Irigaray, Incarnation and Contemporary Women’s Fiction 9781780935980, 9781472543639, 9781472514523

Table of contents :
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction
Divinity
The religious
Incarnation
Notes
Chapter 1 Becoming Incarnate: Luce Irigaray on Religion
Irigaray and the divine
Irigaray and incarnation
Literature as incarnated writing
Notes
Chapter 2 Where Literature, Religion and Feminism Meet: Critical Perspectives
Women’s revisionist writing
Breaking new ground
Notes
Chapter 3 ‘In Love with Either/Or’: Religion and Oppositional Logic in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale
Opposites that tear the world apart
Bodies and word(s)
Chaste vessels and unholy harlots
The Gilead within
Conclusion
Notes
Chapter 4 ‘Where God Begins’: Reconciling the Female Body and the Divine Word in Michèle Roberts’ The Book of Mrs Noah and Impossible Saints
‘The Word that structures difference’
Subjecting the flesh
Incarnating new words
Rejection, revision, renewal
Conclusion
Notes
Chapter 5 ‘Sucked into the Black Cloth’: Religion, Race and Sexual Shame in Alice Walker’s By the Light of My Father’s Smile
Religion as an imperialist force
The wound of sexual shame
The healing spirit of Eros
Conclusion
Notes
Chapter 6 ‘Your Father Who is Tender Like a Furnace’: Divinity, Violence and Desire in A. L. Kennedy’s Original Bliss
Someone to make her whole
Helen and the apple
The ‘palpable gift’ of God’s judgement
Coming to our senses
Conclusion
Notes
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Irigaray, Incarnation and Contemporary Women’s Fiction

Also available from Bloomsbury Breathing with Luce Irigaray, edited by Lenart Skof and Emily A. Holmes In the Beginning, She Was, Luce Irigaray Luce Irigaray: Key Writings, Luce Irigaray Luce Irigaray: Teaching, Luce Irigaray Scenes of Intimacy: Reading, Writing and Theorizing Contemporary Literature, edited by, Jennifer Cooke

Irigaray, Incarnation and Contemporary Women’s Fiction Abigail Rine

LON DON • N E W DE L H I • N E W YOR K • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com First published 2013 © Abigail Rine, 2013 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Abigail Rine has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.



ISBN: HB: 978-1-7809-3598-0 ePub: 978-1-4725-0866-9 PDF: 978-1-4725-1452-3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

For Michael & Julian

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Contents Acknowledgements Abbreviations

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Introduction

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Becoming Incarnate: Luce Irigaray on Religion Irigaray and the divine Irigaray and incarnation Literature as incarnated writing Where Literature, Religion and Feminism Meet: Critical Perspectives Women’s revisionist writing Breaking new ground ‘In Love with Either/Or’: Religion and Oppositional Logic in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale Opposites that tear the world apart Bodies and word(s) Chaste vessels and unholy harlots The Gilead within Conclusion ‘Where God Begins’: Reconciling the Female Body and the Divine Word in Michèle Roberts’ The Book of Mrs Noah and Impossible Saints ‘The Word that structures difference’ Subjecting the flesh Incarnating new words Rejection, revision, renewal Conclusion

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35 35 46

53 55 60 66 71 78

85 86 91 100 106 112

Contents

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‘Sucked into the Black Cloth’: Religion, Race and Sexual Shame in Alice Walker’s By the Light of My Father’s Smile Religion as an imperialist force The wound of sexual shame The healing spirit of Eros Conclusion ‘Your Father Who is Tender Like a Furnace’: Divinity, Violence and Desire in A. L. Kennedy’s Original Bliss Someone to make her whole Helen and the apple The ‘palpable gift’ of God’s judgement Coming to our senses Conclusion

Conclusion Bibliography Index

117 118 123 129 136

143 143 147 152 155 160 165 171 181

Acknowledgements I have many people to thank. First, my gratitude to Professor Luce Irigaray for illuminating her theories for me and for providing invaluable feedback on this research. Her writing and mentorship have profoundly influenced me, both intellectually and personally. Many thanks, as well, to the women of Luce Irigaray’s 2008 Doctoral Seminar, whose collective, collaborative brilliance fed my soul and my work. My deepest gratitude to my PhD supervisors at the University of St Andrews, Professor Susan Sellers and Professor Gill Plain, who guided, mentored and encouraged me through my PhD work, from which this current project springs. I am also indebted to my friends and former St Andrews colleagues, Dr Ben Davies and Dr Susan Massey: Ben, for the wine, stinky cheese and entertaining conversation, and Susan, for the endless cups of Yorkshire gold. I would also like to acknowledge my friends and current colleagues in the English Department at George Fox University: Bill Jolliff, Melanie Mock, Kathy Heininge, Gary Tandy and Ed Higgins. These folks have guided me through my initial years as a teacher and scholar, and I could not ask for better colleagues. I am extremely grateful to have these people in my life. Several other George Fox colleagues also contributed to this undertaking, namely the members of my dynamic writing group, Kathy Heininge and Corey Beals, whose fingerprints are all over this book. Their insight and feedback have continually challenged me as a writer, reader and thinker. I have been similarly encouraged and motivated by my new faculty buddies, Brian Doak, Patrick Ray and Davida Brown; their camaraderie and support have been instrumental throughout the writing and revision process. I would also like to acknowledge Mark McLeod-Harrison, who first introduced me to feminism, and who recently let me take the reins of his Feminist Philosophy class, where I was able to present some of the central ideas of this book. And thanks to my students, past and present, who daily challenge and delight me – particularly the Red Couch Women. Lastly, I wish to thank those in my inner circle: my father, Ric, who instilled in me ‘The Rhino Principle’, and my mother, Becky, who taught me the sweetness of stories and words. They have given me more than I can ever repay. Thanks

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Acknowledgements

to my brother, Jesse and his wife, Stefanie, for their support and love – and for getting together and making Ethan and Liam. As I wrap up the final touches of this book, I feel lucky to have my newborn son, Julian, lying beside me, whose gestation and birth fortuitously coincided with the birth of this book. And to Michael, my love, what can I possibly say? Between us, there is transcendence.

Abbreviations All references to these primary texts will be cited parenthetically as follows: HT

The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood

MN

The Book of Mrs Noah, by Michèle Roberts

IS

Impossible Saints, by Michèle Roberts

FS

By the Light of My Father’s Smile, by Alice Walker

OB

Original Bliss, by A. L. Kennedy

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Introduction

‘Could we not imagine the divine differently?’ This question is posed by theorist Luce Irigaray in her work ‘Spiritual Tasks for Our Age’, and this book offers an extended, resounding ‘yes’ to her question; women are transcending the boundaries of traditional religion to offer renewed conceptualizations that move beyond the phallocentric and oppositional logic of traditional religious discourse (2004f, p. 171).1 Scepticism towards totalizing metanarratives in the wake of postmodernity has not completely purged Western culture of religious concerns, but has rather left room for the refiguring of humanity’s relation to divinity, truth and the unknown.2 This religious re-imagining is revealed by the prevalence of religious themes in fictional works by prominent contemporary women writers. As critic and theologian Heather Walton describes, there is a ‘revisionary movement within contemporary women’s literature concerned with nothing less than the radical revisioning of religious traditions’ (2007a, p. 544). The aim of this book is to examine key writers within this ‘revisionary movement’ and explore how they forge a middle way between blind submission to religion and its total rejection through imaginative attempts at revision and renewal. I argue that the women writers analysed in this book express an incarnational understanding of the religious, in that their works destabilize and recast the hierarchical oppositions that privilege masculinity, divinity, spirit and logos over femininity, desire and the flesh. Luce Irigaray’s writings on the status of women in Western religion form the theoretical backbone of this project, particularly her more recent concern with the relationship between religion and feminine subjectivity. Since the publication of her groundbreaking book Speculum of the Other Woman in 1974, Irigaray has been a highly influential figure in feminist theory.3 Her first two works, Speculum and This Sex Which is Not One (1977), which remain her most well-known, present incisive interrogations of Western discourse and expose its phallocentric binary logic that obscures women’s difference and precludes their development as subjects.4 With An Ethics of Sexual Difference (1984), however, Irigaray’s oeuvre shifts from the critique and deconstruction of phallocentrism to the work of

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Irigaray, Incarnation and Contemporary Women’s Fiction

cultivating feminine subjectivity and establishing and articulating a culture of two sexed subjects, man and woman.5 Irigaray’s work has always engaged with religious discourse to some extent (see, for example ‘La Mysterique’ and ‘Divine Knowledge’ in Speculum, and ‘Cosi Fan Tutti’ and ‘Women on the Market’ in This Sex Which is Not One), but in the 1980s, with the publications of Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche (1980) and Sexes and Genealogies (1987), Irigaray’s analysis of religious discourse becomes a integral part of her wider project of (re) thinking women’s difference.6 For Irigaray, the development of a subjectivity in the feminine necessitates engaging with religion and conceptualizing a feminine divine, as is further discussed here and in Chapter 1. Irigaray’s theories have served as a valuable resource for feminist literary critics in particular, largely due to her interest in the fundamental linguistic nature of women’s oppression, an interest Irigaray shares with other prominent French feminist theorists.7 As Susan Sellers describes in her book Language and Sexual Difference, Irigaray’s perspective situates language and discourse ‘at the heart’ of the feminist project: Language encodes our experience, and because of the particular vision on which our language system depends, the problem for women is that we can only express ourselves in the language that symbolizes the way man has perceived the world to be. Thus for many French feminist writers, the focus is not that of tracing or developing an authentic female voice, but on the contrary, lies in de-constructing the various symbolising procedures that hold the patriarchal vision in place, and which silence, distort and appropriate any other (woman’s) view. (Sellers 1991, pp. xv–xvi)

This underlying interest in the linguistic roots of phallocentrism is paired, in Irigaray’s work, with an interrogation of religion as one of the central ‘symbolising procedures’ that uphold the patriarchal model of subjectivity. As Irigaray’s theories distinctively connect women’s access to subjectivity with both linguistic and religious forces, this makes her work particularly useful in analysing the religious revisionist movement in contemporary women’s writing.8 It is important to note that, following Irigaray’s central concern with sexed subjectivity, this research project assumes irreducible sexuate difference, but is not an attempt to prove or locate the difference.9 In other words, I am focusing on women writers and theorists in an attempt to explore an unfolding revisionist movement in contemporary women’s writing, one that is not defined by contrasting male and female writers or theorists. Irigaray writes of the need for women to ‘discover their word(s), be faithful to it and, interweaving it with their

