Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Incluse exclusa
- Introduction
- 1 Miles Christi: Early Anchoritic Masculinity and the Sacred
- 2 Videte vocacionem vestram: Late-Medieval Male Anchoritism and the Spectral Feminine
- 3 Writing the Flesh: Female Anchoritism and the Master Narrative
- 4 Reading with the Eyes Closed: Revising the Master Narrative
- 5 Mapping the Anchorhold: Anchorites, Borderlands and Liminal Spaces
- Afterword
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - Writing the Flesh: Female Anchoritism and the Master Narrative
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Incluse exclusa
- Introduction
- 1 Miles Christi: Early Anchoritic Masculinity and the Sacred
- 2 Videte vocacionem vestram: Late-Medieval Male Anchoritism and the Spectral Feminine
- 3 Writing the Flesh: Female Anchoritism and the Master Narrative
- 4 Reading with the Eyes Closed: Revising the Master Narrative
- 5 Mapping the Anchorhold: Anchorites, Borderlands and Liminal Spaces
- Afterword
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
[A] body is always a substance for inscription … the flesh writes and is given to be read; and to be written.
GENDER AND THE MASTER NARRATIVE
IN AN ESSAY examining the relationship between the female author, reading and writing, Hélène Cixous rereads the tradition of Eve's transgression as the provision of a fundamental lesson for women about the politics of reading. For Cixous, Eden as primal location provides the ‘scene of the meal in which desire and prohibition coexist’. The ‘meal’ in question is, of course, that of the ‘forbidden’ fruit which, throughout the Middle Ages, provided a primary symbol for humankind's problematic relationship with its own innate desires and its cultural systems of taboo. Faced with the prohibition of God's law and her own desire to move beyond its boundaries, Eve chooses to read the apple as symbol of satiation rather than one of transgression or disobedience. Although aware of the rhetoric of death as punishment for indulgence of desire (‘For in what day soever thou shalt eat of it, thou shalt die the death’), within an economy where death does not yet exist, for Eve its meaning, paradoxically, is devoid of anything meaningful. Thus, in its nonexistence, death fails to signify, whereas the apple – tactile, mysterious and inviting investigation of its luscious interior – is present in all its multiplicity of potential significations. The contest between law and desire, therefore, turns out to be no contest at all.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Medieval AnchoritismsGender, Space and the Solitary Life, pp. 77 - 112Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2011