13. ‘For we be doubel of God’s making’: Writing, Gender and the Body in Julian of Norwich
13
‘For we be doubel of God’s making’:
Writing, Gender and the Body in Julian of Norwich
LIZ HERBERT McAVOY
In her critique of traditional psychoanalytical discourse pertaining to the threatening body of the mother, Luce Irigaray calls for a non-phallic language which, rather than seeking to control this perceived ‘threat’, will embrace the ‘love, desire, language, art, the social, the political, the religious’ which she claims the mother brings to the world and which is denied her under patriarchy.1 For Irigaray, in order for ‘woman’ to (re)discover her place within her own subjectivity and language, she has to cross the chasm back to the place of the mother and reject traditional oedipal configurations which sever her from that primary bond:
We have to discover a language which does not replace the bodily encounter, as paternal language attempts to do, but which can go along with it, words which do not bar the corporeal, but which speak corporeal.2
The oedipal equation which, within Freudian analysis, renders sexual difference primary within human culture, functions, according to Amy Hollywood’s appraisal, ‘to naturalize the multiple forms of power and oppression on which white, propertied, Christian, European men grounded their supremacy’.3 In other words, the Freudian configuration of the mother leads to a fetishized, suffering and desubjectivized female body which is dependent upon traditional political and institutional authority for its meaning. I argue that it is just such an alienated and desubjectivized body which Julian herself is in possession of at the moment of her first visionary encounter with the divine ‘Other’, experienced during her thirty-first year as a woman in 1373. It is also this alienated body which provides the starting point for her attempts to articulate in writing both that encounter and the body which receives it, whether for her own ruminative and exegetical purposes, or with a specific readership in mind. As I shall demonstrate, the bodily nature of Julian’s encounter with the divine Other compels her over the course of the next forty or so years of her life to develop a powerfully persuasive hermeneutic of the female body which will draw increasingly upon the same semiotics, or sign system, of primary unity (with the mother) as postulated by Julia Kristeva in more recent times.
This is, however, a reading of Julian’s hermeneutics which some contemporary commentators have been at pains to reject, in spite of Julian’s foregrounding of female and feminine bodies in her writing and the famously innovative representation of God as the universal Mother of humanity. Perhaps most comprehensive in this context was David Aers who, in a 1996 essay, wrote emphatically of Julian: ‘[Julian] sets aside the “feminine” matrix so extensively illustrated by Bynum … and she does not present herself as a specifically “feminine” subject’ (emphasis in the original).4 For Aers, Julian actively resists aligning herself with the feminine, nor does she exploit any sense of female subjectivity for hermeneutical or authoritative purposes in the way posited by Caroline Walker Bynum in the context of other medieval holy women.5 As a result, there is for Aers also little feminist psychoanalytical potential within Julian’s writing, in spite of the important work undertaken in this area of female mysticism by Simone de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray, for example:6
There is nothing to direct readers’ imaginations in the directions favored by Bynum’s medieval subjects, ones that also fascinate those modern scholars who think they find convergences here with Kristeva’s celebration of ‘abjection’.7
Such an appraisal, as I shall demonstrate, tends towards the one-dimensional in its deprioritizing of the conglomeration of female-associated symbols and their multiplicity of meanings which proliferate in Julian’s texts. Julian quite clearly, particularly in the early stage of her writing, regarded herself as both female and feminine, as Nicholas Watson has also effectively argued. According to Watson, ‘Julian accepts the social models which define proper female activity’ but does so in a way which resists ‘the passivity and low prestige with which they are traditionally associated’.8 As I shall also argue, Julian does far more than just ‘accept’ those social models laid down for her by traditional socio-religious ideological stances: she continually ruminates upon them and turns to them in increasingly complex ways in her search for a suitable idiom and hermeneutic with which to express the mystical encounter. Although per se the mystical experience is ontologically inexpressible, nevertheless, like Julian’s own, it takes place in the ‘here and now’ of bodily ciphering. Moreover, it is to this ‘here and now’ to which the mystic must eventually return and from which position she must attempt to both make sense of and articulate her experience. And, of course, the ‘here and now’ of Julian, as a great many of the other essays included here attest, was rooted in the urban life of late-medieval England, its politico-religious hegemonies, its entrenched gender ideologies and her own deeply gendered body. It is, therefore, precisely this ‘doubleness’ of the extraordinary nature of the mystic’s experience and the ordinariness of her local frames of awareness (what I will identify as her ‘inside–outside perceptions’) – that is to say, her occupancy of a divinely privileged space within the ‘here and now’ – which requires a language of ‘doubleness’ to capture and articulate it. Such a language will attempt to foreground what Hollywood terms the ‘ambiguities within bodily existence’ and reflect the inescapable fact that mystical transcendence is effected ‘only through the body’.9
Upon her own early admission in the first of her two texts,10 A Vision Shown to a Devout Woman, as a young woman Julian had actively sought from God the abjection of a ‘bodelye syekenes’ (Vision, 1.2), a wish fully in keeping with accepted late-medieval ascetic practices. By means of this sickness she hoped to gain access to a fuller understanding of Christ’s Passion and share with him the three ‘woundes’ of ‘contrition’, ‘compassion’ and ‘wilfulle langinge to God’ (Vision, 1.40–1). Significantly here, Julian also chooses to identify with the figure of Mary Magdalen (‘I wolde have bene that time with Mary Maudeleyne’: Vision, 1.6), whose experience of Christ was ubiquitously represented in the Middle Ages as both bodily and human, one predicated firmly upon her redeemed abjection as former whore.11 Within contemporary exegetical readings of the Magdalen’s relationship with Christ, however, Christ’s appearance to her before all others and his instructing of her to take the news of the Resurrection to the disciples12 also rendered her apostolorum apostola: ‘apostless to the apostles’,13 essentially a male role but appropriable by Mary Magdalen because of her position as especially chosen messenger of the word of God. Thus, at least on the level of patriarchal discourse, Mary Magdalen was able to transcend the limitations of her formerly dangerous female body and gain access to the ‘traditional’ and ‘institutional’ configurations of power which have always operated within the realm of the masculine and the intellectual.14 Julian’s early use of Mary Magdalen in A Vision, then, suggests that from the outset of her attempts to write she is grappling with issues of the female body and acceptable ways of overcoming its seemingly ontological legacy of cultural problematics. This, of course, is crucial if she is to substantiate the orthodoxy of her own bodily experiences, justify her necessary incursion upon the ‘traditional’ and ‘institutional’ realms of male religious authority and relay her message to her ‘evencristen’: ‘for I am a woman shulde I therefore leve that I shulde nought telle yowe the goodenes of God, sine that I sawe in that same time that it is his wille that it be knawen?’ (Vision, 6.40–2).
