys to higher purposes, extreme circumstances and it ends to be a proof of virtue, just as in the case of Jeanne d’Arc.The end of the book is interesting: Silence, back in her feminine form, marries the king who was her former boss and friend and becomes the queen. Is this a sign that virtues are always proper of males? 

The word ‘virtue’ comes from the Latin word ‘virtus’ that also derivates from ‘vir’, the Latin word for man.

Are virtues conceived as a primary masculine quality and only accidental and scarce among women? Silence male actions are praised and she is considered a virtuous woman…