SPEAKING FROM THE THRESHOLD: LIMINAL AND LITERARY SUBJECTIVITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL MYSTICAL NARRATIVES A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Corey Lyn Wronski-Mayersak August 2011 © 2011 Corey Lyn Wronski-Mayersak SPEAKING FROM THE THRESHOLD: LIMINAL AND LITERARY SUBJECTIVITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL MYSTICAL NARRATIVES Corey Lyn Wronski-Mayersak, Ph.D. Cornell University 2011 In the corpus of Western mystical literature, many writers claim that mystical union melds the human soul with God, exacting a temporary loss of awareness of their being apart from the divine. This phenomenon particularly intrigued Christian mystics in the late Middle Ages, a period coinciding with a noted increase in first-person narration and a renaissance of the idea of selfhood as a central concern in literary texts. This study argues that mystical writers face a unique challenge in conveying their sense of standing at a liminal point or threshold, in- between states of being, negotiating (before the gaze of their readers) where the “self” ends and the divine other begins. Many assert that the ineffable nature of their experience makes this impossible to convey directly. This dissertation traces representations of the experiencing and narrating I in mystical literature to analyze how writers portray such a liminal state. After exploring liminality as a valuable critical concept for understanding mystical narrative, and as a central component of medieval Christian mystical experience, focus turns to the texts of Elizabeth of Spalbeek, whose “text” is actually a performance, and then to Marguerite Porete and Julian of Norwich, mystics from Lowland regions and England, but all of whose works circulated in some form in late medieval England. The author argues that these mystics are distinctive because they creatively manipulate conventions of narrative in order to represent spiritual experience and its potentially disruptive, divisive effects on perceptions of selfhood and ontological status. Evidencing a keen awareness of how consciousness and its divisions can be represented in narrative, they turn to structures that destabilize the narrating voice or persona, including dialogic discourse that melds multiple voices, inverted chronologies that suspend time, and recursive patterns, and use narrative form to depict their experiences. The study‟s claims proceed from close analysis of the texts in conversation with discourses of narratology, speculative theology, performance theory, anthropology, and psychoanalytic and philosophical theories of the subject. The dissertation bridges scholarship on narrative and mysticism, and contributes to the history of subject-formation and the medieval development of a literature of the self. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Corey Lyn Wronski-Mayersak grew up in New Jersey. Even at a young age, she was often found around books. This inclination stayed with her, and when her initial plans for a dance career had to end, her love of books and the joy of teaching and sharing them took over and became her vocation. She earned a B.A. in English from Goucher College, an M.A. in English from Georgetown University, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in English from Cornell University. iii This dissertation is dedicated to the memory of two wonderful Cornellians lost during my time at the university. Prof. Scott McMillan first welcomed me to Cornell with graciousness and encouragement, and taught with both intellectual rigor and elegance. My graduate student colleague, Deborah Marcum, was an inspiration to many of us and certainly would have written an outstanding dissertation of her own. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First thanks must go to my dissertation committee. Andrew Galloway‟s generosity of time, thought, and patience with the seemingly endless permutations of this project (among other things) should earn him status among the saints profiled herein. From our numerous “dialogues,” the voice and focus of this project eventually emerged, and my debt to him is great. His keen eye and ear for style have also helped to craft a more beautiful narrative. Cary Howie was at many points like a spirit moving over the waters, and always encouraged me to follow my interests and instincts. Masha Raskolnikov, in addition to being an excellent resource on matters of allegory and personification, was among other talents a voice of practicality and helped make this study more accessible and meaningful to a broader audience. The committee‟s intellectual acumen has guided this dissertation to being a far sharper engagement than it otherwise would have been. I am grateful for their willingness to share their different ways of thinking, in vibrant discussion with me and with one another, as I worked to further develop my own. Also during my time at Cornell, Katherine Gottschalk, Elliot Shapiro, Tracy Hamler Carrick, Joe Martin, and Barbara Correll were particularly generous with advice and encouragement. I am grateful to the Cornell research