Bodily abounds. Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light as Cixousian ‘feminine text’

One of the most critically acclaimed and successful examples of historical/political novels in this century, at least in the Anglophone world, is Hilary Mantel's towering Thomas Cromwell trilogy, made up of <i>Wolf Hall</i> (2009), <i>Bring Up the Bodies</i> (2012) and <i>The Mirror and the Light</i> (2020). Mantel took the period and place done to death, the Court of Henry VIII, and imbued it with a new life and striking immediacy thanks to her decision to tell the story through the perspective of a blacksmith's son from Putney, who became a Chief Minister, which in turn allowed the class aspect to take a centre stage in her writings on Tudors and held court where it usually rarely did. This paper, however, focuses on the way gender plays a role in this men-dominated world, where women notoriously fared extremely badly, but it will not do so by focusing directly on the dazzling female characters Mantel gives us with, among others, Anne Boleyn and Jane Rochford, or by merely pointing out Mantel's own gender. Rather, it can be argued that the rich vein of feminism resides in the indomitable style of novels. This will be done with the help of Hélène Cixous's seminal concept of <i>écriture féminine</i>, and especially the so-called <i>body words</i>.