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Is female “madness” best understood as a rational response to a patriarchal society, as a construct of a patriarchal society, or neither? Discuss with reference to Margery Kempe.
Brice Ezell This is a rough version of this paper; feel free to send me a message via my Academiapage with any comments.
I thank Richard Lawes and Lexi Eikelbloom of Regent’s Park College, University of Oxford, for their comments on various drafts of this essay. To engage in a study of Margery Kempe and her Book is to plunge headfirst into a scholarly debate of oscillating opinion, which ranges from “saintly mystic” on one end to “hysterical exhibitionist” on the other.1 Though hailed by many as a signpost for Christian devotion and mysticism, her intense, unshakeable bouts of sobbing to some scholars indicate a legitimate psychotic issue. Gordon Claridge, Ruth Pryor, and Gwen Watkins, in their psycho-literary analyses in Sounds from the Bell Jar , argue that “given [her] mixture of affective and schizophrenic features,” a psychiatrist in the present day would have no choice but to diagnose her with “‘schizoaffective psychosis,’ precipitated in the first instance by childbirth.”2 Others who have undertaken psychological readings of The Book of Margery Kempe have not come to a universal agreement on a diagnosis of
(^1) Volume 4 (1985), 34. William B. Ober, “Margery Kempe: Hysteria and Mysticism Reconciled,” in Literature and Medicine (^2) (Hampshire, UK: MacMillan, 1990), 69. This diagnosis is made with some caution for anachronism, a Gordon Claridge, Ruth Pryor, and Gwen Watkins, Sounds from the Bell Jar: Ten Psychotic Authors. point that will be addressed further in this essay.
the titular mystic; Richard Lawes, for example, “suggest[s] that temporal lobe epilepsy is a much more likely diagnosis than any form of recurrent psychotic ‘madness.’” The preponderance of psychological readings of Kempe have in large part crowded out feminist readings of the Book , a surprising phenomenon given the amount of feminist reappraisals of her contemporary and fellow mystic Julian of Norwich. Claims such as the one made by Verena E. Neuberger in her Margery Kempe: A Study in Early English Feminism , where she declares Kempe “the first English feminist,”4 are less prevalent than the more extreme ones about Kempe’s mental health. Because of how extreme her emotional reactions to her religious experiences are, it on one hand makes sense why the critical consensus seems to be, in the words of Marion Glasscoe, “Perhaps the most helpful perspective from which to view Margery’s spirituality is that provided by modern medicine.”5 Despite the legitimate psychological criteria used by these writers when attempting to retroactively diagnose Kempe, there nonetheless remains an undercurrent of antiquated—not to mention incorrect—psychological terms, namely “hysteria” or the much looser “madness.” Of the many difficulties the literary scholar faces when s/he approaches the text of The Book of Margery Kempe from either a psychological or a feminist perspective, anachronism stands out as the most prominent. To speak of “patriarchy,” “psychosis,” and even the notion of a “subject” in the political sense, is to invoke a series of terms and associations that did not exist in Kempe’s time. As Karma Lochrie writes in her “feminist
(^3) Margery Kempe and Thomas Hoccleve,” in (^) Richard Lawes, “Psychological Disorder and the Autobiographical Impulse in Julian of Norwich, Writing Religious Women: Female Spiritual and Textual Practices in Late Medieval England University of Wales Press, 2000), 230. , eds. Denis Renevey and Christina Whitehead (Cardiff, UK: (^4) Lang, 1994). 175-181. Verena E. Neuberger, Margery Kempe: A Study in Early English Feminism (Berlin, Germany: Peter (^5) in England, Wales, and Ireland Marion Glasscoe, qtd in Lawes, “The Madness of Margery Kempe,” in, ed. Marion Glasscoe (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 1999), 147. The Medieval Mystical Tradition