The fact that Julian also draws upon another of the popular female saints early in the Short Text would seem to corroborate this search for female authority and expression:
I harde a man telle of halye kyrke of the storye of Sainte Cecille, in the whilke shewinge I understode that she hadde thre woundes with a swerde in the nekke, with the whilke she pinede to the dede. (Vision, 1.36–8)
Here, the invocation of the virginal Saint Cecelia and her torturous path towards youthful martyrdom demonstrates clearly Julian’s toying with suitable role models in order to offer a female context for – and justify – the extraordinary account which is to follow. Like Mary Magdalen, Saint Cecelia also had a specially configured relationship with Christ which was in no small measure dependent upon bodily denial and the redirecting of desire from the worldly towards the spiritual.15 Cecelia was a particularly popular saint in the later Middle Ages and, in the eyes of the Church, another appropriate figure for Julian as a young woman to be identifying with.16 This invocation of Cecelia therefore alerts her readers to Julian’s orthodoxy, further enhanced by the fact that she had learned of the saint’s life from a ‘man […] of halye kyrke’. Here Julian is most likely to be alluding to a sermon which she had heard delivered at church and which had had a marked effect upon her youthful and idealistic imagination. Not only was Cecelia a young woman living within the world, as Julian quite possibly had been at that point in her youth,17 but her life follows the traditional – and, on the surface of it, empowering – hagiographic pattern of the young woman’s resistance to torture and abjection at the hands of a patriarch whose attempts to subdue her ardour for God fail at every juncture. Whilst rendering her, like Mary Magdalen, ‘a powerful preacher, evangelist, and lover of God’,18 nevertheless the hagiographic narrative also constructs Cecelia’s young, sealed and virginal body as a deeply physical and fetishized spectacle entirely dependent on the male gaze for its meaning.19 As such, this body is denied its own female potential as (pro)creative entity, bowing instead to a male-constructed version of itself which is configured to represent an ideal, and virile form of piety. Thus, the body of the virgin martyr constitutes the site both of an unnuanced sexualization and a discursive sexual erasure which, in Irigarayan terms, is merely the product of an institutionalized attempt to grapple with the Real and harness the power of the female-maternal in service of the male symbolic order.20 At the same time, however, it offers the male onlooker a glass through which to catch sight of male divinity and in which he himself is reflected. By controlling the meaning of the hagiographic female body in this way, the ‘man […] of halye kyrke’ (and thus the Church which he represents) and others like him are also able to control human – and particularly female – access to the divine.
I would argue, therefore, that Julian’s early introduction of these popular, mainstream female saints simultaneously allows her to draw on a discourse of male-approved orthodoxy whilst offering a platform to explore the female-focused (pro)creative bodily potential which is denied the female within the male Imaginary but which is central to Julian’s mystical insights. Indeed, as Bynum has suggested in the context of other female mystics, ‘Women drew from the traditional notion of the female as physical a special emphasis on their own redemption by a Christ who was supremely physical because supremely human’.21 Thus, the female body, as a complex and multivalent symbol, carries the potential to ‘not only reflect and shape reality but also invert, question, reject, and transcend it’.22 As we shall see, in both texts Julian toys relentlessly with this body as symbol and as hermeneutic and as a place in which the ‘complexities of desire and identification play out’.23 Thus, whilst drawing initially upon the abject hagiographic body of the female saint in what appear to be conventional ways, Julian converts her into a type of smokescreen from behind which she is able to develop an alternative, authoritative, female-focused exegetical frame of reference – an attempt at a female Imaginary even – with that same body, redefined and predicated firmly on her own, located at its core.
