Women and the Word: Contemporary Women Novelists and the Bible

Women and the Word Contemporary Women Novelists and the Bible

Jeannette King

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Women and the Word

10.1057/9780230597358 - Women and the Word, Jeannette King

Also by Jeannette King TRAGEDY IN THE VICTORIAN NOVEL: Theory and Practice in the Novels of George Eliot, Thomas Hardy and Henry James AN OPEN GUIDE TO JANE EYRE

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DORIS LESSING

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Women and the Word Jeannette King Senior Lecturer in Women's Studies Department of English University of Aberdeen

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Contemporary Women Novelists and the Bible

First published in Great Britain 2000 by

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MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

First published in the United States of America 2000 by

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ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, LLC, Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 ISBN0-333-91872-X Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data King, Jeannette. Women and the word : contemporary women novelists and the Bible / Jeannette King. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-333-91872-X 1. English fiction—Women authors—History and criticism. 2. Religion and literature—Great Britain—History—20th century. 3. Women—Religious life— -Great Britain—History—20th century. 4. Women and literature—Great Britain—History—20th century. 5. American fiction—Women authors-History and criticism. 6. English fiction—20th century —History and criticism. 7. Religious fiction, English—History and criticism. 8. Bible—In literature. I. Title. PR888.R5 K56 2000 823'.91409382-dc21 00-041519

© Jeannette King 2000 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 0LP Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire

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ISBN0-333-91872-X

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To Flora and Siobhan

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Preface and Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction

1

1 From the Mother Goddess to God the Father 2 'Destructive Genesis': Old Testament Myths of Origin and Creation The Myth of the Fall: 'And God Created Woman': Emma Tennant - Sisters and Strangers The Myth of the Flood: Tn the beginning there is Mother': Michele Roberts - The Book of Mrs Noah The Myth of the Patriarch: Sara Maitland - Triptych' (

3 Stahat Mater': Christianity and the Virgin Mother Michele Roberts - Daughters of the House Sara Maitland - Daughter of Jerusalem Sara Maitland - Virgin Territory 4 'Outside Time': Prophets of Transgression The New Adam and the New Eve: Michele Roberts - The Wild Girl Priests, Prophets and the Love of Women: Jeanette Winterson - Oranges are Not the Only Fruit 5 A Dissenting Voice: Angela Carter's Passion of New Eve and 'Women's Time'

10 33 34

41 54 62 65 76 89 103 105 118 135

6 Paradise Lost and Regained: Toni Morrison and Alice Walker Toni Morrison's Paradise Lost Recovering the Power of the Goddess: Alice Walker - The Temple of My Familiar

171

Notes

187

Select Bibliography

197

Index

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152 155

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Contents

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For some time now I have been interested in myth, and the part that it plays in the construction of gender, in our perceptions of what it is to be male or female. This interest first resulted in an article on the East German writer, Christa Wolf, whose book Cassandra uses that archetypal image of the silenced woman to explore women's relationship both to language in general, and in particular to the patriarchal religious myths that have played so great a part in defining women and their role in society. At the same time I became increasingly aware that religious myths much closer to our own time and culture seemed to preoccupy many of the best women novelists writing today in our supposedly very secular society. A desire to explore the significance of this preoccupation is what prompted this study. In completing the study, which goes some way beyond my original area of expertise in literary criticism, I have, however, benefited from considerable support of various kinds. First, I must thank the University of Aberdeen for a Research Fellowship which enabled me to concentrate entirely on the project for a period. I am indebted to many of my colleagues in the Women's Studies group at Aberdeen for suggestions and comments, and am particularly grateful to Helen Bond of the Department of Divinity for ensuring that I avoided making fundamental theological errors. Any errors that may have slipped through are entirely my responsibility. I would also like to thank the students who took my course on women novelists and the Bible, whose enthusiasm, ideas and questions have all fed into this book. More personal thanks are due to Liz Allen, Olivia Farrington and Jo Watson, whose ideas, encouragement and friendship have made an important contribution to this project. My biggest debt, however, is to Pam Morris, whose work on critical theory I have regularly turned to while writing this book, and who generously gave detailed and incisive criticism of my manuscript, as well as unfailing support, both of which were much needed and appreciated. Finally, special thanks are due to Flora Alexander and Siobhan Lloyd, to whom this book is dedicated. It was largely due to their efforts and determination that the Women's Studies programme came ix

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Preface and Acknowledgements

x

Women and the Word

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into being at the University of Aberdeen, and my pleasure at being part of that programme has been largely due to what they have taught me, and to their friendship. J.K.

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Has God always been thought of as male? Have monotheistic societies ever worshipped a goddess? How did the worship of a male God become such a dominant feature of monotheistic societies? How does the gender of God affect a society's ethical and social systems? And how does it affect the perception each sex has of itself and the other, and of their roles in society? Over the last twenty years questions like this have increasingly been asked not only by feminist theologians, but by feminist historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists, for whom the history of religion in relation to women is a central concern. These scholars have analysed women's place in religious systems considered both as institutions and ideologies, and women's relationship to the idea of the sacred. The eminent historian Gerda Lerner, for instance, sees the transition from goddess worship to the worship of a male god as central to the history of patriarchy which she charts in her ground-breaking work on women and history: just as the development of plow agriculture, coinciding with increasing militarism, brought major changes in kinship and in gender relations, so did the development of strong kingships and of archaic states bring changes in religious beliefs and symbols. The observable pattern is: first, the demotion of the Mother-Goddess figure and the ascendance and later dominance of her male consort/son; then his merging with a storm-god into a male Creator-God, who heads the pantheon of gods and goddesses. Wherever such changes occur, the power of creation and fertility is transferred from the Goddess to the God.1 Awareness of these changes has led others to investigate those earlier religious traditions based on belief in a Mother Goddess, and the social and cultural systems arising from such beliefs. The anthropologists Baring and Cashford embarked on a study of the many different images of the goddess, but in the process were forced to recognize an underlying unity of image and belief: we discovered such surprising similarities and parallels in all the goddess myths of apparently unrelated cultures that we concluded 1

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Introduction

Women and the Word

that there had been a continuous transmission of images throughout history. This continuity is so striking that we feel entitled to talk of 'the myth of the goddess', since the underlying vision expressed in all the variety of goddess images is constant: the vision of life as a living unity. 2 From a study of such images in the archaeological evidence Riane Eisler attempted to extrapolate the kind of society and values which the worship of a goddess, as opposed to a god, represents. She concludes: the many images of the Goddess in her dual aspect of life and death seem to express a view of the world in which the primary purpose of art, and of life, was not to conquer, pillage and loot but to cultivate the earth and provide the material and spiritual wherewithal for a satisfying life ... Neolithic art, and even more so the more developed Minoan art, seems to express a view in which the primary function of the mysterious powers governing the universe is not to exact obedience, punish, and destroy but rather to give.3 In comparing the effect of these traditions on women with the effect of the Judaeo-Christian tradition that has dominated the West, a number of studies have focused on women's relationship to the Word of God as set out in the Bible. Such comparisons have generally led to the conclusion that the shift from the Mother Goddess to God the Father was a prerequisite to the consolidation of patriarchal social and family structures. Writing on the history of Christianity, Karen Armstrong concurs with those who therefore feel that patriarchal religion did not advantage women: although at the very beginning of its history Christianity did offer women a positive message it has to be said that since the second century Christianity has been anything but 'good news' for women Christianity can offer a message of glad tidings to women, as long as women are clear which of the cultural habits of mind that Christianity has taught us in the West they want to cultivate and which they want to jettison. 4 The novels and stories discussed in this book, as well as the book itself, are part of this ongoing project. They embody the responses of some of the most respected women novelists in Britain and America to the Bible and its myths, exploring their function in defining and

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justifying the role of women. These texts deconstruct and reconstruct those myths not only to expose the patriarchal beliefs which underpin them, but to provide alternative myths which can offer women a more constructive view of their own gender. To reinstate the value of the female in cultural terms, many of them use maternal images and symbols which show the influence (direct or otherwise) of those other areas of contemporary feminist thought mentioned above. I have used the works quoted and many others to provide a context for the novels, and have tried to show the particular relevance of their concern with women's relationship to the divinely inspired 'Word' to the position of women as writers. Although the Bible is central to this study, I must emphasize that I do not - cannot - deal with it as a Bible scholar, but as a literary critic, approaching it primarily through the eyes of the novelists. For this reason I have chosen to use as my text the King James Authorized Version of 1611, which has had such an enormous impact on Western culture, and particularly on its literature. 5 While I am aware of the attempts of theologians like Phyllis Trible to recuperate the Bible's meaning for women, and that the New Revised Standard Version of 1990 has attempted to make the language of the Bible more inclusive, such work does not reduce the historical and lasting impact of patriarchal interpretation and uses of it. The single most influential theorist for me has, however, been the French feminist, Julia Kristeva, whose book, About Chinese Women (Des Chinoises, 1974), provided a framework for much of my own analysis, as will be evident. Central to the analysis of the JudaeoChristian tradition that she undertakes in that work are her ideas about the acquisition of gender identity and language. (Readers familiar with her work may like to omit this section.) Kristeva argues that before they acquire language, both sexes exist in a non-gendered psychic state. She distinguishes between this pre-verbal pre-Oedipal phase (which she calls the semiotic) when the mother and child enjoy perfect unity, and the post-Oedipal phase which marks the recognition of the power of the father and the child's detachment from the mother. The semiotic phase is dominated by the rhythms of the body - of heartbeat and pulse, of the intake and release of breath, of hot and cold - whereas the Oedipal phase marks the child's entry into the symbolic order of language, in which is articulated the 'Law of the Father', which tends to repress the influence of the semiotic. But Kristeva goes on to suggest that the Oedipal phase, and detachment from the pre-Oedipal mother, is much more problematic for the female child. For in order to acquire identity and become a social

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Introduction 3

Women and the Word

being, every child must enter the symbolic order and accept the system of meanings and values inscribed within it. She is therefore faced with two choices. She can identify with patriarchy in one of two ways: she can either identify with the symbolic status of the father, repressing those qualities labelled as 'female' and her dependence on the body of the mother, or she can identify with one of the models of femininity validated by the Law of the Father. Alternatively, she can continue to identify with the mother, and accept being marginal to the symbolic order, passive and powerless. Unlike more deterministic views of gender and language, however, Kristeva's view of the semiotic and symbolic as modalities always simultaneously present in language, allows for the possibility of fluidity in gender identity - the human subject is always 'in process', rather than fixed forever in the subject position offered by the symbolic order. Her view implies too a subversive potential in language, since the tendency of the symbolic towards fixed and unitary meaning is constantly being destabilized by the tendency of the semiotic towards ambiguity and disruption of syntactic order. Accordingly, the subject can engage in what Kristeva calls 'intertextuality', that is, in dialogue with authoritative discourses such as the social construction of gender or the written text of the Bible. As the critic Pam Morris puts it, 'this sense of language as dialogic ... allows a writer to "enter history" as a participative consciousness rather than remaining enclosed within ideology'. 6 Some of the novelists with whom this study is concerned 'enter history' with a specifically theological agenda, whether that theology is located within Christianity, or offered as some kind of alternative to it. Their central concern is to explore the relationship between feminism and Christianity and/or spirituality. Sara Maitland explicitly uses her fiction as a form of theology, attempting in her collection of short stories, Angel and Me,7 for instance, to achieve a synthesis between feminism and Christianity. Her approach is typical of that of other Christian feminists whom she describes as trying 'to confront the world and the Church in a strong conviction of their own - individual and collective - holiness, lovability and God-imaged-ness. Such a conviction is the basis for a radical critique of the Church.' 8 Unlike Maitland, Michele Roberts and Jeanette Winterson seem to have turned away from Christianity without necessarily abandoning a sense of the divine. Both write in response to an intensely religious background, Catholic in the case of Roberts, evangelical fundamentalist in the case of Winterson. Roberts has achieved a very different

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Introduction 5

The God she taps into is only the interconnectedness of everything there is. Camus' benign indifference of the universe. Freud's oceanic feeling. God is like art, which brings the unconscious to the conscious mind. God is unlike religion, which corrupts that process with its own power structure. And, finally, God is not a woman. 9 That last comment will be an important one to bear in mind when considering the novels, a reminder that all myth - religious and otherwise - is a form of metaphor. Both Roberts and Winterson seem anxious to reclaim the sense of spirituality which their early religious teaching taught was irreconcilable with a sense of the body. Winterson rejects the Christianity which told her that her sexual and emotional desires for other women were ungodly, but her fiction suggests that she retains a sense of the divine in those very emotions, and she has recently suggested that she retains a belief in God. 10 Both writers share with Maitland a desire to deconstruct the binary oppositions within Christian theology that not only oppose body against spirit and female against male, but also mysticism against social function, and eros against agape, or other-centred love. Religion is a less dominant issue in the fiction of Emma Tennant and Angela Carter, but their use of Biblical myth is part of the larger project of re-writing the 'grand narratives' of history and myth. The Bible therefore remains a central element in their analysis of the myths by which femininity is constructed, and in their construction of alternative myths. As Roberts says of women in general today, they can be seen as being in 'a postmodernist, confident phase; we are putting the bits together again, working with the fragments, the splits and breaks and making new myths.' 11 While acknowledging that orthodox religion may not play the same role in the individual life and in society that it did, all these writers suggest that the beliefs and values embodied in the Bible and perpetuated by the Church have shaped perceptions of women in a way which must be continually challenged if significant social change is to come about, and if individual women are to have a more complete sense of their identity and their role. Finally, for African-American novelists like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker the deconstruction of Christian gender discourse goes hand in hand with their deconstruction of discourses of race. Their concepts of

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understanding of God from that offered by the church of her childhood. According to a recent interview,

Women and the Word

spirituality are therefore a challenge not just to the values and beliefs of patriarchal religion, but to those of white civilization in general. Their novels are part of the wider and arguably more urgent political project of combating white supremacist ideology and power. They belong to a tradition of African-American writing which is now well documented and widely studied and appreciated. In this study, unfortunately, I can only skim the surface of their achievements, and am only too conscious of the dangers of a white European critic like myself appearing to 'colonize' their novels, and absorb them into a project primarily concerned with white fiction. This is not my intention. Instead I have been motivated by the sense that any study of this field would be incomplete if it failed to acknowledge the response of Walker and Morrison to the Biblical tradition that has both inspired and enslaved the black races, and their conception of an alternative system of values originating with a black mother-centred religion. My hope is that these novels will provide a challenging and inspiring focus with which to conclude this study. A recurrent theme for all these writers is the relationship between mother and daughter, or more specifically the theme of the lost mother, which is the key to feminist psychoanalytic theory. For Roberts the theme determines her literary style: that's why I ended up using very poetic prose for my novels. It seemed necessary, in order to be able to write about what really goes on between a mother and her daughter and then connect that with history, and the body and the Church. (Kenyon, pp. 157-8) The French feminist Luce Irigaray suggests that a satisfactory discourse for the mother-daughter relationship is absent from both religious and psychoanalytic discourse in Western culture. Her influential essay, 'The Bodily Encounter with the Mother' argues that in JudaeoChristian discourse motherhood is detached from sexuality.12 Analysing the Clytemnestra myth, Irigaray argues that the murder of the mother gives rise to 'the image of the virgin goddess, born of the father and obedient to his law in forsaking the mother' (pp. 37-8). The post-Freudian emphasis on the power of the phallus, which makes the castration complex central to theories of sexuality, in her view conceals another more fundamental severance common to both sexes - the cutting of the umbilical cord. This silence about the relationship between mother and daughter must, she argues, be ended if women

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are to find an identity which is not distorted through a phallocentric vision. Like Kristeva, she believes the symbolic order limits the daughter's perception of her mother. It offers only two ways of seeing her either as the all-powerful phallic mother from whom the daughter must escape if she is to achieve any autonomy, or as the castrated mother, denied any economic or social status in her self-effacing role as nurturer, and so deficient that the daughter has no wish to identify with her. So what is a mother? Someone who makes the stereotypical gestures she is told to make, who has no personal language and who has no identity. But how, as daughters, can we have a personal relationship with or construct a personal identity in relation to someone who is no more than a function? (p. 50) With nothing to model herself on, the daughter must instead find her identity in patriarchal formations of womanhood. But in trying to 're-appropriate this maternal dimension', are these writers in danger of falling into precisely the kind of essentialism against which feminists have fought for so long? Identity based on essentialism erases all the very real differences between women from different cultural groups, and risks sliding into myth. Kristeva sees clearly the danger in the 'myth of the archaic mother', which she defines as a Utopian belief in 'the omnipotence of an archaic, full, total englobing mother with no frustration, no separation, with no break-producing symbolism'. 13 Such a myth is dangerous because it can lead to regression and madness in women who cannot make the necessary break from the mother into autonomous independence. In her view, women can only gain access to the political world which will bring about change by identifying to some extent with the values considered to be masculine, such as mastery and authority. Women, she argues, have to 'know that an ostensibly masculine, paternal ... identification is necessary in order to have some voice in the record of politics and history'. 14 'Voice' is a key word here. While often using the concept of the mother goddess to restore the role of the maternal body as a creative and powerful force, the writers discussed in this book also assert women's right to a voice. Engaging with biblical texts and themes is not for them simply a means of challenging Christian views of sexuality, but the traditional Church's position regarding women's right of access to the 'Word'.

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Introduction 7

Kristeva also argues that total identification with the imaginary mother can lead to a destructive separatism, creating an escapist desire for a 'counter-society ... imagined as harmonious, without prohibitions, free and all-fulfilling' (Kristeva Reader, p. 202). Women cannot afford to stay apart in this way, since, as Sara Maitland puts it, 'a refusal to live with and struggle against the actual historical reality of discrimination is unlikely to change much'. 15 In addition, this kind of counter-society can only be based on the expulsion of a scapegoat charged with the evil of which the community wishes to be purged. The dangers of such 'purging' - whether sexist or ethnic - are tragically too apparent in contemporary history to need spelling out, and are forcefully illustrated in Morrison's Paradise, discussed in Chapter 6. Whether we are dealing with the imaginary mother of psychoanalytic theory, then, or the Mother Goddess of prehistory, the risks of such myth-making are equally high, so that one must ask why so many contemporary women writers are ready to take them. Feminist explorations of ancient mythology have added greatly to our understanding of women's history, and of the means by which the concept 'woman' has been constructed and women's position in society has been controlled. And anthropologists' work on early matriarchies has been seen by some feminists as valuable evidence of women's importance in earlier civilizations. But others have pointed out that this research was used by the nineteenth-century ethnographer J. J. Bachofen to prove that woman's role is essentially domestic. Susanne Heine, for instance, argues that he sees women entirely in relation to men, conjuring up a mother-cult which reduces women once again to pleasure and childbearing, their 'naturalness' making them inherently inferior to man as 'civilizer'.16 Lerner also warns against taking myths of a great goddess as evidence of women's power in society, although she believes such myths had a positive function: No matter how degraded and commodified the reproductive and sexual power of women was in real life, their essential equality could not be banished from thought and feeling as long as the goddesses lived and were believed to rule human life. (Creation of Patriarchy, p. 160) One may nevertheless ask what value the myth of a fertility goddess can have for women today, most of whom wish to control their fertility. Clearly women do not in fact look to goddess myths because of a nostalgia for the past, but to find symbols for their own power and

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8 Women and the Word

identity to replace the disempowering symbols of the JudaeoChristian tradition, and new metaphors for women's situation past and present. Sara Maitland's comments perhaps explain why so many women writers - and readers - are interested in exploring alternatives to the patriarchal images of divinity offered by the Bible, when they may themselves have abandoned or never possessed anything that could go by the name of religious belief: since we need (and yearn and long) to speak of the unspeakable, we use metaphors, images, symbolic terms. So far so good, but language is sneaky; if the image is a strong one it always demonstrates a tendency to 'drift' into 'reality'. 17 In other words, while the image of God the father may convey useful ideas about the nature of God's relationship to humanity, it has come to stand for the 'reality' of a male Godhead which justifies the division of the human race into a first and second sex. Maitland goes on to quote Rosemary Radford Ruether: 'It is not just that God is imaged as male, but as male warrior elite. God is not imaged as black male garbage collector either' (p. 153). Constructing alternatives to the myth of God the father represents a challenge not only to sexism but to a value system based on domination and power. And we do not have to be believers to find such challenges thought-provoking and constructive.

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Introduction 9

From the Mother Goddess to God the Father

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. (John 1.1) With these words the Apostle John emphasizes an idea central to the Old Testament myth of the Creation - the power of the word or Logos. Although the first verse of the Book of Genesis states simply, 'In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth', each stage in the act of creation is represented as a verbal fiat, bringing form and meaning where there had been only formlessness and void: 'And God said, Let there be light: and there was light' (Genesis 1.3). The divine spirit is manifest in the Word - to be set down in the Bible as well as in his creation. This association of divine power and verbal authority has been profoundly significant for Western culture. For women in particular, this element in the Judaeo-Christian tradition has been critical in shaping Western understanding of femininity and sexual difference. Such speech acts might seem appropriate metaphors for the creation of the universe, transposing the physical into the conceptual or intellectual. But a very different metaphor seems to have dominated early human societies - the process of birth which marks the entry into the world of each living creature. Birth itself, common as it was, remained the central mystery of life, the mother who gave birth being in consequence an obvious focus of veneration and awe, worshipped in the form of the Great Goddess. The importance and power of this biological metaphor is evident in the apparent universality of Goddess-centred religions, which many historians and anthropologists believe preceded patriarchal systems of belief.1 Writing about 10

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From the Mother Goddess to God the Father 11

everywhere ... we find images of the Goddess. In the various incarnations of the Maiden, Ancestress, or Creatrix, she is the Lady of the waters, the birds, and the underworld, or simply the divine Mother cradling her divine child in her arms ... here the supreme power governing the universe is a divine Mother who gives her people life, provides them with material and spiritual nurturance, and who even in death can be counted on to take her children back into her cosmic womb. (p. 19) Gerda Lerner also argues that the earliest myths of origin celebrate the life-giving creativity of the female, often envisioning a goddess in the form of the sea or earth, although a male god may be involved in initiating the process.2 The Babylonian Enuma Elish, for instance, one of the earliest recorded accounts of creation (c. 1100 BCE) speaks of the primal state as a watery chaos, in which the sweet underground water (Apsu) and the salt sea water (Tiamat) have not yet been divided. Tiamat is described as the bearer of heaven and earth and all life, Mother of the Gods, Apsu their begetter.3 It is only the intervention of the younger gods, dissatisfied with the status quo, that ruptures this order and turns Tiamat into a death-dealing monster. 4 In her many incarnations this Great Goddess appeared as a triple goddess, a precursor of the Christian Trinity - goddess of sky, earth and underworld, both creator and destroyer. Here we see maternity venerated not only as the source of life but as the most powerful human response to the fact and fear of death, whereas later traditions turn to the Word as a means of transcending death, either in the afterlife of the spirit or in terms of literary immortality. Statements about the role of women in such periods must inevitably be tentative, given the timescale involved and the limited evidence available: the existence of goddesses cannot alone be taken as proof of female power, since goddesses continued to be worshipped long after women had become structurally subordinate to men. Lerner argues that the archaeological evidence in the form of neolithic and Bronze Age figures of women, often taken to be fertility goddesses, is probably supported by later mythological and literary material celebrating the power of female goddesses over fertility. And she finds clearer evidence - literary, pictorial and legal - in the Neo-Babylonian period for the worship of female goddesses and the existence of priestesses.

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new archaeological discoveries concerning the Paleolithic and Neolithic ages, Riane Eisler notes:

She also accepts that there is evidence for matrilineal societies in which women had privileges, and for more egalitarian societies than the patriarchal structures which replaced them, although she rejects the arguments for matriarchy put forward by J. J. Bachofen and Robert Briffault (History of Patriarchy, p. 53). It appears that while the male role in procreation remained an unknown factor, women may have been invested with power because of their role as the apparently sole source of human life, fatherhood and the idea of permanent mating being relative latecomers in human history. To represent Creation instead as a speech act carried out by a male god can therefore be seen as a usurpation of a distinctively female power. The process by which such systems of belief were transformed into male-dominated religions is remarkably similar in different cultures, as Robert Graves argues in The White Goddess. He notes as his starting point that: the language of poetic myth anciently current in the Mediterranean and Northern Europe was a magical language bound up with popular religious ceremonies in honour of the Moon-goddess, or Muse, some of them dating from the Old Stone Age.5 The link between women and the moon is a familiar one, based on the lunar pattern in the female menstrual cycle, and providing the basis for a further association between women and water, the moon moving the tides. The different phases of the moon are seen to correspond to different phases of womanhood - virgin, mature woman, and crone. Graves continues, 'the language was tampered with in late Minoan times when invaders from Central Asia began to substitute patrilinear for matrilinear institutions and remodel or falsify the myths to justify the social changes', and describes how female moon cults were superseded by the worship of the sun, the Goddess's son. And whereas the moon represented the creative powers of nature, the wisdom inherent in instinct and natural law, the sun represented Logos, reason, or that which orders the chaos of nature. The transformations that took place in Greek mythology are typical and among the best documented. For the pre-Mycenean Greeks, 'men were but the servers of women' and the creator of all was Metis, representing female intelligence.6 When this Minoan-Mycenean civilization was destroyed around 1000 BCE by the Dorians, the functions of the Goddesses were taken over by the Olympians. Christa Wolf, in Cassandra, a work which combines fiction with non-fiction, shows how these changes in Greek mythology were

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12 Women and the Word

used as ideological underpinning for transformations in society, and the social status of woman altered, many of their sacred practices being taken over by men, who also became head of the household. 7 When the Hebrews attempted to develop a monotheistic religion that would stand apart from and ultimately defeat the pagan religions of the other Canaanite tribes, they incorporated as well as reacted against Canaanite mythology. Central to that mythology were fertility legends usually associated with goddesses like Astarte, and it was perhaps inevitable that some elements of that mythology would be incorporated in the new religion of Yahweh. E. O. James argues, for instance, that the first two chapters of Genesis have their source in the beginning of the Babylonian Enuma Elish, but points out that heaven and earth are no longer formed out of the body of Tiamat, but brought into being by God's creative spirit.8 Elizabeth Gould Davis suggests very close parallels, quoting the opening lines of the Enuma Elish as 'In the beginning Tiamat brought forth the heaven and the earth', a translation which highlights the substitution of Yahweh for the Mother Goddess (p. 141). Lerner comments on other Sumerian elements incorporated into the Old Testament, including the eating of the forbidden fruit, the metaphor of Adam's rib, the concept of the tree of life, and the story of the flood (pp. 185-98). What emerges clearly from her account and from those of other commentators is that Genesis departs significantly from all other creation stories of that period and region in its omission of any female participation. Female deities were thus slowly ousted by male gods, and the major world religions which originated in the thousand or so years following the birth of Yahwism - Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Confucianism - were all founded on beliefs uncompromisingly patriarchal, God himself being created in the male image. Further undermining matrilinear traditions, myths about motherdaughter relationships, such as that of Demeter and Persephone, gave way to a predominance of myths concerning fathers and their offspring, or mothers and their sons. When Persephone, daughter of Demeter the corn goddess, was abducted by Hades, Lord of the Underworld, Demeter's grief was so great that she neglected her duties and all the land grew barren. Because Persephone was only restored to the world of the living on condition that she returned to the underworld for a third of every year, Demeter restored fruitfulness to the land only for the remaining months, but to celebrate her joy at her daughter's return, is said to have founded the Eleusian mysteries, celebrated in Greece for two thousand years. Deborah Sawyer has

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From the Mother Goddess to God the Father 13

suggested that the Demeter myth reflects the very real anxieties of Greek women about the traumatic separation of mother and daughter upon marriage, when the daughter's whole life had been spent privately at home, largely segregated from male company. 9 The kind of love shared by Demeter and her daughter is not acknowledged between women in Christian cultures, and is only rarely and indirectly present in the Old Testament, as in the story of Naomi and Ruth, where the relationship between a woman and her daughter-inlaw provides a rare model for sisterhood. The betrayal and division that occur between Sarah and Hagar are more typical, and it is significant that we have to turn to such stories to find substitutes for mother-daughter relationships, since daughters were, of course, expected to leave their mothers for their husbands. Attitudes to birth itself and to the relationship between parent and child had to change to provide the underpinning for these new mythologies. An apparently scientific basis was provided for Greek mythology by Aristotle, who believed that the whole child was present in the man's seed. His ideas provide justification for Aeschylus's assertion, through the voice of Apollo, in The Eumenides: The mother is no parent of that which is called her child, but only nurse of the new-planted seed that grows. The parent is he who mounts. 10 The displacement or complete erasure of the mother's role finds its most striking embodiment in Greek mythology when Athena is born from the head of Zeus. But the Old Testament Eden myth similarly reverses the facts of birth, a male God being presented as the creator of another male, woman being created in turn out of the man. Adam says, 'she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man' (Genesis 2. 23). The woman's ability to bring forth life is not presented as a cause for celebration but becomes a form of punishment - 'in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children' (3. 16). Eve is punished for desiring Godlike knowledge, whereas Adam is punished because he 'hearkened unto the voice of [his] wife' (3. 17). Woman's secondariness and oppression are thus doubly justified - first, by her origin as part of man, secondly by her being the cause of his fall. As Irigaray puts it, 'by denying the mother her generative power and by wanting to be the sole creator, the Father, according to our culture, superimposes upon the archaic world of the flesh a universe of language and symbols' (Irigaray Reader, p. 41).

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14 Women and the Word

For where the creative function is concerned a shift of emphasis has taken place, from the flesh to the spirit - from a physical relationship to a symbolic function. Until the advent of DNA testing, a child's relationship to its father had to be taken on trust, as compared with the certainty of its biological relationship to its mother. Similarly, belief in the divine must always be a matter of faith, rather than physical proof. And just as faith in a child's paternity is certified in patriarchal societies in the naming of the child after its father, so in the Bible the act of creation is followed by the act of naming - differentiating, classifying and imposing meaning. This seems to be in line with other developments in creation mythology, since Lerner notes that, around the third and second millennia BCE, a new concept of creation appears: 'Nothing exists unless it has a name. The name means existence' (Creation of Patriarchy, p. 150). Through this act God not only brings forth order out of chaos, structure where there had been formlessness, but lays claim to his creation since the act of naming constitutes possession and authority over what is named. That which is named is known. This divine authority is moreover passed on to Adam, who names not only the animals but woman. Male power rests as much on this kind of symbolic authority as on his greater physical strength. The shift from the flesh to the spirit which accompanied these transformations from matriarchal to patriarchal religions was reinforced by a dualism not evident in Goddess-centred religions. The goddess represented both life and death, and was worshipped for her virginity, her sexuality and her maternal aspect; these concepts and qualities were not seen as contradictory but as complementary aspects of nature. In contrast Robert Graves describes the attributes of the Hebrew God: The new God claimed to be dominant as Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the End, pure Holiness, pure Good, pure Logic, able to exist without the aid of woman; but it was natural to identify him with one of the original rivals of the Theme [of the White Goddess] and to ally the woman and the other rival permanently against him. The outcome was philosophical dualism with all the tragi-comic woes attendant on spiritual dichotomy. If the True God, the God of the Logos, was pure thought, pure good, whence came evil and error? Two separate creations had to be assumed: the true spiritual Creation and the false material Creation. (p. 465)

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From the Mother Goddess to God the Father 15

Central to the establishment of Yahweh worship was the concept of One Law, transcendent and purifying, which Julia Kristeva suggests was threatened by the uncontrolled and polymorphic desires of the body. Although a very different cultural tradition is evident in the Song of Solomon, a highly erotic celebration of human love showing affinities with Near Eastern love poetry, the Song was only incorporated into the Jewish canon in 70 CE after arguments among the rabbis over its suitability for inclusion in Israel's sacred literature. Once in the canon it was increasingly interpreted in religious, rather than secular terms, confirming that such a representation of human sexuality conflicted with the dominant tradition described by Kristeva.11 So the body and its pleasures must be separated from spirituality and the desire to uphold the law, and each located in a different sex. All the 'darkness' identified with the desires of the body is projected onto woman as the 'Other', made from Adam's rib and therefore 'divided from man, made of that very thing which is lacking in him'. Since God is male, woman is also all that God is not. While woman fulfils a crucial function in procreation, ensuring the physical survival of the race, she 'has no direct relation with the law of the community and its political and religious unity: God generally speaks only to men' (Kristeva Reader, p. 140). In the role of eternal temptress, Eve and all women after her are thus, according to biblical tradition, to be feared and controlled, lest they distract men from their spiritual concern with Logos, the Word. Such thinking lays the foundation for a hierarchical opposition between 'male' and 'female' characteristics which has persisted into the twentieth century. 12 Kristeva attributes one such shift towards a monotheistic religion based on the authority of the father to the historical situation of the Semitic tribes, suggesting that monotheism, or specifically Yahwism, evolved around 2000 BCE as an attempt by nomadic tribes to create a sense of community in the absence of a coherent ethnic or geographic identity: such a community, that is, had to be essentially symbolic. Their only durable bond was the Word, the 'narrative of tribal wanderings' which forms part of the Old Testament. Monotheism provided an 'agency of communication and cohesion', while it simultaneously represented the paternal function by putting a new emphasis on patrilinear descent, transmitting the name of the father to the child, and thus, in Kristeva's words, refusing to 'recognize the growth of the child in the mother's body', submitting the familial structure instead to an 'abstract symbolic authority' (p. 142). Although writing from a slightly different perspective, Lerner similarly argues that, while the

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16 Women and the Word

fifth commandment instructs the faithful to honour both father and mother, its function is primarily to strengthen the patriarchal family, which depends on the cooperation of wives in a system 'which offers them class advantages in exchange for their subordination in sexual matters'. As evidence to support this, she cites the rape laws which represent the husband or father of the victim as the injured party: because daughters and wives were seen as men's property, rape and also adultery were seen as a kind of theft (Creation of Patriarchy, pp. 113-16). 13 Yahwism and, later, Judaism thus evolved as a highly verbal faith, rather than one which focuses on visual images as Catholicism did: Yahweh, who is always veiled from sight, is known by his Word; the first covenant is a verbal exchange; the tablets of the Law are coupled with God's name. Kristeva continues: The economy of this mechanism requires that women be excluded from the single true and legislating principle, namely The Word, as well as from the (always paternal) face which accords to procreation its social value: excluded from knowledge and power. (About Chinese Women, p. 21) Since God usually speaks only to men, women thus have no direct relationship with the Law of the community. Even procreation becomes part of God's covenant with man, the promise of Sarah's miraculous conception being made to Abraham, not to the mother-tobe. Abraham alone is seen as the source of all the future tribes of Israel, as the lengthy biblical genealogies suggest, and as God's words to him imply: 'he that shall come forth out of thine own bowels shall be thine heir' (Genesis 15.4). Lerner argues that circumcision, the 'token of covenant', is a highly significant symbol: The offering of no other part of the body could have sent so vivid and descriptive a message to man of the connection between his reproductive facility and the grace of God. (Creation of Patriarchy, p. 192)

Such an economy can be seen to prevail throughout the long tradition of logocentrism, defined by Sarah Franklin as 'the conflation of words with truth and dominion as set out in the story of Genesis and corroborated by the idealism, rationalism and positivism of the western philosophical tradition'. 14 For behind the Word, according to

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From the Mother Goddess to God the Father 17

this tradition, is the presence of God, or another unique originating T guaranteeing the meaning or truth of the Word. The unique emphasis of the Bible on speech has inevitably marginalized women in a culture where their voices could not be heard in either religious or political settings. Helene Cixous sees this conceptual system as a massive sleight of hand used to justify patriarchal power, since both logocentrism and phallocentrism in effect place all origins in the phallus, constructing life and creative power as male: Intention: desire, authority - examine them and you are led right back ... to the father. It is even possible not to notice that there is no place whatsoever for woman in the calculations ... Either woman is passive or she does not exist. (p. 39) If 'logical' has become such a key value judgement, logic being seen as the principle weapon of thought and analysis, it is because it implies a control over 'logos', the word. If feminists sometimes therefore reject the dominance of logic, it is not because they want to argue incoherently, but, as Sara Maitland suggests, because the manipulation of logic 'frequently outmanoeuvres justice, truth' in the interests of men. 15 As Cixous continues, What would happen to logocentrism, to the great philosophical systems, to the order of the world in general if the rock upon which they founded this church should crumble? If some fine day it suddenly came out that the logocentric plan had always, inadmissably, been to create a foundation for ... phallocentrism, to guarantee for the masculine order a rationale equal to history itself. (p. 40) Transformations of Goddess-centred religions did not, however, take place without encountering resistance. J. Schouten argues: There were two alternative ways of conquering Paganism open to the Church of Christ, namely either by direct and total demolition of the old beliefs, or by patient and tactful adaptation and substitution. The Church chose the latter alternative. 16 Evidence of such adaptation can be traced in the way in which

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18 Women and the Word

symbols associated with the Mother Goddess are appropriated by patriarchal systems of belief. The serpent, which sheds its skin and is 'reborn', was a symbol of the Goddess's powers of prophecy and regeneration. It finds its way into the Old Testament as the embodiment of all that is to be rejected, set against woman, divorcing her from the Goddess and her instinct. In ancient myth, moreover, it guards the tree of life which is another incarnation of the Great Goddess, but which ultimately gives way to the Cross, the Christian tree of life.17 Only water, linked like the moon with woman from the earliest times, retains some of its original associations with birth and cleansing through the ritual of baptism. References to God as mother can, moreover, be found in the Old Testament, particularly in Hosea and Isaiah. In Isaiah the prophet repeatedly lends weight to the Lord God's promises to his people by comparing his role to that of the mother: Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee. (49. 15) As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you; and ye shall be comforted in Israel. (66. 13) Such references have not, however, played a prominent part in the traditions of the established church, there being few, if any, visual representations of this 'female' aspect of God. But the enduring power of that image is evident in the Christian era in the writings of the Gnostics. The Gnostic Gospels, condemned as heretical in 1000 CE, describe God as a dyad, rather than a Trinity, with both masculine and feminine elements, and offer prayers to both 'Father' and 'Mother'. One of the characteristics of the Gnostic image of God the Mother is sophia, the Greek word for wisdom. Elaine Pagels explains: Early interpreters had pondered the meaning of certain biblical passages, for example, Proverbs: 'God made the world in Wisdom.' And they wondered if Wisdom could be the feminine power in which God's creation is 'conceived'? In such passages ... Wisdom bears two connotations: first, she bestows the Spirit that makes mankind wise; second, she is a creative power. One gnostic source

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From the Mother Goddess to God the Father 19

20 Women and the Word

Pagels suggests that some of the Gnostics see God himself as 'merely instrumental power, whom the divine Mother had created to administer the universe, but who remained ignorant of the power of Wisdom, his own Mother' (p. 113). She argues that these texts were condemned specifically because, unlike the orthodox texts, they abound in such female symbolism (pp. 108-19). It has been argued, furthermore, that Christianity's ultimate triumph over the pagan gods only came about when the Church encouraged the veneration of Mary, which provided a focus for this deep-rooted need for a divine mother. In an article about the current movement to see the Virgin proclaimed as the co-redeemer, Kenneth Woodward observes, for instance, that 'this obscure Jewish mother absorbed and transformed the most powerful pagan goddesses. She was the Madonna who gives life, but also the Pieta who receives the dead'. 19 Elizabeth Gould Davis suggests that the 'artificial and rootless' Olympian Gods invented to displace the Great Goddess were more easily ousted by the Virgin Mary, identified in the popular imagination with the Great Goddess, than by the ascetic figure of Christ (p. 246). The tradition of mariolatry prevalent in the Middle Ages testifies to the effectiveness of this substitution, particularly to the poor, for whom Mary represented the compassionate face of God. The concept of the Motherhood of God was, moreover, kept alive by thinkers like Julian of Norwich. This English female mystic of the fourteenth century writes in her Revelations of an androgynous Trinity, and makes the motherhood of both God and Jesus central to her conception of the deity. This re-conception was taken up, according to Lerner, by a number of left-wing Protestant sects, although never a central theme in the writing and practice of the established churches. 20 The advent of Christianity might therefore seem to shift the focus back onto birth as a central metaphor for the divine power of creation, the story of the virgin birth reinstating the mother as an object of veneration and power. The physical and spiritual seem to be reunited as the Virgin is impregnated with the Word, apparently moving closer to the central power of God. However, looked at more closely this myth is not so far removed from those earlier Greek myths in which male gods, usually in brute forms, raped female mortals, giving birth to legendary figures - births which often heralded epic and historic

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calls her the 'first universal creator'; another says that God the Father was speaking to her when he proposed to 'make mankind in our image'. 18

events. Yeats's poem and Michelangelo's statue of Leda and the Swan testify to the lingering power of such myths, with their disturbing mix of brutality and eroticism. By eliminating the physical aspect of the conception, the Christian myth clearly eliminates both the brutality and the eroticism. The scriptural representation of the Annunciation depicts an acquiescent, rather than resistant Virgin: 'be it unto me according to thy word' (Luke, 1. 38). Nevertheless, by eliminating the sexual act as a necessary preliminary to the birth, the Christian myth eliminates any sense of the woman as participant or partner in the act of creation. She is simply, in Aeschylus's phrase, 'the nurse of the newly-planted seed'. The Greek tradition was perpetuated into Christian times by the Augustinian concept of the homunculus, according to which the male sperm contained the child in miniature, the female womb providing merely a nurturing place. As a nurturing womb, Mary is indeed a humble and passive vessel. The Christian tradition, moreover, shows reverence for the womb while effacing the vagina. Even the child's passage though the vagina in birth traditionally required the mother to undergo a cleansing ritual, as Olwen Hufton points out in her authoritative study of women's history: The mother was not always present at the baptism. In Catholic countries she must wait forty days before a purification ceremony, including prayers to the Virgin, allowed her to re-enter the community of the faithful, a reminder that although she had given a new Christian to the world, her baby was tainted with original sin. Anglican mothers underwent a 'churching', a somewhat modified ceremony of purification. 21 While both father and mother are party to that sin, only the mother requires purification. For the role created for the Virgin gives woman a place in the symbolic structure of the Christian religion only by denying her sexuality. There are feminist theologians who argue, like Sara Maitland, that 'the virginity of Mary is not about biology, but about meaning, about symbol and metaphor', so that her virginity should not be seen as an insult to any woman's sexuality (Big-Enough God, p. 188). But the church's emphasis on the biological dimension has undeniably resulted in the denigration of female sexuality through reference to this ideal. The denial of Mary's sexuality becomes increasingly emphatic throughout Church history so that even as the mother of Joseph's children, Mary remains 'ever-Virgin',22

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From the Mother Goddess to God the Father 21

Women and the Word

while the doctrine of her own immaculate conception ensures that she too bypasses the inheritance of sin which is the lot of every infant conceived in lust. And this impossible role, combining virginity with motherhood, becomes the model for all women. Mary is the 'new Eve', offering women the chance to redeem themselves through motherhood, just as Christ, the 'new Adam' was to redeem mankind. But to be accorded respect within such an ideology, women must aspire to remain free of the taint of sexuality. Only one aspect of their femaleness can be acknowledged; the other is to be repressed. Kristeva has written of the pain involved in attempting to fulfil such a role: Christianity associates women ... with the symbolic order, but only on the condition that they maintain their virginity. If they don't, they may expiate their carnal pleasure by some form of martyrdom ... Once more, the vagina and the jouissance of the mother are disregarded, and immediately replaced by that which puts the mother on the side of the socio-symbolic community: childbearing, procreation in the name of the father. (About Chinese Women, pp. 25-6) In Christian discourse she sees no understanding of the mother's body; no understanding of the physical and psychological suffering involved in childbirth and in the need to raise children in accordance with the Law of the Father; and no understanding of the mother-daughter relationship. It must be acknowledged that Christianity suppressed male as well as female sexuality. Contact with the Roman Empire and the Hellenic language of abstract systems and anti-materialism reinforced the dualistic philosophy by which all human beings were perceived as binary - a spirit trapped in a body. Christian culture was therefore ideally constructed to keep spirituality and sexuality apart. But in phallocentric systems the phallus represents masculine power, so that men exchange the body for power, the power vested in the Logos, to represent and theorize themselves. Margaret Miles has suggested that the image of the nursing Virgin is also potentially a source of power: power to conceive, to nourish, shelter, and sustain human life, a power that may well have been understood by fourteenth-century people threatened by famine, plague, and social chaos as 'the body's best show of power'. 23

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22

But Miles goes on to point out that women were prevented from identifying with this power by the contrast between themselves and the Virgin that was prominent in the verbal messages of preachers and texts. Instead the one valorized role available to women - motherhood - lays emphasis on female physicality in a way which is totally disempowering. Since Christ is human only through his mother, the material, bodily aspect is to the fore in their relationship. She can only give him the milk and tears which have become her traditional imagery; spirituality, in contrast, is the essence of his relationship with his heavenly father. The power and the mystery all remain with the male godhead, with the miracle of the Word made flesh. When Christ reaches adulthood, he therefore casts his mother aside as being in no real sense his 'parent', echoing Aeschylus. And it is from the male elders in the temple that Christ receives his vocation, and is introduced to his father's 'Word', not from his mother. Once again it is worth comparing the implications of this story with earlier woman-centred traditions. Rosalind Miles has pointed out that countless ancient myths ascribe the birth of language to women or goddesses. As examples she refers to Indian mythology and the Vedic goddess Vac, meaning 'language', who is depicted as giving birth to the living word; to the Hindu Goddess Devaki, 'Goddess of the Logos'; to Kali who is credited with the Sanskrit language; to Carmenta, credited by the Romans with creating the Latin alphabet from the Greek; to Medusa who gave the Greek alphabet to Hercules, and to Isis who gave the alphabet to the Egyptians. These myths represent what Miles calls 'a ritual formulation of the primeval truth that the first words any human being hears are the mother's'. 24 As the term 'mother tongue' implies, it is usually the mother who is the primary source of language for the child, whereas 'patrius sermo' (father speech) is a term used to refer to language once it has been transformed into a instrument for 'civilized' formal discourse. Mothers participate in the Christian tradition by preparing their children for baptism - 'in the name of the Father' - and transmitting its doctrines and values to them, as instructed by the clergy. The promotion of the Virgin's mother St Anne, from the twelfth century onwards, provides evidence of what is at stake here. Her role, according to Hufton, is: to raise a woman fit to be the mother of God ... In popular art in the humblest chapels, she teaches Mary to read, hence inculcating Scripture, and watches over her even in childbed ... Such imagery endorsed traditional family roles: they were models for situations

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From the Mother Goddess to God the Father 23

24

Women and the Word

The Virgin impregnated by the Word symbolizes the way in which women internalize and transmit the values of patriarchal religion. Christian mythology thus reinforces the principle of sexual difference already evident in monotheistic Judaism, which distinguished men and women on the basis of their very different relationship to the Law. Myths are not, however, monolithic and eternal, coming into being fully formed and without authorship. They are stories constructed in specific socio-political contexts, and different meanings can be attached to them as those contexts change. While the precise origins and authorship of the collection of texts we know as the Bible are problematic, there is plenty of evidence of the ways in which that text and its myths have been interpreted by male authorities. But Gerda Lerner, in her invaluable survey, 'One Thousand Years of Feminist Criticism', provides evidence for a long history of feminist interpretation of the Bible, both from within and outwith the Christian tradition (The Creation of Feminist Consciousness, pp. 138-66). Some feminists find the Bible an inherently sexist text providing the foundation for patriarchy. They carry out the kind of reading I provided earlier in this chapter to argue, for instance, that the creation of Eve from Adam's rib represents woman as both dependent and lacking, while the story of the Fall constructs her as the guilty partner, made to submit to male authority as punishment for her disobedience. One of its most famous early feminist critics, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, was driven by dissatisfaction with the all-male revision of the King James version in 1888 to produce The Woman's Bible, in which she attempted to undermine the authority of the Bible as a text used to justify the subjugation of women. 25 Aware of the Higher Criticism which had already challenged the view of the Bible as a divinely inspired and infallible text, and seeing it instead as the work of men, Stanton and her revising committee attempted to counterbalance male translations by bringing out the 'motherhood of God' 26 implicit in its pages, and providing readings of such key passages as the Genesis account of creation, which represented women in a far more favourable light. Others, however, have suggested that the Bible's apparent sexism is at least in part the responsibility of the translators and interpreters. Later feminist theologians like Phyllis Trible have used close textual

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which everyone might experience and they endorsed the value of what every woman had to do. (p. 395)

analysis to suggest that the Creation story, for instance, offers itself to an egalitarian view of the sexes, if the reader returns to the original text. She points to the wordplay in the Hebrew term adham, which is a generic term for humankind, and suggests that Adam is therefore basically androgynous. She argues that the creation of woman is, therefore, simultaneously the creation of the male, out of the previously androgynous adham. The subordination of woman to man following the Fall, moreover, in her reading signifies their shared sin, rather than representing the ideal pattern of male-female relations prescribed by God. 27 Mieke Bal similarly offers a very persuasive reading of Genesis, arguing that Eve is 'the climax of the creation', 28 but also suggesting why the creation myth was misread by St Paul and others as a 'sexist myth'. These analyses, however, only serve to illustrate the extent to which these texts have predominantly been interpreted from a patriarchal perspective which suppresses that potential, providing instead authority for ideas both about gender and about institutional religion, determining the role of women in the church. As Hufton shows, in a religious culture which attached great weight to the written text, the 'authority' of the Bible was thus reinforced by the traditions of the church which were subsequently incorporated into theological writings: 'The prescriptive literature ... reveals the preoccupation among theologians and moralists with making the people of the west "the people of a book"' (p. 39). The early Church fathers played a key role in perpetuating such a reading of the Bible, laying the foundation for the suppression of women by the church. Many were influenced by St Paul's reading of Genesis, but that reading of St Paul is selective, laying emphasis on Paul's statement, 'Neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for the man'(I Corinthians 11.9), rather than on his emphasis elsewhere on mutuality. Little account is taken of the context of Paul's words, which makes them arguably less a universal moral imperative than a response to specific circumstances. 29 The importance attached to the parts of the Bible accredited to St Paul, rather than to the Gospels, is also a significant factor. Recent studies of the early Christian church, or the 'Jesus Movement', suggest that women did in fact have an important role to play in the Church. Christ's injunction to both men and women to leave their families and follow him can be seen as a rejection of traditional family roles in favour of individual salvation. And the radicalism of the Christian message is repeated by Paul - 'There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all

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From the Mother Goddess to God the Father 25

26 Women and the Word

Since the New Testament authors lived in a patriarchal culture, they attempted to make the Christian message acceptable to the Jews as well as the pagans of their time. We can see from the study of the Christian apologists or Fathers of the second century that because of their apologetic and missionary interests they played down the role of women in the Christian community in order not to be ridiculed as belonging to an effeminate religion.30 Susanne Heine quotes Tertullian to typify the response of the Church fathers, products of that patriarchal culture, to such 'heretical women': 'how cheeky and arrogant they are! They submit to learning, they dispute, they perform exorcisms, promise healings, and perhaps even baptize.' 31 Less attention was paid to Christ's own command to Mary his mother and Mary Magdalene after his resurrection - 'go quickly, and tell' (Matthew 28. 7) - than to the recommendation that women should remain silent made in I Timothy, an epistle no longer believed even to be the work of St Paul. Not only were women denied the role of priest, mediating between God and man, but most were denied even the opportunity to read and interpret the Scriptures for themselves, effectively denied access to the Word of God by lack of education, even when dogma did not expressly forbid it. 32 Similarly, Paul's injunction that it is 'better to marry than to burn' has been used by generations of preachers to validate a fear and hatred of sexuality for which it is hard to find evidence in the Gospels. Even the virginity of the mother of Christ has been questioned by recent commentators who argue that it is based on a mistranslation of the Hebrew word alma meaning simply 'a young woman of marriageable age'. 33 While it is true that such a woman would almost always be a virgin, parthenos, the term for virgin used in the Greek New Testament, is not the exact translation, but provides an emphasis that has become central to the Church's teaching. The special value of virginity is first asserted by Paul, as much on practical as on moral grounds: The unmarried woman careth for the things of the Lord, that she may be holy both in body and in spirit: but she that is married

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one in Christ Jesus' (Galatians 3. 28). But the revolutionary potential of this message was watered down to ensure the acceptance of Christianity at a time when it was subject to suspicion and persecution. As Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza puts it:

