B. A. WINDEATT.  The Book of Margery Kempe.  New York:  Penguin,
1973.  



      Read together, Pernoud's Joan of Arc and Margery Kempe's
autobiography leave the reader with startlingly different
attitudes towards the respective heroines.  Although they both
suffered from visions and other disturbances of reality, the
women approached their worlds, and missions, quite differently. 
Where Joan was a forceful and charismatic leader, Margery was a
wanderer and possibly a spiritual poser.
      In Joan's case, her mental disturbances (assuming they were
not pretended) have a strange sort of charm; Margery's seem dark
and troubling.  Historians untrained in psychoanalysis ought to
avoid the temptation to analyze historical figures over cultural
and temporal distances such as these.  In this situation, though,
the enticement is too great.  
      Margery displays a radical divorcement from her-self, from
her body.  This theme of alienation from her body is carried
throughout the work.  She consistently refers to herself in the
third person, as if she were an observer rather than a
participant.  She totally ignores her childhood and instead
begins her chronicle at her maturity and marriage.  Whatever
happened before this has been dismissed as unimportant, except
for passages referring to some great sin previous to her
marriage.  After the birth of her first child, she fell into a
'madness' which entailed the nightmarish hallucination of demons
"pawing at her... sometimes pulling her and hauling her about...
(42)."  During this period she also "pitilessly tore the skin of
her body."  Once she emerged from this condition she started
abruptly towards a life of spiritual mysticism.  
      Again,  following the pattern of the divorcement from her
body, she began to plead with her husband to renounce his
conjugal rights:  "she would rather...have eaten and drunk the
ooze and muck...(46)"  Here is a strange double-mortification --
repugnant sexual relations or the debasement of the body by
eating muck.  She adopted the hair-shirt (although Jesus would
later advise her that an external hair-shirt was unimportant.  
      In addition to this psychic self-mortification, she also
experience what might be best described as paranoiac delusions of
persecution.  She refers frequently to the idea that others
believe she is a hypocrite or an object of ridicule (68, 75, 79, 
et cetera).  One of the causes for whatever ridicule might have
existed would have been her exceedingly strange public behavior,
such as that of bursting into tears whenever she saw a baby boy
or handsome man (123).  She was seeing in these males the
transcendent godhead.  This confusion between real men and God
brings all of her other problems together.  It is clear that the
ideas of marriage and physical relations are not repugnant to
her, only the earthly practice of same.  She describes her Christ
as a literal groom (123) and healing, sanctifying bedpartner
(126-7).  It is clear that here she seeks sexual healing for some
previous sexual wounding.   Christ becomes the perfect husband,
loving, caring, sensual, gentle and, of course, all-powerful (he
is God, after all).  
      The conclusion to be drawn from this is that she suffered
some horrible pre-marital sexual trauma (whether rape, child
sexual abuse, or rampant promiscuity -- the details are
unimportant) and that she detested herself and her body for this
(for her body's provocation of her abuser(s)?).  She therefore
mortifies her body and suffers a life-long penance of copious
weeping.  Her fixation on Christ seems to be a result of a dual
concept:  that men are beautiful and desirable, and that she is
bad because she had tempted or provoked a man to sexual violence. 
      It is perhaps unfair to compare Margery's strange, even
twisted, personality to that of someone as popular as Joan, but
still the comparison comes naturally.  Joan will be regarded as a
secular heroine, while Margery can be a role model for women only
in the context of the Church.  
      
Jason Carr
http://www.mousetrap.net/~mouse/uta/