Читать книгу Sex, Sin, and Our Selves - Anna Fisk - Страница 8

Autobiographical Fictions

Writing the Self

“The Waltz of the ‘As A’s”: Autobiography in Academic Writing

Feminist theology’s (not untroubled) faith in the authority of women’s experience is far from alone in feminist discourse in asserting that what we see depends on where we stand. A central aspect of academic feminist theory—be it in philosophy, sociology, political science, literary criticism, and so on—is the argument that abstract and universalized accounts of knowledge serve to obscure the perspective and interests of those of the dominant social classes. Early feminist theorists such as Carol Gilligan and Nancy Hartsock (who coined the term “standpoint epistemology”) claimed that women’s social circumstances entail that they see and know differently from men.1 This, in light of postmodern thought and the critiques of black and postcolonial criticism, led to an emphasis on the particular situation of the critic, researcher, or theorist. This is neatly summarized in the words of Margaretta Jolly: “[i]n today’s pluralist culture, individuals assert that knowledge is by definition conditioned by its context, embodied and relative to its speaker. For them, the job of an academic is not to argue until we arrive at some final objectivity, but to find ways of understanding and living with our differences.”2

Thus in the last three decades it has become standard, at least in certain academic discourses, for an author to open a piece of work with a statement of their own social location; for example “as a white, western, middle-class woman.” This convention, which Nancy Miller terms “the waltz of the ‘as a’s; the obligatory dance cards of representivity”3 does not always entail that the academic writer will continue throughout their work to discuss the ways in which their own circumstances have influenced its production. More often than not, it is a way of paying tribute to the “anxiety over speaking as and speaking for,”4 while avoiding full consideration of that very anxiety. Yet the academic culture of ‘as a ___’ has enabled the emergence of ‘personal criticism,’ in which the academic writer self-consciously reflects on their own experience.

Personal criticism—variously termed “engaged,” “autobiographical,” “confessional,” “testimonial,” “reflexive,” and so on—is a form that deliberately transgresses normative conventions of academic objectivity.5 It may highlight the process of the production of academic work, thus catching “intellectual authority . . . in the act of its own construction.”6 When scholarship is “self-conscious” about its own process, it points to “the fictional strategies inherent in all theory.”7 It is a move away from the academic culture of “books written by someone who, though appearing by name on the cover, endeavors with delight to argue for the unreality of his own existence.”8 In personal criticism the unique, embodied reality of the writer is not bracketed off, but given a central role in the text, with reference to their experiences, interests and desires. Personal criticism may use detailed or lengthy autobiographical material, but more significantly it involves “a certain intensity in the lending of oneself,” in the words of Mary Ann Caws.9 Anecdotes employed to illustrate a concept or argument are not necessarily personal in the same sense, even if drawn from real life experience, whereas personally engaged academic writing expresses a real sense of care towards the subject matter, saying ‘this is important to me, and here is why.’

Autobiography in Feminist Theology

The use of the personal voice has not been as widespread in feminist theology as one might have expected, with its emphasis on ‘women’s experience’ often not going hand in hand with detailed autobiographical reflection. It is more common for feminist theologians to give a perfunctory statement of their social location—ethnicity, nationality, class, and so on—and perhaps give some mention of their experience within the church or university, or involvement in a particular political struggle. There are some exceptions to this generalization, for example Carol Christ has written from an increasingly personal standpoint—something she considers in the preface to the second edition of Diving Deep and Surfacing—and in Rebirth of the Goddess she entwines her systematic thealogy with autobiographical reflection. Carter Heyward’s When Boundaries Betray Us explores issues of intimacy and integrity in friendship and love through an account of her troubled relationship with her therapist. Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Parker wrote together Proverbs of Ashes, which relates their experience of suffering and how this has affected their theology. They claim that “[o]ur theological questions emerged in our daily struggles to teach, minister, and work for social change, and from personal grappling with how violence had affected us. The mask of objectivity, with its academic, distanced tone, hid the lived character of our theological questions and our theological affirmations.”10

I have found Proverbs of Ashes somewhat disappointing as a representation of “the lived character of theological questions and affirmations.” This is partly a matter of taste—the writing style, as with Christ and Heyward, is sometimes akin to that of the popular books categorized in bookshops as either “self-help” or “painful lives”—but, more importantly, because it is not always successful at striking a balance between theology and life-writing. Rebecca Parker’s harrowing descriptions of recovered memories of child abuse do have much to say in addressing profound theological questions. Yet Rita Nakashima Brock does not fully develop how her experience of fragmented identity, growing up in the US with a Japanese mother, discovering late in life that her biological father was a Puerto Rican soldier, has affected her theology.

The same criticism can also be applied to a pseudonymous article in the journal Theology and Sexuality, “Anonymity Desirable, Bibliography Not Required,” published under the name Nema McCallum. She writes vividly and powerfully of her experience of psychiatric institutions as a young woman, asserting at the close of the article that her theology is thus “terminally post-psychiatric.”11 She suggests that the contextual theologies of the contemporary academy run along lines of “metacontextual variables, such as gender, race, sexuality and class,” but lack “the insider-theologies of experience which involve the personal and private unsaids of which it rarely seems safe to speak.”12 McCallum’s argument is that “each of our experiences, perhaps more than our contextual identities, influence our theologies more than we know”; in her case, “[m]y experience of psychiatry, not my identity as a woman, is far more potent in affecting my sense of justice, style of theology, understanding of other people and thinking about God.”13 It is a shame that McCallum does not go on to explain further the ways in which her theology is molded by her experience of psychiatry. This is not the only aspect I find problematic: while I agree that our unique life experiences will shape our theology to a great extent—especially deep traumas such as those narrated by McCallum or Rebecca Parker—I am uncomfortable with the placing of individual, personal “experience” over and above the social contexts of race, gender and class. Like Christ, Brock and Parker, and Heyward, McCallum’s theological life-writing seems to ascribe a certain authority to the experiences of the individual, and upon their ability to directly recall and recreate those experiences in narrative.

There are some instances of autobiographical theological writing that do not suffer from these same weaknesses. Marcella Althaus-Reid reflects on her own experience throughout her work in liberation and queer theology.14 For example, in The Queer God her childhood memory of being reprimanded at her first confession for kneeling in front of the priest, imitating her male cousins rather than follow the convention for girls and kneel at the priest’s right-hand side, is related to “the liturgical symbolic geography relating to gender and sexual positions in the church’s structures.”15 The practical theologian Stephen Pattison draws on his own experience of child abuse and neglect in his analysis of how theological doctrine compounds the sense of shame common to victims of abuse, but his discussion is more theologically-focused than is Rebecca Parker’s on the same theme.16 The feminist biblical scholar Ingrid Rosa Kitzberger has led the way in autobiographical criticism in biblical studies.17 Much feminist theological thinking has taken place outside of traditional academic discourse, in poetry, liturgy and preaching, and these forms often draw on personal experience: for example, the poems and prayers of Nicola Slee.18

Apart from certain exceptions, including those mentioned above, the use of the personal voice in academic writing has been more sophisticated and skilful in literary criticism than in theology. This is perhaps unsurprising, as literature scholars are concerned on a daily basis with choice of words and sentence structure in a way that theologians are not; they will also be more attuned to the conceits of narrative, and the artifice of “the autobiographical I.”

Out of the Shadows: Autobiography in Literary Criticism

The emotions that literary scholars feel about the books they study, but have traditionally set aside in academic discourse on literature, is captured in Sandra Gilbert’s distinction between “the Critic” and “the Reader,” in an early example of personal criticism in the wake of feminist literary theory:

The Critic . . . sounds like someone who has so perfectly mastered his reading that he can criticize it, both in the ordinary (evaluative) and the extraordinary (analytic) sense of the term. Moving grandly among those long-established monuments, he is cool, superior, a godlike museum guide discoursing on the virtues and defects of each chiseled sonnet, each well-wrought novella. . . .

The Reader, on the other hand, is hot and human—and therefore somehow imperfect. Afflicted by texts, she or he struggles to understand them . . . Enclosed in contexts, embarrassed by pretexts, the Reader devours poems, inhales syntax, exhales codes, and is in fact assaulted by so many and such various messages that she or he may eventually come to feel that they are inscribed on her or his skin.19

Gilbert’s expression of the desire to write as a Reader—“hot and human,” “[a]fflicted by texts,” “[e]nclosed in contexts, embarrassed by pretexts”—within an academy characterized by the disembodied (yet male), objective Critic, is an example of the perceived personal tone of feminist criticism. In 1981, Jean Kennard noted the general impression “that large numbers of feminist critics employ an overtly personal tone and that this in some significant way separates feminist criticism stylistically, if not methodologically, from other literary criticism.”20

Despite this general impression, Kennard’s detailed study of feminist literary criticism published in journals in the previous few years revealed only seven (including Gilbert’s) that employ an overtly personal voice. Kennard also notes that the personal material is usually positioned at the beginning of the article and then it returns to a more traditional, detached critical style; a tendency Elspeth Probyn identifies as “a general pattern within feminist criticism of merely using the personal at the outset” before “plodding off into the usual disembodied type of argument.”21

If the use of the personal voice is not actually as common in feminist criticism as she and others had thought, why, wonders Kennard, is it perceived to be so? One conclusion she makes is that the few examples that there are of personal criticism leave such a strong impression that they are thought to be more numerous than they are in actuality.22 I would think that this is due to the deeply felt need, as expressed in Gilbert’s article, for making explicit one’s personal engagement with texts—thus instances of personal criticism occupy a significant place in the memory of those who read them. It is also a simple result of feminist theory’s criticism of the dualistic, rational accounts of knowledge and modes of speaking. Yet however much feminists may think that they ought to write from a personal standpoint, it is not easy to actually do so.