From the Mother Goddess to God the Father 27

But the desirability of female chastity and the danger represented by the female body seem to have consumed later theologians. The view of St Augustine, author of the autobiographical Confessions (397 CE), is representative: 'What is the difference whether it is in a wife or a mother, it is still Eve the temptress that we must beware of in any woman' (Letter 243,10). Augustine argues that God had created man as a rational being, but sin made him irrationally choose things that are less than good. Sexual desire is therefore the essence of sin because it makes us lose our reason. Karen Armstrong has argued that these associations of sex and sin are not warranted by the New Testament, and are based on textual misreading and personal factors shared by the early fathers of the Church. 34 Nevertheless the Doctrine of Original Sin, only formulated in its final version by Augustine in the fourth century CE, and based on his interpretation of Genesis, forged a direct link between sin and sexuality, and therefore woman, which dominated the Church throughout the Dark Ages. The continuing tradition of misogyny is all too easy to trace. In the thirteenth century St Thomas Aquinas, founder of the system declared by Pope Leo XIII in 1879 to be the official Catholic philosophy, confirmed that sex was always evil, and as for women: ... woman is defective and misbegotten, for the active force in the male seed tends to the production of a perfect likeness in the masculine sex; while the production of woman comes from a defect in the active force or from some material disposition, or even from some external influence. 35 Nor were such attitudes confined to the Catholic church. Religious reform during the Reformation involved both sexes, but since it focused particularly on chastity and obedience, women became a primary target, since - as Hufton puts it - 'who should be more chaste or more obedient than the female?' (p. 366). When Martin Luther abolished celibacy for Protestant clergy in the sixteenth century and stressed the positive side of marriage, he appeared to his champions to rescue women from the kind of denigration described above. But his emphasis on married chastity, rather than virginity and sexual abstinence, stemmed from a belief in the importance of

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careth for the things of the world, how she may please her husband. (I Corinthians 7. 34)

wifely subservience to the requirements of patrilinear succession, which required that women be both 'chaste' and mothers. He moreover appears to be in total agreement with the Catholic tradition that woman's weakness made her responsible for the Fall, and saw motherhood and obedience to her husband as woman's only means of redemption: If they become tired or even die, that does not matter. Let them die in childbirth - that is why they are there ... The rule remains with the husband, and the wife is compelled to obey him by God's commandment... the wife should stay at home and look after the affairs of the household as one who has been deprived of the ability of administering those affairs that are outside and concern the state ... In this way Eve is punished. (Lectures on Genesis, 3:16)36 The Bible was used, moreover, to validate the witch hunts which spread throughout Europe from the late fifteenth century and into the seventeenth. Jacob Sprenger's infamous Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches), a handbook to help Inquisitors in their investigation of witches, makes the same misuse of Genesis as others before him: And it should be noticed that there was a defect in the formation of the first woman, since she was formed from a bent rib, that is, a rib of the breast, which is bent as it were in a contrary direction to a man. And since through this defect she is an imperfect animal, she always deceives ... and this is indicated by the etymology of the word; for Femina comes from Fe and Minus, since she is ever weaker to hold and to preserve the faith. (quoted in Armstrong, p. 44) Even more currently reputable authors like Milton continued to promote a reading of the Bible that constructs woman as not only secondary to man but a threat to his salvation. As Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar put it, The story that Milton, 'the first of the masculinists', most notably tells to women is of course the story of woman's secondness, her otherness, and how that otherness leads inexorably to her demonic anger, her sin, her fall, and her exclusion from that garden of the gods. 37

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28 Women and the Word

Through Scripture, then, men have constructed not only divinities, but women. Their 'divinely-inspired' texts have provided the ideological justification for women's cultural and social roles. Since the central power in any ideological system names those who are its objects, in patriarchal societies men name women, but are not themselves named. To quote Oswald Spengler, 'The man makes history, the woman is history.' 38 Woman, like history, has been a text to be written and interpreted by man. In turn, women are induced by education, by ideological structures, by language itself, to internalize the terms in which they are named and accept it in silence as truth. In this lies the basis of their oppression. Since the Word represents knowledge and power, women have been encouraged to be wordless. If 'woman' is a cultural, linguistic category constructed by man, language itself, however, offers an arena in which such definitions may be challenged, an arena which the writers at the centre of this study have all entered. This is clearly not an easy task, since those women who have attempted to take control of 'the Word', to shape the discourse by which they have been defined, have often been consequently marginalized by the dominant ideology - labelled 'hysterics' or even insane. Since 'hysteria' was originally diagnosed as a disease of the womb, the hysteric was by definition unwomanly and unnatural. Her words could therefore be discredited and disregarded. Women are left in an acute double bind: as Goethe puts it, in a quotation aptly used by Christa Wolf in Cassandra, 'you had to remain silent so as not to be considered mad like Cassandra' (p. 141). But the marginal position of the hysteric can become a vantage-point to exploit. As Jeanette Winterson implies in Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, discussed in Chapter 4 below, those who are not allowed to be priests may become prophets instead. To be ordained a priest and allowed to preach God's word, one must be acceptable to the established religious institutions. It can therefore be impossible to fulfil the prophetic, critical role necessary to force recognition of truths which may have become obscured - or in the case of the 'female' aspects of God - never accepted. The prophets of the Old Testament are, of course, both products and producers of patriarchal ideology, reinforcing the sexual taboos of their time and using female imagery in a very negative way. Ezekiel 16, for instance, uses the image of Jerusalem the whore in a way which promotes the view of the sexual female as 'other' and irredeemable. But the contemporary woman writer can force awareness of 'truths' ignored by older generations of prophets, adopting the role espoused by Sara Maitland, who

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From the Mother Goddess to God the Father 29

Women and the Word

argues that it is the prophet's duty to 'recall the community to its own roots to its central truth' -Jesus Christ (Map of the New Country, p. 5). Chosen by Christ to be his witnesses because of his special preference for outsiders and the oppressed, women should, Maitland argues, be amongst the most insistent to revive and spread the radicalism of the Christian message. For other writers this position on the margins is simply the best perspective from which to mount a critique of patriarchal religion or society. All the writers with whom this study is concerned are engaged, then, in a dialogue with patriarchal scriptures. In contrast to those who have tried to make the Bible a monologic text, the source of a single authoritative truth, they appear to share Bakhtin's view that 'the word is born in a dialogue as a living rejoinder within i t . . . every word is directed toward an answer and cannot escape the profound influence of the answering word that it anticipates.' 39 As they explore those discourses by which woman has been constructed, these writers - in what Pam Morris calls a 'subversive spirit of feminine mischief (Literature and Feminism, p. 73) - appropriate words and texts from the biblical tradition for their own purposes. The reader is therefore aware of two voices contending within the text, even if the male voice is present only by implication. But any discourse, however subversive in origin, can ultimately reveal itself as yet another master-discourse, simply opposing one single authoritative 'truth' with another, so to emphasize the 'dialogic' quality of these fictions the novelists tend to use multiple narrators. Hegemonic claims to 'divine' or 'universal' knowledge, whether they represent patriarchal authority or the voice of the all-powerful imaginary mother, are in this way avoided. These multiple narrators, moreover, often purport to be speaking directly to others from memory, exposing and confronting their own subjectivity, rather than concealing their prejudices and ideological assumptions behind third-person 'objectivity' and 'omniscience', and the false authority of a written literary tradition. Oral transmission of stories emphasizes the potential for many versions of a single narrative, and has often been used by women for coded messages, to avoid male censorship, as Marina Warner has shown in her account of the Sibyls: although pagan prophetesses, their words survived into Christian mythology, where they act as emblems of ancient female wisdom. Warner suggests that suspicion of this wisdom, a wisdom unvalidated by the Church, led to the Sybils being denounced as mouthpieces of the devil at precisely the moment in history when their words became exposed to the new humanist techniques of

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30

textual criticism. As Warner notes, 'change the text, and women's speech, especially crones' chatter, becomes a very dangerous thing, a lure, a false seduction'. 40 In reading these texts, therefore, we must not expect often to find the solemn authority which we associate with prophetic modes of discourse, in spite of Maitland's intention to be 'prophetic'. We need instead to be attuned to elements of humour, parody or laughter, the characteristics of Bakhtinian carnival. Carnival for Bakhtin embodies all that is spontaneous, irreverent, bawdy and counter-authoritative. In it the 'unofficial' draws upon traditions of folk lore to undermine official hegemony, debunking everything that society takes seriously or fears. As far as religion is concerned, carnival reintroduces the laughter which has been excluded from religious ceremonies, and condemned by early Christianity. Laughter constitutes in Bakhtin's eyes a victory over our terror of God, over the awe inspired by the power of nature, and over the oppression and guilt we experience regarding all that is consecrated and forbidden (p. 209). Many of the novelists under discussion use playful, metaphoric, anti-realist idioms and forms to blur the boundaries between historically situated realism, autobiography and more experimental, avant-garde forms. The ironic irreverence they employ with regard to both the Scriptures and literary form also prevents them from taking their own mythology too seriously. For these writers are not simply deconstructing the old myths. Their texts can be seen as translating patriarchal texts back into the 'mother tongue', reinstating women's biological differences not as a source of weakness, but as a source of power and privilege. Female sexuality and physicality become positive qualities, rather than an enemy to male spirituality. This involves rethinking such concepts as creativity and power, shifting the focus away from differentiation, control and ownership onto images more conducive to social cohesion, as well as to individual self-expression. The power to dominate is opposed by the power to nurture, the power incarnate in the Great Goddess, whose primary function is not that of Jehovah - to exact obedience and punish - but to give. Several writers seem to be trying to construct that satisfactory discourse of motherhood which Kristeva finds so lacking in patriarchal religion: by deconstructing the traditional opposition between body and spirit, they suggest that women can create not only with their bodies but with their words, Eve's power of biological creation being joined by Adam's power of naming. These texts show, in Irigaray's words, that women

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From the Mother Goddess to God the Father 31

Women and the Word

bring something other than children into the world, we engender something other than children: love, desire, language, art, the social, the political, the religious, for example. But this creation has been forbidden us for centuries, and we must reappropriate this maternal dimension that belongs to us as women. (P- 43)

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32

'Destructive Genesis': Old Testament Myths of Origin and Creation

Julia Kristeva uses the phrase 'destructive genesis' to describe the process that takes place in dialogic discourse, in which 'writing reads another writing, reads itself and constructs itself'.1 This kind of 'negation as affirmation' is a dialectical process in which one ideological perspective is relativized against a contending viewpoint, giving rise to a new, more ambivalent 'truth'. It is an appropriate term to describe the texts discussed in this chapter, since they all enter into dialogue with Old Testament myths, and try to break their powerful hold on our imagination and beliefs by re-working them to construct more powerful and creative roles for women than the myths themselves provide. The phrase 'destructive Genesis' also incidentally suggests the negative influence that the first book of the Old Testament has had on Western perceptions of women. As I suggested in the previous chapter, Kristeva argues that the Hebraic patriarchal tradition, evolving out of older, matriarchal myths, moved women to the margins of a culture of which they were once the centre as mothers and guardians of the society's future. The masculinity of the Old Testament God which evolved from tribal gods and patriarchal deities is never in question, his 'maternal' features being merely an attempt to dismiss the need for a mother Goddess.2 Other commentators have made similar observations about the Halacha, or legal system, derived from the supposedly divine commands set down in the Bible. Established by the Jewish patriarchs, it provided a detailed set of rules and regulations, and specified how spirituality could be infused into everyday behaviour in such a way as to exclude women from any direct access to the Talmudic law. Effectively it limited the religious life of a woman to the home. Whatever power she exercised there, moreover, cannot have erased her sense of unworthiness before the Lord, heightened 33

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34

Women and the Word

The Myth of the Fall: 'And God Created Woman': Emma Tennant - Sisters and Strangers4 Women's sense of unworthiness can only have been reinforced by the myth of the Fall set out in Genesis. Arguably the central myth of the Judaeo-Christian imagination, and consequently of our cultural heritage, that myth has led, as was argued in the previous chapter, to women being constructed as inherently guilty, because 'daughters of Eve'. This is the central theme in Emma Tennant's Sisters and Strangers.5 The novel debunks patriarchal attitudes and myths by exuberantly bringing together contemporary allusions and ancient myth, a technique also used in Jeanette Winterson's Boating for Beginners.6 The underlying seriousness of this deconstruction is, however, indicated by the novel's narrative structure: Eve's story is told by Grandma Drummer to two young girls, one of whom - her granddaughter - speaks directly to the reader as narrator of the outer 'frame' of the story . This young audience functions as the voice of female inexperience, unworldly enough to expect fairness in life, yet already sufficiently exposed to traditional storytelling to have inherited their own share of patriarchal attitudes. The lies promulgated by these stories, according to Grandma, constitute a worse sin even than that Original Sin usually laid at Eve's door. Fairy tales teach little girls to see themselves as passive and weak, waiting - like Cinderella - to be rescued from their difficulties fay the symbol of power', a man (p. 136). The 'lie of the happy-ever-after', moreover, leads them to expect total fulfilment through romantic love, to see marriage as their ultimate goal. Grandma's stated aim is to make these women of the future aware of the lies to which they have been subjected, and to alert them to the pitfalls presented by the seven archetypal roles which men have constructed for women: Romantic heroine (or mistress), wife, whore, Madonna, courtesan, bluestocking, witch. The novel tells the story of a woman called Eve, and the changing nature of her relationship with Adam. Starting out as his mistress, while he is still married to Lil (short for Lilith), Eve later becomes his wife before in turn being divorced by him when he falls for another woman. In order to support herself and her children by Adam - Cain and Abel - she becomes first a prostitute and later a romantic novelist.

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each morning by the sound of her husband saying, in the morning service, 'Blessed art thou, O Lord, Our God, King of the Universe, who has not made me a woman.' 3

She also experiences the harsh realities of life as a single mother, looking after not only her own children, but the vast horde of children Adam had by Lilith. Throughout this period she is repeatedly drawn back to Adam, who alternately lusts after her and resents her. Her success as a scientist eventually destroys their relationship totally, and that career in turn comes to an end when Eve sees God, and decides to go and live with Sally, the friend who has been a constant - if also sometimes a source of conflict - in Eve's life ever since she introduced Eve to prostitution and the possibility of living without a man. Eve's story is to be an object-lesson in the consequences of being brought up on the biggest lie of all - the myth of Eden. Although humanist ideology prompts men and women to believe they are individuals, subjects - the T of their own discourse - who can think, speak and act freely, contemporary critiques of that ideology argue that the subject is also the subject of - in the sense of being subjected to - the language s/he uses and therefore of the values and beliefs inscribed in this discourse. This is the process which the French Marxist Louis Althusser calls 'interpellation'. 7 Being interpellated into the patriarchal discourse deriving from the Eden myth, Eve internalizes male values and the roles they valorize. There is a sense, therefore, in which Eve becomes complicit in her own exploitation: as Grandma says, when Eve decides to live with Adam, she decides 'not to take responsibility for herself (p. 21), content with a parasitic existence, 'feeding off the income and life of Adam' (p. 19). Her desire to be part of the male value system is most evident when she becomes the author of Romantic fiction, herself contributing to the 'Big Lie' (p. 141). Disguised as 'an archangel of feminism', Eve is used by her agent Frank Blake to lead a 'new reaction', since the Devil - just as much as God - Tikes to keep women in their rightful place' (p. 157). Her stories of women achieving success in a male-dominated world are 'a fairy tale just as pernicious as the rest' (p. 158), designed to obscure the price women will have to pay for such 'success'. 'More and more entangled in her own lies' (p. 162), she creates 'liberated' heroines eager to undergo plastic surgery to avoid getting old and ugly. While representing this complicity as a product of interpellation, Tennant seems less ready than some women writers to take a deterministic view of patriarchal ideology. Where others suggest that free choice is made impossible for young women, since the language barely exists in which they can define, let alone achieve, freedom from the roles offered them by patriarchy, Tennant seems closer to earlier writers like George

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Old Testament Myths of Origin and Creation 35

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Eliot who, while maintaining a deterministic view of life, insist on the individual's need to accept responsibility for her own destiny. The power and function of the myth are nevertheless made very clear. Grandma tells the girls that the biblical myth evolved as a result of the suppression of earlier versions, one of which Tennant incorporates into her text - the apocryphal legend of Lilith. The first account of humanity's creation in Genesis states, 'So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them' (1. 27), suggesting equality and autonomy for both sexes. The legend of Lilith, Adam's first wife according to Rabbinical tradition, reinforces such a view, both Lilith and Adam being created from the dust. In this version of the creation of man and woman, Adam, not God, introduces hierarchy into the relationship when Lilith objects to lying beneath him and he tries to force her submission. Her greatest crime, however, is to speak the 'ineffable name', laying claim to an authority in the symbolic order of language which is reserved for the male. She is therefore banished and re-enters legend as a malignant monster with a particular appetite for the flesh of young children. She becomes, that is, the definition of all that is unwomanly. As Grandma Drummer puts it, 'Lilith had been the first wife God had made for Adam, and she had turned out to be a terrible mistake', such a vixen that she was given to the Devil instead. In other words, having created a woman as strong as Adam, 'God saw that equality wasn't what he - or Adam - could cope with at all' (pp. 67-8). According to the legend, Eve is God's attempt to create a woman more to Adam's liking.8 The symbolism of Adam's rib used in the second version of woman's creation in Genesis could be seen to confirm this new emphasis, depicting Eve as both dependent and lacking - in Grandma's words, 'a smiling, submissive part of him'. This prelapsarian 'Eve in Paradise' is the product of male desire, a male fantasy - a beautiful woman, content to be at home preparing food and herself for his consumption, in a bed that is 'an exact replica of Cleopatra's barge' (p. 13). But all such fantasies can only last until reality intrudes - in this case, with appropriate bathos, in the form of Adam's wife Lilith. For Lilith is the repressed 'reality' of Eve - her other self, consigned to the unconscious in order that Eve can pursue the ego-ideal of the perfect woman that Adam offers her. In Eve there is at all times a conflict between this rebellious 'Lilith' self, with her unlicensed desire for knowledge and power, and the conforming self. She appears at one point disguised as Mrs Rochester, Jane Eyre's alter ego, the 'Madwoman

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36

in the Attic' who embodies all the unlawful rebelliousness that the young governess has learnt to repress.9 However hard Eve tries not to acknowledge the face that she sees in the mirror as her own, she must eventually face 'the horror of finding herself Lilith after all' (p. 67). The 'Other Woman' in the husband-mistress-wife triangle, the 'impossible monster' (p. 20), repressed because impossible, is herself. And as soon as Eve becomes the rejected wife, the repressed Lilith surfaces. Adam's rejection of Eve is, like his rejection of the harridan Lilith, justified by the Biblical myth which gives him total dominion over Eve. Through that myth she is constructed as guilty: 'everything in the world is her fault, and poor Jesus had to die to atone for her terrible wickedness'. And what is the nature of her sin? 'She was too inquisitive' (p. 24). But the girls are reminded that 'sex was the original sin' (p. 43). Tennant here alludes to the doctrine of women's frailty which associates the desire for knowledge, which usurps a male prerogative, with female sexuality, another threat to male control and power. Eve's guilt is confirmed by her alliance with the serpent, who according to Kristeva - stands for the inverse of God, since he invites Eve to transgress God's prohibition. As the first woman, Eve embodies in herself all the contradictory attributes later represented by the angel/whore dichotomy. Innocent until tempted, Eve slides inevitably from angel to whore as she moves from Adam's side to the serpent's. The code of eroticism between the two sexes is thus formulated, in Kristeva's words, 'as though it were a code of war. A war without end' (About Chinese Women, p. 21). And yet, if we follow Kristeva's argument, the serpent also represents Adam's repressed desire to transgress, his desire for everything that is neither tolerated by the Law of the Father nor even represented in the symbolic order of language. Emma Tennant similarly reminds the reader that the serpent, the Freudian substitute for the phallus, represents male sexuality, and is - no less than Eve - a male construct, used to displace male responsibility for his own sexuality onto a force outside himself: this mythical figure is in Sisters and Strangers represented by the character of Frank Blake, who both causes Eve's 'fall' and exploits it as seducer, pimp and literary agent. But it is Adam who introduces Frank into Eve's life, literally as his friend, metaphorically as the snake he presents her with as a gift. Just as Lilith and Eve represent the female split subject, so Frank and Adam can be seen as projections of the male split subject, Frank embodying the libidinous self which enjoys and exploits female sexuality, while Adam embodies the Law of the Father whose function is to control female sexuality in order to ensure the

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Old Testament Myths of Origin and Creation 37

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legitimacy of the succession - to ensure that the name of the father is perpetuated. Frank is thus Eve's God when she is Lilith, just as Adam is the conforming Eve's God. Both mistress and wife are, however, simply stages in the process by which Eve is interpellated into the role of 'woman'. Constantly searching for a valorized role, trying to achieve the ego-ideal that embodies everything that she is not, her ambitions are repeatedly displaced onto new roles, one of the most important being that of the mother. For through that role women can be made to feel part of the symbolic order from which they are excluded: to quote Kristeva again, In a symbolic productive/reproductive economy centred on the Paternal Word (the Phallus, if you like), one can make a woman believe that she is (the Phallus, if you like) even if she doesn't have it (the serpent - the penis): Doesn't she have the child? In this way social harmony is preserved. (About Chinese Women, p. 22) That is, women can be made to believe that they are the source of power, because they have children, an argument recalling Freud's suggestion that the desire for a child is merely a displacement of the little girl's desire for a penis, that is the power vested in masculinity. Eve's desire for power and knowledge (repressed along with her 'Lilith' self) can find its metaphorical substitute in children. But the ideal of motherhood is another patriarchal construction, as Eve implies when she asks Adam if he thinks she'd be 'a good enough mother' (p. 42, my italics): being a biological mother does not in itself fulfil the ideal. The role therefore offers further opportunities to reinforce Eve's sense of guilt, since any maternal 'neglect' can be cited as the cause of her children's suffering or delinquency. Nor is the 'goodness' of the role defined solely in relation to the child: in aspiring to be a 'Madonna', Eve must aspire to the impossible, to be both mother and virgin. As Grandma explains, 'men cannot accept to themselves that their mother is anything other than a virgin from beginning to end of their life' (p. 105). Since 'Mother' is always sacred, she cannot also be a sexual being within the Christian scheme of values. Those mothers who flaunt their sexuality thus breach the profoundest taboos and must be punished as 'the all-devouring mother of insatiable lusts' (p. 107). This again illustrates male ambivalence towards female sexuality and anxiety about the legitimacy of his offspring: as Grandma points out, 'no man can ever be one hundred

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per cent sure of the paternity of his child. That's why men have locked women up, over the centuries' (p. 71). Eve's experience of motherhood further exposes the gap between myth and reality, the element of idealization being brought into sharp focus by the contemporary social reality concealed and legitimized by myth. Set against the revered image of the Madonna is the reality of the single mother, attempting to look after her children with inadequate support moral, financial or emotional - from father or society. Such realities, Grandma suggests, form the basis for more sinister fairy tales - stories in which children are abandoned by their parents in the forest to die. Next, the myth of the courtesan, variously conceived of as the woman formed only for man's delight, or as the woman who exploits her sexuality to gain power over men, is exposed as a sham in the light of the sordid realities of men's real power over women. Even 'scrubbers', as their name suggests, have also to do the housework - in Eve's view it 'sounds just like a housewife's lot' (p. 80). The superwoman myth of the 'post-feminist' era is equally deceptive. Even as a rich and successful writer, Eve is as exploited as any prostitute, paying ninety per cent of her revenue to her publisher/lover. Nor can she return to Adam, since she is now so much more powerful than him that he can no longer love her. The 'New Adam' may play the role of the 'new Man' with his new wife Brigid, the 'new Woman', but is only able to sustain it while Eve keeps her distance. Once she moves in with the twins and Lilith's ragamuffins, and Lilith 'freezes the Garden of Eden' (p. 101), it turns into Hell, a baroque extravaganza reminiscent of the fantasy of revenge acted out in Fay Weldon's The Life and Loves of a She-Devil.

The ideal offered as an alternative by many feminist writers - that of female friendship - also proves deceptive: 'many women can't see each other' because of the different categories into which men place them as part of their 'Divide and Rule' strategy: Tf a woman isn't one type in the eyes of men, then she must be another' (p. 183). Since women have no power of their own, in order to survive, they must compete with one another for the derived power of a male 'protector'. The roles men construct for women thus serve not only to limit women's individual power but to keep them from recognizing their collective strength, so that her 'sisters are strangers to her' (p. 139). New structures to replace that of the patriarchal family are needed before 'sisterhood' can become a reality rather than simply another myth, albeit a comforting one. As long as Eve remains dependent on male approval, she will remain a victim of male mythology.

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Tennant suggests that the only protection from the power of such myths is knowledge, which is why it is identified as Eve's first sin. Once she has 'eaten of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil' (p. 51), Eve finds that her power grows too. When she takes Lilith's place as the abandoned wife, discovering the reality behind the myth of romantic love, she joins a long line of betrayed women, united not only by their desire for revenge but by the power conferred by their justified anger and their release from the role of passive, dependent female. But such knowledge is, as I have already suggested, always regarded as dangerous in patriarchal religious discourse, particularly if allied to sexuality. It can only be tolerated in 'wise women', too old to be a sexual threat, and even then liable to be persecuted if threatening the power of the church or state. When Eve - in pursuit of knowledge - aspires to be an intellectual, she finds herself 'pushed out and driven into silence' (p. 175), pigeonholed as a 'Bluestocking' in a role that is valued by none other than her own marginalized kind. And with knowledge, comes responsibility, which comes to Eve ironically through the practice of mothering, rather than biological maternity. When she sees the Madonna in a church, she sees 'the burden of love taken on in the name of the whole world' (p. 103), and takes on Lilith's children as well as her own. There is, however, considerable ambiguity attaching to this concept, clearly an important one for Tennant. Eve's assumption of responsibility for the children can be seen as an acceptance of patriarchal ideology, enabling men to abdicate their share of parental responsibility. But if it is simply further evidence of her complicity in the ideology of maternal self-sacrifice, then why is 'the concept of responsibility' regarded as her 'sin' in male eyes (p. 43)? Are we to understand that it is because her role as a mother distracts her from the attentions due to the male? Even the young girls listening to the tale of the Mediterranean Madonna see her as a kind of witch imprisoning Adam, who regresses into infantilism as he is forced to compete with his children for attention, when what he wants is the 'dream of Mediterranean harmony' (p. 129), in which he will sit around while the women and children work. Or is Eve's readiness to take on this burden of care alone an indication of maturity incompatible with childlike dependency and therefore, like knowledge, a challenge to male power? This succession of restrictive roles might lead the reader to conclude that Tennant sees women as forever victim. As whores they achieve a certain freedom, if only from 'the whole chain of stereotypes into

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which men place and always will place women' (p. 86), but they are not, as we have seen, beyond male power. The most powerful female role represented in the novel is that of the witch, embodied in Grandma Drummer herself. The witch is the binary opposite of the female ideal constructed by patriarchy, manifesting herself in more modern times in the role of the bluestocking or suffragette metaphorically or literally tying herself to the stake on which her predecessors were burned. Many a woman who could not or would not enter into a relationship with a man, or another role sanctioned by men, has found herself consigned to this role. But the lesson of this 'moral tale', it appears, is that the young girls 'must try to change the world of men and make a new Eve' (p. 184). We meet here a theme that will become very familiar in this study - the idea that instead of fighting for equality with men, for a place at the centre of the existing power structure, women should accept their marginal role and turn it to their advantage. But how can the new Eve avoid being silenced, or persecuted, in that marginalized role? What kind of power can the idea of a witch's magic evoke for Grandma's young listeners? The end of the story, however, reveals that Grandma Drummer is Eve herself, telling her own story. No longer perpetuating the 'big lie' of Romantic love in her fiction, she is now involved in an autobiographical project, telling the story from Eve's point of view. This is, perhaps, the witch's 'magic' - the power to use words for their transformative power, to change and re-shape the myths women have inherited into subversive forms more suited to their needs and purposes. The Myth of the Flood: 'In the beginning there is Mother' 1 0 Michele Roberts - The Book of Mrs Noah The story of the Flood sent by God to cleanse the earth of the wickedness of humankind is the myth of a second fall: Noah, the only righteous man left on earth, is made responsible not only for saving his family, but for the survival of all living creatures. To this end he builds an ark, in which he, his family and all God's other living species survive till the flood waters recede. In The Book of Mrs Noah Michele Roberts appropriates this and other biblical and religious myths and reworks them to create new meanings. Her novel is a complex narrative centred on a librarian's visit to Venice with her husband while he attends a conference. The woman fantasizes that she is Mrs Noah, but instead of inhabiting an ark full of animals, on her ark she is joined by five sibyls. The wide-ranging stories they tell each other, including her

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own version of the flood narrative, form the body of the narrative. Where Genesis tells us how God made the world, her novel suggests the world - or more specifically man - made God. But she also envisions a second Eden, a new world after the Flood, structured according to female values. The Book of Mrs Noah implicitly attacks the logocentric belief that behind the 'Word' lies God, a unique originating T guaranteeing its meaning and truth. In addition to five 'sibyls' or wise women, the narrator conjures up the 'Voice of God' on her imaginary Ark. This middle-aged man - 'the speaker of the Word of God' (p. 51) - claims to be the Creator, who invented the world then wrote it down before retiring to a 'tax-free haven. Heaven'. The nature of his authority is typically both stated and subverted by the title of 'Gaffer' - defined as 'one who makes gaffes' (p. 54). 11 The authority of the Word' is further undermined by Michele Roberts when the question of origins is pushed back a stage, the Gaffer reflecting on where he, the 'creator' originated. Hearing the 'voice of Mother' calling to him, he imagines a new, unauthorized version of creation: Tn the beginning there is Mother.' The fable that follows re-writes the Fall in terms of the Oedipal conflict, the Gaffer being expelled from Paradise by Father, so that he feels compelled to change the original version to - Tn the beginning there is Father.' As Father is the authority that separates the child from the mother, father is the power to be feared - 'Father is God. Father makes babies' (p. 240). But for the male child, there is an ambivalence here, since father also provides a role model. The father offers a heroic role, 'eternal life', free of the bodily 'stain of the woman', a means of transcending the humiliating dependence on female power. It is also a role through which the male can return to the lost mother in a relationship which reverses the balance of power: 'He could marry one, get his mother back ... Always ready for him, permanently available' (p. 241). Psychoanalytic theory is thus used to explain the ideological function of the myth of God the Father. As an alternative to the myth of the male creator, the novel uses the dream sea journey to spin a complex web around the related concepts of creator, creation and creativity. While her husband is at his conference, the librarian takes part in a 'conference' of her own, each speaker a product of her own imaginative quest for the origins and nature of female creativity. Roberts's deconstruction of Biblical myth shows how firmly it establishes the rationale for a male God. As the Gaffer puts it, 'It's the male who represents humanity, creativity, spiritual quest, after all. How could a woman possibly do that? How could

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a mother know anything about human growth?' (p. 56). To his unintentionally ironic question he gives an equally ironic answer: to be a creator one has to rise above the body and be 'androgynous', like him. The Gaffer embodies those generations of orthodoxy which have argued that only man can claim to represent the human race, to be the norm, the universal: 'man', it is argued, includes 'woman'. In contrast, the female represents a gender-specific and therefore partial view. The biological creativity of the mother becomes evidence of her incapacity for other forms of creativity, rather than a single dimension of it. 12 Through such arguments creativity and divinity have been preserved as a male domain. In order to enforce and maintain this view, the female view has to be suppressed. The Gaffer's vision being an 'inclusive' one, 'the last word on the subject', he cannot see the need for women writers. Furthermore, such writers attend to women's experience in their work, so that they are, by implication, anti-male, depriving men of their rightful status and centrality in women's lives. The Gaffer seeks reassurance instead from the mermaids swimming alongside the ark, a male projection whose mirrors reflect a 'whole' and Tioly' image back, as they advise him 'to refuse to be named' (p. 238) in the terms of the women. Warning him not to enter the human world, the mermaids promise to return him to his 'forgotten home' in Atlantis, the 'perfect womb where childhood never ends' (p. 239). Like sirens, the mermaids represent the duality in male perceptions of woman as simultaneously the mother who offers security and the sexual being who threatens to engulf and disempower him. They themselves illustrate the successful suppression or transvaluation of the female tradition, for the mermaid was originally the pagan goddess of the sea, worshipped as the giver of life, another incarnation of the Mother Goddess. Such distortion and silencing is shown not to be restricted to the Judaic tradition. Like Christa Wolf, Roberts uses classical mythology in one of the sibyls' stories to show how the earlier version of the Apollo and Daphne myth depicts Daphne and her maenads as poets, 'hunting their meanings' and singing them to the people. When Apollo, however, steals her laurel branch, he also locks up her version of the story, fostering the belief that women cannot be poets and story-tellers, since 'poets and storytellers make women' (p. 53). By such revisions women are doubly silenced - their stories are stolen from them by men so that there can be no female tradition, and the male versions that survive serve only to confirm the non-creativity of women. As Roberts's Gaffer puts it, women, being 'receptive', can be

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an 'incubator' of his ideas, like the Virgin Mary, but it is 'the male who represents humanity, creativity' (p. 56). The Book of Mrs Noah, however, offers an alternative mythology with the mother at its centre, which suggests a very powerful role for women. The narrator evokes such an alternative religious tradition in her ecumenical chapel on the Ark. After the Roman Catholics have sung a litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the feminist Catholics follow with their litany in praise of the Great Mother. This falack Goddess', 'hunter of meanings', 'moon-swallower', from the 'land of milk and honey' (pp. 43-4), belongs to the earlier tradition of the Great Goddess. It provides a focal point for the author's exploration of female creativity, in terms both of motherhood and of writing, restoring woman to the role of 'creator' reserved in the Judaeo-Christian tradition for a male God. In this new mother-centred mythology the creativity which is associated with the godhead is inextricably linked with birth as Roberts takes the myth of the Ark and recuperates its meaning for women. The first story told on the Ark is the story of Mrs Noah, told from her own point of view. The narrator evokes the patriarchal world described in Kristeva's 'War between the Sexes'. She describes her people as wanderers, tied together by kinship but with male and female separated by the menstrual blood which is a sign of shame. But Mrs Noah's use of imagery and symbolism shows her gradually breaking out from the confines of the patriarchal mindset. Water represents life in its literal sense for her nomadic tribesmen, but becomes a central symbol of religious significance for Mrs Noah. The flood itself is compared with a woman's waters breaking, suggesting birth as well as destruction, and associating the flood waters with the amniotic fluid which sustains the infant in the womb. In Mrs Noah's dream, the ark figures as a womb , containing all creation. 13 After their nine months within the ark, Noah and the survivors emerge as from the womb to a world devastated by the flood, but also cleansed and purified by it. Water represents to Mrs Noah a world of tolerance and fluidity, all the possibilities of a new beginning which will break free from the old world in which women are defined by men. While her husband Jack's god gives men power in the form of dominion over the animals, and demands blood sacrifices, Mrs Noah simply wants harmony. She wants no more blood, instead pouring water over the survivors' heads 'as a kind of prayer for the dead'. Baptism, one of the few sacraments in which women have always played a part, here represents a female alternative to the barbaric patriarchal ritual of sacrifice: 'Water is [her] god'

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(p. 83). The story reinstates the mother's role as the focus for religious feeling - a remembrance of the womb rather than the cross, which recalls traditions of goddess-worship rather than patriarchal religions. The values of this alternative tradition are explicitly opposed to those of the patriarchal Godhead. The grief and guilt the narrator, like the other sibyls, displays over an abortion she has had provokes the Gaffer to ask himself, 'Did God grieve for the ones he killed?' (p. 249) as he surveyed the millions drowned by his flood, an 'abortion' of his own children on a far vaster scale. Where her husband Jack's God is outside the world he has created and - it is implied - is Jack's own construction, Mrs Noah's god is immanent, always present in the world around her, even in herself. 'Worship', therefore, means becoming part of the world and working in it: it is above all 'the action of creation' (p. 88), and it is significantly after giving birth that she first feels aware of this god . Her god is water, but also the Earth, a 'hard mother' who nevertheless 'delivers' them from the flood. To affirm her vision, Mrs Noah provides everything with new names. In Genesis naming is part of the process of differentiation and division by which God creates the universe out of chaos, but for Mrs Noah naming is a relational act, connecting all creation in harmony and with God. Similarly, where in Genesis it is an act whereby Adam demonstrates his authority over all living things, for her it is an act of worship. This mother also devises writing - signs to help her daughter-in-law Sara and grand-children to remember the new names - signifiers to function in her absence. She tells Sara, this mud brick is a word, and it means my-love-for-you. And it will replace me when I'm no longer with you. It will survive our separation. It will survive my death. This is my gift to you, daughter, and to your children and to their children. (p. 87) Where 'Word' and 'woman' have been kept apart in patriarchal systems of thought, woman here reclaims the Word as that which is not in conflict with the body, but which represents it, just as the sign is embodied in clay tablets. There appears to be an optimism here that woman can be represented in the symbolic order, if women have a hand in shaping it. Patrilinear inheritance is replaced by a matrilineal handing down of culture, as Mrs Noah hands the tablets over to Sara. In this story elements of the Judaic/Christian tradition are revitalized by feminist concepts which have their roots in Mother Goddess myths.

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A similar opposition between male and female concepts of God is presented in the second story, where a heretic learns to reject the God 'who requires such suffering' (p. 106) in favour of a divinity centred in motherhood. She has a vision of a basilica, shaped like a bee-hive: This church is the woman's body, where God begins' (p. 122). Like Mrs Noah, she sees creation as a process, a dance, in which she participates - 'creation happening over and over again, unceasingly' (p. 123) in the miracle of human generation. If God begins in the womb, not in the Word, there is no need to despise the body in favour of the spirit, nor to insist on the split between them, as the Christian church has done. For believers like the Beguines there is 'no need to fear the body's desires' (p. 117), and therefore no need to punish it. They reject the Augustinian idea that woman's beauty is an evil which 'evokes men's lust, and drags them down to vileness, away from their search for God' (p. 105). On the Ark, 'mind and body are not split' (p. 210), but reconciled. In the chapel on the Ark, the narrator sees God's presence even in works of art which attempt to express the human relationship to food, sexuality and death. Sexuality and food can take on sacramental qualities, if they are offered in the name of love. For the Re-vision Sibyl, cooking is an act of devotion which she can carry out, in contrast to the all-male sacraments of the Christian church from which she feels excluded. Roberts is attempting to reinstate the physical as a source of spirituality and creativity, rather than a hindrance to them, a reminder that in Christ the Word (the holy spirit) was made flesh. In order to free the image of the Mother from the attributes associated with it by patriarchal religious discourse, the narrator has to construct a 'creator' who is not enmeshed in this tradition. Looking at a painting of the Virgin, she takes this Christian construction and turns it into a potent image of female creativity. She imagines the Virgin 'reading the story of the Boat ... she conceives other words; new words. She creates the Word inside herself, by herself using her own power', no longer simply a passive receptacle for the son of God. The Angel of the Annunciation becomes merely Mary's 'inspiration', giving her the 'words of the other/the book' (p. 214) so that she can take them inside herself and rework them. This is a very different perception of the 'virgin impregnated with the Word' from that which Kristeva argues is central to Christian discourse of the Virgin Mother, to be discussed in Chapter 3. Linking this figure with virgins from other myths, the narrator calls her 'the proud hunter-goddess ... the virgin; which means the whore. She is the Ark, the maker of the Word.

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She is the author/ Here Roberts breaks down not only the body/spirit dichotomy, but the virgin/whore distinction through which the church has sought to define and control women, rewarding or punishing them according to their readiness to conform to male-dominated sexual mores. Rejecting the authority of the Old Testament, this author/narrator is writing a 'new text, with herself as the subject that speaks' (p. 215), and the power to define herself. However, Roberts's construction of a female religious tradition raises problematic issues facing many feminists today. In the first place, to hark back to a lost pagan world is clearly regressive. The Forsaken Sibyl, while yearning to worship something within and outside herself, does not want 'some sentimental icon of a lost Mother Goddess' (p. 208). The final story told on the ark graphically suggests the dangers involved in unthinking reversion to Mother Goddess mythology. In this futuristic nightmare the prime minister is a blend of the Virgin Mary and Margaret Thatcher: 'Big Mummy' is 'Omnipotent. Eternal'. The word 'Mother' is taboo, the name that must not be spoken, as Yahweh once was, while 'Cunt' is ' a word that inspires reverence', representing 'what every woman should aspire to: that essential and complete female Beingness' (p. 260). Such a 'religion' provides the ideological basis for a society in which women are either breeders, feeders or tarts, classified according to their biological status, as they are in Margaret Atwood's dystopia The Handmaid's Tale. This kind of biological essentialism is the underside of female 'difference' feared by many feminists. Clearly the idea of mother worship, no less than father worship, has dangers: it may encourage regressive infantilism in those who worship the mother, evident in Roberts's presentation of male/female relationships, which she seems to see as a continuation of the child/mother relationship. The male child, eternally conscious of the loss of the mother, becomes the child-man, seeking through every adult sexual relationship to be restored to the security represented by the mother. 'Mummy' must be eternally available; hence the appeal of the pornographic magazine where she is spread wide for him, 'stapled in place' (p. 232). The greatest hate is reserved for 'the woman who goes away' (p. 218), the independent woman who re-enacts the mother's rejection of her child and must therefore in turn be rejected as 'whore'. For men like the narrator's husband, Noah, fatherhood is to be feared, since the wife/mother's love should be theirs alone. For those, on the other hand, who identify with the mother, mother-worship may result in over-investment in self-denial or

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alternatively in over-possessiveness. As was suggested in the previous chapter, according to Irigaray, patriarchal religious discourse reduces the mother's role to that of a nurturing function. This encourages her to invest all her ambitions into this single function. In The Book of Mrs Noah the nurturing role is subjected to particular scrutiny. When cooking supper on the Ark, the narrator invokes Christ's words at the last supper to suggest that the mother's relationship with her unborn child is a kind of sacrament: 'This is my body and my blood. Do this in memory of me. The blood and body of the mother nourish the child inside. That is the true holy communion' (p. 102). But this meaning is perhaps ironicized by the preceding statement - 'Eat this spoonful for me, darling' - which suggests feeding can be a form of manipulation and power. Here the narrator tries to confront the evidence that women, including mothers, have been instrumental in perpetuating the oppression of their own sex: 'preferrer of sons/despiser of women ... foot binder/ soul binder' (p. 44). Patriarchal religion accords motherhood a privileged role only in return for the mother ensuring the perpetuation of patriarchal values and structures. Mother worship, from this perspective, simply encourages women to return to the roles from which they have been trying for generations to liberate themselves unless it is founded on a new discourse of motherhood. Roberts is, in fact, distrustful of any myth, however woman-centred, which offers itself as the final answer to patriarchal myth. In the novel's final story, the strongest opposition to 'Big Mummy' is embodied in Lucy, the prostitute who leads the Daughters of Isis, intent on violent revenge on men. In her is revived all the fearful mythology of the Amazon, and the castrating woman. As in Wolf's Cassandra, such a violent alternative, in which women take on the warlike properties traditionally associated with men, is rejected because it is too close to the death culture the narrator encounters on the islands she visits from the ark. Each time she lands she encounters warnings of the apocalypse, of torture, of silenced populations, as if men - unable to bring forth life - can only bring forth death. Roberts rejects any alternative whereby women achieve power and equality by adopting male patterns of dominance and violence. Rather than offering a totally 'female' version of experience to replace the male version embodied in patriarchy, Roberts looks for a reconciliation of 'male' and 'female', perceived as two equally important dimensions of human experience. She describes 'masculine' and 'feminine' in these terms:

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not as essential attributes of a given biology, but as images of forms of energy existing within each of us in different ratios. The feminine way tends towards receiving, opening, waxing and waning, relating, uniting. The masculine way tends towards dividing, ordering, separating, naming. Our culture, I think, values the latter more than the former. I've learned, now, to value the feminine within myself. But it's incomplete and insufficient without the masculine. ('The Woman Who Wanted to be a Hero', p. 65) The Gaffer learns to recognize that history does not make sense without women. Equally, while the Correct Sibyl resists the power of the male God who is 'just a word' which nevertheless 'defines all that is not-him' (p. 190), she cannot believe it is any better to say 'She made the world: How can I invent she without explaining what she touches or yearns to touch, the not-she, the mother who goes away and touches father' (p. 191). Using either He or She involves falling back into millennia of gender stereotyping. The meaning of one is irrevocably defined by the meaning of the other, sexual identity depending on such binary opposites. The hint of a way out of this impasse is provided by the story of Turtle and Dog, the last story told on the ark. These two young orphan boys live as vagrants in a future world which reflects our current nightmares about the possible breakdown of society, a world where classes and genders are rigidly classified and segregated, ironically governed by 'Big Mummy'. The boys, almost as dehumanized as their names suggest, nevertheless carry out the only real 'mothering' found in Big Mummy's state when they find a baby girl they call Mouse. They look after her until she is eleven, when she loses them and is taken into a brothel by Big Lucy, the only prostitute tough enough to walk the streets alone. In this 'Temple of Joy', Mouse meets Turtle again, completing his 'puberty rite'. Meeting again outside, they make love, forging a link against oppression through a sexual relationship unregulated by the state, as well as through their own language. If 'Mother' is the word they cry out most joyously, it is because they have found in their loving tenderness for each other a gender-free ideal which offers both security and freedom. 'Mothering' has become a practice, not an aspect of gender. What Roberts is offering the reader is, then, not an ideal of motherhood based on an essentialist view of woman, but a breakdown of the concept of gender which, in effect, employs the term 'Mother' as a metaphor. 14

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Women and the Word

That metaphor is, nevertheless, central to Roberts's attempt to reclaim creativity for women, and to assert that the power of the Word is not predicated on masculinity. In The Book of Mrs Noah, therefore, the womb, represented by the ark, is associated with artistic as well as biological conception. Roberts herself comments in an interview, 'the ark came to suggest to me both a woman's body and a storehouse for old books which I love ... Ideas around arks, archives, the pregnant body, came together.' 15 The ark's construction embodies the splitting of the subject, its upper regions representing the conscious while the hold contains the 'hysterics' which the narrator initially refuses to acknowledge. As Roberts puts it, in the same interview, 'my narrator wants to walk on the top deck where everything is good and nice; but she discovers there's a lot of chaos underneath' (p. 158). But immersion in the 'hold' of the unconscious is a necessary part of the writing process. In it the narrator confronts both personal and cultural images of the past, both her aborted child and the 'relics' of Europe's past, which include violent images of story-book heroines like Snow White. In the hold she also enters the 'house of language'. The links she makes here between language, the maternal body and the ark are very specific: 'The house of words. Here, inside the Ark, the body of the mother, I find words' (p. 273). Creativity begins in the womb, in the Ark, in acknowledging her own gender as the unconscious source of her creative energy, even if aspiring to writing that encompasses the experience and perceptions of both male and female: Roberts's interview concludes, 'You have to start with your femaleness, not with writing like a man, and grow and expand from there, find your masculine part too' (p. 172). The narrator's recognition of her bond with her mother and her own potential as a mother is symbolized by the rainbow (p. 274), the umbilical cord that in the original flood myth links heaven and earth, promising God's friendship and support. Roberts, like Maitland in 'Triptych', uses the rainbow to reinstate the importance of the cutting of the cord, overshadowed in Freudian theory by the castration complex. For the narrator the rainbow therefore denotes both connection and separation, the connection that guarantees continuity and security, and the separation that makes freedom and independence possible. For the mother's creativity encompasses not only the gift of life but the gift of speech, as it does in her earlier account of Mrs Noah's story: she teaches her infant the words or signifiers that will stand in her place, enabling it to survive in her absence. The words 'Writer. Mother' (p. 275) become linked during the ark's voyage: the

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narrator returns to consciousness both pregnant and once more able to write. This return to the mother is, however, not so much a return to the personal mother as an attempt to make contact with a female cultural tradition. Like the mother in the complex of stories within the story of the heretic nun, the narrator learns that 'mother' is the 'Lady Wisdom' she has been searching for all her life, but failed to recognize because, like Lot's wife, in the same group of stories, she had been forbidden to look back. The library that she invents for her ark is, therefore, a repository of women's words embodying the suppressed female tradition. The 'Ark of Women is the Other One' (p. 19), a refuge for all the women who do not fit into the roles offered them by patriarchy, a place to 'find out what it means to be a woman writer' (p. 21). The stories she and her sibyls tell each other give voice to feelings and ideas that have been silenced for generations. They provide a grim and continuous history of women's oppression by men: Mrs Noah's last words are 'Welcome death ... Until I'm reincarnated, born again into the next story' (p. 89). They offer what is missing from patriarchal texts, answering the Gaffer's question as to why there should be a need for women's writing. The only story told on the ark by a male narrator highlights this need. It is 'one of the oldest and commonest stories told along these streets' (p. 204), the story of a woman seduced and made pregnant by her employer, thrown out by his wife, and ultimately hanged for infanticide. A man has to act as scribe, because the woman at its centre cannot write, one of the main reasons for the many gaps in women's written history. The version of the story we are offered explicitly combines the 'sensational details of popular novels and broadsheets with the sober nature of religious confessional tracts' (p. 192), demonstrating the distortions which occur to the experiences of women denied access to the written word, when even well-intentioned men 'give it a shape ... make her up' (p. 193). Both the story-teller and Mr Allen, the employer, whose diaries are also incorporated into the narrative, take it in turns to exploit Meg Hansey both sexually and as the subject of their narratives; they implicitly compete first to master her body and then to write her story. Neither attempts to enter into Meg's feelings or perspective: the account of her infanticide is written with an almost clinical detachment. The narrator's story may resurrect 'her poor body' (p. 204), but never her inner life. It provides yet another example of women's suffering at the hands of men, but says nothing of their creativity or their

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courage. Meg is another passive victim written into the role of wicked woman. The novel's female narrators recognize, however, the dangers of first-person confessional writing. If - as the Babble-On (Babylonian) Sibyl puts it - it 'reproduces the sinner in the confessional' (p. 95), it merely confirms her 'guilt'. The sibyls' stories are told from a different perspective. Heretics affirm, rather than confess, their perceptions and beliefs, rejecting the crimes that they are accused of and the labels that are attached to them. Mrs Noah consistently affirms her vision of God, and the validity of her dreams and values against those of her overbearing husband. Most of the stories are intended by their authors as a last testimony, a document for their daughters, a new source for the female tradition. In them women progress from being defined by men to defining themselves. The novel as a whole, although using a firstperson narrator, similarly avoids the dangers of 'confessional' form because the narrator constructs her identity through a patchwork of voices and styles, which allows her to avoid being defined and confined to a single role, shape or quality. This open, experimental form moreover offers a 'female' alternative to patriarchal authoritarianism without slipping into authoritarianism itself. Roberts does not set one woman's word against the voice of God, but attempts to convey the multiplicity of female experience as well as its common element. Instead of trying to define 'feminine' as men have done, this text asks whether 'feminine' can be reinvented to mean 'the history of women's lives ... the lives that they actually lead' (p. 141), with all the variety that implies. Inviting the five sibyls onto the Ark to 'discover how other women survive' (p. 32), the narrator confronts many different answers. The discussion of women's writing in Chapter Ten (pp. 45-8), for instance, represents a number of totally conflicting views which stand unedited. Although the narrator is distressed by the degree of hostility and intransigence represented, there is no attempt to rank those views in order of merit. Nor is the narrator's voice privileged above the other voices heard in the story, a point underlined by the novel's ending, since the first line that she writes in her diary is the first line of the novel's second chapter, the beginning of the story of the ark. The effect is to make the reader question the 'reality', the status of the fiction just read, the narrator's voice being rendered as fictive and unauthorial as those of 'her' creations. By this device the narrator, as it were, 'liberates' her sibyls, allowing each of them equal weight with herself. She also liberates her own writing voice, since her writer's block ends with what

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constitutes the text itself - the variety of women's experiences she has listened to. One problem the narrator of The Book of Mrs Noah shares with all the sibyls is the need to construct a language which will not falsify female experience. The gross Orwellian ISfewspeak' of the dystopia imagined in the final story, where rape is termed "giving bliss', has its roots in such existing double-think as 'she asked for it', so that each of the sibyls is falocked' by the sense that language is something which defines and controls, rather than expresses them. The Correct Sibyl, for instance, adopts a style that is 'dry; unfeeling; technical terms rigorously arranged; over-controlled' to hold in check her feelings of revenge, but finds it fails to convey her true experience (p. 175). The Re-Vision Sibyl was once inspired by Donne and Hopkins to 'invent a language to speak her like this' (p. 128), but fell back into stereotyped gender roles after marriage, hanging onto other people's words Tike hooks' (p. 140) so that she was classified and controlled by them. But to reach instead for the Forsaken Sibyl's new female language of 'incoherence and irrationality and syntactical violence and multiple word-orgasms' (p. 49) seems to the narrator to result in the kind of writing that men have been only too happy to classify as 'feminine'. Is Roberts here presenting a critique - conscious or not - of the kind of ecriture feminine, female practice of writing, advocated by French feminists? Helene Cixous implies such writing is highly metaphoric and celebratory in tone, exploiting the rhythmic and sound qualities of the language in a way that highlights its physicality. But it also appears to be potentially 'violent' in its attempts to disturb the binary hierarchies of phallocentricism and the tightly logical grammatical hierarchies of complex syntax. 16 Kristeva appears reluctant to accept the concept of a woman's language, arguing that its '(at least syntactical) existence is highly problematical and [its] apparent lexical specificity is perhaps more the product of a social marginality than of a sexual-symbolic difference'. The distinction she draws between the semiotic and symbolic modalities of language is perhaps more relevant to Roberts's position, for, although the semiotic may appear to be the more 'female' disposition in that it retains traces of the infant's pre-linguistic relationship with the mother, Kristeva reminds us that communication is only possible for male or female through the symbolic. Attempting to remain in the semiotic stage can only lead therefore to self-silencing and/or madness. Similarly, for Roberts, if there is to be communication, there can be 'no despising of logical language'. Instead that language must be re-worked to forge a new