In view of Julian’s identification with Cecelia then, it comes as no surprise that A Vision moves rapidly on to recount a major, life-threatening illness experienced by its author in her thirty-first year. This illness resulted in extreme pain and bodily abjection and endured, in apt Christic fashion, for three days and nights, taking Julian to the brink of death:
Ande when I was thrittye wintere alde and a halfe, God sente me a bodelye syekenes in the whilke I laye thre dayes and thre nightes, and on the ferthe night I toke alle my rightinges of haly kyrke, and wened nought tille have liffede tille daye. And after this I langourede further two dayes and two nightes, and on the thirde night I wenede ofte times to hafe passede, and so wened thaye that were aboute me. (Vision, 2.1–6)
Julian is intent from the onset to stress the severity of her illness, corroborated also by those who are witnessing it alongside her (‘and so wened thaye that were aboute me’). Moreover, it symptomizes itself as an intensely bodily experience (‘my sight begane to faile […] the overe partye of my bodye begane to die […] Mine handes felle downe […] my hede satylde downe on side’: Vision, 2. 29–35). In both A Vision and the longer A Revelation Julian’s narration of this pivotal event relies upon vivid recollection of the bodiliness of her own suffering in its minute detail and upon seeing it from the perspective of others too, in what aptly constitutes a type of ‘double-vision’. In the Short Text particularly, she appears to be casting herself – again like Cecelia – as affective spectacle whose abject body is there to be ‘read’ by both her onlookers and her readers in full hagiographic mode in order to prepare them for the extraordinary revelations which are to follow. By the time she comes to revise this account in her Long Text version, however, Julian will have no need for this type of hagiographic smokescreen with its literary performance of the male Imaginary. Excising all reference to Saint Cecelia from her text, she will turn instead to her own body for the provision of a primary hermeneutic, allowing that body to speak in ways more eloquent than those of the ultimately inadequate ‘paternal language’ of traditional hagiography.24
Also excised from the Long Text is Julian’s representation of her own mother who, in the Short Text, takes up a prominent position in Julian’s sickroom. Here, Julian establishes her as an archetypical Mater Dolorosa figure lamenting the passing of her child and, in so doing, attaches a powerfully affective discourse of Marian piety to the narrative of her own sickness:25 ‘My modere, that stode emanges othere and behelde me, lifted uppe hir hande before me face to lokke min eyen. For she wened I had bene dede or els I hadde diede’ (Vision, 10.26–8). Read alongside the suffering hagiographic body which Julian has also been constructing in A Vision, such an affective moment between mother and child threatens to invoke the same fetishistic appropriation of the (m)other to which I alluded earlier in the context of the virgin martyrologies. Julian is clearly drawing upon internalized cultural discourses of ontological female suffering and ventriloquizing them textually in a less-than-subtle attempt to offer the scene an aura of traditional affective piety. The recognisably affective and specular qualities of this type of account are, however, problematized by the fact that Julian is not dead, merely paralysed bodily by illness and transfixed psychologically by the vision of Christ which, unbeknown to her companions and her mother, is unfolding before her own gaze. Indeed, any affect is negated by the complexity of the multiple perspectives offered by Julian at this point: her own, those of Christ, her mother, her readers. The result is a doubling and redoubling which gives rise to a tension both electric and breathlessly articulated. In effect, Julian is leaving her increasingly abject body behind in the sickroom with the onlookers whilst entering a transcendent, visionary realm. She is quite literally there and elsewhere in a way which will eventually offer her an escape route from traditional readings of her own bodily abjection.
Julian’s initial articulation of these mystical experiences is both sensory and material (‘I […] sette mine eyen’; ‘I sawe the rede blode’; ‘I saide’; ‘smoke come in […] with a grete hete and a foule stinke’; ‘I harde a bodely jangelinge’; ‘I laugh mightelye’: Vision, 2.26; 3.10; 3.14; 21.26–7; 23.3; 8.43). Paradoxically, however, she represents herself and her body as simultaneously configured by a specular logic from without and a transfiguration from within. She is both there and not-there; her body is both abject and transcendent. It is the convoluted doubleness of this inside–outside perception of the body which not only allows for a remarkably nuanced response to her visions but will become fundamental in the Long Text to the forging of a suitable hermeneutic for their articulation and understanding. Moreover, since the scene of its inception is the female-focused and maternalistic space of Julian’s sickroom, and the female-focused and (re)productive space of her female body, it is hardly surprising at all that her primary hermeneutic will also be an intensely female and maternal one.26 Whilst this is in full keeping with Bynum’s assessment of women’s special relationship with redemption via their own Christ-like physicality,27 in Julian’s hands this treatment moves way beyond mere identification with Christ or Mary: for her, a (re)productive female body can both pave the way to and articulate the redemption of a humanity which is, like its deity, reconfigured along female lines. Throughout her writing there is a sense that Julian is striving to construct a female body which functions as both metatext and semiotic framework and which, in its doubleness, will eventually overlay and integrate traditional ‘paternal’ narratives and interpretations.
