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In her Booker Prize-winning novel Wolf Hall (2009), Hilary Mantel stages a conflict between the historical figures King Henry VIII (1491-1547) and Catholic prophetess Elizabeth Barton (ca. 1506-34). His unbending desire for a male heir compelled Henry to break from Rome, and so effectively to assume proprietorship over the spiritual fate of a nation. Barton sought to prevent Henry's church reform measures, prophesying with particular vehemence against his proposed divorce of Catherine of Aragon (1485-1536) and subsequent marriage of Anne Boleyn (ca. 1501-36). In this essay I will trace the historical Barton's rise to power-from dispossessed orphan to her face-to-face encounters with the king himself-as well as her subsequent imprisonment and eventual execution, and I will augment the history proper with Mantel's imaginative recasting of Henry's court to show just how Mantel's depiction of Barton's influence is so welcome a contribution to an otherwise familiar history. I will go on to consider Barton through Judith Butler's theoretical model for state-defying feminist agency, as outlined in Antigone's Claim: Kinship between Life and Death (2000), and conclude that Barton's ultimate seeming failure tells more about Butler's model than it does about Barton, whose incursion on patriarchal sexuality cannot be adequately accounted for by the interpretive scheme outlined in Antigone's Claim.
Moreover, as a scholar of contemporary anglophone narrative, when I consider the galaxy of literature on the other multiple Booker Prize winners to date, J. M. Coetzee and Peter Carey (and posthumously, in 2010, as part of the "Lost Man Booker Prize," J. G. Farrell), I find myself wondering: Why the comparative dearth of critical attention to Mantel? It is my hope that this essay plays a small part in redressing that critical lacuna.
HISTORICAL AND SCHOLARLY ACCOUNTS OF BARTON
Elizabeth Barton was born in 1506 and spent her early working life as a servant until an illness in 1525 brought about a series of visions; Bartons spasmic, barely conscious trances seemed to lend credence to her claims of prophecy. When she correctly predicted the death of her masters child, in addition to other accurate acts of clairvoyance, witnesses were compelled to verify Barton's ability. News spread quickly of her visions. Her semiconscious command of a Catholic vocabulary, the likes of which one of low birth was...