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currency, a language that can be anchored in one's 'own bodily existence in society and history' (p. 208). Kristeva, too, whatever reservations she has about essentialist concepts of women's writing, recognizes the attempts made by women writers to 'shatter language, to find a specific discourse closer to the body and emotions, to the unnamable repressed by the social contract' (Kristeva Reader, p. 200). Both novelist and theorist avoid essentializing views of the female by locating women's experience specifically in time and place. For the novel's narrator, then, women must be prepared to take risks with language, not in the name of irrationality and violence, but to achieve a new fidelity and accuracy in relation to their own experience: Out of this chaos inside, make a pattern. Out of the timeless perfect whole of the internal world, pluck two or three symbols at a time. Let yourself make a mess, make mistakes, fail. Laugh at yourself. Fall from paradise, from the enclosed garden, and write words. (p. 209) But before they can start to forge a new linguistic 'currency', women have to leave 'paradise', abandon the seductive but confining constructions offered by patriarchal gender discourse. Like the BabbleOn Sibyl they must learn to start exploiting words, even if at first it means speaking only in 'code', 'images', 'metaphor' (p. 95). Like the Correct Sibyl, they will find that this means getting away from what pleased others in the past, and hunting for new words. For Turtle and Mouse, the young people in the final story, playing with words and writing poetry is a means both of expressing their deepest feelings, and of questioning the meanings offered by an oppressive state. The narrator herself adopts this exploratory, ambivalent use of language in her punning quotations from the Sphinx's book of riddles, each questioning the meaning of words traditionally used to describe female experience, such as 'confinement'. Every writing woman in the novel is acutely aware that control of language is essential for female autonomy: 'naming is power' (p. 109). The Myth of the Patriarch: Sara Maitland - 'Triptych' 1 7 Sara Maitland's collection of short stories, A Book of Spells, deals - as its title implies - with magic, specifically with female magic. It contains a wide range of stories all sharing the theme of women's power to

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subvert, through their own words, patriarchal structures, power and myth, and to thereby generate a 'magic' that can transform female experience. In the story 'Triptych', Maitland, a feminist Christian as well-known for her non-fiction as for her fiction, explores the role of this 'magic' for women marginalized by patriarchal religious discourse, echoing the issues raised by Emma Tennant in Sisters and Strangers. For them both, as for Michele Roberts, 'naming is power', but Maitland suggests that that power can be abused by women as well as by men, if they are unable to detach themselves from patriarchal power structures. In Triptych' Maitland reworks the Old Testament myth concerning the relationship between Abraham, the first patriarch and his wife Sarah, and the black slave Hagar. Gerda Lerner sees the story of the covenant with Abraham as marking a decisive change in the relationship of man to God which becomes 'defined in such a way as to marginalise women' (Creation of Patriarchy, p. 188). As was noted in the previous chapter, circumcision, the ritual of the covenant, symbolizes the rededication of each male Israelite child to the obligation to worship only Yahweh. In return Yahweh promises his people a land of their own, and many generations to succeed their founder, Abraham. These generations are to be the product of Abraham's 'seed', as though it were self-generating. There is no symbolic or ritual role for the mother. Lerner argues that, by making the covenant only with Abraham, Yahweh gives divine sanction to the authority of the patriarch over his family and tribe. Maitland explores the position of women in this patriarchal society by analysing the patriarch's relationship to his wife and concubine through their point of view, using the form suggested by the story's title: the narrative has a tripartite structure, each section presenting one character's viewpoint. Hagar, the black female slave whose narrative opens the story, is triply disadvantaged in this power structure. But the transaction through which she passes to Abraham as a form of property or currency underlines the relative powerlessness of even the most privileged of women. The Bible tells how Abraham and Sarah took refuge in Egypt to escape famine. While there, Abraham pretended that the beautiful Sarah was his sister, afraid that if the Egyptians knew she was his wife, they would kill him in order to take her for themselves. Sarah was therefore taken into the Pharaoh's household, and Abraham was well treated for her sake until the truth was discovered, and both were expelled. Hagar is an Egyptian slave, given to Abraham in exchange for Sarah's favours, on account of

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Women and the Word

Abraham being afraid and greedy. Maitland thereby emphasizes that the wife, as much as the concubine, is the patriarch's property, her body his to dispose of as he wishes. Although protected by the coolness of the tent while Hagar is exposed to the pitiless heat of the sun, Sarah too is ultimately mere barter. And yet Sarah was, before her marriage, a princess - the meaning of her name in Hebrew. Coming from Ur, the 'ancient city of Wisdom', where astronomy and magic are revered more than being a warrior, she is a woman whom Maitland likens to herself: two women, of different time, place, space, race, but two women of privilege, articulate, sophisticated, adept, self-controlled. Women, even, of power, by class, education, marriage, status. (p. 113) One of the questions the story asks, therefore, is whether that power is an illusion, or whether Sarah is guilty of abrogating what power she has. The story is, however, about woman's relationship not only to man, but to the God that man has created in his own image. It is about the power that man derives from that manmade God. Sarah is, when she first meets Abraham, seduced by his vision of the promised land, peopled by a community bound together in equality by religion and law, but finds herself betrayed when that vision reveals itself as a form of cruel power, and when love is revealed to be ownership. God's commands to Abraham seem to her ever more bizarre; even Hagar is horrified when he commands all the men, even her infant son, to be circumcised, believing she had left behind such barbarities in her heathen world. 'God' grows 'more and more like Abraham himself (p. 106), so that Sarah loses her faith, recognizing God as the manifestation of Abraham's will. When 'God' belatedly answers her prayer for a child, he is merely fulfilling his promise to Abraham, perpetuating the tradition of patrilinear descent through male children, one of the principles on which that patriarchy rests. Sarah's pregnancy is not a blessing from God, conferring honour on her and women in general, but a demonstration of His power, and the lengths to which He will go to respond to Abraham's needs. Since she is long past childbearing age, the gift of a son seems like a cruel joke. In calling her child Isaac - 'God has laughed' (p. 104) - Sarah also names God, identifying Him as a divinity that reinforces and reflects the power of men over women. She too laughs at her attempts to get her own way 'in a world where even God is a man and on the other side' (p. 116). The story confirms what

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The Book of Mrs Noah implies about mothering, that it is not simply a question of biology. Sarah feels Isaac is not her son, faecause she did not consent to him' (p. 110). He is reared not with her in the women's tents but in the 'courts of the men'. Her milk will not flow for him, since all her mothering is given to Hagar and Ishmael. Through her relationship with Hagar, however, Sarah challenges patriarchal power. Ironically, birth - the result of the most intimate aspect of the male-female relationship, but often a demonstration of male power over women - is in 'Triptych' the site of that challenge. In birth, women forge new bonds not only - and not always - with their child, but with the women who share the experience with them. Hagar remembers how every part of Sarah's body shared in that experience: Sarah's hands, strong and commanding, under her own armpits, Sarah's knees, steady and firm either side of her waist. Sarah's breasts soft and warm against her head and shoulders, Sarah's voice gentle and determined: breathe push relax push push breathe breathe down the baby, said Sarah's voice ... (p. 103) The sensuality of this description means that the birth reads like an extension of the sexual relationship between the two women, for Sarah is to Hagar 'mother, friend, lover, Sarah' (p. 104). That sexual relationship constitutes a challenge to the Law of the Father, which decrees that sex is only sanctioned for the purposes of patriarchy. But in its complexity it also threatens the social and ideological structures of patriarchal societies, whereby women are defined by their relationships with men, for Sarah sees Hagar as the daughter she 'won ... for herself (p. 114). The birth of Ishmael takes the challenge to its limits, threatening the principle of patrilinear succession, since Sarah and Hagar regard Ishmael as 'their son', rather than Abraham's. When Sarah still believed herself to be barren and past childbearing, she sent Hagar to Abraham to satisfy his obsessive desire for a son. She sees herself as Ishmael's mother too because she 'called him into being, not by lust but by intelligence' (p. 115). The friendship between the two women therefore becomes the focus of the fear of every man in the patriarch's encampment, and the focus of hope for every woman. Tragically, however, the birth of Ishmael also represents the beginning of a process of betrayal of the female bonds being forged here, since it results from the exercise of power, both Abraham's over Sarah and Sarah's over Hagar. In yielding to Abraham's desire for a son,

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Women and the Word

Sarah becomes complicit with patriarchal power, forcing Hagar to be his mistress by reminding her for the first time in their relationship of the 'seal of ownership' (p. 106) - that she is mistress and Hagar is the slave. By thus naming Hagar, she acts like a male proprietor, forcing her into the role of slave. Hagar had been equally complicit 'because she had, named and hurt, accepted the naming, she had acted like a slave' (p. 107). Later, when Abraham orders Ishmael's circumcision, she is again disturbed by Sarah's acquiescence: why had Sarah kept silent in the tent, smothering Hagar with kisses rather than challenging the madness that grew in Abraham, rather than telling him that there was no God that would seek to damage the children of the promise? (p. 105) Offering Hagar the comfort of her body instead, Sarah is silenced by her fear that the women will be the next helpless victims. The final act of betrayal represents the most obvious change that Maitland makes to the biblical original. In Genesis, Sarah is said first to have asked Abraham to choose between herself and Hagar because her maidservant, in her pregnancy, has started to show that she despises her mistress; in the second version of the story, Sarah again asks Abraham to send Hagar and her son away, this time because she feels Ishmael is a threat to Isaac's position. The fact of Hagar's dismissal is thus put down to female rivalry. Maitland provides a different explanation, imagining the importance and power of female friendship in a culture where women are a form of property, with potential for exchange, and regarded as mere vessels for the all-important male 'seed', and where God speaks only to men. That women should, in such a culture, turn to each other for love, in every meaning of the word, breaches no laws of psychological probability. In Maitland's version, Abraham commands Sarah to send Hagar and her child away, lest Ishmael be seen as a rival to Isaac, threatening the legitimate succession. But Abraham's command provides the moment that highlights Sarah's complicity. In obeying this command, Sarah 'consents to her own degradation' (p. 115), punishing herself as well as Hagar, whom she has loved most. She returns to Abraham's tent and the 'courts of the masters' (p. 108). While the relationship between Sarah and Hagar appears, therefore, to challenge the patriarch's power, Sarah ultimately remains complicit with the symbolic order, the Law of the Father, from which she derives

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her power as daughter of a king and wife of the patriarch. The first hint that this may happen is given when she offers Hagar the consolation of her body, instead of verbally challenging the terms of Abraham's (verbal) covenant with God. To try to remain outside patriarchal structures, refusing to engage directly with its symbolic and real power through language, can only ever be a temporary answer. In the case of Sarah and Hagar, the silent language of the body which unites them gives way to the verbal betrayal which separates them when Sarah says 'yes' to Abraham's banishment of Hagar. While female friendship is potentially the source of 'magic', transforming relations of ownership into relations of love, and constructing new patterns of relationship as alternatives to those legitimized by patriarchy, it remains vulnerable to male power, as it does in Sisters and Strangers. That power is evident in the bruises Hagar sees on Sarah's body at the moment of her betrayal. The true nature of Abraham's visionary new order is revealed: there is to be no more talk of 'equality', as there was in his visionary days; the hierarchy reasserts itself. There remains, nevertheless, a hint of female complicity, as Sarah acknowledges that his power is 'the power they had all given him, freely and in love' (p. 109). Hagar's presence, with her son, is, however, more than just a threat to the succession, for her relationship with Sarah embodies values that have no place in Abraham's religion or vision of society. As the narrator of another of Maitland's fictions says, Hagar is driven out 'because she loved the mother'. 18 Similarly, Sarah's love for a slave of a different race transgresses the hierarchical structures on which Abraham's power depends. Those alternative values are ultimately embodied in Hagar's God, who saves her and her son from death in the desert. As Maitland notes, even the biblical original acknowledges the extraordinary fact that Hagar 'sees God and lives' (p. 119), but in her text this is not the God of the Israelites but a God who represents the thrice marginalized elements in Hagar. This is a black God, a female God who wraps her like a mother does, a God of the oppressed slave who hears 'the voice of [her] silence' and gives it voice, making Hagar the 'mother of many nations', just as Abraham is made the patriarch by Yahweh (p. 111). This God gives Hagar the laughter that was once such a delight in Sarah, and makes herself known in the saving of life, in water - as Mrs Noah's God does - rather than in the spilling of blood. Hagar does not require miracles to prove her God's power: she does not bother to ask God to part the waters of the Red Sea for them. She is content to be taken home, out of slavery, and outside the world of the patriarch. The 'magic' that was Sarah's - the power of her

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laughter and her love to make her slave feel free - has apparently passed to Hagar herself, since it cannot survive within that world. There remains, nevertheless, the 'magic' of the word, the power of the story-telling itself. For the narrating of events from a female point of view finally silences the male voice. Sarah's and Hagar's versions of the story are not, in fact, followed by Abraham's, since the narrator refuses to enter into his point of view. Her reasoning reminds us of the continuing power of patriarchy - the narrator does not need to tell Abraham's story, since it is already available in Genesis, well-known and widely circulated. Here the narrator, like Grandma Drummer, foregrounds her own purpose - the 'homophobia and misogyny' of patriarchal texts must be answered; the sleight of hand by which Abraham, 'a real bastard', has been presented as the 'wellspring of God's will towards justice, of decency, of normality' must be exposed. Along with so much other 'moral turpitude' , his vices have been 'renamed "virtue". This is called patriarchy' (p. 118). While the emotional reality and 'vitality' of Sarah and Hagar have succeeded in speaking through 'the long silences' (p. 119) in the patriarchal text, it is the author's function now to give them voices. Maitland in effect answers 'No' to those who have advised women to write from the 'neutral' or 'universal' perspective of myth, extending as much sympathy to their male characters as to the female. Her identification with the victims prevents her from identifying with the oppressor, who is no longer to be allowed the last word.

All these novelists, therefore, suggest the damaging effects that Old Testament myths have had on women's perceptions of their own sex, but offer different means of combating them. Tennant suggests that knowledge is the only protection against the insidious workings of patriarchal ideology, but offers a concept of knowledge as 'magic' which seems doomed to exist only on the margins of society. Roberts provides the fullest and most positive exploration of what a religion based on God the Mother might mean. She suggests moving towards an ethical system derived from the womb rather than the abstract symbolism of the Law of the Father, but nevertheless rejects any separatist option in favour of a system of belief in which female and male could be reconciled. In Maitland's work the concept of female magic is developed on two levels - literally in the form of Hagar's Black Mother Goddess in whom Hagar's own marginalised aspects of race,

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sex and class are transformed into a source of faith, hope and life, and metaphorically in her presentation of the act of storytelling as the weapon of the powerless against the powerful. All seem agreed that if the 'Word' does dominate our culture, then women themselves must use words to subvert its power and authority, giving voice to the many other words it has suppressed. Each of these texts suggests implicitly that female 'magic' can only begin to operate by engaging with the male symbolic order, not by simply regressing into separate worlds of 'female difference'.

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3

(

The Christian view of women is for many feminists best represented by the apparent misogyny of St Paul referred to in Chapter 1. His pronouncements have been used as the basis for the continued suspicion and denigration of women by the Church fathers, and to remind women that they remain 'daughters of Eve', unworthy of an active role in the church. Yet the most influential female figure provided by the New Testament would seem to present a very positive image of womanhood. The Virgin Mary is, after all, an object of veneration for Christians, and particularly Catholics. Is it possible to reconcile these apparently conflicting views of women? Or could it be that the image of the Virgin Mother has itself been used to underline women's sense of inferiority, and to deny them any power within the church or public life? In the first place, as has already been suggested, the ideal Mary embodies is even more impossible for women to achieve than that which Christ represents for men. While men may at least emulate his celibacy and his vocation in the priesthood, the virgin who is also a mother achieves her sainthood through a miracle enacted upon her by God, rather than through her own dedication and endurance. The figure of the Virgin Mother embodies all the contradictions inherent in the Christian ideal of woman which underpins patriarchal ideology. Mary is the 'new Eve', as Christ is the new Adam. She redeems womanhood by taking on the role of mother, which is the only means by which women can redeem their original sin: as St Paul writes, the woman who has transgressed 'shall be saved in childbearing' (I Timothy 2. 15). But Mary is also guilt-free because free of the taint of sexuality: she knows 'not a man' (Luke 1. 34). This construction of motherhood devoid of sexuality is, Kristeva suggests, a specifically 62 10.1057/9780230597358 - Women and the Word, Jeannette King

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Stabat Matef: Christianity and the Virgin Mother

'masculine appropriation of the Maternal, which ... is only a fantasy masking primary narcissism'.1 A mother without sexuality is a mother who can fulfil all the child's needs without those ever being challenged by the sexual demands of the father. The doctrine of the Ever-Virgin Mary, moreover, which denies the Virgin any sexuality even after the birth of Christ, can be said to strip her of her essential humanity. 2 Yet here, too, there is great ambiguity, since Mary's role is to provide the physical, human link with the divine, to enable the 'Word' to be 'made flesh'. This emphasis on the maternal role therefore defines women through their bodies, and requires them to find fulfilment through their bodies, while at the same time vilifying the sexuality of the body in a way which can only lead to a sense of confusion and guilt. But is this loss of humanity not compensated for by her relationship with the divine? This is extremely problematic, since she is on the one hand a route to salvation and the Holy Ghost, but on the other an essentially passive vessel - a medium for the divine, not an agent of the divine. Where Yeats, in Leda and the Swan, speculates whether Leda, at the moment of conception of the children of Zeus, might have 'put on his knowledge with his power', Mary does not share Eve's criminal desire for knowledge. If we compare her role with that of the Mother Goddess, whom it has been suggested the Virgin Mary was an attempt to displace, the loss of power is striking. In the Christian myth, the power of creation remains with the implicitly male Holy Spirit who impregnates her. Mary's perfection rests in her total and passive obedience to God's will, rather than in any active pursuit of his kingdom on earth. Mary thus constitutes a prototype of that love which is self-sacrificial - agape rather than eros. It involves submitting not merely her own body and will to God's purpose, but her son. This self-effacing love requires her to abnegate her relationship with her divine son, acknowledging the prior claims of the divine Father. When Jesus visits the temple in Jerusalem with his parents at the age of twelve, and stays behind without them, Mary asks, 'Son, why hast thou thus dealt with us? behold, thy father and I have sought thee sorrowing.' His reply, 'How is it that ye sought me? wist ye not that I must be about my father's business?' (Luke 2. 49), informs her, in Kristeva's words, that 'filial relationship rests not with the flesh but with the name or, in other words, that any possible matrilinearism is to be repudiated'. 3 Such a role model implies that the only means for women to achieve recognition and a valued role in the Church is through accepting a

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Women and the Word

role which defines them through their relationship with others, rather than in and through themselves. Finally in an essentially logocentric tradition it is highly significant that it is with her body that Mary serves, not with her words, reinforcing the ideal of silent self-denial. The Virgin has provided the church with primarily visual images - the milk with which she nourishes her son and the tears with which she suffers with him. Apart from the Magnificat glorifying God, the only words of the Virgin which have been recorded are those mentioned above, and effectively rejected by Christ. While Christ himself is represented as making the ultimate sacrifice, it is his life as much as his death which is offered as a model for his disciples and other men after him, a life in which his words are to be remembered, recorded and heeded. In contrast, those women who choose to follow the maternal ideal represented by Mary seem doomed to marginality and silence. But does this hold equally true for those women who follow the alternative path represented by Mary - the path of lifelong virginity? Those women who choose the convent life become 'Brides of Christ', rejecting all other loyalties and their own sexuality. For them motherhood can only ever be achieved symbolically by those who achieve a role of authority within this world and become 'Mother Superior'. This rejection of the traditional female roles which define women in relation to men, primarily as wives and mothers, can be seen as a feminist option, in so far as it has historically given women a degree of independence and autonomy, and even provided women with a space in which to write and think. 4 However, the vows of silence so often taken by both men and women in monastic life highlight the problems that lie in the way of regarding the religious life as a means of female self-determination and self-expression. Both Sara Maitland and Michele Roberts use their fiction to explore the contradictions inherent in the ideology surrounding the Virgin Mother. Roberts's Daughters of the House and Maitland's Virgin Territory focus on the nun's vocation, asking whether women who sacrifice the role of motherhood, with its sense of participation in creativity and power, for a role ostensibly regarded with the utmost veneration, gain an alternative form of power. In submitting their lives and wills to a patriarchal religious tradition, do they paradoxically gain a voice? These novels, together with Maitland's Daughter of Jerusalem, also examine and test the ideal of motherhood represented by the Virgin. Is the idealization of motherhood by the Church real, they ask, or an attempt to contain women's power and creativity within safely circumscribed

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'Stabat Mater': Christianity and the Virgin Mother 65

limits? Are women awarded this privileged role only at the price of their silence, their acceptance of male authority and power? of the House5

To represent the two dimensions of the Virgin Mother, impossible to reconcile in normal female form, Roberts uses the familiar device of twin children. 6 She acknowledges the autobiography of Ste Therese of the Child Jesus as a source of inspiration for the novel, using not only Therese but one of her sisters, Leonie, as a reference point for the characters of the twins. However, where the historical Leonie Martin is described as 'an emotionally disturbed child who suffered and caused anguish in her family' for many years before following her sister's 'Little Way',7 Roberts uses Leonie's resistance to church and family as an example not of deviation from, but of an alternative to that 'way'. Each of the two main characters of Daughters of the House has chosen a different path, seeming to exemplify the choices which Kristeva sees as available to female children, determining their psycho-sexual development: the choice of either identifying with the male symbolic order, embodied in patriarchal social structures, or of continuing to identify with the mother and accept a role that is always marginal to the symbolic order. Therese and Leonie appear to embody these options, but the precise implications of their choices only become fully apparent at the end of the novel. The beginning of the novel emphasizes what divides them: each appears to be the child of a different mother and father, a difference emphasized by nationality as Leonie apparently has an English father, where both Therese's parents are French. Each woman, moreover, offers the reader a different version of the events which lie at the heart of the novel, interpreting them in terms which explain and validate her choice of vocation, confirming that all experience is mediated, shaped and given meaning through discursive practices. Therese's choice is the role of the virgin, embodied in the religious life of the nun. Her choice appears to Leonie to have been inspired by a desire to reject the life of the flesh: 'Deny the body's needs and advance in holiness' (p. 12). The childhood game of Christians and martyrs enjoyed by both Therese and Leonie has evident sexual connotations: Leonie wants to stay with the body, to be the lion, and the fight and the soft belly too; in contrast Therese describes these moments of sexual pleasure as 'dying. The moment in the game when the martyr's soul began its slow slip away to heaven' (p. 65). The

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Michele Roberts - Daughters

Women and the Word

association of sexuality and death, recalling the French phrase 7a petite mort', here denotes the death of the body itself, signified in the slippage from the physical and sensual to the spiritual, a pattern familiar in the saint's ecstasy. The discourse of female sanctity effaces the physical and displaces female desire onto a desire for spiritual union with God. For to be female in a patriarchal world is, the novel shows, to be constructed as inherently shameful. Leonie and Therese share the shame of their first menstrual cycle, symbolized by the red stain on Leonie's clothes. It is one of the many shameful secrets to which all women are apparently party: Therese and Leonie are 'proper jeunes filles. Which meant having secrets' (p. 124). The 'secret knowledge' (p. 105) to which Leonie hopes to gain access when she allows Baptiste to make love to her is the knowledge of sex, the guilty knowledge that Eve brought to Adam. In contrast, in the convent Therese undergoes a different kind of union, in which, according to Leonie, she 'died to the world. A white death ... The sky was a canopy of white held over a bride' (p. 157). By withdrawing from the world, Therese can rid herself of all bodily needs and earthly passion. Returning to her childhood home, she feels a secret pride in her adult slimness, since 'her body obeyed her now' (p. 15), rather than listening to the temptations offered by the traditional French farmhouse cooking of her childhood. The notes for an autobiography which Leonie finds in Therese's notebook record a story couched in the discourse of spirituality - words like 'soul, God, sin, miracle, prayer' (p. 19) - and clearly inspired by Ste Therese of the Child Jesus, The Little Flower, and her L'histoire d'une dme. Therese's rejection of the flesh also means rejecting her own mother, who is consistently represented as her daughter's opposite, in terms indicating sensuality and passion. Whereas Therese has always liked white, 'spotless, pure, immaculate' (p. 55), Antoinette's primary colour is red: she has red hair, wears red clothes and 'a mad red grin'. The red shoe found in the cellar, hinting at a hidden secret, brings forth 'patches of red' on her face, the outward sign of her shame. Antoinette appears to be the archetypal scarlet woman, rumoured to have used her body to preserve the village's wine from the German occupation forces. The potential danger which her sexuality represents to the established order is shown in Leonie's dream of the bomb inside Antoinette's red suitcase, creating 'red shreds of flesh' (p. 52). If red stands for sexuality and passion, it also stands for blood and violence, reminding the reader of the brutal reality of the Nazi occupation

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which occasions the most important secret concealed in the text. Therese's rejection of sexuality is reinforced by fear of suffering: as her mother lies dying of cancer, Therese is obsessed by the need for mortification of the flesh to shorten her mother's time in purgatory, since 'unchastity is a mortal sin' (p. 148). Therese's denial of her body becomes publicly evident when she refuses food after Antoinette's death. This asceticism is her first act of identification with the Virgin, confirmed by the privilege of being granted a vision of the Virgin, which she claims cures her of her illness. But this is not an act of identification with the maternal. In desiring to become a nun, Therese can be said to identify with the male symbolic order, conforming to one of the its most valued images of womanhood, and deriving her power and identity from her status in that order. Therese's vision, moreover, is only validated by the church once she and it have been made to conform to the church's belief systems. Any claim that a female voice may make to speak independently can easily be contained by the power to name invested in patriarchy. In this struggle for power, the cure sees himself as 'more than a match for some small female saint with no name' (p. 42). Therese appears happy to conform, to derive her sense of identity and value from this male power system. When she sees one of the village women in a clearing in the woods, dressing a makeshift altar with pagan offerings of barley and oats, she observes that 'she shouldn't be doing that' (p. 101), brings out her rosary and goes into an ecstasy singing the Ave Maria, which brings the villagers back temporarily at least to Christian forms of worship. When she visits the cure to discuss her vision, he speaks 'with a pulpit authority laced with a show of charm' (p. I l l ) , which fails to conceal his contempt for her. He adopts a time-honoured tactic to discredit her and make her withdraw her claims, accusing her of 'hysteria' and the 'heated imagination' typical of 'young girls of a certain age'. But Therese has, in any case, internalized church teaching enough to know that the cure has 'God-given power' to tell her what to do, that 'the priest represented Christ and must be right' (p. 113). This teaching includes a sense of her own inadequacies as a female, denied direct access to God, denied the right to serve God in the church: scorned by the altar-boys, who are ironically 'wrapped in lace and linen' - vestments which remind us that in pagan religions the priest's role was originally carried out by a woman - she is, like all women, 'forbidden to enter the sanctuary'. Therese is finally interpellated publicly into the sexual shame of women by a sermon in which

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the cure draws on the 'Authority of our Holy Mother the Church' to warn of the dangers of 'adolescent frailty' and 'undesirable elements of individualism and mysticism', invoking the thoughts of St Paul and St Augustine on women for final justification (p. 115). Although Therese's initial response is that red-hot passionate anger which aligns her with her mother, the impulse to conform ensures that she exercises all her will to suppress it: If she pressed very hard then her mouth would not open to scream. Torrents of lava would not tumble out to force fire down his throat, torch his tongue. She was red and liquid and dangerous. She would damage that priestly flesh, oh yes, scorch it, she would tear his head very slowly from his neck and laugh as the blood gushed. She would shut him up ... stop up his mouth for ever with red hot mud. (p. 115) Her subsequent silence is the response which many heretics and subversives have been forced to adopt in the face of such overwhelming opposition. She withdraws into that world of 'white peace' in which she can feel wrapped in the 'folds of [God's] silence'. The description of this withdrawal includes an element of eroticism, in which God becomes the lover on whom she lies and lets go of 'her hot grief in an orgasmic dissolution, and yet also 'purges' her of her sexual guilt. Therese here seems to conform to what Kristeva defines as one of the 'two great Christian feminine archetypes', the melancholic and the ecstatic: 'in the case of the ecstatic, the mother is denied and her attributes are displaced onto the symbolic father.' She goes on to quote St Teresa of Avila: 'in this holy madness, it [the soul] can utter these words: The milk that flows from your breasts, O my divine husband, is sweeter than wine' (About Chinese Women, p. 27). Through this death of the flesh Therese becomes 'a voice singing in the desert' as Christ himself and so many saints and prophets have done. But hers is a voice which, unlike that of her male counterparts, will not be heard unless it is singing an authorized song. In choosing convent life, Therese chooses 'silence, obscurity, poverty. She no longer spoke to anyone except God' (p. 115). She later reflects, 'She'd made herself empty ... open to the silence' (p. 158), an empty space to be written on by others. Therese appears to find acceptance for her 'song' with her second visionary moment. Her first thoughts on coming round after fainting hover ambivalently around the pagan and the Christian: 'Wind over

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the wheat... over the leaves on the vine. The bread and the wine. The harvest's gifts. Those were the words she had to remember.' Again, however, the meaning of this individual, private vision is taken from her, and her later admission that she misled people about her visions implies that this is done with her complicity. The Bishop's reference to 'that smile that she mirrored' suggests a conscious evocation on Therese's part of a particular role. 'The blue and silver glow of the vision' (p. 139) matches perfectly the little statue of the virgin in her room, to which she has always turned for comfort. Therese recognizes the Bishop's power, and uses it to get a chapel built for Our Lady of Blemont-la-Fontaine. She takes on some of that patriarchal power in naming the saint herself, and asking for her feast-day to be the day of the harvest festival in what may be an attempt to keep faith with the older pagan tradition. Even for a would-be nun, the price to be paid for her validation by the church hierarchy is paradoxically conformity to the traditional female role. Leonie sees her as 'a holy tarf (p. 148), manipulating the clerics in a parody of seduction: Therese, lowering her lashes like a lacy brown veil and trying not to smile too obviously, did not look modest. It was the same look she'd directed at the men all through lunch and they'd loved it. Leonie thought men were stupid to be so easily taken in ... above all, don't say a word, and they were yours. (p. 147) The world of the convent, which appears to offer independence from men, nevertheless requires silent subservience to the Law of the Father. In Leonie, all Therese's choices are reversed, her tastes being represented in specific opposition to Therese's: 'Everything she hated was white' (p. 55), including the salon, 'as coldly white as death' (p. 53). Therese's chosen life, requiring the death of the body, is to her a living death. Leonie appears to have conformed to the conventional role of the wife and mother, whose life is defined by her biology and finds its expression in the family home. Her house, like a body, 'has skin' (p. 2) and 'scars' (p. 44). Instead of Therese's hymns of praise, 'Leonie's inventory sang a litany of beds and tables and chairs' (p. 19), and the novel's chapter headings - each one an item on this inventory - indicate the extent to which she shapes the narrative of her life through this discourse of domesticity. Leonie's adoption of the mother's role is, however, no more a form of true identification with the female than is Therese's, but simply the

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'Stabat Mater': Christianity and the Virgin Mother 69

adoption of another of the roles validated by patriarchy. Leonie has become the castrated mother, the mother who has accepted the limited role constructed for her in the symbolic order. It becomes clear that for Leonie the house is a substitute for the true claims and joys of the body, a socially validated focus onto which to displace her deeper repressed desires. That household litany, that spell, which enables her to 'reassert control over her world ... her kingdom ... peopled with daughters who looked like their mother and loved her comfortably and did as they were told' (p. 168), is ultimately no defence against her awareness of what she has lost. For the house has 'forbidden places' (p. 1), specifically the cellar where a secret is buried. There the child Leonie loses her sense of identity, as she comes close to the secret of her real mother. There she is in danger of becoming the melancholic, who cannot separate from the mother and can never therefore forge an independent subjectivity. What the adult Leonie has lost is the maternal body and all it represents - a love which cannot be encompassed by the term 'comfortable'. This is a state she experiences most fully in her relationship with her wet nurse, Rose, which suggests the undifferentiated, pre-Oedipal unity between mother and infant which Kristeva designates as plenitude or bliss: She was inside what happened, and also outside. Her edges were of warm flesh, arms that held, contained. The world bent forwards, over her and into her, and she seized the world and leapt into it. Sweetness was her and it, her two hands grasping, her mouth demanding and receiving the lively flow. She was in a good place. Where the arms that held her would not let her drop, where her name was called over and over, where she was wanted, where she could stay and enjoy. The name of Leonie was the name of bliss. (p. 168)8 In the pre-Oedipal stage Leonie can feel truly named, because she has not yet entered the symbolic order which can only mis-name the subject in the process of differentiation which defines the subject in terms of lack. But Rose has gone, leaving behind emptiness, a void, and what becomes a double sense of betrayal when Leonie learns that Antoinette was her real mother: 'She'd been cast out, first by one woman and then by another' (p. 152). Leonie's early identification with the maternal body is underlined by the sense of a common, though unspoken, language. As a child, ostensibly of French and English parentage, Leonie experiences a 'sea

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change' in the Channel ferry that returns her from her English heritage to the French, and unbeknown to her, from her adoptive mother to her real mother and to her mother tongue: 'true language was restored to her ... as whole as water ... streams of words ... which promised bliss' (pp. 35-6). The terminology used here is suggestive of Kristeva's semiotic disposition in language, evoking the ties of the infant with the mother and the liquid rhythms of the womb with which it is also associated. Because pre-verbal, memories of the semiotic state cannot find expression in the symbolic order of language, so that Leonie has repeated difficulties in articulating those experiences which threaten to bring those memories to the surface. Love for the red/gold virgin manifest in her vision makes her 'speechless' (p. 100), so that to speak of her feels like betrayal. When Therese asks if the vision spoke to her, she replies, 'It wasn't about talking. Not that sort anyway' (p. 96). When people attempt to assimilate it to the Catholic tradition, assuming it is 'Madame la sainte Vierge' (p. 87), Leonie resists, saying she does not know her name. It speaks to her in that 'secret language, the underground stream' (p. 86) which belongs more to the semiotic than the symbolic. The vision restores to her something she thought she had lost and would never find again - the deepest pleasure ever known to her - the experience of plenitude associated with Rose. This language links Leonie, moreover, with a matrilinear tradition which the church desires to suppress, since it is both pagan and female. Her vision of what Roberts calls a 'black sexy Madonna' 9 refers to a tradition on which Christianity has been superimposed, one which celebrates harvest and fertility, still evident in the 'necklace of twisted corn' and 'bouquets of oats and barley' (p. 101) which village women bring to the clearing.10 Before the Second World War, this place was marked by a statue of a 'very ancient saint', built above a spring, 'a powerful place. Full of magic' (pp. 41-2). The village cure claims any apparitions are the work of the devil, which he must exorcise, destroying the 'pagan nonsense' (p. 110) represented by the remaining pile of stones, in his zeal to get religious observance back into the church where he can control it. Significantly it is in the realm of language that he initiates his assault on Leonie's credibility, describing her vision to the visiting Bishop as 'a mix-up of languages. A problem of translation' (p. 146), caused by Leonie's dual nationality. Since Leonie appears to be seeking her identity through the maternal and the semiotic, she must be marginalized and silenced by those who embody the authority of the patriarchal order.

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'Stabat Mater': Christianity and the Virgin Mother 71

In spite of the contrasts drawn between the two women, however, the novel increasingly draws attention to what is common to the two women in terms of their childhood experience and their family relationships, until it emerges they are twin daughters of the same parents - Antoinette and a father whose identity remains unresolved. This sense of the same starting point for these 'subjects in process' is represented very vividly in the penultimate chapter, in the picture of the twins feeding simultaneously from Rose's breasts. Therese's memories of Rose's body are as strong as Leonie's - memories of 'bliss ... milky fullness'. Therese feels 'born a second time, into a land of plenty ... Rose was the world' (p. 33). This second birth is a birth into female identification, rather than into the world of the father. As an alternative to baptism in the church, in the name of the father, Rose takes both babies to the shrine in the clearing, and dips their feet into the spring with its pagan magical powers, to ensure life. Like Leonie, Therese experiences an irreparable sense of abandonment when she is taken from Rose and is left with 'emptiness' (p. 169). Hers, too, is a double loss, since she experiences the death of her biological mother as a second abandonment. But whereas Leonie displaces her sense of loss, her desire, onto the socially validated ideal of motherhood, attempting to replace her mother by her own body, Therese displaces the same desire onto the ideal of the virgin, instituted in the life of the convent, attempting to replace her mother with the Mother Church and the Virgin Mother: She'd found herself another mother, she'd been sold one readymade by the priests of her Church. Perfect, that Mother of God, the pure Virgin, a holy doll who never felt angry or sexy and never went away. (p. 165) Roberts is here clearly aware of the pattern set by Sainte Therese, whose mother died when Therese was five, and who is said to have then consecrated herself to the Virgin Mary by taking her as her own mother. 11 The Virgin represents a more complete love than that offered by the human mother, whose love has always to be shared with the father. In being free from sexuality, she offers a love that is perfect - untainted, undivided and ever-present. And her purity requires no reparation from those who follow her. Therese returns home, however, to remember the past and end the silence she has imposed on herself. Away from the convent, the image

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of that perfect but unreal mother melts 'in the heat of her hands', no longer a consolation for the loss of the real mother. She destroys the statue of the Virgin which she, in effect, named into being, in a fire which represents her repressed anger, significantly using Leonie's lighter to do so. Through this act her need for the maternal body surfaces in a vision of the 'red and gold lady' who holds out 'her hands to her daughter ... to teach her the steps of the dance', the dance which she refused as an adolescent. The last the reader hears of Therese is, 'She cried Maman, and flung herself at the church door' (p. 166). Is Therese thus reunited with her mother in death, in a symbolic conflagration which destroys the church and all it represents? Or is she forever unable to reach her mother, confined as she is within those structures? Before attempting to answer this question, it is important to remember that Therese returns to resurrect not only her own past but the past of the village; she aims to unearth the truth of what happened to a Jewish family and their protector, locked up in the Martin family home by the Germans during the occupation, and whose mass grave is found in the clearing when the priest orders the destruction of the pagan shrine. Remembering her mother's final instructions, Therese goes down to the cellar, and finds the broken statue of the ancient saint, 'clasping a broken sheaf of corn', which her mother had buried there, after the cure had ordered its destruction. The significance of the act is clear to Therese: 'Just once in her life [Antoinette had] defied the priest, the Church, acted in a way that allied her to the villagers', and the older, female tradition. In Therese's description, the statue merges both with Leonie's red gold vision and the massacred Jews: 'Shut up like a cry in a box ... Yellow stars. A young woman with a dark gold face. The communal grave' (p. 162). All represent a past out of which Catholicism grew, but which it now attempts to deny. There is also a logic for linking the Jews with the female tradition as victims of Fascism, since the Nazis blamed the Jews for feminism, as for so much else. Gottfried Feder, one of the party's ideologues, wrote: The Jew has stolen woman from us through the forms of sex democracy. We, the youth, must march out to kill the dragon so that we may again attain the most holy thing in the world, the woman as maid and servant. 12 It becomes clear, moreover, that Leonie has in some way also repressed this history and silenced herself. When she approaches the

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'Stabat Mater': Christianity and the Virgin Mother 73

room in which the family and their protector were kept captive, she knows 'the words she was frightened to say were fastened up inside this room', 'death words' released by the opening of the grave. She has refused to listen to the voices of the dead she had heard as a child: the Jews had 'chanted prayers in a language she could not understand' (p. 170), as well as their names and the name of their informer. Knowing, at some level, the cure was the informer, why should she be complicit with the church to which she has been so hostile? It could be a sense of guilt which makes her repress such knowledge. Rose is only available to the twins as wet-nurse because of her baby's death, caused by the death of Rose's husband, who protected the Jews; there is also the rumour that Antoinette gave herself to a German soldier, who could thus be the father of Leonie and Therese. Above all, perhaps, Leonie refuses Therese's version of the past, which includes the story of her mother raped by a German, because she refuses to identify with that suffering, to be 'trapped in the darkness. She wasn't a Jew' (p. 152). Again Leonie defines herself here in implicit opposition to Therese who 'stood for the father, for God, for suffering. For everything Leonie wanted to forget' (p. 171), including the element of martyrdom, guilt and mortification which Kristeva sees as the inevitable consequence for the woman who fails to conform to the symbolic order by repressing her identification with the mother, and her sexuality.13 The implication here is that Therese represents something that Leonie has repressed. Leonie's youthful references to her internalized censor or super-ego as the 'nun in her head' (p. 104) suggests Therese represents her ego-ideal, that embodiment of chastity to which society requires her to aspire. She also represents something more positive, which can perhaps best be defined in the terms Roberts uses to describe her own youthful desire to become a nun: 'it also represented a way of hanging onto some sort of a spiritual life, some autonomy, power and respect' ('The Woman Who Wanted to be a Hero', p. 55). The corollary of this is that Leonie sees herself as the repressed side of Therese. When she allows the young man Baptiste to make love to her, she excuses herself for this 'guilty pleasure' (p. 104) on the grounds that she is a mere substitute for Therese, the woman he is really making love to, who she knows would refuse him. But it would be an over-simplification to see Therese as the conforming self and Leonie as the repressed rebellious self, since, when Therese returns to the family home after a twenty-year absence, Leonie's feelings are so intense that she feels Therese is inside her, and attempts to vomit her

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forth. Therese is to Leonie like a lover whom she wants to kill - she is what is most desired but also most hated because forbidden. This ambivalence can be explained by the childhood eroticism between the two sisters, breaking the taboo on incest, but also alerts us to the process of repression undergone by each of them. The twins can, in fact, be seen as two halves of a single whole, each incomplete without the other. Roberts may, indeed, have originally intended to write about one woman, since her notes refer to 'the daughter writing her spiritual autobiography', and comment, 'Perhaps the child ... will speak in tongues' (Notebooks, p. 70). These thoughts appear to have been transmuted into the story of two children speaking with different voices, but representing two halves of a single identity, an idea reinforced by the image of the mirror which asks Leonie, 'Which of us is which? ... If she smashed her fist into Therese's face, would she hear the crack and splinter of glass?' (p. 4). The apparently irreconcilable conflict between the two sisters - two halves of a single whole - underlines the impossibility of wholeness for women in a culture constructed around the ideology of the impossible ideal of the Virgin Mother. In spite of her attempt to define herself in opposition to patriarchal religion, Leonie has, therefore, evidently been complicit with it, silencing her knowledge about the cure, and allowing her need for the maternal body to be silenced by identifying with the acceptable version of the feminine embodied in the patriarchal image of motherhood. At the end of the novel Leonie knows that she is going to have to confess to her silence about the identity of the informer, and that she will need Therese's side of the story to lend completeness. While allowing what has been repressed by the symbolic order to surface, she has also to find some way of engaging with the symbolic order, if she is not to remain forever silent, caught in the double bind which Kristeva sees as the product of the structuring of sexual difference in the West. Leonie finally has a moment of sixth sense which enables her to see Therese and all the others she has denied inside the room she fears to enter. Therese's presence with those known to be dead seems to confirm her death in the fire and to suggest she has been released from her identification with the symbolic order through this association with those who have been repressed and silenced. At last Leonie is prepared to listen to these voices and the different languages they use: 'She stepped forward, into the darkness, to find words' (p. 172). What is clearly required is some way of putting into words both those bodily experiences which are normally repressed, and the

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'Stabat Mater': Christianity and the Virgin Mother 75

experiences of the spirit. The author's notes on the novel suggest such a thing is possible when she describes her own youthful longing for visions, and how she later experienced 'bliss' when she wrote poetry, relating this act of creativity to a feeling rooted in the body (Notebooks, p. 71). This means rejecting the ideal of womanhood which the church offers when it demands a split between body and spirit: in this ideology women are either to be totally defined by their bodily function as mothers, or to repress the body and live a life of spirituality. Therese's vocation makes her feel 'not a real woman like the others' (p. 10), while the statue of the virgin built on her instigation is 'flat as a boy ... the perfect mother who'd never had sex. To whom all earthly mothers had to aspire' (p. 164). The paradox embodied in the Virgin shows not a real veneration for women, as the tradition of mariolatry might imply, but a fear and distrust of the power vested in their bodies. The uncertainty surrounding the twins' paternity, which remains such a crucial question in the novel, foregrounds the symbolic dimension of the father-child relationship. The patriarchal concepts of illegitimacy and shame which surround the identity of their mother are tools used to erode the power of the mother which might otherwise threaten patriarchy. Sara Maitland - Daughter

of

Jerusalem14

Whereas the image of the Virgin in Daughters of the House is seen to exert a negative influence on the construction of gender, Sara Maitland's first novel, Daughter of Jerusalem, suggests that Christianity and the images of women presented in the Bible are not the cause of patriarchal oppression of women, but merely its tools. In this novel the Bible figures as a text misinterpreted and misused by patriarchy, but is here re-appropriated for feminist purposes. Like Daughters of the House, Daughter of Jerusalem shows how a woman acquires her sense of gender and identity not only through immediate family relationships, but through identification with a culture or system of belief, here embodied in the name 'Jerusalem'. 15 The novel is concerned with the attempts of the heroine, Elizabeth - a publishing editor - to conceive, and the problems she and her bisexual husband Ian consequently face, arising both from their own relationship and from the attitude of the medical profession. Chronologically, the narrative covers a nine-month span from April to December, at the end of which Liz finally has hopes she may be pregnant. At the end of each of the nine chapters, the narrative shifts

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76 Women and the Word

to a re-presentation of a biblical narrative centred on woman, from which Liz draws inspiration and strength. From her earliest years Liz appears to reject those images of women validated by patriarchy. Androgynous in appearance, refusing to be restricted to monogamous sexual relationships and domesticity, she is particularly resistant to the image of female passivity which her own mother both embodies and promulgates. She remembers how, as a child, illness was a way of getting her mother's attention: 'when she was weak and docile, she had corresponded to her mother's idea of a daughter' (p. 117).16 But this refusal to identify with her mother can also be, as my analysis of Daughters of the House has suggested, evidence of internalization of patriarchal values at the very deepest level, since Liz's desire to distance herself from her mother is also driven by that sense of shame derived from patriarchal readings of the Bible. Liz learns that the female body is shameful - even, more fundamentally, that the female is shameful because primarily a body. She remembers the shame of discovering her femaleness when her first menstrual flow took place in public, dramatically bringing into the public gaze that which is not to be acknowledged, an experience she shares with Roberts's young Mrs Noah. Even in her own home, she has to keep this reality, shared by every female, from her father, so that he 'should not know that the blood curse was on his house' (p. 41), that his adored daughter shares in the sin of Eve. This shame is, moreover, associated with female deceit, since this 'horror ... flowed out from that scarlet place that the girls had been trying to make into a temple of promised delights' (p. 203). The ambivalence registered here reflects patriarchal attitudes towards the womb, seen as both the 'Garden of Eden and the seat of madness' (p. 71), the place of wholeness from which all are expelled too soon, and the source of hysteria. Nor is any 'sisterhood' strong enough to overcome the sense of guilt: too ashamed to share her experiences with others, she feels isolated, 'disgusted and amazed by the difference between herself and other women she knew' when as an adolescent she discovers the pleasures of her own body (p. 203). The shame associated with femaleness makes Liz attempt instead to identify with her father. Her childhood memories of her father have religious associations, often linked to pilgrimage-like holidays on Saints or Feast days, so that Liz's desire for her father's approval blurs into a desire for validation by the male symbolic order represented by God the father, whom she believed 'was made in the image of her father' (p. 38). The interpellation of young women into a sense of

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78 Women and the Word

It is not from God the Father that we derive the idea of paternal authority; it is out of the struggle for paternal control of the family that God the Father is created. His word is law and the idea of his power becomes more important than any demonstration of it; it becomes internalized as 'conscience,' 'tradition,' 'the moral law within'. (p. 67) In refusing to identify with the kind of femininity she sees embodied in her mother, Liz still therefore finds herself - ironically - having to conform to achieve male approval. Although imagining herself as 'her father's substitute son' (p. 180), an unexpected memory of her doll's house and 'girlie' experiences with her father casts doubt on the validity of her imaginings. Far from being the son who represents sameness, it appears she has functioned as the passive, acquiescent female reflecting back on the male a sense of his own value. While he teaches her to be like him, and not to conform, he ultimately becomes the authority that she fights. The moment she develops desires and tastes of her own, unsanctioned by him, becomes the moment of betrayal and the moment that she loses her sense of being approved. After his death her need for validation is therefore displaced onto others: even as a feminist adult, she is aware of the need to please men, 'briefly creating herself as a child with the admiration of an older man' (p. 60) when she feels neglected. She is pathetically grateful that her bullying lover James is ready to accept her, 'reputation' and all, instead of getting angry with her father and 'with all the men who put a price on a little respect and affection' (p. 79). For the price of achieving status through identification with the male symbolic order is always conformity to its values. To retain her father's approval, moreover, Liz must remain forever his little girl, not allowed to grow into a woman, with all that implies. When Liz loses her virginity on the night of her father's death, at a time when they were in conflict, her sexuality becomes inextricably linked with the betrayal of her father and the loss of his love. Her numerous sexual relationships indicate a conscious refusal to conform to the ideal of the virginal woman, but her earliest feelings of shame over her body develop into shame and guilt over how she uses that

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shame and guilt therefore functions to sustain male control over the family, justified as a reflection of God's care for the family of man. As Adrienne Rich puts it,

body as she grows into the moral world of patriarchy - a world which defines female sexuality as evil and dangerous, and does all in its power to control it. Although her gynaecologist refers to her 'unashamed promiscuity' (p. 2, my italics), she has internalized this association of sexuality and guilt so deeply that she starts to fear that her failure to get pregnant is the ultimate sign of her guilt, written on her body. She fears she is being punished for using her body as she wishes, since her desire to control her body threatens male power. Like the New Testament Elisabeth, mother of John the Baptist, she feels the 'damnation' of her barren womb, and feels she is in 'a dangerous wild place', in the desert where barren women belong, where John himself went to repent the sins of his mother (p. 162). There is, therefore, a paradox here: while identifying with her father rather than her mother, Liz in a sense steps into her mother's place, becoming her rival for her father's affections in what is an implicitly sexual relationship. Her relationship with her mother is fraught with conflict and guilt over this betrayal, since Liz knows she has 'stolen the pure love of a man' (p. 159). Guilt is also created by her knowledge that her own difficult birth prevented her mother from having another child - the beloved son. The representation of this triangle emphasizes, moreover, how difficult it is for the female child to find a satisfactory identity within the symbolic order, for separating from the mother involves a sense of loss both of the mother and of that part of the self which still identifies with the mother. The distressed child in Liz feels the loss of the mother's comfort: T want to cry out in the night and have Mummy come and offer me a nice warm breast to suck' (p. 113). Because her mother represents for Liz only the castrated mother of the symbolic order, she is virtually reduced to a function, a function which - the novel implies - may be carried out by any appropriate figure onto whom a 'child' projects its needs: 'All mothers go away in the end. Her own mother. Her father. Ian. Nancy' (p. 114). She resents yet is unable to resist fulfilling that same function herself, particularly in relation to her husband. When her mother breaks her ankle, however, the resulting role reversal places Liz in the 'maternal' role in relation to her mother in a way that enables her for the first time to attain some sense of her mother as another person, not as a rival for her father's love nor as a nurturing function. She finds herself liking her mother, realizing for the first time how inadequate her father must have made his wife feel. Above all she realizes that it was not she who had betrayed her mother, but her father. This realization of the extent to which she has been interpellated into both rivalry and

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guilt initiates the process of growth that will eventually release her from that sense of guilt. But the pattern of female rivalry for male approval is too firmly established for mother and daughter to identify with each other enough to create that sense of solidarity which might free them from patriarchal ideology. Liz cannot overcome the sense of difference that prevents her from sharing with her mother her distress at her infertility: there can be 'no sisterhood for them' (p. 132). Sisterhood is what she hopes to find instead in feminism. Her feminist friends endorse her rejection of the 'femininity of passivity' (p. 11), and their belief in women's right to choose their own lifestyle, not necessarily in relation to men, answers to her need for self-definition. Believing in 'a woman's right to choose', they appear to recognize and validate her desire for control over her own body, releasing it from the definitions of patriarchal discourse. The support they offer her is, however, conditional: some choices appear to be less of a right than others. Liz notes wryly that feminists are only meant to feel guilty about wanting babies, not about having abortions. When she is reluctant to join in a pro-abortion march, she feels their response is no different from her father's: 'Be a good child and Daddy will love you' (p. 45). Feminism, like patriarchy, appears to impose a role on her which does not fit: her friends, dear as they are to her, 'all cast themselves as the star in their own interpretation of the play, and then expected everyone else to play supporting roles ... she bought love by being inadequate as a woman' (pp. 185-6). So strong is her need for acceptance that she is unsure whether she can risk ending this by getting pregnant. The form of feminism which Liz encounters appears unable to provide her with a satisfactory answer to her anxieties about sexuality and maternity. The belief in a woman's right to choose appears of little help to a woman whose bodily functions appear to be out of her control; when yet another unwanted period arrives, 'the process seeks no consent' (p. 41). Either her lack of control is a threat to that belief, or she is forced to concede that she may be in some way responsible for her body's malfunction. She is sufficiently a victim of patriarchal ideology to fear that there may indeed be a conflict between sexuality and feminism on the one hand, and motherhood on the other, that her gynaecologist may be right in suggesting it is her promiscuity, or her rejection of her femininity, which prevents her from conceiving. She wonders whether maternity would put an end to her promiscuity: 'would a child be a way out of the excessive sexuality she fears in herself?'

