Abstract
이희구 Lee Hee Goo: The Difficult Women: Margery Kempe and Sonia
Orwell Medieval and Early Modern English Studies Volume 24
No. 2 (2016) 107-130
The manuscript of The Book of Margery Kempe and the Winchester
manuscript of Mort D’Arthur were found in 1934. Though two
manuscripts seem to have nothing to do with each other, Margery
Kempe in the first manuscript relates to an unexpected woman of
20th century who transposed the latter manuscript. It is Sonia
Orwell who is known better as the second wife of George Orwell.
The point that they come across is “transcription.” From the proem
of the book, we find Margery obsessed with getting her scribe to
write her life into letters. Sonia, starting with the
transposition of the Winchester manuscript, lived a life of a
female junior editor who “transcribed” male authors’ texts into
items in journals or books. In the late Middle Ages, women could
guarantee, if any, their textual authority only through male
scribes. That explains Margery’s anxiety over her scribes. Sonia
took over the role of scribes as an editor, but her position did
not have auctoritas medieval scribes enjoyed. She was only a
passive channel through which male textual power was transferred
to printed materials. Margery and Sonia took textual positions
different from each other, but female inferiority in power
relations runs parallel for them. It is through these two women
that this paper aims to show how stubbornly this inferior status
of women (writers) subsists even across the times pan of 600 years
with help of theory of queer temporalities.
Keywords
The Book of Margery Kempe, Sonia Orwell, queer temporalities,
women editors, medieval scribes