The Difficult Women: Margery Kempe and Sonia Orwell
0
조회
0
다운로드
0
인용
0
참고문헌
키워드
초록
The manuscript of The Book of Margery Kempe and the Winchester manuscript of Mort D’Arthur were found in 1934. Though two manuscripts seem to have nothing to do with each other, Margery Kempe in the first manuscript relates to an unexpected woman of 20th century who transposed the latter manuscript. It is Sonia Orwell who is known better as the second wife of George Orwell. The point that they come across is “transcription.” From the proem of the book, we find Margery obsessed with getting her scribe to write her life into letters. Sonia, starting with the transposition of the Winchester manuscript, lived a life of a female junior editor who “transcribed” male authors’ texts into items in journals or books. In the late Middle Ages, women could guarantee, if any, their textual authority only through male scribes. That explains Margery’s anxiety over her scribes. Sonia took over the role of scribes as an editor, but her position did not have auctoritas medieval scribes enjoyed. She was only a passive channel through which male textual power was transferred to printed materials. Margery and Sonia took textual positions different from each other, but female inferiority in power relations runs parallel for them. It is through these two women that this paper aims to show how stubbornly this inferior status of women (writers) subsists even across the times pan of 600 years with help of theory of queer temporalities.
Abstract
The manuscript of The Book of Margery Kempe and the Winchester manuscript of Mort D’Arthur were found in 1934. Though two manuscripts seem to have nothing to do with each other, Margery Kempe in the first manuscript relates to an unexpected woman of 20th century who transposed the latter manuscript. It is Sonia Orwell who is known better as the second wife of George Orwell. The point that they come across is “transcription.” From the proem of the book, we find Margery obsessed with getting her scribe to write her life into letters. Sonia, starting with the transposition of the Winchester manuscript, lived a life of a female junior editor who “transcribed” male authors’ texts into items in journals or books. In the late Middle Ages, women could guarantee, if any, their textual authority only through male scribes. That explains Margery’s anxiety over her scribes. Sonia took over the role of scribes as an editor, but her position did not have auctoritas medieval scribes enjoyed. She was only a passive channel through which male textual power was transferred to printed materials. Margery and Sonia took textual positions different from each other, but female inferiority in power relations runs parallel for them. It is through these two women that this paper aims to show how stubbornly this inferior status of women (writers) subsists even across the times pan of 600 years with help of theory of queer temporalities.
참고문헌 (29)
- Bowker, Gordon, "Inside George Orwell: A Biography" (2003), Palgrave Macmillan
- Chappell, Julie A., "Perilous Passages: The Book of Margery Kempe, 1534-1934" (2013), Palgrave MacMillan
- Corman, Brian, "Women Novelists before Jane Austen: The Critics and Their Canons" (2008), U of Toronto P
- Copeland, Rita, "Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages" (1995), Cambridge UP
- Davis, Isabel, "A Companion to The Book of Margery Kempe", pp.17~34 (2004), D. S. Brewer
- Dean, Jodi, "The Object Next Door: Review essay on Kenneth Reinhard, Eric Santner, and Slavoj Žižek, The Neighbor, Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More, and Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View", Political Theory, 35(3), pp.371~378 (2007)
- Dinshaw, Carolyn, "How Soon Is Now?: Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time" (2012), Duke UP
- Freeman, Elisabeth, "Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories" (2010), Duke UP
- Holbrook, Sue Ellen, "The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England. Exeter Symposium IV. Papers Read at Dartington Hall", pp.27~46 (1987), D. S. Brewer
- Gilbert, Sandra, "A Mad Woman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination" (1979), Yale University Press
- Hirsch, John, "Author and Scribe in The Book of Margery Kempe", Medium Aevum, 44, pp.145~150 (1975)
- Kelliher, Hilton, "The Rediscovery of Margery Kempe: A Footnote", The British Library Journal, 23(2), pp.259~263 (1986)
- Kempe, Margery, "The Book of Margery Kempe. Early English Text Society" (1985), Oxford UP
- 이희구, "The Book of Margery Kempe: Criticisms and Queer Temporalities", 영미문학페미니즘, 23(3), pp.59~79 (2015), 한국영미문학페미니즘학회
- Mahoney, Dhira B., "Margery Kempe: A Book of Essays", pp.37~50 (1992), Garland Publishing
- Marcus, Sharon, "Queer Theory for Everyone: A Review Essay", Signs, 31(1), pp.191~218 (2005)
- Marek, Jayne E., "Women Editing Modernism: “Little” Magazines & Literary History" (1995), UP of Kentucky
- Oliver, Clementine, "The Middle Ages in Texts and Texture: Reflections on Medieval Sources", pp.323~332 (2011), U of Toronto P
- Orwell, "George. 1984" (1949), Harcourt
- Seager, Nicholas, "The Rise of the Novel" (2012), Palgrave
- Sheldon, Michael, "Friends of Promise: Cyril Connolly and the World of Horizon" (1989), Harper and Row
- Spurling, Hilary, "The Girl from the Fiction Department: A Portrait of Sonia Orwell" (2002), Coutnerpoint
- Tarvers, Josephine, "The Alleged Illiteracy of Margery Kempe: A Reconsideration of the Evidence", Medieval Perspectives, 11, pp.113~124 (1996)
- Voaden, Rosalynn, "God’s Words, Women’s Voices: The Discernment of Spirits in the Writing of Late-Medieval Women Visionaries" (1999), York Medieval P
- Wallace, David, "Strong Women: Life, Text, and Territory, 1347-1645" (2011), Oxford UP
- Watson, Nicholas, "Voices in Dialogue: Reading Women in the Middle Ages", pp.395~434 (2005), University of Notre Dame Press
- Žižek, Slavoj, "The Parallax View" (2009), The MIT P