If we return to the sickroom narrative of A Vision, we can see this fully in action: here, it is the female-focused reciprocity between the bodies of Julian and her mother within the ‘here and now’ of that room which provides the bridge for an articulation of Julian’s transition to the mystical space. Not only does her mother’s anguish merge with Julian’s own physical suffering in a type of imitatio Maria, as I have suggested (‘Herein I sawe in partye the compassion our oure ladye, Sainte Marye’: Vision, 10.37), but, in turn, it leads Julian on to a consideration of how ‘Criste and sho [Mary] ware so anede in love that the gretnesse of hir love was the cause of the mekillehede of hir paine’ (Vision, 10.37–40). Typically, Julian’s use of the verb ‘anede’ here is multifaceted: its obvious maternal associations within this particular context serve to deconstruct the hierarchical gender binary of male/female within the text (Christ’s humanity is one with his mother’s flesh) but the term is also clearly redolent with echoes of primary unity with the mother, of that maternal, pre- or extra-linguistic space identified by Kristeva as the semiotic chora – a space which the virgin martyrologies make such concerted effort to deny in their energetic dismembering of the material, female (pro)creative body.28 Such a space (which Julian will later develop into a full-blown configuration of Christ as ‘oure moder [in whom] we profit and encrese’: Revelation, 58.38) is also identified by Kristeva as the pre-symbolic site of unity which underpins all human existence. As such it is ideally positioned to express the inexpressible which is unfolding before Julian’s eyes, since its origins, like that of mystical unity with God, lie before and beyond language. It is also a realm which ‘does not reduce the subject to one of understanding, but instead opens up within the subject this other scene of pre-symbolic functions’. It is, therefore, a specifically female space since it draws upon the (unremembered but always latent) lost union with the mother and (again recalling the there-and-not-there of Julian’s mystical encounter), ‘is no more than the place where the subject is both generated and negated’.29 Thus, Julian’s insight into the primary unity of Mary and Christ, brought about by the compassion of Julian’s mother for her own child, invokes both a physical and a theological given which rests firmly upon all humanity’s sharing of ‘female’ flesh. In contemplating her own abjection, she recognises in herself the mystical union of humanity with Christ by means of that same female flesh – which, like Christ, she has taken from her mother. Thus, from this early stage of doubling and redoubling in the Short Text, Julian is clearly reading her visionary insights in terms of the feminine and female, plumbing her own experiences of being a woman of the ‘vulnerable flesh’ and her relationship with her own mother for a suitable hermeneutic with which to articulate these highly complex mystical insights. In drawing on both traditional and affective models of femininity and reconfiguring their scope, Julian destabilizes their hegemony, the end product of which is the gestation of a ‘new’ language with which to express an intensely embodied experience of mystical unity which incorporates both male and female.
The Short Text, therefore, offers us the sense that Julian is experimenting with such hermeneutics of the feminine in order to provide an ‘intelligible verbal translation’30 of the ultimately extra-linguistic knowledge of divine unity to which she has been privy. Initially dependent upon the ‘paternal language’ of male, intellectual rationalism to provide this ‘translation’, she soon recognises that this language will no longer do. Pressed by her priest upon her recovery to tell him how she is feeling, Julian’s answer that she ‘hadde raved that daye’ (Vision, 21.7) is redolent with self-doubt and a struggle to arrive at a logical explanation for seemingly inexplicable experiences. Her attempt to embellish this (‘The crosse that stode atte my bedde feete, it bled faste’: Vision, 21.7–8) leaves Julian so abashed and ashamed at her own inability to trust in God’s revelation and articulate it in ways that might make it intelligible, that she is silenced entirely: ‘Bot I couth telle it na preste. For I thoght: “Howe shulde a preste leve me? I leved nought oure lorde God” ‘ (Vision, 21.13–14). Clearly, she is aware that the normal structures of rationalist language are insufficient as a means of articulating the non-rationalist experiences which she has undergone, even more so in the light of a self-doubt which is clearly predicated on traditional gender hierarchies within the confessor–woman binary and the intellectual distance traditionally posited between a ‘lewed, febille, and freylle’ woman and God.
Much of the Short Text, therefore, can be read in terms of a quest for a suitable means of expression which will simultaneously move beyond the rational but will also be accessible to it. Such a language of ‘doubleness’ emerges out of the sickroom-space where Julian herself is most ‘doubled’, that is to say simultaneously most ‘herself’ but most negated, where her subjectivity is both generated and denied. In a flash of visionary insight into primary unity with God-the-Mother (‘I saw a grete aninge betwyx Criste and us’: Vision, 10.44) she leads her readers inexorably towards the bursting forth of an inexpressible and reciprocal joy, a type of jouissance which is the result of this momentary vision of ‘oneness’ with Christ:
And sodaynlye, me behaldande in the same crosse, he chanchede into blisfulle chere. The chaunginge of his chere changed mine, and I was alle gladde and mery as it was possibille. Than brought oure lorde merelye to my minde: ‘Whate es any pointe of thy paine or of thy grefe?’ And I was fulle merye. (Vision, 11.17–20)
This jouissance of ‘aninge’ is one which will again surface many years later in her revised text in which Julian’s representation of God as Mother becomes fully formed. For Julian, ‘The moders service is nerest, rediest, and sekerest: nerest, for it is most of kind; rediest, for it is most of love; and sekerest, for it is most of trewth’ (Revelation, 60.12–14). The maternal principle operates intrinsically at all levels: it is fundamental to nature (‘nerest’), it is an intrinsic component of love (‘rediest’) and deeply and intensely metaphysical (‘sekerest’). Most pertinently, it leads us back to and towards an inexpressible joy: ‘We wit that alle oure moders bere us to paine and to dying. A, what is that? But oure very moder Jhesu, he alone bereth us to joye and to endlesse leving – blessed mot he be!’ (Revelation, 60.15–17). ‘[A]ninge’ with God is thus configured by Julian in terms of a restoration of primary unity with the (m)other in a way that for Julian is again ‘doubel’:
