----- Original Message -----
From: Sarah Salih <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, October 03, 2000 10:22 AM
Subject: Re: dragon-sexing & Jonah's whale
> OK, here goes. This is specific to the Katherine Group
> Seinte Margarete, and is acknowledged to be speculative.
> I
> started by worrying about Margaret's patronage of
> childbirth, and the implicit analogy between childbirth and
> her emergence from the dragon: so a woman would not only
> have to identify with the dragon but expect to be burst
> apart.
Perhaps the analogy is being over-extended. I suspect that what was
venerated was the process of life coming forth anew. After all St
Christopher is good
for travellers in general, not just those with rivers to cross.
>I still can't see what women might have got out of
> this.
me neither!
(but can't you say much the same about all martyrs?)
> However, Katherine Group texts distinguish
> consistently between female bodies and virgin bodies:
> virgin bodies (I'd argue, and do elsewhere at length) are
> actively produced in the course of the legend.
is this in the forthcoming 'Versions of Virginity in Late Medieval
England'?
> The
> dragon's often read as a masculine sexual oppressor on the
> grounds of sexual symbolism - long pointy tongue - but if
> we're going to take sexual symbolism into account, it
> doesn't pierce, but engulf her.
transgloti
two loosely connected issues:
they also seem to have a predilection for the young unsullied and female in
the more popular texts
which is a bit of a giveaway
and what about the teeth? Distinctly predatory I'd say...
> So I read the dragon here
> as representing the abject female body - Margaret's, or her
> mother's - from which the virginal body is born. It is
> referred to by masculine pronouns, but then there is some
> doubt as to whether it's an actual beast or a demon in the
> form of a dragon,
> in which case it doesn't have a secure
> gender identity, demons' sex-changing ways being
> well-known, and can manifest into whatever is most
> demonically convenient for it.
>
> And yes, I'm sure you could make an analogous case for
> Jonah's whale.
this was pure speculation on my part: I wondered if anybody had actually
done it!
I had only looked at french versions of St Marguerite - (all male dragons I
fear) so I did some background reading on english versions after your last
posting. The english versions seem very much bowdlerised and extemporised
versions of the continental model. They are much more bloodthirsty than the
french versions I have come across. Michael Winner rather than Walt Disney.
Perhaps we Brits have always been Sun readers.
Are they all like that? Or do people only write about the XXX versions?
Does this apply to all saints' lives?
I have just been listening to the final version of the radio 4 adaptation of
'the Passion of Margery Kempe'. Trouble is it sounds just like an episode of
the Archers a never-ending story of country life) which also has an
eccentric lady called Margery ?Antropus who is married to a Robert (the
scribe is called Father Robert in the adaptation). Most bizarre.
john a w lock
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