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(p. 18). But feminism is unable to provide Liz with an understanding of what it might mean to be a 'real woman' outside of patriarchal definition as long as it fails to recognize her need for a child. As Kristeva has pointed out, in rejecting the idealized image of motherhood, it also 'circumvents the real experience that fantasy overshadows' (About Chinese Women, p. 161). Liz's desire for a child, therefore, leaves her vulnerable to the symbolic order's discourse of motherhood, and particularly to the idea that motherhood is incompatible with sexuality. As a consequence she succumbs at times to the fear that pregnancy has to be deserved, that it is a gift conferred on 'good' women, not on those like her who have 'polluted' the womb by desiring sex without consequences; she imagines the voices of patriarchal religion condemning her as 'a child murderer': 'the filth was within.' Menstruation is in her case literally felt to be a 'curse', and her barrenness somehow self-willed, because a consequence of sin: 'Barren women murdered babies in their wombs, taking the children from their husbands and drowning them in the milky darkness, killing them in the hidden garden' (p. 138). Again the ambiguity inherent in patriarchal attitudes towards the female body is evident - is it 'darkness' or a garden, tomb or womb? The fear and guilt Liz feels reflects a much older belief that the failure to produce offspring is always the woman's fault: writing about Europe in the early Modern period Hufton notes, the woman was blamed for a sin or offence in the eyes of God which had caused him to render her infertile. She carried the stigma of shame and she was also denied salvation, though this was more strenuously enunciated in Catholic writings. (p. 174) The female body, moreover, becomes the site on which God proves his sole right to create. As the theologian Rachel Adler puts it, 'The barren woman is useful because she proves God's fertility, so to speak.'17 Only Yahweh can make women fertile, as even Eve acknowledges when she conceives Cain: T have gotten a man from the Lord' (Genesis 4. 1). In the Catholic Church even the patron saint of childbirth is a man - St Gerard Majella. And while the power of the church and its discourse may seem irrelevant to a modern young woman like Liz who has lost her faith, that power has been reinvested in other vehicles of patriarchal authority in science and medicine. She learns to think of the infertility clinic she

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here the professionals were even stronger: the mothers here could be lured into the role of priestess collaborators with the magical medicine gods. Here the visitors were forced to be the supplicants, made to beg to see the holy places where mothers and doctors together had created these new power-points, these babies. (p. 209) The consultant she visits for help with her fertility problems takes on in her mind the authority of a God in his apparent power over fertility. Before she can be 'given' a child by him, she must deserve it by conforming to and acknowledging his authority. The displacement of her desire for her father's approval onto this man is quite explicit as she imagines him saying to her, T am with you always ... When you are good I will reward you. I will be your father. You will be the Mother of the Child' (pp. 38-9). When she visits him in April, the month of the Annunciation, this messenger of patriarchy tells her she must cooperate, acquiesce in his power, accept his naming of her as 'unfeminine', since it is her resistance to her femaleness - and by implication to his masculine right to name and control her body that is the cause of her infertility. She must abandon her identification with the feminist cause, with women: 'Her heart was not really here with him, she obeyed only the externals. Her heart was really out there with the wicked women who murdered babies in the womb and ate the flesh of their unborn children.' Even her sexuality is seen as evidence of her resistance to patriarchy, since in marrying a homosexual, 'a half-man', she has shown she does not dare 'to offer herself to the fullness and beauty and power of the man. Dr Marshall was a man' (p. 92). A woman's right to choose, to control her own body, is limited by science, the new religion, as long as women need the predominantly male medical profession to help them. Even the psychiatric profession, the branch of medicine ostensibly dedicated to recognizing the needs of the individual, operates within a theoretical framework which reinforces Dr Marshall's crude constructions of sexual difference. If she does not cooperate by visiting the psychiatrist who will help her to adjust to her gender role, then all treatment will be suspended. It is then ironic that the old religion, through the Bible, provides Liz with an alternative image of power over fertility - the Old Testament

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attends as a 'shrine of intercession where women must go to beg', and when visiting a maternity hospital feels,

story of Sarah and Hagar. In Maitland's interpretation of the story there are two key issues - first, the idea of female friendship as a means of overcoming the barrenness which Liz experiences in isolation; secondly women's involvement in childbirth, an idea she reinforces with a lyrical exploration of the role of the midwife in history. According to an interview with Rosemary Hartill, by giving these meanings to the story Maitland is trying to retrieve its original meaning, the story that 'right there at the roots of our history, somehow got buried'. Her purpose is: to draw parallels between that very legendary and all-so-long ago experience of barrenness and of women's friendships - not to contrast them, but to underline how those experiences weren't a barmy new trend in feminism, but were fundamental to a whole kind of imaginative experience. 18 Maitland's revision of the story implies, as was suggested in Chapter 2, that Sarah creates Hagar's baby through using her intelligence to bring Hagar and Abraham together, whereas her own pregnancy is God's joke, even perhaps a punishment for usurping his right to control fertility.19 Throughout history the midwife played a similar and vital role in fertility that went beyond assisting at the birth, since she also played a part in the conception through her potions and white magic. This power was her undoing: Tn the end they would have to torture and burn such power; they would have to steal away such knowledge. Men could not risk the strength, the skill, the magic, the mightiness of the witch' (p. 75).20 The power was taken over by priests and ultimately by the medical profession. Liz toys with the idea of becoming such a 'midwife' to Ian and Amanda, the writer for whose book on childbirth Liz has already acted as midwife. She rationalizes that 'it would still be her child, because she had freed [Ian] to love women' (p. 73) by introducing him to heterosexual sex. Her plan fails, but in any case such an act of midwifery would not correspond to the precedent set by Sarah because it would not be carried out in the spirit of sisterhood which bound Sarah and Hagar, but in a spirit of jealousy. Such sisterhood in childbirth is experienced, however, when Liz assists at the birth of her friend Alice's baby 'Miranda ... A thing to marvel at' (p. 214). The jealousy which Liz feels over the pregnancy of Alice, a lesbian with no desire for a child, gives way to a readiness to share not only the birth but her new home and Ian as fatherfigure with her friend. This enables her to experience the power of

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motherhood itself, as opposed to the power wielded by the medical profession. Unlike the castrated mother of patriarchy, embodied in the idealized image represented in Amanda's book - 'a sentimentalized glorification of motherhood' (p. 55) - and used by the media to circumscribe its power, this motherhood is firmly rooted in the physical. When Alice's waters break the amniotic fluid represents to Liz real healing power to replace that of the holy water into which she had dipped her hand with her father at Easter: 'The body, she was patiently taught, is the temple of the Holy Spirit. This was the water from the inner temple; she would be purged, healed, would obtain the powerful magic from Alice' (p. 207). Even her father is not immune to such power: at Montserrat he had made extravagant votive offerings to the Black Madonna for a son. Unlike the passive Virgin promoted by Western churches, this version of the Virgin has inherited the power of the Mother Goddess, since she 'has absorbed the power of darkness, the older magic and has dominated it. She is the source of power, her secrecy and knowledge are mysterious and mighty' (p. 92). But while recognizing the power and glory of motherhood, Liz rejects what her friend Paula calls the 'myth-making' that 'the act of pregnancy was somehow the zenith, the proof point of "femininity"' (p. 21), that motherhood is the mark of a 'real woman'. And once again the Bible provides her with images of women which express the variety of female experience in a way which highlights female power in contrast to the helplessness of the 'liberated' modern woman. As Maitland tells Hartill, the Bible provides feminists with a model and justification for their anger, since feminist anger is 'in the Bible right there in terms of victorious anger against a man' (p. 122). Characteristics such as anger, sexual control and violence, not associated with the 'real woman' of patriarchy, are embodied in Deborah the prophetess - an ugly but powerful woman whose 'words had delivered Sisera [the enemy warrior] into the power of a woman', her friend Jael. Such women create a disproportionate amount of fear in men, revealing the extent to which ideas about gender are constructed as a means of social control. Liz too refuses the traditional role of female victim, appalled by Ian's use of violence against her, and insists on her right to control her own sexual pleasure. And yet, while she knows her androgynous physique is one reason for the success of her relationship with Ian, a bisexual, she does not want to become a pseudo-male, refusing Ian's attempts to enter her from behind. But given that our notions of gender are essentially binary, it is almost impossible to discuss the nature of the 'real woman' in isolation from

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that of the 'real man'. Maitland presents Delilah's betrayal of Samson as an act motivated by her hatred of his softness, of her own power over him: 'She had been brought up among real men.' Too late she realizes her mistake, that 'his softness, his willingness to share everything with her, even his weakness, his passions, his uncertainties; those were the things that a man should have.' The weakness is in her: 'she had not been woman enough to meet the new and gentle man in him', (pp. 110-11). The implications are that Liz may have made the same mistake in thinking herself Ian's 'saviour', that by turning him away from homosexuality and enabling him to become a father she would turn him into a 'real man'. Ian is himself affected by the same ideology, feeling the purity of his motives for wanting a child has been besmirched: 'now I just want to prove to the world that I am a man' (p. 246). Like Delilah, Liz must learn to accept Ian as he is, for 'out of his gentleness will come fruitfulness' (p. 247). What then is, or should be, the relationship of one sex to the 'Other'? Must male and female always be perceived as binary opposites, set into a hierarchical power structure? Liz's early relationships appear to have confused sexuality with filial love, perpetuating her relationship with her father. Fleeing the violent power struggle with James, her most domineering lover, she enters into a relationship of mothering with the gay and sick Ian, but when Ian fails to comfort the hurt child in her, she turns to her boss Tony - 'this daddy' (p. 158) for comfort. Her sexual response to Tony, which she experiences as a new 'passivity of active consent' by her body, then alarms her because it seems to reactivate in her a sense of gender identity which she has rejected, a sense of gender based on purely biological characteristics 'this was the Man, this was what bred children, sent women weeping throughout the world in joyfulness' (p. 159). She can only cope with this by retreating again into the fantasy of childhood, pretending that Tony has just acted as 'the Father, not the Lover' (p. 160). She can play the female child to the male adult, but what might playing the female adult mean? Is Liz to be diagnosed as a woman who refuses to recognize her own sexuality, to be a 'real woman', as her body - according to the consultant - seems to be telling her? Or is she simply still seeking to break out of those relationships of dominance and subordination that characterize child/parent relationships and often provide a model for female/male relationships in patriarchal society? She feels she loses her sexual power when she gives 'the power of love and demand over her' to Ian (p. 153). Perhaps she, like Delilah, has to recognize that this is a valid exchange. For her relationship with Ian,

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like the lesbian and homosexual relationships depicted in the novel, breaks down binary oppositions in gender in a way which creates new possibilities of relationship. Furthermore Liz sees a baby as something that would make her grown up, and free her from being 'Daddy's little girl for ever' (p. 107). In the sense that their need for a child emanates from the unsatisfied desires of the child in each of them, it can be said to transcend gender and offer a way of breaking not only with the past, but with traditional definitions of gender. There is, in any case, no need for either Liz or Ian to conform to dualistic notions of gender since, according to Maitland's interpretation of the Bible, in Christ women like Liz can find acceptance of the whole self, finally achieving an end to shame. He releases the Woman with the Issue of Blood from her curse of continuous bleeding, because he alone of men is unafraid of being defiled by contact with her 'shame'. Similarly, he saves the prostitute Mary Magdalene from her own sense of disgust, recognizing that 'the body and the soul were not as separate as people tried to make them' (p. 192). He asks her to care for his mother after his death, feeling no need to keep virgin and whore separate, accepting both with his own 'wholeness'. Liz recognizes this gift of acceptance in Ian, the one man who 'believed in her as virtuous ... and did not care about her past' (p. 15). Christ himself is represented as a man who fails to conform to patriarchal stereotypes: he is 'the man that men said could not be a man, because he loved prostitutes and cuddled small children' (p. 140). Liz's affair with Tony leaves her full of guilt and terrified that she will now conceive as an ironic punishment, so that she experiences the arrival of her period as a sign of God's forgiveness, and the beginning of her release from guilt and shame. That release is confirmed by Maitland's representation of the Virgin. Used, as we have seen, by patriarchal religion to reinforce women's sense of shame at their inability to conceive without sin, the Virgin is here released from the dualism that separates body from soul. At the moment of birth 'she had riven the barriers between the begetting and the begotten; she had torn the veil between flesh and soul' (p. 249), destroyed the dualistic philosophies of her age. At the moment of conception, her evocation of the life of the womb, 'where the promised land of soft, white hills and warm, damp, flowering valleys, flowing with milk, is prepared for the traveller' suggests that the land promised by God to the Jews is merely a symbolic substitute for the pre-natal paradise where every need is satisfied, that there is a close link between religious belief and the child's bond with its mother. The

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sensuality of that description, the recognition that sexuality is more than genital, and the young woman's 'unassailable self-assurance' are 'a slap in the face to anyone who wants to see the virgin birth as antisexuality' (pp. 29-30). Maitland also releases the concept of 'virginity' from its narrow biological meaning which implies that once lost, it can never be regained, by referring to both Christian and pagan rituals. The nuns on Shrove Tuesday metaphorically strip themselves in confession - 'There, naked before their priest-servant, the blood of the Lamb washes them clean again' - while the Greek goddess Hera bathes in the fountain of Canathus to restore her virginity every year (p. 170). Instead of setting Mary apart from all women on account of her unique virginity, the novelist aligns her with them. The gulf between body and soul, flesh and word, is in fact destroyed from the very moment of the Annunciation, when Mary carries her desire 'beyond mind and logic higher and higher to the throne of the living God, to the source of light, to the infinite word. She became her own messenger' (p. 30). The Virgin here represents woman's ability to conceive spiritual meanings, to articulate meaning not only as a body but through her words. This belief in the power of desire, and of the Word, over the flesh is what Liz learns from the Virgin. To combat her fear of not getting pregnant she refuses to speak of it: Tf it is not named it has no power. If it has no word it cannot exist. The word creates. The name holds power. To move over the face of the water and call them into shape; to give her fears the name of despair' (p. 229). Instead of giving life to those fears by naming them, she determines instead to 'use those words, the good words. Mother, sister, lover, child, friend. Solidarity, love, delight, friendship. Hope' (p. 230). In this feminist litany she borrows the power of the Father the power of the Word - to 'conceive' the possibility of becoming pregnant, and in that moment it appears she conceives the child, significantly while Doctor Marshal is out of the country. The novel ends with her feelings once again being written on her body, this time in the form of her failure to menstruate - 'She hopes' (p. 247). When the Virgin declares 'all generations will call me blessed', she is therefore expressing, according to Maitland, 'a very deep kind of pride in identity' (Hartill, p. 122), which enables her, at the moment of the Annunciation, to assent with the whole of her being. In contrast, when Dr Marshall tells Liz that 'assent' is the quickest path to conception, he means that Liz must accept his interpellation of her as 'unfeminine', and cast off those aspects of her self which do not conform to patriarchal ideology. Mary is, moreover, not represented

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simply as a passive vehicle for God's purpose, but as carrying out that purpose herself. When Maitland writes, 'assent becomes the moment of conception. The assent with full knowledge', it implies that assent initiates conception. Mary's role is transformed from a passive one to an active one that makes female desire a creative force: 'That purely conscious, unalienated woman who can so assent with the entirety of her person, needs no biological intrusion between her desire and its fulfilment' (pp. 28-9). Her womanhood is 'so vital and empowered that it could break free of biology and submission, any dependence on or need for a masculine sexuality' (p. 30). And here knowledge, instead of being a sin, as it was for Eve, is a sign of grace. The Virgin becomes an image of empowered, independent womanhood 'Virginal, alone, complete' (p. 249). She can be a feminist icon, the 'free woman' who chose to say yes to God, where Eve said no, and made salvation possible. The miracle of Christ's birth thus becomes not just a celebration of a male god, but a miracle in which woman plays an active part, and significantly - a speaking one, since in her Magnificat, her song of praise, Mary announces the end of the old order and the beginning of the new. The handmaid of the Lord is now only 'bound' to what she herself has created, the baby who is the 'beginning of the end' (p. 249). Instead of the Virgin's assent representing conformity to patriarchal religion, it represents her embrace of an ideology which challenges all existing hierarchies. Maitland maintains it is precisely because motherhood is so powerless in the public world that the mother of Christ comes to represent Christianity's revolutionary message: For motherhood is without power, without honour, without authority in the world; so the servant God, who has come into the world to set the captives free, will empower motherhood, honour it, and authorize it as in heaven, so on earth. (A Big-Enough God, p. 22) The meaning of the Magnificat is summed up in the title of one of Maitland's short stories, 'Mother of Freedom'. 21 If motherhood has such a political meaning, it seems to Liz to make possible a solidarity and cooperation between women that could bring about social change. Lerner too has argued from historical evidence that when class difference in women's experiences as wives, daughters and workers separated them totally, 'motherhood was then the only basis on which sisterhood could even be conceptualized' (Creation of

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Feminist Consciousness, p. 122). In the representation of the Visitation in Daughter of Jerusalem, when the Virgin Mary, frightened of her own power, needs to share her experience she turns to her cousin Elizabeth, thought to be barren, menopausal, and generally beyond the pale, but now pregnant like Mary. In Elizabeth's arms, Mary conceives again: the flowering of the great song of praise and power and triumph, the love song that unites her not just to Elizabeth but to all the other difficult women everywhere and every when. The mighty are cast down, the humble exalted ... the women hold one another, empowered by one another they declare for the new order, together they feel and sing and love themselves towards the new Jerusalem. (p. 53) Liz finds, however, that sisterhood is not to be achieved through maternity or the desire for it. Her attempts to create a sense of solidarity between herself and the other infertile women at the clinic meet with hostility, and her desire for a child leads to conflict with her feminist friends, even though some are already mothers. Maitland offers the story of Leah and Rebecca as an illustration of the hostility that can develop between the barren and the fertile in a culture where only the fertile woman is of value, where fertility constitutes womanhood. Again Lerner's observations seem relevant. She suggests that, in spite of the unifying potential of motherhood noted above, its glorification in patriarchal religious discourse later led growing numbers of women to recognize that collectivity needed to be defined not by the maternal role but by their personhood. Only then can 'sisterhood' be defined as the collective entity of women. Liz similarly comes to recognize that sisterhood needs to be established on a broader basis, that the 'femaleness' which determines sisterhood is not to be defined by fertility, any more than it is to be defined by sexuality. Feminism has not yet been able to provide her with a satisfactory discourse of motherhood, nor yet with a satisfactory discourse of sisterhood. The figure of the Virgin, however, as interpreted by Maitland, perhaps provides both, an idea that the novelist explores more fully in Virgin Territory. Sara Maitland - Virgin

Territory

Where Daughters of the House looks at the virgin and the mother as alternative ideals for women in patriarchy, Sara Maitland's Virgin

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Territory is more concerned with exploring the relationship between the two. It makes explicit what is implicit in Roberts's novel: that the role of the virgin is a patriarchal construction designed to prevent identification with the maternal. The choice between identification with the male symbolic order and identification with the female is also made more explicit by Maitland than by Roberts, because it is expressed by two 'voices' embodying these options, which speak to the central character, the nun Sister Anna, and make their claims on her. In their choric, sometimes repetitive, articulation of the values and beliefs they represent, these voices provide a more polemical analysis of women's role in patriarchal religion than does Daughters of the House, perhaps because this is one of Maitland's earliest novels. The analysis, however, goes beyond a deconstruction of the patriarchal ideal of the virgin. It continues the reconceptualization of what the Virgin represents which Maitland began in Daughter of Jerusalem. In the process, it provides a complex consideration of what identification with the female might mean, showing how problematic attempts to re-constitute concepts of the virginal and the maternal from a feminist perspective can be. Sister Anna herself is represented as a woman who has all her life identified with patriarchy as embodied in the Catholic church. That identification is, however, threatened by a crisis of faith and identity occasioned by the rape of another nun, Sister Kitty, outside Santa Virgine, the Latin American convent to which both belong. Unable to eat or to stop crying, and beset with a sense of failure, she is sent by the Mother House to London to recover, and to carry out research on the history of her Order in South America. Anna's vulnerability exposes her to a series of new influences, representing different ideologies of the female. The internal conflict this produces is most dramatically represented by the clashing voices of the Fathers, the internalized voice of patriarchal Christianity, and the imagined voice of Caro, a brain-damaged three-year-old, whose parents have appealed to Anna for help. These voices can be seen to represent the conforming and rebellious selves of the Lacanian split subject. The conflict between the little girl and the great Fathers represents every woman's attempt to free herself from patriarchal ideologies; victory could mean a re-birth for 'the daughter of darkness' (p. 133), but into what? Although patriarchal ideology is principally articulated through the disembodied voices which speak to Anna's conscience, it is also embodied in Anna's father, showing how patriarchal religion functions to maintain the status and power of men even in contemporary

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society. What the reader is told about Anna's relationship with her father also demonstrates the process by which the female child is interpellated into myths of femininity. Because Anna's mother left her and her sisters at an early age, the father has total control over his daughters, who consequently combine the 'sweetness and submissiveness which were his touchstones of femininity' (p. 20). When Anna becomes a nun, he is able to hand her over to the 'Mother' she has not previously known, so that she remains forever his child, continuing to be called 'Baby' even at the age of 30. To question him is 'heresy' and any lapse in her religious devotion requires her to seek forgiveness from God/father. The power of the patriarchal head of family is simply a reflection of the power of God the father. The voices of the Fathers in turn borrow some of their power to terrify from their associations with this biological father. They represent discipline and control, the Law of the Father as embodied in the Word of God. This is their appeal for those like Anna's beloved friend Sister Kate who seek shape and control for their frighteningly intense feelings. Their power also shapes the universe. They describe that power to Anna: 'the power of the Living Word that commanded the earth to come out of the chaos, that broke the chaos, raped it, remade it. We make order ... We control ... Consent and you will enjoy if (p. 33). The language used here, however, hints at the violence underlying this concept of creative power, likened to the act of rape. Anna herself apparently recognizes and responds to the ambivalence in this disciplining power. Desiring to be made 'good' again after transgression, 'she craved it suddenly, physically, her belly melting, wanting, warming; greedy for her own humiliation, her own rape' (p. 41). 22 But Sister Kitty's experience should have shown Anna enough of the reality behind the rape fantasy to alert her to the real threat here. The promise of protection that the Fathers offer is contingent upon total obedience and self-abnegation. Obedience to the Fathers requires, moreover, a rejection or denial of the Mother. For Anna this is easy, since she knows little of mothers, her own having left her. What she does know only confirms what the Fathers have told her of the role of mothers as betrayers: Mother Superior, Mother Church and Holy Mary Mother of God are all more devoted to the Fathers than to their 'daughters'. In consequence, the well trained Fathers' daughter can become a 'fifth column' among women, ensuring that the Law of the Father is perpetuated rather than identifying with their own gender. As Kristeva puts it, 'the daughter is handed the keys to the symbolic order when she identifies with the

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father: only there is she recognized not in herself but against her rival, the vaginal, jouissante mother' (About Chinese Women, p. 30). Her rewards are limited, nevertheless, since such a faithful daughter can 'never become a Father, would never be a god or a power of her own' (p. 76) and thus would never secure her own autonomous fulfilment. Deriving her sense of value from identification with the Father, such a daughter always promotes his interests: as Anna's father tells her when she becomes a nun, 'Would I have given up my baby for anything except my own salvation?' (p. 37). So what is it that the Fathers offer protection from? In the discourse of the Fathers it is the 'madwoman' inside Anna trying to get out, everything that the symbolic order attempts to repress. That madness is identified with the child Caro, who is not simply a brain-damaged aberration, but represents what is damaged in us all. Everyone, according to her 'voice', hides 'the screaming. The no words. Incontinence ... What is human? you ask and you answer it is words you say and reason. It is conscience and thinking about others ... So I am not human I am animal. I am freak. I am in you' (p. 72). Maitland has Caro use the same image of the cellar that in Daughters of the House represents what is hidden beneath the socially presentable face of the individual and family: T sit here in the cellar and I scare you all, because you don't want to know you are me' (p. 69). Anna's original sense of vocation can be seen as an attempt to repress what Caro represents, coming to her as it does when she stands on the edge of the Grand Canyon and decides not to go down to the 'wild water' below (p. 19). But what she most fears, as she tells the Fathers, is what they have made her through the process of repression: 'Yes I am scared of internalized violence, and sexiness inside me ... by the emotional storms you have brewed up for me . . . . Yes I am terrified to look inside myself and see what you have made there' (p. 191). This self is not essentially 'unnamable'; it has only become so because patriarchal religion has denied its existence in women, or has forced women to regard it with shame. If she is to come to terms with herself, Anna has to learn to love even 'the dirty bits which are without words, without names' (p. 73). But Caro invites us to question the simplistic binary oppositions of the symbolic order: 'chaos is not dark as opposed to light, chaos is before all light and dark, and after it.' What the Fathers identify as insanity and disintegration is, according to her, part of Hagia Sophia, wisdom, a joyful and creative force 'who sings the creation into life' (p. 54) and 'danced on the void before there were words' (p. 198).23

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Caro's voice clearly represents Anna's own knowledge of alternative traditions and value systems, evoking not only the pre-Oedipal stage of the individual subject, but a myth of creation which precedes Genesis, demonstrating how both subject and myth are constructed through repression. The self that is repressed is, moreover, the self that still longs for the mother. The demands of that self are embodied in Caro, whose body is the only means by which this brain-damaged child can 'speak', but whose 'voice' nevertheless pleads forcibly with Anna against the claims of the Fathers. Caro, ejected prematurely from her mother's body, represents the child in Anna, who had, out of her duty to the Fathers, killed that inner child: 'The child who would allow her to play, to be cuddled and be loved' (p. 53). Anna has denied her body and its needs. She imagines Caro immediately after birth being 'snatched up to heaven to the bright courts of the fathers', leaving unsatisfied the craving to be held: 'Held and rocked to the sound of the breathing and heartbeat ... for consolation, for memory of the warm dark place' (p. 44). Anna is at first unable to relate her own need to be held to the loss of her mother; only through Caro does she learn that mothers can hold you through the darkness of night. When Karen, the young lesbian she meets in the course of her research at the British Library, puts her arms around her, Anna reflects that she had never been comforted in such a way at the convent. When Karen later embraces her again, the phrase 'And Karen held her' (p. 151) is repeated, as if to emphasize the almost ritual significance of an act which protects her from the wrath of the Fathers. She cannot remember what it is to be held and comforted by the maternal body, only what it is to be possessed by the Fathers. The Christian tradition offers compelling representations of this act of maternal love in art and literature depicting the Holy Mother and Child in the Pieta, but such a gift appears to be the preserve of the son, not the daughter. Caro, then, in her physicality, screaming out her needs, represents in the starkest terms to Anna the bodily needs of the child and its yearning to return to the watery security of the womb. This is a hopeless yearning of course, since it is Tost forever, the underwater paradise, the deep dance without effort, without gravity, without consciousness' (p. 43). This is the world which is echoed in Kristeva's semiotic stage, a preverbal world of eternal 'play' and fluidity before the logical structures of the symbolic order differentiate, define and categorize so that the subject may find its identity within that order. For the break with the semiotic and the mother's body must be made. That body must be

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denied firstly because it is associated with filth and refuse, what Caro identifies in herself as 'foul but free' (p. 53).24 Secondly it must be rejected so that the subject can establish the borders between itself and the mother, achieving the separation necessary for the creation of the individual ego. The subject is nevertheless left in a state of what Kristeva calls 'abjection', generated by horror at not knowing the boundaries of self and not-self, at being overwhelmed by the maternal body. This condition is suggested by Anna's recurrent fear of being swallowed up by what she terms chaos. While Anna must resist conformity to the Law of the Fathers, she must also resist over-identification with the imaginary mother, since the desire to return to the pre-Oedipal state is a dangerous form of regression, a refusal of socialization and adulthood. Kristeva identifies it as a desire for loss of identity, for a dissolution of the self in mother - in other words, for death. 25 It is ironically Caro that seems to offer a more constructive option, when she asks Anna to 'parent' Caro and herself into a new life: Baptize me. Name me. Birth me again in water and the word. Let me live as I am and love me ... Consent to me ... Come down deeper below the words. Let it break down all the way. E ven to the bot torn of se nse. and be low. da na ga el . ... then there can be birth and creation. (p. 133) Caro appears to be tempting Anna to lose herself in the pre-verbal world of the semiotic. She invites Anna to enter the wordless dark, where the symbolic order does not provide the structures and definitions by which the subject must identify itself. But Caro's request that Anna should also name her, birth her in the word as well as in the waters of the womb, recognizes Anna's need ultimately to engage with the symbolic order of the Fathers. In this way identification with the female is not necessarily a surrender to chaos and darkness, but a means of growing by accepting the chaos as part of herself. As Maitland suggests in one of her works of non-fiction, instead of seeing God as imposing order on chaos, it may be easier to realize the 'immensity of God' by inviting chaos back into our lives, since projecting the elements of chaos outwards can only lead to alienation and destruction (Map of the New Country, p. 184). Anna is perhaps encouraged by the image that Fiona, Caro's mother, offers her of the

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life-cycle of the butterfly: Fiona describes the disintegration that takes place inside the chrysalis before it re-forms into a butterfly as evidence of resurrection, but only possible if one consents to be broken down. Anna appears by the end of the novel to recognize what she shares with Caro, but is no longer tempted to subsume her identity in that of Caro and remain in a regressive childlike state: 'She had seen the light and did not want to go back into the dark' (p. 199). Anna is, moreover, offered other alternatives to the Law of the Fathers, represented by different versions of the Virgin who has been her ego-ideal under that law. For a nun virginity is a defining characteristic, identifying her in terms of her physical intactness. When Sister Kitty loses her virginity, through no fault of her own, the white unicorn associated with purity disappears from her view. The importance of female chastity in the Christian tradition is later spelt out even more clearly: 'the unicorn was male purity, it was the Christ who loved the Virgin' (p. 126). The virgin's role is to tame the unicorn, who drinks milk from her breast. Again the mythology embodies the ideological contradictions inherent in the ideal of the Virgin mother. The virgin exists to nurture, and satisfy the bodily needs of the male, but can only tame its lusts if she is herself utterly pure. Maitland has, however, argued elsewhere that Mary's virginity does not have to be seen as 'an insult to our sexuality', if we understand physical purity as representing a great power on which women can draw (A Big-Enough God, p. 186). She points out that for the Greeks the virgin Artemis was not only goddess of the woodlands and the hunt, but also the goddess of childbirth, on whom women in labour called. In comparison with the serene form of virginity Anna and her beloved friend Sister Kate had been sold, such images appear to offer a more complete female identity which recognizes the 'deep horror' in the virgin too, the dark side of the moon which represents the pain and anger produced by denial: There was Anna's place of passivity, of denial, the place where Persephone was raped by the God of Hell and then desired to stay with him in the darkness for a very long time. And there was Kate's place of fury, where the young bitch wolves not yet come to their first heat descended on the sheep pens yowling in the manic blood greed. (p. 106) Anna at first believes in the potency of these images as a means of freeing herself from the tyranny of the Fathers. But they too are the

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products of patriarchal religions, as Anna seems aware when she identifies herself with Pallas Athene, 'a creation of the Fathers and virgin only because they like it that way' (p. 22). And while Kate's anger about social injustice seems to link her with Artemis the huntress, it also drives her to take on the darker nature of Kore/Persephone who has spent half her life with the dead, and leads ultimately to her own death among guerrilla fighters. The ambivalence of these dangerously seductive goddess images is spelt out by Karen, who claims that all such symbols of strong women are merely projections of male fear. Rather than embodying an alternative female ideal, such patriarchal myths represent male horror at women who reject men and thus constitute a challenge to male supremacy. Positive images of the virgin can, however, be found if the term is redefined so as to shift its emphasis away from the sexual, bringing it closer to the meaning of the word used to define the mother of Christ in the Hebrew text - an unmarried woman. Anna compares her own state with Karen's in a way which leads her to reconsider the implications of the virginal ideal: Virgins did in fact have enormous power; they could summon and tame unicorns. But she wore a gold wedding band on her left hand; was she still a virgin? Karen ... had sex with people ... but had given nothing away to the Fathers. Was she a virgin? (p. 97) Karen's challenge to the church's view is quite explicit: 'Come into the woman-place with me ... we will be true virgins forever; women who hold themselves, and hold themselves free' (p. 126). Michele Roberts similarly describes finding, through reading Jung, 'the archetype of the virgin, the woman who exists for herself, Diana the huntress, who is both chaste and sexual, mother of many children but belonging to no man' ('The Woman Who Wanted to be a Hero', p. 55). Maitland represents Karen in opposition not only to the church but to Caro; Karen is the child of light in contrast to the child of darkness. Like Kate, Karen is perceived as a huntress. She aims to bring to the surface all the feelings Anna has repressed into the dark world of the unconscious represented by Caro, to expose them to her light, so that they can be acknowledged, analysed and acted upon. Karen sees the Christian ideal of virginity as a completely negative image. Because its power derives from not belonging sexually to a man, it can only be an image of resistance, rather than of change, and therefore fails to challenge male ownership rights.

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Anna herself begins to feel that women together may constitute a more positive female image, because they are not defined by their relationships with men. But while she argues that the nun is just such a model of autonomy, her freedom from male control is illusory, contingent on conformity to patriarchal religion. Within the confines of the convent, the embrace between Anna and Kate echoes the Visitation embrace when Mary visits her cousin Elisabeth, mother of John the Baptist, and both celebrate the conception of their sons. But because neither Anna nor Kate is able to ask for the love she needs, each nun submits instead to the discipline imposed by the church. In contrast, Karen sees the image of the Visitation as 'ultimate Dyke moment ... from their love will come freedom for all the world' (p. 146). Seeing the lesbian as a positive version of the negative image of the virgin, she sees this embrace as not simply a personal or sexual statement but a political act with the potential to challenge all existing hierarchies and power structures. The similarities with Roberts's thinking are again striking. Of her first novel, A Piece of the Night, she writes, 'Above the body of the dead nun, the sexually and spiritually repressed woman, it resurrects the modern lesbian feminist, the fierce virgin Aphrodite who is also a mother' ('The Woman Who Wanted to be a Hero', p. 60). Karen is, nevertheless, subject to the limitations of her own ideology, which comes dangerously close at times to a simple mirror image of patriarchy. In her concentration on the body as the only means to self-realization, she too seems to want to define women in terms of their sexuality. When Anna meets Karen, she feels there is something missing, which can perhaps be defined as the more spiritual dimension so strong in Anna herself. And Anna comes to recognize the danger that Karen represents, when she realizes she had never been free with Karen: 'she had been powerless before Karen's naming of the universe; she had played Eve to Karen's Adam' (p. 188). In her simplistic splitting of the body from the spirit, and her single-minded authoritarian desire to 'name' Anna, Karen is not herself free from patriarchal patterns of thought. The novel offers one more way of thinking about the term 'virgin', through the concept of the Amazon. 'Amazon' is a Greek word meaning 'without breast', as this tribe of women were said to remove their right breast in order to draw their bows more effectively. This mythical race of female warriors, living apart from men, was the product of patriarchal Greek religion, but when the Spanish opened up South America, they named the river Amazon after the female

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warriors they claimed to have seen on its banks, giving rise to new Amazonian myths which Maitland appropriates for feminists. The violence associated with the Amazon women is neither denied nor validated. Anna learns, for instance, that Francisco da Orellana, the discoverer of the Amazon river, had been killed by the warrior women. She recognizes both the power and the attractions of violence, but rejects it as a betrayal of all that should separate the female from the Law of the Fathers. What Karen teasingly calls 'matriarchal, womenled, exclusive men-free cultures in the Amazon' (p. 159) do not, then, seem to be an answer. Another explorer, Gaspar de Capello, the founder of Santa Virgine, is inspired by a vision of the Virgin and the unicorn to give up his dreams of gold to pursue the ideal of purity they represent. He realizes the correspondence between this vision and the beliefs of the native Indians, who 'understood the worship of a God who was mother, son and horned beast together' (p. 82). This journey into a world untouched by Western patriarchal civilization brings men in touch with their more female side, with a world based on the maternal rather than paternal principle. But in the process it can destroy them. The Conquistadors' search for El Dorado, the city of gold, is justified as a God-given dream, representing the longing for heaven, a dream of eternal life and happiness, of undeserved richness, and of salvation. But the dream is unreachable because the great virgin forest outside constantly threatens to engulf and destroy the conqueror's cathedrals and cities. This version of history suggests that female fecundity, female physicality, threatens the male - or female - quest for spiritual fulfilment. But an alternative reading suggests that we are dealing here with two conflicting concepts of virginity - the Christian ideal of chastity, the female body untouched by the male, in conflict with the idea of female vitality and fecundity unrestricted by male controls. To elaborate, Maitland quotes from the anthropologist Nor Hall: The virgin forest is not barren or unfertilized, but rather a place that is specially fruitful and has multiplied because it has taken life into itself and transformed it, giving birth naturally and taking dead things back to be re-cycled. It is virgin because it is unexploited, not in man's control. (p. 14) Such a vision does not exclude spirituality. The female foundress of Anna's Order of Santa Virgine wanted to restore purity, Christ and the

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Unicorn to the New World, where they had been consumed in the desire to conquer and possess, to rape the wilderness and its culture as Sister Kitty is raped. By this reading the Church's history can be seen as an imposition of patriarchal power on something essentially female, the 'Virgin Territory' of the novel's title, reflecting those Amazonian myths of matriarchy which tell how men manage to steal the source of women's power.26 The resistance of the Amazonian wilderness to such possession nevertheless remains a source of hope, offering Anna an image of the Virgin free from the false dichotomies to which it is otherwise subject. This land represents the 'wild zone' of her emotional life, linked as it is with the women who represent her repressed anger and sexuality.27 Kate's anger following Sister Kitty's rape drives her to the wilderness in the interior of South America where she meets her death. Yet when Karen massages the grieving Anna after the news of Kate's death, Anna feels herself to be in 'the jungle of the Amazons' (p. 155), at peace except for Kate's absence. These apparently contradictory images of rage and death and peace are accommodated in the Rain Forest, where she and Kate once found 'richness and rottenness beyond imagining'. In this world purity and fertility are shown to be compatible female ideals; the virgin and the mother can be reconciled in a way which, unlike the ideal of the Virgin Mary, does not involve a denial of sexuality. It is possible to reconcile the virgin and the mother in this way only by rejecting dualistic philosophies which see human beings as binary - the spirit or soul being trapped in the body, in which all the darkness of the self is embodied and which must therefore be repudiated. The novel ends, as it begins, with Sister Kitty and the meaning of the rape which, according to her religion, has rendered her unchaste. Kitty finally understands that her spirituality is not dependent on such masculine definitions of chastity: 'the western civilisation which is meaningless here had given her her virginity, but she has given herself back her purity' (p. 209). To confirm that such purity is a state of the spirit not the flesh, the vision of the unicorn returns. The body's meaning is determined by the spirit within. Anna likewise learns that to identify with the female means not only accepting her body and its needs, but recognizing the female in spirit. Realizing that her identification with the male symbolic order has kept her in an infantile state, she knows she has to go back to the beginning before she can become a mature, independent woman: 'She must go back to the womb and be born again in the power of the spirit... to the place that Caro had invited her ... to the Amazon valley ... to the land of

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the mothers ... and learn to be a grown-up woman' (p. 204). She acknowledges that she will in all probability end up living with her 'sisters', as either a radical lesbian or a nun, but this motherless child must first find her mother, without whom she cannot identify who her sisters are. When she hears her last Mass in the convent in London, the familiar words - 'Listen, oh daughter, give heed to my words; forsake your people and your father's house' (p. 202) - therefore take on a new meaning. The spiritual meaning of the female, and more particularly the maternal, is revealed to Anna in the image of the Garden of the Mother which she finds in a book of paintings by a Benedictine nun. The picture gives visual representation to a phrase of Pope John Paul I: 'God is Father. Even more, God is mother.' 28 The nun goes on to say that this mother 'lives in the secret garden, in the dark places of deepest interiority ... The garden flows with her white milk and golden honey and all her children are fed' (p. 203). The imagery here suggests a reversal of the myth of the fall, a Garden of Eden from which there is no expulsion for disobedience by a stern patriarch. This myth satisfies both the desire for social justice and the needs of the individual soul, reunited at last with the source of its being. In identifying God as Mother, Anna seeks her redemption through a feminized image of Christ and his mother, rather than through the Old Testament God of justice and wrath for whom the Fathers claim to speak. She attempts to silence their voices by dedicating herself to the Christ who loves her. Maitland here identifies a conflict between the patriarchal interpretation of Christianity and Christ's gospel itself. As she writes elsewhere, 'This Fatherhood of the first person of the Trinity must be wrestled with, must be claimed back from the pervasive grip of patriarchy, which is one of the powers and dominions that has been cast down and set aside in Christ Jesus' (A Big-Enough God, p. 17). The religion of the Fathers is based on the concept of obedience and punishment, and a power that can create all things but also destroy all things, that is responsible for Hiroshima and megadeath. This is a religion of anger and violence as opposed to the religion of Christ and love. But what is the relationship between this garden and the Amazonian wilderness which seems to be its polar opposite? The Amazon was frequently compared by its earliest discoverers to the Garden of Eden, and Nor Hall's comments above on the fertility of the Virgin Forest can be linked to the idea of the immaculate conception embodied in the Virgin Mary. Through this complex of imagery and

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symbolism Maitland is able to reclaim the Virgin Mother as a genuinely female ideal rather than a patriarchal construction, an ideal as much political as sexual, since Mary's Magnificat - which Maitland elsewhere calls 'the triumph song of all Christianity' (Hartill, p. 122) promises that in her the poor and oppressed shall be exalted, a promise manifestly betrayed by the Church's activities in Latin America. Anna is distressed by the exploitation and distortion of this ideal, distressed that 'so much power ... drew its authority from the belly of a peasant woman ... who had believed that her pregnancy would set the captives free' (p. 60). The idea of the Garden might at first sight appear to be a taming of the wilderness, of Anna's repressed, rebellious self, that represents a diminution of her self rather than its fulfilment. But this is the image that inspires her to return to the dark interior of the Amazon, and to the 'white city where women knew their own power' (p. 204). It is an empowering vision, derived from an engagement with cultural history and its images. Anna has already been empowered by discovering how much of patriarchal power derived from her own complicity. She tells the Fathers, 'you have only the power that I have handed you on a plate ... I shall use the women's power ... the power of hands and bodies and blood and birth and madness' (p. 189). However mystical the image of the Garden might seem, Maitland is, like Kristeva, well aware of the danger of women escaping into Utopian visions of the 'archaic mother', when they should be engaging with existing political or social realities. For Anna this means recognizing that she must engage with the symbolic order. She goes on to tell the Fathers that she will also use their power, the power of words, for the power of patriarchy is embodied in language: 'The logos is the word of the Father proceeding forth, but it never leaves the Father's side' (p. 171). After her first sexual encounter with Karen, she feels she should have remained silent, rather than using the words of the Fathers which means she is still allowing herself to be inscribed into the symbolic order, accepting their definitions of her feelings as guilty and unclean, and retreating from those definitions to the non-verbal world of the body. In the past, silence had seemed the best response to the Fathers' demands. Caro's lack of language seemed a source of strength, since the final act of resistance available even to the powerless is to refuse to consent or obey. But Karen had insisted that resistance was only a passive response, not leading to change. Anna makes her first attempts to wrench the Logos away from the Father's side when she chooses to

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have herself tattooed with a fish, the symbol of Christ. The tattoo is a way of inscribing her own meaning upon the body. Although using symbol rather than word, to avoid using patriarchal language, Anna nevertheless here takes a significant step in freeing herself from the Fathers. She is finally empowered to answer the Fathers with the full force of all her anger at being hunted and terrified by them for so long: 'By the power of the Holy Virgins I summon you; by my own power I command you ... the mark of the fish is upon me, I am branded in his love' (p. 188). While women must, as Caro urges, go down 'below words' to access those experiences not acknowledged in the symbolic order, they must also engage with the symbolic order which constructs identity. Women must use language themselves to challenge the male right to name, for there is 'a great power in naming, calling things by name was the act of creation; the eternal Word naming the darkness and chaining it to light and form' (p. 94). Women must become, like Anna, a daughter of the Word, rather than all that is denied by it.

