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  • Trance of Involvement:Absorption and Denial in Fifteenth-Century Middle English Pietàs
  • Evelyn Reynolds

I. INTRODUCTION

It is a familiar image. Mary gazes down at her dead Son, absorbed in grief. In many medieval images of the Pietà, as in the example below, one of her arms curves under Christ's shoulders; the other drapes across his hips. Dwarfed by the wealth of fabric that covers her apparently massive thighs and calves, Mary's face bows above Christ's chest. Her eyes are downcast, her mouth closed, her face still, her attention focused on the body in her arms. She does not look up, out of the page, at the reader.


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Figure 1.

"Pietà," Book of Hours, use of Rome, in Latin and French. West central France (possibly Angers), second quarter of the fifteenth century. Copied from the Belles Heures. Bloomington, Indiana University Lilly Library, MS Medieval and Renaissance 30, fol. 21r, detail. Courtesy Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.

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One of the paradigmatic representations of absorption in the later Middle Ages, the Pietà asks its audience to engage what it means to look at an image of someone absorbed in grief—or in any emotion or action, for that matter.1 The Pietà is a particularly potent example of absorption because it heightens its affective pull with a complex temporality that involves its audience in their particular present with the past and with eternity. It is an intersection between teleological redemptive time (the Biblical narrative of Christ's life, death, and resurrection) and ateleological time (the eternal meaning of Christ's death for the believer). It situates its questions about affect in a scene that holds together history and its viewer's present, a scene that involves its audience in eternal, cosmic events. Within this temporal matrix, an answer to the question of absorption lies in the affective paradox that is inherent in images of absorption like the Pietà: such images not only invite their audience to be absorbed in a scene that portrays intense concentration—a scene, for example, of someone reading a book, sleeping, playing an instrument, or experiencing extreme emotions, including joy and grief—but also deny their audience that absorption.2 To put this another way, as Michael Fried has suggested, absorptive images both invite [End Page 439] their audience to be immersed in the image, just as the figures in the image are absorbed in their own emotion or activity, and displace, reject, deny, or negate that absorption.3

Because literary representations of the Pietà respond to visual representations like the one above and vice-versa, the Pietà nests together the visual, the literary, and the cultural to create the simultaneous invitation and displacement of absorption. In the Pietà above, for example, although the artist has emphasized Mary's and Christ's humanity, Mary's grief remains beyond the viewer's affective reach. Indicating Mary's human frailty, the downward-curved semicircles of her eyelids mirror the semicircular wound in Christ's side, a resemblance emphasized by the vertical vectors that run from her nose and lips to his naked, carefully delineated ribs. Mary's pose echoes that of the Mother and Child so that she is not just human but a human mother with a wounded, dead child, and therefore subject to the special vulnerability and deep grief natural to that position.4 And yet—a pair of angels holding a crown hovers over Mary's head. Even though they point to her lack of awareness, and thereby demonstrate her absorption in human grief, they also foreshadow Christ's ascension and Mary's assumption. They embody the grieving Mother's connection to the divine. The hugeness of Mary's thighs, knees, and calves under the drapery are reminiscent of the proportions of a statue on a plinth. This visual echo creates the illusion that, though this is an image on a page, the viewer is looking up at it. In this way the image's materiality—its use of physical characteristics—both promotes affective involvement and distances the reader from the figures.5 Furthermore, the ornate wooden posts of the chair on...

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