"What Is The Remedy?": Confession, Abjection, and Narratives of the Self in Margery Kempe’s The Book of Margery Kempe and Sylvia Plath’s Ariel

Abstract

In this thesis, I examine the reception history of two confessional writers, Margery Kempe and Sylvia Plath, and analyze the affective mechanisms of the reader’s desire to secure a static subject at the center of their texts, The Book of Margery Kempe and Ariel and Other Poems, by abjecting these authors. In response to this “problem of biography,” I suggest alternative readings of these texts that better account for the communal, mutable self constructed through these texts’ confessions. I first briefly outline the reception history and common “problems of biography” against which I am reading the Book and Ariel. Then, I place Michel Foucault’s account of the relationship between confessional speech and ideas of the self in conversation with Judith Butler’s and Julia Kristeva’s notions of abjection to illuminate how Kempe’s and Plath’s willing, hyper-feminine confessions upset the ideological mechanisms by which a confession is validated. Instead of scrambling for biographical or biological “truth,” it is ultimately my contention that the reader’s identification with these abject confessions has constructive theological and ethical ramifications. At stake in this argument are the ways in which the self—the subject—is gendered and sexed through confession, and how the reader’s engagement with a text might transform the expectation of an essential, static self into an indiscrete, relational one.