An instance of writing in a personal voice, while simultaneously considering the difficulties of that process, is Jane Tompkins’s “Me and My Shadow,” an essay of virtually iconic status in discussions of personal criticism. It opens with the words “[t]here are two voices inside me . . . One is the voice of a critic who wants to correct a mistake in the essay’s view of epistemology. The other is the voice of a person who wants to write about her feelings . . . These beings exist separately but not apart. One writes for professional journals, the other in diaries, late at night.”23 What follows is a phenomenological consideration of how she might go about reconciling those two voices, how to “move away from academic conventions that segregate intellectual concerns from meditations on what is happening outside my window or inside my heart.”24 It is difficult for Tompkins to integrate these voices: firstly because she is embarrassed to be writing about her “feelings,” because it seems self-indulgent, yet her feminist convictions require her to resist this sense of shame.

In Tompkins’s piece her emotional voice, struggling with the nature of academic discourse, is then joined by a resolutely embodied voice, with the sentences which provoked the most comment in response to the piece: “[m]ost of all I don’t know how to enter the debate without leaving everything else behind—the birds outside my window, my grief over Janice, just myself as a person sitting here in stockinged feet, a little bit chilly because the windows are open, and thinking about going to the bathroom. But not going yet.”25 This collapsing of the public/private dichotomy to such an extent—making reference to a friend’s suicide as well as needing to go to the toilet—marked a shift in the use of the personal voice in literary studies. The academic writer’s personal testimony became truly engaged rather than anecdotal or rhetorical.

The personal criticism of which Jane Tompkins’s “Me and My Shadow” is exemplary is routinely attacked for being emotional, uncontrolled, ‘too much information,’ ‘gossipy.’ There is, as Nancy Miller notes, a gendered element to this: “[b]y going/not going to the bathroom in public, Tompkins crosses the line into the dangerous zone of feminine excess.”26 This “calling attention to oneself” will more often than not embarrass the academic audience or reader; exhibitionism that leads to social discomfort may be regarded as ‘impolite.’ Miller asserts that the reader’s embarrassment provoked by the appearance of the personal voice in academic discourse is not a reason to avoid it; rather, it is “a sign that it is working.”27 Miller also notes—as does Tompkins—that she herself gains enjoyment from autobiographical detail in an academic piece of writing, preferring “the gossipy grain of situated writing.”28 Those who are discomforted by the immensely revelatory tone of Tompkins’s essay, Miller suggests, may be bothered more by her display of feminist anger, than by her reference to her bladder: “[i]t is her anger, that is ‘not supposed’ to show, but it does. ‘She’ is making a spectacle of herself. ‘She,’ as has often been said of me, is ‘being emotional.’”29

The use of the personal voice in academic writing makes one vulnerable to attack that goes deeper than the intellectual. More unpleasant than a male audience member’s comment on Elspeth Probyn’s paper on eating disorders—that her speaking of her personal experience of anorexia made him “nervous”—was a feminist’s response to the printed version, that Probyn’s “weighty words” of confession “lacked sweat and blood” in their invocation of the female body.30 This insensitivity to the point of cruelty in choice of vocabulary is a reminder why so many choose not to write from a personal perspective. The use of the impersonal tone in academic discourse serves to distance oneself from one’s own intellectual positions, a distance that ensures that—however violent the assault—no one will get hurt.

Autobiography and Selfhood

While objections to personal criticism on the grounds that it is ‘embarrassing’ may rightly be dismissed, there are more profound problems with the presence of the personal voice in academic writing. Tompkins acknowledges her anxiety over the use of the personal voice: “[t]he voice in which I write about epistemology is familiar. I know how it ought to sound. This voice, though, I hardly know. I don’t even know if it has anything to say. But if I never write in it, it never will.”31 These words are inspiring, but what is troubling is the notion of a distinct “voice,” a unified essence that has been obscured by the conventions of patriarchal scholarship, struggling to break through. Here the turn to autobiographical criticism runs the risk of implying that the personal voice is invested with inherent authority, because it is implicitly associated with a ‘person’ in a way that ‘objective’ writing is not. In the words of H. Aram Veeser, it can be argued that personal criticism “builds on the hypothesis of liberal authenticity: ‘I felt it, therefore it is true.’”32 Aside from questions of validity or truth, privileging one’s own voice in this way may lead to a silencing of, or failure to listen to, the voices of others. This begs the question, “[c]an stories be told through selves and through emotions without being at the expense of other stories and selves?”33 Probyn writes in the engaged, autobiographical mode, but in the hope that it is possible “to construct ways of thinking that are marked by ‘me’ but that do not efface actively or through omission the ways in which ‘she’ may see differently.”34 This requires resistance to “a simple reification of either experience or the experiencer,”35 acknowledging that there is no “unmediated innocence”36 to the self and to experience.

Feminist theology has a methodological commitment to the authority of “women’s experience,” but problems inherent in this were apparent from its earliest days, and extended and profound critiques are in no short supply.37 The two main criticisms are the philosophical naivety of its notion of ‘experience,’ and its failure to account for difference in grouping together the experience of white middle-class westerners with that of women from different social contexts. Taking on the criticisms of womanist theologians, in 1989 Carol Christ and Judith Plaskow admitted that “[t]he notion of women’s experience must be taken as an invitation to explore particularity rather than to homogenize significant differences.”38 Therein lies the enduring significance of feminist theological method: that particularities matter; that theological truths do not necessarily hold for everyone, and that theology is always done with an agenda, whether or not it is acknowledged. Emphasis on women’s ‘stories,’ rather than ‘experience,’ could underscore that experience is never unmediated; rather it is constructed and interpreted. The communal nature of ‘story’ may guard against the charge of solipsism, and the accusation that liberal belief in the authority of experience rests on Enlightenment notions of the autonomous individual. At the same time, the particularity of ‘story’ can prevent white, middle-class feminist theologians from committing the error of confusing their own experience for ‘women’s experience.’

We do not look inside ourselves and find our stories there, submerged and waiting to be brought out into the light. The stories we tell about ourselves are produced—albeit from the ‘stuff’ of experience, however fragmented and unreliable our memory of it—within particular contexts and for particular purposes. This is especially the case with academic life-writing; for example, Probyn’s story of her experience of anorexia, given as part of a conference paper, “was, of necessity, a representation forged for my argument,” and this is confirmed by her family’s reaction: “my mother’s conclusion in reading the article was that I had a happy childhood, whereas my sister’s was closer to the point as she gently mentioned the poetic, or academic, license involved in my description.”39 This is a reminder that our stories are never just our own: they are also part of the stories of those others whose lives intersect with ours. In putting experience into the public domain of academic discourse, respect for the feelings and privacy of partners, family, and friends will often require that only certain stories are told, in a very certain way. Furthermore, how one chooses to present oneself, in academic life-writing as anywhere else, is shaped by how one wishes to appear; thus behavior and motivations of which one is not proud are likely to be omitted or drastically altered in the telling.

