The embarrassments of confession: Reading Margery Kempe today
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The embarrassments of confession: Reading Margery Kempe today
Ye a J u n g P a r k Department of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA.
Abstract An underexplored but key point of critical and affective response to Margery Kempe’s Book is its perceived double excess: an over-eagerness to over-share the self that can potentially ‘embarrass’ the reader. Insomuch as triggers for embarrassment – what counts as excessive or inappropriate – are coded according to gendered and racialized social norms, undercurrents of embarrassment silently perpetuate the power relations behind traditional negative responses to the text, responses we like to believe we’ve left behind. This essay takes Kempe’s text as a case study for analyzing the habits of interpretation that lead to ‘embarrassed’ readings of confession, and explores the implications of such habits for how we read confessions and self-revelations today, particularly those from speakers marked as different from the mainstream, as Kempe persistently has been. A closer look at the embarrassment response highlights for us the intersections of confessional practice, the reading of intentions (hidden or otherwise), and the struggle for rights to interpretation itself. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2020) 11, 253–263. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-020-00177-6
The history of Margery Kempe scholarship is also a history of recalibrating readers’ reactions to ‘her written confession and testimony’ (McAvoy, 1999, 43). In her time and now, Kempe is a magnet of affective response, and people ‘continue to react very strongly, one way or another – love her or hate her’
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postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies www.palgrave.com/journals
Vol. 11, 2-3, 253–263
Park
1 See Bremner (1992) for a metacritical review of early scholarly reactions to Kempe. 2 For an interesting selection of reader responses, see Bale (2014, 16) and ‘Dr. Virago’ (2006).
3 For examples of such contextualizing scholarship, see Riehle (2014) and Ashley (1998).
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(Atkinson, 2015). For many years after the 1934 rediscovery of the Book, readers tended to make harsh judgments about the text’s peculiarities and its general truth-value. Kempe’s figuration as ‘petty, neurotic, vain,’ full of ‘morbid self-engrossment,’ and ‘very hysterical,’ to borrow some iconic language (Allen, 1940, lxiv; Colledge and Walsh, 1978, 38; Knowles, 1961, 147), is based on doubts about the trustworthiness of Kempe’s self-presentation. These oncecommon loud expressions of aversion to what Clarissa Atkinson (2015) has memorably dubbed Kempe’s ‘ick factor’ are now near-obsolete in Kempe scholarship,1 but the familiar and near-automatic processes of intuitive second-guessing that fuel such responses are alive to this day among readers of Kempe.2 Today’s readers still face a ‘she said, they said’ tension between what Kempe’s text states and what we, as savvy readers and postmedieval psychologizers, expect to have taken place,
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