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4

In her essay 'Outside Time' (About Chinese Women, pp. 35-8) Kristeva follows her analysis of women's relationship to the Law in Judaism and Christianity with a discussion of their conceptual relationship to time, in order to suggest the political consequences of women's psycho-sexual development in contemporary patriarchal societies. She argues that Judaeo-Christian culture represents woman as the unconscious, all that is repressed by the symbolic order 'in whatever is legislating, restrictive, paternal' (p. 35), the truth of which can only be imagined as a woman. By becoming the embodiment of this 'unconscious', moreover, woman is related to the timeless, the archetypal, while man is associated with the linear time embodied in language and history. Those women who identify more closely with the mother than the father, and are more in tune with their unconscious, are consequently likely to be silenced: they 'hold themselves back, sullen, neither speaking nor writing, in a permanent state of expectation punctuated now and then by some kind of outburst: a cry, a refusal, an "hysterical symptom"' - a symptom, moreover, destined for marginality or for 'a new mysticism' (p. 37). They therefore remain outside time, outside history, making little if any impact on the values or structures of the order which marginalizes them. As was suggested in the Introduction, Kristeva argues that women must refuse such extremes, and accept that it is necessary for women to identify with some of the values considered to be masculine, and to use 'the endorsed communicative word that institutes stable social exchange', in order to have some impact on the symbolic order, while nevertheless refusing masculine definitions of femininity. The first step is to join with all those who 'swim against the tide', in order to listen for what she calls 'the unspoken in speech, even revolutionary 103 10.1057/9780230597358 - Women and the Word, Jeannette King

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speech; by calling attention at all times to whatever remains unsatisfied, repressed, new, eccentric, incomprehensible, disturbing to the status quo' (p. 38). Michele Roberts' The Wild Girl and Jeanette Winterson's Oranges are Not the Only Fruit both centre on female figures who swim against the tide. These characters could be described as prophets, according to the terms Winterson uses to distinguish the prophet from the priest: The priest has a book with the words set out. Old words, known words, words of power. Words that are always on the surface. Words for every occasion. The words work. They do what they're supposed to do; comfort and discipline. The prophet has no book. The prophet is a voice that cries in the wilderness, full of sounds that do not always set into meaning. The prophets cry out because they are troubled by demons. 1 If priests and prophets have such different relationships to the book of God, so too do men and women, as represented in these two novels. To be a priest is to preach the word as set out in the canonical texts of the established church; since women have been excluded from the priesthood, those with a religious vocation have had to speak from their marginal position outside the church, and find their own words. While the position of the prophet therefore offers greater freedom than the role of the priest, it also evidently represents a threat to the church. The transgressive women in The Wild Girl and Oranges are Not the Only Fruit are marginalized by patriarchal society, defined as being outside the law because outside of male control, so they are well placed to challenge patriarchal practices and values. Sara Maitland has identified the nature of this challenge in her comments on women's intervention in the interpretation of scripture and their rejection of the masculine language used for God. Discussing the apocryphal figure of Lilith, she suggests that Lilith's greatest crime was to name God: The free naming and imaging of God threatens the structures of power, and must therefore be prevented ... no one must question that the way in which God is described officially is the only way that it is proper to describe God. This has led to a prolonged struggle, between priest and prophet, priest and poet, law and charism. (A Big-Enough God, p. 125)

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Maitland sees both women and poets as being typically unsympathetic to abstract and cerebral theological language which contributes to the demonization of the material, particularly the body. The freedom with which feminists represent God and his son is designed to release women from the dualistic mythologies which have traditionally kept women and their bodies in opposition to the godly. In their engagement with such mythologies, The Wild Girl and Oranges are Not the Only Fruit make the body the locus not only of eroticism but of spirituality. Roberts's Mary Magdalene and Winterson's young lesbian heroine are 'prophets' because they challenge the Word of God by representing sexuality in terms of the divine. But the prophet who cries out because 'troubled by demons' can easily be demonized, and legitimately disregarded. In exploring this dilemma, Roberts and Winterson dramatize the issues at the heart of 'Outside Time'. The New Adam and the New Eve Michele Roberts - The Wild Girl2 The text of The Wild Girl purports to be The Gospel according to Mary Magdalene. Mary is presented as a female prophet telling the story of her life with Jesus, a male prophet who is also the Son of God. But the prophetic tradition Jesus belongs to is very different from that on which the Christian church has based its doctrines, for he rejects the dualism which has set male spirituality at odds with female sexuality. Instead he aligns himself with Mary Magdalene, declaring, T am the new Adam, Mary, and you are the new Eve' (p. 82). Just as this 'New Adam' has been sent by God to redeem mankind from the sins of the old Adam, so this 'New Eve' plays a similar part in atoning for the sins of the first Eve. But although the idea of Mary Magdalene as the New Eve became a kind of orthodoxy in the second century, the role of the New Eve is more commonly taken by the Virgin Mary, often seen as the antithesis of the Magdalene. Roberts follows the tradition begun by medieval writers and artists of combining the figure of Mary Magdalene with Mary the sister of Martha and Lazarus, and with the woman who anoints Christ's feet, but in other respects her novel constitutes a radical challenge to the orthodox view of Christ's life and teaching presented in the New Testament gospels. Like other prophets before her, however, Roberts's Mary Magdalene claims to be leading her listeners back to the truth. For while The Wild Girl appears to be the product of contemporary feminist perspectives, it also draws on much older sources - the non-canonical Gnostic Gospels. Roberts

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mentions in particular the Nag Hammadi texts, found in Egypt in 1945, and the Gospel of Mary, another Coptic text found by a German Egyptologist in Cairo in 1896.3 She uses these ancient texts, relating them in turn to their sources in Mother Goddess mythology, to help her imagine what an 'alternative Christianity' would have been like. The Gnostic texts which seem to have most significance for Roberts are The Gospel of Philip, The Gospel of Thomas and, of course, The Gospel of Mary, all of which seem to share a belief in the need for male and female to be reunited, and in the unique - and possibly sexual - relationship between Christ and Mary Magdalene. According to the Gospel of Thomas, for instance, which its translators argue is closely related to the sources of the New Testament gospels, Jesus says, 'when you make the male and the female one and the same, so that the male not be male nor the female female ... then will you enter [the Kingdom]' (p. 121) a statement which is repeated almost verbatim in The Wild Girl (p. 61). The Gospel of Philip refers to Mary as 'the companion of the Saviour', using a word in the original which usually denoted a sexual partner, and states that 'Christ [loved] her more than [all] the disciples, and used to kiss her [often] on her [mouth]' (p. 135). The Gospel of Mary itself not only confirms the privileged nature of that relationship, but suggests the resentment it caused among the other disciples. Simon Peter asks Mary to tell the disciples those secrets which Jesus spoke only to her, but reacts to her revelation with disbelief: 'Did he really speak privately with a woman (and) not openly to us? Are we to turn about and all listen to her? Did her prefer her to us?' (p. 473). It would be a mistake, however, to suggest that the Gnostic Gospels, product of a patriarchal society, provide a proto-feminist reading of Christ's life and teaching. The Apocryphon of John, for instance, perpetuates the dualistic notion that man was put into a material body by the evil powers to keep him imprisoned, and that woman and sexual desire were sent to keep him there. What Roberts does is to focus on those aspects of the Gnostic texts which appear to lend themselves to egalitarian readings, opening up the alternative possibilities for Christianity to which they might have given rise. The Gospel according to Roberts's Magdalene, however, has its foundation in her re-vision of the Old Testament, which again draws on the Gnostic Gospels in places. She dreams an alternative myth of Creation devoid of those binary oppositions which underpin patriarchal gender discourse. Where Genesis states, 'And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Nighf (1.4-5),

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Mary dreams: 'Chaos was simply a darkness, teeming with the promise of complicated life ... So in the beginning there was light, and there was also darkness, the one the sister of the other ... Both expressed God: Masculine and feminine, darkness and light' (p. 78). Here darkness is the source for all else, rather than light's sinister opposite. Similarly with masculine and feminine, the statement 'both expressed God' restates Genesis's 'God created man in his own image ... male and female created he them' (1. 27) in terms which remove the ambiguity which has allowed God to be envisioned as only masculine. Mary's dream, furthermore, echoes the numerous creation myths which suggest that the first differentiated form taken by divinity was female, and that what we know as the God of patriarchy was her son: 'her name is Sophia, and her other name is Wisdom' (p. 78). Sophia's son is called Ignorance, because he believes he has created himself, declaring T am perfect, and I am God, and there is no other God but me' (p. 77). He is recognizable as Jehovah, the God of the Israelites, asserting his unique power and authority to Moses in the first commandment: Thou shalt have no other gods before me ... for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me. (Exodus, 20.3 and 5) Roberts here emphasizes an aspect of the canonical text which is also evident in the Gnostic Testimony of Truth, in which the God of Genesis is represented as a jealous and envious God.4 Such assertions moreover draw attention to the fact that Jehovah is said to have supplanted earlier goddesses. The same intertextuality is evident in the representation of Adam and Eve. Mary dreams that Sophia sends her daughter Zoe, also called Eve, to raise up Adam who has no soul. He thanks her with the words, 'you shall be called the mother of the living because you have given me life'. In Genesis Adam also calls Eve 'the mother of all living' (3. 20), but Roberts's revision of the myth implies that Genesis misrepresents this truth when it depicts Adam giving 'birth' to Eve. She provides an explanation for this 'false' myth in the dream which the Children of Ignorance send to Adam to make him imagine that Eve came from his rib and was meant to serve him. The equation woman = darkness is thus broken. Further changes are made to the Genesis myth, restoring the female principle to the centre of the

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creation myth: Eve/Zoe creates a likeness of herself for Adam, hides in the tree of knowledge and then enters into the snake. In the form of the snake she gives Adam and her likeness, Eve, the apple from the tree so that they gain her wisdom and knowledge. But Mary later dreams that Adam and Eve are driven out of Paradise by Ignorance. Following them, Mary calls on Sophia-Eve-Zoe, 'We have lost your power and a terrible destruction has been unleashed' (p. 166). The fall of the human race is represented as the consequence not of disobedience, prompted by woman, nor even of the desire for divine knowledge, but of denying the Mother and the separation of male and female, a view also expressed in the Gnostic Gospel of Philip: When Eve was still in Adam death did not exist. When she was separated from him death came into being. If he again becomes complete and attains his former self, death will be no more. (p. 141)5 The figures of Ignorance and his children reappear in several of Mary Magdalene's dreams, nightmare figures suggesting the destructive impact of patriarchal religion, and its centrality to the maintenance of patriarchal power. In one manifestation, as 'the Master', Ignorance voices the condemnation of women so frequently expressed by the early Church fathers: - You are a woman damned by your desires and by your freedom ... you are nature, matter, temptation, death, and putrefaction. Through you, and through the product of your cursed body, men know death, and so they arrive in my domain ... This is my judgement on you, which shall endure as long as the Law of the Father prevails. (p. 101) But it is not only women who are the victims here. The sequence of apocalyptic dreams which ends the novel depicts the destruction of Jerusalem foretold not only by the Old Testament but by Christ himself, if the city were not ready to receive him. Mary Magdalene hears another prophet, an old man outside the walls, predicting destruction by the sword, by famine and by fire, a reference to the destruction of Babylon as described in the Book of Revelation (18. 8). This prophet also speaks from outside patriarchal religion when he asserts that this destruction has been caused by his people's rejection 10.1057/9780230597358 - Women and the Word, Jeannette King

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of the female part of God. The city walls are occupied by Ignorance and his children with 'engines of death that were shaped like the sign of maleness', and from them he insists again on his omnipotence: T am the Man, and I am complete, and I am entire ... I can split the seeds of creation in two and make death, and so I am God' (p. 176). This association of Godlike power with death and destruction leads to the unquestioning self-righteousness that justifies using that power the 'might is right' argument. The echo of Robert Oppenheimer's words on the explosion of the first bomb that 'split the seeds of creation' is surely not accidental.6 In contrast, the women who encircle the city in prayer and dance recall the women of Greenham Common, whom Roberts includes in her acknowledgements. They summon up Sophia, who comes out roaring like a dragon, terrible because so long ignored. The return of the repressed is enacted in a scene of high drama, creative power turned into a totally destructive force instead of working in harmony with the other male God acknowledged by the symbolic order. The 'seeds of creation' are split in two; the city is destroyed. The path to redemption after such a Fall is consequently very different from that proposed by orthodox doctrine. The prophetic message Roberts's New Adam brings is that before anyone can enter the Kingdom of Heaven, male and female must be re-united: since God is both male and female, the only way to know God is to acknowledge both in oneself and let them come together, 'the light of the Father married to the darkness of the Mother' (p. 63). Those who are thus saved will be baptized not only in the name of the Trinity, but also in the name of the Mother 'who is earth, matter and soul married and indivisible' (p. 111). Jesus here appears to acknowledge the much older pre-Christian tradition of the Mother Goddess, of which Mary Magdalene is shown to be the direct inheritor. When strange songs come into her head as a child, her mother tells her they are forbidden because they are pagan. After running away from home on her mother's death, and being raped by merchants on the journey, she eventually finds safety in Alexandria with Sibylla, a courtesan, and is comforted in her loss of her mother and motherland by the myth of Demeter and Persephone, which promises to reconnect mother and daughter. There are references to this myth on several occasions when Mary Magdalene experiences a sense of loss: in the 'harrowing of hell' scene Salome instructs her to follow her without looking back, and there is a clear reference to Persephone on the morning Mary wakes with a seed stuck between her teeth. Mary's parting gift from Sibylla, moreover, is an alabaster jar, decorated with the coiled body of a snake - one of the

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mother goddess's most ancient symbols. Returning to Bethany, when she meets Salome, one of Jesus's followers, Salome's song and dance remind her of a dance last seen in Alexandria, where, at the feast of Dionysus, the women call upon 'the young male god they had lost and feared dead and wished to revive' (p. 54), enacting rituals which clearly prefigure Christ's death and resurrection. In imagining Mary Magdalene's life with Jesus, Roberts interweaves the familiar language and stories of the Christian gospels with mothergoddess mythology and imagery in such a way as to indicate their common ground. In doing so, she also suggests the common ground between Jesus and his companion. Even before Mary becomes a disciple, when Lazarus is dying of love in Jesus's absence, she resorts to her own 'magic' using rituals which evoke symbolically the hibernation of bees in their hive, the rising of bread, and the swaddling of a new-born baby, all associated with women. She sings to him, 'Sleep in the mother's womb and be reborn' (p. 40), and tells him she will untie him after three days, so that when he rises upon being called out by Jesus on his return, it is unclear whose healing has played the more significant part. After Jesus's death she too harrows Hell, which is represented as the place of the lost Mother: 'She was an absence, a black pit into which I fell.' In language which recalls descriptions of the mystic's dark night of the soul, removed from God, Mary Magdalene laments, T was a baby, thirsting and starving and dying, and nobody came. Nobody knew my name and nobody touched me. Nobody needed me. Nobody knew I was alive' (p. 115). Her sense of exile, of being torn from her mother, only ends when, with the help of Salome in the guise of mother, she undergoes a kind of ritual rebirth in a structure shaped like a beehive and is reunited with the bridegroom, wearing vine leaves twisted round his head which reiterate the link with Dionysian myth. Feeling as helpless as a new-born baby, Mary is finally united with the mother goddess in all her manifestations. She receives from Salome the blessing of the virgin and the mother and the crone, the three phases of the moon goddess, and encounters 'the Queen of Heaven', the Virgin, who is also a fertility goddess with grapes and corn embroidered on her dress. The common ancestry and nature of these multiple faces of the same power is celebrated: I am She who has many names. I am Ishtar and Astarte, Athar and Artemis and Aphrodite. I am Isis ... and Inanna ... You have seen me as the witch Hecate, and as her sister Demeter, mother and nurse. But I am also Persephone, borne off by Pluto into the

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underworld, there to eat the pomegranate seed and bring the human and the divine together again ... I am She who is three in one. For I am Martha the housewife and I am Mary the mother of the Lord and I am Mary the prostitute. (p. 125) This song of the mother-goddess can also, of course, be interpreted in psychoanalytic terms, as an account of the separation of the mother from the daughter and the impossibility of reuniting them within patriarchal discourse which keeps these three 'faces' of woman separate. After being as if dead for three days, Mary Magdalene wakes with hands covered in bee-stings, and nails clotted with wax, stigmata represented in terms of female symbolism. The identification of Mary with Christ's experience is complete. Denial of the mother here and elsewhere therefore becomes linked with denial of Christ himself. The link between Christianity and the mother goddess is emphasized by Roberts's use of the symbol of the tree which, as the cross, is Christianity's central symbol, but is also a symbol for the mother goddess. As a child Mary Magdalene hides in a tree, which is like a cradle in which she can imagine her mother singing to her. And where a commentator like the third-century bishop of Rome, Hippolytus, describes Mary clinging to Christ as the tree of life in the Easter garden,7 Roberts has Jesus describe Mary as the tree of life: 'on you I hang ... My tree of roses and thorns' (p. 95). The love between Mary Magdalene and Jesus suggests the reunion of the two traditions, dramatized when Jesus cries out on the cross, the tree of death, T am going back to my Mother' (p. 97). When she commemorates the crucifixion years later by roasting a lamb and using its skin for binding her book, Mary observes: The Lamb of God hung on the tree. He embraced a wooden bride, he went back to the tree-mother, to the Spirit of life who hid in the bark and the jostling leaves ... He and I have re-joined them, the tree of life and the tree of death. So I shall marry them again, the flesh and the tree, in making this book. (p. 154) This emphasis on the marriage of the flesh and 'the tree' - the spirit of Christ - is in contrast to the 'false creation' (p. 82) perpetuated by the children of Ignorance, a world which insists on the separation of man and woman, body and soul. By rejecting the dualistic thinking which insists on the separation between the soul and the body, Mary

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also refuses the distinctions between male and female which result from that separation. If body and soul are not in opposition, there is no need to deny the body to nurture the soul. If sexuality is no longer evil, woman - regarded by the church as the evil temptress - can be relieved of some of her responsibility for man's downfall, and entitled to participate more fully in the spiritual life. But belief in the evils of sexuality has been reinforced for orthodox Christians by the Church's insistence on Christ's celibacy, so that Roberts's most radical challenge to the orthodox life of Christ lies in Mary's account of the love between Jesus and herself, a love which is of body and soul, 'conceiving and giving birth between [them] to God' (p. 58). Mary's language might simply seem to belong to the tradition of those many religious mystics who have used the language of the body to describe spiritual union with God, that ecstasy which they see as the summit of religious experience. According to St Teresa of Avila, for instance, at such times the soul is 'conscious of fainting away, in a kind of swoon, with an exceeding sweet delight'. 8 But if ecstasy means, as Karen Armstrong suggests, that the soul leaves the body to become absorbed in the divine (p. 175), then it would seem to mean the denial and death of the body, experienced literally in martyrdom, so often experienced as ecstasy. Kristeva's view of ecstasy similarly sees it as the reward for the virgin's denial of her body. 9 For Roberts's Magdalene, however, the body and sexuality are not simply metaphors for religious experience, but a route to it, or even a form of it. According to Mary Magdalene's 'revelation' to the disciples, Jesus taught: 'The body is the mirror of the soul, and through the body, not by denying it, we enter the other world, the world of eternity' (p. 108). Sexuality, rather than being a distraction from the soul's true concerns, becomes a means by which the soul can reach out beyond itself to the timeless. The language Mary uses to describe orgasm asserts its spiritual dimension - 'this is the resurrection and the life' (p. 67). Sexuality is no longer opposed to spirituality but a manifestation of it. If body and soul, sexuality and spirituality, are no longer in opposition, then neither are those two images of femininity central to patriarchal ideology - the virgin and the whore. Mary the Virgin and Mary Magdalene work together for the redemption of sinners in this text; they sing together in celebration of the breakdown of such polarities: T am the whore ... and the holy one.' After the apocalyptic destruction of Jerusalem, Mary Magdalene has a vision which echoes, yet significantly challenges, the Revelation of St John, who writes:

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And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars ... And she brought forth a man child, who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron: and her child was caught up unto God, and to his throne. (Revelation, 12. 1 and 5) Mary Magdalene sees a woman with the same attributes. But after giving birth to her son Jesus, this mother goes to another: 'the scarlet woman ... sitting in her wilderness, fasting and weeping and praying. She who had been signed as Babylon the Great, as the mother of harlots and of all the abominations of the earth.' And whereas in Revelations this Whore of Babylon is the city which is destroyed, in The Wild Girl she is united with the Virgin Mother: And the first woman came and found her, and held on to her with a strong grip, and did not let go ... Both of them looked steadily at each other, and at the child they held between them, and, opening their mouths, they spoke to each other of many things, and called each other sister. (p. 179) By undermining the patriarchal view of religious devotion and human sexual love as mutually exclusive, Roberts presents a challenge to what Irigaray calls the 'monopoly of divine power by male gods, which is responsible for female sexuality ... being kept from the light and left without representation in terms of the divine'. 10 For Mary Magdalene's body is also the means by which the divine speaks through her, undermining the traditional opposition between the 'Word' of God, embodying his laws and the values promoted by the Church, and the female body. Her gift for songs derives from bodily awareness. When she watches her mother beating eggs she feels her mother is God beating the air, and when she herself is beaten for breaking eggs, the semiotic rhythms of the spoon with which she is beaten transfer to her flesh till she finds herself singing an unfamiliar song. Jesus is described as seeing in her songs the same mystery that he is trying to understand, recognizing them as old songs, but with a new and powerful meaning. The power of the Word and the power of the body are represented not in conflict, as they are in patriarchal religious discourse, but as one and the same, as Mary Magdalene implies

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when she says that Jesus has given women 'the courage to acknowledge our capacity to carry God inside us and to give birth to God in our preaching and songs' (p. 70). The Wild Girl, moreover, develops the link between the Word and the womb, the idea that female spirituality and creativity are in some way connected with the maternal body, through the concept of Mother Earth in a way which relates to the eco-feminism characteristic of some branches of feminist theology.11 One of Mary Magdalene's most powerful prophecies can be seen as a refusal to remain, in Kristeva's terms, 'outside time', marginalized by patriarchal power-structures: - I will show you the power of the woman ... both to create and to destroy ... From the Mother we come, struggling and bawling into the light, and to her we return, choking and crying ... If we do not respect her image in her creation, she will act swiftly to protect herself ... She will descend and slaughter all her children ... causing famines, plagues and drought. (p. 60) The desire to reinstate the female into a valued role in society is presented not as the self-indulgent preoccupation of Western feminists, but as a global social imperative, which is also linked to Jesus's mission to fight for justice and help the poor, the mission celebrated in his mother's Magnificat. Mary Magdalene's 'revelation' from Jesus includes a clear reminder of that mission: 'to serve me, and to serve my Mother and Father, you must serve the needs of those who suffer injustice and poverty' (p. 108). Roberts's apparently radical re-interpretation of the Gospels appears, then, to be more in touch with the early Christian message than later patriarchal interpretations would suggest. The novel also provides a hypothetical demonstration of the process by which the text itself - the Gospel according to Mary Magdalene is suppressed in favour of those patriarchal interpretations. From the moment that Jesus himself is no longer present, Peter, the founder of the apostolic church, betrays his misunderstanding of the nature of the resurrection as it was revealed to Mary by insisting that only men can be apostles, because he and the other male disciples have seen Jesus rise in the flesh, whereas Mary Magdalene has only seen him in the spirit. When Mary expresses her wish to become a priest and to baptize, so as to obey Jesus's command that she bear witness for him, Peter shows himself to be too bound by the prejudices of his own

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society to accept Jesus's revolutionary attitude to women. His first argument is that Jesus himself was a man, so that those who follow him and act in his name must also be men. His second argument is based on social and historical necessity, the fact that it is too dangerous for women to preach: 'amongst disciples ... there is no male and no female. In the eyes of God all of us are equal ... But at the same time we live in the world' (p. 131). But the deeper reason is a fear and loathing of women, aroused by their sexuality. When Peter had asked Jesus to make Mary leave, all the women in the company were afraid of hearing the same accusations of uncleanness they had heard all their lives. Such arguments, as was suggested in Chapter 1, continued to be rehearsed throughout the history of the church. Mary's dream of witches being burned at the stake is represented as the logical conclusion of the process of exclusion and vilification begun here. In contrast, Roberts's representation of Mary Magdalene shows her in the role of 'chief female disciple, first apostle and beloved friend of Christ', removing the accretions by which she became, according to Haskins, 'transformed into a penitent whore' (p. 15).12 While it may seem curious that such a figure should become one of the most popular female saints, much of the appeal of this figure for the church appears to be that, according to this reading, she accepts her interpellation as a sinner and repents - in other words, she fully acknowledges the validity of the male symbolic order, its judgements and its values. She becomes the prototype, after Eve, of the sinful sexual woman, and, as the sinner who repents, provides a better model for real women than the Virgin, who is without sin. 13 Through restoring Mary Magdalene to her role as the 'Apostle of the Apostles', Roberts challenges that later reading which excludes her and changes her role, foregrounding the contested nature of the status and origin of the canonical text, and leading the reader to ask, 'To whom then does the Word belong?' But it could be argued that The Wild Girl also demonstrates a process of self-silencing. Mary Magdalene places great emphasis on her right to speak in accordance with her own vision. Even when Jesus asks whether she has acted in his name and his father's name, she is confident enough to respond, 'What I have done, I did in the name of God, who has many names' (p. 42). She writes her own book, claiming divine authority for her words by saying, a voice spoke to me, saying: take this vision, and eat it up and swallow and digest it well. And afterwards write it down in your

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And yet she appears to back away from this responsibility, and when exiled in Massilia (Marseilles), admits that she has not fulfilled her mission. The reasons she offers are semi-ironic comments on the practicalities of women's lives which so often prevent them from fulfilling their 'higher' destinies - the need to care for the child she bore to Jesus and the need to grow crops to survive. But she also refers to a deeper need: the need to bear witness to God through prayer and silence as well as through words and preaching, the need to be alone with God in the wilderness, ... the need to found a community which would testify to God through stillness as much as through activity. (p. 155) Here Mary seems to retreat into the kind of silent mysticism which Kristeva sees as a refusal of and withdrawal from time and history. There is, moreover, ambivalence in her attitude towards her book, which she buries because ideas are dangerous and make people kill each other. These dangers are made graphically clear through Mary Magdalene's dream of book-burning, and of a hall of judgment where one man, representing all men, is on trial for their crimes against women. After a savage delineation of those crimes, she is appalled to recognize the face of the accused as that of Christ, who asks her whether she now understands what she is capable of. Roberts is clearly as aware as Kristeva of the dangers for feminists of separatism, and of scapegoating, but her novel also seems to illustrate one of the fundamental double-binds which perplex feminists. In her eagerness to assert that 'each of us can receive revelation' (p. 112), and that no one has the power to decide what is truth, Mary Magdalene seems to undermine the authority of her own Words, in spite of claiming divine inspiration. Anxious not to replace the authoritarian monologism of patriarchal discourse with another monolithic 'truth', Roberts can be seen simply to be taking a stand to defend plurality of belief and meaning. At the same time, however, she seems to be in danger of playing down the power and justice of the feminist argument. Mary Magdalene's reservations about her role as prophet are also motivated by a growing distrust of the Word which highlights the

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book ... And you must go and prophesy to many peoples and nations ... and tell them what you have seen. (p. 178)

problematic nature of women's relationship to language. Aware of the difficulty of 'finding the truth in words', her doubts and confusions increase: 'With every mark of ink on the page, I obscure what lies behind it. What my language reveals, it also hides' (p. 162). The difficulty of using the language of this world to describe that which is essentially other-worldly has long been recognized. The Wild Girl implies that when wholeness is finally attained and there is an end to dualistic modes of thought and perception, there will be no need for language at all: 'Words are for the waking world, to establish the distance and separation we need between ourselves and between us and the rest of creation' (p. 123). If we approach this ideal of wholeness from a psychoanalytic point of view, it takes us back to the child's relationship to the mother, to Kristeva's semiotic stage in which the child does not perceive itself to be separate from the mother. But this is also a pre-linguistic stage, and any return to it can only lead to silence and/or madness. There are also gender-specific implications, like the often-expressed anxiety that women cannot express themselves effectively in the language of the male symbolic order. If it is better to remain silent to avoid having one's meaning compromised or creating yet another master-discourse, women's voices can only end up as voices crying in the wilderness, never engaging with historical and political reality. I would argue, however, that in The Wild Girl Roberts performs a fine balancing act between these options of silence and compromise. The novel illustrates the way that women have been silenced and have been complicit in silencing themselves, but at the end of the novel, Mary Magdalene acknowledges and accepts a new call to travel and proclaim the Word, with the ironic coda, 'then I went inside to make breakfast' (p. 180). And the novel as a whole performs an act of reclamation. Mary's book is represented as reaching modern readers only because her granddaughter dug it up. In writing Mary's gospel, Roberts acts as another 'granddaughter', giving voice to the silenced and so recreating the buried matrilinear tradition which the text both celebrates and mourns. Roberts has acknowledged that she made Mary Magdalene a writer in order to 'investigate possible links between women's creativity and sexuality'. 14 This, therefore, is the central message that Mary Magdalene passes on to her daughter: T shall tell her that through her woman's body she knows the Spirit and the Word, that through her body she experiences God' (p. 180).

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Like Mary Magdalene, Jeanette - the heroine of Winterson's Oranges are Not the Only Fruit - is thought to be possessed by demons. As in Mary's case, those demons are a way of accounting for her unlicensed sexuality, doubly unacceptable to the church in Jeanette's case because she is a lesbian. Unlike Mary Magdalene, she refuses to relinquish them and repent, so that she must be expelled from the church. And in this novel, the link between female sexuality and women's access to the Word of God is made explicit: Jeanette's deviance is seen as the consequence of women being allowed too great a voice within the church. Morality, threatened by female sexual deviance, once again provides the justification for silencing women. But Jeanette's 'demons' are not driven out; they are the source of the individual insights into theology and sexuality that constitute her 'prophecies'. Where Mary Magdalene sees heterosexual union as a manifestation of divine love, Winterson's heroine sees such divinity in her sexual love for other women. 15 The novel's chapter headings, taken from the first eight books of the Old Testament, provide the first indication of Jeanette's intimate relationship with both the Bible and her church, which initially appears to place few restrictions on women's right to a voice. The first five chapters - named after the Books of the Pentateuch, containing the Laws of Moses - establish the Taws' by which Jeanette's youth is governed and her identity shaped. 16 But she belongs to one of those sectarian churches which have allowed women the greatest opportunity for participation. Jeanette, the narrator, comments, 'The women in our church were strong and organized. If you want to talk in terms of power I had enough to keep Mussolini happy' (p. 121). Hating the Catholic Church, with its rituals and priests, Jeanette's mother appears to be the living proof of the view that Protestantism improved women's position in the church and society by placing so much emphasis on the individual's reading of the Bible as a means of reaching God and achieving salvation. She regularly neglects traditional 'woman's work', such as the care of her family, for 'the Lord's work'. As the Missionary Secretary, she plays an influential role not only in the local church, but in spreading the Word world-wide on the radio. Convinced of the power of the Word, like all the faithful who shrink the Hallelujah Giant to six feet through their prayers, she is also convinced of her direct access to God. Her daughter sees her as an Old

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Priests, Prophets and the Love of W o m e n : Jeanette Winterson - Oranges are Not the Only Fruit

Testament prophet, who has visions and dreams like William Blake. At times even, Jeanette tells us, she 'invented theology' (p. 5). At the centre of the novel, moreover, is an intense mother-daughter relationship which seems to fill that gap which Irigaray sees in Western religious discourse. Jeanette's adoption is described in terms reminiscent of the Nativity, a female child taking the place of the Christ child, a 'gift of God', given to her mother to carry out her will, rather than the father's. Her mission is handed down to her from her mother, for whom it has provided a very necessary sublimation of her intense passion, preventing her from 'being burned by [her] own flame' (p. 9), as the story of the death of a moth illustrates. This mother, who is never named, as if herself possessing the power to name rather than be named, seems to be not only in full control of the Word herself, but ready and able to pass on that power to her daughter, challenging patrilinear lines of succession and prerogative and telling Jeanette, 'You can change the world' (p. 10). Winterson writes, in an autobiographical piece closely relating to the novel, 'the child preached to the people in the might of the Spirit. Many and more filled the church, consumed by Pentecostal fire.'17 This church appears not to value the male child at the expense of the female; Jeanette feels totally accepted, part of a family. The power possessed by Jeanette's mother is, however, derived from the church and totally contingent on her conformity to its values and requirements, as stipulated by its male pastors. She is an example therefore of the woman who identifies totally with the male symbolic order, deriving her status from it by serving it. Her conformity to the church's patriarchal view of female sexuality is evident throughout the novel. She appears to have no sexual relationship with her husband, and by adopting a child comes as close as is humanly possible to emulating the Virgin in becoming a mother without sin. Instead of 'the jolt beneath the hip bone', for her it is 'water and the word' (p. 10). As Kristeva puts it, 'a mother participates in the community of the Christian Word not by giving birth to her children, but by preparing them for baptism' (About Chinese Women, p. 25), by inculcating in them the prohibitions of the symbolic order. Her body is denied, even in its asexual dimension: as Jeanette comments, 'we never usually touched except in anger' (p. 100). She clearly identifies with the myths of generation and power underpinning patriarchal ideologies, conceiving of Jeanette as having sprung from her head, like Athena from Jove's. Jeanette is not therefore being brought up in a matrilinear society but in a patriarchy, her mother indoctrinating her in the values and

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beliefs of a church which ultimately serves male interests. The very active role played by the women members of that church is circumscribed, their frustrated emotions and ambitions being safely channelled into a servicing role by charismatic male preachers. As Jeanette observes when Pastor Spratt, an Erroll Flynn look-alike, is crusading, 'a lot of women found the Lord that week' (p. 8). The church's fundamental view of women is evident in Pastor Finch's comment on how easily evil can suddenly fill a man, and how even more easily a woman. When Jeanette is disturbed by the very negative view of sexual relations held by all around her, where all men are seen as 'beasts', the only reassurance her mother can offer is to remind her that her name has been put down for missionary school, and she should remember Jane Eyre and St John Rivers. Jeanette's mother has taken a novel which puts a premium on women's need for both passion and autonomy, and rewritten its ending so that Jane's happyever-after is predicated on a highly asexual relationship, in which she serves a man who serves the Lord. Given that Jeanette's mother has identified herself with the patriarchal church in this way, it is inevitable that she will betray her daughter when Jeanette comes into conflict with the church by falling in love with another young woman, Melanie. But this love is not intended as an act of defiance against the church's teaching. Jeanette cannot believe that this first sexual relationship is one of those Unnatural Passions which have led to the 'epidemic of demons' sweeping the north west because it does not feel 'awful' (p. 86). Indeed she encourages Melanie's interest in the church, reading the Bible and praying with her. She is the greater conformist of the two, worried that if Melanie studies theology at university she will encounter heresies; whereas Melanie thinks she should understand how other people think, Jeanette knows they are wrong. It is not until both 'families' her own and the church - eject her that she realizes that both are dedicated to the preservation of male dominance. For her mother's powerful voice is ultimately a mouthpiece for the patriarchal church. She is ready to deny not only her daughter but her own freedom to speak. When the Council pronounces its judgement on the two girls, it attributes their sins to an even more serious aberration: 'going against the teachings of St Paul, and allowing women power in the church.' Jeanette is told to give up preaching as well as her aberrant sexual practices. Her mother's concurrence in this judgement is an event that makes nonsense of Jeanette's whole life. Her mother's public statement reads like a denunciation at a show trial:

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women had specific circumstances for their ministry, ... the Sunday School was one of them, the Sisterhood another, but the message belonged to the men ... My mother droned on about the importance of missionary work for a woman, that I was clearly such a woman, but had spurned my call in order to wield power on the home front, where it was inappropriate. (p. 131) Jeanette's mother is readier to be a priest than a prophet, prepared to read the words set out for her, in this case a statement prepared with the help of the pastor. The last three chapters of the novel, named after the Histories written by the Prophets, deal with Jeanette's rejection of the church and the formulation of her own theology. In 'Joshua', the first of them, Jeanette begins her own version of truth, her own 'prophecies', designed to attack the structures of belief and value constructed by her mother, until the walls come down. 'Joshua' is preceded by Jeanette's story of the elect sitting inside at a winter feast, the women suffering most from the cold because of their bare shoulders; none of them notices that outside the revolution is beginning, since they believe nothing can change their world. This hint of the impending apocalypse implies that revolutions are caused by the behaviour of those inside the privileged order. As Jeanette says after her mother's betrayal, 'That walls should fall is the consequence of blowing your own trumpet' (p. 110). Jeanette's story about Winnet, a young girl trapped by a sorcerer, is the story of her own relationship to her mother. The sorcerer wants Winnet to be his apprentice, a 'missionary' for his ideas, spreading a power which will entrap yet more innocents. Once in his castle, she forgets how she got there, just as Jeanette was kept ignorant of her own parentage: She believed she had always been in the castle, and that she was the sorcerer's daughter. He told her she was. That she had no mother, but had been specially entrusted to his care by a powerful spirit. (p. 141) Winnet, too, is condemned for an illicit romantic relationship, and refuses like Jeanette to be defined by the male symbolic order and interpellated into the role of a sinner: 'Winnet could not ask forgiveness when she was innocent' (p. 143). This chapter, 'Judges', thus enacts not only the church's judgment of Jeanette, but her judgment of them and

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her mother: Tf there's such a thing as spiritual adultery, my mother was a whore' (p. 132). Her use of the word 'whore' signals a new readiness to attribute her own meanings to words, other than those imposed by the symbolic order. As she says later, if she had stayed and conformed, she could have been a priest, but she wants to be able to use her own words, to define herself instead of being defined. But for Jeanette, learning to use her own words is a long and complex process, demonstrated through the author's use of a 'dialogic' technique which counterpoints different voices against one another. The Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin coined the term 'dialogic' to describe both the nature of language in general - which can only function in dialogue - only taking on meaning in context, and what he sees as the defining characteristic of the novel, particularly evident in certain types of novel in which different voices, different points of view, collide without any hierarchy of voices being established by the author. 18 Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, like The Wild Girl, enters into such a dialogue with other texts and discourses, notably the Bible, challenging the closed, authoritative view of the world embodied in monologic texts which pretend to be the 'last word'. The representation of Jeanette's childhood, spent largely in the presence of adults, highlights the child's response to and use of the language of adults, which in turn makes free use of biblical references, quotations and phrasing. Having been taught to read from the Book of Deuteronomy, Jeanette's imaginative life is peopled not with 'horsies, bunnies and little ducks', but 'Abominations and Unmentionables' (p. 41), including testicles which Jeanette has to look up for herself. When she goes to primary school, Jeanette's language disturbs those who do not share this world and its discourse, which is felt to be inappropriate for a child because it expresses concerns from which children, according to educational orthodoxy, should be protected. Her teacher's expectations about the content of essays titled 'What I Did in my Summer Holidays' make Jeanette's essay appear deviant. Jeanette writes about Auntie Betty, who was thought to be at death's door, but got better, 'thanks to my mother who stayed up all night struggling mightily' (p. 37). Her teacher is discomforted on two counts. In the first place her 'lambs' are not supposed to be exposed to such serious subjects as fatal illness, or such unorthodox subjects as faith healing. Secondly the phrase 'struggling mightily' does not belong to the discourse of primary school essays. Jeanette's tendency to juxtapose things usually kept separate, and to present items and ideas out of their usual linguistic context keeps her on the margins of school life with its firmly

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established practices and ideologies. The only language they can offer her is far too restrictive for her desire to open up new territories of experience. Her hyacinth display - The Annunciation - which she sees as a 'clever marriage of horticulture and theology' (p. 45), is not appreciated because it does not conform to her needlework teacher's expectations. This adult recognition depends on perceiving the surrounding world in terms of learned patterns which categorize, differentiate and structure the chaos of experience. Where these patterns separate the serious from the trivial, for instance, the child's perspective is totally non-selective: everything observed and overheard receives the same degree of attention. At the linguistic level one of the most important patterns to be learned is the distinction between literal and metaphorical meaning. Jeanette's movement between these different types of discourse and the levels of interpretation they make possible is one of the most important elements in the learning process that leads ultimately to a voice and a view of her own. The novel opens with the literal statement, 'Like most people I lived for a long time with my mother and father' (p. 3), using a style that draws little attention to itself, in the manner of 'realist' narratives which present themselves as autobiographical history. But this is almost immediately followed by the metaphorical 'my mother liked to wrestle'. While we would of course be surprised by any piece of creative writing which did not make use of metaphor, the shift between the literal and metaphoric in this novel is often made problematic and usually comic by the narrator's apparent unawareness of the resulting shifts in meaning and tone. Jeanette's deadpan style, mixing a variety of adult registers without fully understanding their connotations and appropriacy, creates regular bathos in its anticlimaxes, but also articulates her experience of religion as an integral part of everyday reality, rather than a distinct realm of experience for Sundays and holy days, marked off by its own distinct language. Much of the metaphorical texture of the novel, moreover, derives from its dialogue with the Bible, as the chapter title 'Genesis' leads the reader to expect. But the biblical text is often brought into a curious focus by the subtle and unheralded shifts in and out of the child's perspective. The dialogic aspect of the novel makes possible the interplay of different voices, reading and responding to the canonical text. And the narrator's dialogue with the Bible becomes a group discussion with the introduction of her mother's voice and view. When the narrator Jeanette observes, 'We had no Wise Men', referring to the familiar nativity figures, the reason she

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gives for their absence is her mother's - 'she didn't believe there were any wise men'; the removal of capital letters here marks the shift from religious discourse to personal prejudice. The narrator continues by observing that they did have sheep, shifting easily from shared religious symbolism to the child's memory of the content of Sunday lunch: 'One of my earliest memories is me sitting on a sheep at Easter while she told me the story of the Sacrificial Lamb. We had it on Sundays with potato' (p. 4). While her language is apparently saturated with the discourse of her church, Jeanette's childish usage ironically and unconsciously parodies the doctrine of transubstantiation underlying the Catholic mass which to her church is heresy. The possibilities of distancing herself from that discourse are hinted at in the adult narrator's mocking echo. The distinction between what is for literal interpretation and what might be metaphorical is further confused for Jeanette by belonging to a church in which literal interpretation of the Bible is the norm. Such literal-mindedness is extended, moreover, by many members of the church to secular life. Her mother, for instance, is horrified by the use of anthropomorphic language in a radio programme about 'the family life of snails', which she regards as 'an Abomination ... like saying we come from monkeys' (p. 21). And yet in this society the use of biblical language rich in metaphor is also the norm, so that when Jeanette tells her mother 'the world is very quief (p. 24), her mother assumes she is speaking metaphorically and carries on reading. It is left for Miss Jewsbury, who conducts the Sisterhood choir, to recognize that the child is deaf. It is hardly surprising, then, that as a child Jeanette similarly confuses the two, so that her dreams of marriage are sometimes troubled by a pig-groom, because she has heard people talking about the woman in her street who 'had married a pig' (p. 69). Reading Beauty and the Beast only confirms her confusion: 'What do you do if you marry a beast?' (p. 71). But the novel prioritizes neither literal nor metaphoric meaning, nor does it create any hierarchy among the many voices that constitute the text. The more literal discursive style that maintains the illusion of realist narrative in the 'autobiographical' strand of the novel provides what Bakhtin calls 'centripetal' discourse - working towards unitary meaning - to steer the reader through the 'facts' of Jeanette's life. What he calls 'centrifugal' discourse (Bakhtin Reader, pp. 74-7), disrupting the sense of unitary meaning by opening up multiple alternative meanings, is provided in Winterson's 'spiral narrative' (p. xiii) by the metaphorical aspects of her style and allegorical

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narratives which enable the writer to move between different levels of meaning. Through this discourse the narrator is able to challenge the church's literal-minded reading of the Bible which provides the main scaffolding for the structure of values and beliefs which is meant to shape her destiny. The distinction between so-called 'facts', or 'history', and their meaning, or 'stories', is fully explored in 'Deuteronomy', 'the last book of the law', before all such Taws' are challenged for good. Here the narrator discusses the way that particular versions of past events are privileged over others and become 'history'. In contrast, stories function as metaphor, open to individual interpretation, rather than analysis. She argues that, since both story and history are readings of the past, the distinction between them is false, but provides help for those who want to know what they should and should not believe. Above all, this distinction has an ideological function: 'Knowing what to believe had its advantages. It built an empire and kept people where they belonged, in the bright realm of the wallet.' This function can operate at the individual as well as political level: 'often history is a means of denying the past. Denying the past is to refuse to recognize its integrity. To fit it, force it, function it, to suck out the spirit until it looks the way you think it should' (p. 92). When Melanie suggests that Jeanette's 'version' of their relationship 'would make a good story' (p. 166), she is implying that it bears little relationship to 'the history, the nothing-at-all facts' to which she wishes to reduce the past. These relationships between literal and metaphorical readings, between 'fact' and 'stories', are brought into -sharp focus because Oranges are Not the Only Fruit is a novel about people for whom the world and the book are in constant dialogue, the world being interpreted in the light of the Book - the Bible. As a child Jeanette is brought up to see the world as a book to be read, and to believe that her mother has the key by which to read it: 'everything in the natural world was a symbol of the Great Struggle between good and evil' (p. 15). Books, moreover, provide what she believes is a clear-cut guide to interpreting the complexities of the world, so that she goes to the library in times of confusion, believing that words 'couldn't change half way through a sentence like people, so it was easier to spot a lie' (p. 70). And at times the world can be in a sense re-written to conform to the Book. As Winterson says in an interview on the subject, in her youth 'books were not recording angels, they were kinetic forces. They did not write down the world, they altered it forever' ('Better than Sex', p. 4). But her use of the plural 'books' is highly significant, for as a teenager she

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found herself drawn to books other than the Bible.19 Similarly, even as a child Jeanette is resistant to the fixed unitary readings of the world and the book offered her: 'The daily world was a world of Strange Notions, without form, and therefore void. I comforted myself as best I could by always rearranging their version of the facts' (p. 47). Her response to a male-centred universe is to create her own world(s). Through writing her own 'stories', and drawing on folk tales and Arthurian legend, Jeanette creates alternative structures of belief and value to those provided by the Bible which is her primary source. These stories provide the 'centrifugal' element in her dialogue with a church that damns her with its unchangeable judgement. This 'alternative' discourse first appears in the novel's opening chapter, where the phrase 'Once upon a time' (p. 9) signals a very obvious shift into the register of the fairy tale of the over-sensitive princess, alerting the reader to a different level of significance from that of the discourse that precedes it. The story provides a fanciful yet potent comment on both the preceding 'realist' account of Jeanette's mother, and the following account of Jeanette's 'genesis', which convey her mother's vision of her child's destiny through a biblical register, evident in such phrases as 'and so it was', and in the repetition of 'We stood on the hill and my mother said' (p. 10). While the biblical style underlines the mother's messianic vision, the style of the fairytale undermines it, alerting the reader to the adult narrator's dissociation from it. Jeanette's first explicit theological disagreement is caused by a sermon on perfection, which the Pastor defines as 'flawlessness' (p. 58). Jeanette responds with a story about a prince looking for perfection. He considers himself expert enough to write a book about it, but destroys the woman who most closely embodies it because he, too, is mistakenly looking for flawlessness. The woman tells him that the search for perfection is in fact a search for balance or harmony, and that what he wants does not exist. Undeterred, the Prince buys a book from an orange-seller - by implication Jeanette's mother, for whom 'oranges are the only fruif - about 'how to build a perfect person ... It's a bit weird ... this geezer gets a bolt through the neck' (p. 65). The echoes of the Frankenstein legend reflect on her mother's folly in trying to construct her own perfect being, her own messiah. For her most radical challenge to biblical authority, however, Jeanette turns to the Arthurian legend of the Holy Grail, finding there a text which vindicates her quest for a perfect love by linking together the human and divine. In her rewriting of the legend 10.1057/9780230597358 - Women and the Word, Jeannette King

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Jeanette represents herself as Sir Perceval, the youngest darling of the court, who leaves in search of the Holy Grail because he has had 'the vision of perfect heroism and, for a fleeting moment, the vision of perfect peace' (p. 161). As a child Jeanette also feels like a member of a magic circle dedicated to the love of God, and when her search for perfect love leads her to another woman, it does not in any way conflict with her love for God, any more than Perceval's holy mission conflicts with his love for Arthur. It is in fact a manifestation of the same need and the same love: if God is your emotional role model, very few human relationships will match up to it ... I thought once it had become possible, and that glimpse has set me wandering, trying to find the balance between earth and sky. If the servants hadn't rushed in and parted us, I might have been disappointed, might have snatched off the white samite to find a bowl of soup. (p. 165) According to Sir Thomas Malory's version of the legend, Morte d'Arthur, Perceval is the only knight of the round table who finally sees the grail, which vanishes when approached by those who are not of perfect purity. In using the legend, therefore, Jeanette explores allegorically and at a more sophisticated level her own intuitive belief, ironically found in the Bible: 'To the pure all things are pure' (p. 103). Jeanette is therefore not afraid to enter into dialogue with the Bible, taking phrases redolent with its power and authority and endowing them with a meaning which to the orthodox can only be blasphemous. She is not prepared to accept that her love for Melanie puts her outside the circle of the blessed and God's word as represented in the Bible. As Winterson has said of the events which appear to have formed the basis of this novel, she refused 'to believe that [her] love and that book were separated by the chaos of damnation': 'the Word became flesh, I saw God in another woman and I loved her' (T used to live ... ', p. 155). Jeanette's stories create a structure of values and beliefs which justify her refusal to be interpellated as a sinner. When Melanie's fiance tells her he forgives them both, there is for her only one possible response: she spits at him. As Sir Perceval, moreover, Jeanette steps into a male role which, like her love for women, challenges heterosexual gender constructions. After her judgment by the church Jeanette adroitly identifies the real issues involved:

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having taken on a man's world in other ways I had flouted God's law and tried to do it sexually... The devil had attacked me at my weakest point: my inability to realize the limitations of my sex. (pp. 131-2) But although Jeanette's greatest crime, according to her mother, is 'aping men' (p. 125), in reality she is damned for identifying too closely with the female, with the mother, against the Law of the Father. Since her mother has betrayed her female self in the service of that order, Jeanette has to turn elsewhere for an image of the maternal with which to identify. But in this novel the very concept of motherhood is problematic. When Jeanette finds out about her adoption and wants to see her natural mother, her mother insists, 'You were always mine, I had you from the Lord I'm your mother ... She was a carrying case' (pp. 98-9). For Jeanette's mother, motherhood is a function and a relationship, not a matter of biology. Her position challenges essentialist notions of gender in a way which most feminists would approve of. However, she is ready to abandon that role once her daughter behaves in a way she cannot accept, and asserts at her friend Elsie's funeral, 'She's no daughter of mine' (p. 153), making that relationship appear very flimsy, easily fractured and devoid of the unconditional love associated with the maternal ideal. The return of Jeanette's natural mother, whom Jeanette is not allowed to see, leads to the child's first experience of uncertainty, which is linked textually to her uncertainty over the nature of her feelings for Melanie, in spite of a chronological gap between the two events. The structure of the narrative therefore suggests that Jeanette's lesbianism may be a response to the loss of her mother, as well as a challenge to patriarchal morality. Michele Roberts sees this as a common theme in contemporary women's writing: it's a question of tailoring the myth of the lost mother to modern needs ... The lost mother is triumphantly found through lesbian love ... The heroine discovers her true self and sexuality through acknowledging her lesbianism. This is the first story that many women of my generation have needed to tell. 20 Since Jeanette cannot identify with the female self through her mother, she has to find that self in other women, who represent a challenge to the male symbolic order with which her mother identifies. As Carter Heyward puts it, 10.1057/9780230597358 - Women and the Word, Jeannette King

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There are a number of such autonomous women in Jeanette's life. The most important of them, Elsie Norris, acts as a surrogate mother who provides the kind of tenderness and understanding that Jeanette fails to get from her mother. When Jeanette is in hospital, it is Elsie who takes the place of her mother, too busy to visit, and it is Elsie who listens and comforts Jeanette in her distress over Melanie. Known within the church as Testifying Elsie because of her readiness to testify to the Lord's intervention into even the most trivial aspects of her life, Elsie nevertheless shows an independence of life and thought which encourages Jeanette's own heterodoxy. She is the person who first teaches Jeanette the importance of stories and the imagination. In Jeanette's story of Winnet, Elsie is represented by Abednego, the raven, named after one of the mice in Elsie's home-made tableau of the Old Testament figures, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego in the fiery furnace. Abednego warns Winnet to leave the sorcerer, because if she stays, she will be destroyed by grief. He drops into Winnef s hand a rough brown pebble, telling her it is his heart, which has turned to stone because he chose to stay. The rough brown pebble reappears throughout the novel, acting as a kind of talisman to remind Jeanette of who she is. It is first given to her by her orange demon, who represents the repressed desires which she needs to acknowledge: 'We're here to keep you in one piece, if you ignore us, you're quite likely to end up in two pieces, or lots of pieces.' In trying to exorcise Jeanette by driving out the demons they hold responsible for her sexual deviance, the church authorities create the repression that can only lead ultimately to breakdown. Jeanette clearly understands the ideological nature of the struggle here: 'Can love really belong to the demon? ... If they want to get at my demon they'll have to get at me' (p. 106). In metaphorically giving Jeanette her heart, Elsie therefore functions as a contrast to her mother, who features in another of the stories as the woman with a heart of stone. Jeanette's mother is regularly associated with the Forbidden City of stone, now in ruins, and the stone walls which Jeanette, like the prophet Joshua, must blow down. Stone may represent the ancients, but authoritarian institutions like the church, supported by laws written on tablets of stone, always deny the needs of the individual and the body. Jeanette knows it is 'the nature

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The lesbian has symbolized historically the woman who does not need men to make her a full person ... In other words, in a sexist/heterosexist society, the lesbian represents the autonomous, free-spirited woman - and thus she is feared and despised.21

of stone to convert bone'. Stone here represents the forces of repression: 'At one time or another there will be a choice: you or the wall... The City of Lost Chances is full of those who chose the wall' (p. 110). But the world outside the church of her childhood also fails to satisfy Jeanette's needs. Winnet wants to go to the city where no one works, and people only think about the world, believing that in a place dedicated to the truth, no one will betray her. She clearly represents Jeanette's idealization of life at Oxford university, but although Oxford is represented as a citadel which Jeanette has not yet felt the need to attack, neither does it guarantee to safeguard her integrity: This ancient city is made of stone and stone walls that have not fallen yet. Like paradise it is bounded by rivers... If you drink from the wells ... you might live forever, but there is no guarantee you will live forever as you are. You might mutate. The waters might not agree with you. They don't tell you this. (p. 156) It appears, therefore, that the repressive forces acting on Jeanette, proscribing her love for women and so structuring her relationship with her mother that it can only lead to betrayal, do not operate only inside her church, but are symptomatic of a society in which, to quote Adrienne Rich, heterosexuality is a 'political institution'. 22 Does she also imply that Jeanette's sexuality is part of what Rich calls the 'lesbian continuum' (p. 27) of woman-identified experience in which all women participate, whether or not they have had sexual experiences with another woman? If lesbianism is seen not only as the ultimate challenge to patriarchal familial structures, but as a condition which unites all women, whether they recognize it or not, it can easily lead to the kind of separatist fantasy of the all-female community based upon 'female' values of co-operation, non-aggression, nurturing, creativity and the life of the planet which Kristeva sees as such a danger. 23 Michele Roberts similarly warns against such idealization when she goes on, in the essay mentioned above, to identify the second story that women of her generation need to tell: a conventional lesbian romance may be so concerned with establishing the finding of the lost, good, nurturing mother that it can make no space for the exploration of 'bad' feelings, angry feelings, just as the conventional heterosexual romance smooths over conflict between the man and the woman. I'd love to read a lesbian

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romance which tackled head-on the anger and rage that women can feel for each other, the way in which the bad mother can surface in a relationship, the way in which women can exercise power over each other. ('Write, She Said', p. 231) Although there are no representations of successful heterosexual relationships in this novel, Winterson is far from idealizing lesbian relationships, any more than she idealizes motherhood. Neither of Jeanette's young lovers proves faithful, instead betraying her just as her mother does. And while Elsie embodies the good mother, the 'bad mother' who exercises power over other women is embodied in Miss Jewsbury, the closet lesbian who, under the guise of providing Jeanette with the support that she badly needs, takes advantage of her age and inexperience by seducing her. The novel's ending opens up these complexities further rather than resolving them. The Book of Ruth from which the last chapter takes its title is a story both of homecoming for Naomi, Ruth's mother-inlaw, and of female bonding, summed up in Ruth's declaration, after the death of her husband, to Naomi, 'whither thou goest, I will go' (Ruth, 1.16). Jeanette herself returns home, but how does she position herself in relation to her mother? Her mother retains a charismatic power. Like the sorcerer in Jeanette's story she has 'tied a thread around [her daughter's] button, to tug when she pleased'. Jeanette goes on, T knew a woman in another place. Perhaps she would save me. But what if she were asleep? What if she sleep-walked beside me and I never knew?' (p. 171). Jeanette has now learned not to expect perfect loyalty from those she loves, whereas there is some comfort to be had from familiarity. Her mother reinforces that sense of familiarity by behaving as if nothing has changed, but she herself has. On entering the house Jeanette finds her mother has applied a more modern discourse to the traditional forms of Christian worship in her rendition of Hark the Herald Angels Sing, accompanied by the rhythm of the samba. Still active in her church, she is now working on the town's first mission for coloured people, feeding them with tinned pineapple, since 'after all ... oranges are not the only fruit' (p. 167). Given emphasis as the novel's title, this statement is obviously meant to be taken seriously as a conciliatory gesture of acceptance towards her daughter. Moreover, the reference to orange brings other ambiguities into focus. If Jeanette's demon is orange, and oranges were originally her mother's only fruit, it seems possible that Jeanette's

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repressed rebellious self is an aspect of her mother, that there is an identification between mother and daughter that neither can acknowledge since the church has weakened the bonds that should have held them together, like Ruth and Naomi. One of the unresolved mysteries of Jeanette's childhood is the photograph of a woman, 'Eddie's sister', in the photograph album; the silence surrounding it may indicate her mother's love for another woman. As Miss Jewsbury tells Jeanette, her mother is a woman who knows all about women's feelings. Jeanette allows her mother to have the novel's last words: 'This is Kindly Light calling Manchester' (p. 171). Her mother is apparently ready to reclaim her authority to speak, to be 'the Light'. Jeanette feels her life has come full circle, but the question remains, is this closing of the circle a restoration of the mother-daughter relationship on a new, more tolerant footing, or a rebuilding of the walls of the patriarchal citadel around her? 24 An answer can perhaps be found by remembering that Jeanette is the narrator of her own text, so that the figure revisiting the site of conflict is not the figure within it, but the one who emerged from it. Oranges are Not the Only Fruit is what Pam Morris calls a 'performative text', illustrating Kristeva's 'sense of identity as performance, often with elements of self-parody' (Literature and Feminism, p. 154). In such texts the narrator is not so much describing her life as constructing herself out of a variety of texts and discourses. That self is to be found in the dialogic juxtaposition of voices, rather than in any single narratorial presence, and so the text avoids the kind of rigidly defined, unitary sense of self which patriarchal religious discourse attempts to impose on women. In this kind of writing, Morris suggests, a self constructs self as voice or performance, yet retains a comic cynicism towards that construction of identity. It is this parodic resilience that constitutes the aesthetic control in their work, preventing any emotional excess or slide into a purely confessional discourse. (Literature and Feminism, p. 155) The use of parody thus allows the possibility of escape from otherwise potentially deterministic gender constructions. Parody, moreover, is not simply an echo, but an attempt both to identify with what satisfies our needs and has power, and to mock it. In using the language of the Bible, the Word to which her sex has traditionally been denied access, Jeanette adopts a discourse which has the power and authority of patriarchy behind it, appropriating that power

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and authority for her own purposes. It enables her to answer the pastor in his own language but on her own terms. 'To the pure all things are pure' is unanswerable if Jeanette has freed herself from those patriarchal definitions that have labelled her as 'impure'. But the additional element of mockery is the main weapon of both narrator and author, since humour indicates the possibility of victory over fear. As Kristeva puts it, Taughter always indicates an act of aggression against the Creator'. 25 Once Jeanette is able to distance herself sufficiently from the judgments of the church to recognize them as learned responses, echoes themselves of earlier texts and their intent, she can find and represent her early life as comic, as well as threatening. After the chapter 'Deuteronomy', in which Jeanette consciously explores the nature and power of the Word as it manifests itself in authorized history, the text displays an increasing distance from the language and Law of the Fathers. This suggests an answer to the question posed about the novel's ending: although Jeanette is back in the family home, she is no longer a victim of its discourse and ideology. If Jeanette has placed herself outside patriarchal ideology by refusing to be defined by its discourse, are her 'prophecies', like Mary Magdalene's, in danger of being a 'cry outside of time'? Although she presents herself as the voice of the prophet crying in the wilderness, that voice remains in dialogue: the subject is, to use Kristeva's terms, in process. There is no attempt to disengage from dialogue and adopt the monologic stance of infallibility and authority characteristic of the prophetic tone. While on page 155 she states categorically that Winnet will certainly not go back, two pages later she herself does just that. Even in the final chapter the strength of her mother's voice, clearly articulated in the dialogue, and the parallel stories of Winnet and Sir Perceval ensure that the 'mature' narrator's voice cannot be heard in isolation. However much she engages in the construction of alternative worlds, Jeanette's return home implies she needs to engage with the world as she knows it, rather than to escape from it through such fantasies. She is aware of the price to be paid for that return. As she says of Lot's wife, who looked back after leaving home and turned into a pillar of salt, 'Pillars hold things up, and salt keeps things clean, but it's a poor exchange for losing your self (pp. 155-6). But she also tells how, when Winnet is rescued from the sorcerer by an old woman, and taken to her village, she cannot master their language, although she learns the words. And she is afraid to talk of her old world, so alien to the villagers, because she knows they will think her mad. She is effectively silenced when away from those who share her language, and so she

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cannot speak as herself, but must pretend to be the same as them. Jeanette, too, has to return to those who share the language out of which she has constructed herself, even if she has introduced her own dialect into it. She acknowledges as much herself when she links her own determination to reconstruct herself with her former church's belief in the endless possibility of being 'born again': Tn the old world, anyone could be a new creation, the past was washed away' (p. 155). Nor does this mean any dilution of Jeanette's 'prophetic' vision her belief in her right to love other women. She recognizes both the necessity and the difficulty of finding love, of finding someone who can identify her without controlling or constraining her: some people can spend their whole lives together without knowing each other's names. Naming is a difficult and time-consuming process; it concerns essences, and it means power. But on the wild nights who can call you home? Only the one who knows your name. (p. 165) Like Roberts and Maitland, Winterson recognizes the enormous power of naming, and women's need to name rather than simply be named. She shares, however, their awareness that this power has to be used with caution when it concerns naming others. It is surely significant that Jeanette's mother remains unnamed even at the end of the novel. There can be no greater indication of Jeanette's determination to continue engaging in dialogue than this suggestion that, however monstrous her mother may appear, to the adult narrator she too is still 'in process', and therefore still potentially able to engage in the process of reconstruction with her daughter. 'To imagine the inclusion of the maternal as a position capable of its own subjectivity' (p. 375), to use Laurel Bollinger's words, is surely only possible for a woman who has freed herself from the tyranny of patriarchal gender discourse.