These are issues that apply not only to academic life-writing, but, as “the process and the product of assigning meaning to a series of experiences, after they have taken place, by means of emphasis, juxtaposition, commentary, omission,”40 to autobiography in general. In postmodern critical theory, autobiography does not disclose a life and its historical moments, or a unique individual self.41 Rather, autobiography is “a narrative artifice, privileging a presence, or identity, that does not exist outside language”;42 indeed “[t]here is no essential, original, coherent autobiographical self before the moment of self-narrating.”43

The recollection of life events in the form of a coherent story is constitutive of a “narrative identity.”44 According to Paul Ricoeur, “life cannot be understood other than through stories we tell about it,” thus “a life examined, in the sense borrowed from Socrates, is a life narrated.”45 Richard Kearney takes this rephrasing of Socrates as far as to say that “the unnarrated life is not worth living.”46 Writing of the human desire for narration, Adriana Cavarero describes how, in The Odyssey, Odysseus weeps for the first time when he hears his story told by another, “[n]ot only because the narrated events are painful, but because when he had lived them directly he had not understood their meaning . . . By fully realizing the meaning of his narrated story, he also gains a notion of who is its protagonist.”47 He weeps because he has encountered “the unexpected realization of his own desire for narration,” the desire shared by all human beings, “narratable selves.”48

The narrative identity produced in autobiography is ascribed a redemptive role by thinkers such as Kearney, who claims that “[a] model of narrative selfhood can . . . respond to anti-humanist suspicions of subjectivity while preserving a significant notion of the ethical-political subject.”49 I agree to an extent, but am suspicious of Kearney’s emphasis on narrative “unity.”50 The sense of wholeness upon which rest rationalist accounts of the human subject, undermined by modernist literature and postmodern theory, have, it is argued, long been taken for granted by men, but proved harder to come by for women. As feminist theorists of autobiography have noted, “[n]o mirror of her era, the female autobiographer takes as a given that selfhood is mediated; her invisibility results from her lack of a tradition, her marginality in male-dominated culture, her fragmentation— social and political as well as psychic.”51

Academic life-writing would do better not to reproduce, in terms of narrative, a stable and authoritative identity, “a postmodern, self-help driven subject who coheres around any story she is able to cobble together.”52 As Kathy Rudy writes of her experience of telling her story of leaving the Christian faith because of conflicts about her sexuality,

[t]he “all-or-nothing” problem of unified subjectivity . . . is that it does not accurately reflect the way I feel in losing my faith. It was and is a much more jagged process, an uneven development. I find myself longing for things I no longer believe in, believing in things that seem patently absurd . . . What I need is a theory of subjectivity that would allow me to be two contradictory things at the same time, that would allow me to say “I believe” and “I don’t” in a way that does not require coherent explanation. I need a theory that will allow me to be fragmented . . .53

The recognition that the ‘personal voice’ is neither unified or pre-existent may guard against the temptation to invoke it as authoritative, thus silencing the voices of others. Speaking in a personal voice, but with an awareness that this voice is not natural or innocent, but deliberately adopted for a particular purpose, is preferable to an ‘impersonal’ voice—equally as unified, but denying its own existence. To write ‘in the personal voice’ is actually to employ one of many personal voices—in reading or writing engaged criticism it is usual for several voices to appear in one piece of work. As most of us are not gifted in impressionism, perhaps slightly shifting the metaphor to one of ‘key’ or ‘pitch,’ rather than ‘voice,’ would be helpful. Veeser writes of confessional criticism as “performance”54—we could conceive of this in terms of theatre as well as music. Sidonie Smith describes autobiography as “a kind of masquerade,” and I find helpful the image of the life story as a mask—“an iconic representation of continuous identity that stands for, or rather before, her subjectivity as she tells of this ‘I’ rather than of that ‘I’”55—representative of the self in the moment of performance, but not identical to it. Even more so than ‘story,’ performance is not individuated and solipsistic, but communal, dependent on the audience. It depends upon the forming of a relationship between the self in autobiographical narrative, and “the ‘fictive reader’ created by the autobiographer to help bring that self into existence.”56 In terms of autobiographical criticism, in the words of Nancy Miller, “[b]y the risks of its writing, personal criticism embodies a pact . . . binding writer to reader in the fabulation of self-truth, that what is at stake matters also to others: somewhere in the self-fiction of the personal voice is a belief that the writing is worth the risk.”57

The Trouble with Narrative

The research that underpins this chapter thus far was originally undertaken to support my own choice of a methodology of autobiographical reflection. The period of my initial research into life-writing in academic scholarship coincided with the long summer vacation, the first six weeks of my giving up smoking, and living alone for the first time. I came to consider whether these factors had a considerable effect on my reading: without the sense of routine provided by cigarettes, flatmates or term-time activities, my sense of self became rather hazy, and this was exacerbated by reading about the theory and practice of writing the self. At the time I wrote, I’ve been wandering around my flat, bearing sticking plasters. I forget that they are seeping in nicotine; instead I feel that they are patching up leaking holes.

I was looking for theoretical support and precedence for bringing my self (a self that seemed to be dissolving into the haze of the smoke of the cigarettes that I was not smoking) into my scholarship. What I found instead was that it was more complicated than simply being brave and preparing myself for some of my academic colleagues finding my writing embarrassing, or inappropriate, or—even worse—boring. The above discussions of the personal voice in academic criticism underscored what I was already beginning to sense—that the attempt to write oneself into one’s academic work can seem just as artificial as the attempt to make oneself invisible. Thinking about whether or not I wanted to write in this way, whether bringing my own story into my theological writing would be essentially pornographic—staged and false, while pretending to be revealing to the point of obscenity—also led me to think more deeply about the problems of a redemptive view of narrative.

Beneath the over-arching narrative of modernity, “we are encouraged to think of our lives as coherent stories of success, progress and movement.”58 Even in tragic stories, the narrative form still inclines to closure, to resolution. In the narrative structure of the popular imagination there is often little difference between epiphany and catharsis, and perhaps the anguish of the distance between the narrative of our hopes, and how our lives actually turn out, is not that the drama did not pan out as we would have liked, but that it did not follow a satisfying dramatic structure; events have not unfolded in a successive whole. Or, if we are able to tell our life stories as emplotted narratives in which there is a distinct pattern to events, we have to be extremely selective about which elements of experience to draw on. Janet Stacey, writing as someone in remission from cancer, but attempting to avoid “[t]he dangers of the success story”59 and working with the recognition that “the accounts that we produce are structured by the formations of memory and the conventions of narrative,”60 argues that “conventional narrative structure cannot necessarily contain the demands of a changing world.”61

I have had a significant—albeit shifting—sense of my own ‘story’ for a large part of my life. I grew up in an evangelical context in which it is not only believed that the history of the world is the unfolding of God’s perfect plan, but that one’s own life as an individual is also a story penned by God’s hand. Having been treated for depression from the age of thirteen, from an early age my self-understanding was shaped by a therapeutic paradigm in which the patient relates their emotions and experiences in order to arrive at a pattern of cause and effect, facilitating healing by making present distress explicable. I had lost interest in religion in the years leading up to my teens, which were characterized by stereotypically dysfunctional and rebellious behavior until I was ‘born again’ (again) aged fifteen. The severe depression did not lift, but it took on a different aspect, vacillating between elation and misery. The latter was dominated by religious guilt; this was compounded by the discord between my ‘testimony’—the narrative of how I had gone wrong but was now saved, and well, and happy—and how I actually felt a lot of the time. In my final year of school I had a breakdown and became agoraphobic for several months: this was after a school year in which I had been happier than ever before, thus undermining a model of gradual recovery and also my ability to assess my own mental health.

I did get through it, however, and left home for university, studied theology and philosophy, felt my dogmatic certainties gradually crumble and fall away—a narrative common to so many who come to the academic study of theology from a strict religious background. The left-wing and feminist values that I had always cherished, though they sat somewhat uncomfortably with evangelicalism, were able to flourish; I also felt able for the first time since I was fifteen to accept that I was not heterosexual, and nor did I want to be. So I also had a ‘coming out story’—a story of liberation from heteronormativity that would push aside my evangelical story of liberation from bondage to sin. Academically, I was for a while quite taken with canonical narrative theology,62 more attractive than the abstractions of systematic theology or analytic philosophy, and it seemed like a way of holding together my feminist beliefs with my resistance to theological study emptied of divine stories and symbols.

After graduating, I wanted to give my mind a rest, get healthy spiritually and physically, and live in the countryside, before commencing a PhD program. So I spent a year living and working at a liberal Christian retreat center in the Dales National Park in North Yorkshire. That particular story did not work out as planned—in the course of my time there the charity ran out of money and the center had to close, despite the extreme hard work and fierce idealism of those involved. I felt like the whole experience—of living in a small, often troubled community in the middle of nowhere, and being part of a religious institution that has failed—had stripped me bare of all the stories and words that had previously defined me. Living in such a beautiful and isolated place, where the powers and cycles of nature are so manifest, my spirituality became oriented more towards the world around me than to the canonical Christian narratives. I also lost the idealism that enabled me to believe that feminist theology can follow the same pattern of the Christian story; that it can tear down and then rebuild the monoliths of Christian doctrine, as I had once hoped.

In the early stages of my PhD study, I was encouraged to foreground my personal narratives in my theological engagement with literature. But this was colored by a nagging sense that in my autobiographical writing I was selecting certain parts of myself, certain ‘versions,’ presenting confessional writing as a mirror when it is more like a mask—something displayed for performance, rather than a slightly distorted reflection of reality. More troublingly, I started to suspect that throughout my life the narrating of my own stories had kept me trapped rather than set me free, that my identity had been so tied up with certain narratives that other possibilities were closed off. It seems that my belief in the worthiness of my self and my life is dependent upon the realization of certain narrative outcomes. It also seems that deep and long-lasting anguish results from people having conflicting narrative versions of the same events. Having lost faith in the grand religious narratives, I had also come to doubt the good of the smaller-scale life narratives—especially my own.