For we be doubel of Gods making: that is to sey, substantial and sensual […] And the seconde person of the trinite is oure moder in kind in oure substantial making, in whom we be grounded and roted, and he is oure moder of mercy in oure sensualite taking. (Revelation, 58.32–6)
Julian’s construction of a hermeneutics of the feminine able to be read within a Kristevan framework also emerges in other areas of her texts, especially in her visceral representations of Christ’s body. Such representations were subject to Elizabeth Robertson’s own scrutiny in 1997 in a pivotal essay regarding Julian’s ubiquitous use of gynaecentric imagery such as blood flows, wombs and enclosure in both her texts.31 As Robertson demonstrated, Julian’s depiction of a suffering Christic body is much dependent upon these patterns of imagery which are, in turn, closely associated with Julian’s development of a hermeneutics of the maternal feminine which I have been examining here. Let us take as one example the Short Text account of the dramatic onset of bleeding which Julian witnesses as her vision of Christ’s Passion ensues:
And in this, sodaynlye I sawe the rede blode trekille downe fro under the garlande alle hate, freshlye, plentefully, and livelye, right as methought that it was in that time that the garlonde of thornes was thrystede on his blessede hede. Right so, both God and man, the same sufferde for me. I conceyvede treulye and mightelye that it was himselfe that shewed it me, withouten any meen. (Vision, 3.10–14)
I choose this particular version because it fully exemplifies Julian’s experimental yet multifaceted use of the image of Christ’s bleeding. Adhering to the traditional affective model which Bynum has established as both feminine and female-focused, Christ’s bleeding emanates from an infinitely suffering, infinitely abject, infinitely fleshly body – a body which, as we have seen, is also that of Christ’s mother, Mary, and, of course, Julian herself as ‘a sinfulle creature lyevande in this wreched fleshe’: Vision, 3.17). This depiction is immediately followed by Julian’s exposition of the hazelnut vision, ‘a littille thinge the quantite of a haselle nutte, lygande in the palme of my hande’ (Vision, 4.7–8) which, ‘as rounde as any balle’ (Vision, 4.8–9), can be read as both a macrocosmic world and a microcosmic womb.32 Julian then explicitly brings the reader’s attention back to the newly pregnant Mary as directly inherent to this gynaecentric context she is constructing here: ‘In this, God brought oure ladye to mine understandinge. I sawe hir gasteleye in bodilye lyekenes, a simpille maidene and a meeke, yonge of age, in the stature that sho was when sho conceivede’ (Vision, 4.21–3; my emphasis). So, what we have in the Short Text is the following equation: Julian → the flowing of blood → remembering her own fleshliness → vision of the hazelnut/womb → the Annunciate Mary – many of the traditional players upon the affective stage; and the equation remains the same in both texts, in spite of a series of ruminative interpolations which extend the whole account in the Long Text. Whilst one could argue conventionally, as does Aers, that this passage provides ‘a vernacular version of a scholastic discourse … reasoning enquiry … [and] spiritual reading’,33 such an interpretation offers only one side of the equation and denies the complexity of the multiple perspectives from which Julian is herself operating. Julian’s writing, as we have seen, consciously attempts to deconstruct such rationalist explanation, offering a network of viewpoints from which to articulate her experience for all her readers, whether well-versed in scholastic discourse (‘them that be wise, for they wit it wele’: Revelation, 9.2–3) or those who are ‘lewed’ – that is to say, uneducated and simple. We need only return to the text itself to see that, for Julian, there is no hierarchical opposition between affect and intellect, body and mind. Indeed, her integration of each of these components within her exegeses and analyses, especially in the Long Text, demonstrates quite the contrary. Time after time, she begins her meditations from and within the body as a place she experiences, knows and can articulate, leading her readers via that body to an understanding of her mystical insights. She is acutely aware that it is the experience of the body, whether feminine-human or masculine-human, which her readers – her ‘evencristen’ – will recognise and will also be able to identify with and articulate. This she does in order to pave a way towards an understanding of the very complex theological and mystical issues with which she is dealing and to produce a language ideally crafted to represent the seemingly inexplicable. In other words, wherever we want to look in her writing, Julian starts with what she knows and what she deems her readers or ‘evencristen’ will know, and leads them gently from the familiar to the deeply unfamiliar, whilst at the same time making it known and recognisable.34
This is nowhere more apparent than in the following passage from the Long Text (a passage which has been excised from all but one Long Text manuscript, perhaps by a prurient scribe) in which Julian articulates her perception of the goodness of God again in terms of human abjection:
For God of his goodnes hath ordained meanes to help us full faire and fele. Of which the chiefe and principal meane is the blessed kinde that he toke of the maiden, with all the meanes that gone before and come after, which belong to our redemption and to our endles salvation […]
Forto the goodnes of God is the highest prayer, and it cometh downe to us, to the lowest party of our need. It quickeneth our soule and bringeth it on life, and maketh it to waxe in grace and in vertu. It is nerest in kinde and rediest in grace. For it is the same grace that the soule seketh and ever shalle, tille we knowe oure God verely, that hath us all in himselfe beclosede. A man goeth upperight, and the soule of his body is sparede as a purse fulle fair. And whan it is time of his nescessery, it is openede and sparede ayen fully honestly. And that it is he that doeth this, it is shewed ther wher he seith: ‘H cometh downe to us, to the lowest parte of our nede.’ For he hath no dispite of that he made, ne hath no disdaine to serve us at the simpilest office that to oure body longeth in kinde, for love of the soule that he hath made to his awne liknesse. For as the body is clad in the cloth, and the flesh in the skinne, and bones in the flesh, and the harte in the bowke, so are we, soule and body, cladde and enclosedde in the goodnes of God.
