| This dissertation offers an investigation of subjectivity and masculinity within the historical context of early and late medieval Christianity through readings of Augustine of Hippo's Confessions and Henry Suso's Life of the Servant. Using a theoretical framework of psychoanalysis, feminism, gender theory and deconstruction, it can be seen that subjectivity in the masculine mode will have never been simply or only monologic, a monolithic construct. For both Augustine and Henry Suso, the “self” of their self-writing, the specificity of their supposed identity as male subjects, might only be realized through means of and in relation to the Divine Other. Yet an exploration of such an identity, textually conceived of, revealed and concealed through the speaking of the textual confessional, the textual “self” reveals and conceals the fissures internal to the structure of that identity: masculinity supposedly founded in, grounded in and guaranteed by the masculinity of the deity that has created the man in his own image and likeness, works to cover over the instability of its structure. The self-certainty of the confessing subject is illusory, the masculinity of this subject being the “dominant fiction” nurtured by the workings of Western metaphysics, the onto-theology also known as Christianity. But in the self-writing of Henry Suso, the Augustinian paradigm is profoundly disturbed: self-writing has become a co-operative process where the one is produced by the two, the “self” is written as “he” rather than “I,” and the masculinity of the “self” is also produced through the writing of the feminine other. Henry Suso's masculinity is decidedly unstable, and autobiography reads more in the manner of hagiography. It is in the ascetic practices, the mystic experience integral to the spirituality of Suso, especially the centrality of his relationship to the dying body of the God-man, that we can see both in the case of the Dominican friar and in the crucified body which is situated at the center of Christian theology and medieval piety, masculinity re-situated at the margins, masculinity more in the manner of femininity. |