I have told a story of how I came to distrust story. It is, in a sense, fiction, in that I made it, though over time, and not always consciously. I looked back over memory and chose certain experiences and interpretations (often remembering the interpretation rather than any direct recollection of the experience), I wrought them into sentences and I laid them out in a certain shape. Yet I still would not want to say that that I made it up. Rather, a multitude of different stories could be told in a survey of the same young life; a multitude of different voices adopted, different masks worn. In writing about myself, I am creating certain versions of myself. It is not pretense, but it is artifice. The trouble with narrative is when its artfulness is confused for the natural, not that the artfulness is bad in itself. These recognitions about narrative and selfhood have been helpful, in both personal and academic terms, to my understanding of certain things. But it is important that I wear this particular story lightly, that I do not give it a unity that becomes prescriptive.

Writing an entire book on feminist theology and literature without mentioning my own stories, adopting an impersonal voice, is not an option for me. But I am making golden bone collages, rather than weaving tapestries. In this book I read the stories of Michèle Roberts and Sara Maitland beside my own, but in the recognition that this is not an appeal to direct and unmediated experience, and that my writing is, in a sense, just as much a fiction as theirs. I read these stories beside my own because admitting the instability of one’s standpoint does not imply that it is better to try to speak from nowhere. I read these stories beside my own because that is the best way I know to continually remind myself that I do not speak for everybody, that my reading and theology can only ever be that of a British, middle-class, well-educated white woman—but that acknowledgement should not be a rushed apology, placed at the beginning of a piece of academic work, and not referred to again.

Writing the Self in Sara Maitland

and Michèle Roberts

In the second section of this chapter, I discuss the life-(or self-)writing of Michèle Roberts and Sara Maitland. I consider the ways in which the authorial self is composed and transmitted in their writing and interviews, and how they engage with the process of self-narration.

Sara Maitland: Voice and Silence

Sara Maitland was born in 1950, the second of six children, and grew up in London and then a mansion in south-west Scotland, her father’s childhood home. Maitland describes her parents as encouraging their children—who they viewed “in a slightly collectivized way”—to be “highly articulate, contentious, witty, and to hold all authority except theirs in a certain degree of contempt.”63 While introspection was discouraged, “[w]ithin the magical space they had created for us . . . we were given an enormous amount of physical freedom—to play, to roam, to have fights and adventures.”64 A large family in an ancestral home in Scotland is the setting of the novel Home Truths, but perhaps the most significant influence family life has had on Sara Maitland as a writer is the witty, bantering style of her authorial voice.

Maitland was “excessively well-educated at expensive girls’ schools in London and Wiltshire.”65 Her education would provide her with a love and sense of ownership of classical myth, so important in her short stories.66 Maitland describes boarding school as “a damaging, brutal experience, made worse by the fact that in my parents’ world not to enjoy your schooldays was proof that you were an inferior human being—you were supposed to be ‘a good mixer,’ to ‘take the rough with the smooth.’”67 The high expectations that Maitland grew up with, both at home and at school, perhaps feed into the explorations of religious guilt in her writing:

At home we were supposed to get into Cambridge, and wear long white gloves, a tartan silk sash and our deceased grandmother’s pearls, and dance at Highland Balls. I was expected to have my own political opinions, and have them turn out the same as my parents. We were expected to be sociable, active and witty, and hard-working, industrious and calm. We were meant to be sociable and popular and bizarrely chaste. At school we were meant to be educated, independent, self-assured and totally innocent.68

In a 1986 essay Maitland compares the demands her father made of his children—his “tribe”—to those of Yahweh in the Hebrew Bible: “his devotion and loyalty in exchange for keeping their law.”69 As an adolescent she was “a father-identified daughter” who “wanted to be Pallas Athene to his Zeus.”70 The protagonists of Maitland’s novels Daughter of Jerusalem, Virgin Territory and Three Times Table are women who have adoring relationships with demanding fathers. In “Two for the Price of One,” Maitland conceptualizes the oppressive ideal ‘Father’ that she has internalized as a being separate from her real father, who died of cancer in 1982: “[i]n my late teens I fled away from my father’s house; it has taken me a long time to realise that I carried with me the Father from whom I could not escape by escaping childhood, from whom I have not yet escaped, and from whom I have had, and still have, to wrest my loves, my voice, my feminism and my freedom.”71

Maitland’s upbringing in the Presbyterian Church of Scotland lent her “a great love of the Bible and a generally warm feeling about Christianity,” but she had no “sense of ‘personal conversion,’ of passion or commitment”; thus “[a]s a teenager the mantle of Christianity simply slipped off.”72 The Christianity she encountered at Oxford in the 1970s was not to her at odds with her new-found socialism and feminism amidst those heady days: “[i]t was this conviction of enormous possibility that brought me back to thinking about God . . . made brave by hope and anger, I was tough enough for the enormous God whom I met.”73 In 1972, Maitland converted to Anglicanism; the same year she married an American training to be a vicar. They were Anglo-Catholic, a culture Maitland enjoyed as “colourful, gossipy, close-knit, extravagant and deeply-ironic,” while believing that “the strongly sacramental constructions of high-church liturgical practice balanced the rationalist and individualist tendencies of much feminist theory.”74

Maitland had her first child, a daughter, in 1973, and living in London as a mother and vicar’s wife she became more involved with the feminist movement, and started to refer to herself as a writer. She wrote and published with the Women Writers Collective of Michelene Wandor, Zoe Fairbairns, Valerie Miner and Michèle Roberts; her 1978 novel Daughter of Jerusalem—a contemporary feminist’s ambivalent struggle with infertility, interspersed with the stories of biblical women—won the Somerset Maugham Award. In 1982 her son Adam was born; 1983 saw the publication of a non-fiction book about Christian feminism, A Map of the New Country, and a collection of short stories, Telling Tales. At this time she also wrote a third-person narrative of her experience as a feminist writer, “A Feminist Writer’s Progress,” with a fairy-tale structure, explaining her move from social realism to revisioning of myth.75 Her second novel, Virgin Territory, was published in 1984; a further book of short stories, A Book of Spells, and an epistolary novel, Arky Types, written with Michelene Wandor, would appear in 1987. As a feminist writer, mother and vicar’s wife, she would both play up to and feel awkward about her “eccentric” image.76 In an autobiographical essay at the end of A Book of Spells, she describes being a writer and a mother:

This morning I was meant to be upstairs, drafting a short story. It is not their demandingness that keeps me from this sterner pleasure, but their loveliness. I have written before about how their dailiness and iron will for my attention balance and protect me against the dangerous voyages of the imagination—they ballast me safely with normality and connectedness, and ensure my return to sanity and to home. I have not written about the reverse: how the rigour and excitement and challenge of writing fiction weights me against their enchantment, against maternal romanticism and the isolated womb life in the garden.77

Maitland describes her life in the 1970s and 80s as an immensely happy time, “a marvelous life.”78 But at the end of the 1980s, this disintegrated: her marriage was ending, amidst the depressing contexts of Thatcherism and the increasing right-wing misogyny of Anglo-Catholicism. Thus in the early 1990s she underwent a period of profound life changes. Her theological interests, enriched by her interest in science, focused on “a huge, wild, dangerous God . . . a God of almost manic creativity, ingenuity and enthusiasm; a Big-Enough God”;79 a theme of her novels Three Times Table and Home Truths, and some of the short stories of Women Fly When Men Aren’t Watching. In 1993 she converted to Roman Catholicism: “there has been no doctrinal or liturgical change for me, merely a repositioning of my relationship to authority; a reaffirmation, despite its many sillinesses (and I must say wrongnesses) that a church can, and must, be universal, can be large scale through time and space—can indeed be big enough.”80

Maitland moved to a house in a small Northamptonshire village, in which she was “suddenly, and without exactly planning it, living on my own for the first time in my life.”81 Maitland found that she loved the solitude and silence, and wanted more of it. She associates the experience of change and a renewed sense of self with her age—not only the changing circumstances of a marriage ending and children leaving home—but also by the physiological “change” of the menopause. This is something that is little discussed in western culture, “terrified of the process of ageing, and in which women are encouraged to take artificial hormones so that they do not enter this magical condition.”82 Maitland’s collection of short stories written during this time, On Becoming a Fairy Godmother, retells old and invents new tales about menopausal women, “making unexpected changes in their lives, opening up their imaginations and finding a new self-sufficiency.”83

Maitland’s solitary lifestyle and increasing interest in silence meant that she became more attuned to the natural world: “I would go out into the garden at night or in the early morning and just look and listen: there were stars, weather, seasons, growth and repetition.”84 For the first time in her life she tended her own garden, finding sacramentality in its silent joy:

Gardening puts me in contact with all this silent energy; gardeners become active partners in all that silent growth. I do not make it happen, but I share in its happening. The earth works its way under my nails and into my fingerprints, and a gardener has to pay attention to the immediate now of things . . . In Warkton for the first time a garden became precious to me—it became an occupation, a resource and also my first glimpse that there might be art forms that I could practise that might not be made out of words.85