(Revelation, 6.19–37)
Far from being devoid of the Kristevan abject or the affective, this passage is redolent with both and, as I have argued elsewhere, the body being produced, whilst apparently default male, can also be read as a feminized one, not only in its abjection but also in its (pro)creativity.35 The flesh which constitutes this body is again the ‘blessed kinde that he [Christ] toke of the maiden’. Human flesh is Mary’s flesh and Mary’s flesh is God’s flesh; God’s goodness (love) is inseparable from it and, by implication, is the full realization of that flesh’s procreative potential. In full maternal fashion, it nurtures us in our helpless abjection, that is to say, ‘in the lowest part of our need’. And it is a need, of course, that is being configured here by implication in terms of that of the underdeveloped human baby, dependent upon the mother for all bodily things and locked in a fleeting pre-separation and semiotic dependency upon her until its inevitable entry into the Symbolic (and to language) brings about permanent disruption. Here, however, Julian resists such permanent disruption of what Kristeva terms ‘pre-thetic unity’36 by recapturing the ‘network of traces’ and the ‘residues of the first symbolizations’ which, within poetic language, tend to enter into negotiation within the ‘symbolic chain’.37 For Kristeva, such traces of pre-thetic unity are released by the type of linguistic slippage characteristic of poetic language and which results in ‘the explosion of the semiotic in the symbolic’.38 As both Ena Jenkins and Vincent Gillespie demonstrate most cogently in their essays included after this one, Julian’s texts are saturated with poetic sensibility and language, a poeticity fully in keeping with Bernard McGinn’s observation about the nature of ‘mystical masterpieces’ quoted by Baker earlier in this volume.39 Thus, if Julian’s daring and exposed account of the defecating body is read in the context of the other ‘bodily’ extracts, this body carries with it the same traces of the semiotic bubbling up by means of the intensely poetic language used to configure it. Not only is the body a purse opening to spare its waste (‘soule’), even that waste becomes synonymous with the beauty of the human soul (also ‘soule’) and, therefore, of God (‘the soule that he hath made to his awne liknesse’) via Julian’s poetic gymnastics. Julian’s daring and adept pun on the word ‘soule’ here40 draws an analogy – synonymy even – between the faecal waste produced by the human body and the transcendent soul and both, therefore, become an expression of an imago Dei. For Julian, even the act of defecation is a vision of God and the very waste matter the body voids itself of (like the child the mother voids herself of during childbirth) is made, like the soul, in the likeness of God-our-Mother. This act of human abjection, therefore, offers the reader a further introit into the complex mystical theology of unity, in effect another route back to the enclosed realm of the pre-thetic semiotic, with which Julian completes this extract: ‘so are we, soule and body, cladde and enclosedde in the goodnes of God’.
Such a multivalent – and often startling – poeticity within Julian’s writing is far more than a linguistic category: it is integral to the structure and cadence of her writing, to her use of complex and highly wrought ‘webs of metaphor’ (as Jenkins puts it), to her construction of generic pastiche (according to Gillespie) and to the hermeneutics of the feminine with which I have been dealing here. In this sense, it is also fully invocative of the rhythm of the semiotic within poetic language itself, a semiotic which underlies the written and the spoken word and which can only ever surface in the syntactical and grammatical disruption which is brought about by and within poetic language and its intricate connotivity. As Kristeva asserts:
Indifferent to language, enigmatic and feminine, this space underlying the written is rhythmic, unfettered, irreducible to its intelligible verbal translation; it is musical, anterior to judgement, but restrained by a single guarantee: syntax.41
As I have argued, Julian’s poetics are firmly dependent upon such semiotics of the ‘female’ and the ‘feminine’: firstly, as articulated overtly and traditionally within the language and syntax of the male Imaginary; and, secondly, as Julian develops her own treatment of them.42 As she becomes more confident in her own poetics, her strategic use of the female hermeneutic constitutes a veritable haemorrhaging up of the normally unaccommodated semiotic through the multiple surfaces of her writing in what approximates a ‘female Imaginary’. This semiotic articulation provides, therefore, one of the sites identified by Hollywood as the place where there can be an extra-Symbolic expression of fully embodied female practices. For Julian, such ‘practices’ in their mystical ‘doubleness’, located both in and out of symbolically configured time and space, thus render it possible that ‘endless, ceaseless, illimitable desire might be thought and lived outside of a phallic law of [female] impotence’.43 In the words of Julian herself, and as if echoing these precepts:
[O]ure lady is oure moder, in whome we be all beclosed and of her borne in Crist. For she that is moder of oure savioure is mother of all that ben saved in our saviour. And oure savioure is oure very moder, in whome we be endlesly borne and never shall come out of him. (Revelation, 57.40–3)
The complex conflation of ‘lady’, ‘moder’, ‘we’, ‘Crist’, ‘savioure’, ‘him’ as subjects here points towards the unity of a mystical encounter with God in which the subject is endlessly generated, defined, relinquished and negated, in which all and nothing is possible, a unity which is pre-discursive and extra-linguistic and which, like Julian’s God and the earthly mother, is ‘the endlesse fulfilling of all true desyers’ (Revelation, 59.15–16). As such, it cannot be captured in any capacity within a traditionally denotive linguistic register. Indeed, it can only be approximated upon by verisimilitude or a ‘connoted mimetic which raises the chora, the realm of the pre-thetic, to the level of signifier’.44 And this holds true in both texts: there is a sense in A Vision that Julian is experimenting with and prising open language in order to find a suitably expressive connotive register with which to articulate her extraordinary experiences in an all-inclusive way. In the longer Revelation she reveals a greater sense of confidence in this new register and its ability to construct an effective hermeneutic to encapsulate the unity of divine love which she has witnessed and experienced. Thus, in the same way as she chose to erase the gendered presences of Saint Cecelia and her own mother from the Long Text account (and therefore the overt gendering of the mise en abîme),45 what we find in their place is a feminine which has gone ‘underground’, as it were, and which has returned to its place of origins in the semiotic. Therefore, just as the defecating body examined above can be read as a default male humanity because of Julian’s use of masculine nouns and pronouns to denote it, so also it is connotively feminine in its abjection and productivity. Just as the quick, red, fresh flow of blood which Julian witnesses in her sickroom is denotive of that emanating from a wounded male body, equally it is connotive of specifically female blood flows: the menses, the broken hymen, childbirth. Julian, of course, is characteristically exploiting both denotation and connotation at the same time here in true poetic fashion, another example of the ‘doubling’ which forms a crucial part of the mystical enterprise and the means of its articulation. For, in Julian’s connotive universe, the bridging of binaries and the elision of their differences is ultimately productive of a third category – all that there is: ‘for alle oure life is in thre’ (Revelation, 58.25). Moreover, this ‘thre’ is defined by Julian in terms which she has already rendered inherently feminine in her writing: it is ‘kinde’, ‘mercy’ and ‘grace’; but it is also ‘oure fader […] oure moder, and […] oure lorde’, which trinitarian equations are subsumed into ‘oure moder in kind […] in whom we be grounded and roted’ (Revelation, 59.34–6).