librarians and the English staff for support in many forms. Arnold Sanders originally set me on the path of studying medieval literature, and the support he has extended to me since has gone ludicrously beyond the call of duty. Sarah McNamer and Penn Szittya were excellent mentors during my M.A. work at Georgetown. Dr. McNamer first introduced me to Elizabeth of Spalbeek‟s intriguing performance and supervised my first concentrated writing on Julian. v Benedicta Ward, SLG, introduced me to the intellectual rigor of the medieval mystics, and offered me a beautiful example of what it means to use the works of the mind to the glory of God. In their commitment to educate the whole person, the Jesuits of Georgetown University nurtured both my intellect and my spirit, and taught me that the two are inseparable. Special thanks is due to Jes Sauer, S.J. and Kevin Quinn, S.J. for what I‟m sure is much more than they realize. Bruce Lawrence provided theological conversation and many prayers over the course of my graduate career. Joel Greene and Danielle Colabella helped me keep perspective. Erik Kenyon was a resource on liturgical music. Giffen Maupin offered comments on chapter five. Michael G. Sargent shared with me his forthcoming work on the readership of the Mirror of Simple Souls as I prepared portions of an earlier version of chapters three and four for publication. Portions of chapters three and four and of my introduction to the English Mirror will appear in Viator: Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 42.2 (Autumn 2011), published by Brepols on behalf of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at UCLA, under the title “Dialogic Melting: Representing Mystical Union and its Instability in Marguerite Porete‟s Mirror of Simple Souls,” and are included here with permission. They have been reintegrated with the larger study with some revision and additions. A great deal of thanks is due to my loving and supportive parents, Maria and Leonard Wronski, who instilled in me a love of reading and learning from the start. My husband Jerry always has my love and my heartfelt thanks for his unwavering support, sense of humor, reminders that there is life outside academia, and willingness to endure Ithaca winters. vi My deepest gratitude is to the one who makes “all things well,” and who for reasons that I do not understand has blessed me with this path and the people on it. And so, like Marguerite‟s translator “M.N.,” let me begin by saying, “to ϸe worschip and laude of ϸe Trinite be ϸis werk begunne and endid. Amen.” vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Biographical Sketch iii Dedication iv Acknowledgments v General Introduction 9 Chapter One: Points of Intersection 43 Chapter Two: “A New and Unheard of Manner”: Elizabeth of Spalbeek‟s Performed Narrative 76 Chapter Three: The Stakes of Language: Expression in The Mirror of Simple Souls 114 Chapter Four: Spoken “Ful Mystili”: Marguerite‟s Dialogic Narrative of Union 136 Chapter Five: “I Saw Him and Sought Him, and I Had Him and I Wanted Him”: Julian of Norwich‟s Visionary Narrative 167 Conclusion 218 Bibliography 224 viii GENERAL INTRODUCTION This dissertation argues that, in several late medieval narratives of personal encounter with the divine, form becomes content when vocabulary fails; content, therefore, itself becomes a means of representation. In a reassessment of late medieval mysticism that sees a sense of being “in-between,” what I will refer to as being liminal, as a central and inescapable feature of mystical experience, I suggest that some medieval mystics turn to alternative narrative structures to represent their ineffable experience and its effects on perceptions of selfhood and ontological status. Negotiating a conflict between, on the one hand, the desire to describe and reflect upon the liminal experience of mystical union and, on the other, the challenge of its inexpressibility, they use their texts not only to name, but also to recreate and represent, through a verbal portrait, the experience of mystical union. The project is, therefore, a study of literary subjectivity, of the narrating and experiencing I and the consciousness it represents, that brings together analysis of narrative structure and the unique ontological and linguistic circumstances that underlie mystical writing.1 And the consciousness that we find in the mystical texts is one vividly aware of the I‟s essential liminality. In the mystical texts I explore, the narrating I, what in the terms of narratology we can see as a retrospective I recalling events, is one with the experiencing I, a speaker/protagonist in the very process of experiencing the effects of mystical union being described. Moreover, the texts force us to reconsider some other basic questions about the possibilities of “narrative”: can you narrate a story without knowing who you are as narrator? How do you tell a story about 1 Particularly in medieval studies, the phrase “literary subjectivity” was popularized in large part by Michel Zink in La Subjectivité littéraire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1985).