“Confusyd in hirself and hir owyn unstabylnes:”
Plurality, Bricolage, and Infinite Regress in The Book of Margery Kempe
There is a plurality of spiritual signifiers in The Book of Margery Kempe. We all know of Kempe’s “gift of tears,” of her ecstatic visions, her commitment to wearing white and creating a chaste marriage for herself. However irritating these signifiers may be, at first read the semiotics appear to be stable. Kempe cries readily when free association brings to mind the earthly life of Christ; she details a concierge Christ figure who is available to satisfy her emotional and practical needs; Kempe wears white despite ridicule and she labors diligently through mockery, marital rape, and clerical resistance to gain permission for a chaste life. However, by deconstructing The Book of Margery Kempe, we can see the instability and fluidity in her seemingly homogenous spiritual signifiers of tears, the bricolage of her ideas about marriage, and the infinite regress of her relationship with Christ. The Book of Margery Kempe, promotes the ideology of personal affective piety while at the same time revealing the instability of the ideology; in doing so Kempe’s text is de-centered from late medieval female devotion.
Plurality of Signfiers …show more content…
Embedded within the surface phenomena of this affective piety are two elements, the langue of pious expression and the parole of Kempe’s tears. According to Ferdinand de Saussure, in his early twentieth century Course in General Linguistics, langue encompasses the abstract, systematic rules and conventions of a signifying system--it is independent of, and pre-exists, individual users which is termed parole. In the late medieval langue of affective piety, Kempe’s parole is not words but the readable signifier of her
Plurality, Bricolage, and Infinite Regress in The Book of Margery Kempe
There is a plurality of spiritual signifiers in The Book of Margery Kempe. We all know of Kempe’s “gift of tears,” of her ecstatic visions, her commitment to wearing white and creating a chaste marriage for herself. However irritating these signifiers may be, at first read the semiotics appear to be stable. Kempe cries readily when free association brings to mind the earthly life of Christ; she details a concierge Christ figure who is available to satisfy her emotional and practical needs; Kempe wears white despite ridicule and she labors diligently through mockery, marital rape, and clerical resistance to gain permission for a chaste life. However, by deconstructing The Book of Margery Kempe, we can see the instability and fluidity in her seemingly homogenous spiritual signifiers of tears, the bricolage of her ideas about marriage, and the infinite regress of her relationship with Christ. The Book of Margery Kempe, promotes the ideology of personal affective piety while at the same time revealing the instability of the ideology; in doing so Kempe’s text is de-centered from late medieval female devotion.
Plurality of Signfiers …show more content…
Embedded within the surface phenomena of this affective piety are two elements, the langue of pious expression and the parole of Kempe’s tears. According to Ferdinand de Saussure, in his early twentieth century Course in General Linguistics, langue encompasses the abstract, systematic rules and conventions of a signifying system--it is independent of, and pre-exists, individual users which is termed parole. In the late medieval langue of affective piety, Kempe’s parole is not words but the readable signifier of her