She became interested in “how gardens might reflect ideas, thoughts and desires, just as literature or painting does”86 and wrote a book about such gardens, along with the garden designer Peter Matthews, called Gardens of Illusion. Researching the book, she travelled around the UK, and, observing “the wild and desolate places that still . . . occupy a great deal of space in our supposedly overcrowded land,” such as the Pennines, the Lake District and the Highlands. In this she found that “it was not peace and contentment that I craved, but that awed response to certain phenomena of the ‘natural’ world . . . I discovered in myself a longing for the sublime, for an environment that, rather than soothing me, offered some raw, challenging demands in exchange for grandeur and ineffability.”87

Maitland became more interested in silence itself and contemplative prayer, and in 2000 decided to move to “the Huge Nothing of the high moorlands” of Weardale, in pursuit of “not just a greater quantity of silence, but also a more intense and focused experience of it.”88 Shortly after moving to the moors, she spent six weeks in isolation on the Isle of Skye: “[f]ascinated by silence, drawn joyfully into the void, I wanted to experience a total version.”89 Her commitment to silent living deepened, and her historical, literary, and theological research, as well as her own thought on the experience of silence, was published in 2008’s A Book of Silence. The book opens with Maitland “sitting on the front doorstep of my little house with a cup of coffee, looking down the valley at my extraordinary view of nothing,”90 feeling particularly satisfied because the previous day she had received the completion certificate for this house, that she had built on the moors of Galloway. On her website, she says, “[h]ere I write and pray and walk and am happy.”91

Maitland’s writing of her self is more prominent in non-fiction than in her novels or short stories; it is in Michèle Roberts’s fiction that I read a lot of fictionalizing of the author’s own life experience (hence this chapter’s section on Roberts is considerably longer than that on Maitland). However, one aspect of Maitland’s life that is employed in her novels and short stories is her voice hearing: from the 1980s onwards she experienced auditory hallucinations: voices which she knows are internal and “something to do with my imagination,” to which she gives descriptive names: “the Dwarf, the Angel, the Little Girl.”92 In A Book of Silence she writes, “I found the content of these voices more absorbing and engaging than tormenting, and they certainly never urged hideous actions upon me.”93 She does not believe in the existence of schizophrenia, thinking that “there must be something wrong, when people are unable to distinguish between Peter Sutcliffe (the Yorkshire Ripper) and William Blake (who as a boy saw angels sitting in a tree on Peckham Rye, ‘bright wings bespangling every bough like stars’).”94 The voice of Angel is heard by characters in the novel Brittle Joys and in some of the stories of Angel and Me: Short Stories for Holy Week. The “collective voice I called the Godfathers and who seemed to represent a kind of internalised patriarchy”95 are put to direct use in Virgin Territory.

It is in another kind of voice that Maitland’s self is present in her fiction: her authorial voice, the writerly ‘I,’ is sometimes inserted into the story, particularly when she is engaging with the story of an other; for example “Triptych” in A Book of Spells or “Requiem” in Women Fly When Men Aren’t Watching. This is part of a practice of bringing the process of writing the story into the text itself; at the end of The Book of Spells is a non-fiction piece which begins with her discussing her feelings about the brief for the essay, and whether to write it or not.96 This device is also used in Arky Types, in which the ‘characters’ Sara and Michelene write to each other debating how to write a novel together. In Maitland’s writing in the first person, the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction are blurred: “A Feminist Writer’s Progress” describes in story form her experience as a feminist writer, with a footnote that reads “[w]hether, and in what ways, you believe any of this is, of course, entirely up to you, but remember always that the writer is a writer of fictions and too literal or chronological a belief may prove dangerous to your health.”97 In the theological book, A Big-Enough God, she says of her account of becoming a feminist and a Christian, “I at least am convinced by my own narrative.”98

Although Maitland’s distinctive voice—witty, passionate, eccentric—is what makes her self so present in her writing, the personal narrative that has come to define her in recent years is her embracing of that which may seem antithetical to ‘voice’: silence. This is not just because her most extended work of life-writing, A Book of Silence, is a book about silence which interweaves her story with her thought and research on silence, rather than a straightforward autobiography, nor even because that book and Maitland’s discussion of it have proved so popular with the wider public. Rather, it is because Maitland has come to understand herself as a seeker of silence; the story of her life flowing towards silence. This has had interesting implications for her consideration of herself as a writer. During the last decade, she found that she was not writing fiction any more:

When I had come north it had been with a sense that the stories were not enough—I wanted to dig deeper into them, to pull more out of them. It had not occurred to me that I would abandon them, nor they me. The desire to write, to tell stories that pull my thoughts and emotions together, has been something that I have lived with and felt integral to my sense of well-being, even identity, for as long as I can remember. Now quite simply stories did not spring to mind; my imagination did not take a narrative form. I had in a peculiarly literal way “lost the plot.”99

Although Maitland has written a number of acclaimed short stories since embarking on a predominately silent lifestyle, she doubts that she will write another novel. Considering why this is, she notes that, historically, silent living has given rise to great poetry and non-fiction, but not to fiction, especially novels: “[p]erhaps it is because fiction involves creating whole new worlds and this requires a greater assertion of the ego than recording what comes, as a gift, into your own silent life.”100 On the other hand, the sense of self that comes across so clearly in Maitland’s writing and interviews has perhaps been strengthened by silence; she comments that writers who live silently, even those “who build in a rhetoric of self-abnegation . . . end up writing autobiographically.”101 Maitland’s love of silence has led her to consider deeply the nature of language and narrative—these things that structure human experience and yet are opposite to the silence she finds so profoundly fulfilling. Novels (at least the kind of novels that Maitland once wrote) involve “narrative, plot and resolution or closure, all of which are linear or time-bound and therefore deeply alien to silence.”102 Maitland’s account of silence, repeatedly retold in articles, interviews and speaking engagements, is both a narrative she has constructed, and a way of being that is resistant to narrative, especially narrative closure. This is something that comes to the fore in the final paragraph of A Book of Silence:

I am finding it hard to finish this book, because I don’t feel that I am at the end of anything. Back in Warkton, at the very beginning, I tried to design a garden that would open out into infinity; that would forgo the satisfaction of closure, in the hope of finding the jouissance of the unresolved, the open-ended. Now I am trying to design a whole life that will do that. For me silence is both the instrument and content of that life.103

Michèle Roberts’s Life Story

If Sara Maitland’s writing of her self comes to be defined by silence, Michèle Roberts’s is in some ways the very opposite: being a writer is absolutely essential to her sense of self, and is a theme of nearly all her fiction. Roberts is a particularly interesting writer to consider in terms of autobiography, because her self-writing is entwined with her theorization of the process of doing so. The self that Michèle Roberts discloses—or narrates—in her writing and interviews is projected clearly, and in bright colors. This autobiographical fiction is not stable, and flickers in and out of her novels, taking a different guise when read in the light of her memoirs, but it is indisputably there, throughout all her work.

Michèle Roberts was born in 1949 to a French mother and an English father. She has a brother and two sisters, one of which is her twin. Roberts’s childhood was divided between Edgware in Surrey and summers in rural Normandy, and her potted biographies usually open with the information that she is “half-French,” making this detail significant to her identity as a writer, despite the fact that all her published works are in English. Her fiction is sometimes set in France, but usually involves a character that is in some way both French and English, or else an English person living in France or vice-versa. In an interview with Jenny Newman, Roberts describes how growing up with the feeling of “having two families and two homes, and [having] to move back and forth across the sea to join them up” was an important impetus for becoming a writer.104 The awkwardness of growing up not-quite English and not-quite French—the dual identity that results from being raised in two places, two cultures, divided by language and by the sea—is given to Roberts’s protagonists Julie in A Piece of the Night and Léonie in Daughters of the House, and explored autobiographically in “Une Glossaire/A Glossary.” In the latter, the division is represented linguistically—with each section headed by a French word and its English meaning—by the oblique between the two languages. Roberts’s repeated recreation of a childhood in rural Normandy—particularly evocative of the material and domestic—represents the attempt to restore a sense of closeness to her mother. Childhood is also an important aspect of Roberts’s writing because “[w]hen you’re young, you’re very open to the world, you’re vulnerable, you’re soft-shelled. I think your childhood stamps you, wounds you, shapes you . . . you struggle to turn it into language and make something of it.”105

The childhood “wound” that opens again and again in Roberts’s writing is the Roman Catholicism she inherited from her mother and from convent school. She describes its influence as all-pervasive: “as integral as the blood in my veins, passed on to me by my mother like milk. Catholicism was a language itself: a complete system of images, and such a rich one, within which to live and name the world.”106 Roberts had been devoutly religious as a child, and believed she had a vocation to become a nun, but lost her faith once leaving home and going to university.107 Looking back—in anger—on her religious childhood and adolescence, she came to regard church teaching on women, sexuality, sin, and judgment as a cause of great harm: “the Catholic split between body and soul . . . damaged me almost irreparably, I would say, as a young woman growing up, because it made me feel so bad about desire, sex, pleasure, myself, my own body. Part of what my work’s been trying to do is to repair damage.”108