Such a remarkable and prescient collapsing of gender binaries and disrupting of traditional phallogocentric language in her representation of God as simultaneously man, woman, father, mother, masculine, feminine, bodily, spiritual and spirit, is fully productive of the type of language called for by Irigaray in the extract with which I began this essay. As a language which does not deny the corporeal but which ‘goes along with it’, in its facilitation of the emergence of semiotic traces within its syntactical idiosyncrasies and rhythmic pulsations, it is both anti-phallic and constructed specifically to approximate upon a vision as closely as is humanly possible. Ultimately it tells of how love, desire, language, writing, the social, the political, the religious, can – and must – ‘speak woman’ as well as speak man; ultimately it reinstates woman alongside man for a fully coherent expression of full humanity and divinity.
1 Luce Irigaray, ‘The Bodily Encounter with the Mother’, in The Irigaray Reader, ed. Margaret Whitford (Oxford, 1991), pp. 35–46 (43).
2 Ibid., p. 43.
3 Amy Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History (Chicago, 2002), p. 239.
4 David Aers, ‘The Humanity of Christ: Reflections on Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Love’, in David Aers and Lynn Staley, The Powers of the Holy: Religion, Politics, and Gender in Late Medieval English Culture (Pennsylvania, 1996), pp. 77–104 (92). Aers positions much of his argument in this essay as a counterpoint to an earlier ground-breaking feminist appraisal of Julian’s writing, for which see Elizabeth Robertson, ‘Medieval Medical Views of Women and Female Spirituality in the Ancrene Wisse and Julian of Norwich’s Showings’, in Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature, ed. Linda Lomperis and Sarah Stanbury (Philadelphia, 1993), pp. 142–67. See also the comments of Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins, and Christopher Abbott as noted in my Introduction, p. 11 n. 36.
5 Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Los Angeles and London, 1987); and Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York, 1991).
6 Simone de Beauvoir included an entire chapter on the subject in her La Deuxième Sexe (1948); for which see Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. and ed. H. M. Parshley (London, 1988), pp. 679–87. Perhaps even more influential has been the analysis of female mysticism undertaken by Luce Irigaray in her essay ‘La Mystèrique’, in Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, 1985), pp. 191–202.
7 Aers, ‘Humanity of Christ’, p. 102.
8 Nicholas Watson, ‘ “Yf women be double naturally”: Remaking “Womman” in Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Love’, Exemplaria 8, 1 (1996), pp. 1–34 (7).
9 Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy, p. 278. My own understanding of the term ‘doubleness’ in this context rejects the binary normally associated with the term, preferring instead to read it in terms of the endless doublings and multiplicities which we find in Julian’s writing.
10 All references to Julian’s writing will be taken from The Writings of Julian of Norwich: A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman and A Revelation of Love, ed. Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins (Turnhout, 2006).
11 For a detailed examination of the complexity of the Mary Magdalen figure in the Middle Ages, see Susan Haskins, Mary Magdalen: Myth and Metaphor (New York, 1993).
12 John 20:17.
13 On Mary Magdalen’s role as apostless see Katherine Ludwig Jansen, ‘Maria Magdalena: Apostolorum Apostola’, in Women Preachers and Prophets through Two Millennia of Christianity, ed. Beverley Mayne Kienzle and Pamela J. Walker (Los Angles and London, 1998), pp. 57–96. See also Haskins, Mary Magdalen, pp. 55–94.
14 Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy, see n. 3 above.
15 For a discussion to the contribution made to the Short Text by the inclusion of Saint Cecelia see Liz Herbert McAvoy, Authority and the Female Body in the Writings of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 147–9. See also Susan K. Hagan, ‘St Cecelia and St John of Beverley: Julian of Norwich’s Early Model and Late Affirmation’, in Julian of Norwich: A Book of Essays, ed. Sandra J. McEntire (New York and London, 1998), pp. 91–114.
