Narrating and focalizing the Book of Margery Kempe

Narratology can profit from more historicized attention to premodern texts. This essay opens an extended narratological analysis of the fifteenth-century Middle English Book of Margery Kempe. Modifying narrative theory (Genette, Bal) to suit a medieval narratology, I use discourse analysis to explore the language, focalization, and temporality of the narrating discourse. The text, seemingly without a narrator, deploys multiple focalizations to construct an intricate third-person narrative rather than a strict autobiography of the life of a lay, extravagantly pious, and visionary woman. Some focalizations are internal (Experiencers), while others are external (Summarizer, Commentator, Scribal-Textualist). The lively narration weaves together homodiegetic and heterodiegetic perspectives. The narration constructs multifocalized accounts of the protagonist’s everyday struggles and interactions and her interior experiences and visions of Jesus suffering in the Passion and “fresch” on the streets. Narratological analysis uncovers the textual power of narrating the protagonist’s life story with transplacing temporalities of Apostolic past, near past, and present reading time.