Margery

Margery uses her book as a platform of bringing out her examination on women and the church. Margery’s male contemporaries believed that it was illegal for women to preach God’s word to the people, and the purpose of her book is to counter these views. Her book conveys the effort of woman to separate from her personal history and search for instances, where she can feel and describe the presence of God. Through all her exotic religious experiences, Margery does consider herself as unique although she devotedly accounts for all the praise she receives from Jesus. Margery argues that if such things can happen to her then they sure can happen to anybody, anywhere, looks upon the lord and has faith. She presents her transformation story, and this is relevant as it shows how God can turn a worthless person into a courageous pilgrim who is ready to rise to hostile authority and even against an angry mob (Gilbert et al, p. 53).
Margery in the end leaves behind an incredible testimony of conviction and personal faith. This book is relevant to Christians today as it shows them the significance of suffering for the sake of Christ and the longing for God as the purpose of life. Margery has a strong aspiration for union with God despite her concern with the earthly suffering. Margery’s life story as well as her life revolves around her spiritual occurrences. She searches for spiritual powers such as Julian, and travels as far as Jerusalem, to holy sites to progress with her religious journey towards God. The journey to these places often involved a personal risk and a significant expense. On her way, Margery treats anything she comes across either as a spiritual aid or a spiritual obstacle and fails to mention the aspects of her life, which fail to fit in those two categories (Gilbert et al, p. 52).
Margery makes every element of her daily life, from the food she eats or fails to eat to clothing an act of commitment. Such small moments of dedication enable her to make the large ecstatic devotion moments possible. For example, she defers the earthly sexual pleasure and instead directs that energy to her visions, such that her sexual union becomes a heavenly contact image marriage with God. Through this, Margery’s spiritual desire for God develops into her life’s organizing principle. These show Christians the importance of sacrifice and dedication as a tool to serving God (Gilbert et al, p. 46).
“To all virtuous Ladies Honourable or Worshipful, and to all other of Heuah’s sex fearing God and louring their just reputation, grace and peace through Christ, to eternal glory,” (Gilbert et al, p. 110). These words are from Speght’s A Muzzle for Melastomus, and they reveal her longing for women to feel dominant. The words also illustrate to the world that it is not correct to categorize and ridicule women as being weak individuals. She writes her prose with strength as it discusses science, military affairs and politics, in contrast to most women writers who predominantly promote domestic novels. She defends the nature of women and the value of womankind. Her book has a Christian indication on death and of women’s education. She argues that it is God’s will that women receive equal respect as men. Speght focused on the smaller gender roles and fought for equality, and her message remains apparent today as women still fight for their voice (Gilbert et al, p. 110).
Lady Mary Wroth is among the most influential writers of the early modern period. Her work Love’s Victory focuses on female friendship and agency. In her work, the women use their agency to work beside men in order to build a community in which there is a modification of the class hierarchy and gender concepts to encourage reciprocity, community and respect. Wroth wanted to portray a representation of model couple through showing what a woman can bring into a relationship and the manner in which both partners can work as one and come up with a perfect compatible marriage. There is the concept of respect and mutuality, which is essential in balancing out the power dynamic in romantic relationships between men and women; therefore, making their unification a partnership. Wroth seems to be dramatizing varying views on the marriage constitution towards a companionate partnership, which increased in the renaissance (Gilbert et al, p. 102).
In Love’s Victory, both partners were to demonstrate loyalty, mutual affection, and respect and this focus reflect the description of renaissance’s companionate marriages. During the renaissance, a focus on mutuality and companionate marriage was among the most progressive contributions to women status. This is so since it assumed that a wife had the ability of understanding, sympathy and intelligence, which are necessary to uphold the woman’s side of the partnership. This belief worked in levelling the position between a husband and a wife since it began to reveal that a reasonably equal intelligence could exist between men and women, and this became widespread. These passages illuminate that loyalty, respect and mutuality are the key ideals of a companionate. These values also uphold in Love’s Victory romantic relationships as it has revolutionary themes of respect, community, female agency, reciprocal love, friendship and egalitarianism that make the drama, which are still relevant in the society today (Gilbert et al, p. 106).
Work cited
Gilbert, Sandra M, and Susan Gubar. The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Traditions in English. New York: W.W. Norton, 2007. Print.

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