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bodies, make it a living and spiritual flesh’ (2004e, p. 151).10 This project works with Irigaray’s assumption that women must shape their own path of becoming and seeks to uncover where this path may lead – while avoiding the definition or reduction of women’s difference. Women must be read in their own right, and this study aims to uncover the gods of women’s imaginations without situating them in opposition to men or obscuring their individual differences. I would also like to clarify that when I write of religious discourse, I am referring specifically to Western religious discourse, often described as the Judeo-Christian tradition. I have limited the parameters in this way to reflect the primary concerns of the writers examined here. Although some of the novels, such as Michèle Roberts’ The Book of Mrs Noah (1987) and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), engage myths found in the Hebrew Bible, they, as well as A. L. Kennedy and Alice Walker, primarily critique and revise Christian discourse. This is not to say that feminist revision is uniquely post-Christian; it does, however, acknowledge the monolithic presence of Christian discourse in the West. Irigaray’s work also exposes this monolithic presence, as well as its connection to the articulation of sexuate difference. Much of her recent writing on religion examines central myths in the Christian tradition, such as the incarnation of Christ and the Annunciation, and reveals how these myths have been interpreted to affirm a phallocentric model of subjectivity. Before introducing and contextualizing the religious terminology used throughout this book, a preliminary question must be considered: if this research depicts a movement away from traditional religious concepts, why use religious language at all? Why not use neutral terms, such as ‘meaningful’ instead of ‘sacred’, or ‘autonomy’ rather than ‘divinity’? First of all, I am following the lead of the writers themselves; my work reflects their attention to religious concerns and the language they use. More importantly, however, it is through the innovative use of religious language that these concepts are redefined.11 To simply dismiss ‘God’ does nothing to alter who or what ‘God’ is purported to be. Avoiding religious language allows established concepts to remain within discourse – even if that presence is believed to be absent. It is through creatively deploying the old words that they are broken open and inscribed with new meaning. Irigaray employs this strategy of redefining religious words by using them in both renewing and subversive ways in her own writing.12 Three key terms that she rewrites in this way are used throughout this book – divinity, incarnation and the religious – and I would like to introduce these concepts here, before developing them further in Chapter 1.

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Irigaray, Incarnation and Contemporary Women’s Fiction

Divinity The central goal of Irigaray’s religious project, as well as the theoretical undercurrent of my own research, is to articulate a subjectivity in the feminine, and for Irigaray, this is connected to women becoming divine: To pursue human becoming to its divine fulfilment, such seems the spiritual task most adapted to our age. Not simply to submit to already-established truths, dogmas and rites, but to search for the way of a human flourishing still to come. (Irigaray 2004c, p. 186)

Like Irigaray, the fiction of Atwood and Roberts depicts a mode of being that is becoming, adhering to the idea that subjectivity is processual, not merely obtained at birth or through an androcentric oedipal crisis. My understanding of becoming in Irigaray’s thought is taken largely from the essay ‘Divine Women’, which describes becoming as an ongoing realization of potential: ‘To become means fulfilling the wholeness of what we are capable of being’ (1993b, p. 61). In order for the development of the subject to occur and continue, it must be oriented towards a horizon, a never-realized goal or ideal that facilitates continual transformation. In existing discourse, women have been unable to become subjects as women. ‘Woman’ has been defined solely in relation to ‘man’, who defines himself through his male God. Women, by and through themselves, have no relation to the infinite. This lack of a viable religious discourse, one reflective and inclusive of women’s embodied experiences, results in stasis, in paralysed becoming. The God of monotheism, as the idealization of masculine subjectivity, does not inspire the continual development of woman, but rather ‘paralyses a part of her spiritual energy into a kind of idolatry or passivity’ (2004f, p. 174). Reflecting Irigaray’s analysis to varying degrees, the novels examined in this book express narratives of spiritual paralysis in relation to existing religious discourse and voice a desire to write beyond this discourse into a renewed religious space.

The religious In her book Sexes and Genealogies, Irigaray describes the inevitability of religious thought, asserting that if ‘we are unable to eliminate or suppress the phenomenon of religion . . . it is crucial that we rethink religion’ (1993d, p. 73). Irigaray uses the terms ‘spirituality’ and ‘religion’ in her work, at times interchangeably,

Introduction

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but she also refers repeatedly to what she calls ‘the religious’ or ‘the religious dimension’. Irigaray asserts that her own work is an attempt to ‘think anew a religious dimension when many believe we have put an end to it’ (2004d, p. 147). The religious, she writes, ‘is an important aspect of our culture’ and it is crucial to consider ‘how we have been determined by this dimension and how we can, in the present, situate ourselves with respect to it’ (2004d, p. 145). The religious dimension is an external cultural force, but its words, concepts and tenets are internalized on an individual level; thus, the religious ‘in some obscure way . . . holds together the totality of the self, of the community and culture’ (2004f, p. 171).13 In this way, the religious is both intensely personal and communal, and its revision has the potential to transform relations between the self and the other. As Irigaray puts it: The religious, in my opinion, must correspond to a way of accomplishment of the human both as a gathering of the self in oneself and as a bond with the universe and the other. . . . a certain conception of the religious has left human beings in a status inferior to their own nature, has deprived them of a spiritual and divine becoming of which they are capable. (2004c, p. 192)

This ‘certain conception of the religious’ refers to traditional monotheistic religious discourse, which paralyses feminine becoming, as described above. Irigaray also, however, describes a refigured concept of the religious as having the capacity to undo the dualistic damage of Western metaphysics, to function as a ‘gesture which binds earth and sky, in us and outside of us’ (2004c, p. 190). I understand this to mean that the religious, when re-imagined, has the ability to overcome divisive oppositions, to inspire actions, expressions and relations that support ‘the whole of what is, making it grow and flourish’ (2004c, p. 190). Throughout this project, I have chosen to primarily use ‘the religious’, rather than ‘spirituality’ or ‘the sacred’, because this term can uniquely evoke a plurality of forces: the external forces of community, institution and culture, as well as the internal spiritual drives and desires of the individual – all of which must be interrogated and revised in order to facilitate sexuate human becoming.14

Incarnation For Irigaray, divinity is fundamentally a question of incarnation. Irigaray questions the traditional opposition between divinity and humanity, instead

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Irigaray, Incarnation and Contemporary Women’s Fiction

offering the notion of becoming divine as an incarnate process that women and men must realize for themselves, as sexuate subjects. As Irigaray writes, the spirit must ‘remain soul in the flesh’ in order to become (2004b, p. 169). Becoming divine, then, is to cultivate one’s own incarnation, to realize oneself as both flesh and divine spirit. Affirming the traditional concept of divinity as a disembodied, masculine Word suppresses alterity, thereby dissolving the possibility of figuring a feminine subjectivity (1993a, p. 217). Irigaray’s concept of incarnation is, of course, connected to Christ’s incarnation, a central tenet of Christian theology: Jesus Christ is the Divine Word made flesh. The notion of incarnation itself has the potential to confound the traditional religious oppositions of divinity and humanity, spirit and flesh, body and Word, and thereby has the potential to transfigure the binary schema of Christian discourse. According to Irigaray, however, this potential remains unrealized, as religious discourse maintains a schism between the embodied and the divine, asserting a theology that only conceives of the male word becoming male flesh. There is currently no viable model of female incarnation.15 Although the concept of incarnation appears in Irigaray’s written works, it was in her 2008 doctoral seminar that she elaborated on the vital connection between women’s incarnation and women’s use of language. During this seminar, Irigaray described how spiritual incarnation is a process that requires the participation of words in order for women to name and express themselves, rather than passively receiving the words and definitions of the other. Irigaray’s ‘theology of incarnation’ asserts that ‘the word is a vehicle of the divine’, affirming the transformative potential of language, particularly language that expresses the life of the sexuate body (2004e, pp. 151, 156). In her seminar, she asserted that when the Word is not incarnate, but cut off from the sensible dimension and is no longer embodied, it remains an absolute entity outside our reaching, outside possible experience and therefore unable to cultivate a living discourse that reflects and expresses the feminine. As previously discussed, Irigaray’s notion of incarnation destabilizes several interrelated conceptual oppositions. When I argue, then, that the fictional works analysed in subsequent chapters exemplify Irigaray’s incarnational theology, I am referring to the ways in which they creatively refigure the relationship between the human and the divine, the body and the word, the spirit and the flesh. These writings re-envision the Word by offering words, words that ‘create bridges’ between language and the sexuate body and begin the work of articulating subjectivity in the feminine (2004d, p. 145).

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Following Chapter 1, which further contextualizes this research in Irigaray’s theories, and Chapter 2, which situates it in relation to existing work on feminist revisionist literature, the remaining chapters offer close readings of novels by Margaret Atwood, Michèle Roberts, Alice Walker and A. L. Kennedy. Chapter 3 examines Atwood’s interrogation of oppositional logic in religious discourse through her novel The Handmaid’s Tale, focusing particularly on the subjection of the female body to the divine, masculine Word. Chapter 4 expands this discussion by exploring two novels by Roberts that expose the violence within religious discourse and deconstructs the subjection of body to Word. Chapters 5 and 6 shift the discussion to the schism between the flesh and the spirit, analysing the fiction of Walker and Kennedy respectively and revealing how their novels confront the religious denigration of feminine sexuality and refigure the connection between eroticism and divinity.16 These fictional accounts unveil an emerging conceptualization of the religious that goes beyond an ‘abstract and moral discourse’ to elucidate a ‘living and present discourse’ that allows women to ‘to be faithful to ourselves’, our bodies, our words (2004d, p. 145, xiii). In the formation of an incarnational religious discourse, which I argue is reflected in these novels, woman no longer must ‘quit her body’ or ‘renounce’ who she is now ‘for a future in another world’ (2004b, p. 167). For Irigaray, the task before us, the task answered by these women writers, is ‘to make divine this world – as body, as cosmos’, to bind earth and sky, flesh and spirit, within us and around us (2004b, p. 167, emphasis mine). In closing, I would like to make clear that although there are significant commonalities between these women writers, notably the redemption of the body, the reunion of spirituality and sexuality, the affirmation of embodied experiences as sources of authority, and the violence within existing religious discourse – there are also significant differences that reveal the heterogeneity of revisionist writing. Kennedy, for example, revises the connection between divinity and eroticism, but nonetheless retains the notion of a personified and masculine God – a notion of divinity that Roberts and Atwood explicitly reject. While Roberts is concerned with women establishing a connection to their maternal genealogies, Walker attempts to refigure the father-daughter relationship. And although all the writers in this study are preoccupied with the religious articulation of gender, Walker reveals how both sexism and racism have roots in religious discourse. Clearly, this book is not an attempt to present a monolithic vision of women’s experiences or religious reflections; while tracing common threads among these writers, I also hope to show their differences

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and allow these works to enter into dialogue with one another. My research is concerned with interrogating the power relations within religious discourse and representing the world and feminine subjectivity in new and myriad ways, not voicing a unitary idea of ‘women’s experience’. As Irigaray asserts, the first step in realizing an incarnational theology is for each woman to find her own words and embrace her own unique incarnation. To explore what ideas are shared between these writers should not be read as an attempt to obscure their differences and diverse experiences, but to make connections among a plurality of female voices that are critiquing religious discourse and offering new imaginative models.

