Perform Or Else

How an alternative existence may speak and perform in the conformity-minded social theatre constitutes a timeless cultural issue. As one of the two medieval women writings extant, and the first English autobiography narrating the spectacular life of its eponymous heroine, the 15^th century manuscript, The Book of Margery Kempe, offers an apt site to interrogate the fraught issue of alternative presence within cultural oligarchy.Based on a critical understanding of Judith Butler's performativity theory, and incorporating it with other inspiring thoughts from the performance school, the dissertation locates Margery Kempe's spiritual and textual performance in the contested late medieval English "social theatre" and seeks to spell its message, impact and art. It is argued that Margery's "ritualizing performance art," sharply differentiated from contemporary "realistic theatre" yet availing itself of the same mechanism of performativity, allows her to "niche" into the given social matrix and address social and cultural issues as a liminal individual, and Kempe's book will be shown as more than relevant to us moderns not merely for the historical data it carries, or the feminist claims it makes, but as a cultural performance that bears out the power of performance both in accommodating performativity the basic structuring device of the dominant discourse, and as a timeless negotiation strategy for individuality seekers.The dissertation contains 7 parts. The introduction recapitulates the accomplishments as well as the limitations of Kempe studies since the 1940s, and identifies the potential gains to glean from a performative turn. In accordance with the general performance process, the body chapters examine the dynamic interaction among scripting, production and review as revealed by Margery Kemp's performances. Chapters One and Two explore Margery's spiritual performances as social constructs. Identifying value-laden, fixed signification as the common cognitive trick shared by gender performativity, mimetic theatre, and medieval semiotics, Chapter One dissects Margery's "Christian" identity as accomplished and normalized in and through stylized repetition of such church-defined performatives as, inter alia, church rites, secular theatre, and pilgrimages. Consequently, the official discourse is able to fulfill its monologuing urge over social order by producing silent subjects who are not merely forbidden from speaking differently, but are incompetent and undesirous of doing so.Rather than seeking an absolute symmetry between Butler's performance theory and individual praxis, Chapter Two tackles "Butler trouble", i.e., the agency dilemma that plagues Butler's formulation, and argues for the agency of a provisional subjectivity as enabled by both slippage-prone repetition and discursive polyphony. An examination of Margery Kempe's immediate devotional context, the 14-15^th century East-Anglia English society, is then undertaken to identify the monologuing urges at work (among which mysticism forms a major, East Anglia-specific player). Mapping the transformation of Margery from a lay middle-class Christian to a free-lance mystic, the rest of the chapter argues that her subjectivity shift from sinner to God's chosen soul necessitates vocational perfonnances dramatically different from those required by socially assigned identities.Chapters Three through Five examine the conflicts between Margery's vocation-induced obligations and social expectations, and how these conflicts are negotiated through the management of verbal, visual and "zero" performatives, to varying degrees of success. Chapter Three identifies speech as a leading performative, its efficacy subject to culturally defined conventionality. An analysis of late medieval lay and female speech codes as demonstrated in both historical and literary texts suggests a keen awareness of the power of speech, and attempts to contain that power through regulating both the constative matter and the performative context of utterances. Analyzing the many speech occasions in the book, I suggest Margery has actively sought adherence to contemporary performative requirements to form a positive "teacher" image, while Kempe has tried to project Margery verbally as a "holy woman," to guarantee the felicity of her speech. The chapter concludes that the irresolvable discrepancy between Margery's and conventional terms of felicitous speech subjects her speech to the risks of erasure and penalties, and therefore demands a supplementary speaking strategy.Inspired by the innovative employment of unconventional performatives by modern performance artists, Chapter Four investigates space, clothes and body both as conventional signifiers and as Margery Kempe's non-verbal performatives. It's argued that Margery's flexible travel between place and space, fusing the sacred and the profane, and Kempe's use of textuality as a loft-structured virtual space, effectively maximize her stage presence. At the same time, the removal of such culturally sensitive performatives as clothes and the female body out of their regular contexts gives Margery's performance an unusual visibility for spiritual communications to follow. The chapter also explores the rich connections between Margery's visual performatives with medieval mystical and devotional traditions (bridal attires, holy tears, holy fool, imitatio of Christ), which enables Margery Kempe to performatively fashion authenticating identities. With ritualizing repetition, Margery's body-oriented performances supplement her verbal claims in creating a reformative social discourse.Chapter 5 builds on John Cage's understanding of silence and noise as the unheeded ubiquitous and attends to what Kempe studies have long ignored—the zero signifiers of silence and noise in Margery's social performance and Kempe's textual performance. After breaking down the binary opposition between silence and speech by suggesting silence is multiple in form and fraught with words, the chapter seeks to gloss Margery and Kempe's intentional silences, and argue selective mutism is applied throughout as a strategy to enable and protect her social critique with unintelligibility. I then study silence in the form of weeping, crying and laughter, and find in noise a sonorous, bad-name enhanced unintelligibility that renders it effectively instrumental both to Margery's shock theatre and to Kempe's social commentary. Thus the performance art unintelligibility has a deconstructive implication especially suited for alternative expression.Making virtue out of necessity, as modern performance artists often do, Margery Kempe's performance art succeeds, at its best, in inserting her (re-)constructive discourses back into the master copy of the social theatre. My study, however, does not seek to valorize Margery/Kempe as a former woman warrior turned to an all-transforming performance expert. The concluding chapter identifies the revolutionary content of her discourse, acknowledges its vulnerability to redressing efforts, yet nevertheless celebrates the power of Margery's performance to incorporate the performance art vision, technology and spirit to allow for a livable life. Touching upon the fundamental issue of social (counter-)control, The Book of Margery Kempe calls for efforts to elicit the power of performance as a productive strategy in the perpetual negotiation between the voice-seeking individual and the monologue-minded society at large.