disparagement” in the case of Kempe.8 A more specific word that has been used to describe Kempe and other female mystics, one with explicitly gendered connotations, is “hysteria,” which Lawes notes is “the most common” diagnosis given to Kempe.9 This word, of course, has also been abandoned in the clinical lexicon of modern psychiatry. Using these now antiquated terms as springboards for analysis, literary and psychological criticisms of Kempe have utilized appropriate clinical diagnoses, such as the previously mentioned diagnoses by Lawes and Claridge, Pryor, and Watkins. For the purposes of this essay, “madness” will be taken in two ways: (1) in the antiquated fashion, referring to any “mad” behavior whatsoever, and (2) the clinically proper understanding of “madness,” meaning any diagnosis based on modern psychological principles that has attempted to correct for the loose diagnosis that has resulted from the use of the word “madness.” By way of example, the aforementioned diagnosis of schizoaffective psychosis would be a proper way of understanding “madness” in that it takes an imprecise term and uses medically up-to-date knowledge to allow for a more precise diagnosis. Patriarchy is another concept worth defining, given that, as previously mentioned, this notion and its feminist associations did not exist in Kempe’s time. The complexity of patriarchy and the theory surrounding it is vast, and for the sake of this argument a rather simple definition will be used. In defending Kempe’s role as an early feminist, Neuberger points out that she “fought for a sphere where [she] could make [her] own decisions.” Given the primordial stages of both feminism and female subjectivity at Kempe’s point in
(^8) Lawes, “Madness of Margery Kempe,” 149. 910 Ibid. This second understanding presumes that Kempe can be retroactively diagnosed. Though this is a big assumption to make, in fairness to the question at hand, and given that many of the psychological readingsof Kempe come from a place of genuine medical concern and understanding rather than an attempt to dismiss her for her supposed “lunacy,” I believe it prudent to take the possibility of mental illness inKempe seriously. 11 Neuberger, Ibid.
history, patriarchy is most helpfully understood as a social order in which women were systematically unable to meaningfully make their own life choices. Even those scholars who read Kempe in a positive, empowered light, as Christopher Roman does, are forced to admit that she is forced to function within male-defined roles: “Each of her positions has a function: when she pleases Jesus, she is like a daughter, when she weeps, she is like a mother… and when she sorrows for her distance from heaven, she is like a spouse.” Kempe’s “madness,” for the clinically minded reader or for those of her contemporaries who viewed her as “mad,” begins with the birth of her first child. Leading up to the birth, she “was labored with great attacks of illness.”13 Immediately after, she witnessed, “as she thought, devils open their mouths, all inflamed with burning flames of fire as if they should have swallowed her in.”14 Post-partum depression, as it is now understood, is a common phenomenon amongst mothers, though in Kempe’s case the leap from the physiological to the psychological is quite jarring in its demonic quality. Kempe’s contemporaries, however, would have found the shift quite understandable, as Claridge, Pryor, and Watkins explain: “To the mediaeval mind, madness was a direct result of, and punishment for, unacknowledged or unrepented sin.”15 In Kempe’s case, this “sin” would in her mind refer to her not reporting to her confessor as was required for proper penance; during times of “good health,” she was deceived by “her enemy, the devil” into believing that she “could do penance by herself alone.”16 This ties in with the accusations of Lollardry that plagued Kempe’s spiritual
(^12) Transformation of Christian Spirituality in the Late Middle Ages Christopher Roman, Domestic Mysticism in Margery Kempe and Dame Julian of Norwich: A (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 2005),
- 13 Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe , trans. and ed. Lynn Staley (New York, NY: Norton, 2001), 6. All references to the 14 Ibid. Book refer to this Norton Critical Edition. 1516 Claridge, Pryor, and Watkins, Ibid, 49.Kempe, Ibid.