Notes 1 From Luce Irigaray, ‘Spiritual Tasks for Our Age’ (2004), p. 171, emphasis Irigaray’s. Throughout this book, unless otherwise noted, all italics within quotations are the authors’ original emphases. 2 For more on the postmodern dismantling of metanarrative(s), see Jean-François Lyotard’s seminal work on postmodernism, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979). Lyotard argues that postmodernity is characterized by ‘incredulity towards meta-narratives’, disbelief in totalizing narratives that explain all human experience and knowledge by appealing to universal values or truth. Lyotard’s work specifically discusses the metanarratives of Marxism and the Enlightenment, and I would argue that religions such as Christianity are also metanarratives in that they offer a story to explain all stories, one that is rooted in the immutable and absolute reality of God. 3 See Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman (1985). 4 See Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One (1985). 5 See Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference (1993). As Alison Martin observes in Luce Irigaray and the Question of the Divine (2000), many critics see a break in Irigaray’s work after Speculum and This Sex Which is Not One, but Irigaray describes her oeuvre as having three interrelated phases, which will be discussed further in Chapter 1. For in-depth explorations of Irigaray’s conceptualization of sexed difference, see Alison Stone, Luce Irigaray and the Philosophy of Sexual Difference (2006), and Penelope Deutscher, A Politics of Impossible Difference: The Later Works of Luce Irigaray (2002). For a collection of critical responses to Irigaray that trace the trajectory of her work and its reception through the 1990s, see Carolyn Burke, Naomi Schor and Margaret Whitford, Engaging with Irigaray: Feminist Philosophy and Modern European Thought (1994). This collection, though useful in exploring the shift in Irigaray’s work from critiquing phallocentrism to

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conceptualizing a culture of two subjects, notably overlooks her engagement with religion. The third section of Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, entitled ‘When Gods are Born’, focuses on the concept of divinity and includes an in-depth examination of Christian mythology in the chapter ‘The Crucified One: Epistle to the Last Christians’. Sexes and Genealogies contains the essays ‘Belief Itself ’, ‘Women, the Sacred and Money’, as well as the significant essay ‘Divine Women’, which first fleshes out Irigaray’s contention that women must ‘become divine’ in order to gain subjectivity. See, for example, the works of Hélène Cixous and Julia Kristeva. For a clear introduction to the theories of Irigaray, Cixous and Kristeva, as well as an explication of the difference between Anglo-American and French feminist views of women and language, see Susan Sellers, Language and Sexual Difference: Feminist Writing in France (1991). Cixous, whose theories are also employed in this study, similarly explores linguistic and religious forces and their influence on feminine subjectivity, but her work does not engage with religion to the extent and depth that Irigaray’s does. Although the vast majority of critics use the term ‘sexual difference’ in relation to Irigaray’s work – and she herself uses the term in her earlier works – in her 2008 doctoral seminar at Queen Mary College, London, Irigaray expressed a preference for the term ‘sexuate’ rather than ‘sexual’, to avoid confusion with theorizations of sexuality and queerness, as well as to distinguish her concept of sexuate relational identities from biological sex differences. This shift in terminology can also be found in Key Writings, which employs the term ‘sexuate difference’. As Irigaray asserts in the preface to Key Writings, this collection is her attempt to trace the development of her work and expresses her current theoretical positions: ‘I would like to unveil other perspectives, new perspectives, on the horizon and the unfolding of my thinking, showing how they relate to a first moment’ (2004d, p. vii). The book consists of five thematic sections on Philosophy, Linguistics, Art, Spirituality and Religion and Politics, each of which is contextualized in her overarching project of realizing sexuate difference. In the section on Spirituality and Religion, Irigaray elucidates her religious thought in detail and the essays in that section serve as the primary theoretical texts of this book. Penelope Deutscher, in her monograph on the later works of Irigaray, corroborates this interpretation of Irigaray’s strategic use of religious words: ‘Irigaray’s view is that the concepts of God and divinity need to be used otherwise, disrupted, reimagined and resignified. Avoiding the terminology would not achieve the same substitutive effect’ (2002, p. 96). Jacques Derrida coined the term ‘paleonymy’ to refer to this strategy of rewriting the meaning of words by deploying them in renewed contexts. In Positions

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Irigaray, Incarnation and Contemporary Women’s Fiction (2004), Derrida defines paleonymy as a ‘strategic necessity that requires the occasional maintenance of an old name in order to launch a new concept’ (p. 60). Irigaray uses the strategy of paleonymy throughout her oeuvre, particularly in her refiguring of the religious. Her concepts of incarnation and divinity, which are central to the theoretical underpinnings of this book, are key examples of Irigaray retaining an old name to simultaneously express a new concept while deconstructing an old one. Similarly, in ‘Divine Women’, Irigaray writes that ‘only the religious, within and without us, is fundamental enough to allow us to discover, affirm, achieve certain ends’ (1993b, p. 67). In addition to the primary terminology of this project – incarnation, divinity and the religious – I will occasionally use other words such as ‘spirituality’ and ‘theology’, terms that also appear in Irigaray’s work. Where ‘the religious’ is an all-encompassing term that reflects both individual and collective conceptions and experiences, I occasionally use ‘spirituality’ to describe depictions of individual religious ideas and experiences, and ‘theology’ to evoke a way of thinking of or conceptualizing the religious. At times, my use of certain words is influenced by particular authors; for example, Walker uses the term ‘spirit’ in her writing, as well as ‘spirituality’, so my analysis of her fiction will reflect her wording. For more on Irigaray’s interpretation of Christ’s incarnation and his death, see ‘The Crucified One’ in Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche. For another account of incarnation and the maleness of Christ from a feminist perspective, see Julia Baudzej, ‘Re-telling the Story of Jesus: The Concept of Embodiment and Recent Feminist Reflections on the Maleness of Christ’ (2008). For the purposes of this research, I make a conceptual distinction between the body and the flesh. In Christian scripture and tradition, the flesh typically connotes the sexual, sinful and fallen aspect of human nature that sits in opposition to the perfect spirit of God. As such, in this book I use the term ‘body’ in a more general sense to discuss corporeality, and ‘flesh’ to refer specifically to the desiring and erotic body.

1

Becoming Incarnate: Luce Irigaray on Religion

In this Chapter I will explore, through the lens of Irigaray’s philosophy, the necessity and intricacies of  ‘rethinking’ religion. I will also examine how women’s literary writing provides a valuable means of both subverting traditional religious discourse and offering alternative aesthetic expressions of the divine that can better enable the incarnation of women. Before proceeding, in subsequent chapters, to analyse the fictional works featured in this book, I will first flesh out the context of this project by addressing fundamental questions, the first of which concern Irigaray’s religious thought: Why is it necessary to revise or ‘rethink’ religion? Why must women ‘become divine’? The answers to these questions are complex and must be situated in Irigaray’s broader philosophical project, which I will proceed to do in the following section, after first considering the contentious responses to her work on religion.

Irigaray and the divine Irigaray’s writings on the religious are perhaps her most overlooked and misunderstood. Many notable critics and commentators on her work have downplayed the religious elements or disregarded them completely.1 Those feminist critics who have engaged with Irigaray’s religious thought are overwhelmingly from the fields of theology and religious studies, and their responses have been varied.2 Grace Jantzen, in her book Becoming Divine (1999), outlines two general reactions of resistance to Irigaray’s contention that women must become divine. On the one hand are the secular feminists, who view religion as inherently regressive and damaging to women and assert that feminists should abandon any ‘pious quest’ for divinity in favour of ‘practical and theoretical struggles for justice’ (Jantzen 1999, p. 7). Another form of resistance

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comes from feminists who embrace more traditional forms of religion, such as Christian feminists. As Jantzen describes, these feminists, though certainly critical of the patriarchal religious perspective, misinterpret Irigaray’s view of divinity as a call for women to ‘play God’, an idea they find ‘religiously distasteful’ (1999, p. 7).3 Jantzen’s assertions regarding the widespread contentious reactions to Irigaray’s religious themes are corroborated by theorist Elizabeth Grosz: Irigaray’s recent writings on the divine have evoked shock, outrage, disappoint­ ment, and mystification in her readers. To many, she seems to have succumbed to the most naïve essentialist reliance on religion to overcome or to provide solutions for women’s socio-political and psychical oppression. (1993, p. 199)

Grosz continues in her article to attempt to ‘defend [Irigaray] against these accusations’, and salvage Irigaray’s work from a perceived alliance with religion (1993, p. 199). As Tina Beattie argues, this is a common reaction from secular feminists when dealing with religious elements in Irigaray’s work. Beattie names Grosz and Margaret Whitford as two central commentators on Irigaray who ‘show a nuanced understanding’ of Irigaray’s thought, but nonetheless ‘appear determined to rescue her from her own mystical and religious inclinations, particularly when these focus on Christianity rather than Greek mythology’ (1999, p. 119). Ultimately, Beattie argues, Grosz attempts to liberate Irigaray from her ‘ambivalent relation’ to religious discourse ‘by locating her firmly on the outside’ (1999, p. 120). I find Grosz’s articulation of Irigaray’s divine insightful and largely agree with her reading, particularly her contention that Irigaray’s religious interest is ‘directly linked to her ongoing critique and displacement of the founding concepts of Western philosophy’ (1993, p. 199). I do, however, concur with Beattie’s analysis, as Grosz closes her article with the following statement regarding Irigaray’s preoccupation with the divine: ‘This is not a religious conversion, a leap of faith; it is a political and textual strategy for the positive reinscription of women’s bodies, identities and futures in relation to and in exchange with the other sex’ (1993, p. 214). Like Beattie, I find this closing sentiment unnecessarily reductive. In ‘Spiritual Tasks for Our Age’ (2004), Irigaray makes it clear that her interest in the religious cannot be reduced to a mere political strategy. She repeatedly asserts the need for women to forge their own spiritual paths and develop a relation to the infinite; this is not merely a means to a political end. Irigaray clearly places value on the religious dimension and asserts the need for women to refigure this dimension in their own terms – an effort that will certainly, according to Irigaray, have ramifications in the political sphere, but cannot

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simply be defined as a political act. This reveals what is perhaps the underlying difficulty that feminist critics, both religious and secular, have with Irigaray’s religious thought: Irigaray’s divine straddles and destabilizes the neat binary of ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ that is taken for granted in the discourses of modernity. For the religious feminist, Irigaray seems too secular; for the secular feminists, her work seems excessively mired in religious language and thought.4 I cite these critical responses in detail in order to show that Irigaray’s work on religion remains contentious and misunderstood, and its centrality to her overall project overlooked. This widespread reluctance to seriously consider Irigaray’s reworkings of religion and the divine has been discussed by Irigaray herself, who insists that this aspect of her thought is not tangential, but fundamental to her broader goal of subverting phallocentric discourse and rethinking sexuate difference: I don’t think anyone among you could say, ‘I’m not going to consider the problem of God.’ For we are, notably, in a monotheistic cultural economy, subjected to a culture of the male God, the masculine Trinity. Philosophy, art, most of the western representations of the body since classical Greece, are connected either directly or indirectly to this idea. (1996, p. 212)5

