Margery Kempe: A Changed Woman

There has always been an argument on how the way you dress is typically the way that you usually feel or even the way you want other people to perceive you. Margery Kempe had an anomalous, yet complicated technique of explaining, way of showing to the audience what she was feeling or what she was trying to convey to the reader. Margery Kempe created this biography that has it’s own way of making the audience understand the way she went throughout her life. Brought to my attention when trying to break this book down, I fathomed she is a changed woman from the beginning of the book to the end of the book and an immense hint to this theory comes from the idea of the color of clothes she wears. So, the importance of the colors gold, white and black …show more content…
Priest Wenslawe had only given her this charge or commandment to Kempe since he was trying to humiliate her as well as embarrass her in front of God in a way which he knew would hurt Kempe in the situation, since as holy as she is, disobeying God is the last thing she wants to do. This wasn’t genuinely effective since she quotes, “Sir, our Lord was not displeased though I wore white clothes, for he willed that I do so” (Kempe 62), she noted that Priest Wenslawe’s plan didn’t end the way he contemplated it to be and thought that her God was actually impressed with the obedience of what the priest had asked her …show more content…
The symbolism of this transformation in clothing was how Kempe showed her audience of how she went from one recognition of herself to a complete opposite person. Mary C. Erler reports that, “The gradual adoption of white clothes coincides with the central period of change and redefinition of Margery’s life”. Kempe had a different identity throughout her whole life, she went from being a self-obsessed woman who cared for what she wore and the way she looked at other people’s lives, to being still self-absorbed but in a different way, wearing white and black (at times) but being a slave to God, willingly or not. God is her one and only and nothing else mattered as long as she made God