Excremental Desire, Queer Allegory, and the Disidentified Audience of Mankind

Medieval morality plays, in dramatizing the pitfalls along the path to Christian salvation, solicit their audience members to align themselves with the protagonists of their narrative action. Viewers are the Everyman of Everyman; they are the Mankind both of Mankind and of The Castle of Perseverance. As such, they are called to interpolate themselves into the dramatic plot by envisioning the moral choices of the protagonists' actions as directly relevant to their own lives. As David Bevington explains, medieval morality plays were "characterized primarily by the use of allegory to convey a moral lesson about religious or civil conduct, presented through the medium of abstractions or representative social characters. The most common plot of these moralities, retold in play after play, was that of an allegorical contest for the spiritual welfare of the mankind hero."¹ Given the endings of these plays, with their protagonists first falling yet then overcoming the moral snares on their road to redemption, many critics view them as theologically conservative.

Yet the journey to salvation in Mankind is depicted as unabashedly filthy and exuberantly queer, one that necessitates the protagonist's explorations of desires both excremental and homoerotic, and thus for viewers to undertake such a queer journey as well. Allegories depend on their surface text inviting related yet discrete interpretations, yet in unleashing such doubled (and even multiple) meanings, they frequently invite queer readings attuned to the vagaries of erotic expression between their (putatively normative) text and their (subversive) subtext, for these structures and substructures cannot help but to create hermeneutic fissures. As Angus Fletcher explains of allegory, "In the simplest terms, allegory says one thing and means another," as he then elaborates: "The whole point of allegory is that it does not need to be read exegetically; it often has a literal level that makes good enough sense all by itself. But somehow this literal surface becomes much richer and more interesting if given interpretation."² This doubled structure sparks the inherent paradox of allegory, in that its secondary semantic level often contains the potential to undermine its literal reading.³ Within the traditions of allegorical theater and medieval morality plays, this doubling of meaning is inevitably doubled again, owing to the viewers' likely identification with the narrative's protagonist while also experiencing the disjunction between the desires expected of a fictional character and their voyeuristic desires while witnessing his moral progress. In effect, the audience must continually oscillate within this doubling of allegorical form and its subtext, as well as within the doubling of narrative identification with the protagonist's moral journey and their personal investment with perverse plottings.

And so, whereas some may envision medieval allegories as inviting textual and subtextual readings that simultaneously stand consonant with Christian teaching, various exemplars of the form testify to its inherent queerness, with the surface level of narration camouflaging an erotically charged and potentially perverse subtext, as evident in such masterworks as Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun's Roman de la Rose, William Langland's Piers Plowman, and the Gawain-Poet's Pearl.⁴ Glenn Burger explains of literary queerness that ideologies, both those of the Middle Ages and of today, circumscribe various constructions of desire and the self, in that culture demands "coercive performances of sexuality and identity [such] that resistance is only very provisionally enacted (never absolutely secured) within circulations of power."⁵ Within such power structures, queer energies and evasions offer a critical strategy for reassessing the meaning of prevailing cultural scripts, with genre functioning as just such a cultural script that regulates erotic expression yet is simultaneously rendered susceptible to its subversion from within. Several critics have commented on the "degeneracy" evident in Mankind's dramatic action, with this telling word acknowledging the play's homoerotic themes while mostly refusing to engage with the cultural meaning of such degeneracy as an unexpected path to redemption.⁶ As Mankind acknowledges, his travails concern the "rebellyn of [his] flesch" (l. 313), a phrase that cannot escape erotic connotations, and Mercy admonishes Mankind against his rowdy companions—"What how, Mankynde! Fle þat felyschyppe...