Following Irigaray, I contend that the divine cannot remain a peripheral interest for critics who seriously engage with Irigaray’s work. As I will show in the following section, Irigaray’s notion of divinity continues the project begun in her earlier and better known works and reveals the necessity of feminist religious revision.6 In a 1994 interview with Elizabeth Hirsch and Gary Olson, Irigaray characterizes her work as progressing through three distinct but interconnected phases. The first phase, comprising the works Speculum of the Other Woman and This Sex Which is Not One, she describes as her ‘critical’ phase, in which she shows ‘how a single subject, traditionally the masculine subject, has constructed the world and interpreted the world according to a single perspective’ (Hirsch and Olsen 1995, p. 97). In her second phase, beginning with An Ethics of Sexual Difference, Irigaray turns her attention to theorizing how a subjectivity in the feminine might be conceived and articulated (Hirsch and Olsen 1995, p. 97). This investigation leads to the emergence of a third phase, in which Irigaray moves from considering feminine subjectivity to ‘the construction of an inter-subjectivity respecting sexual difference’; in other words, Irigaray’s current work is primarily concerned with the establishment of a culture of two sexuate subjects, man and woman, which would replace the mono-culture of the

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masculine subject (Hirsch and Olsen 1995, p. 96). Though some critics have read Irigaray’s oeuvre as featuring an abrupt break after This Sex Which is Not One, I would contend that this is a gross misreading.7 Irigaray’s entire oeuvre can be seen as an attempt to subvert the phallocentric discourse of the masculine subject. The scathing critiques she offers in her first two works pave the way for her conception of an alternate order founded on sexuate difference and two autonomous subjects. The preoccupations of her second and third phases in particular are deeply intertwined, for in order to achieve a culture of two subjects, woman must first become a subject in her own right. Much of Irigaray’s religious thought is devoted to this question of women becoming subjects and becoming divine – two parallel gestures, as will be shown. In order to better understand Irigaray’s concepts of feminine subjectivity and divinity, it is helpful to locate her work in the psychoanalytic and poststructuralist traditions. Speculum and This Sex engage with the psycho­analytic discourses of Freud and Lacan, which Irigaray situates in the broader tradition of Western philosophy. Although Irigaray interrogates the phallocentrism of both thinkers, she also borrows much from psychoanalysis, namely the notion of subjectivity as a process and the fundamental importance of sexual difference. In his theorization of the human psyche, Lacan conceives identity and consciousness as conceptualized through language and employs the phallus as a central signifier that functions as a sign of power and the primary signifier of difference that distinguishes between the sexes in terms of lack. It is the phallus as a signifier that anchors the system of representation and upholds the categories of masculine and feminine. The primacy of the phallus in Lacan’s model of the psyche highlights a socio-lingual structure that is fundamentally male-centred. According to Lacan, only boys can fully enter the Symbolic and attain subjectivity, because the power of the phallus is associated with the male body. Girls, perceiving their lack, conform to the linguistic and social prescriptions of femininity, which is constituted as the passive negative of masculinity.8 Irigaray’s initial works expose that when Freud and Lacan talk about subjectivity, it is always in male terms; the female is defined as that which is not male. Irigaray’s responding question, the question that precipitates her second phase and dominates her religious thought, is: how can women become subjects as women? Irigaray’s work is also highly influenced by Derrida’s critique of what he terms ‘phallogocentrism’, a neologism that combines the concepts of phallocentrism and logocentrism. Derrida’s analysis of Western thought exposes a central assumption

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of absolute truth and a belief in logos – reason, or the Word – as the key to unlocking this truth. Derrida relates this notion of a single origin or meaning of the universe to the phallus and describes the phallogocentric thought as a series of interconnected binary oppositions that privilege one (masculine) term over another (feminine) term. Derrida criticizes Lacan’s vision of a single, masculine libido as a phallocentric erasure of difference.9 Following Derrida, Irigaray asserts that, in Western discourse, sexuate difference remains un-thought; it is ‘precisely what Western culture has abolished’ (2004d, p. ix). Under the current phallo(go)centric model, women’s supposed difference is simply a prop to define the masculine. Moving from her first phase of critiquing this order, Irigaray proceeds in subsequent works to assert that in order for phallo(go)centric discourse to be destabilized, we must move from the order of one (masculine) subject to develop a culture of two subjects: a masculine and a feminine subject that can replace the subject/object binary schema of phallocentrism. This necessitates that women become subjects in their own right, rather than the mirror that orients masculine subjectivity. Irigaray is clear that merely critiquing the phallic order is not sufficient; criticism must be paired with the creation of something new: . . . criticizing patriarchy or phallocracy does not suffice in order to join a culture of two subjects. Of course, the criticism of a monosubjective culture must remain a constant gesture. But it has to be accompanied by the construction of another culture, and even two other cultures: a culture of [sic] appropriate to feminine subjectivity and a culture concerning the relation between two different subjects. A single criticism . . . can end in a wrong nihilism through the nullification of sexuate difference, the most basic and universal of all human differences. (2004d, p. viii)

This concept of sexuate difference is fundamental to understanding Irigaray’s oeuvre in its entirety, as well as her religious thought. For Irigaray, sexuate difference is ontological in the sense that there is no un-sexed human being. Sexuate difference is not merely biological difference, however, but refers to two distinct, relational identities. As Irigaray describes: . . . sexuate difference does not only result from biological or social elements but from another way of entering into relation with oneself, with the world, with the other(s). . . . Sexuate difference means that man and woman do not belong to one and the same subjectivity, that subjectivity itself is neither neutral nor universal. (2004d, pp. x, xii)10

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Sexuate difference, in Irigaray’s view, is irreducible difference: neither man nor woman can be reduced to the other; there exists a negativity, an irreducible mystery or transcendence between them. Irigaray’s central project of rethinking sexuate difference is intricately connected to her reconception of the divine.11 Western discourse obscures difference, particularly sexuate difference, by positing a culture of and between men and God. This God is estranged from human experience, absolutely the other, and serves as an ideal to guarantee male subjectivity. Difference is not conceived between and among sexed human beings, but is merely a marker of ‘greater or lesser proximity’ to the divine (2004f, p. 174). According to Irigaray, then, until religion is reconceptualized, feminine subjectivity will remain unthought and a renewed encounter with the other in difference will remain unrealized. In her essay ‘Divine Women’, Irigaray clarifies the relationship between a feminine divine and feminine subjectivity. This essay directly engages with Ludwig Feuerbach’s work ‘The Essence of Christianity’, and the primary idea Irigaray borrows from him is that the divine is a mirror for human conscious­ ness. Feuerbach asserts that humans are distinct from animals because we have consciousness of a being that perceives itself as infinite. Human beings have an inner and outer life, and this inner life is infinite, because it can conceive of the infinite. For Feuerbach, God is ‘the manifestation of man’s inner nature, his expressed self ’ (1972, p. 109). He writes: But if religion, i.e., the consciousness of God, is characterized as the selfconsciousness of man, this does not mean that the religious man is directly aware that his consciousness of God is his self-consciousness, for it is precisely the absence of such an awareness that is responsible for the peculiar nature of religion. Hence, in order to eliminate this misunderstanding, it would be better to say that religion is the first, but indirect, self-consciousness of man. That is why religion precedes philosophy everywhere, in the history of mankind as well as in the history of the individual. Man transposes his essential being outside himself before he finds it within himself. (1972, p. 110)

In other words, according to Feuerbach, ‘God’ is created out of man’s consciousness; God is the self-consciousness of man. Man does not exist because God created him; man exists because he created God. Feuerbach’s vision asserts God as a reflection of the subject’s awareness of his (or her) own consciousness and the fullness of possibilities open to him (or her). In this way, the divine springs from the human, and religious movement stems from a desire for deeper

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self-knowledge. This use of Feuerbach introduces the primary sense in which Irigaray uses ‘God’: God is a projection of the ideal, a horizon of subjectivity. Irigaray takes Feuerbach’s analysis and investigates it in the context of sexuate difference, contending that the God of Western religious discourse has been created out of man’s subjectivity. Father God is man objectified: In order to become, it is essential to have a gender or an essence (consequently a sexuate essence) as horizon. Otherwise, becoming remains partial and subject to the subject. When we become parts or multiples without a future of our own this means simply that we are leaving it up to the other, or the Other of the other, to put us together. . . . To avoid that finiteness, man has sought out a unique male God. God has been created out of man’s gender. . . . Man has not allowed himself to be defined by another gender: the female. (1993b, p. 61)

Recalling the influence of psychoanalytic theory, Irigaray adheres to the idea that subjectivity is achieved, not merely granted or given at birth, and as noted previously, her early works reveal how only men have been allowed to pursue and achieve subjectivity. Irigaray refers to the ongoing development of the subject as becoming. As she puts it, ‘to become means fulfilling the wholeness of what we are capable of being’, and ‘this road never ends’; it is a continual movement towards an ideal (1993b, p. 61). In order to become, women must have a goal, a horizon of potential. Without this horizon, women’s subjectivity will continue to be constructed around an other, as in existing discourse, where women have been unable to become subjects as women. ‘Woman’ has been defined solely in relation to ‘man’, who defines himself through his male God. In this phallocentric model, women have no relation to the infinite. This demonstrates how the divine is integral to Irigaray’s central pursuit of a subjectivity in the feminine that can exist alongside, but independent from, masculine subjectivity. To put it simply, a relationship with the divine is what women need to become autonomous subjects. Irigaray’s refiguring of the divine recalls her engagement with Lacan and Derrida, as Grace Jantzen demonstrates. Religion plays a prominent part in Lacan’s conception of the ‘masculine symbolic of the west’, as it is ‘undergirded by a concept of God as Divine Father, a God who is also Word, and who in his eternal disembodiment, omnipotence and omniscience is the epitome of value’ (1999, p. 10). God likewise plays a central role in Derrida’s account of logocentrism; the disembodied perfection of God ‘serves to valorize disembodied power and rationality’ and it is the ‘assumption of the divine presence’, of Absolute Truth, that ‘grounds the system of signs’ and holds them together in ‘onto-theological

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unity’ (1999, p. 10).12 The question of the divine, then, is central to the model of phallogocentrism, and therefore must be refigured if an alternative to this model is to be conceived. Yet, as Elizabeth Grosz recognizes, although Irigaray critiques and significantly revises the traditional concept of God, she also insists on the necessity of retaining the concept of divinity itself: God provides the genre, the context, the milieu and limit of the subject, and the horizon of being against which subjectivity positions itself. For this reason, Irigaray refuses to abandon the language of patriarchal religion, although she retains a distance from it. (1993, p. 208)