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A Dissenting Voice: Angela Carter's Passion of New Eve1 and 'Women's Time'

The title of Carter's novel, The Passion of New Eve, places it at the centre of any discussion of the influence of the Bible on women's writing. By yoking together the central story of the New Testament the Passion of Christ - with arguably the central story of the Old - the story of the Fall - Carter indicates that the novel will address those myths in a typically challenging way. As she said in an interview, Tf it's not blasphemous, why bother to make it up?' 2 Unlike the other novelists discussed so far, however, while ready to use biblical myths and others in her work, Carter is not interested in constructing alternative, feminist myths as a source of positive imagery and symbolism for contemporary women. Her evident concern with the ahistoric nature of myth suggests she shares the reservations expressed by Kristeva in 'Outside Time', and explored more fully in her essay, 'Women's Time' (Kristeva Reader, pp. 188-213). Carter describes The Passion of New Eve as an 'anti-mythic novel ... a feminist tract about the social creation of femininity', 3 of which she first became aware in the summer of 1968, when she started questioning the nature of her reality as a woman. Her use of biblical myth has therefore an explicitly feminist purpose. And since sexuality is central to the construction of 'femininity', particularly in patriarchal religious discourse, Carter explores such forms of sexuality as lesbianism, cross-dressing, trans-sexualism and sado-masochism which are regarded as deviant by both Old and New Testament orthodoxy. It is not simply dualistic views of women, but the dualistic differentiation of the two sexes which is under attack in this novel. As Sally Robinson puts it, 'For Carter, gender is a relation of power, whereby the weak become "feminine" and the strong become "masculine". And, because relations of power can change, this construction is always open to 135

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deconstruction.' 4 Carter's challenge to the Law of the Father is not, however, mounted through an exploration of solely biblical myth. Since Carter regards all myths as 'extraordinary lies designed to make people unfree', she identifies herself as being more generally 'in the demythologising business' ('Notes from the Front Line', p. 71). This business involves using and exploring a whole range of contemporary discourses, including those that are visual rather than verbal, since Carter sees women as being defined in primarily visual terms, and is concerned with what is 'written on the body', to use Winterson's phrase. The Passion of New Eve presents a series of nightmarish dystopias in which mythic metaphors and symbols come, as it were, out of language and are given material embodiment, blurring the line between the literal and the metaphoric as Oranges are Not the Only Fruit does. The desert in which Eve - literally - finds herself represents the desert or wilderness which prophets have traditionally entered in order to find themselves and their god, so that they could return to instruct society on the errors of its ways. The prophetic role is, however, presented in a much more muted form than it is in The Wild Girl and Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, since the possibility of meaningful speech seems largely eroded in a world where visual images have such power. The eponymous heroine of The Passion of New Eve is not, moreover, initially an outcast, marginalized for her sexuality as Mary Magdalene and Jeanette are. For this 'New Eve' begins life as a man, Evelyn. Carter's originality in this novel lies in exploring the impact of the myths of woman through a male subject, her first-person narrator. Evelyn's 'passion' is inscribed in two different but related discourses. The first is the religious discourse according to which passion signifies the suffering until death undergone by Christ and the martyrs. The second is the discourse of romantic love, in which it denotes extreme sexual emotion, which often becomes associated with death. But at the beginning of the novel, Evelyn is only vicariously aware of this connection because as a young man he has learned to see through the lens of a modern version of romance - the Hollywood romance - in which woman is the beautiful but suffering victim. That myth is embodied in the former movie star Tristessa de St Ange, whose name suggests the combined roles of suffering saint and adored angel which she plays. Evelyn is aware of the unreality of this figure - 'Enigma. Illusion. Woman?' (p. 6) - who incarnates on screen the lifeless yet potent image of passive femininity waiting to be aroused by her male lover. She is 'necrophilia incarnate' (p. 7). Carter indicates the link

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between this totally modern myth and the first biblical myth of woman by oblique reference to Keats's comment on Adam's dream 'he awoke and found it truth' 5 - when Evelyn says of Tristessa, 'she had been the dream itself made flesh' (p. 7). When Evelyn goes to New York, he is confronted by both a city and a woman who embody the repressed darker side of the symbolic order. Instead of the dream city constructed by Hollywood, he finds 'a lurid, Gothic darkness' (p. 10) in a country overrun by rats and perpetually threatened by violence, not least by 'the Women', whose anger is no longer contained by patriarchal images of femininity. The situation represents in graphic form the belief Carter expresses in the appropriately titled 'Notes from the Front Line': Western civilisation as we know it has just about run its course and the emergence of the Women's Movement... is both symptom and product of the unravelling of the culture based on JudaeoChristianity, a bit of Greek transcendentalism via the father of lies, Plato, and all the other bits and pieces. (p. 72) Her view of the women's movement as a response to the JudaeoChristian tradition which is nevertheless deeply affected by that tradition echoes Kristeva's analysis of the women's movement, which will be discussed later in this chapter. Her own contribution to the 'unravelling' process is to show how the symbolic order's attempts at repression are potentially self-destructive. The city planned as 'a city of visible reason' is vulnerable because the 'darkness had lain, unacknowledged, within the builders' (p. 16). Where the forbidden desires of 'the Old Adam' cannot be spoken, the result is corruption and violence, as those desires take their revenge against a weakened, because divided, system. Yet so closely identified is Evelyn with this symbolic order that even in this completely lawless city, he still observes the last vestiges of law in operation - the 'don't walk' signs. But Evelyn is inevitably attracted and excited by the city's darkness, and the woman who seems to embody it. Leilah, a young negro, acts out another social construct, the other side of the dualistic discourse of femininity, the whore to Tristessa's angel. Evelyn watches Leilah construct her self as the object of desire in the mirror before she goes to work as a dancer. The reflection that she sees is another Leilah: 'Leilah invoked this formal other with a gravity and ritual that recalled witchcraft; she brought into being a Leilah who lived only in

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the not-world of the mirror and then became her own reflection' (p. 28). In consequence she abandons her repressed self in the mirror, functioning only as a fiction of Evelyn's erotic dream. Leilah, like all women, has to learn to see herself with the eyes of men; she adopts the position of the male spectator in order to construct a self that will satisfy the male gaze, so that in a sense she and Evelyn become one: 'we entered the same reverie, the self-created, self-perpetuating, solipsistic world of the woman watching herself being watched in a mirror' (p. 30). In contrast, later in the novel, Leilah takes on the guise of Sophia, a young acolyte of the ruler of an underground city of women, and in that guise looks to Evelyn like a woman who has never been exposed to one of 'those looking glasses that betray women into nakedness' (p. 54). By this reading it is culture, represented by the mirror, that creates shame and a sense of lack, not the fruit of the tree of knowledge, as the biblical myth of the Fall proposes. That myth simply provides ideological justification, or mystification, for the social construct. For Leilah is represented not only as a social construct, the contemporary embodiment of a male fantasy, but as a mythic being, 'Woman'. Evelyn's lovemaking parodies the kind of pornography of which Carter writes, 'Pornography ... assists the process of false universalizing. Its excesses belong to that timeless, locationless area outside history'. 6 Evelyn conceives of Leilah as man's eternal other, that which is feared as well as desired. This 'slut of Harlem', he later recognizes, is mostly a projection of the 'lusts and greed and selfloathing of a young man called Evelyn' (p. 175). His fears of his own darkness are the more readily projected onto Leilah because of her colour, which enables him to represent her in racist as well as sexist discourse. He describes that colour in startlingly emotive terms: 'nigredo, the stage of darkness, when the material in the vessel has broken down to dead matter. Then the matter putrefies. Dissolution' (p. 14). Before entering her building, he experiences 'an archaic, atavistic panic before original darkness and silence' (p. 25). Leilah is therefore easily associated with all those myths which attribute to women the responsibility for man's fall from grace, like the succubi, the female demons who seduce sleeping men, and those siren temptresses who lead men into, rather than out of, the labyrinth. Evelyn, who admits to feeling 'all the ghastly attraction of the fall' (p. 25), is only too ready to fit Leilah into the creation mythology inherited from patriarchal biblical tradition. Those myths are brought to his attention by the old Czech soldier, Baroslav, living in

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Chaos, the primordial substance ... the earliest state of disorganized creation... The fructifying chaos of anteriority, the state before the beginning of the beginning ... Chaos ... embraces all opposing forms in a state of undifferentiated dissolution. (p. 14) Baroslav urges Evelyn to plunge into 'dissolution' in order to be resurrected, to find new life. But although Evelyn identifies Leilah with dissolution, he is readier to associate her with the immortality, evil and death which the soldier foresees for him than with new life. He fails to consider the significance of the Czech's seventeenth-century print of a hermaphrodite with a golden egg, since even in this world which has reduced everything to image, he has not yet learnt to read the image. When, instead of offering him the kind of mythical transformation and rebirth to which his mind is attuned, Leilah offers the reality of her pregnancy, the mythical superstructure he has erected collapses, and he reacts with all the cliches of contemporary masculinity under threat. The whore cannot be mother; the removal of Leilah's womb along with her baby signifies that her role as the incarnation of Woman is over for him. And since Evelyn is unaware that her original name was Lilith, identifying her with Adam's first, too powerful wife, he cannot predict the mythic sequence of revenge he has initiated. Fleeing the city for the desert, in the hope of finding himself, Evelyn simply carries with him the myths of women inscribed in the symbolic order. This continuity is underlined by the symbols ascribed to those forces which attempt to disrupt that order. Both the angry women of New York and the priestesses of Cybele that he meets in the desert are represented by the threatened phallus. The city women wear a badge bearing the female circle encompassing bared teeth - a visual representation of Freud's vagina dentata - while the women of the desert are represented by 'a broken arrow or truncated column' (p. 45). This monument bears the same inscription as Leilah's place of habitation in New York: TNTROITE ET HIC DII SUNT' (ENTER, FOR HERE THE GODS ARE). And just as the chaos of the city is the place where opposing forms embrace, so Beulah, the desert city of the women, is the place where 'contrarieties are equally true' (p. 48). This community of

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the flat above, who functions as a kind of Old Testament prophet. He reminds Evelyn that the kind of chaos he sees around him is the origin of everything:

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women is not, therefore, a feminist fantasy so much as another projection of male fear, like the myth of the Amazons deconstructed in Maitland's Virgin Territory. The priestesses of Cybele have, like the Amazons, cut off a breast, that primary symbol of the female in both erotic and maternal discourse, not to prepare themselves for battle, but to give to the Mother Goddess. The action represents their absolute virginity, their independence from men. Above all this community embodies female identification: these women identify with the mother rather than the father. They define themselves in relation to the many-breasted black Mother, who represents all that is repressed in the symbolic, the inadmissible object of the male infant's desire. Evelyn is aware of going towards what he has been forced to deny - the 'source we have forgotten ... the labyrinth within us' (p. 39). There is also recognition that all sexual desire is a manifestation of repressed desire for the lost mother, so that his pursuit of Leilah has led inevitably to this moment. Having, at birth, been ejected forever from the womb that is to him Nirvana, Evelyn can only hope to glimpse it again in 'the Nirvana of non-being which is gone as soon as it is glimpsed' (p. 59) in the moment of orgasm, which offers the illusion of union with another. But this Mother does not exist to satisfy male desire. Her breasts are not meant for comfort, only for nourishment, and intercourse with her is experienced not as seduction but rape, not as penetration but engulfment. When faced with this essence of woman, the archetype in material form, Evelyn experiences the terror of Faust encountering the Mothers, at 'a femaleness too vast, too gross for [his] imagination to contain' (p. 66). He knows he is 'at the place of transgression' (p. 63), breaking the prohibitions of the male symbolic order by returning to Mother. This can only be experienced as a loss of manhood, since gender is acquired by acknowledging the Laws of the Father. Mother is therefore a grotesque embodiment of the castrating mother of male fantasy. She is 'the Great Parricide ... Grand Emasculator' (p. 49). Carter's Mother, therefore, draws on the fears and fantasies embodied in patriarchal myths of women when representing herself as a Mother Goddess. Just as the patriarchal Old Testament God is created in man's image, so the Goddess is reconstructed in Mother: a 'great, black, self-anointed, self-appointed prophetess, the self-created godhead' (p. 58). Mother's 'religion' has its own litany. Like the religion invoked in Maitland's 'Triptych', it deconstructs the binary opposites in gender discourse, calling on

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(p. 61)

and other mythological incarnations of the goddess. In this role Mother reenacts biblical myth in a revised form, combining the Genesis myth with the myth of the Virgin birth. By turning Evelyn into a woman, she creates a new Eve, who will also become the Virgin Mother. As the New Eve later notes, she is 'the fruit of the tree of knowledge ... a man-made masterpiece of skin and bone, the technological Eve in person' (p. 146). In an 'annunciation', Evelyn is told that after his operation he will give birth to 'the Messiah of the Antithesis'. Since Evelyn will be inseminated with his own semen, this process will 'reactivate the parthenogenesis archetype' (p. 68) and represent a 'triumph over phallocentricity, the generator of mortality' (p. 69). The process of surgical re-construction makes possible a form of resurrection. As Evelyn recovers, he hears a loudspeaker intone 'EXCEPT A MAN DIE AND BE BORN AGAIN HE MAY NOT ENTER THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN' (p. 52), and is reminded of Baroslav's biblical prophecies of

death and resurrection. The novel therefore gives material form to the concept of gender as a construction, and uses technology to emphasize that 'myth is a made thing, not a found thing' (p. 56). In Beulah there is very little that is natural, but science has taken the place of the supernatural to lend credibility in a secular society. He is symbolically reborn as a woman in a room 'seamless as an egg ... a simulacrum of the womb'. Technology is a particularly appropriate means of carrying out this mythic vengeance on him since technology is the means by which man attempts to master his environment, including those powerful forces which he fears and has historically represented in myth. In a neat reversal, the women use technology - elaborately constructed stage sets, red lights, and recorded music - to create the kind of 'metaphysical dread' (p. 52) usually created by myth. Technology is represented here as another means of constructing gender and controlling sexuality, a tool more often found in male hands. Mother's construction of Eve's artificial womb anticipates real-life scientific experiments on animals, as well as reflecting current developments in infertility treatment, in which the gynaecologist appears to exercise the kind of Godlike control over women's fertility attacked in Maitland's Virgin Territory. After the operation Evelyn is 'programmed' by technology substituting for social conditioning,

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The moon the virgin mother patroness of harlots

exposed to Tristessa's old movies, and the taped sounds of contented mothers and gurgling babies, as well as every painting of the Virgin and child in history. Tristessa's movies are another contemporary form of myth, making possible 'a perpetual resurrection of the spirit' of its idols (p. 119). Celluloid makes possible Tristessa's 'specious triumph over time' (p. 5), perpetuating the myth of eternal youth and beauty. When the new Eve finally meets the screen goddess, Tristessa is spending her time making glass tears in a house of glass shaped like a wedding cake or a mausoleum, symbols of love and death intertwined in the passion she incarnates on screen. Her environment is therefore a perpetual reflection, reiterating the mirror image which is all that really exists of this constructed cultural icon. When Eve sees Tristessa lying on a glass bier with a bible on her breast, surrounded by waxworks of film stars who died unnatural deaths, it is totally logical that she should conclude that this sleeping beauty is also dead. By representing myths of woman as products of technology, the novel reminds us that they are always the product of a specific historical moment, not eternal archetypes. But Eve herself is not a woman simply by virtue of an operation that changes her sexual organs. Demonstrating the truth of Simone de Beauvoir's famous maxim, 'One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman', 7 Eve admits, T am a tabula erasa, a blank sheet of paper, an unhatched egg. I have not yet become a woman, although I possess a woman's shape' (p. 83). She remains in the state of innocence before the Fall until she escapes from Beulah and is captured by Zero, a oneeyed, one-legged poet. Zero names their roles - 'You Eve ... Me Adam' (p. 91) - and her 'fall' comes through her acquisition of an understanding of the power relations inscribed in that relationship. Zero's world, where he rules over a harem of seven women, aged between twelve and twenty but all reduced to a state of uniformity by their dungarees, is a gross parody of patriarchal sexual relationships. His power depends on the blind devotion of his wives. Their readiness to subjugate themselves to the unattractive tyrant who beats and abuses them can only be explained by the power of ideological interpellation. They accept the beatings because they believe they deserve it, being constructed as less than animals by Zero himself, and having learnt to see themselves as guilty or inadequate in the broken homes and criminal backgrounds common to them all. They compete for his sexual services because they have become convinced that their health depends on it. Their sense of helplessness and inferiority provides the

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foundation for his authority, which is another purely mythical construction: 'a god-head, however shabby, needs believers to maintain his credibility' (p. 99). When Zero has sex with Eve, she feels she is he, and this annihilation of the self forces upon her the knowledge that she too had been a violator. She is fully aware of what has happened: 'The mediation of Zero turned me into a woman' (p. 108). It is here that Eve 'becomes' a woman, experiencing life from the subject position of a woman in the symbolic order. But because she is marginalized and rendered powerless by the Law of the Father embodied in Zero, she has the advantage of being able to distance herself from a system of beliefs and values of which, as Evelyn, she was unthinkingly part. She is therefore able, from the margins, to adopt a more critical 'prophetic' stance towards that system of power. Zero attempts to act out the power embodied in him as representative of patriarchal authority when he, together with Eve and his women, tracks down Tristessa and puts her on trial as 'PUBLIC ENEMY NUMBER ONE' (p. 91), because he is convinced she has made him infertile by exercising her power over him while he watched one of her films. Her beauty is experienced as a form of witchcraft, drawing attention to the root meaning of 'glamour', a key term in the discourse of the Hollywood star-system: 'glamour' originally referred to the power of witches who could 'cause the male member to disappear', according to the authors of the Malleus Maleficarum.8 Zero claims that he will only be able to procreate when she is dead, after which he plans to repopulate the West Coast with the tribe of Zero. Like Mother, he too is driven by the myth of a second coming. The real reason Tristessa represents a threat is that she is thought to be a lesbian, her sexual choice making her independent of men and their domination - in other words, emasculating them, since to be a man in patriarchal discourse is to be dominant. Zero forbids any lesbian relationships among his wives, on pain of death, since woman-centred relationships are a threat to 'compulsory heterosexuality'. Since Zero is masculinity incarnate, he is able to represent himself as the avenging tool of patriarchal justice. But this view of Tristessa is dramatically shown to be yet another myth with the revelation that 'she' is a man, who has spent most of his life masquerading as a woman, without having undergone the physiological reconstruction that Evelyn endures. His construction of the iconic Tristessa in himself demonstrates the Lacanian splitting of the subject even more powerfully than Leilah's construction of her mirror image, as is evident in his tendency to talk about him/herself

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in the third person. As he says of Tristessa, 'She had given herself to the world in her entirety and then found nothing was left ... She left me for dead' (p. 144). The novel therefore offers two models of constructed femininity - the one biological and the other cultural, the one imposed by force and the other chosen - through which to explore the nature of gender and the essentialist debate. Sophia, one of Mother's acolytes, assures Eve that a 'change in the appearance will restructure the essence' (p. 68), that he will start to feel like a woman once his body has been changed. In contrast, Tristessa tells him that 'once the essence was achieved, the appearance could take care of itself (p. 141): in other words, when his 'femininity' became natural to him, externals would be of little significance. This is borne out by the end of the novel. When he is captured by a Children's Crusade, even with his head shaved, his clothes torn and the make-up scrubbed from his face, Tristessa becomes his female self again before being shot. The concept of gender is made more problematic by the fact that in this novel about myths of femininity the most powerful emotional relationship takes place between two characters who start life as men, even though both are now presenting themselves as women. It might be fairer to describe this as a relationship between two men and the myth of woman by which they are both possessed. Even when Tristessa is only a screen presence to Evelyn, he recognizes her appeal to homosexual men, seeing her as the only woman who completely expresses their pain at feeling marginalized by their sexuality. Both men, moreover, appear to demonstrate what many feminists see as the narcissistic nature of male sexual desire. Leilah's appeal for Evelyn is that she so precisely reflects back his vision of himself: She was a perfect woman; like the moon, she only gave reflected light. She had mimicked me ... so that she could make me love her and yet she had mimicked me so well she had also mimicked the fatal lack in me that meant I was not able to love her because I myself was so unlovable. (p. 34) Tristessa similarly turns himself into the only woman he could have loved. In the process all reality is lost, Tristessa becoming only 'an idea of himself with 'no ontological status, only an iconographic one' (pp. 128-9), like Leilah creating her ego-ideal in the mirror. Tristessa is 'seduced by the notion of a woman's being, which is negativity. Passivity, the absence of being' (p. 137), demonstrating what Irigaray

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calls the 'logic of the same', in which 'femininity' is simply an empty mirror reflecting back masculine sexuality as presence.9 Woman, according to this logic, is always only a non-man, enabling men to see her as a tabula rasa onto which can be projected all their own desires and fantasies. When Eve, now a woman dressed as a man, is forced by Zero to marry Tristessa, a man dressed as a woman, theirs is a marriage in which both are the bride, both the groom, which might seem to suggest that, if a man can create a sense of 'otherness' in another man, or even his own self, there is no need for a 'real' woman. Another way of looking at this union is, however, to see it as a representation of the mythical hermaphrodite, first seen in the old Czech's flat in New York, enabling the two lovers to achieve what Tristessa had originally aspired to alone. As Eve recognizes, 'out of ... our interpenetrating, undifferentiated sex, we had made the great Platonic hermaphrodite together, the whole and perfect being' (p. 148). The solipsism of Tristessa's earlier yearnings is replaced by mutual recognition and appreciation of male and female in each other, a recognition which transcends ideological gender constructions. This relationship, moreover - unlike the hermaphrodite - can produce life. Images of rebirth and fertility are once again evoked when Eve refers to the smell of her vagina as 'the primordial marine smell, as if we carry within us the ocean where, at the dawn of time, we were all born' (p. 148). Together in the desert they are the 'sole oasis'. Eve conceives, and leaves the desert as 'Eve and Adam both, on a mission to repopulate this entire, devastated continent' (p. 165). When she acknowledges that the desert is the place where she became herself, in spite of having lost her masculinity, she concedes that she has abandoned the old certainties derived from patriarchal gender discourse, recognizing the interdependence of one term and its meaning upon the other: 'Masculine and feminine are correlatives which involve one another. I am sure of that - the quality and its negation are locked in necessity' (p. 149). Bisexuality is thus represented as a possible way out of imposed unitary gender identity, and a means of transcending the 'logic of the same'. Neither Eve nor Tristessa is, however, able to explore this possibility since both are captured by a final parody of patriarchal power fuelled by biblical ideology - a crusading army of young boys led by a 14-year old Colonel. Ideology is as clearly inscribed on his body as it is on any woman's, GOD and AMERICA being engraved on medallions attached to his body. This 'scourge of Christ' has been inspired to undertake his crusade by a vision of the Son of Man, looking very like himself, only

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dressed in the uniform of the Green Berets. Here Tristessa, the silent star of the screen, is shot and silenced for ever; Eve is, however, regarded as the woman taken in adultery and so forgiven, interpellated into patriarchal sexual ideology like Mary Magdalene. After escaping both the children and the 'rescuing' cavalry of the Women, Eve returns to the urban world which she finds in a state of chaos and civil war. There she re-encounters Leilah, and after this brief 'welcome back to historicity' (p. 166), is drawn once more into disempowering myths of woman. For under Leilah's direction, in an obvious allegory of the birth process in reverse, Eve returns to Mother, squeezing through rock and going naked through walls of meat, covered with bloody dew to rendezvous with her maker. But the Mother Goddess has lost her power and gone underground: she has been reduced to a 'figure of speech and has retired to a cave beyond consciousness' (p. 184); in psychoanalytic terms the mother has been repressed into the unconscious and is manifest only in symbolic substitutions. Eve is, moreover, aware that this process is not simply a regression for the individual, for whom the 'destination of all journeys is their beginning' (p. 186), but a regression through evolutionary history as she sees a parade of great apes passing before her eyes: 'Time is running back on itself (p. 183). When Eve finally exits from the cave, all she finds is a symbolic substitute for Mother - a mad old lady singing to her death. This reunion of the pregnant Eve and her 'Mother' belongs with those mythic mother-daughter relationships which, it has been argued, are repressed by patriarchal religious discourse, and when Eve leaves the New World in Mother's boat with the invocation 'Ocean, ocean, mother of mysteries, bear me to the place of birth' (p. 191), she is retreating totally out of history into myth. In contrast Leilah appears to do the reverse. When Eve meets her again, after escaping from the children's army, she is leading a group of down-at-heel but well armed vagrants and wearing the badge of the Women. Eve realizes that Leilah, too, is the daughter of Mother, an incarnation of Lilith, Adam's first wife, for whom Eve was the more compliant replacement. The two women - Leilah and Eve - therefore separately embody the feared and desired faces of woman, according to patriarchal religious discourse, both reconstructed by Mother to destroy men. Leilah had changed her name in the city so as to conceal her role as temptress. But while Leilah had, in the city, been a classic example of the split subject, her identity constructed solely through her mirror image, away from that world of mirrors she can be whole.

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Eve now recognizes her as the inhabitant of Beulah she knew as Sophia, seeing one girl where she had previously seen two - 'Lilith, all flesh, Sophia, all mind' (p. 175). Unlike Mother, Leilah herself is now totally engaged with history, recognizing the final irrelevance of myth: she tells Eve, 'History overtook myth ... and rendered it obsolete. Mother tried to take history into her own hands but it was too slippery for her to hold' (p. 172). Where Leilah once performed a dance called the End of the World, she is now 'part of the purging' (p. 176); where the priestesses of Cybele once carried out miraculous births, they are now active participants in the civil war engulfing the USA. Leilah confirms what the novel as a whole suggests, that neither the resurrection of Mother Goddess mythology nor the construction of new myths of female creativity is the way forward for women today. Carter states unequivocally that 'mother goddesses are just as silly a notion as father gods' (Sadeian Woman, p. 5). Her representation of Mother parodies not only the castrating mother of patriarchal ideology but the myth of the archaic mother. Like Kristeva, she appears to see no future in pursuing a Utopian vision of an omnipotent, englobing mother who promises no frustration and no separation. She is equally hostile to other myths of female identity. Carter's attitude to gender is fundamentally anti-essentialist, the female body for her being always located in history and susceptible to being written on by history: 'Flesh comes to us out of history; so does the repression and taboo that governs our experience of flesh' (Sadeian Woman, p. 9). She is therefore as resistant to attempts to construct feminist myths in which the female body is a source of power and independent female creativity as she is to patriarchal myths which represent it as the source of all evil, and evoke the womb/tomb analogy. In reality, the womb is all too often not only an empty space ready for fertilization and conception, visual proof of male fertility, but a site over which women still have to do battle with male doctors, law-makers and theologians. Women, Carter argues, should reject 'the bankrupt enchantments of the womb', since the theory of maternal superiority to which they give rise is 'one of the most damaging of all consolatory fictions', putting any woman who subscribes to it into 'voluntary exile from the historical world' (Sadeian Woman pp. 109 and 106). The similarities between Carter's position and Kristeva's are evident here, for Kristeva's analysis of women's relationship with time suggests that, for her too, models of femininity, like myths, have a tendency to deny the specifics of women's lives. She distinguishes in 'Women's Time' between linear time, the time of history and language

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which can only be understood sequentially, and cyclical or monumental time which is to be understood as the time of eternity. She argues that while men are more firmly centred in linear time, women are also situated in cyclical time, by virtue of their biological rhythms, and their reproductive role. By becoming a mother, for instance, a woman enters time through the chain of reproduction represented in the symbolic order by patrilinear genealogies, but at the same time, by becoming Mother, she enters the realm of myth, the myth of motherhood as an eternal unchanging condition which unites her with all other women and places her outside history. Consequently woman is more readily associated with space, as a metaphor for eternity, than with time conceived as history. As evidence, Kristeva cites the 'innumerable religions of matriarchal (re)appearance' ('Women's Time', p. 191), including those myths of resurrection in which the Virgin's body does not die but moves from one spatiality to another, from earth to heaven. 'Women's Time' continues the discussion Kristeva began in 'Outside Time', extending her analysis from individual women to the women's movement. Just as she distinguishes between those female children who identify with the father and those who identify with the mother, so she identifies similar tendencies in the feminist movement. In the first stage, up until the 1960s, liberal feminism demanded equality with men, and therefore identified with the symbolic order in a way which left the existing system intact. Second stage radical feminists from the 1960s onwards emphasized women's difference from men, rejecting patriarchal values in favour of a value system focused on the maternal. This, however, depends on an idealized, timeless myth of the mother, which all too easily becomes a retreat and refuge from historical reality. Such feminists risked, therefore, opting out of the political struggle and becoming totally marginalized. By refusing to be named by the symbolic order, to participate in the Law of the Father, women may turn themselves into what she calls a 'counter-society ... in which all real or fantasized possibilities for jouissance take refuge' (p. 202), and which purges itself of all possible evil by attributing it to the scapegoated male. Feminism thus becomes a form of inverted sexism. In trying, moreover, to represent themselves in a way which breaks through the limits imposed on representations of women by Christianity and humanism, women may find feminism becoming a new religion in place of the old, complete with its own mythologies and creeds. Kristeva envisages a more productive third phase of the women's movement, requiring both 'insertion into history' (p. 195) and the

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radical refusal of the patriarchal values inscribed in the symbolic order. This will be made possible by women challenging the very notion of identity, sexual or otherwise, while simultaneously foregrounding the idea of female difference as an existing political reality in patriarchal societies. She wonders whether feminism can break free of its belief in Woman, Her power, Her writing, so as to channel this demand for difference into each and every element of the female whole, and, finally, to bring out the singularity of each woman, and beyond this, her multiplicities, her plural languages. (p. 208) In this way the duality of women's relationship with time can become a strength, since, as Pam Morris puts it, while women's structural position within the reproductive cycle unifies women, 'that structural position derives its meaning and its experienced form from the determinants of linear time; from the social specificity that alone constitutes each historical moment'. 10 If the specificity and variety of women's experience are recognized, 'Woman' can be brought back into history. Carter makes similar distinctions between man's relationship to time and woman's in The Passion of New Eve. Eve states: 'Man lives in historicity; his phallic projectory takes him onwards and upwards but to where? Where but to the barren sea of infertility, the craters of the moon!' In Beulah, this distinction becomes the basis of a syllogism. 'Time is a man, space is a woman' 11 is followed by 'time is a killer', so that the final maxim 'kill time and live forever', can also be read as an invitation to kill man - in other words patriarchy. This argument is elaborated in the Women's interpretation of the Oedipus legend: Evelyn listens to a taped lecture telling him how Oedipus had a sensible desire to murder his father, who dragged him from the womb in complicity with historicity. His father wanted to send little Oedipus forward on a phallic projectory (onwards and upwards!); his father taught him to live in the future, which isn't living at all, and to turn his back on the timeless eternity of interiority. This 'timeless eternity' can be interpreted as Kristeva's 'cyclical or monumental time', represented by women's participation in the biological cycles of ovulation, conception and birth. The same recorded voice exhorts Eve to 'journey backwards to the source!'

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Women and the Word

(p. 53), to retreat into the myth of the archaic mother, as she does at the end of the novel. In contrast, Leilah embodies the 'performative' notion of gender and identity discussed in the previous chapter, which Carter implies may provide a more realistic basis for breaking through the oppressive effects of ideologies of gender than myth can. The different gender roles experienced by Evelyn are imposed on him in a narrative which gives material form to Bakhtin's statement: 'the plastic value of my outer body has been as it were sculpted for me by the manifold acts of other people in relation to me.' 12 At the beginning of the novel, Leilah appears to be similarly oppressed by the masks she is forced to wear, but the novel's ending forces the reader to consider these masks in a different light, as enabling her to take on roles which render her an agent in her own fate, rather than a passive victim of it. As Sally Robinson argues, quoting Mary Russo: 'To put on femininity with a vengeance suggests the power of taking it off (Russo, p. 224). The masquerade, conceived as a double strategy of acceptance and denial of femininity, is, thus, a means toward subverting all notions of a 'natural' femininity. If one can both take it and leave it, then gender becomes a performance rather than an essence. (p. 120) The social constructions into which Leilah fits herself can be seen retrospectively as disguises which enable her to refuse to be identified solely with that body. As she tells Eve when they meet again, 'rape only refreshes [her] virginity' (p. 174). While she, unlike Eve, retains her identify as a woman, she remains in control over what that means, free to play the whore, the spiritualized sister, or the guerrilla fighter. That control is signified by her ability to change her own name. Kristeva argues in 'Women's Time' for the need for aesthetic practices to bring out 'the multiplicity of every person's possible identifications ... the relativity of his/her symbolic, as well as biological existence' (p. 210). The representation of Leilah in The Passion of New Eve provides an example of such a practice. Leilah's identities are, moreover, related to her historical specificity in a way which prevents her from being reduced to any myth of 'woman' as Eve finally is. Leilah is not just a woman, but a black woman, immediately breaking down the single category 'woman'. With its vision of a future in which women and blacks wage a revolutionary 10.1057/9780230597358 - Women and the Word, Jeannette King

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war against the white male, this highly mythic novel nevertheless remains engaged with history. Myths, feminist or otherwise, function outside time, constructing models of experience which appear to disregard social and historical specifics. Angela Carter, however, plays with myth only to challenge any suggestion that myths are universal in their significance, believing that 'there is no way out of time. We must learn to live in this world ... because it is the only world that we will ever know' (Sadeian Woman, p. 110). Speaking of this novel in an interview, she said she had 'previously wanted to be more political, but only with this novel found a suitable form'. 13 By counterpointing myth with contemporary history, and gender with race, she introduces political issues which will become the foreground of the novels to be considered in the next chapter. If it is important for feminist writers to explore female identity in a way which avoids essentialism, and retains the sense of women as historical agents, then representations of those women who - by virtue of their race or sexuality - most clearly break up the homogeneous concept 'woman' may provide the most illuminating examples. 14 The Passion of New Eve in this way carries the challenge to the Genesis myth of creation far beyond the question of female sexuality and its responsibility for the Fall by ultimately breaking down the distinction between Eve and Adam. By emphasizing the blackness of the Leilah/Lilith figure excluded from the canonical writings of the Old Testament, it also, moreover, undermines the claims of biblical myth to possess universal validity across the boundaries of gender and race.

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6

Nowhere is the impact of patriarchal religious discourse on women more evident than in African-American women's writing. Just as the Bible has been used to construct woman as essentially inferior to man, it has also been used to construct the black races as essentially inferior to the white, so that the black female is doubly oppressed by this discourse, perceived both in gender and in colour as being made not in God's image. Whereas Christian religious discourse has offered white women the choice of being Eve or Mary, black women have more often been defined as Eve only. Where images of the black Madonna have flourished, they have generally done so outside the mainstream Christian church, and have been discouraged by that church. 1 The novels of Toni Morrison and Alice Walker have consistently grappled with this heritage, while at the same time acknowledging the revolutionary potential of Christian discourse as a form of liberation. Central to their work, therefore, is an attempt to explore what - if anything - can be recuperated from the JudaeoChristian tradition for the African-American woman, and what other historical and religious sources might provide a discourse in which both her gender and her race will be a source of spiritual strength rather than defilement. Both writers, moreover, suggest that the institution and ideology of slavery, which is so significant a part of the African-American heritage, was able to exploit Western religious thought, even while contradicting the fundamental message of Christianity. Tragically, for every minister that preached against slavery, there were others ready to preach in its support, defining the African as all that was alien or 'Other', threatening the white male's pursuit of spiritual salvation. 2 Such arguments provided the implicit justification for the oppression 152 10.1057/9780230597358 - Women and the Word, Jeannette King

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Paradise Lost and Regained: Toni Morrison and Alice Walker

and destruction of the African, seen as less than human, and gave rise to a demonic inversion of biblical attitudes to women. Whereas biblical religious discourse idealizes the mother and the virgin, denying the female body, the ideology of slavery commodities the female body, which becomes a site of production as well as reproduction, both its sexual and maternal functions becoming the property of the slave owner. 'Mothering' becomes a highly problematic concept since the nurturing powers of the mother can be diverted, through wetnursing, to the owner's child. Under this system, the child's relationship with its mother is simultaneously everything and nothing. It is everything, since a slave's child inherits its mother's status, even if it has a free man for a father, an ironically bitter form of matrilineal succession. And yet it is nothing, since the child of a slave does not belong to her; it belongs to its master, but is not 'related' to him, even if he is its father. Virginity similarly ceases to be a virtue for the female slave, since it is her duty to satisfy her master's sexual desires: her virginity is simply another commodity which may increase her value. In this way the ideology of white supremacy revealed the contradictions in patriarchal religious discourse, showing how its ideal of universal or true womanhood excludes women of colour and lower class. In her famous speech 'Ain't I a Woman?', the visionary ex-slave Sojourner Truth provided a critique of that ideology by reference to the reality of her own experience as a female slave: That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain't I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain't I a woman? ... I have borne thirteen children, and seen them most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain't I a woman? ... Then that little man in black there, he says women can't have as much rights as men, 'cause Christ wasn't a woman! Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him. 3 For African-American writers to challenge biblical constructions of women therefore requires a different strategy from those adopted by many of their white contemporaries, in response to those biblical

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discourses which have required Western women to deny the body to achieve salvation. The emphasis of French feminists, for instance, on 'writing the body' is problematic for those who feel they have always been written as body, represented as body and no more, and whose bodies have been literally written on by the branding iron. As Margaret Homans points out, Toni Morrison is angry that in white American writing the 'Africanist presence', both female and male, has been required to signify the body 'so that mind can be white'. 4 Many black feminist critics have pointed out the particular dangers in identifying black women with the body. Valerie Smith summarizes the issues in her critique of the role of the black woman as a historicizing presence in recent feminist criticism: at precisely the moment when Anglo-American feminists and male Afro-Americans begin to re-consider the material ground of their enterprise, they demonstrate their return to earth ... by invoking the specific experiences of black women and the writings of black women. This association of black women with reembodiment resembles rather closely the association, in classic Western philosophy and in nineteenth-century cultural constructions of womanhood, of women of color with the body and therefore with animal passions and slave labor.5 Black women, it appears, can just as easily function as the 'Other' for white women, as white women have done for white men. According to Homans, they have 'been required to do the cultural work of embodying the body for white culture', as women have always done in patriarchal religious discourse. She argues that even black feminist critics are guilty of using black women to represent 'experience, sensuality, emotion, matter, practice as opposed to theory, and survival' (p. 416). Articulating this problem usefully throws into focus an issue that this study has repeatedly returned to: any attempt to define woman in terms of the body can only be an essentializing project which evades the fact that the body is clearly not experienced in the same way by women of all races. By introducing race into considerations of gender, the writer places the female body within a context which makes it impossible to evade the social and political situation of the individual woman. The same effect is created when women's religious experience is located in a context of race consciousness, making for a socially and politically specific emphasis. The African-American writer can then raise the question of female identity in historically and culturally

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specific terms which avoid creating essentializing myths, while constructing alternative narratives and discourses of female spirituality to subvert those which have defined that identity in both racist and sexist terms. For African-American women writers, like others in this study, the first step towards constructing a discourse, and reconstructing religious traditions that restore female spirituality, without denying the female body, is to deconstruct the body/mind dichotomy. They too insist on the need for the power of the body to be translated into the power of the word, so that women do not remain mute presences in discourse. For language is here seen not simply as a means of articulating and acknowledging the maternal body and/or the mother/daughter relationship which has been repressed by patriarchy. It is rather a form of magic, a creative, transformative process which can repair the division of body and spirit, of female and male, of black and white. In these novels, words are creative magic since by naming the hitherto unnamed they bring into being what has been silenced or unacknowledged, making it appear as if by magic. In her futuristic dystopia, Native Tongue, Suzette Haden Elgin envisages a world in which oppressed women will empower themselves by using their own language. They are inspired by an illicit text, 'The Discourse of the Three Marys', which tells them: 'Magic, you perceive, is not something mysterious, not something for witches and sorcerers ... magic is quite ordinary and simple. It is simply language.' 6 Throughout the novels of Morrison and Alice Walker, but particularly in the novels under discussion in this chapter, songs demonstrate the power to move individuals and people to new conditions of belief and action. Stories revive individual and racial memories, making possible the reconstruction of a history upon which to build a future. Morrison's Paradise and Walker's The Temple of my Familiar return to the narrative of the Fall with which this study began, exploring the concepts of the just society and the relationship between man and woman derived from the Genesis tradition, and working them into narratives of potential release. Toni Morrison's Paradise Lost The African Americans who try to create their own paradise in Morrison's novel of that name 7 have absorbed the central narratives of white patriarchal religion well - so well that their planned Garden of Eden is also doomed to become a paradise lost. In trying to create

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a safe haven beyond the reach of white racism, they create a world which ironically becomes its mirror-image, dependent on the same kind of binary oppositions that underpin white supremacist thinking. Such oppositions also provide the basis for the processes of hierarchy and exclusion central to the biblical myth of Paradise, as interpreted by the Church Fathers. To them, Eden represented the state of innocence that existed before woman introduced sexuality and disobedience to man, so that the narrative of the Fall justified the subordination of woman to man and the expulsion of both woman and man from Eden. Similarly the group of black Americans known as the Fathers, who build the town they call Haven, and later the town of Ruby, not only create a racial hierarchy which excludes those they see as racially inferior, but use biblical notions of gender hierarchy to control their own women, and exclude those they cannot control. The structure and complex chronology of the novel demonstrate this link between racial and gender oppression. The novel opens with a horrific attack by armed men from Ruby on defenceless women living in what was once a convent, some distance outside the town itself. The men are motivated apparently by a mission to purge suspected depravity among the women. But during the account of the attack, the narrative moves, through the memory of one of the men, to the past which is supposed to justify their actions. He makes the link between race and gender explicit, reminding himself they have come to the Convent to make sure that nothing ever again threatens the integrity of the only successful all-black town. The link is also implicit in the fact that the first woman to be shot is white. The rest of the novel is a retrospective account, structured around the experiences of the women in the convent and others who feel excluded from 'paradise', which demonstrates the fatal link between racial oppression and the oppression of women. The desire to create a paradise, realized in the building of Haven and Ruby, whose streets are named after the Gospels, is represented as a response to a history of oppression experienced by a group of freed slaves and their descendants. The story is told piecemeal, through different narrative points of view, throughout the novel, demonstrating the story's controlling force on the community and its sense of destiny. After emancipation the founding fathers had played important roles in state legislature and county offices until white supremacism reduced them to penury and brutal manual labour, and they decided to look for a new home. Even more decisive for their

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sense of identity was their subsequent rejection by lighter-skinned black communities, to whom the blue-blackness of their skins was almost as much a sign of difference as it was to the whites. At a town called Fairly the nine intact families of the founding fathers, together with others less complete, experienced what became known in their history as the Disallowing, exclusion by other freed black Americans who thought the impoverished newcomers would threaten their own security. That experience of exclusion becomes the force that unifies and empowers the wanderers, and also becomes the principle on which they build their own all-black town, Haven, in 1890. When the effects of the depression almost destroyed Haven, the descendants of the original families, expelled from their first paradise, abandoned it to the snakes which are a biblical embodiment of the forces of evil, and repeated their grandfathers' feat by moving deeper into Oklahoma and building Ruby in 1949. This historic narrative is, moreover, represented and experienced in terms which echo the persecution-driven wanderings of the Israelites as they searched for the Promised Land after their escape from slavery. The story of those wanderings, sustained only by their belief in a divine purpose, is in later years told and retold to the community by the 'Old Fathers'. The stories include signs which they see as Godgiven: when the group gets lost and their leader Big Papa (Zechariah) prays for guidance, he sees a man, sent to show them the way, and concludes, 'He is with us ... He is leading the way' (p. 97). The same walker leaves a mark in the grass, so that Zechariah can tell the people, 'This is our place' (p. 98). The stories become a kind of mythology embodying not only the community's history, but their values and sense of themselves as another chosen people. The failure of other coloured towns thus becomes evidence of God's justice, punishment of those who rejected them. The only other stories the people of Haven hear are stories from the Bible, the only book each family owns, whose 'strong words, strange at first, becoming familiar, gaining weight and hypnotic beauty the more they heard them' (p. I l l ) , they eventually make their own, so that the stories in the book and the stories of their own past seem gradually to become one. Part of the charge they believe God has handed to them, like the Israelites, is to multiply, but there is another covenant, a bargain or 'deal, no less, with God' (p. 113), by which the fathers pledge themselves to what they perceive as God's purpose, in return for his protection, even though it emerges that this protection does not preclude the deaths of young men like Easter and Scout Morgan in Vietnam. It is this deal

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nine 8-rocks murdered five harmless women (a) because the women were impure (not 8-rock); (b) because the women were unholy (fornicators at the least, abortionists at most); and (c) because they could - which was what being an 8-rock meant to them as was also what the 'deal' required. (p. 297) The term '8-rock', derived from a mining term used to describe the coal found deepest in the ground, is used to identify those families whose blue-black complexions indicate their blood has been undiluted by blood from families with lighter skins. The frequent references throughout the novel to the genealogies of those families is reminiscent of the genealogies of the Israelites, and their determination to maintain racial purity is epitomized in the name of their leader, Zechariah. Like the Old Testament prophet of that name, Zechariah too has visions of how disobedience might lead to a scattering of his people, separating them from each other, their ancestors and their descendants. What holds the families together is what holds the early Jewish tribes together according to Kristeva's analysis - the Law of the Father. The nine families are set apart from others not only by colour, but by their adherence to the terms of the deal, their covenant, and the laws they extrapolate from it. If there is no jail in Ruby, indicating an absence of crime, this is because those laws have been internalized by the majority, and any dissidents are expelled from the community. And just as the commandments given to Moses and the Israelites were carved in tablets of stone, so the Law, the controlling Word, of the Fathers of Ruby is forged in iron and set in stone: it reads, 'Beware the Furrow of his Brow'. This edict is, moreover, attached to a communal Oven, carried with them on their journey from Haven to Ruby in the same way that the tabernacle containing the tablets of the Law travelled with the Israelites to the Promised Land. This Oven, with its 'iron lip', becomes the symbolic mouthpiece of the Fathers. 'Round as a head, deep as desire' (p. 6), it represents both the intellectual, abstract Law on which the community is founded, and the deeper needs that were its inspiration. Unlike Moses' tablets, however, the iron motto on the Oven, the Word which legitimates all other Law, is not easily understood. Its

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which is used to justify the attack on the convent, as Pat Best, the teacher who acts as the community's unofficial chronicler, observes:

source is unclear: it is said to be something Zechariah could have heard, or invented, or that could have come to him in his sleep, leaving open the possibility of divine inspiration. And endless arguments take place about the precise meaning of the inscription. Pat Best's research into the history of the nine families suggests to her that it is intended as a warning to those who had disallowed them, and any others who might oppose them. As evidence she cites the alcoholic hell experienced by Menus Jury ever since he attempted to marry someone from outside the families. She sees the motto's ambiguity as deliberate on Zechariah's part, encouraging a sense of fear and guilt in all who might have transgressive thoughts or feelings. The passage of time has increased uncertainty, since some of the letters are missing, leaving only ' ... the Furrow of His Brow' (p. 86). The elders depend for their interpretation on another legend adding semi-miraculous properties to the words, telling how the blind and illiterate five-yearold child, Miss Esther, 'read' the words with her fingers and spoke them aloud. But the young reject the idea that an ex-slave like Zechariah, with the strength of character to build a whole town, could have advocated fear, and suggest instead that the motto should read 'Be the Furrow of His Brow'. They demand the right to enter into dialogue with the Word of the Fathers, believing they can obey God's will by becoming 'His voice, His retribution' (p. 87), his instrument to secure racial justice, whereas the elders insist the words of the young are blasphemy, and that their duty is to obey the Law as interpreted by the Fathers. The elders want to fix the meaning of the Oven for all time, to insist on one meaning, one Law, as the principle which binds the community together. Steward Morgan, one of the most important of the new leaders, threatens violence on anyone who attempts to change the words in the mouth of the Oven, but it is ultimately the Fathers themselves who try to 'Be the Furrow of His Brow' when they attack the Convent. As Pat then recognizes, 'It wasn't God's brow to be feared. It was his [Zechariah's] own, their own' (p. 217). The Fathers have put themselves in place of God. But this Old Testament view of God and the Law is opposed in the novel by the ethics of Christianity. Dovey, Steward Morgan's wife, links the men's longing for monolithic truths with an attack on the body of Christ when she comments on the motto on the Oven, 'Specifying it, particularizing it, nailing its meaning down, was futile. The only nailing needing to be done had already taken place. On the Cross' (p. 93). The minister Richard Misner fully recognizes how his congregation's ancestors clung to their faith throughout persecution