Thus a devout young girl’s struggle with Catholicism and sexuality appears again and again in Roberts’s fiction, and in an especially autobiographical way in the characters of Julie in A Piece of the Night, Helen in The Visitation and Thérèse in Daughters of the House. Thirteen-year-old Thérèse, who wants to be a nun, copes with her mother’s terminal cancer by focusing on the purity of piety: “she lay on the floor in the shape of a cross, and prayed. . .What comforted her, when from time to time she opened her eyes and squinted upwards, was the sight of her statue of Our Lady of Lourdes. The Madonna with a heavenly look, a light veil over her fair hair, blue sash about her girlish waist.”109 Yet this is disturbed by her developing body: “[s]he hated her stomach which stuck out as though she were pregnant however hard she tried to suck it in. She hated her breasts.”110 This echoes Roberts’s own experience of adolescence and the onset of menstruation,111 of seeing herself as female within a church whose symbolism denies the physicality of womanhood. For Julie at convent school on the feast day of Joseph the worker, dedicated to the Virgin: “[t]his is our day, the little girls’ day, when we sing of pearls, of lilies, of bleeding hearts, of secret soft places visited by God. Only my hands are slimy with heat and perspiration, there is a sanitary towel strapped like a dead rabbit between my legs.”112 In The Visitation the conflict between the church and teenage sexuality is played out in Helen’s guilt at kissing a boy at the church youth club dance; her twin brother and her friend caught having sex in her father’s car headlights, the priest calling them whores. That night she thinks of how “[t]he nuns teach her how to compose herself for sleep: lie on your back, arms folded across your breast, and think of the four last things. Death, judgment, heaven and hell.”113

Having moved away from religious faith, Roberts’s teenage spiritual fervor was channeled into the desire to be a writer; a parallel she draws explicitly: “I lost my religious vocation easily, in my first term at Somerville [College, Oxford], standing on the staircase outside the college library cradling copies of Paradise Lost and Beowulf . . . I realised that nuns were not allowed to stay up all night reading. Very well, then. Don’t be a nun. That was that.”114 This narrative of having exchanged God for books would be told in terms of swapping one vocation for another: from being a nun to being a writer. Yet Roberts acknowledges the relationship between her Catholic heritage and the desire to write, because of the images and stories integral to the Catholic tradition, the women saints she learnt about at convent school, and the medieval mystics she studied at university. The image of saint as writer and writer as saint is a significant motif throughout her work.

The sense of vocation—including a willed poverty—took her to London after university, to write and train to be a librarian at the British Museum. Her experience working in the Department of Printed Books feeds into the image at the heart of The Book of Mrs Noah, of the Ark as a great library for women; her relationship to the physical presence of ancient printed books is echoed in the mystical heretical scrolls of Impossible Saints.115 She remembers “[s]preading my hands over the thick paper of the pages, I knew that knowledge was physical . . . Books were material; like beloved bodies; provided not only intellectual but also sensual delight. I could touch them, open them, caress them, feed from them.”116 Roberts portrays her wanderings around London with an equal sense of physical intimacy: “[t]he city was like one of the manuscripts I studied at the British Museum. Layer upon layer of history lay quietly underneath the current written surface; not gone but just forgotten; biding its time. The city held memory in its very stones and bricks.”117

Although Roberts had been witness to radical politics and the spirit of 1968 while an undergraduate at Oxford, it was in London in the early 1970s that her commitment to socialism and feminism was to flourish. Through her friend Alison Fell, she became part of a feminist street theatre group, whose acts of protest were “carnivalesque and amusing”118 and went to consciousness-raising group meetings. The development of feminist identity, and friendship, is an important aspect of A Piece of the Night, Roberts’s first novel. It describes a rural French childhood and Oxford university education, and the fermenting of feminist consciousness, against the backdrop of a troubled mother-daughter relationship, couched in psychoanalytic terms.

A Piece of the Night also relates the tensions and difficulties of experiments in communal living, which Roberts experienced in a collective household headed by Alison Fell’s husband. The guilt she felt at her inability to live this way, without possessions or even a room of her own, led her to draw parallels between this politically idealistic lifestyle and her childhood religious vocation: “[l]ooking back, I think I was like a young nun making up her mind to leave the convent: how difficult to go against a community you have chosen, ferociously loved and supported and now criticise. You feel you are betraying them.”119 Shortly after leaving and renting a flat, the unease caused by not having the safe and conventional lifestyle expected by her middle-class family led her to go and work at the British Council in Bangkok for a period, which features in The Visitation. On her return to London, Roberts worked for the Pregnancy Advisory Board, and was a clerk for a sociological research unit. At the same time she was deeply involved with the feminist literary community, publishing poetry with Judith Kazantzis and Alison Fell, and short fiction as part of the Women Writers Collective. Roberts was the poetry editor of Spare Rib, the magazine of the women’s liberation movement in the UK. A Piece of the Night was the first novel to be published by The Women’s Press.

The Visitation, Roberts’s second novel, contends with being a writer, a twin (as Roberts is), the death of her beloved English grandmother, the joys and struggles of female friendship and the possibility of heterosexual love. Both A Piece of the Night and The Visitation are saturated with Jungian ideas on archetypes and the search for integration and wholeness. Jungian thought was to be even more prevalent in The Wild Girl, which Roberts has explained as her altered view of herself once she got married in 1983: “[t]he novel had been sparked off by my transition from being single to being married. The Catholic Church taught that a single woman could not be both holy and sexual. Why not? Why did a woman have to be split in two? I began to re-imagine Christianity, to imagine a Christ who loved and listened to women.”120

Roberts had married an older man, a scholar of Renaissance architecture she had met at one of her poetry readings. The time spent immersed in Italy’s art, architecture and cuisine—and the loneliness and unease caused her by this marriage—are reflected in The Book of Mrs Noah and some of the short stories of Playing Sardines. The Book of Mrs Noah—which, like so many of Roberts’s works, is made up of lots of different stories—is threaded together by the voice of Mrs Noah, a woman staying in Venice while her husband researches architectural history, who has nothing to do except dive into her imagination. This novel explores the relationship between writing and motherhood, utilizing the Ark-library as an image of pregnancy—which Roberts relates to her experience of infertility.121 She accompanied her husband to Harvard, but at the end of the first academic year there she decided to leave him, and returned to London in time for the publication of The Book of Mrs Noah. Having achieved success as a writer, especially with The Wild Girl, she took up the post of Theatre Writer in Residence at Essex University.

At Essex, while working on an original play called The Journeywoman, she met the artist Jim Latter, who would become her second husband. Her happiness with him formed part of In the Red Kitchen, in which the character Hattie speaks in the second person to her lover, with whom she is making a home. As Hattie decorates their house, it becomes the embodiment of the contentment she has achieved, wrapped up with her love for the man her narrative is addressed to: “[y]our cufflinks and loose change share a big yellow Pernod ashtray with my watch and brooches.”122 The house in which Roberts first lived with Jim was divided between him and his ex-wife, so their sons could live with both of them; ideas of “the house as repaired body, as metamorphosing body” also inspired In the Red Kitchen, “which circled around haunting, breakages and secrets.”123 These themes—and the importance of the house—were carried over into Daughters of the House, written “out of a sudden need to think about where I came from (parents and politics), about the Second World War’s impact on civilians in occupied France, about collaboration.”124

Daughters of the House—with its clearer storytelling that Roberts attributes to her relationship with Jim—was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the WH Smith Literary Award. With the resulting increased sales and prize money, Roberts could afford to buy her own home, and she opted for a house in France, in order to reconnect with her French side, associated with her mother. Roberts’s mother had reacted angrily to her fiction, and their relationship had been difficult for many years, but around this time they “reached an oasis. We felt able to express our love for each other. We forgave each other. A miracle in the desert.”125

Roberts would come to terms with the trauma of another familial relationship—that with her father—staying in the childhood home in France after the death of her aunt, haunted by “a projection of old childhood fears and desires.”126 She explains,

What came up for me, the ghoul that haunted me . . . was the strong feelings I’d had in this house for my father. At puberty, aged ten, I was madly in love with him, flirted with him, competed with my mother for his attention. I didn’t know this was normal, that little girls routinely fall in love with their dads. Catholicism taught that sex before marriage was wicked. Sexual feelings in a child of ten were therefore of course very wicked indeed, and sexual feelings for my father were wickedest of all.127

Impossible Saints, written shortly before her father died, was the novel through which Roberts grappled with the complexities of the father-daughter relationship, and its guise in patriarchal religion. The main narrative, of Josephine, features a father-daughter relationship with hints of incestuous desires, but it is in the short narratives of a multitude of women saints that “we get various ways in which the daughter fights her father, loves him, flirts with him, gets raped by him.”128 Roberts felt that Impossible Saints was a “breakthrough novel”129 not only in terms of her father, but also as regards religion. Her works of fiction that followed—Fair Exchange, The Looking Glass, Playing Sardines, The Mistressclass and Reader I Married Him—circled around her interests in the importance of the material—of sex, food and place—and women as writers and historical agents, but in a lighter way than in her earlier work.

