3 Performativity and performance

Abstract

This chapter considers issues of performativity and performance. Namely: what work does emotion ‘get done’ within Middle English literary texts, whether as simply advancing the plot by providing narrative motivation and action or as performing more complex tasks? Feelings have a key role in constructing the imagined secondary worlds of different genres, filling in the details of the social norms that obtain in particular contexts. Making use of Reddy’s concept of the ‘emotive’, the chapter also examines how the gap between character interiority and external display is bridged and discusses when emotion can be construed as end-oriented performance, intended to have a particular effect on its witnesses. Access to interiority via performativity is often intermittent or manipulated by the narrator in order to vary the focalisation of the story; here emotives may offer a confirmatory meta-analysis on changes within the emotional self. The chapter engages with such concepts as sincerity and pretence and their relevance to arguments about the development of concepts of interiority, the purposes of public performance and ritual behaviour, and the elaboration and maintenance of the courtly persona in line with social expectation and situational pressures. It concludes with a case-study of a highly performative and gendered emotion: danger, a behaviour expected of high-status women, but which opens them up to resentment and criticism on the part of the men who demand it of them.

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