Even though Irigaray is clearly working with Feuerbach’s idea of projection in her conception of the divine, I would argue that she is not presenting this as an explanation of the origins of religion, but rather as a way of exploring the restrictions and dormant possibilities in contemporary religious thought. Unlike Feuerbach, Irigaray sees projection as a deliberate endeavour,  an exercise of desire and imagination. Irigaray is not asserting that women conceptualize a female model of the patriarchal God; on the contrary, she is advocating a radical reconceptualization of the religious and the divine that would present an alternative model in which divinity is rooted in the realm of sexuate humanity.13 As Alison Martin argues, it is this inability to distinguish Irigaray’s divine from traditional and patriarchal notions of divinity that accounts for much of the resistance to her work. As explored earlier, critics do not generally regard Irigaray’s perspective on religion and divinity as a central facet of her work (Martin 2000, p. 41). This, Martin contends, is ‘symptomatic of a certain expectation that the question of the divine should be a matter for religion alone’, as well as ‘the assumption that religion is one aspect of life which can be adopted or rejected at will’ (2000, p. 41). This perspective, according to Martin: . . . assumes a post-Enlightenment conception of religion as a system of myth that is susceptible to rational analysis and to the informed choices of thinking subjects. This limited understanding of the divine, as something to which individuals adhere or not, is not Irigaray’s understanding of it. For her, the divine is not simply a question of belief that can simply be avoided. (2000, p. 41)

Irigaray’s divine is a force that ‘operates in the constitution of the subject’, and her refiguring of divinity is fundamentally agnostic (2000, p. 42). As Irigaray asserts in ‘The Age of the Breath’, ‘the divine does not necessarily signify for woman that an entity called God exists. The relation of the woman with God

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seems both subtler and more incarnated’ (2004b, p. 170). In ‘Divine Women’, although Irigaray locates divinity as integral to constituting subjectivity, she resists positing a static, unchanging notion of God, acknowledging that ‘there comes a time for destruction. But, before destruction is possible, God or the gods must exist’ (1993b, p. 62). To put it differently: in Irigaray’s view divinity, like subjectivity, is continually in the process of becoming. The horizon that orients the development of feminine subjectivity is a fluid one that shifts, changes and evolves, further facilitating women’s becoming.

Irigaray and incarnation Having established the connection between subjectivity and divinity in Irigaray’s work, and having contextualized it in her overall project of re-envisioning sexuate difference, it is necessary to move into a discussion about how Irigaray’s thought is useful in examining women’s revisionary fiction. This requires exploring her notion of incarnation. As I have argued, Irigaray’s theorization of the divine asserts that women must begin the work of imagining or projecting their own notions of ‘God’ and articulating a renewed religious dimension that facilitates becoming. In her article ‘Incarnation: The Flesh Becomes Word’, Anne-Claire Mulder reads this call to refigure the divine as twofold: first, as a liberating call for women to abandon the ideals established by and for the masculine subject and second, as an invitation for women to ‘claim the discursive site of the absolute for themselves and for their gender’ (2002, pp. 181–2). The reading of Irigaray offered here, as well as in Mulder’s article, emphasizes the central importance of language and discourse in refiguring the divine, as well as the need for imaginative aesthetic and narrative depictions in realizing an alternative divinity. I am suggesting, through my analysis of Irigaray, that reclaiming the absolute necessitates creative and imaginative gestures, revisionist strokes that not only critique existing narratives, but that offer renewed conceptualizations of the divine and its relationship to the feminine subject. Furthermore, I would stress that the language that cultivates becoming must be incarnate—not an abstract, disembodied discourse, but words that spring from the life of the body and encode the realm of the senses. This incarnational relationship between word and body is central to both Irigaray’s religious thought and the overarching project of this book, as it confronts the traditional subjection of female corporeality to the masculine authority of the Word.

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Irigaray’s insistence on the need for women to formulate a theology of incarnation is a response to the underlying hierarchical oppositions coded within Western, specifically Christian, religious discourse. As has been explained, Irigaray’s philosophical project interrogates the dualistic logic of ‘the Greeks,’ which undergirds Western thought. This logic, exemplified perhaps most clearly by Aristotle’s law of non-contradiction, is fundamentally dichotomous and oppositional. Irigaray highlights dualistic thinking as a key feature of ‘a culture in the masculine’ and, adopting a psychoanalytic lens, she roots the ‘logic of pairs of opposites’ in the failure of masculine subjectivity to fully differentiate from its maternal origins: ‘it is through a division into body and mind, nature and culture, sensible and intelligible that masculine subjectivity has tried to emerge from an undifferentiated link with the first other’ (2010, p. 264). These oppositional ‘couplings’ that undergird Western discourse serve as ‘substitutes’ for sexuate difference, which remains unthought (Irigaray 2010, p. 264). Dualist logic pervades Christian thought as well, which features several central binaries at its root. The realm of the divine, for example, has traditionally been viewed within Christianity as radically separate from the realm of the human; this separation, moreover, is hierarchical, with the human being the lower realm. Similarly, the spirit and the flesh are presented as mutually exclusive, and the spirit is higher and closer to divinity, while the flesh is lower, fallen and mired in the inferior world of the human. Despite the central Christian doctrine of the incarnation, which confounds the Aristotelian logic of either/or, the schism of the Word and the body persists, mirroring the divine/human split. Each of these religious dichotomies, moreover, is gendered through its connection to the oppositional categories of man/woman. Man, superior and closer to God, is associated with spirit and divinity, while woman is affiliated with the flesh, the terrestrial and the profane. Penelope Deutscher, in her study of Irigaray’s later works, corroborates this assessment of Christian tradition, asserting that, within Christian thought, ‘the projection of a divine transcendent realm serves to legitimate’ the hierarchical ranking of man over woman, as well as the transcendent and celestial over the ‘the material/sensory realm’ (2002, p. 93). In this oppositional model, ‘the woman represents the flesh that tempts man away from righteousness’ (2002, p. 93).14 Although this dichotomous logic can be traced to secular Greek roots, Christianity’s adoption of the dualist paradigm can be seen as contributing to the pervasiveness of dualism in Western thought and culture. Christian tradition, some argue, helps to anchor the so-called logic of the Greeks within Western

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discourse. In their work Christian Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender (1996), Elizabeth Stuart and Adrian Thatcher argue that Western society’s devaluing of the body, specifically the female body, is largely an inheritance of Christianity: Much of this discomfort [with the body] has undoubtedly come from our Christian culture. Despite the central proclamations that God is the creator of matter, that the divine moves through human history, and, most importantly of all, that God has become a body, much of Christianity ended up deeply suspicious of the body. . . . The culture of patriarchy into which both Judaism and Christianity were born affirmed the normativity and superiority of men. Women and their bodies were regarded as dangerous sources of uncleanness. (1996, p. ix)

Irigaray’s analysis and critique of Western religion likewise interrogates the pervasive devaluing of the body and its opposition to the divine. As she writes, ‘we have made our way from an origin sinking into an abyss: in a night without words . . . logos without flesh, abstract discourses, a divine wanting in soul’ (2012, p. 107). In Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, Irigaray reads the story of Christ’s incarnation and crucifixion as a myth that has been interpreted as violently subjecting the body to the Word. In Irigaray’s account of the traditional reading, the Virgin Mary signifies the female body subjected to the masculine word; Mary mediates the incarnation of the masculine Word made man, but her incarnation of her own word(s) remains unrealized. Christ, in turn, signifies the masculine Word severed from the realm of the flesh. Irigaray argues that ‘Christian institutions and dogmas’ have erased the humanity and sexuate corporeality of Christ, as his body must ultimately be sacrificed to achieve God’s will: ‘Who interpreted him in this way? Who abominated the body so much . . .? Why could his presence in the flesh not be perceived as divine?’ (1991b, p. 177). Similarly, in her essay ‘Equal to Whom’, Irigaray links the erasure of Christ’s sexed body in traditional interpretations of the incarnation to patriarchal hierarchies and the oppression of women: The denegation of Christ’s incarnation as a sexual being and the use to which that denial is put in the service of sexual hierarchization and exploitation seem to have blocked an understanding of that sexual nature and confined it to the province of the patricians and Pharisees. (1991a, p. 74)

Grace Jantzen rightly observes that Irigaray’s interpretation of Christ does not deny that ‘the maleness of Christ’ has been used to ‘bolster the masculinist symbolic, serving to guarantee the superiority of men’ (1999, p. 16). Irigaray’s

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analysis exposes the debasement of the body, as well as something deeper: maleness is not representative of all humanity, so Christ’s is necessarily a ‘partial incarnation’ (1999, p. 17). Irigaray expresses the inadequacy of the traditional, masculine model of incarnation in ‘Equal to Whom?’, asserting that the divine word made male flesh does not offer women ‘certain needed representations of themselves, of their genealogy, and of their relation to the universe or to others’ (1991a, p. 80). Irigaray advocates reinterpreting the notion of incarnation in light of sexuate difference and calls for ‘the incarnation of all bodies (men’s and women’s) as potentially divine’ (1991a, pp. 68–9). As in  all of Irigaray’s work, sexuate difference is crucial here; there is no un-sexed human flesh, so the divine must be incarnated in women as well as in men; as she writes in Marine Lover, ‘only through difference can the incarnation unfold’ (1991b, p. 188). The dualisms of phallocentrism, which privilege what is male, divine, rational, immaterial and transcendent, are confounded by Irigaray’s notion of incarnation. Her work offers the concept of incarnation as a tool to think beyond dichotomies, to reach beyond the dualist paradigm. Rather than ‘a redemptory submission of the flesh to the Word’, as traditionally conceived, Irigaray’s incarnation manifests ‘a different relationship between flesh and word’, a bond ‘in which human and divine are wedded’ (1991b, p. 169). This incarnation is situated in a ‘world of becoming’ (Irigaray 1991b, p. 169) and sexuate difference: . . . Irigaray’s notion of incarnation proposes a double incarnation of two divines in accordance with the sexed body which is either male or female. It is through this notion of incarnation as sexed that Irigaray aims to bring about a recognition of women, entailing respect for their sexed bodies (as well as those of men). She envisages that the social outcome of the symbol of the incarnated Christ would be to encourage respect for the incarnation of all bodies as potentially divine. (Martin 2000, p. 181)

In other words, an incarnational way of thinking, as conceived by Irigaray, redeems women from being relegated to mere matter by uniting divinity and the creative power of the word with the female body.