This neat narrative of Michèle Roberts’s life story is based mostly on her memoir Paper Houses, but could also have been pieced together by information from her interviews and non-fiction writing, which augment the tale told in Paper Houses. It ends at a certain point—around the writing of Impossible Saints—although a little information about the years since are given on the last page, on which Roberts reveals that, after seventeen years together, her marriage to Jim had ended. Even though I already knew that, as the reader of this memoir I encountered the ending of this story with a jolt of sadness for its narrator.

Yet the narrator is not Michèle Roberts the partner, friend, daughter, sibling, step-mother, aunt—at least not the one known by her lovers, friends or family—it is Michèle-Roberts-the-writer, as disclosed to her readers. It is a fiction, but Roberts is well aware of that. She recognizes the “human need to make a shape for the story that we all have . . . autobiography and biography are not very different from fiction: similar impulses and similar stylistic devices are there to make a beautiful or truthful shape.”130 Roberts is also aware of the dangers of unified narratives told in one, omniscient voice. She had deliberately chosen to write novels that experimented with multiple perspectives and fragmented narratives—“plaiting, . . . interweaving down-to-earth voices rather than up-in-the sky ones”—associating omniscient narrators with God, fathers, the Pope. As such, Paper Houses is her only novel-length work which employs a single, ‘reliable’ narrator telling a straightforward narrative.

In the introduction, Roberts reflects on the process of writing her memoir, a fictionalized account of a person and a life, pieced together from the notebooks she wrote at the time: “[w]hen I spread them out on the floor of the room where I write they look like the multi-colored pavement of a piazza. This memoir is like fiction, in as much as I have shaped and edited it, but it is as truthful as I can make it, honouring both facts and the way I saw them at the time.”131 As the editor and shaper of the narrative, she chose, “[o]ut of consideration for others’ privacy,” to omit some “characters” and to “censor some episodes”132—but she recognizes that this is not the only sense in which she is “in charge” of the narrative: “[w]riting this memoir joins up all the scattered bits of me, makes them continuous, gives me a conscious self existing in history . . . Out of what often felt at the time like muddle and mess I subsequently make this memoir, this story.”133 Roberts images the artifice of memoir in terms of her enjoyment of exploring and wandering a city’s streets (of which Paper Houses contains many vivid descriptions): “[m]y narrative in one sense goes in a straight line, chronologically, charting my rake’s progress, but in another sense is a flâneur. It circles around recurrent images and themes, runs back and forth between inner and outer worlds.”134 Thus Roberts’s being “in charge” of the narrative is not the same as having complete control over it: “[y]ou become part of a flow and dance of words. You forget yourself and just get on with writing, just as, walking in the city, you can dissolve into the crowd, simply float, listen, look.”135

Writing her autobiography, “the flâneur enjoys being enticed down side streets,”136 both figuratively and literally. This relates to the importance of place, materiality and home in Roberts’s life-writing (indeed, all her work). The house is a symbol of redemption, but it is not the physical house her memoir is named after, but that which gave her security, meaning and identity during the years of wandering: “[m]y diary was a room of my own in which I could speak and act as I liked. Reading created me a temporary house, spun a cocoon around me.”137 This is carried forward into the future; the final sentence of Paper Houses: “[w]riting goes on too: I keep on building my paper house; my chrysalis.”138

Michèle Roberts’s Life-Writing as Redemptive

For Michèle Roberts writing is home; it is also an alternative vocation. She frequently draws an analogy between her childhood desire to become a nun, and her vocation as a writer, which entails discipline and sacrifice, but has great spiritual reward: “writing is a bit like waiting on God . . . trusting in the darkness, opening yourself up to what comes, being empty . . . I’ve invented my own version of the convent, becoming a writer.”139 This, the connection between writers and saints and Roberts’s interest in medieval literature, means that “spiritual autobiography” as a genre is important in her work. The piece of life-writing, “The Woman Who Wanted to Be a Hero,” reads like a feminist Jungian version of a medieval saint’s spiritual autobiography, describing Roberts’s “journey” to “wholeness.”140 The childhood mystical experiences of interconnection attested to here may also be read in The Wild Girl: “suddenly, with no warning, the world was utterly transformed . . . [t]he universe breathed in and out and I dissolved in it, no longer I . . . This world shimmered and danced and changed constantly, and I, the not-I, was part of it, and understood it, and was it.”141

Although the novel draws on patristic and gnostic texts, Mary’s narration is more akin to that of spiritual autobiography than a gospel. The Book of Mrs Noah features the spiritual autobiography of a nun awaiting the results of a trial for heresy, relating her movement from a guilt-ridden, self-hating religion to a creation and birth-centered spirituality, influenced by (a fictionalized) Marguerite de Porete and the Heresy of the Free Spirit. The struggles of historical women mystics to transmit their ideas, sometimes directly defying the religious authorities, at other times employing cunning strategies of collaboration, are celebrated by Roberts,142 especially in Impossible Saints. Yet this novel, and Daughters of the House, also suggest that women’s spiritual autobiographies are not innocent. In Impossible Saints, Sister Josephine (Roberts’s reimagining of Teresa of Avila) writes a version of her Life that coheres with approved dogma, in order to escape the suspicion of the Inquisition: “[s]he had danced their prescribed dance and performed their set gestures, had sung their recommended song, and received their polite applause.”143 The character of Thérèse in Daughters of the House is inspired by Thérèse of Lisieux, whose posthumous spiritual autobiography The Story of a Soul was exceptionally popular and ensured her canonization in 1925. Roberts’s Thérèse, the pious child who became a nun in the wake of family trauma and secrets, writes her autobiography, “the story of a soul”144 twenty years after leaving home: “I thought if I wrote what happened when we were children it would help me to decide what it is I’ve got to do.”145 Léonie reacts thus: “if you tell any more lies about the past I’ll kill you . . . You always were good at making things up . . . in your version I was the sinner and you were the saint . . . Yours will be the Authorised Version of what happened won’t it.”146 Roberts’s exploration of “a woman’s dodgy desire to control a story”147 in the characters of Léonie and Thérèse, perhaps expresses in fiction an ambivalence about life-writing that does not come across in her interviews and non-fiction. In Daughters of the House there is a sense that the healing and redemption that Roberts elsewhere ascribes to writing is not achieved easily, or without cost.

A sense of redemption through writing comes across in Roberts’s words in 1983: “I became a writer through sheer necessity. I desperately needed to describe experience in order not to be overwhelmed by it, to name the conflicts inside myself, to imagine solutions to them.”148 She often describes her novels as attempts at solving a particular problem, for example A Piece of the Night asks “what is a woman?” and The Visitation, “[h]ow do men and women love each other?”149 This is couched in terms of her relationships—for example Impossible Saints is concerned with her father; A Piece of the Night and Flesh and Blood are about the mother-daughter relationship. Writing about conflicts in relationships may bring further division rather than healing, because, as for Léonie and Thérèse, “versions clash.”150 Roberts’s mother hated A Piece of the Night, “finding it ugly, cruel and disgusting, and believed I had written it deliberately wanting to hurt her.”151 Novels cannot bring ultimate healing or redemption, and so for Roberts similar themes are brought up again and again; the “sense of constant failure, of not getting something good enough or beautiful enough” results in the writing of “another novel and another and another.”152 Psychoanalytic ideas about artistic creation as the attempt to make reparation for the loss of connection with the mother’s body have an important role in Roberts’s conception of writing. But there can be no final restoration to the primordial paradise, only the repeated attempt to cope with the anger and emptiness felt at its loss: “[w]e re-create the mother inside ourselves, over and over again.”153 Thus the healing, or redemption, brought about by writing one’s life or self is not final or complete, but nonetheless deeply valuable.

