Margery Kempe's Dissenting Fictions

Renaissance Quarterly, Summer, 1997 by Jean LeDrew Metcalfe

In support of her interpretation of the Book as social criticism, Staley takes pains to establish Kempe's authorial agency by emphatically distinguishing the work's author from its subject. Margery is not Kempe, but a carefully constructed persona; her holiness, illiteracy, nonconformity, and social liminality each contribute to Kempe's larger artistic design. Moreover, the mediation of scribes in the production of the work does not diminish Kempe's creative autonomy, but functions as one of her many "carefully contrived strategies" (11) intended to authorize the potentially radical character of her writing. The explicit emphasis on Margery's spiritual development, then, disguises a more profound concern for the nature of human community - the ways in which a community is constituted and its values perpetuated. Thus, Staley contends, Kempe subtly scrutinizes the commercialism of church and state, the hierarchical ordering of contemporary power structures, and the ineffectuality of male authority. Exhibiting Lollard sympathies, Kempe endorses the use of the vernacular and valorizes the notion of individual spiritual autonomy.

Insisting upon the fictionality of Kempe's writing, its treatment of provocative social and religious issues, and its narrative sophistication, Staley reexamines the Book by placing it alongside the major (male-authored) texts of the medieval canon. Believing that the author's gender has negatively affected the critical reception of the work, she repeatedly likens Kempe's writing to that of Chaucer and Langland in its "masterly" (55) artistry and its "shrewd" (77) social commentary. Staley summarizes this affinity in her concluding chapter:

[The Book] makes most sense when juxtaposed with poems like Piers Plowman or the Canterbury Tales or to later medieval works like the mystery cycles. The Book shares with those works an episodic structure, a tendency to destabilize the meanings it supposedly affirms and to him at an overarching internal structure that is never allowed to predominate, and a sophisticated use of words to convey and confuse meaning (171-72).

While her project dearly has feminist overtones, Staley nevertheless falls short of a feminist reading of Kempe. In her effort to position Kempe as "a worthy heir to Chaucer" (85), she fails to interrogate the criteria of canonicity that have privileged male authors in the past. In fact, her approbation of Kempe's writing remains for the most part theoretically ungrounded.

Despite these potential shortcomings, Staley's acute sensitivity to the complexity of Kempe's text results in an adept reading of the strategies of concealment, dislocation, and deflection that allow Kempe to express heretical ideas under the guise of orthodoxy. With an admirable clarity of style, she effectively adumbrates an intricate narrative of dissent, rendering both Margery and Kempe far more fascinating figures than most readers have hitherto acknowledged.

JEAN LEDREW METCALFE University of Western Ontario