Literature as incarnated writing Irigaray, while asserting the need for both men and women to foster their religious and spiritual development as distinct subjects, is careful to make clear that neither sex can accomplish this for the other. Indeed, Irigaray’s work seems

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to suggest that the onus of cultivating sexuate difference lies primarily, at this juncture, with women, because before a culture of two subjects can emerge, women must first become subjects in their own right. Women need to incarnate a feminine subjectivity, which is why I focus specifically on women’s writing as a means of realizing incarnation, and, to understand why the writing of women has transformative potential, it is necessary to explore the central role of language in religious discourse. The Word or logos has a prominent place in Western religious (specifically Christian) tradition. On the one hand, there is the Word qua God: Jesus Christ as the Word made Flesh. This ‘word’ presents a model of incarnation that is masculine, one in which woman plays the role of a mediator. A transcendent masculine deity becomes man through woman. She incarnates the masculine divine, but her own incarnation remains unrealized. The ‘word’ also signifies the creative power of God, who speaks the world into existence and then gives Adam, the first man, the power to name creation. It is this word that becomes flesh in Christ. Western religion is also dependent on ‘the Word’ in a different sense, that of the Word as authoritative scripture. In most of the more recent Protestant interpretations of Christianity, the Word of God is conflated with the Bible, which serves as the primary source of divine revelation.15 This dependence on a closed canon of authoritative scripture, one written by men, contributes to the stagnation of a religious discourse that does not facilitate the becoming of women. In each of these senses, the Word (as God, as God’s creative power, as God’s revealed Truth), remains fundamentally masculine and removed from women’s embodied existence. Rethinking religion involves, as Irigaray describes, undoing the subjection of the (female) body to the (divine) word, and it is my contention that women’s literary writing is one means of facilitating the divine incarnation of women as advocated by Irigaray’s philosophy (2004e, p. 150). ‘If the word is a vehicle of the divine,’ Irigaray writes, ‘we have to take care that it will be deifying for us, that it incarnates us, as women, deifies us, as women’ (2004e, p. 156). Part of this means not relying solely on the traditional Word as revealed by God through men; instead women should choose their own words, words that reconceptualize the feminine and the divine, words that reclaim the female body as the ‘object of a female subjectivity experiencing and identifying itself ’ (Irigaray 1992, p. 59). This endeavour cannot be envisioned through an abstract, moralistic discourse, but rather ‘requires the mediation of art’ (Irigaray 2012, p. 22). In fact, as Irigaray argues in her latest work In the Beginning, She Was, in order to accomplish this ‘undertaking’ of sexuate incarnation, we must no longer view religion, philosophy and art as separate

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entities, but as interrelated creative gestures that can usher in a ‘new epoch of our human evolution’ (2012, p. 22). Poetic writing particularly lends itself to this process of incarnation. In the preface to her book of poems Everyday Prayers (2004), Irigaray highlights how the ‘real foundations’ of culture are ‘poetic’, and that literature and art ‘open new horizons’ at an historical and personal level (2004a, p. 29).16 She also locates the particular ‘advantage’ of poetic or literary writing in its ability to act as a ‘medium’ of the senses, to express ‘form’ and ‘matter’ simultaneously (2004a, pp. 29–30). Thus, I would argue, poetic writing is incarnated writing, writing that expresses the life of body and mind, flesh and spirit together – writing that welcomes, and even intentionally creates, ambiguity and mystery. In poetic writing, truth remains fluid and unconfined, and in this medium, women can seek out ‘a personal absolute that accepts being questioned, modified and fecundated by the development of the other towards their absolute’ (2004b, p. 173). As Irigaray describes, literary writing has the ability to ‘keep the telling open-ended, to leave it to its own multiple germination and to the multiple ways in which it can be heard’ (2004a, p. 30). Poetic language, unlike abstract discourse, has the ability to express ‘the plurality of the living’, an ability that connects this mode of writing to the religious realm: ‘In such a language, meaning always remain[s] multiple but rooted in a simple, wise and secretly religious ground’ (2012, p. 24). Literature’s capacity to express plurality and paradox aligns with what literary critic Alicia Ostriker calls a ‘hermeneutics of indeterminacy’ – the tendency for women’s revisionist writing to cultivate a multiplicity of truths and meanings within a text.17 This notion of indeterminacy corresponds to Irigaray’s work on a feminine divine as contingent and always linked to ongoing change and becoming; she does not advocate that women assert an immutable, transcendent absolute as men have done. Rather, the divine absolute of women is itself indeterminate, which lends itself to literary representation. As Irigaray writes: The poem celebrates this singular event, using words not to name once and for all but to unite the varied dimensions of what occurs, sometimes in a better way than any other artistic medium. . . . Far from immobilising anything, such a saying tries to return each living being to its becoming, with a respect for its blossoming. (2004a, p. 34)

Irigaray advocates cultivating a ‘living and present discourse’ of the religious, and offers poetic or literary writing as a primary means of doing so, asserting that ‘poetic language is more appropriate to this work than speculative discourse’,

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where women must resort to adopting ‘the other’s language, using his grammatical and lexical norms’ (2004a, p. 47). Irigaray’s emphasis on the transformative potential of poetic language brings to light the key ways her feminist project differs from Anglo-American gynocritical approaches.18 Anglo-American feminism is, generally speaking, driven by a struggle for equality with men; Anglo-American critics, then, tend highlight authority, authorship and canonization in their readings of women’s literature.19 The gynocritical approach to women’s writing seeks to locate a female literary tradition alongside the male literary canon, and stresses realism, reading women’s writing as a more or less straightforward articulation of female experience. In contrast, as critic Susan Sellers indicates, ‘language is at the heart of the French feminist debate’, and ‘the Anglo-American emphasis on women articulating our experience and overcoming our conditioning to become men’s equals is thus the wrong insistence’ (1991, pp. xiv–xv). Sellers notes how Irigaray’s work asserts the importance of both language and experience, but presents the relationship between the two in a more complex and nuanced way, one that simultaneously recognizes the liberatory potential and constraints of language: To these French feminists, it is only by focusing on the processes by which language creates our meaning – as well as on what it omits – that women can begin to unravel the patriarchal structure that encloses us and, by disobeying its laws, begin to change the way we are perceived and hence end the stranglehold of the patriarchal system itself. (1991, p. xvi)

Although she rejects the naïveté of the Anglo-American approach to language, Irigaray does not assert the futility or the inevitable silencing of women in phallocentric discourse. Neither does she advocate taking a purely critical and deconstructive stance. Rather than merely assaulting male-centred religious discourse, or creating a separate and oppositional discourse, Irigaray advocates that women maintain an ongoing dialogue with tradition while simultaneously exceeding and subverting it. This would accomplish the dual task of conservation and creation, as described in ‘Fulfilling Our Humanity’ – to keep alive what remains life-giving and to discard what inhibits women from becoming divine (2004c, p. 187). Advocating the need for both critical and creative gestures, Irigaray writes that, due to the ‘closure of the logos’, ‘the house of language has become a kind of tomb to which it is necessary to give back a semblance of life’ (2012, p. 5). Irigaray is careful to stress that rethinking religion does not mean utterly discarding current religious discourse. Rather, it means finding the path between blind submission to religious tradition and ‘thoughtlessly critiquing,

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destroying or forgetting that which exists’ (2004c, p. 187). Theologian Heather Walton, whose work will be discussed throughout this chapter, asserts that Irigaray’s work on the religious ‘teaches us to become deconstructive writers/ readers of our own tradition’, and although I agree with this assessment, I would add that Irigaray is also urging women to be constructive as well as deconstructive (2007c, p. 126). She advocates a return to religious tradition, in order to sift through what is oppressive and what remains life-giving. The goal is to both conserve what remains fruitful – and only what is fruitful – in existing discourse and to create new ways of facilitating becoming. In Everyday Prayers, Irigaray offers literary writing as a means of disrupting the determining forces of Western discourse, affirming that she ‘who writes wipes away a subjectivity educated in the Western manner’ (2004a, p. 30). She ‘takes root in, or renews links with, less logically formal levels of the wording’, and her writing ‘no longer aspires to take but to give, to transmit, to restore’ (2004a, p. 30). Stressing the importance of linguistic creative efforts, Irigaray asserts that new ‘words and gestures need to be invented’, ones that express a concept of the divine that enables sexuate becoming (2012, p. 65). Morny Joy, who is somewhat critical of Irigaray’s religious perspective, nonetheless credits Irigaray with several ‘invaluable innovations in feminist thought’, and notes that Irigaray’s ‘call for imaginative explorations – with their mythological and poetic invocations – is extraordinarily seductive’ (2006, p. 158).20 This emphasis on the need for imaginative poetic representations and stories that convey a refigured sense of the divine show how Irigaray’s work reveals the religious as a fundamentally human endeavour; the divine does not sit in opposition to humanity, but is cultivated in the realm of the human, through human words and concepts, through the relations between sexed human beings. As such, she asserts that women must be actively involved in cultural production, which includes the realms of literature and religion, in order to ‘share in the definition and exercise of truth’ with men (1993c, p. 56). As Heather Walton explains, ‘a masculine symbolic predicated upon the phallus . . . can be remade when the feminine breaks silence and claims its own language, cultural incarnation and divine image’ (2007c, p. 7). I agree with Walton’s reading; Irigaray calls women forth to be ‘messengers’ of a new age, an age of spiritual becoming for both sexes, and my work suggests that the revisionist fiction of contemporary women writers is one means of refiguring the religious (2004e, p. 164). The writers analysed in subsequent chapters of this book do not attempt to articulate a realist vision of female experience; they instead interrogate the

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values and hierarchies of phallocentrism, and their works seek to subvert the underlying binary logic that upholds Western religious discourse. Their fiction does not resolve the paradox of being both limited and liberated by language, but rather highlights this ambiguity, expressing a hermeneutics of indeterminacy. Following Irigaray, it is my contention that women writers, by embracing their own creative power and seeking out their own words, can open religious and cultural discourse to make room for mystery and feminine subjectivity, thereby reconciling body and word. Heather Walton’s recent work stands alone as an attempt to theorize the intersection of literature and theology from a feminist perspective, and her writing is helpful in further exploring the relationship between women’s writing and religious revision. Since the 1970s, feminist theologians have turned to women’s literature as a valuable resource, a turn which will be discussed in the following chapter. However, rather than shifting theological discussion into the realm of literature, Walton argues that these theologians have tended to ‘turn women’s literature into alternative sacred texts or better theology’, and thus ‘the “literary” nature’ of these texts is ‘sacrificed in this process’ (2007c, p. 142). Yet, as both Walton and I would argue, it is because these texts are literary that they have subversive powers. A central contention throughout this book is that literature is the ideal space for the re-imagining of the religious to occur, precisely because it is a realm that cultivates imagination, mystery and incarnation. One of the most valuable contributions of Walton’s analysis is that it shows how the categories of literature and theology parallel many of the central binary oppositions that Irigaray’s theories seek to overturn. According to Walton: . . . literature and theology are thus commonly located on opposite sides of a binary schema through which meaning is generated in Western culture. Theology is placed on the side of spirit, reason, light, truth, order, God. Literature is associated with the body, desire, darkness, mystery, humanity. Theology is the place where God and ‘man’ meet. Literature, like Lilith excluded from the garden, endlessly seduces and gives birth. (2007b, p. 35)

Both Irigaray’s and Walton’s work reveal that this binary schema is gendered and hierarchical. The body, desire and mystery are associated with the feminine, which is subordinate to the immaterial and masculine realm of reason, truth and God. Literature is likewise ‘constructed as female’, while theology is, as Walton describes above, ‘the place where God and “man” meet’ (2007b, pp. 35, 38). Theology, not literature, is considered to be where authoritative and systemized explanations of God and Truth are found. Theology has always been assumed