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and injustice, knowing it was possible to triumph even over death, confident in the belief that 'death was life ... and every life ... was holy ... in His eyesight' (p. 160). But this belief seems to be at odds with the Old Fathers' motto: 'Oklahoma is Indians, Negroes and God mixed. All the rest is fodder' (p. 56). Misner's vision of Christianity involves a communitarian spirit, his non-profit-making credit union offering a direct challenge to the banking practices of the Morgans. At the wedding of the Morgans' nephew K.D. to Arnette Fleetwood, two ministers deliver sermons representing those different religious perspectives. Reverend Senior Pulliam offers the version of God worshipped by the Fathers, a God whose love has to be earned: 'Love is not a gift. It is a diploma' (p. 141). In contrast the focus of Misner's religion is a personal Christ, directly accessible to anyone who looks for him. Holding the empty cross in front of the congregation, as if to call them away from their obsession with the Oven, he sees it as the first sign any human being had ever made, fundamental to human identity because it refers symbolically to the human body: This mark of a standing human figure poised to embrace. Remove it ... and Christianity was like any and every religion in the world: a population of supplicants begging respite from begrudging authority ... the weak negotiating a doomed trek through the wilderness. His implicit rejection of the Old Testament God around whom the Jews and the eight-rock Fathers built their faith leads to a radical view of a Christ with whom the oppressed black American can legitimately identity, since 'the execution of this one solitary black man ... moved the relationship between God and man from CEO and supplicant to one on one' (p. 146). The cross, Misner suggests, is a living symbol, unlike the dead symbol which the Oven has become. Reverend Misner sees, therefore, that the people of Ruby have created a Paradise defined by what it excludes rather than what it includes, modelled on the same principles as white racist societies, the same binary oppositions that inscribe racism and sexism in the language: 'They think they have outfoxed the white man when in fact they imitate h i m . . . . How can they hold it together, he wondered, this hard-won heaven defined only by the absence of the unsaved, the unworthy and the strange?' (p. 306). The 'One-drop law' invoked by white people to reject the racially impure is adopted by the eight-rocks for the same purpose. The confusion of biblical motifs and racist

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principles is given dramatic representation in the nativity play acted out by the children of the town. Instead of a single holy family being refused at the inn, seven couples are turned away in a scene which reenacts both the Bible story and the Disallowing. But Pat realizes that two of the original nine families, including her own Cato line, have been excluded. Her father Roger had been the first to violate the blood rule which came into being when the eight-rocks realized they had been rejected by other Negroes because of their skin colour. 'Crackers' like Pat's mother Delia are despised and rejected, and Pat is even aware of hostility towards her own daughter, Billy Delia, whose light skin represents her mother's shaming lack of racial purity. But the rule appears to incur its own curse, for as the eight-rocks increase in prosperity, they decrease in fertility. Fewer children are born, some of them defective, evident signs of inbreeding. The blood-rule, moreover, has particular consequences for women which mean that the principles of exclusion and hierarchy, most apparent on a racial level, are equally powerful on a sexual level. Race and sex are profoundly linked because racial purity can only be safeguarded if female sexuality is controlled: women are the route by which the 'one drop' of non-eight-rock blood could pollute the whole blood line. Dominated by the same Law of the Father as the Israelites, this community of blue-black Americans has adopted the same patriarchal attitudes to female sexuality. The very name of their town echoes the Proverbs passage often used in marriage services: 'Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies' (31. 10). For them too, in Kristeva's words, monotheism 'represents the paternal function: patrilinear descent with transmission of the father's name centralizes eroticism in the single goal of procreation' (About Chinese Women, p. 20). The emphasis on patrilinear lines of descent in the families' genealogies and the anxiety about the future of K.D., the last male in the Morgan line, testify to this tradition, in which women are valued solely in terms of their relationship with men, as wives, daughters and mothers. Although the town's name pays homage to a woman, mother of K.D. and sister of the Morgan brothers, who died early in the town's history, this memorializing of a dead mother preserves an ideal while it erases a reality. The child K.D., 'witness to his mother's name painted on signs and written on envelopes for the rest of his life, was displaced by these sad markings' (p. 17). The word, the sign for his mother, cannot fill the absence created by the loss of his mother's body. And the child's loss is symbolic of what is lost to the community as a whole by their investment in an idea of paradise

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which reduces womanhood to a sign validated by the Fathers. The men pride themselves on the absence of any slack or slovenly women in the town, feeling satisfaction in their clean and orderly homes, created by industrious women producing wholesome meals and endless supplies of clean linen. Even while attacking the Convent, they are quick to judge the women for failing to have their preserving jars ready for the new season. This domestic ideal, with its emphasis on order and industry, channels the desires of the women into acceptable ends and so maintains control by ideological means. What patriarchal ideology identifies as a domestic ideal and as protectiveness towards the vulnerable can, however, degenerate into the desire for more overt means of control. The shame of the Disallowing was heightened for the Fathers by the fact that so many of their women were pregnant, hence the resonance of the nativity scene depicting no room at the inn. The community now therefore prides itself on its protection of women, on knowing that women can walk out alone at night in safety, as they cannot in the world outside Ruby. But any woman who fails to conform to the community's idea of a good woman forfeits that protection, and faces exclusion. There is moreover the sense that attitudes have hardened, again explained by Kristeva's analysis: 'There is one unity: an increasingly purified community discipline, isolated as a transcendent principle and thus insuring the survival of the group' (About Chinese Women, p. 19). While Elder Morgan, one of the original Fathers, had defended a black prostitute against a white attacker, his grandson Steward could see the white man's point, 'could even feel the adrenaline, imagining the fist was his own' (p. 95). As Pat's daughter, young Billie Delia puts it, when the Morgans and the Fleetwoods clash over K.D.'s treatment of his fiancee Arnette, 'the stallions were fighting about who controlled the mares and their foals' (p. 150). The attack on the Convent is only the most violent expression of the feelings of men 'who had seen in lively, free, unarmed females the mutiny of the mares' (p. 308). The power of the men's feelings, however, derives from the repression of their own sexuality. For, as Kristeva's analysis of the sexual economy represented in the Genesis myths suggests,8 the myth of male superiority is fostered by the projection of their own forbidden sexual desires onto women: as the elderly midwife Lone observes, through this strategy 'the fangs and the tail are somewhere else' (p. 276). This displacement is vividly dramatized through the relationship between K.D. and Grace, known as Gigi, the young woman whose arrival in town attracts the attention of every young male. Gigi

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is introduced into the novel through K.D.'s point of view, showing that, as far as he is concerned, Gigi started it all. Embodying an overt sexuality that is forbidden in Paradise, Gigi is in his eyes responsible not only for his desire, but for damaging his relationship with Arnette, and his position as the favoured Morgan descendant. The same pattern of attribution underlies the violence enacted against the convent. The independence of the convent women and their apparent ease with their sexuality and all-female world make them the embodiment of everything the men of Ruby most desire and fear. They embody all the ungodly pleasures that the people of Ruby have sacrificed, under the terms of 'the deal', for peace and security. Because the Convent is located outside Ruby, it is possible for the Fathers to believe that all evil is banished from their own town, but at the wedding of K.D. and Arnette the ideology of the Fathers and the unfettered world of the convent women are brought into direct conflict. Mavis, Gigi and Seneca, their bodies on display and decorated, play loud dance-music outside the very home where the community is singing hymns to celebrate the wedding ceremony which lays the foundations for the family structure at the heart of patriarchy. It becomes easy, therefore, to turn the Convent women into scapegoats for everything that goes wrong in Ruby, with hints of witchcraft. The Morgans claim, 'They meddle. Drawing folks out there like flies to shit and everybody who goes near them is maimed somehow and the mess is seeping back into our homes, our families' (p. 276). When Arnette is beaten up, 'folks' blame the Convent women, although Pat suspects K.D. When Sweetie Fleetwood's children are born damaged, the Convent is held to blame in some way, although they were delivered by Lorn, Ruby's midwife. The rumour that they have performed abortions represents the ultimate threat to male control of female sexuality, apparently relieving the women of Ruby of their responsibility to continue the blood line. Because these women represent everything that threatens Ruby's status as 'paradise', the plan to drive them out acquires divine sanction in the eyes of the new Fathers, who see themselves in the role of God driving the woman responsible for the Fall out of Eden: Bodacious black Eves unredeemed by Mary, they are like panicked does leaping toward a sun that has finished burning off the mist and now pours its holy oil over the hides of game. (p. 18)

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The hunting imagery used throughout the attack reinforces its ambiguity as a pursuit fuelled by a desire that can only be fulfilled through the destruction of the desired. But to its female inhabitants the Convent has a very different significance. For them it, not Ruby, is the 'Haven', the 'Paradise', because free from male control. It is a refuge for women who have been victimized or rejected by male-dominated American society, interpellated as inferior or guilty because they failed to conform to that society's feminine ideal. The first to take refuge at the Convent in the novel's narrative present is Mavis. Because her twin babies suffocated when she left them in the back of her car, Mavis has been interpellated as white trash mother. The newspaper reporter who interviews her after the accident wants her story to provide a warning: Mavis is to become a cipher of maternal neglect. The story will not include her husband's physical and emotional abuse of her, or his neglect of her and the children. When the Cadillac in which she seeks her escape breaks down, she discovers the Convent, where only lies are rejected. Gigi too fails to conform to the patriarchal ideal of womanhood, embodying uncontrolled sexuality to the men of Ruby, while her involvement in the Civil Rights movement represents to the white world the forbidden desires of the black American. Traumatized by the death of a young boy in a civil rights demonstration, she condemns herself for lacking staying power and is totally without self-esteem. She comes to Ruby looking for a rock formation said to look like lovers coupling, a vision which somehow underlies her dream of social justice, as if all equality has to have its roots in the free union of man and woman. Finding the Convent instead, there she is required to deny neither her body nor her longing for justice. The other young refugees at the Convent are more obviously victims. Seneca arrives there after being compelled to follow the weeping Sweetie Fleetwood, mother of damaged children, since all such weeping women embody the child in herself whom she has never allowed to shed tears. Abandoned at the age of five by her young unmarried mother - whom she believes to be her sister - Seneca spends her life attempting to make herself worthy of the love she believes she has forfeited by being bad. Even when sexually abused by her foster-brother while still a young child, because no one believes her story she feels guilty, believing there is something wrong with her that makes her the target of male lust. She therefore cuts herself as a form of punishment, and as a form of pain she can understand. At the Convent, Seneca finds unconditional love. Pallas is the child of

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wealthy parents, but equally neglected. Her mother, ironically named Divine Truelove, not only leaves her, but steals Pallas's lover from her. After running away, being gang-raped and nearly drowning, Pallas is driven by an Indian woman to a clinic, where she meets Billie Delia, one of the staff, who takes her to the Convent. Where her father's response to her plight is to call the police and invoke the law, at the Convent she finds the kind of true parenting she has never known. The Convent also becomes a refuge for the women of Ruby, for whom it embodies all the feelings and values marginalized or made transgressive by their patriarchal community. All who go there are offered help, although not always the help they ask for. When Connie has an affair with Deek Morgan, his wife Soane goes to the Convent ostensibly to abort her child, so as to bring home to Connie the effect of that affair on her marriage, but she leaves still pregnant, and her later miscarriage is, she believes, a judgment on her readiness to use her baby's life as a bargaining tool. Connie's subsequent part in saving the life of Soane's teenage son is enough to make the women's sexual rivalry a matter of insignificance, the close friendship that develops between the two women testifying to the power of female friendship. While still unmarried, Arnette arrives with the same request as Soane, but in spite of the convent women's readiness to support her and her child, attempts to procure an abortion herself, resulting in the premature birth of a baby that dies soon after. Contrary to the men's belief that the Convent women are regular abortionists, what they really offer is an opportunity for women to consider and act on their own desires, free from male control. Billie Delia is damned by the community of Ruby not only for her light skin but because, as a three-year-old child, she took pleasure in riding naked on a horse, demonstrating a sinful capacity for sexual pleasure. When she turns to the Convent in despair after a fierce argument with her mother, she is changed forever by what she finds there, prompting her to leave Ruby for a freer and fuller life. For Lone, too, whose skills as a midwife and healer align her with the spiritual and physical healing tradition embodied in the Convent, the Convent represents total acceptance. Feared by the men of the town, who hate their dependency on her skills for the safe passage of their wives and babies through childbirth, she knows what it is to be needed but rejected. The Convent satisfies these women's needs because it is a female space which has been retrieved from patriarchal ideology. Originally a mansion built by an embezzler as a refuge from the law, it remains the physical embodiment of that ideology. Shaped like a bullet, to

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represent the owner's violent and masculine response to what he fears, it is embellished with pornographic images of women - ashtrays shaped like vaginas and nipple-tipped doorknobs. These images do not, however, represent sexual freedom, even to the sexually liberated Gigi. In the house she finds an etching of St Catherine of Siena: 'A woman. On her knees. A knocked-down look, cast-up begging eyes, arms outstretched holding up her present on a platter to a lord' (p. 74). Although Gigi's first response is to laugh at the 'pudding tits exposed on a plate', the etching raises in her a new consciousness of the ways in which men use women's bodies, so that she later responds to K.D.'s staring at her breasts with irritation and unease. When the building was turned into a convent, attempts had been made to erase these images by the nuns, dedicated to an ideal of female sexual purity. But while it had been possible to cancel the evidence of the embezzler's pleasure, it had not been possible to hide the terror represented by the shape of the building. It is ironically appropriate, therefore, that when the death of the last of the nuns releases the house to the 'wild' women, that shape should be inhabited by so potent a source of male fear. In this building the female body is no longer represented for male pleasure, nor denied to preserve an ideal of female purity, both views rooted in patriarchal discourse; instead it is restored to the women themselves. The 'blessed malelessness' of the house makes it feel to a woman like a 'protected domain, free of hunters but exciting too. As though she might meet herself here - an unbridled, authentic self (p. 177). For in the absence of men, the women find themselves empowered by the strength they find in each other, rather than seeking validation within the male symbolic order. Even Mavis comes to believe that 'the old Mavis was dead. The one who couldn't defend herself from an 11-year-old girl, let alone her husband' (p. 171). To Seneca, as to the other girls, Connie, the woman at the centre of this all-female household, is 'magic' (p. 173) in her ability to give the defeated and helpless the strength to begin life again. The source of this 'magic' is not, however, supernatural but human - unconditional love. The main source of that love is Connie, whose story is the last of the Convent women's to be told in the novel. But Connie is only able to exercise her power because she has been transformed by the love of the Mother Superior of the Convent, Mary Magna, who had rescued the nine-year old Connie from a life of destitution and abuse on the streets of a South American city. In grateful love for her rescuer, Connie spends the next thirty years in the service of God, until a meeting with Deacon Morgan revives memories of the

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joys of the body, of dancing in the streets of her own country, which she now experiences in the consummation of her love for Deacon. Their lovemaking under the fig trees that grow into each other like a loving couple aligns them with the same celebratory tradition of human love with which Gigi identifies, the fig trees representing an alternative Garden of Eden. In Connie are combined love of the Divine, sexual love and the experience of receiving and giving what we traditionally identify as maternal love - caring for those more vulnerable than ourselves. She therefore represents a direct challenge to patriarchal religious discourse which suggests that these different kinds of love cannot be realized in one woman. The power of that love does, however, take on supernatural properties when Connie saves the life of Soane Morgan's son after a driving accident, appearing to possess the power, Christ-like, to raise people from the dead by 'stepping in to find the pinpoint of light' which is life. She learns this skill from Lone, another woman with the power to give, sustain and transform life, but Connie's religious training teaches her that her powers are guilty and transgressive, sent from the devil. Lone, however, argues that her remedies are just as much God's as any form of faith or medicine: 'You need what we all need: earth, air, water. Don't separate God from His elements' (p. 244). Connie continues to feel cut off from God by the apparent miracle she repeatedly performs on Mary Magna herself, out of love, and is only able to come to terms with her power by finding new words for it, outside the discourse she has inherited from patriarchal religion: calling it 'in sight', she finally accepts it as a gift from God. Ultimately, then, Morrison uses Connie to represent a reconciliation of the Christian tradition with an older female tradition. Connie learns the power of Christianity from Mary Magna, who herself possesses a semi-divine quality, giving off a cool blue light, taking on the attributes of her namesake, the Virgin. But as a powerful maternal figure, she is also linked with the older Mother Goddess, enabling Connie to connect the two apparently conflicting religious traditions. These traditions can only, however, be reconciled by challenging the Word at the heart of patriarchal religion, particularly the attitudes to women enshrined in patristic interpretations of the Bible. In her final revelation to the girls, at once her life story and her credo, Connie rejects the Eve/Mary dichotomy that separates female sexuality from female spirituality: My child body, hurt and soil, leaps into the arms of a woman who teach me my body is nothing my spirit everything. I agreed her

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until I met another. My flesh is so hungry for itself it ate him. When he fell away the woman rescue me from my body again. Twice she saves it. When her body sickens I care for it in every way flesh works. I hold it in my arms and between my legs. Clean it, rock it, enter it to keep it breath. After she is dead I can not get past that. My bones on hers the only good thing. Not spirit. Bones. No different from the man. My bones on his the only true thing. So I wondering where is the spirit lost in this? It is true, like bones. It is good, like bones. One sweet, one bitter. Where is it lost? Hear me, listen. Never break them in two. Never put one over the other. Eve is Mary's mother. Mary is the daughter of Eve. (p. 263) And just as Connie found new terms to recuperate her powers from the witchlike associations of 'magic', so she teaches the young women who come to her in despair also to tell their own stories and represent themselves in their own terms, rather than in terms of the ideology which labels them as victim or deviant. She teaches them to paint templates of their bodies onto the cellar floor and add images of their experiences onto them, so that they can externalize their pain and guilt, transferring it onto their painted selves so that they no longer need to hurt their own bodies. Similarly when the women begin what she calls the loud dreaming, and share their stories with each other, they achieve a kind of catharsis or exorcism through narrative, so that they are no longer haunted like so many in Ruby. Others outside the Convent are similarly engaged in challenging patriarchal myth. For years Pat Best has been providing a feminist interpretation of the genealogies of the Fathers which constitute the official version of Ruby's history. Her interest is in the women with only one name, whose identity depended on the men they married. She adds footnotes to the official story, using her imagination and insight to fill the gaps left by the documentation, and aided by women's talk: Grandmothers sitting on the floor while a granddaughter scratched their scalps liked to reminisce aloud. Then bits of tales emerged like sparks lighting the absences that hovered over their childhoods. (pp. 188-9) Inevitably, the most significant focus for any challenge to the orthodoxy of the Fathers is the Oven itself. Like Misner, the women in the community see how a rigid and unchanging Law, set in stone, has

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destroyed the spirit on which the community was built. Now an empty symbol, the Oven had originally provided a source of nourishment, as well as a sense of identity. Its round shape represents not only the head but the womb, not just the father - as head of the family - but the mother's power to nourish. Haven had survived the early years of the Depression because its residents never denied each other anything; Soane Morgan, wife of Steward's brother Deacon, cannot understand why her banker husband is now motivated solely by profit, so that he no longer helps out his friends with their money problems. She reflects that, even after the move to Ruby, when the Oven was no longer needed as a source of food, it had been the focus of celebrations after outdoor baptism, when everyone had rejoiced in their new-found safety. As soon as baptisms were held indoors, this 'utility became a shrine' (p. 103), the focus of a kind of idolatry. The narrative of life in Ruby represents a constant struggle by the women to maintain a different set of values to those of racial pride and intolerance maintained by the Fathers. Pat compares their attempts to prevent her pale-skinned mother Delia dying in childbirth with Steward Morgan's response to Delia's arrival as Roger Best's wife 'He's bringing along the dung we leaving behind' (p. 201). But Soane and her women friends are ignored by men with their eyes set on Paradise. When someone paints a black fist with red fingernails on the Oven, therefore, the colour of the eight-rock patriarchy is combined with a sign of female sexuality in a transgressive almost sacrilegious gesture. The nature of that challenge is made explicit when Anna Flood, whose unstraightened hair and closeness to Misner make her an object of suspicion in the community, argues that even the young are wrong about the wording on the Oven, which should read, 'Be the Furrow of Her Brow' (p. 159). Understanding that the young need to reinterpret the Word, need a living religion, rather than to be held in the deadly grip of the past, she suggests that such a religion might be rooted in the concept of female spirituality and power. Misner himself looks for inspiration elsewhere, to the community's African roots, as the black civil rights movement of the 1960s did. The Fathers, however, since the second Disallowing in 1949, reject the idea of campaigning with other coloured Americans or of recognizing a bond with others with African roots. Their vision of themselves as a chosen people in search of their Promised Land is too exclusive to accommodate any sense of a wider racial identity. For them, history before their epic journey is a history of slavery, just as it was for the Israelites before Moses led them out of Egypt. But Misner believes that

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only by knowing about the world before slavery can they shake off slave mentality. Trapped in a myth of the past, rather than acknowledging their history, and cut off from the political issues that concern other African Americans, the people of Ruby have no future. Their idea of paradise is based on denial, most evident in their proud boast that there is no death in their town. Since the death of the woman it was named after, nobody has ever died in Ruby, except for the racially impure Delia Best, who counts as a non-person. The first death in Ruby since its naming - the death of Sweetie's child Save-Marie therefore symbolizes the Fall. But this Fall follows not the sexual transgressions against which the Fathers fulminate, but the attack on the Convent, which demonstrates their hatred of women beyond male control. This act not only leads to Connie's death, but to division between the Morgan brothers and their wives, and suspicion and hostility throughout the community. All have to ask themselves, 'How could so clean and blessed a mission devour itself and become the world they had escaped?' (p. 292). In contrast, the younger people in Ruby respond positively to Misner's insistence that they should derive racial pride not from the exclusivity of eight-rock blood, but from joining with other black Americans to assert their equality with white Americans. Interpreting the words on the Oven as 'Be the Furrow of His Brow', the young learn from him to argue that, as a race, African Americans can become the instrument of God's justice. They want to assert their African roots, giving themselves African names and making the Oven a focus for their celebration of this black and beautiful identity. They accept Misner's offer of a myth of creation with its origins firmly in Africa in place of the mythical Eden passed down by white interpreters of the Bible: your own home, where if you go back past your great-great-grandparents, past theirs, and theirs, past the whole of Western history, past the beginning of organized knowledge, past pyramids and poison bows, on back to when rain was new, before plants forgot they could sing and birds thought they were fish, back when God said Good! Good! - there, right there where you know your own people were born and lived and died ... That place. Who was God talking to if not to my people living in my home? (p. 213) The novel itself, however, ends not with any ancient myths of paradise, either Hebrew or African, but with a contemporary all-female

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vision which the novel's final word names as 'Paradise'. Set in South America, the vision focuses on Piedade, a woman 'black as firewood'. It appears to be based on Connie's memories of such a woman, a liberating inspiration which set in motion the 'loud dreaming' of the young women in her care. The vision is one of comfort and security. The emerald eyes and tea brown hair of the woman whose head lies in Piedade's lap are those of Connie herself, although the experience is one she never had, an experience of reaching age in the company of the other; of speech shared and divided bread smoking from the fire; the unambivalent bliss of going home to be at home - the ease of coming back to love begun. (p. 318) This final vision therefore embodies another Eden, a 'solace', which can only be a dream within patriarchal society. What, then, is the relationship between Misner's suggestion that salvation for black Americans lies in returning to African roots, and this final enigmatic suggestion that it lies rather with recognizing the power of women and their song? A more fully worked-out answer to this question is provided not by this novel but by Alice Walker's novel, The Temple of My Familiar. In this earlier novel the African Mother Goddess appears to offer an alternative to the legitimating principles of white patriarchal religion, an alternative which combines the two images of 'home' offered in Morrison's Paradise. Recovering the Power of the Goddess: Alice Walker - The Temple of My Familiar9 While not denying the potentially redemptive and liberating meaning of the New Testament, Alice Walker's novel, The Temple of my Familiar, also suggests that historically the Bible has been used as an instrument of exploitation and oppression, rather than liberation. The novel looks therefore to the much older tradition of the Mother Goddess as a source of inspiration, particularly for women. But while most of the writers discussed in this study have also evoked this tradition in their fiction, none of them has foregrounded the element of race to the extent that Alice Walker has in this novel. For her Mother Goddess is African and black, and the geographical source of spiritual truth is Africa, not the Mediterranean. The displacement of the Goddess from Western mythological and religious systems by the God of Israel and

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Christianity is therefore evidence not only of the subordination and denigration of women, but of the repression and denigration of the African race. The power of Walker's analysis of this process lies in her ability to couple questions of gender with questions of race without minimizing the weight of either. But this novel is not primarily about a mythical past in which women had power. The Temple of my Familiar is structured in such a way as to demonstrate that the struggle of black women for freedom, both from the white races and from black men, is ongoing. The past, recent and prehistoric, is brought into the novel's contemporary present through an interwoven series of retrospective narratives, all delivered by characters in the novel, which demonstrate how different forms of ideological and institutional enslavement have destroyed the mother goddess tradition, and the power it gave black women. But although that tradition is presented as an alternative to the ideologies of enslavement, it is not allowed to develop into a rival master discourse in its turn. The novel's complex and at times confusing chronology blurs any sense of an over-arching mythical or historical timeline. Similarly the sense of parallel strands in the tradition, showing its evolution in South America as well as in Africa, militates against the construction of a single 'grand narrative'. Instead the memory of the mother goddess tradition is a thread running through the narrative, linking its different strands, and indicating its continuing importance in the lives of all women of colour. The first person narrators each speak about their own highly subjective experience, experiences which often defy the conventions of realist narrative, so that the reader is left with the responsibility of assessing their truth claims without any direction from an external narrator or reference to other written or spoken authority. Unifying all the narratives is a single theme - a quest for the mother. Whether a quest for the individual, biological mother, or for the mythic mother goddess, all ultimately converge on that myth of origins. Carlotta, her lover Arveyda, and mother Zede are all involved in retrieving the traditions of Zede's South American ancestors; Suwelo, through the memories of his Uncle Hal and his beloved Lissie, explores the history of mother goddess mythology; Fanny, through the memories of her mother Olivia and father Ola, explores her African heritage; and Mary Jane, through her research into the life of her English great aunt discovers the matriarchal culture of the African M'Sukta. Each of these narrative strands is linked by the plot to at least one of the others, emphasizing the impossibility of turning one's back

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on the mother, either individual or mythical. Although Arveyda in a sense takes Carlotta's mother from her, by becoming her lover, he also returns her to her daughter complete by making Carlotta aware that, as Irigaray puts it, 'We do not have to renounce being women in order to be mothers' (p. 43). Walker here transgresses those religious taboos explored by French feminists, and restores the mother-daughter relationship on a basis which recognizes the sexualized maternal body, perceived simultaneously as a source of creative and spiritual power. Knowing about her mother's love affair with Arveyda enables Carlotta to see her 'as a woman, a person, a being. Sacred. And to love her more than ever' (p. 439). And in turn Carlotta performs 'magic' in conjuring up the mother Arveyda has almost forgotten through the Gospel of Shug, in whom he recognizes his mother's spiritual kin. Similar retrievals take place throughout the novel, 'mother' becoming its central metaphor, uniting present with prehistory, and each individual with his/her roots as the basis for creative thought and production. The key structural principle of the novel is therefore provided by the psychological function central to its system of values - memory. Walker uses the inscription from a memorial to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust as an epigraph to the novel's final part: 'Remembrance is the key to redemption' (p. 368). Or, as Alison Easton says of Grace Nichols's poetry about Caribbean slavery, 'Remembrance, if enacted in a new way, may offer a certain kind of liberation.' 10 For the African races, as for women, memory has a particularly important role to play, as their history has until recently been omitted from written records. The most important memory in the text is that of Miss Lissie, an elderly African American whose belief that she has been reincarnated many times provides a device by which a single subject's memories can span the whole history of the mother goddess tradition and its aftermath, providing a mythical history of race and gender relations. In Lissie, the authenticity of subjective experience is combined with a historical perspective which demonstrates the power that awareness of the mother goddess tradition can bring to individual women. Miss Lissie is introduced into the novel by one of the novel's younger male characters, Suwelo, when he inherits the house of his Uncle Rafe, who - together with his best friend Hal - had been Lissie's lover. As Suwelo listens to her stories, he realizes they may provide some illumination into the breakdown of his own relationship with his lover, Fanny. Lissie's narrative includes a myth of the Fall, which concerns her only incarnation as a male, the white son of the queen, a wise woman and healer, trained by her own mother. In this prelapsarian 10.1057/9780230597358 - Women and the Word, Jeannette King

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world the two sexes live separately but in harmony. On puberty, the young man leaves the tribe to find a mate with his familiar, a strong and gentle lion called Husa. But when he meets a girl with a snake for a familiar, he experiences shame for the first time as he realizes his difference from her, seeing his ghostly reflection in a pool, and his naked penis, and she rubs him with berries to change his colour. When the girl reacts to his suffering with the mourning ritual of one of the great apes, he is, however, sickened by her animality and chases her away with a club, with which he also kills her snake. He is ultimately driven into exile by his sense of difference. Wearing an animal skin brought to him by Husa, he puts on the image of man the hunter, therefore becoming the enemy of the animals to complete the fall from harmony. Fantasizing that perhaps her former self's mate returned to him to start a new tribe, Lissie points out that this fantasy also forms the basis for the Old Testament myth of creation. The association of the female with both the snake and the awakening of shame echoes the biblical myth of the Fall. But the young man's sense of difference, induced by both his whiteness and his penis, neatly reverses the norms by which Western culture has interpreted both as tokens of superiority. It therefore provides a psychological rationale for the biblical version, suggesting the white male's sense of inferiority requires the kind of myth Genesis offers as compensation and justification. A mythical explanation for that sense of inferiority is provided by what Fanny calls black people's special relationship with the sun: 'the bedrock of [their] security as black human beings'. She tells Suwelo that, in contrast, the African white man, born without melanin, so without protection from burning, felt cursed by the sun which black people worshipped, so that he stopped people from worshipping it, and replaced it with a new god which more closely resembled himself 'cold, detached, given to violent rages and fits of jealousy' (p. 352) and moved to the more temperate climate of Europe. In Lissie's version of Eden, people and animals live in harmonious intimacy until the Fall, whereas in the Old Testament, man is given dominion over the animals by God, justifying his subjugation of all other forms of life. To complete Lissie's account of the Fall, when the male and female tribes later merged, women 'became emotionally dependent on the individual man by whom man's law now decreed they must have all their children' (p. 403). From now on men alone were 'familiars' of women. But other memories function to make it clear that oppression through division is not restricted to the white races. Lissie remembers 10.1057/9780230597358 - Women and the Word, Jeannette King

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another life as a pygmy, when she and her tribe lived with their cousins, the apes, creatures who lived in total harmony with the world around them: 'They seemed nearly unable to comprehend separateness; they lived and breathed as a family, then as a clan, then as a forest, and so on' (p. 102). From them she and her mate learn to bond for life. The arrival of large men who kill the apes introduces not only terror but that consciousness of difference which forms the basis of all oppression. The pygmies learn they have superior skills which enable them to kill their larger cousins themselves, while the men among them realize they have superior strength which enables them to dominate the women and children. In this instance size, rather than colour, introduces the sense of difference, but here again women become the oppressed. It is important, however, to note that Lissie tries to repress the memory of her reincarnation as a man, suggesting she is unwilling to recognize that in her too lies the potential for using her sense of difference to oppress others. The text is here perhaps warning women against simply reversing the processes by which they have been oppressed. If Lissie's 'memories' thus suggest that African visions of harmony have been superseded by the Eden myth, other narratives use different kinds of evidence to suggest that all patriarchal religious myths try to erase the matriarchal myths which preceded them. When the AfricanAmerican Fanny goes to Africa to meet her half-sister, Nzingha, she hears about her sister's visit to Paris, where she was sent by their radical father Ola, to be 'educated'. She is horrified by a lecture on the Greek foundation of Western civilization which represents Medusa as a monster, since she knows that the snakes which replace Medusa's hair are symbols of fertility and wisdom in Africa. Nzingha has learnt, ironically from nuns working in Africa, that this figure is in fact the mother of Christian angels. She is Isis, mother of Horus ... The Goddess, who, long before she became Isis, was known all over Africa as simply the Great Mother, Creator of All, Protector of All, the Keeper of the Earth. The Goddess. (p. 296) In Africa, the nuns had been far enough from European churches to debunk all the anti-female, white supremacist religion they had been taught. Even Notre Dame, Nzingha learns from them, was built on the site of a shrine to Isis, later known as the Black Madonna, built in fact to colonize any remnants of the goddess's spirit. What Medusa now 10.1057/9780230597358 - Women and the Word, Jeannette King

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represents is: 'the Western world's memorialization of that period in prehistory when the white male world of Greece decapitated and destroyed the black female Goddess/Mother tradition and culture of Africa' (p. 298). Walker implies, then, that Christianity has been a useful tool in the colonial project, suppressing the religion of the mother goddess and replacing it with an ideology which placed the white man at the centre of civilization, with a responsibility to impose his systems of knowledge and belief on the inferior non-white races. The result has been what Gayatri Spivak calls 'epistemic violence', as well as physical brutality. 11 Recalling her life as a young Moor in Spain, Lissie recalls how the daughters of the Moors had believed that Christianity, unlike Islam, would let the Goddess of Africa pass into the modern world as the Black Madonna. But the Spanish Inquisition condemned belief in the black mother as heresy: she could not have been the mother of the white blue-eyed Christ, 'because both the color black and the female sex were of the devil' (p. 223). All women who demonstrated their power as healers and midwives were burned at the stake as witches. Women could only keep alive the memory of their African Eden, where all life was connected, through their feeling for other animals, usually only a cat, who became their familiar. But because women's relationship with animals and their children made men jealous, it too became evidence of witchcraft. Lissie confirms what Kristeva argues - that the only role allowed a man's mother in Christianity, 'after nurturing and rearing him with her blood, is to shut up' (p. 223). Once again the story is picked up through another narrative strand, as Fanny learns from her parents how the white man enslaved Africa by destroying its religion as well as through superior technological and military power. Ola tells his daughter that, like the Hopi tribes of South America, most ancient Africans thought of the earth 'as a body that needs all its organs and bones and blood in order to function properly' (p. 339), which is why they drove out those who tried to mine the country. The African deities, like those represented in the fiction of Sara Maitland and Michele Roberts, demand respect for the earth, whereas the white man's God gives mankind authority over it: as Lissie observes, the religion taught her as a child encourages people to see the earth as something to be consumed. Africa is robbed not only of its mineral wealth but of its culture by 'investors', who turn it into an uninhabited region in the world imagination. The novel offers a psychological as well as economic explanation for this process, suggesting - as post-colonial theorists have done - that the white man 10.1057/9780230597358 - Women and the Word, Jeannette King

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represses those parts of himself which he sees as 'primitive', projecting them onto the African who comes to represent the despised and feared 'other'. One of the key figures in the only white narrative strand in the novel, a wealthy young woman called Elly Peacock, who acquired a great love of Africa through travelling there in the 1920s, recognizes this in a diary entry, made after visiting what sounds like an early performance of Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring: There was our passion and our savagery before it became tamed. But it had not really become tame, only repressed - and the worship of nature turned into its opposite, and the end result was wilderness ravaged and despoiled, and people in chains. (p. 257) For it is not only the continent of Africa, but its people that are enslaved. From her mother Olivia, a former African missionary, Fanny learns how Christianity was used to justify that enslavement, how the White man made the Bible say 'whatever was necessary to keep his plantations going, ... using it as a tool to degrade women and enslave blacks'. Olivia's stepfather Samuel abandoned his African mission because he lost his faith 'not in the spiritual teachings of Jesus, the prophet and human being, but in Christianity as a religion of conquest and domination inflicted on other peoples'. Christianity had diminished and oppressed his people, so that it was hard for them to feel loved by the God of Christianity in the way that they felt loved in their traditional religions. Any suggestion that God had a female aspect was erased with equal rigour: even the Holy Ghost, 'who at one time was the Female in the Deity' (p. 167) became male. But it is Lissie's memories that turn the 'objective' historical facts into intensely realized subjective experience, demonstrating not only the physical suffering undergone, but the onslaught upon the most deeply felt religious beliefs. From her incarnation as an African slave, she recalls how some amongst them still carried on the old tradition of mother worship, and were horrified to see mothers sold into slavery. She describes life in the slave ships, where all were branded before embarking and had their wounds soothed with mother's milk, the last trace of the mother's power, even for those Africans who no longer believed in her worship. Slavery represents the antithesis of all that the Mother Goddess stood for, subverts all the most intimate bonds between human beings, even those between mother and child. As was suggested earlier in this chapter, slavery turns motherhood

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into a mode of production rather than reproduction, a process by which more commodities are produced, rather than familial ties being created. When white crew men made slaves pregnant, the offspring's colour 'made their own seed disappear ... the color of gold was all they saw' (p. 85). Referring back to the myth recounted by Fanny, Lissie argues that 'the white man worships gold because it is the sun he has lost' (p. 392). The novel shows the process, moreover, repeated in the Americas, emphasizing that colonialism was a characteristic mode of operation for white Europeans as a race, not for specific nationalities. Another narrative strand involves a young South American woman, Carlotta, now living in California, and her mother Zede. It traces Zede's history back to her native American ancestors, called indios by the Italian explorer who thought them to be 'in God' (p. 19). Zede recounts to her daughter their myth of creation, and describes the religious tradition that evolved from it: in the beginning, at about the same time the toucan was created, there was also woman, and in the process of life and change she produced a being somewhat unlike herself. This frightened her. Still, she kept the little hombre with her for a long time, until he grew anxious to discover whether there existed, somewhere else, more of his own kind. (p. 61) In this account it is the men who constructed the goddess myth, as a means of explaining the phenomenon of birth: Immediately they imagined a mujer muy grande, larger than the sky, producing somehow, the earth. A goddess. And so, if the producer of the earth was a goddess, then women must be her priests, and must possess great and supernatural powers. (p. 62) But while this meant that women were for a time the only priests, it led ultimately to their subjugation, since the men not only worshipped but feared the women, as the source of what they could not understand. The men therefore decided to become priests themselves, castrating themselves to become like women and dressing like them, experiencing a pain in the process that could only intensify their hatred of women. Lacking joy, the priests could only inspire the 10.1057/9780230597358 - Women and the Word, Jeannette King

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people during ceremonies by wearing feathered costumes, made by women, as if by magic. Remnants of that tradition, and of women's spiritual power remain even in Zede's lifetime: she remembers as a girl, menstruating, going to bathe in a waterfall, 'a magic place ... always on the full moon'; the young women 'would all gather by Ixtaphtaphahex, the Goddess' (p. 58), with their mothers, and listen to stories of long ago. Carlotta's mother is the inheritor of this 'magic', making capes with feathers that seem to be a gift from the Gods. Walker does not, however, suggest that slavery is purely a phenomenon of white culture, or that it was only white men who destroyed the culture of the mother goddess. Lissie's memories suggest that the mother goddess tradition had been under attack for generations before the slave trade finally destroyed it: 'The men had decided they would be creator, and they went about dethroning woman systematically' (p. 78). This meant raiding the women's temples, enslaving the captives, and even selling women and children of their own tribe that they no longer wanted to be responsible for. And some of the old African religions mutilated women's bodies - as they still do - as part of the process by which 'man, in his insecurity and feeling of unlovableness, made himself the sole conduit to God, if not at times the actual God himself (p. 167). Nor does Walker suggest that such misogyny is confined to the past. Post-colonial African males are, according to her storytellers, only too ready to ape white sexist attitudes, adopting the practice of pornography and encouraging black women to look like white women, unwittingly falling victim to the last ploy of the colonizer - the imposition of white taste and attitudes on the native population. Ola, Fanny's father, writes plays about the oppression of black women by black men, despairing as his government introduces or retains laws unpopular with women, like the laws against interracial marriage - to secure 'race pride' - and permits polygamy. He sees Africans collaborating in the destruction of their continent and their children. Underlying all is the fear of women: as his last wife, Mary Jane Briden, says, 'Nothing is harder for men in power than to contemplate what the African woman knows' (p. 387). With the wholesale suppression of Mother Goddess mythology, it becomes increasingly easy to deny that societies based around matriarchy, rather than patriarchy, ever existed. The only evidence that matriarchal myth might relate to matriarchal practice is, according to the novel, contained in a museum, divorced from all possibility of ever again becoming a living reality. Mary Ann Haverstock, a wealthy young American who liberates Zede and Carlotta from a life of toil and

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poverty, leaves them in America when she travels to England under the name Mary Jane Briden to research the life of her Great Aunt - Elly Peacock. Because Mary Jane is a white American, research, rather than memory, is her only means of reconstructing the African past. Elly's journal describes her discovery of a young African woman M'Sukta, the last of a matriarchal tribe, living in a reconstruction of her village as a museum exhibit. On the one hand, the written word, always possessing a degree of authority in Western culture, appears to authenticate this evidence of matriarchy. On the other, its inscription in Elly's diary, like M'Sukta's enclosure in a fake recreation of her world, is further evidence of the way in which the history of matriarchal culture has become safely contained as an object of academic study in patriarchal Western culture. Elly Peacock's desire to explore this alien culture derives from her desire to be liberated from the restrictions of her life as a wealthy white English woman, just as her supposedly liberated descendant, Mary Jane, looks for a freedom she cannot find within the confines of the American dream. For the matriarchal culture represented by M'Sukta and her people is not interested so much in asserting matriarchal power as in the principle of freedom and equality for both sexes.12 Where Lissie's first postlapsarian memories suggest that men and women cannot live together in harmony, M'Sukta's people seem to have found a way of resolving this conflict through the design of their housing. The Ababa tribe, after thousands of years of separate living, experimented with living in couples in a way that would retain each person's freedom, by building houses shaped like a bird, with two wings joined by a body of common space. Such houses resulted in a peaceful and egalitarian way of life. Here there is a recognition of the reality of interdependence of men with women, of black with white - a recognition embedded in the motto built into the wall of M'Sukta's hut: 'ME TAO ACHE DAKEN SOMO TUK DE . . . THEY CANNOT KILL US, BECAUSE WITHOUT US THEY DIE' ( p p . 2 5 4 - 5 ) .

The most urgent question, therefore, which presses on the central characters in the novel is whether men and women can once more live together without endangering each other's liberty. The novel implies that answers cannot be found in the white man's culture. This is implicit in the fable which gives the novel its title: Lissie dreams that she shows Suwelo - white in her dream - her temple, and her colourful familiar, part bird, part fish. As it darts about, distracting her, she traps it under a metal washtub, understanding as she does so that 'all of this activity on the familiar's part was about freedom, and that by [her] actions [she] was destroying [their] relationship' (p. 139).

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She nevertheless persists, watched by a white crowd, until the creature eventually succeeds in flying away for ever, leaving her in an alien world and century. Alice Walker has said in an interview that 'your familiar is your own free spirit'. Her next comment explains the racial elements here: 'colonial religion ... is the iron pot put over the heathen, put over the natural person'. 13 By attempting to secure the approval of her white observers, Lissie has stifled 'the natural person' in herself, and separated herself from her own traditions and culture, leaving nothing but a momentary sense of victory. The novel is not, however, advocating a return to the religion of the mother goddess, or looking for sanctions and principles in a mythical golden age, but simply directing the reader to the wisdom to be found in civilization's African roots and in a female religious tradition. It suggests, moreover, that such wisdom survives in African-American women's experience, in accordance with what Patricia Hill Collins defines as 'an Afrocentric Feminist Epistemology'. She suggests there are two types of knowing - knowledge and wisdom. Whereas knowledge can be derived from reading and education, wisdom is based on experience, and Collins argues that the distinction between the two has been the key to black women's survival: 'Knowledge without wisdom is adequate for the powerful, but wisdom is essential to the survival of the subordinate.' 14 Walker's female religious tradition seems to be based on such wisdom, rather than on knowledge derived from a written source like the Bible or its authorized interpreters. This becomes clear when we see how the biblical tradition is reworked in the Gospel according to Shug, the lesbian singer who transforms the life of Celie, Olivia's mother, in Walker's most famous novel, The Colour Purple. Disaffected with the male-centred churches which turn a blind eye to so much male violence towards women, Shug founds a 'band': what renegade black women's churches were called traditionally; it means a group of people who share a common bond and purpose and whose notion of spiritual reality is radically at odds with mainstream or prevailing ones. (p. 330) These 'praying bands', in which women preached and talked about Scripture, are typical of the struggle for women's religious agency amongst African Americans in the nineteenth century, according to Gerda Lerner. She points out that, although these self-educated African-American evangelists, including Sojourner Truth, based their

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authority to teach and preach on mystical experiences and on citations from the Bible, sharing the theological tradition of white Protestant religions, their churches had their own language, symbolism, structures and traditions (Creation of Feminist Consciousness, p. 107). Shug's 'church' is not a building but, as Celie explains, 'simply a few words gleaned, like spiritual rice grains, from her earthly passage' (p. 326). These words are set out in her pamphlet, The Gospel According to Shug, which presents an alternative set of Beatitudes, extolling racial harmony, the children of love, those who love life, the generous, those who laugh, those who love all without discrimination or prejudice, and those who love the Earth. It is a hymn in praise of tolerance and diversity. The last of Shug's Beatitudes, 'Helped are those who know' (p. 319), implies what Collins defines as wisdom rather than knowledge, and her Gospel resists the unifying authority of monotheism, since the love of diversity extends even to the concept of God. Everyone brings their own ideas about God(s) to this new religion: as Mama Shug is reported to have said, 'there was only one thing anyone could say bout G-O-D, and that was - it had no name' (p. 193). These are the same beliefs that inspired the missionary Samuel to help the Africans discover their own power to communicate directly with God because 'God' was not a monolith, and 'not separate from us, or absent from whatever world one inhabited' (p. 166). This religious tradition is based on ideas of the divine as immanent in the world and in human beings, rather than a remote force located outside human experience. It also, ironically, incorporates the Christian principles of love and forgiveness which have been negated by racism and sexism. Mary Jane's radicalism, which leads her to reject her wealthy parents' ideology, follows a religious conversion, based on Christ's words, 'the least of these'. When Olivia advises Fanny to forgive the white man, she asks, 'Do you think they know what they are doing ... ?' (p. 339), echoing the words of Christ on the cross, and describes the white man as the prodigal son of Africa, this time using the Old Testament to affirm the principle of forgiveness. For such a religious discourse, centred not on authority and a monolithic view of truth but on subjective lived experience, the oral tradition would seem to be the only appropriate means of transmission. A belief system that is transmitted orally can be adapted to specific circumstances and needs, and respond to other voices and traditions, including - as we have seen - the Christian one. According to Collins, new knowledge claims are usually developed through dialogue in what

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she calls Africanist feminist epistemology, reflecting its roots in the African oral tradition. The Temple of my Familiar is constructed primarily out of oral histories. Where written sources are included they are those typical of women, and until recently rarely acknowledged as literature or 'real' history - letters and journals. And it is highly significant that Lissie makes use of more modern technology, using cassette recordings to transmit her memories after her death without losing the immediacy of her voice. Like others discussed in this study, this novel is 'dialogic' in its use of multiple voices, none privileged over another, often engaging implicitly if not explicitly with the monologic voice of white patriarchal monotheism. The truth claims of those voices can only be validated by the individual experiences of the presence that utters them, not by the power and authority of the transcendental presence that sustains the logocentric tradition. There is no attempt to efface their subjectivity, and no master discourse can be extracted from the complexly interwoven fabric of the text. But the most significant aspect of these oral histories is that they give women a voice. However much of women's creative power may derive from the body, that power must be transmitted into and through language to enable women to become the subjects of their own narratives. All the novelists discussed in this study have affirmed that women have to enter into the symbolic order in which sexual and political power relations are inscribed, if they have any hope of transforming those relations. As Ola the revolutionary explains, 'Talk ... is the key to liberation, one's tongue the very machete of freedom' (p. 348). M'Sukta's language, the product of a matriarchal society, suggests one way in which female experience, including that of the female body, might enter into language, since its highly metaphoric nature demonstrates how language denoting the physical can embody the abstract and spiritual, transmitting the physical bases of experience. A page from Elly's journal attempts to recreate that quality in a literal translation alongside its more formal English translation: These words never bored me ('made my head heavy as rice grains in a gourd') all the years I lived in the museum ('granary for humans'). Those words called me back when sickness and sadness ('heaviness of centre chesf) threatened to carry me away ('eat down my soul'). It is a miracle ('the end of rainbow') that they should have been there at all, etched in the mud wall beside the granary door; for our people did not read or write; instead they placed their trust ('open chest, sun shining') and their history ('kisses and kicks

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Against the wider vocabulary of the English, M'Sukta's language offers a more limited vocabulary which relates every concept to physical experience; against the concise abstractions of the English, hers offers a system of representing abstractions like justice in terms which are breathtakingly simple, yet make it impossible to retreat from reality into theory. Through language, moreover, African-American women can construct an empowering symbol system through which to represent themselves and their traditions, freeing themselves from the disempowering definitions of patriarchy and colonialism. For, as Gerda Lerner writes, 'revolutionary ideas can be generated only when the oppressed have an alternative to the symbol and meaning system of those who dominate them' (Creation of Patriarchy, p. 222). African slaves, she suggests, could maintain their humanity through their collective memories of a prior state of freedom and their own culture, which provided alternatives to the master's rituals and symbols. For Walker the sources of such a symbolic system are provided by the tradition of the Mother Goddess, which acknowledges the legitimacy of female power as beneficent and independent. She suggests the pervasiveness of that tradition by noting that the colour blue is a symbol of female power in each of the cultures evoked in the novel: Olivia's African-American mother believed that a particular vivid shade of blue gave off power when she wore it; blue is an important colour in the feathers of Lissie's familiar, and peacock is the colour of the feathers Carlotta uses for her magic capes, as well as being the name of Mary Jane's feminist ancestor. Mary Jane herself sails off to her new life in a ship with a small turquoise snake embroidered on the sails, a snake which becomes her personal emblem of spirituality. She knows enough about older religious traditions to know the symbol's meaning: The snake, which sheds its skin but is ever itself, and, because of its knowledge of the secret places of the earth, free from the threat of extinction, apparently uneradicable; and turquoise, a color of cleansing of body and spirit, of the clarification of memories, and of powerful healing. (pp. 233-4)

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to the ancestors') in the memory ('head granary') of human beings ('those alone on the earth who think of what is just' - just, 'two hands holding equal amounts of grain'). (p. 256)

For readers of the Bible, the snake has long been identified with women, through Eve. In this novel Walker recuperates its original function and association with the Goddess, so that it once again represents woman's place both in the reproductive cycle and in the processes of physical and spiritual healing which are central to any religious tradition. Such a symbolic discourse locates spirituality in the female body, rather than in opposition to it, because the mother goddess mythology on which Walker draws is free from such dualistic thinking. When Fanny and Arveyda make love at the end of the novel, they share the same vision of a yellow plum tree, its branches full of every living creature, even fish. This is the same vision of life before the fall described by Lissie, 'the whole tribe of creation climbing an enormous plum tree' (p. 395), in which there is no separation on the basis of colour or gender or species. Two important points are made here. The first is that when they name each other - '"My ... spirit", says Fanny ... "My... flesh", says Arveyda' (p. 449) - they are not reiterating the binary oppositions of patriarchal gender discourse, but recognizing each other as part of a single unity - flesh and spirit. Secondly the vision which they have been privileged to experience comes to them through orgasm, the spiritual through the sexual. The religious tradition they have tapped into is as holistic as patriarchal religion is dualistic: it validates spirit and body, male and female, as parts of a single whole. If this tradition frees women from the binary oppositions of patriarchal religious discourse, does it necessarily liberate them from the essentializing effects of that discourse, or merely replace the equation women = body = evil with women = body = good? As if to emphasize that the linguistic tradition evident in M'Sukta's language is still alive in Africa, Nzingha tells Fanny that in her language 'the word for woman is the same as for seed granary' (p. 283). This metaphor appears to represent woman entirely as body, as reproductive function, but simultaneously demands that the reader is alert to its subtext. That is, if we think of women only in terms of their reproductive functions, then this is all the metaphor will mean to us; if, however, we recognize women's capacity for other forms of creativity, then we will be responsive to the metaphoric richness of 'seed granary', and its potential for representing women as the source of every kind of creative and intellectual thought. Walker's representation of the female body is, moreover, highly materialist, located in specific historical and cultural contexts which reveal how far the

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female body has been written on by patriarchal discourse, particularly when that body is black. Though both the slave and the white female slave owner may menstruate, have intercourse and give birth, even those supposedly universal female processes are experienced quite differently by each. As the subjects of their own narrative, therefore, the women in this novel are active agents in the construction of female identities located in a specific cultural and historical situation. These identities are rooted in a female tradition, but not confined by it, rooted in the body but not confined by it. The construction of female identity as multiple and resistant to classification is epitomized in Lissie, whose varied manifestations of her identity, captured by a photographer in one of her incarnations, represent her refusal to be confined to the role of wife, mother or mistress. The female religious tradition Walker evokes is also specifically located in race consciousness and in history. That tradition is perhaps best represented by the Church founded by Arveyda's mother, named the Church of Perpetual Involvement to identify its charismatic and dynamic nature. It defines itself in opposition both to racism and to sexism, playfully reversing the thinking underlying the false 'humanism' by which man embodies what is human, while woman is something different: Suwelo ultimately learns from both Fanny and Hal to feel truly flesh and blood for the first time - 'Human, the same as women' (p. 355). Sharing a hot tub with Carlotta feels like a baptism, but this baptism is not in the name of the father. The individual quests for the mother and for origins are represented as part of a collective political effort to put both women and the African back into history and thus enable them to project a future. The tradition of the mother goddess, therefore, provides Walker with a religious and symbolic discourse which empowers women while at the same time preserving the revolutionary impulses embodied in the African-American literary tradition of the slave narrative.

