Margery Kempe and Rudali: A Transgressive Journey Within

This article examines the life of fourteenth century mystic Margery Kempe and how she has used her body to defy immobility – concretization of domesticity and chastity. In the process, attempts have been made to look into the connection between food and body – what happens when one stops having food, what significance a body with empty stomach carries socially. Is starvation an escape from the way the body is perceived in Medieval Times? Mystics like Margery Kempe and her contemporaries St. Bridget of Sweden, Julian of Norwich used to starve day in and day out to do penance. Does a starved human body serve another purpose besides doing penance? Particular roles are set for particular bodies in society. When the very image of the body does not excite temptation, the body somehow bypasses the very rules prescribed for it. Critics have argued such a body creates a space for an alternative existence. The body becomes sacred, like the body of Christ. This process of creating a haloed body is achieved through performance. These ritualistic acts, performed by the body, enable the person in creating a space which is transgressive in nature. Margery seems to escape the roles of her gender - she stops being the wife of John Kempe; she stops being the mother of fourteen children; she even stops sleeping with her husband, however John often forced her to pay the marital debt. But it becomes problematic when she, having refused her husband’s body, desires the holy body of Christ. Therefore, a sacred body proves to be tempting. She, having escaped from the very roles which her gender sets for her, ends up following the same, only this time with a more masculine man, Christ himself. Now, does she really escape from her gendered body?