Hoccleve, the Virgin, and the Politics of Complaint

Abstract

What is the relation between Marian lament and the distinctively modern, autobiographical complaints of Thomas Hoccleve? What, moreover, is the relation between Hoccleve's performances of private misery and his ability to offer advice and counsel to princes? This article argues that Hoccleve's “Complaint of the Virgin” can teach us to recognize the complex interweaving of gender, genre, ideality, and excess that informs Hocclevean complaints more generally. “The Complaint of the Virgin” explores a woman's exemplary transition from subversive investment in private connection and private suffering to self-abnegation and participation in public power. In doing so, the poem provides a model for Hoccleve's own movements between marginalized interiority and public rhetoric—and for his meditation between Lancastrian subjects and their sovereign. The Virgin offers a lesson in the 1364 Abstracts [PMLA pleasures and power of complaint, the disciplining of interiority, and the production of social relations through spectacle and sacrifice.

Publisher

Modern Language Association of America

Publication Date

10-1-2002

Publication Title

PMLA (Journal Of The Modern Language Association)

Department

English

Document Type

Article

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1632/003081202X60260

Language

English

Format

text

Link to Full Text

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