In her autobiography, Margery Kempe demonstrates how she achieved personal,

spiritual and economic autonomy. By starting her own businesses, along with her father’s

wealth, Margery acquires an economic independence that allows her to achieve

independence in other aspects of her life. Margery exhibits a desire to achieve an

autonomy unknown to many women of the era, especially women of her station and with

so many children. What separates her from many other women of the day is that Margery

actually accomplishes many of her goals toward autonomy and independence. She does

this through means of economics, using her family’s wealth and her own, through her

own businesses. When Margery desires freedom from her husband’s sexual desires, she

is able to use her acquired wealth to pay off his debts in return for his decision to

undertake chastity with her.

Throughout, The Book of Margery Kempe is characterized by “the author’s

constant awareness of money” and her “perception of herself as property” (Delany 84).

Margery began life well-equipped to acquire a fortune—her family already had one. She

was “socially prominent and well-to-do, a member of one of the most prominent families

in one of England’s richest towns” (Delany 82). Her book “outlines an identity that is

predetermined by the interlaced claims of society and nature” (Staley 88). Her

prominence in society allows her to have a more legitimate economic role, as a woman

owning a business and providing for herself. Despite the failures of her two businesses, it

seems that she was wealthier than her husband, John Kempe. Margery is allowed free

will to act how she wants, with all of her fits and rages and eventually her ecclesiastical

yearnings, because of her monetary position. The “safety net her money gives her”

allows her to act in ways which would not be acceptable in mainstream society (Staley
121). For example, she arrays herself in extreme fashion, with “gold pipes on her head

and her hoods with the tippets were dagged” (Kempe 535). Margery, at times, especially

early in her narrative, appears entirely obsessed with money— what Delany calls the

“’cash nexus’: it pervades her consciousness as it pervaded her world, part of every

human endeavor and confrontation” (Delany 86). While Margery rejected many of her

fellow townspeople’s values, she retains an attachment to money despite her newfound

passion for God. Since her money is what allows her to maintain some semblance of

independence, this is understandable. And adorning herself ostentatiously would only

help her cause, of trying to live her life away from everyone’s prying eyes. The wealthy

are allowed to be somewhat eccentric.

Margery’s economic stability enabled her to travel abroad on pilgrimages, a

privilege which few of her day were allowed. By already having a family fortune, along

with an accomplished husband, Margery was able to take the opportunity to try and fail in

her businesses—she had the capital and the opportunity to take the chance, which women

of a lower social class would not have enjoyed. Later, even after her enterprises failed,

Margery was able to travel all over England and Europe on her pilgrimages, also a luxury

of the privileged. Indeed, “her class position gave her independent access to the market,

as investor, producer, and consumer, and… this shaped her identity, particularly her

religious consciousness.” (Aers 87). Women were often prevented from embarking on

enterprises such as starting their own business: men thought that “by depriving these

women of any economic self-determination it would make them more dependent than

female wage-labourers, certainly than those without children, and perhaps more

dependent than the merchant’s dog” (Aers 89). If women had no outside outlet through
which to seek power, all power in the marriage belonged to the man. Why Margery was

allowed to begin her own business is never explained, and the odds against it ever

happening in the first place make it a greater accomplishment.

Margery certainly attempted to better herself economically—she makes a foray

into the brewing business as a way to supplement her income. Even though the business

collapses, Margery’s business ventures are not complete yet. Although she believed that

the failure of the business was due to divine providence, she is determined to start another

business, if for no other reason than “pure covetousness and to maintain her pride.”

Friedrich Engels wrote, “Within the family the husband is the bourgeois and the

wife represents the proletariat” (Delany 84). While Margery seems to manage some form

of independence throughout her adventures, she is discriminated against on a consistent

basis, on the mere basis of gender. Even in a class-structured society, in which Margery

holds a special place as the daughter and wife of respected men of Norfolk, she is often

judged first as a woman, not as a business owner. While it “may be difficult to see

Margery as oppressed when she is wealthy and seems to hold her own so well,” she is

nevertheless a victim of oppression: “Margery is exposed to and has internalized the

most damaging aspects of bourgeois society” (Delany 84). Nevertheless, it seems that

Margery is able to disengage from many “female” aspects of life, such as the raising of

her children, and tending of the household, primarily because of her social status and

monetary situation. She is in a better position than many of her fellow women.

When she simply cannot bear her husband’s overtures any more, Margery does

what any good businesswoman would: she brokers a deal, mutually advantageous to her

and her husband. Margery enters into a contract with her husband—she will pay his
monetary debts, and in return, he will release her from her debt, the marriage debt.

Perhaps the constant feeling of being treated as someone’s property leads her to treat

herself as property, a product to be bought, sold and bartered for. When her physical

person is finally secured from his advances, she is finally able to turn her attentions fully

to what she wanted to devote her time to all along, Jesus Christ. Delany writes,

“Margery, like any serf, buys manumission from her lord: the human property whose

service she removes has its price” (Delany 89).

While Margery Kempe often appears delusional and insane throughout her

autobiography, she also demonstrates a unique independence and a strategic mind for

economics, which, along with her social class, enables her to seek opportunities that most

women of lower social classes would certainly be denied. Her societal role is what

defines her and allows her to become who she is. Kempe’s autobiography “is not a book

of devotion; we are constantly aware of Margery in relation to her society” (Delany 82).

In Margery’s day, wealth provided the only “opportunity for those with enough financial

resources to enter the circuits of exchange, opportunity… to increase the scope of

choices, to act on them and to foster at least the potential for increasingly differentiated

identities and liberties (Aers 96).” Without her economic independence and the secure

position in society it gave her, Margery would not have been able to achieve either her

religious freedom or freedom from her husband’s sexual desires.