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as the discipline which points away from feminine, embodied and desiring existence towards the transcendent, immaterial and masculine reality of God. When this assumption – that the divine is found by escaping sexuate, sensual human experience – is called into question, as it is here, literature, as a realm of imagination that welcomes sensuality and mystery, seems the ideal place to explore what Irigaray calls the religious dimension. Throughout much of her writings, including her most recent book In the Beginning, She Was, Irigaray contends that Western logic privileges what is solid, cohesive, fixed and absolute, over what is fluid: The binary oppositions that found Western logic result, to a great extent, from a will to master the fluid – what is elusive, not reducible to a name, to an object, to any totalization, but can ensure the cohesion of a whole. . . . The fluid is of a more tactile than visual, or even auditory, nature, even if it intervenes in the exercise of all our senses. . . . For want of considering the decisive role that fluid plays in a thinking of the living, the fluid has been left in the darkness of Western culture. (2012, p. 104)

I would like to draw Irigaray’s notion of fluidity into this discussion about literature and theology. As a mode of writing that invites openness and multiplicity, that seeks to engage with and evoke the realm of the senses, that exceeds the closed boundaries of abstract theological and philosophical discourses, I would argue that literature could be considered fluid. In ‘the darkness of Western culture’, where religion is still seen as a stable realm of codified absolutes, the fluid nature of literature is seen as oppositional to the religious, or at least less capable of revealing religious ‘truths’ than the more abstract mode of theology. This derogation of literature is symptomatic of the larger, overarching privileging of solids over fluids, and the masculine over the feminine, as Irigaray describes. I would argue, however, that an incarnational, Irigarayan view of the religious is best explored in the fluid realm of literature. As a space that welcomes ambiguity and heterodoxy, literature is an ideal place to engage with religious discourse, where women can make their own words flesh. Unlike theology, literature evokes ‘what is contrary, particular and resists abstraction or incorporation into systematic thought’; through ‘parable, metaphor and allegory [literature] confounds interpretation’ and ‘is profligate in the production of new meanings’ (Walton 2007b, p. 35). Literature is a space generated by creative power and imagination, a space where ideas come alive through narrative, where voice, thought and experience become textually incarnate. This perspective does not

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uphold the traditional subordination of literature to theology, but rather affirms literature as a viable space where fundamental questions about the nature of reality can be explored. In her analysis of the relationship between theology and literature, Walton maintains that: . . . we have lost the sense that literature occupies a special place within culture. This is the space of the not true, the not complete, the not normal. Literature is where language does not behave in a regular manner and where communication is both intensified and broken. Because of these characteristics literature has come to signify more than a defined body of texts. It is an oppositional term regarded as a precious resource in a culture which is powerfully regulated. (2007c, p. 122)

Literature, because of its place in the binary schema of Western discourse, has distinctively revolutionary potential. And it is not only the writer who participates in this subversion, but the reader as well. Just as ‘writing itself takes on the role of destabilizing a world of established meanings’, so reading ‘literature has similar subversive potential as the reader brings her own contribution to this imaginative work’ (2007b, p. 2). In Irigaray’s most recent work on the religious, she affirms women as being in a uniquely subversive position, as the ones who can begin the work of constructing a feminine subjectivity and usher in a new era (2004b, p. 168). This is accomplished in part by disrupting, or exceeding, the hierarchical oppositions that subordinate what is associated with the feminine. Similarly, as I argue in this book, literature, like the feminine, is a fluid realm of excess, ambiguity and heterogeneity, a realm that threatens a codified and ‘powerfully regulated’ discourse, and is therefore better able to destabilize it.

Notes 1 For examples of critics who downplay or ignore Irigaray’s interest in the divine, see: Margaret Whitford, Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine (1991); Carolyn Burke, Naomi Schor and Margaret Whitford, Engaging with Irigaray (1994); Tina Chanter, Ethics of Eros: Irigaray’s Rewriting of the Philosophers (1995). See also Rosi Braidotti’s foreword to Adriana Cavarero’s In Spite of Plato: A Feminist Rewriting of Ancient Philosophy (1995). Braidotti commends Caverero’s resolute secularism and distance from Irigaray’s ‘glorification’ of a feminine divine (1995, pp. xvi–xvii). For more on the general trend of overlooking these aspects of Irigaray’s work, see Ellen T. Armour, Deconstruction, Feminist Theology and the Problem of Difference

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2

3

4 5 6

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Irigaray, Incarnation and Contemporary Woman’s Fiction (1999), p. 131, and Grace Jantzen, Becoming Divine: Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Religion (1999), p. 7. Sources from feminist theologians and religious scholars on Irigaray and divinity include: Grace Jantzen, Becoming Divine (1999); Morny Joy, Divine Love: Luce Irigaray, Women, Gender and Religion (2006); Ellen T. Armour, ‘Divining Differences: Irigaray and Religion’ (2003); Judith L. Poxon, ‘Corporeality and Divinity: Irigaray and the Problem of the Ideal’, (2003); Serene Jones, ‘This God Which is Not One: Irigaray and Barth on the Divine’, (1993); Heather Walton, Imagining Theology: Women, Writing and God (2007) and Literature, Theology, Feminism (2007); Damien Casey, ‘Luce Irigaray and the Advent of the Divine’, (1999); Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, ‘Struggle is a Name for Hope: A Critical Feminist Interpretation for Liberation’, (1997); Amy Hollywood, ‘Deconstructing Belief: Irigaray and the Philosophy of Religion’, (1998); Carolyn Sharp, ‘Divine Daughters of Divine Mothers: Luce Irigaray’s Search for Women’s Own Divinity’, (2002); Graham Ward, ‘Divinity and Sexuality: Luce Irigaray and Christology’, (1996). Notable exceptions to this general trend are: Elizabeth Grosz, ‘Irigaray and the Divine’, in Transfigurations: Theology and the French Feminists (1993); Penelope Deutscher, A Politics of Impossible Difference (2002), and ‘“The Only Diabolical Thing About Women . . .”: Luce Irigaray on Divinity’, (1994); and Alison Martin, Luce Irigaray and the Question of the Divine (2000), and ‘Luce Irigaray and the Adoption of Christianity’ (1998). Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza is one prominent feminist theologian who takes issue with Irigaray’s religious perspective, asserting that her notion of the divine ‘feeds into the consumerist self-help mentality and new age spirituality of individualistic fulfillment and potential for growth that is presently in vogue’. See Schüssler Fiorenza, 1997, p. 243. For more on the secular/religious binary in this context, see Jantzen, 1999, pp. 8, 69–76. Quoted in Deutscher, 2002, p. 92. My explanation of Irigaray’s philosophy is necessarily abbreviated in this book; for book-length considerations of her religious thought in relation to her entire oeuvre, see Alison Martin, Luce Irigaray and the Question of the Divine (2000) and Morny Joy, Divine Love: Luce Irigaray, Women, Gender and Religion (2006). Jantzen’s Becoming Divine (1999), though not exclusively on Irigaray, nonetheless provides a detailed account of her work on religion. As Martin writes, many have read Irigaray’s work as ‘divided and divisive’, characterized by ‘an abrupt break’ in the early 1980s (2000, pp. 33, 38). Irigaray, in contrast, sees her work as a ‘cohesive whole’ with ‘one stage emerging from and leading onto another’, and I am inclined to agree with Martin that Irigaray’s description is a ‘more useful and convincing way of understanding her thought’

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(2000, pp. 33, 39). Martin also makes the interesting point that ‘the justification for claiming a break in Irigaray’s work must derive from a refusal to reverse a chronological order of reading and view the earlier work in light of the latter’ (2000, p. 40). 8 For more on Lacan, see Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection (2005). See also Rosalind Minsky, Psychoanalysis and Gender: An Introductory Reader (1996), and Elizabeth Grosz, Jacque Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (1990). Jantzen’s Becoming Divine (1999) also provides substantive analysis of Irigaray’s interaction with Lacan. 9 See Jacques Derrida, ‘Geschlecht: Sexual Difference, Ontological Difference’ (1983). See also Sellers’ explanation of Derrida and his influence on French feminist thought in Language and Sexual Difference (1991). 10 Irigaray’s notion of universal, fundamental sexuate difference is perhaps the most contentious part of her philosophy and has garnered charges of essentialism ever since her work first attracted the attention of feminist critics. As Ellen Armour notes in her article ‘Questioning “Woman” in Feminist/Womanist Theology’, ‘the bulk of the secondary literature on Irigaray’ interprets her work as essentialist (1999, p. 164). One particularly notable reading of Irigaray as an essentialist can be found in Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (1988). Other critics have tried to rescue Irigaray’s work from these charges: see, for example, Naomi Schor, ‘The Essentialism Which is Not One: Coming to Grips with Irigaray’ (1994). Elisabeth Grosz’s ‘Sexual Difference and the Problem of Essentialism’ (2004), from this same collection, is also helpful in clarifying the terms of the essentialism debate. Alison Martin argues that Irigaray’s notion of sexuate difference is better labelled ‘universalist’ than ‘essentialist’, in that Irigaray asserts sexuate difference as the fundamental, universal difference, but does not ascribe to an immutable, fixed essence of woman (2000, pp. 18–33). Alison Stone, in Luce Irigaray and the Philosophy of Sexual Difference, clarifies how Irigaray’s concept of sexuate difference cannot be reduced to biological difference, but is rather perceived as ontological (2006, p. 95). Like Schor and Martin, I find most accounts of Irigaray’s essentialism unnecessarily reductive and simplistic, wherein the term ‘essentialism’ in painted in broad, vague strokes. In my own reading of Irigaray, I am inclined to agree with Martin’s interpretation. Irigaray certainly privileges sexuate difference over other forms of difference, and in fact views the reconceptualization of sexuate difference as the key to rethinking all difference(s). In addition, her psychoanalytic perspective does place emphasis on the body and sexuality; Irigaray views different relational identities between women and men stemming, in part, from their difference from the mother, as well as women’s abilities to engender and make love from within their bodies, rather than from without, as men do (see the preface to Key Writings). At the same time, Irigaray’s psychoanalytic view also embraces the notion of identity and subjectivity as