Annunciation: Writing the Self as Birthing the Self

Speaking about the lack of finality and need for multiple attempts in writing novels to solve problems, Roberts comments, “I’m not saying I’m finding earth-shattering solutions, but I am interested in making the novel different every time,” for the same reasons that people have more than one child, and enjoy the differences between their children.154 Continuing the novel-as-child motif, she sees the way that each of her novels has been provoked, inspired or enabled in some way by another person in her life, as that person engendering a child with her: “a very problematic image to use—that making a book is like making a baby . . . but I think you could use pregnancy as an image, as a womanly creation . . . I haven’t had children myself—I was infertile—but I think I’ve had ten children by different people.”155

One of the reasons why this image is “problematic” for a woman novelist is related to the relationship between autobiography and fiction, what Domna Stanton refers to as “the age-old, pervasive decoding of all female writing as autobiographical.”156 Roberts has said that she is defensive when hers and other women novelists’ work is designated as “autobiographical,” as if to undermine the skill and artfulness of constructing a piece of writing.157 As Sidonie Smith suggests, men’s autobiography is viewed as “crafted,” whereas writing by women that is classified as “autobiographical” is “spontaneous” or “natural.”158 The conflation of women’s biology with their writing is satirized by Roberts in The Book of Mrs Noah in the character of the Gaffer, “Author of the Word of God”:

Women writers, well, they’re like leaky wombs, aren’t they, letting out the odd stream of verbiage, the odd undisciplined shriek. They don’t create. They just spill things out of that great empty space inside . . . It’s the male who represents humanity, creativity, spiritual quest, after all. How could a woman possibly do that? How could a mother know anything about human growth? Any fool can give birth. Writing a book is labour.159

Although there are troubling aspects to the image of writer-as-mother, the envisaging of the labor of writing a book as birth and childrearing has proved helpful to Roberts. Towards the end of The Book of Mrs Noah, a painting of the annunciation of the Virgin Mary is used to symbolize a woman’s act of creation in a way that collapses distinctions between the generativity of nature and the creative will of the Word. In the painting, Mary reads the story of Noah, while the angel speaks to her: “[m]editating on words, her half-shut eyes cast down, seeing nothing but the black marks on the white page, she conceives other words; new words. She creates the Word inside herself, by herself, using her own power . . . She is the Ark, the maker of the Word. She is the author. Meditating on the Old Testament, then discarding it, she will write a new text, with herself as the subject that speaks.”160 In Roberts’s annunciation, in which words are made flesh and the flesh makes new words, the woman writer conceives herself, in giving herself subjectivity and speech. This image of writing oneself as a giving birth to oneself reminds me of a phrase of Hélène Cixous: “[w]riting, dreaming, delivering; being my own daughter of each day.”161

Maitland also writes of the annunciation, imagining Mary’s “assent” as “the moment of conception,”162 “an assent to the totality of herself, to a womanhood so vital and empowered that it could break free of biology and submission, any dependence on or need for masculine sexuality.”163 Her 1999 novel Brittle Joys portrays the annunciation as the invention of the craft of glass-blowing: “[l]ying on the leather that covers her hand is a sphere, her glowing blue, light-refracting, light-distorting bubble, free of the rod, free and filled with inspiration. It has a navel, a small round scar, that joins it to her and to history, but she has set it free . . . She is pregnant, breathed into, inspired by the spirit. This is the annunciation.”164 This, as in Roberts’s image, presents a woman’s inspiration in artistic creativity as part of her bodily capacity to nurture new life.

Writing-as-mothering, as “annunciation,” is particularly appropriate as an image of the fiction of autobiography, while maintaining a sense of the very close connection between the writer and the subject of the autobiography. The self that writes a life is not the same person who lived the events being remembered and narrated; the person disclosed on the page is in many ways an entirely separate creation, a daughter, almost. As Roberts reflects in Paper Houses, “[w]ho was that ‘I,’ that young woman of twenty-one? I reconstruct her. I invent a new ‘me’ composed of the girl I was, according to my diaries, my memories (and the gaps between them), and the self remembering her. She stands in between the two. A third term. She’s a character in my story and she tells it too. She’s like a daughter. Looking back at her, thinking about her, I mother myself.”165

I find the image of annunciation helpful both in terms of the presentation of my own stories—the insertion of an autobiographical self who is in some sense my own creation—and in terms of my understanding of the authors Michèle Roberts and Sara Maitland’s incarnation in their writing. In the following chapter I stay with the symbolism of the Virgin Mary, by considering “reading these stories beside my own”166 in terms of encounter, that of visitation.

1. Hartsock, Feminist Standpoint.

2. Jolly, “Speaking Personally,” 214.

3. Miller, Getting Personal, 121.

4. Ibid., 20.

5. Henderson, “Introduction,” 13.

6. Harbord, “Platitudes,” 24.

7. Miller, Getting Personal, xii.

8. Cavarero, Relating Narratives, 76.

9. Miller, Getting Personal, 1.

10. Brock and Parker, Proverbs of Ashes, 6.

11. McCallum, “Anonymity Desirable,” 51.

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid.

14. Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology; Queer God; From Feminist Theology to Indecent Theology.

15. Althaus-Reid, Queer God, 10.

16. Pattison, “Suffer Little Children”; Shame.

17. Kitzberger, Personal Voice in Biblical Interpretation; Autobiographical Biblical Criticism.

18. Slee, Praying Like a Woman.

19. Gilbert, “Life Studies,” 853.

20. Kennard, “Personally Speaking,” 141.

21. Probyn, Sexing the Self, 13.

22. Kennard, “Personally Speaking,” 143.

23. Tompkins, “Me and My Shadow,” 169.

24. Ibid.

25. Ibid., 173.

26. Miller, Getting Personal, 23.

27. Ibid., 25.

28. Ibid., xi.

29. Ibid., 23.

30. Probyn, “This Body Which is Not One,” 113.

31. Tompkins, “Me and My Shadow,” 173.

32. Veeser, “Case for Confessional Criticism,” x.

33. Probyn, Sexing the Self, 84.

34. Ibid., 4.

35. Ibid., 20.

36. Ibid., 4.

37. See, for example, Fulkerson, Changing the Subject; Graham, Making the Difference; Jantzen, Becoming Divine; Thistlethwaite, Sex, Race and God; West, Deadly Innocence.

38. Christ and Plaskow, Weaving the Visions, 3.

39. Probyn, “This Body Which is Not One,” 113.

40. Smith, Poetics of Women’s Autobiography, 45.

41. See Cavarero, Relating Narratives; Smith, Poetics of Women’s Autobiography; Stanley, Auto/Biographical I.

42. Smith, Poetics of Women’s Autobiography, 5.

43. Smith, “Performativity,” 108.

44. Ricoeur, Ricoeur Reader, 436.

45. Ibid., 435.

46. Kearney, On Stories, 14.

47. Cavarero, Relating Narratives, 18.

48. Ibid., 32.

49. Kearney, On Stories, 152.

50. Ibid., 4.

51. Brodzki and Schenck, Life/Lines, 1.

52. Rudy, “Subjectivity and Belief,” 40.

53. Rudy, “Subjectivity and Belief,” 42-3.

54. Veeser, “Case for Confessional Criticism,” xiii.

55. Smith, Poetics of Women’s Autobiography, 47.

56. Ibid., 6.

57. Miller, Getting Personal, 24.

58. Stacey, “Heroes,” 83.

59. Ibid., 90.

60. Ibid., 99.

61. Ibid., 83.

62. See Frei, Eclipse of Biblical Narrative; Hauerwas, Peaceable Kingdom; Loughlin, Telling God’s Story.

63. ABS, 4.

64. Ibid.

65. TPO, 32.

66. See ibid., 17.

67. ABS, 6.

68. Ibid., 7.

69. TPO, 37.

70. Ibid., 39.

71. Ibid., 33.

72. BG, 4.

73. Ibid., 5.

74. Ibid., 5.

75. FWP, 86–87, 95.

76. BSP, 165–66.

77. Ibid., 168.

78. ABS, 13.

79. BG, 150.

80. Ibid., 6.

81. ABS, 15.

82. Ibid., 18.

83. Ibid., 19.

84. Ibid., 16.

85. Ibid., 21.

86. Ibid., 22.

87. Ibid., 23.

88. Ibid., 29.

89. Ibid., 37.

90. Ibid., 1.

91. AM.

92. LMC.

93. ABS, 14.

94. LMC.

95. ABS, 14.

96. BSP, 165–66.

97. FWP, 23

98. BG, 5.

99. ABS, 189.

100. Ibid., 259.

101. Ibid.

102. Ibid., 260.

103. Ibid., 287.

104. IJN.

105. Ibid.

106. WWH, 52.

107. GCG, 15.

108. IJN.

109. DH, 76.

110. Ibid., 73.

111. WWH, 54.

112. PN, 146.

113. TV, 33.

114. PH, 11.

115. IS, 188

116. PH, 22.

117. Ibid., 43.

118. Ibid., 48.

119. Ibid., 69.

120. Ibid., 248.

121. GCG, 18

122. RK, 25.

123. PH, 308.

124. Ibid., 313.

125. Ibid., 325.

126. Ibid., 330.

127. Ibid.

128. IBR, 99.

129. Ibid., 106.

130. Ibid., 97.

131. PH, 7.

132. Ibid.

133. PH, 6.

134. Ibid.

135. Ibid., 6–7.

136. Ibid., 6.

137. Ibid., 250.

138. Ibid., 337.

139. FSG, 199.

140. WWH, 51.

141. WG, 29.

142. IGS, 140–41.

143. IS, 130.

144. DH, 19.

145. Ibid., 23.

146. Ibid.

147. PH, 313.

148. WWH, 51.

149. IJN.

150. PH, 313.

151. Ibid., 183.

152. IJN.

153. FSG, 21.

154. IJN.

155. IBR, 97.

156. FSG, 132.

157. Ibid., 4.

158. Smith, Poetics of Women’s Autobiography, 16.

159. BMN, 56.

160. Ibid., 214–15.

161. Cixous, Coming to Writing, 6.

162. DJ, 28.

163. Ibid., 30.

164. BJ, 227.

165. PH, 14.

166. Sands, Escape from Paradise, 167.