Piers
Plowman
Provider:
Cecilia Liu /
¼B³·¬Ã
Gender and Personification
- Gender and personification
-- Female forms/bodies
In the Dreamer's encounter with Lady Holy Church we trace certain tensions
in the masculine perception of an idealized body of the Church in female form;
in the story of the marital fortunes of the more mobile figure of Meed
of the Maid we see how the reward-dynamic of contemporary society is apprehended
by the Dreamer. Meed seems to embody at various stages both the dynamic
of a reward-based society and its most common currency: material gifts and
money. That she embodies an antithetical social order to that of Lady Holy
Church and/or represents a lower social class are interpretations which depend
on whose 'version' of Meed is being represented at any particular time in
the Dreamer's vision. Her changing form (e.g. from illegitimate rich
maid to legitimate 'muliere' to common whore) is an index of the contested
definition of her proper name. In the story of the changing marital prospects
of this very much man-made object of desire, no less than in the story of
Lady Holy Church, we can see something of the operations of the traffic in
reward in the Dreamer's society and something, too, of his society's 'traffic
in women.' (Men have certain rights in their female kin, and women do not
have the same rights either to themselves or to their male kin.)
- By the fourteenth century, the
iconography of the female form, the realization of the figure of the Church
as the Bride of Christ and as Mother Church had considerable currency in the
imagistic repertoire of Western Christianity.
- It is significant that the Dreamer
does not initially recognize the Lady in personal terms. The authority of
the Lady is signaled by her social orientation as an inhabitant of the fixed
and stable castle, and it is with an overwhelming sense of her "otherness"
(in class and gender terms) that the Dreamer begins his dialogue. Already
we may observe a discrepancy between the perception the Dreamer has of Lady
Holy Church in an idealized female form excluded, it seems, from his everyday
life and the Lady's view of herself, which insists on her spiritual reality
and her social immanence.
- Lady Holy Church emphasizes that
the Dreamer's vision is socially determined yet fictional; as is her representation
within it. The 'real' Church is not female, nor perfected, any more
than 'real' Christians are likely to find their salvation by merely dreaming.
- Both Lady Holy Church and Meed
represent projections of male desire, although the desire for Meed seems to
be more immediately recognizable by the Dreamer. When he sees Meed, he too
is ravished by her appearance (Passus II, 8-16). In the arrangement
of women, on the right and the left, Lady Holy Church and Meed the Maid, it
seems as though the Dreamer is drawing on a cultural cliché, a version
of the Mary/Eve opposition, to express and explore other kinds of antithetical
values, spiritual and secular. One kind of polarized binary opposition in
circulation in his culture (the splitting of womankind into two opposed figures)
provides him with a way into exploring other kinds of oppositions: the dichotomy
between the operations of the heavenly economy of redemption and an earthly
economy involving material reward appears to be aligned to the split between
Lady Holy Church's world of guaranteed truth (alienating and mystifying though
its language has proved to the Dreamer) and the context in which her rival
Meed is ensconced.
- The Dreamer, in his visions, does
not have access to a pure symbolic order: his visions, his conceptualizing
abilities, are socially based and culture bound. The female forms he imagines
are figured as social beings, with particular class-based interests (which
in the case of Lady Holy Church and Meed the Maid appear to be in competition),
not actually as females in the abstract (something which is virtually impossible
to figure in isolation anyway). The language of femininity, of feudalism,
of mercantilism (to name just three of the discourses in combination here)
are in dialogue in the figures of Lady Holy Church and Meed the Maid, just
as these figures are engaged in dialogues with the male figures who are around
them, whose own access to social, material, spiritual capital is a variable
(and in these stakes the Dreamer seems a poor man all round).
(external) 
English
Literature I: the Medieval Period;English
Literature and Culture
From Medieval Period to the Eighteenth Century