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Notes

Introduction 1 Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 145. 2 Anne Baring and Jules Cashford, The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image (London: Viking, 1991), p. xi. 3 Riane Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987), p. 20. 4 Karen Armstrong, The Gospel According to Woman (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1986, p. xii). 5 The World's Classics edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) of this version, ed. by Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett, includes the Apocrypha as well as excellent explanatory notes and a historical introduction which is invaluable. 6 'Women's Writing: An Ambivalent Politics' in Exploring Bakhtin, ed. by Alastair Renfrew and Andrew Roberts (Glasgow: Strathclyde University Press, 1997), p. 100. 7 Angel and Me: Short Stories for Holy Week (Oxford: Mowbray, 1995). 8 Introduction to Antonia White, The Hound and the Falcon (Virago, 1980), p. xiii. 9 Sally Vincent, The Exorcist', The Guardian Weekend, 17 May 1997, p. 33. 10 In, for example, statements made at the Edinburgh Festival, August 1998. 11 See Women Writers Talk: Interviews with Ten Women Writers, ed. by Olga Kenyon (Oxford: Lennard Publishing, 1989), p. 166. 12 The Irigaray Reader, ed. by Margaret Whitford (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), pp. 34-46. 13 The Kristeva Reader, ed. by Toril Moi (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), p. 205. 14 About Chinese Women, trans, by Anita Barrows (New York: Marion Boyars, 1986), pp. 37-8. 15 A Map of the New Country: Women and Christianity (Routledge, 1983), p. 110. 16 Christianity and the Goddesses: Systematic Criticism of a Feminist Theology (SCM Press, 1988), pp. 88-94. For a useful summary of Bachofen's ideas and influence, see Stella Georgoudi, 'Creating a Myth of Matriarchy', A History of Women in the West, I: From Ancient Goddesses to Christian Saints, ed. by Pauline Schmitt Pantel (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 449-63. 17 'Ways of Relating', in Feminist Theology: A Reader, ed. by Anne Loades (SPCK, 1990), p. 151.

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Unless stated, the place of publication is London

188 Notes

1 See Bibliography, Section 1. 2 See Creation of Patriarchy, p. 149. I am indebted for much of my discussion of goddess worship to Lerner's work. 3 See Elizabeth Gould Davis, The First Sex (London: J. M. Dent, 1973), pp. 141-2, and Ellen Van Wolde, Stories of the Beginning: Genesis 1-11 and Other Creation Stories, trans, by John Bowden (London: SCM Press, 1996), pp. 189-93. 4 See Baring and Cashford, p. 276. 5 The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth, enlarged edition (London: Faber & Faber, 1961), p. 9. 6 Charles Seltman, quoted in Gould Davis, p. 36. 7 Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays (London: Virago, 1984), passim. For a fuller discussion of Wolf's treatment of this subject, see Jeannette King, 'Women and the Word: Christa Wolf's Cassandra', Journal of Gender Studies, 3 (1994), 333-41. 8 Myth and Ritual in the Ancient Near East (London: Thames & Hudson, 1958), p. 167. 9 Women and Religion in the First Christian Centuries (Routledge, 1996), pp. 60-61. 10 Greek Tragedies, trans, by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, 2 vols (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), II, 658-60. 11 See James M. Reese, 'Song of Solomon', in The Oxford Companion to the Bible, ed. by Bruce Metzger and Michael Coogan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 708. 12 See Helene Cixous, 'Sorties', The Cixous Reader, ed. by Susan Sellers (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 37-40. The work of the feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether in the 1970s also focuses on dualism as the basis for the oppression of women and all other forms of domination (see Bibliography). 13 Lerner's chapters 'The Patriarchs' and 'The Covenant' (pp. 161-98) provide a helpful introduction to the laws and customs of early Hebrew society. 14 'Luce Irigaray and the Feminist Critique of Language', Canterbury, University of Kent: Women's Studies Occasional Papers 6 (1985), p. 12. 15 A Big-Enough God: Artful Theology (Oxford: Mowbray, 1995), p. 153. 16 The Rod and Serpent of Asklepios: Symbol of Medicine (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1967), p. 71. 17 Lerner provides an interesting analysis of this process of transformation (Creation of Patriarchy, pp. 193-5). 18 'What Became of God the Mother', in Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion, ed. by Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979), p. 111. 19 I am indebted to Katrin Wilhelm for drawing my attention to this article. 20 The Creation of Feminist Consciousness: From the Middle Ages to EighteenSeventy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 90-1. 21 The Prospect before Her: A History of Women in Western Europe, Vol. 1, 1500-1800 (HarperCollins, 1995), p. 189. 22 See Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin

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Chapter 1: From the Mother Goddess to God the Father

23

24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

37 38 39 40

Mary (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1976) for a fascinating study of this subject to which I am much indebted. 'The Virgin's One Bare Breast: Female Nudity and Religious Meaning in Tuscan Early Renaissance Culture', in The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. by Susan Rubin Suleiman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 205. The Women's History of the World (Paladin, 1989), p. 128. The Woman's Bible: The Original Feminist Attack on the Bible, ed. by Dale Spender (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1985). Quoted in Mary Youman, 'The Woman's Bible', Kentucky Philological Association Bulletin (1983), p. 77. See 'Eve and Adam: Genesis 2-3 Re-read' in Womanspirit Rising, pp. 74-83; and 'Feminist Hermeneutics and Biblical Studies' in Feminist Theology, pp. 23-9. 'Sexuality, Sin and Sorrow: The Emergence of Female Character (A Reading of Genesis 1-3/, in The Female Body in Western Culture, pp. 317-38. See Sawyer, pp. 100-11. 'Women in the Early Christian Movement' in Womanspirit Rising, pp. 86-7. Women and Early Christianity: A Reappraisal, trans, by John Bowden (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1987), p. 132. The Judaic tradition denied women access to the halacha or Talmudic law. See, for example, Kristeva, 'Stabat Mater', The Kristeva Reader, p. 163. I am indebted to Karen Armstrong for much of the information about the early Church fathers provided in this chapter. Summa Theologica, quoted by Armstrong, p. 62. See Merry Wiesner, 'Luther and Women: The Death of Two Marys', Feminist Theology, pp. 123-34. But see Lerner for a more positive view of the Reformation's impact on attitudes to women (Creation of Feminist Consciousness, pp. 93-105), a view contradicted in turn by Armstrong, p. 277. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 191. The Decline of the West, trans, by Charles Francis Atkinson, vol. 2 (George Allen & Unwin, 1945), p. 327. The Bakhtin Reader, ed. by Pam Morris (London: Edward Arnold, 1994), p. 76. This edition of Bakhtin's writing provides invaluable detailed commentaries on his work. From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and their Tellers (New York: Vintage, 1995), p. 75.

Chapter 2: 'Destructive Genesis': Old Testament Myths of Origin and Creation 1 Desire in Language, ed. by Leon S. Roudiez, trans, by Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine and Leon S. Roudiez (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), p. 77. For a fuller explanation of this subject, see Pam Morris, 'Re-routing Kristeva: From Pessimism to Parody', Textual Practice, 6 ( 1992), pp. 31-46. 2 'The War Between the Sexes', About Chinese Women, pp. 17-24.

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Notes 189

3 Jonathan Webber, 'Between Law and Custom: Women's Experience of Judaism', in Women's Religious Experience: Cross-Cultural Perspectives, ed. by Pat Holden (Beckenham: Croom Helm, 1983), p. 144. 4 Sisters and Strangers: A Moral Tale [1990] (Paladin, 1991). All page references to this novel will follow the relevant quotation in the text. 5 Another important reworking of the myth of the Fall occurs in Doris Lessing's novel Briefing for a Descent into Hell (Granada, 1972), which I have written about elsewhere (Doris Lessing, London: Edward Arnold, 1989). The novel recounts the Inner-space' journey of exploration undertaken by a man apparently suffering from amnesia. During the journey he experiences a version of the Fall, the guilt for which he projects onto the women who distract him from his 'higher' purpose by making him aware of his own carnality and sexuality. 6 Jeanette Winterson, Boating for Beginners [1985] (London: Methuen, 1990). 7 Althusser's theories are usefully explained in Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), pp. 171-3. 8 For a detailed discussion of Lilith's place in the Judaic tradition, see Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews, 7 vols (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1937), I, 64-9. 9 See Gilbert and Gubar, pp. 336-71 for the most influential account of this relationship. 10 Michele Roberts, The Book of Mrs Noah [1987] (London: Methuen, 1988), p. 239. All further page references will follow the relevant quotation in the text. 11 Jeanette Winterson's Boating for Beginners presents a comic version of the flood narrative which she at one time 'disowned'. Although I do not believe it carries sufficient weight to warrant detailed attention here, I would like to note how many of the issues raised by Roberts echo those to be found in the earlier novel. For example, according to Boating for Beginners, behind the Word of God is Noah, a parody of the quintessential patriarch, who claims to be collaborating with the 'Unpronounceable' on a global history explaining God's role, to be called 'Genesis' or 'How I did it' (p. 13). Winterson's God, however, is created by Noah, and represented as a parody of Frankenstein's monster, who escapes his creator's control, going to live in a cloud and claiming that he created the world. 12 The autobiographical relevance of this is evident in Roberts's own comments: 'Whereas when I was younger I believed that to be whole and creative and possess a soul, I had to deny my femaleness and sexuality, I found I had reached a point in my journey where I could see that my creativity sprang directly from my femaleness, that neither could exist without the other. Creativity entailed exploring my conflicts about being a woman; being a woman meant that I could give birth to a novel.' (The Woman Who Wanted to Be a Hero', in Walking on the Water: Women Talk about Spirituality, ed. by Jo Garcia and Sara Maitland (London: Virago, 1983), p. 61. 13 It has been argued that other important symbols in the Bible represent the womb. Elaine Pagels, for instance, in The Gnostic Gospels, quotes the Great Announcement, a mystical writing, as describing the Garden of Eden as such a symbol: 'Scripture teaches us that this is what is meant when Isaiah says,

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190 Notes

14 15 16 17 18

"I am he that formed thee in thy mother's womb" [Isaiah 44:2]' (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980, p. 111). Cixous similarly emphasizes that she uses the word 'mother' as a metaphor in 'The Laugh of the Medusa', Cixous Reader, p. 252. Women Writers Talk, p. 160. See Pam Morris, Literature and Feminism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), pp. 119-33, for a very helpful analysis of the term. A Book of Spells (London: Methuen, 1988). All page references will follow the relevant quotation in the text. Virgin Territory [1984] (London: Virago, 1993), p. 85. All further page references will follow the relevant quotation in the text.

Chapter 3: (Stahat Mater'\ Christianity and the Virgin Mother 1 'Stabat Mater', Kristeva Reader, p. 163. 2 A later doctrine makes even her mother, St Anne, a virgin retrospectively. See Warner, 'The Immaculate Conception', Alone of All her Sex, pp. 236-54. 3 Kristeva Reader, p. 164. 4 See Hufton, pp. 367-74. Lerner comments that, although the convent provided free space and freedom from domestic and reproductive responsibilities, this was 'within a patriarchal institution, the Catholic Church, in which all the higher offices and positions of power were held by the male clergy' (Creation of Feminist Consciousness, p. 58). 5 Daughters of the House [1992] (London: Virago, 1993). All page references will follow the relevant quotation in the text. 6 She also does this in an earlier novel, The Visitation (London: Women's Press, 1983). 7 See Marie Baudouin-Croix, Leonie Martin: A Difficult Life (Dublin: Veritas, 1993). 8 It is important to note that this experience of plenitude is derived not from Leonie's biological mother, but from a body which has in effect been bought. This underlines the fact that Kristeva's theories are not essentialist but always take account of the historical and social specificity of women's lives. 9 'Writing Daughters of the House: Extracts from my Notebooks', A Virago Keepsake (Virago, 1993), p. 71. 10 Lerner notes, Tn the earliest centuries of Christianity the worship of the harvest goddesses Ceres and Demeter was widespread in the Mediterranean area. In Europe, heathen practices like the celebration of festivals outdoors near certain stones and springs previously identified with goddesses, continued for centuries after the acceptance of Christianity ... Several shrines and churches dedicated to Mary were situated in locations where earlier the worship of goddesses had taken place' (Creation of Feminist Consciousness, p. 123). 11 There appears also to be a strong autobiographical element here, as in The Visitation, since Roberts describes her own experience of being a twin and of feeling she had been separated too soon from her mother, the 'queenly

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Notes 191

12 13 14 15

16

17 18 19 20 21 22

23 24

25 26 27

Virgin Mary, the land flowing with milk and honey' (The Woman Who Wanted to be a Hero', p. 54). Quoted in Kate Millet, Sexual Politics (London: Virago, 1977), p. 163. See About Chinese Women, pp. 26-7. Daughter of Jerusalem [1978] (London: Pan Books, 1987). All page references will follow the relevant quotation in the text. The novel derives its title from Luke 23. 28-9. When Jesus carries the cross through the streets of Jerusalem, he is followed by a crowd of people, particularly women, lamenting, to whom he says, 'Daughters Of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but weep for yourselves, and for your children. For, behold, the days are coming, in which they shall say, Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bare, and the paps which never gave suck.' Adrienne Rich's comment on her first experience of pregnancy articulates the same association between passivity and maternity: 'A part of me, even then, could not tolerate passivity, but I identified that part with the "unwomanly" and in becoming a mother I was trying to affirm myself as a "womanly woman". If passivity was required, I would conform myself to the expectation.' Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (London: Virago, 1977), p. 129. Quoted by Sawyer, p. 143. 'Daughter of Jerusalem', Writers Revealed (London: BBC Books, 1989), p. 121. 'Triptych', discussed in Chapter 2, is a fuller development of the story sketched out in Daughter of Jerusalem. See Rich, Of Woman Born, pp. 134-7, for a brief summary of the church's attitude to midwives and their reasons for fearing them. Angel and Me, pp. 39-44. There are obvious echoes here of the last line of one of John Donne's Holy Sonnets: 'Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee.' In the tradition of the mystic, the spiritual and the erotic are often fused in a way which appears to reconcile the needs of body and spirit, but which in fact substitutes the power of the Word for the reality of the flesh. There is a long tradition of imagery predating the Old Testament in which Wisdom, Sophia in Greek, is invariably personified as a female being. See Baring and Cashford, pp. 470-8 and 609-58. Excrement, blood and bodily fluids, all repeatedly invoked by Caro, are instances of what Kristeva calls the abject, that is objects which the subject tries to expel to establish the clean and proper body, but which cannot be eliminated and thus threaten the individual's sense of boundaries. Because the mother enforces the separation of the child from these elements in her early training, the child in turn internalizes that demarcation from filth by identifying the mother with these things. See Feminism and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Dictionary, ed. by Elizabeth Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 197-8. See T Who Want Not To Be', About Chinese Women, pp. 39-41. See The Feminist Companion to Mythology, ed. by Carolyne Larrington (London: Pandora, 1992), pp. 401-2. Elaine Showalter uses the term 'wild zone' to represent that area of women's culture, experience and consciousness which is outside men's

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192 Notes

experience. The most significant aspect for her is that 'metaphysically, or in terms of consciousness, it has no corresponding male space since all of male consciousness is within the circle of the dominant structure and thus accessible to or structured by language. In this sense the "wild" is always imaginary'. The problem for women in general, and for women writers in particular, is to find some means of giving expression to this consciousness. 'Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness', The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature and Theory (London: Virago, 1986), p. 262. 28 Maitland explores the whole issue of the 'gender' of God in A Big-Enough God, pp. 17-23.

Chapter 4: 'Outside Time': Prophets of Transgression 1 Oranges are Not the Only Fruit [1985] (London: Vintage, 1991), p. 156. All further page references will follow the relevant quotation in the text. 2 The Wild Girl [1984] (London: Methuen, 1985). All page references to the novel will follow the relevant quotation in the text. 3 See The Nag Hammadi Library in English, trans, directed by James M. Robinson (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1977) and Pagels, Gnostic Gospels. 4 'But what sort is this God? First [he] envied Adam that he should eat from the tree of knowledge ... And he said, "I am a jealous God; I will bring the sins of the fathers upon the children until three (and) four generations."' (The Nag Hammadi Library, p. 412) 5 Roberts virtually repeats these words on page 108. 6 Quoting from the Bhagavad Gita, the Hindu sacred epic, Oppenheimer said, T am become Death, the shatterer of worlds' (quoted in Robert Jungk, Brighter than a Thousand Suns, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1958, p. 183). 7 Quoted in Susan Haskins, Mary Magdalene: Myth and Metaphor (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1993), p. 65. 8 Quoted by Haskins, p. 268. 9 See 'The Virgin of the Word', About Chinese Women, pp. 25-33. 10 'On the Divinity of Love', The Irigaray Reader, p. 178. 11 See, for example, Rosemary Radford Ruether, Gaia and God: An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing (London: SCM, 1992). 12 In her account of the evolution of the Magdalene myth, Haskins points out that the only definite information the New Testament gives is that she was one of Christ's female followers, present at his crucifixion and witness of his resurrection - the first, according to St John, to be charged with proclaiming the Christian message. She argues that later commentators consider her a prostitute because they confuse her with other women in the gospels, such as Luke's sinner, Mary of Bethany, the woman from Samaria and the woman taken in adultery. Although a later addition states that Jesus cast seven devils out of her (Mark 16. 9), Haskins points out that possession was not synonymous with sin. 13 It is interesting to note that changes in the Roman Calendar in 1969 relieved Mary Magdalene of the charge of sinfulness, disconnecting her from Luke's sinner and even Mary of Bethany, so that she is now seen only as the woman cured of devils and Jesus's devoted witness.

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Notes 193

14 'Street-walking Woman: Mary Magdalene, by Susan Haskins', Independent on Sunday, 1 August 1993, p. 26. 15 Writing of her own first novel, A Piece of the Night, Roberts too has acknowledged the importance of lesbianism as a force in her own creative and emotional life: 'Lesbianism represented the only way for me to express my femininity, love, creativity' ('The Woman Who Wanted to be a Hero', p. 60). 16 Winterson has acknowledged that this account is largely based, as the heroine's name suggests, on her own upbringing as 'the adopted daughter and only child of evangelical parents who hoped she would grow up to become a missionary for their fringe-Pentecostalist church' ('Better than Sex', Guardian, 22 July 1997, 'G2', p. 3). 17 T used to live in a long stretchy street... ', in Walking on the Water, p. 154. 18 See 'The Dialogic Imagination', The Bakhtin Reader, pp. 114-22. 19 'When I was a child there were only six books in our house and one of those was the Bible. Books, mysterious, strange, forbidden, rare, as fabulous objects, part necromancy, part Grail, were the things dreamed of, but not possessed' ('Better than Sex', p. 1). 20 'Write, She Said', in The Progress of Romance: The Politics of Popular Fiction, ed. by Jean Radford (London: Routledge, 1986), p. 230. 21 Our Passion for Justice: Images of Power, Sexuality and Liberation (New York: Pilgrim Press, 1984), p. 170. 22 'Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence', in The Vintage Book of Feminism: The Essential Writings of the Contemporary Feminist Movement, ed. by Miriam Schneir (London: Vintage, 1995), p. 313. 23 See 'Women's Time', Kristeva Reader, pp. 202-3. 24 Laurel Bollinger presents a convincing argument that 'maturity consists in the continuation, not the elimination, of mother-daughter relations' in her analysis of the novel's relationship to the Book of Ruth in 'Models for Female Loyalty: The biblical Ruth in Jeanette Winterson's Oranges are Not the Only Fruit', Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, 13 (1994), p. 364. 25 Revolution in Poetic Language, trans, by Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), p. 223. Kristeva is perhaps echoing Bakhtin here (see Chapter 1, note 56).

Chapter 5: A Dissenting Voice: Angela Carter's Passion of New Eve and 'Women's Time' 1 The Passion of New Eve [1977] (London: Virago, 1982). All page references will follow the relevant quotation in the text. 2 Quoted by Susan Rubin Suleiman, Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics and the Avant-Garde (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 169. 3 'Notes from the Front Line', in On Gender and Writing, ed. by Michelene Wandor (London: Pandora, 1983), p. 71. 4 Engendering the Subject: Gender and Self-Representation in Contemporary Women's Fiction (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), p. 77. 5 'The Imagination may be compared to Adam's dream - he awoke and found it truth.' Letter to Benjamin Bailey, 22 November 1817, Letters of

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194 Notes

6 7 8 9 10 11

12 13 14

John Keats: A Selection, ed. by Robert Gittings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 37. The Sadeian Woman (London: Virago, 1979), p. 12. The Second Sex, trans, by H. M. Parshley (London: Pan Books, 1988), p. 295. Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (London: Women's Press, 1979), p. 4. The Speculum of the Other Woman, trans, by Gillian Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 27. 'Women's Writing: An Ambivalent Polities', p. xxx. Carter here quotes from William Blake's Vision of the Last Judgment, which is also the source for the name 'Beulah'. For Blake, Beulah represents a paradise distinct from Eden. But this is not to suggest that Carter sees such all-female communities as a haven for women, since the point about Blake's Beulah is that this state of sensual innocence should be a merely temporary stage before the entry into experience which is the only route to the higher innocence of Eden. (I am indebted to my colleague David Duff for this information.) Quoted in Morris, 'Women's Writing: An Ambivalent Polities', p. xxx. Quoted in Kenyon, Writing Women, p. 23. It is interesting to note Carter's observation that she felt 'much more in common with certain Third World writers, both female and male, who are transforming actual fictional forms to both reflect and to precipitate changes in the way people feel about themselves' ('Notes from the Front Line', p. 76).

Chapter 6: Paradise Lost and Regained: Toni Morrison and Alice Walker 1 See Baring and Cashford, pp. 586-8. 2 The correspondence between Drs Richard Fuller and Francis Wayland, for instance, debated the belief that slavery was sanctioned by the Scriptures in Domestic Slavery Considered as a Scriptural Institution, ed. by Rev. Francis Wayland (New York: Lewis Colby, 1845), while evidence that the Bible is still used to sanction racism can be found daily on the World Wide Web. 3 The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women (2nd edition), ed. by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (New York: Norton, 1996), p. 370. 4 '"Women of Color" Writers and Feminist Theory', in Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism (revised edition), ed. by Robyn Warhol and Diane Herndl (London: Macmillan, 1997), p. 407. 5 Valerie Smith, 'Black Feminist Theory and the Representation of the "Other"', in Feminisms, p. 316. 6 Native Tongue (London: Women's Press, 1985), p. 242. 7 Paradise [1997] (London: Chatto & Windus, 1998). All page references to the novel will follow the relevant quotation in the text. 8 See About Chinese Women, pp. 17-24. 9 The Temple of my Familiar [1989] (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1990). All page references to the novel will follow the relevant quotation in the text.

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Notes 195

10 'The Body as History and "Writing the Body": The Example of Grace Nichols', Journal of Gender Studies, 3 (1994), p. 59. 11 'Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism', in Feminisms, p. 902. 12 According to Riane Eisler, prepatriarchal societies were 'remarkably equalitarian' by contemporary standards, even where women played leading roles as priestesses and heads of clans, and where matrilinear succession was the rule: 'there is little indication that the position of men in this social system was in any sense comparable to the subordination and suppression of women characteristic of the male-dominated system that replaced it' (p. 25). 13 Interview with Tammy Simon, My Life as Myself, with Alice Walker (Sounds True Catalogue cassette recording). 14 'Toward an Afrocentric Feminist Epistemology', Feminisms, ed. by Sandra Kemp and Judith Squires (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 201.

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196 Notes

This bibliography is intended to provide an introduction to the areas covered by this book, and to the novelists discussed in it, and is not intended to be exhaustive. More specialized bibliographies of feminist theology, anthropology or myth criticism can be found in most of the books listed in the first two sections. The place of publication is London, unless stated otherwise.

1. The Myth of the Mother Goddess Bachofen, J. J., Myth, Religion and Mother Right: Selected Writings of J. J. Bachofen (Routledge, 1967) Baring, Anne, and Jules Cashford, The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993) Billington, Sandra G. and Miranda J. Billington, eds, The Concept of the Goddess (Routledge, 1996) Davis, Elisabeth Gould, The First Sex (J. M. Dent, 1973) Diner, Helen, 'Mothers and Amazons: The First Feminine History of Culture' (New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1973) Eisler, Riane, The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987) Gimbutas, Marija, The Language of the Goddess: Unearthing the Hidden Symbols of Western Civilization (San Francisco: Harper, 1989) Graves, Robert, The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth, enlarged edition (Faber & Faber, 1961) Hall, Nor, The Moon and the Virgin: Reflections on the Archetypal Feminine (Women's Press, 1980) James, E. O., Myth and Ritual in the Ancient Near East (Thames & Hudson, 1958) Larrington, Carolyne, ed., The Feminist Companion to Mythology (Pandora, 1992) Lerner, Gerda, The Creation of Patriarchy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986) Miles, Rosalind, The Women's History of the World (Paladin, 1989) Neumann, Erich, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype (Routledge, 1963) Pantel, Pauline Schmitt, ed., A History of Women in the West, I: From Ancient Goddesses to Christian Saints (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994) Schouten, Jan, The Rod And Serpent Of Asklepios: Symbol Of Medicine (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1967) Stone, Merlin, The Paradise Papers: The Suppression of Women's Rites (Virago, 1976)

2. Women in the Bible and the Church Armstrong, Karen, The Gospel According to Woman (HarperCollins, 1996) Bal, Mieke, Lethal Love: Feminist Literary Readings of Biblical Love Stories 197

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Select Bibliography

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987) Bal, Mieke, 'Sexuality, Sin and Sorrow: The Emergence of Female Character (A Reading of Genesis 1-3/, in The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. by Susan Rubin Suleiman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 317-38 Bancroft, Anne, Women in Search of the Sacred (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997) Baudouin-Croix, Marie, Leonie Martin : A Difficult Life (Dublin : Veritas, 1993) Brenner, Athalya, ed., A Feminist Companion to Genesis' (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993) Carroll, Robert, and Stephen Prickett, eds, The Bible, Authorized King James Version (Oxford University Press, 1997) Christ, Carol P. and Judith Plaskow, eds, Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in Feminist Spirituality (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989) , Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979) Condren, Mary, The Serpent and the Goddess: Women, Religion and Power in Celtic Ireland (New York: Harper, 1989) Daly, Mary, Beyond God the Father (Boston: Beacon Press, 1983) , Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Women's Press, 1979) Fiorenza, Elisabeth Schussler, Bread not Stone: The Challenge of Feminist Biblical Interpretation (Boston: Beacon, 1984) , In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (SCM Press, 1983) , ed., Searching the Scriptures: A Feminist Introduction (SCM Press, 1993) Garcia, Jo, and Sara Maitland, eds, Walking on the Water: Women Talk about Spirituality (Virago, 1983) Ginzberg, Louis, The Legends of the Jews, 7 vols (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1909-38) Hampson, Daphne, Theology and Feminism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990) Harris, Kevin, Sex, Ideology and Religion: The Representation of Women in the Bible (Brighton: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1984) Haskins, Susan, Mary Magdalene: Myth and Metaphor (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1993) Heine, Susanne, Christianity and the Goddesses: Systematic Criticism of a Feminist Theology (SCM Press, 1988) , Women and Early Christianity: A Reappraisal, trans, by John Bowden (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1987) Holden, Pat, ed., Women's Religious Experience: Cross-Cultural Perspectives (Croom Helm, 1983) Hufton, Olwen, The Prospect before Her: A History of Women in Western Europe, Vol. 1, 1500-1800 (HarperCollins, 1995) Isherwood, Lisa, and Dorothea McEwan, eds, An A to Z of Feminist Theology (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996) Lerner, Gerda, The Creation of Feminist Consciousness: From the Middle Ages to Eighteen-Seventy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993) Loades, Anne, ed., Feminist Theology: A Reader (SPCK, 1990) Metzger, Bruce, and Michael Coogan, eds, The Oxford Companion to the Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993) Miles, Margaret, 'The Virgin's One Bare Breast: Female Nudity and Religious

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198 Select Bibliography

Meaning in Tuscan Early Renaissance Culture', in The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. by Susan Rubin Suleiman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 193-208 Pagels, Elaine, Adam, Eve and the Serpent (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990) , The Gnostic Gospels (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980) Pelikan, Jaroslav, Mary Through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996) Phillips, J.A., Eve: The History of an Idea (New York: Harper & Row, 1984) Robinson, James M. (trans.), The Nag Hammadi Library in English (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1977) Ruether, Rosemary Radford, Gaia and God: An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing (SCM, 1992) , Mary: The Feminine Face of the Church (SCM Press, 1979) , Religion and Sexism: Images of Woman in the Jewish and Christian Tradition (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1974) , Sexism and God-talk: Towards a Feminist Theology (SCM Press, 1983) , Womanguides: Readings towards a Feminist Theology (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985) , Woman Healing Earth: Third-World Women on Ecology, Feminism and Religion (SCM Press, 1996) Russell, Letty M., ed., Feminist Interpretation of the Bible (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985) , and J. Shaunon Clarkson, eds, Dictionary of Feminist Theologies (Mowbray, 1996) Sawyer, Deborah, Women and Religion in the First Christian Centuries (Routledge, 1996) Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, The Woman's Bible: The Original Feminist Attack on the Bible, ed. by Dale Spender (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1985) Trible, Phyllis, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1978) , Texts of Terror: Literary and Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984) Van Wolde, Ellen, Stories of the Beginning: Genesis 1-11 and Other Creation Stories, trans, by John Bowden (SCM Press, 1996) Warner, Marina, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1976) Woodward, Kenneth, 'Hail Mary', Newsweek, 25 August 1997, 39-45 Youman, Mary, 'The Woman's Bible', Kentucky Philological Association Bulletin (1983), 73-86

3. Primary Texts Carter, Angela, 'Notes from the Front Line', in On Gender and Writing, ed. by Michelene Wandor (Pandora, 1983), pp. 69-77 , Nothing Sacred: Selected Writings (Virago, 1982) , The Passion of New Eve (Virago, 1982) , The Sadeian Woman (Virago, 1979) Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar, eds, The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, 2nd edition, (New York: Norton, 1996)

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Lessing, Doris, Briefing for a Descent into Hell (Granada, 1972) Maitland, Sara, Angel and Me: Short Stories for Holy Week (Mowbray, 1995) Maitland, Sara, A Big-Enough God: Artful Theology (Mowbray, 1995) , A Book of Spells (Methuen, 1988) , Daughter of Jerusalem (Pan Books, 1987) , Introduction, Antonia White, The Hound and the Falcon (Virago, 1980) , A Map of the New Country: Women and Christianity (Routledge, 1983) , Virgin Territory (Virago, 1993) Morrison, Toni, Paradise (Chatto & Windus, 1998) Roberts, Michele, The Book of Mrs Noah (Methuen, 1988) , Daughters of the House (Virago, 1993) , 'Dogma that's had its day', Independent on Sunday, 1994, p. 19 , 'Street-walking Woman: Mary Magdalene by Susan Haskins', Independent on Sunday, 1 Aug 1993, p. 26 , The Visitation (Women's Press, 1983) , The Wild Girl (Methuen, 1985) , 'The Woman Who Wanted to be a Hero', in Jo Garcia and Sara Maitland, eds, Walking on the Water: Women Talk about Spirituality (Virago, 1983), pp. 50-65 , 'Write, She Said', in The Progress of Romance: The Politics of Popular Fiction, ed. by Jean Radford (Routledge, 1986) , 'Writing Daughters of the House: Extracts from my Notebooks', A Virago Keepsake (Virago, 1993), pp. 70-4 Tennant, Emma, Sisters and Strangers: A Moral Tale (Paladin, 1991) , 'Women Talking about Writing', in Women's Writing: A Challenge to Theory, ed. by Moira Monteith (New York: Harvester, 1986) Walker, Alice, Interview with Tammy Simon, My Life as Myself, with Alice Walker (Sounds True Catalogue cassette recording) , The Temple of my Familiar (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1990) Winterson, Jeanette, 'Better than Sex', Guardian, 22 July 1997, 'G2', pp. 1-3. , Boating for Beginners (Methuen, 1990) , Oranges are Not the Only Fruit (Vintage, 1991) Wolf, Christa, Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays (Virago, 1984)

4. Secondary Texts Alexander, Flora, Contemporary Women Novelists (Edward Arnold, 1989) Bakhtin, Mikhail, The Bakhtin Reader, ed. by Pam Morris (Edward Arnold, 1994) Beauvoir, Simone de, The Second Sex, trans, by H. M. Parshley (Pan Books, 1988) Bollinger, Laurel, 'Models for Female Loyalty: The Biblical Ruth in Jeanette Winterson's Oranges are Not the Only Fruit', Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, 13 (1994), 363-80 Bristow, Joseph, and Trev Lynn Broughton, eds, The Infernal Desires of Angela Carter (Longman, 1997) Cixous, Helene, The Cixous Reader, ed. by Susan Sellers (Routledge, 1994) Doan, Laura, 'Jeanette Winterson's Sexing the Postmodern', in The Lesbian Postmodern, ed. by Laura Doan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp.137-55

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200 Select Bibliography

Eagleton, Terry, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983) Easton, Alison, 'The Body as History and "Writing the Body": The Example of Grace Nichols', Journal of Gender Studies, 3 (1994), 55-67 Franklin, Sarah, 'Luce Irigaray and the Feminist Critique of Language', Canterbury: University of Kent. Women's Studies Occasional Papers 6 (1985) Gerrard, Nicci, 'The Prophet', New Statesman and Society, 1 September 1989, p. 13 Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979) Guerin, Caroline, 'Iris Murdoch - A Revisionist Theology? A Comparative Study of Iris Murdoch's Nuns and Soldiers and Sara Maitland's Virgin Territory', Literature and Theology, 6 (1992), 153-70 Hartill, Rosemary, 'Sara Maitland: Daughter of Jerusalem', Writers Revealed (BBC Books, 1989), pp. 115-27 Heyward, Carter, Our Passion for Justice: Images of Power, Sexuality and Liberation (New York: Pilgrim Press, 1984) Hinds, Hilary, 'Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit: Reaching Audiences Other Lesbian Texts Cannot Reach', in New Lesbian Criticism: Literary and Cultural Readings, ed. by Sally Munt (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992) Irigaray, Luce, The Irigaray Reader, ed. by Margaret Whitford (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991) , The Speculum of the Other Woman, trans, by Gillian Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985) Kenyon, Olga, Women Writers Talk: Interviews with Ten Women Writers (Oxford: Lennard Publishing, 1989), pp. 149-72 , Writing Women: Contemporary Women Novelists (Pluto, 1991) King, Jeannette, 'Women and the Word: Christa Wolf's Cassandra', Journal of Gender Studies, 3 (1994), 333-41 Kristeva, Julia, About Chinese Women, trans, by Anita Barrows (New York: Marion Boyars, 1986) , Desire in Language, ed. by Leon S. Roudiez, trans, by Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine and Leon S. Roudiez (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980) , The Kristeva Reader, ed. by Toril Moi (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986) , Revolution in Poetic Language, trans, by Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia, 1984) Lathers, Marie, 'Fin-de-siecle Eves in Villiers de LTsle-Adam and Angela Carter', in Literature and the Bible, ed. by David Bevan (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993), pp. 7-27 Luckhurst, Roger, '"Impossible Mourning" in Toni Morrison's Beloved and Michele Roberts' Daughters of the House', Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 37 (1996), 243-60 Millet, Kate, Sexual Politics (Virago, 1977) Morris, Pam, Literature and Feminism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993) , 'Re-routing Kristeva: from pessimism to parody', Textual Practice, 6 (1992), 31-46 , 'Women's Writing: An Ambivalent Polities', in Exploring Bakhtin, ed. by Alastair Renfrew and Andrew Roberts (Strathclyde University Press, 1997), pp. 57-74

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O'Rourke, Rebecca, 'Fingers in the Fruit Basket: A Feminist Reading of Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit', in Feminist Criticism: Theory and Practice, ed. by Susan Sellers et al. (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), pp. 57-69 Palmer, Paulina, 'From "Coded Mannequin" to Bird Woman: Angela Carter's Magic Flight', in Women Reading Women's Writing, ed. by Sue Roe (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987), pp. 179-205 Rich, Adrienne, 'Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence', in The Vintage Book of Feminism: The Essential Writings of the Contemporary Feminist Movement, ed. by Miriam Schneir (Vintage, 1995), pp. 310-26 , Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (Virago, 1977) Rigney, Barbara Hill, Lilith's Daughters: Women and Religion in Contemporary Fiction (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982) Robinson, Sally, Engendering the Subject: Gender and Self-representation in Contemporary Women's Fiction (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991) Roe, Sue, ed., Women Reading Women's Writing (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987) Rowland, Susan, 'The Body's Sacred: Romance and Sacrifice in Religious and Jungian Narratives', Literature and Theology, 10 (1996), 160-70 Sage, Lorna, Angela Carter (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1994) , Flesh and the Mirror: Essays on the Art of Angela Carter (Virago, 1994) Showalter, Elaine, 'Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness', The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women. Literature and Theory (Virago, 1986) Suleiman, Susan Rubin, Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics and the Avant-Garde (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990) Vincent, Sally, 'The Exorcist', Guardian Weekend, 17 May 1997, 30-4 Wandor, Michelene, ed., On Gender and Writing (Pandora, 1983) Warhol, Robyn and Diane Herndl, eds, Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, revised edition (Macmillan, 1997) Warner, Marina, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and their Tellers (Vintage, 1995) Wayland, Rev. Francis, ed., Domestic Slavery Considered as a Scriptural Institution, (New York: Lewis Colby, 1845) Wright, Elisabeth, ed., Feminism and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992)

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202 Select Bibliography

bliss, see plenitude Bollinger, Laurel, 134 Briffault, Robert, 12 Bronte, Charlotte, Jane Eyre, 36, 120

Abednego, 129 Abraham, 17, 55, 58, 83 Adam, 14, 16, 24-5, 31, 36-7, 45, 97, 105, 107-8, 142, 145, 151 adham, 25 Adler, Rachel, 81 Aeschylus, The Eumenides, 14, 21 Afrocentrism, 154, 181, 183 Althusser, Louis, 35 Amazons, the, 48, 97-8, 140 Anne, St, 23 Annunciation, 2 1 , 46, 87 Aphrodite, 97, 110 Apollo, 14, 43 Aristotle, 14 ark, the, 4 1 , 46-7, 50 Armstrong, Karen, 21, 27-8, 112, 187 Artemis, 95-6, 110 Astarte, 13, 110 Athena, 14, 96, 119 Atwood, Margaret, The Handmaid's Tale, 47 Augustine, St, 2 1 , 27, 46, 68 Babylon, 11, 108, 113 Bachofen, J.J., 8, 12 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 30, 3 1 , 122, 124, 150 Bal, Mieke, 25 bands, praying, 181 baptism, 19, 21, 23, 44, 72, 119, 169, 186 Baring, Anne, 1 Beatitudes, 182 Beauvoir, Simone de, 142 Beguines, 46 Beulah, see Blake binary oppositions, 5, 49, 85, 86, 92, 106, 140, 156, 160, 185 bisexuality, 145 Black Madonna, 71, 84, 152, 175, 176 Blake, William, 119, 139

Carmenta, 23 Carter, Angela, 5 'Notes from the Front Line', 137 The Passion of New Eve, 135-51 The Sadeian W o m a n , 138, 147, 151 Cashford, Jules, 1 castration complex, 6, 50 Catherine of Siena, St, 166 childbirth, 10, 14, 20, 21-2, 28, 44-5, 57, 72, 81, 83, 86, 95, 110, 119, 178 churching, 21 civil rights movement, 169 Cixous, Helene, 18, 53 Clytemnestra, 6 Collins, Patricia Hill, 181, 182-3, 187 colonialism, 176, 179, 181 Corinthians, first Epistle to, 25, 27 covenant, 17, 55, 59, 157, 158 creation, myths of, 10-14, 19, 36, 42, 46, 63, 93 106-8, 138-9, 141, 151, 170, 174, 178, 187 Cross, the, 19, 45, 111, 159-60, 182, 19, 159 Cybele, 139-40 Daphne, 43 Davis, Elizabeth Gould, 13, 20 Deborah, 84 Delilah, 85 Demeter, 13-14, 109, 110 Deuteronomy, Book of, 122 Devaki, the Hindu Goddess, 23 dialogism, 3-4, 30, 33, 107, 122-3, 127, 132, 183 Diana, the Goddess, 96 Dionysus, 110

203

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Index

Index

dualism, 15, 22, 86, 99, 105, 106, 111, 117, 135, 137, 155, 185 Easton, Alison, 173 ecriture feminine, 53 ecstasy, 66-8, 112 see also mysticism Eden, Garden of, 39, 42, 77, 100, 155-6, 167, 171, 174-6 see also Paradise ego-ideal, 36, 74, 95 Eisler, Riane, 2, 11, 187 Eleusian mysteries, 13 Elgin, Suzette Haden, Native Tongue, 155 Eliot, George, 35-6 Elisabeth, mother of John, 79, 89, 97 Enuma Elish, 11, 13 essentialism, 49, 54, 128, 144, 147, 151, 154-5, 185 Eve, 14, 24-5, 28, 36, 37, 63, 66, 8 1 , 105, 106-8, 141, 142, 151, 152, 168, 185 Exodus, Book of, 107 Ezekiel, Book of, 29 Fall, m y t h of the, 14, 24-5, 28, 3 4 - 4 1 , 42, 108-9, 135, 138, 151, 155, 156, 170, 173-4, 185 Fascism, 73 Feder, Gottfried, 73 feminism, 35, 39, 45, 55, 64, 73, 76, 80, 82, 83, 84, 89, 90, 105, 114, 116, 135, 137, 148-9, 154, 168, 183 Fiorenza, Elizabeth Schussler, 26 Flood, m y t h of the, 13, 4 1 , 44-5, 50 Franklin, Sarah, 17 Freud, 38, 139 Galatians, Epistle to the, 26 garden symbolism, 8 1 , 100-1 Genesis, Book of, 10, 13, 14, 17, 24-5, 33-4, 42, 45, 58, 60, 8 1 , 106-8, 123, 141, 151, 174 Gerard Majella, St, 81 Gilbert, Sandra, 28 Gnostic Gospels, 19, 105-6

Apocryphon of John, 106 Gospel of Mary, 106 Gospel of Philip, 106, 108 Gospel of Thomas, 106 Testimony of Truth, 107 God the Father, 2, 20, 42, 77, 78, 9 1 , 100 God the Mother, 19, 24, 60, 100 Goethe, J o h a n n Wolfgang von, 29 Graves, Robert, The White Goddess, 12, 15 Great Goddess, see Mother Goddess Greek mythology, 12, 14, 20, 2 1 , 87, 95, 97 Greenham C o m m o n , w o m e n of, 109 Gubar, Susan, 28 Hagar, 14, 55, 83 Halacha, the 33 Hall, Nor, 98 Hartill, Rosemary, 83, 84, 87, 101 Haskins, Susan, 115 Hecate, 110 Heine, Susanne, 8, 26 Hera, 87 Heyward, Carter, 128 Hippolytus, Bishop of Rome, 111 Hirsh, Marianne, 134 Holy Ghost, the, 63, 109, 121, 177 Holy Grail, see Malory Homans, Margaret, 154 homunculus, 21 Hosea, Book of, 19 Hufton, Olwen, 2 1 , 23, 25, 27, 81 hysteria, 29, 67, 77 immaculate conception, 22, 100 interpellation, 35, 38, 67, 77, 79, 87, 91, 115, 121, 127, 142, 146, 164 intertextuality, see dialogism Irigaray, Luce, 6-7, 14, 31-2, 48, 113, 119, 144-5, 173 Isaiah, Book of, 19 Ishmael, 58 Isis, 23, 48, 110, 175 Jael, 84 Jahweh, see Yahweh James, E. O., 13, 187

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205

Magnificat, 64, 88, 101, 114 Maitland, Sara, 8-9, 18, 2 1 , 31 Angel and Me, 4, 187 A Big-Enough God, 88, 95, 100, 104-5 A Book of Spells, 54 Daughter of Jerusalem, 64, 76, 89, 90 A Map of the New Country, 29-30, 94 'Mother of Freedom', 88 'Triptych', 54-60, 140 Virgin Territory, 64, 89-102 140, 141 Malory, Sir Thomas, Morte d'Arthur, Kali, 23 126-7 Keats, John, 137 mariolatry, 20, 76 Kenyon, Olga, 138 Martha, St, 105, 111 Kristeva, Julia, 3-4, 7-8, 16-17, 31, Martin, Leonie, 65 33, 65, 74-5, 112, 116, 119, 130, martyrdom, 22, 65, 74, 112 132, 133, 137, 158, 161, 176 Mary, Gospel of, see Gnostic abjection, 94 About Chinese Women, 2, 17, 22, Gospels Mary, the Virgin, St, 2 0 - 3 , 44, 46-7, 37, 38, 68, 8 1 , 91-2, 119, 162 62-4, 67, 72, 75-6, 84, 86-9, 91, jouissance, 22, 92, 148 97, 98, 101, 105, 110-13, 115, plenitude, 70-2 119, 140, 141, 142, 148, 167 semiotic, 3-4, 53-4, 71, 93-4, 113, Mary Magdalene, 86, 105-17, 118, 117 133, 146 'Outside Time', 103, 105, 135, 148 Matthew, St, Gospel of, 26 'War between the Sexes', 44 matrilinear succession, 12-13, 45, 63, ' W o m e n ' s Time', 135, 147-50 71, 117, 119, 153 Lacan, 90, 143 Medusa, 23, 175 Law of the Father, 3-4, 22, 37, 57-8, Metis, 12 60, 69, 91, 94, 98, 108, 128, 133, midwives, 83, 165, 176 140, 143, 158, 161 Miles, Margaret, 2 2 - 3 Miles, Rosalind, 23 Lazarus, 105, 110 Milton, John, Paradise Lost, 28 Leda and the Swan, 21, 63 monologism, 30, 116, 122, 133, 183 Leo XIII, 27 monotheism, 13, 16, 24, 161, 182, Lerner, Gerda, 1, 8, 11-12, 13, 15, 16-17, 20, 24, 55, 88-9, 181-2, 183 184, 187 m o o n cults, 12, 110 Morris, Pam, 4, 30, 132, 149 lesbianism, 86, 93, 97, 100, 105, 118, Morrison, Toni, 5-6, 152, 154 128-9, 130-1, 135, 143, 181 Paradise, 8, 155-71 Lilith, 36, 104, 139, 146, 151 Moses, 107, 118, 158, 169 logocentrism, 17-18, 42, 64, 183 mothers Logos, 10, 12, 15, 16, 18, 22, 101 archaic, 7, 147, 150 Lot's wife, 51, 133 castrated, 7, 70, 79 Luke, St, Gospel of, 2 1 , 62 phallic, 7 Luther, Martin, 27

Jehovah, see Yahweh. Jerusalem, 76, 89, 108, 112 Jesus Christ, 20, 23, 25-6, 30, 46, 48, 68, 86, 88, 95, 96, 100, 102, 105-6, 108, 109-12, 113-15, 136, 153, 159-60, 167, 176, 182 Jesus Movement, the, 25 John, St, Gospel of, 10 J o h n Paul I, 100 Joshua, Book of, 121, 129 jouissance, see Kristeva Julian of Norwich, 20 Jung, Carl, 96

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Index

Index

Mother Goddess, 1-2, 8, 10-13, 15, 19-20, 33, 43-5, 47, 60, 63, 84, 106, 109-11, 140, 146-7, 167, 171-2, 173, 175-6, 179, 181, 184-5 mother tongue, 23, 71 mysticism, 5, 68, 103, 112, 116, 182 see also ecstasy Nag Hammadi texts, 106 Nativity, 119, 161, 162 Nichols, Grace, 173 Oedipus, 149 One-drop law, 160-1 Oppenheimer, Robert, 109 Original Sin, 27, 34 Pagels, Elaine, 19-20 Paradise, 93, 130, 156, 160, 162, 171 see also Eden parody, 31, 69, 132-3, 142, 145 patriarchy, 2, 48, 56, 60, 67, 77, 80, 82, 89, 90, 97, 100, 101, 107, 119, 155, 163, 169, 179, 184 patrilinear succession, 16, 28, 56, 57, 119, 148, 161 patrius sermo (father speech), 23 Paul, St, 25-6, 62, 68, 120 Pentateuch, 118 Perceval, Sir, see Malory Persephone, 13, 95, 96, 109, 110 Peter, St, 106, 114 phallocentricism, 6, 18, 22, 53, 141 Pieta, 20, 93 pornography, 47, 138, 166, 179 pre-Oedipal phase, 3, 70, 93, 94 Promised Land, 86, 157-8, 169 prophecy, 30, 68, 104-5, 108, 109, 116, 118-19, 121, 129, 133-4, 136 Proverbs, Book of, 19, 161 Radford Ruether, Rosemary, 7 resurrection, 95, 110, 112, 114, 141, 148 Revelation of St John, Book of, 108, 112-13 Rich, Adrienne, 78, 83, 130

Roberts, Michele, 4, 5, 55, 60, 128, 130-1 The Book of Mrs Noah, 41-54, 57 Daughters of the House, 64-76, 90, 92 A Piece of the Night, 97 The Wild Girl, 104-17, 122, 136 'The W o m a n W h o Wanted to be a Hero', 49, 74, 96, 97 Robinson, Sally, 135, 150 Russo, Mary, 150 Ruth, 14, 130, 132 Sarah, 14, 17, 55, 83 Sawyer, Deborah, 13-14 Schouten, J., 18 semiotic, see Kristeva serpent, the, 19, 37, 38, 109, 113, 174, 184-5 sexuality, female, 5, 21-2, 26-7, 31, 37, 38-9, 40, 62-4, 66-7, 74, 77-81, 85, 87, 89, 97, 99, 105, 112-13, 115, 118-19, 128, 130, 135, 141, 151, 156, 161, 163, 167, 169 Showalter, Elaine, 'wild zone', 99 Sibyl, the, 30 slavery, 55, 58, 59-60, 152-4, 170, 177-9, 186 Smith, Valerie, 154 snakes, see serpent Solomon, Song of, 16 Sophia, 19, 92, 107, 109 Spengler, Oswald, The Decline of the West, 29 Spivak, Gayatri, 176 Sprenger, Jacob, Malleus Maleficarum, 28, 143 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, The Woman's Bible, 24 Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring, 177 symbolic order, 3-4, 22, 36, 37-8, 45, 58, 65, 67, 7 0 - 1 , 74-5, 78-9, 81, 92-4, 99, 101, 102, 103, 115, 117, 119, 121, 137, 139, 140, 148-9, 166, 183 Talmud, 33 Tennant, Emma, 5

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Sisters and Strangers, 34-41, 55, 59, 60 Teresa of Avila, St, 68, 118 Tertullian, 26 Therese, Ste, 65 L'histoire d'une dme, 66, 72 Thomas Aquinas, St, 27 Tiamat, 11, 13 Timothy, first Epistle to, 26, 62 transubstantiation, 124 tree of knowledge, 40, 138 tree of life, 13, 19, 108, 111, 141 Trible, Phyllis, 3, 24 Trinity, the, 11, 19, 20, 109 Truth, Sojourner, 'Ain't I a Woman?', 153, 181 unicorn, symbol of the, 95-6, 98, 99 Vac, Vedic Goddess. 23 Virgin Birth, 20, 87, 141 virginity, 21-2, 26-7, 38, 64-5, 87, 90, 95, 96, 97-9, 112, 113, 140, 150, 153 Visitation, the, 89, 97

Walker, Alice, 5-6, 152 The Colour Purple, 181 The Temple of my Familiar, 155, 171 Warner, Marina, 30-1, 188n Weldon, Fay, The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, 39 white supremacism, 6, 156, 175 Winterson, Jeanette, 4, 29, 136 Boating for Beginners, 34 Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, 104, 118-34, 136 witches, 28, 41, 83, 96, 110, 115, 143, 155, 163, 168, 176 Wolf, Christa, Cassandra, 12, 29, 43, 48 Woman's Bible, The, see Stanton womb, 21, 44-5, 46, 50, 60, 77, 79, 82, 86, 93-4, 114, 139, 141, 147, 149, 169 Woodward, Kenneth, 20 Yahweh, 13, 16-17, 55, 59, 81, 107 Zechariah, 157

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Index 207