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