The Bride Show

The brideshow episode participates fully in this logic. It renders Kassia intelligible not because she speaks, but because the form itself requires her to appear as a legible figure—visible, exemplary, narratable. Her subjectivity is not expressed; it is formatted. This becomes especially evident in the chronicler’s concluding gesture, where the episode is retroactively endowed with moral and narrative resolution: “As for Kassia, having lost out on an earthly kingdom, she built a convent, was shorn a nun, and until her death, led a philosophical life pleasing to God” . [3] In White’s terms, this closing line transforms a contingent moment into the prelude to a life-course, converting the brideshow from an anecdote into origin story, a hinge through which Kassia’s identity is made retrospectively coherent.

Here, then, the chronicle does not transmit a life; it makes one narratable. Kassia becomes the kind of subject the form demands—one whose meaning arises not from voice or self-inscription, but from the narrative architecture that precedes her. In this sense, the text organizes her legibility in advance. It identifies Kassia as someone who can be evaluated before she can be heard, someone whose narrative position conditions the very possibility of her voice. Even the rejoinder attributed to her functions less as a speech act than as what White would call a narrativizing device: an utterance that serves the logic of the story rather than the woman within it. The chronicle substitutes persona for presence, role for self; she appears not as a speaking subject, but as the position from which speech would need to be imagined.

Read through Gilmore (1994), this substitution is not accidental but structural: a demonstration of how a woman’s self may be written before being self-writing. And here Liz Stanley’s formulation of the auto/biographical I (1992) clarifies what is at stake. The brideshow does not sit on the autobiographical side nor the biographical side of the divide; it occupies the slash that separates them—the unstable interval where inscription by others eclipses self-inscription. It becomes a limit-case of auto/biography: the site where a subject appears only as the effect of discourse.

White’s analysis helps us see why this matters. If the chronicle is a form that produces coherence, then Kassia is not simply represented within it—she is generated by it. She emerges as a narratable figure because the archival form requires her to. The auto/biographical here is not authored but assigned. What the brideshow provides is not Kassia’s voice but the architecture that determines how—and whether—such a voice could ever enter the record.