schizoaffective psychosis, Claridge, Pryor, and Watkins still recognize the limitations of retroactive diagnosis: “All psychiatric assessment procedures contain an instruction to set aside as diagnostically insignificant any experience that occurs as part of a shared religious or subcultural belief system.”22 With this diagnostic criterion in mind, it becomes evident that to identify Kempe’s role in responding to the patriarchy of her time is to call into question her religious experience. The previously mentioned distinction between the meanings of “madness” is crucial to aid in deciphering this issue. If “madness” is taken to mean the flawed, pseudo- psychological category that Kempe’s contemporaries placed her in, the answer to the term’s functioning would clearly be that it is an extension of patriarchy. Post-partum depression, the catalyst of Kempe’s perceived psychological issues, was poorly understood in her age, meaning that for anyone who labeled her as such was operating on deeply faulty information. Being in a place of inferiority where her diagnosis would be solely determined by male doctors and church leaders—given that her supposed madness is inextricably bound with her religious experience—Kempe would have no agency in making choices regarding her medical treatment. The other meaning of “madness,” having to do with the ways in which modern psychological methods have rectified long- standing nonspecific words like “madness or “hysteria,” also runs the risk of such totalizing diagnosis. Claridge, Pryor, and Watkins’ invoking of the psychiatric rule of putting aside religious and subcultural experience means that were a psychologist to deem her “mad” based on modern criteria, he would be in large part to rule out the legitimacy of Kempe’s religious experience. From a modern clinical perspective or an
(^22) showed evidence of genuine psychopathology.” Claridge, Pryor, and Watkins, Ibid, 67-8. This nonetheless does not stop them from positing that “she
outdated pseudo-psychological one, Kempe appears the victim of a patriarchal construct, not an active dissident against it. Yet that distinction may not be so binary as it seems. Even if one were to hypothetically grant that Kempe suffered a psychological malady, either in the short or long term,23 there is no reason this madness could not function as a response to patriarchy, potentially even a rational one. Put another way, it can be said that an irrational system—one based on the arbitrary preference of one half of the human race over the other—necessarily generates irrational responses. But while the response may be irrational in content, i.e. it is to some degree psychotic, that the response is irrational is itself rational. To help explain this paradoxical idea, it is helpful to turn to Liz Herbert McAvoy’s handling of gender essentialism in her reading of The Book of Margery Kempe. McAvoy writes, What is important, however, is that essentialist discourse should not be deployed for purposes of dogma or ideological domination as is the case under patriarchy, but as a disruptive interventionist strategy which, by throwing some light on how that hegemony operates, can point towards how its prescription may be escaped, evaded or displaced. Like essentialism, madness has been a mechanism enforced in patriarchal societies the world over. Because of the way it falsely oppresses and limits the experiences of women, one could not expect the system to churn out entirely “rational” results. In order to
(^23) reading of the Lawes, for example, while comfortable in invoking contemporary psychological language in his Book , not to mention his diagnosis of temporal lobe epilepsy, disputes the notion that Kempe was a lifelong psychotic. “Though Kempe’s emotions are strong, and often expressed in rather ‘theatrical’ways, I would argue that they are not ‘shifting and shallow’ [a DSM-IV criterion for histrionic personality disorder]. Her emotional content is remarkably consistent throughout thein achieving her spiritual ends, often in the face of considerable danger and opposition.” See Lawes, Ibid, Book , and so is her determination
- 24 Liz Herbert McAvoy, Authority and the Female Body in the Writings of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2004), 16.
English feminist,” there are undeniably shocking things about her life. In some instances, these are the same things that make her such a controversial figure still today; as Roman notes, in contrast to Julian of Norwich, whose “visionary experiences” occurred in the “enclosure” of her role as an anchoress, Kempe went out into the world and actively challenged people from England to Jerusalem, allowing her to actively challenge the “spiritual authority between institution and individual.”28 Moreover, she upended norms of marriage by cutting a bargain with her husband that allowed her to not have to have sex with him, after which she “adapted [her marriage] to suit her.”29 Both of these actions far from suggest the delusions of a raving “madwoman”; however, nor do they depict the norm-upending actions of a radical. Rather, they paint the picture of a woman who, in her own ways, creating an experience that nudged against patriarchal norms in a considerable fashion. Today, the literary world knows her for the remarkable achievement of the first autobiography in the English language. Looking to the definition of patriarchy mentioned earlier in this paper, Kempe clearly does stand out as one who, to some degree, was able to create a space for herself in a system bent on excluding her. If she was truly “mad” in her methods, she was no more “mad” then the patriarchal society she lived in. Had Kempe the chance to defend her Book against accusations by the likes of the priests she so often had to square off with, she would have reacted much like Picasso did to the German soldier. “Did you do this?” the priest would ask. “No, you did this!” she would respond, reminding him that it is not only the work of the Lord that drove her to document her experiences; it was also “the Pope and all his cardinals,” “all archbishops
2829 Roman, Ibid, 213.Neuberger, Ibid, 177.
and bishops,” “all the order of priesthood,” and indeed “all men and women of religion.”
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Claridge, Gordon, Pryor, Ruth, and Gwen Watkins. Sounds from the Bell Jar: Ten Psychotic Authors. Hampshire, UK: MacMillan, 1990. Print.
30 Kempe, Ibid, 182.
