ABSTRACT
The Prioress’s Tale is a predominantly castrative treatment of the story of becoming a subject: a proto-self’s acquisition of language and selfhood saturated in images of fear, bewilderment, and pain. The Prioress’s Tale suggests that Miracles can be read as stories of entry into language and selfhood even when they seem farthest from issues of symbols, letters, and signs. The surface of language embodies a struggle between symbolic separations that parcel it out and semiotic instabilities that blur the separations and make them indeterminate. In the castrative treatment of entry into language, the return of semiotic functioning in the spaces of the symbolic, otherwise a normal and natural consequence of becoming a subject appears as a miracle of mitigation. Embodying the enigmatic space of the semiotic, the sweetness of the hymn—Mary’s sweetness—”pierces” the clergeoun before his throat is cut. Mary emerges in the midst of the losses to minimize them, to restore life and hope to those afflicted by them.
