Margery's Mirror
Keeping up with my reading. I'm on Clarissa Atkinson's Mystic and Pilgrim: The Book and the World of Margery Kempe. The introduction is particularly interesting as I'm still lecturing on the Autobiography module at work and always on the look out for new insights. Atkinson, rightly noticing that Margery Kempe by some measures at least wrote (well, dictated) the first autobiography in the English language, makes a connection between the development of this genre and the introduction of 'accurate' silver-backed mirrors into society, enabling the recognition of an individual self and thus the ability to speak and write about the individual, albeit in the language of medieval alterity, the language of medieval religion and spirituality. Atkinson actually quotes another critic, Georges Gusdorf:
'Literary historians and critics vary widely in their opinions as to when and under what circumstances "real" autobiography first appeared. Georges Gusdorf ties its beginnings to the invention of the mirror, which he says "would seem to have disrupted human experience, especially from that moment when the mediocre metal plates that were used in antiquity gave way at the end of the Middle Ages to silver-backed mirrors produced by Venetian technique. From that moment, the image in the mirror became a part of the scene of life..." The mirror image complemented Renaissance anthropology, stimulated the new art of self-portrait, and permitted people to see themselves as unique beings. In relation to autobiography it worked, on the one hand, to revitalize the Christian tradition of confession...and on the other hand, by stimulating attention to the individual, the mirror image helped to turn autobiographers away from the "deforming" theological image in which every subject is first a creature - and a sinner. The medieval world view had to break down before "man could have any interest in seeing himself as he is without any taint of the transcendent" '
Of course as Atkinson points out, Margery's book is very much concerned with the idea that its subject is a 'creature' and one significantly tainted first with mental distress and breakdown, and subsequently with the transcendent. 'Most critics assign the beginnings of 'real' autobiography to a date later than the end of the Middle Ages,' she comments. Yet perhaps the fifteenth-century Book of Margery Kempe does mark a significant transitional state when the sense of an individual reflected through language and text begins to emerge. Furthermore Margery sees herself as 'ordained to be a mirror'; boldly and uncomfortably pointing out the faults of her contemporaries and fellow pilgrims. She is also, because of the diverse interpretive communities and developing readership of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, something of a mirror to us, reflecting our own interests and ways of reading. She is not the first mystic to use the imagery of mirrors - the early fourteenth-century 'Mirror of Simple Souls' is a particularly interesting earlier text, particularly because it was initially condemned as heretical before being 'adopted' as a legitimate treatise of spiritual guidance. But still - the time and trends in Margery's book are unique and perhaps even mark the beginnings of a cultural 'mirror stage', the psychoanalytical term for the beginnings of the sense of a complete individual self (Lacan places it at about age two) and at the same time a sense of separation, even alienation, from self and others.
It would be fascinating, as I was discussing with a colleague in the pub a couple of nights ago, to read a cultural history of mirrors. I wonder if such a text is available but I don't know of it? Would there be gender implications of mirror use as well as social and generational ones (almost certainly)? Silver and exact, as Plath writes in her mirror poem, the mirror would make a compelling and still relevant focus for all sorts of psychological, spiritual and cultural concerns.
'Literary historians and critics vary widely in their opinions as to when and under what circumstances "real" autobiography first appeared. Georges Gusdorf ties its beginnings to the invention of the mirror, which he says "would seem to have disrupted human experience, especially from that moment when the mediocre metal plates that were used in antiquity gave way at the end of the Middle Ages to silver-backed mirrors produced by Venetian technique. From that moment, the image in the mirror became a part of the scene of life..." The mirror image complemented Renaissance anthropology, stimulated the new art of self-portrait, and permitted people to see themselves as unique beings. In relation to autobiography it worked, on the one hand, to revitalize the Christian tradition of confession...and on the other hand, by stimulating attention to the individual, the mirror image helped to turn autobiographers away from the "deforming" theological image in which every subject is first a creature - and a sinner. The medieval world view had to break down before "man could have any interest in seeing himself as he is without any taint of the transcendent" '
Of course as Atkinson points out, Margery's book is very much concerned with the idea that its subject is a 'creature' and one significantly tainted first with mental distress and breakdown, and subsequently with the transcendent. 'Most critics assign the beginnings of 'real' autobiography to a date later than the end of the Middle Ages,' she comments. Yet perhaps the fifteenth-century Book of Margery Kempe does mark a significant transitional state when the sense of an individual reflected through language and text begins to emerge. Furthermore Margery sees herself as 'ordained to be a mirror'; boldly and uncomfortably pointing out the faults of her contemporaries and fellow pilgrims. She is also, because of the diverse interpretive communities and developing readership of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, something of a mirror to us, reflecting our own interests and ways of reading. She is not the first mystic to use the imagery of mirrors - the early fourteenth-century 'Mirror of Simple Souls' is a particularly interesting earlier text, particularly because it was initially condemned as heretical before being 'adopted' as a legitimate treatise of spiritual guidance. But still - the time and trends in Margery's book are unique and perhaps even mark the beginnings of a cultural 'mirror stage', the psychoanalytical term for the beginnings of the sense of a complete individual self (Lacan places it at about age two) and at the same time a sense of separation, even alienation, from self and others.
It would be fascinating, as I was discussing with a colleague in the pub a couple of nights ago, to read a cultural history of mirrors. I wonder if such a text is available but I don't know of it? Would there be gender implications of mirror use as well as social and generational ones (almost certainly)? Silver and exact, as Plath writes in her mirror poem, the mirror would make a compelling and still relevant focus for all sorts of psychological, spiritual and cultural concerns.
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