마저리 켐프의 순례와 구술 자서전을 통해 본 여성적 주체성의 형성

초록

This article examines the process through which Margery Kempe, a fifteenth-century English lay married woman, fashioned a form of feminine subjectivity through pilgrimage and oral autobiography. The Book of Margery Kempe traces how Margery, a wife and mother of fourteen children, constructed a spiritual self and religious authority through her post-partum crisis, visions of Christ, a vow of chastity negotiated with her husband, her adoption of Saint Bridget as a spiritual model, long-distance pilgrimage, and the processes of oral narration and scribal mediation. Moving beyond interpretations that reduce Margery’s weeping, white clothing, third-person self-designation as “this creature”, and vernacular self-defence to emotional excess or eccentric mysticism, this study reads these practices as forms of self-expression and authority formation enacted within the constraints of marriage, motherhood, ecclesiastical institutions, and a male clerical literary culture. It argues that Margery’s feminine subjectivity emerged through the reinterpretation of maternal experience, the negotiation of conjugal chastity, public self-expression through pilgrimage, and the textualization of her life through oral autobiography. Taken together, these interrelated practices reveal the complex and composite process by which she fashioned a female spiritual subject and established religious authority.

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