16 Hagan was one of the first commentators to recognise the importance of Julian’s identification with Saint Cecelia, commenting, ‘Saint Cecelia … provides Julian with historical affirmation of woman’s value as a voice for Christian wisdom in the face of sceptics and nay-sayers’. ‘St. Cecelia and St. John of Beverly’, p. 108.
17 Not all commentators are convinced about Julian’s status as a laywoman prior to her anchoritic enclosure. For a summary of the debate surrounding her early life, see my introduction, pp. 4–5 above.
18 Writings, ed. Watson and Jenkins, p. 64 n.36.
19 On the fetish of the female saint’s body see Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy, pp. 240–1. For Hollywood, the male hagiographer’s subtext is a fetishization of the suffering female body as substitute for his own body and his own hopes for immortality. As such, the female is ‘susceptible to fixation and reification’ in a way which is ‘profoundly debilitating’ (241).
20 See, for example, Ingaray’s ‘Any Theory of the “Subject” has always been Appropriated by the “Masculine” ’, in Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, 1985), pp. 133–46.
21 Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York, 1992), p. 146.
22 Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy, p. 217.
23 Ibid., p. 217.
24 It is highly significant to the argument I will be making that, while erasing Cecelia from the Long Text narrative, Julian chooses to retain reference to a series of other male saints, including Peter, Paul and Thomas. She also introduces the lesser-known John of Beverley, whom an extant Dutch source casts as a reformed murderer, for which see Writings, ed. Watson and Jenkins, p. 236, notes on Revelation, 38.13–29. The only female saint whom Julian retains is Mary Magdalen in her capacity as sexual sinner, thus removing altogether the tortured female body as configured by male-authored hagiography as a frame of reference for her own experiences of suffering.
25 For a protracted analysis of the role played by the Virgin within Western culture see Julia Kristeva’s essay ‘Stabat Mater’, in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York, 1986), pp. 160–85.
26 This is an aspect of Julian’s writing for which I have argued at much greater length elsewhere. Again see McAvoy, Authority and the Female Body, especially chs 2 and 4.
27 Bynum, Fragmentation, p. 146.
28 Julia Kristeva borrows the term chora from Plato’s Timaeus where it is deployed to denote an ‘essentially mobile and extremely provisional articulation’. Kristeva uses it to designate the ‘rhythmic’ space which precedes language and the entry of the child into the Symbolic. It is where the primary and as yet unbroken bond with the mother is constituted. It therefore underpins, whilst simultaneously being denied by, language and representation. See Julia Kristeva, ‘Revolution in Poetic Language’, in A Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (Oxford, 1986), pp. 93–8 (94).
29 Ibid., p. 95.
30 Ibid., p. 97.
31 See n. 4 above.
32 I have argued this point at greater length in Authority and the Female Body, pp. 83–4. See also Liz Herbert McAvoy, ‘Feminising the Body in Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love’, Leeds Studies in English n.s. 33 (2002), pp. 99–113.
33 Aers, ‘Humanity of Christ’, p. 84.
34 A useful essay which discusses this aspect of Julian’s writing is Nancy Coiner, ‘The “homely” and the heimlich: The Hidden, Doubled Self in Julian of Norwich’s Showings’, Exemplaria 5, 2 (1993), pp. 305–23.
35 See Liz Herbert McAvoy, ‘“...a purse fulle feyer”: Feminising the Body in Julian of Norwich’s A Revelation of Love’, Reading Medieval Studies 34 (2004), pp. 99–113.
36 Kristeva defines thetic as ‘the signifiable object’ which is both a ‘denotation’ and an ‘enunciation’: ‘Revolution in Poetic Language’, p. 106.
37 Ibid., p. 118–19.
38 Ibid., p. 119.
39 ‘Mystical masterpieces … are often close to poetry in the ways in which they concentrate and alter language to achieve their ends’: Bernard McGinn, The Foundations of Mysticism, vol. 1 of The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism (New York, 1992), p. xiv.
40 Edmund Colledge and James Walsh define Julian’s use of the word ‘soule’ in this extract as ‘undigested food’ in A Book of Showings to the Anchoress Julian of Norwich (Toronto, 1978), p. 306 n. 35. Watson and Jenkins, however, gloss it as a ‘meal’ or ‘food’ (Writings, ed. Watson and Jenkins, p. 142, note on ll. 29–31). The latter also concur with my own assertion in ‘ “…A purse fulle feyer” ‘ and in Authority and the Female Body that the passage anticipates Julian’s portrayal of God as Mother in chs 55–62 of the Long Text.
41 Kristeva, ‘Revolution in Poetic Language’, p. 97.
42 For Irigaray, syntax is a ‘double syntax’ because it simultaneously has to contend with the strictures of masculine ordering whilst dealing with the suppressed syntactical order of the feminine. Luce Irigaray, ‘Questions’, in The Irigaray Reader, ed. Margaret Whitford (Oxford, 1991; various repr.), pp. 133–9 (134).
43 Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy, p. 278.
44 Kristeva, ‘Revolution in Poetic Language’, p. 109.
45 The mise en abîme is a French critical term without suitable English equivalent which Neil Hertz has defined as ‘a casting into the abyss […] an illusion of infinite regress’, a definition which would seem to fit Julian’s drawing upon the semiotic well. Such an ‘infinite regress’ refers to the incorporation within the text or other artistic work of a symbol which replicates in miniature the larger structure, resulting in an ‘unending metanymic series’. Neil Hertz, Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism (Ithaca, 1979). For Cré‘s understanding of the term in the context of Julian’s work, see her essay p. 124 n. 22.