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11 12

13

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Irigaray, Incarnation and Contemporary Woman’s Fiction always in process, contingent upon and continually formed by external forces. In this way, Irigaray’s notion of sexuate difference reflects a combination of forces: biological, psychoanalytic and sociocultural. In sum, I do not find ‘essentialist’ to be an entirely accurate or helpful label for Irigaray’s work, because (1) Irigaray sees feminine subjectivity as largely unthought, not as a fixed, immutable essence and (2) she sees feminine subjectivity as something that is always being elaborated, renegotiated, always becoming. I do, however, certainly acknowledge her emphasis on sexuate difference as universal and even, arguably, ontological (see Stone). As Penelope Deutscher observes, ‘A substantial reshaping of sexuate identity structures would require a reshaping of social conceptions of divinity’ (2002, p. 92). As Jantzen asserts, even secularism ascribes to a logocentric model, as the concept of God remains central and unchanged, although his existence is denied. In other words, despite the fact that theists and atheists wrangle over God’s existence, they tacitly agree on what the word ‘God’ signifies. Grosz’s reading of Irigaray corroborates this: ‘I do not believe that Irigaray is advocating a return to the model of piety and devotion offered by the well-worn feminine emblem, Saint Teresa. This would simply reinsert women back into the confines of men’s modes of self-worship guaranteed by a God built in their image. Nor is she concerned with resurrecting or creating female goddesses from a mythic prehistory. . . . Irigaray is explicit in her rejecting of these patriarchal traditions and representations of God and the divine’ (1993, p. 202). See also Rosemary Radford Ruether, ‘Woman, Body and Nature’ (1983), and Alison Jasper, ‘Flesh Insights on the Prologue of John’s Gospel’ (1998). Jasper’s analysis shows how the concept of ‘flesh’ is ‘associated with the symbols of woman and the feminine which, within the phallogocentric vision, constitute the definition of what is to be valued positively – that is to say that whatever is male or masculine-identified is defined by its not being, or its being superior to, whatever is female or feminine-identified’ (1998, p. 186). The Bible also, of course, occupies a dual cultural space as authoritative scripture and a foundational work of literature in the Western tradition. Although it maintains a monolithic presence in Western culture, its role is heterogeneous: for some, the Bible is the Word of God; for others it is merely a collection of poetic writings; for many it is both. The role of the Bible in women’s revisionist writing will be discussed more extensively in Chapter 2. Like Irigaray, I am using ‘poetic’ not in the sense of a literary genre, but in the sense of language that is chosen for both meaning and aesthetic qualities. Poetic writing, then, can be found in prose as well as poetry. As will be explored below, feminist literary critic Alicia Ostriker locates what she calls a ‘hermeneutics of indeterminacy’ in women’s revisionist writing. This term also appears in the work of feminist theologian Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, who

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discusses this hermeneutics in the context of feminist readings of the Bible. See Sharing Her Word: Feminist Biblical Interpretation in Context (1998). 18 Gynocriticism is a term coined by Elaine Showalter in her essay ‘Toward a Feminist Poetics’ (1979). 19 The vast majority of critical works on feminist revisionist writing take this approach, as will be discussed in Chapter 2. 20 Joy primarily takes issue with Irigaray’s central emphasis on refiguring the relation between man and woman, which she reads as a heteronormative ‘repressive tendency’ in Irigaray’s thought. I would argue that this is an overly simplistic reading of Irigaray’s notion of sexuate difference, particularly as Irigaray is explicitly critical of how the expansive possible fecundity between the sexes has been reduced to heterosexual coupling.

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2

Where Literature, Religion and Feminism Meet: Critical Perspectives

This chapter overviews existing studies of religious revision in contemporary women’s writing and serves to highlight current blind spots in the intersection of literary, religious and feminist studies. As I argued in the previous chapter, literary writing is uniquely positioned to critique current religious discourse and present alternative imaginative models of the sacred. However, this subversive and creative potential remains underexplored in part because of secular predispositions within feminist literary criticism, and also because feminist theologians, who take the religious dimension of these texts more seriously, nonetheless tend to overlook their literary dimension. By surveying the current state of this murky interdisciplinary realm, I hope to show how my work ventures into new territory, providing an alternative reading of the revisionist impulse within contemporary women’s fiction, one that cuts through conceptual and disciplinary lines between religion, literature and feminism.

Women’s revisionist writing Much of the existing work on religion and contemporary women’s literary writing, including the aforementioned work of Heather Walton, has been produced by feminist theologians.1 Carol P. Christ is perhaps the most prominent theologian, and the first feminist critic, to explore religious themes in fiction by women. In  1976, Christ published a methodological reflection on feminist studies in religion and literature, in order to ‘clarify and chart the way for other feminist scholars’ to engage in the intersection of women’s writing and religion. In this article, Christ outlines four ‘methodological decisions’ that guide her work:

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Irigaray, Incarnation and Contemporary Woman’s Fiction 1) Like feminist critics of literature, I assume a relation between literature and life . . . . 2) Like religion and literature critics, I assume and interpret the religious dimension of modern literature – thus entering a territory largely unrecognized and uncharted by feminist, or other, literary critics. 3) Unlike most religion and literature critics, I . . . use a representational theory of literature together with the story and religion theory. 4) Unlike androcentric critics, I use a sex-differentiated model of humanity in discussing modern literature. (1976a, p. 319)

As quoted, Christ draws on a representational theory of literature that views a work of literature as a reflection and representation ‘of the known world of experience’, which ‘moves from there into the “hypothetical world”’ as described by Giles Gunn. According to Christ, Gunn writes of literature as articulating a ‘hypothetical world’ that ‘mediates a form of otherness, a sense of things not quite our own’, and Christ builds on this model to affirm a connection between this literary world and the world of experience (1976a, p. 322). She combines this view of literature with Stephen Crites’ theory of religion as ‘the fundamental story which creates a sense of self and world for a group’ (1976a, p. 322). These fundamental stories, Christ argues, have articulated the place and identity of women in a ‘man’s world’ and the re-writing of these stories has ‘the power to create a new self for women in the world’ (1976a, pp. 322–3). For Christ, then, the religious dimension of women’s experiences as projected into literature has the potential to revise the fundamental stories that dictate the parameters of (male) selfhood in culture. This perspective shares some similarities with Irigaray’s view of religion as a force that orients subjectivity and binds together the self and community, as well as the assertion that in order for feminine selfhood to be thought and articulated, the religious itself must be rethought. Though Christ is a theologian, her work recognizes and emphasizes the elemental importance of story and myth in religious discourse, and seeks to mine these literary works for religious ideas that are rooted in personal (specifically female) experience, as well as to bring to light religious themes that are overlooked or mislabelled by feminist literary critics with no background in the study of religion. Christ describes attending the 1975 Doris Lessing Seminar of the Modern Language Association as being ‘painful for one trained in religious studies to listen to literary critics use the imprecise terms “Jungian,” “unconscious,” “irrational,” and “unrealistic” to describe the spiritual dimension of [Lessing’s] novels’ (1976a, p. 319, n. 7). Christ is not the only feminist theologian to claim that religious

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elements in women’s novels are overlooked by literary critics; nearly every study cited in this chapter says as much. While I agree that there is a gap in feminist literary scholarship when it comes to religion, to insinuate, as Christ does, that literary works cannot lend themselves to both religious and psychoanalytic readings (and dismissing psychoanalytic terminology as ‘imprecise’) reveals how much Christ is hemmed in by her discipline. Clearly, the disciplinary lines between religious and literary studies complicate in-depth studies of religion in women’s literature, which is perhaps why this area remains largely unexplored, particularly from the perspective of literary studies.2 Despite her reservations regarding literary criticism, Christ’s work, Diving Deep and Surfacing: Women Writers on Spiritual Quest (1980), which has been reprinted multiple times since its initial publication, remains a pioneering work in its engagement with religious themes in women’s literature. In this book, Christ elaborates and builds on her earlier methodological reflections, presenting several key ideas that have guided my own research, as well as providing points of departure. First, as noted earlier, Christ places great emphasis on the importance of story in conceptualizing and articulating a feminine self: Women’s stories have not been told. And without stories there is no articulation of experience. Without stories a woman is lost when she comes to make the important decisions of her life. . . . Without stories she cannot understand herself. (1980, p. 1)

Christ asserts a ‘dialectic between stories and experience’, wherein experience creates stories, and stories give shape to experience (1980, pp. 4–5). In a patriarchal society, however, the power of ‘shaping experience through storytelling has not been in women’s hands’; women, rather than recognizing, naming and celebrating their experiences of the world, have been forced to suppress and deny these experiences (1980, p. 5). Though she affirms this dialectic between stories and experience, Christ is careful to state that stories are not merely about recounting experience; building on the work of Michael Novak and Stephen Crites, Christ asserts that stories have a sacred dimension in that they ‘create a sense of self and world’ (1980, p. 3). Christ’s readings of works by authors such as Doris Lessing, Kate Chopin, Margaret Atwood, Adrienne Rich and Ntozake Shange reveal what Christ calls a ‘spiritual quest’ (1980, p. 7). In order to clarify what she means by ‘spiritual quest’, Christ distinguishes this from a ‘social quest’, which ‘concerns women’s struggle to gain respect, equality and freedom from society’ (1980, p. 8). The spiritual

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quest, conversely, ‘concerns a woman’s awakening to the depths of her soul and her position in the universe’, and it is this spiritual quest that is recounted in women’s writing (1980, p. 8). Christ presents these two quests as distinct but connected; the spiritual ‘provides orientation’ for the social quest and ‘grounds it in something larger than individual and even collective achievements’ (1980, p. 11). Christ almost seems to conceive of the spiritual quest as that which buoys a woman as she embarks on the often despairing social quest for equality. Though I certainly see the spiritual quest for self and meaning – or in Irigarayan terms, for a subjectivity in the feminine – as connected to the social quest for equality, I find Christ’s neat distinction between the two problematic. For Irigaray, any pursuit of equality prior to the articulation of a feminine subjectivity merely affirms a masculine model of power and relations. If Christ’s spiritual quest can be read as a variant of Irigaray’s ‘quest’ for a feminine subjectivity, then it cannot be separated from the quest for social equality. To articulate a subjectivity in the feminine through stories that name women’s experiences and revise the fundamental (and masculine) narratives of religion is simultaneously a social and a spiritual gesture. Christ states that, ‘women’s quest seeks a wholeness that unites the dualisms of spirit and body, rational and irrational, nature and freedom, spiritual and social, life and death, which have plagued Western consciousness’ (1980, p. 8). This notion of the religious that ‘unites’ the violent oppositions of Western discourse is also repeatedly voiced by Irigaray and is traced throughout the works of women writers analysed in this book, as they attempt to reconcile divisive concepts of body and Word, flesh and spirit and the divine and human. Where I diverge from Christ, and adopt an Irigarayan model, is in the reading of the reconceptualization of religious concepts as a fundamental part of women’s quest for voice and power in society. The spiritual quest is not, as Christ seems to suggest, an individual pursuit that supports women’s collective quest for equality in society; rather, the ‘quest’ for a feminine subjectivity simultaneously involves the spiritual and the social, the collective and the particular. In addition, Christ’s work unquestioningly affirms the subordination of literature to theology. She seems to seek out an alternative theological discourse in women’s literature, one based in ‘women’s experience’, but a discourse that is nonetheless logocentric and offers a static concept of truth and knowledge. This tendency is most clearly seen in Christ’s criticism of Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening. According to Christ, this novel’s ‘weakness’ lies in the fact that

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Chopin could not ‘imagine any alternative for Edna other than spiritual or physical death’ (1980, p. 39). She continues: The ending of The Awakening may have been realistic for its times, but readers who recognize the importance of stories in shaping lives have a right to ask more of a novelist than realism. This is not to say that all books must have happy endings. But it is to acknowledge that . . . women ask literature to provide images of a woman who is “a person” they seek to become. . . . One task facing women writers is to write stories in which the spiritual and social quest can be combined in the life of a living, realistic woman. And also, one task facing readers is not to be fully satisfied with women’s literature until it does. (1980, pp. 39–40)

This directive to women writers clearly demonstrates that Christ is not interested in the subversive potential of literature as a realm of paradox and mystery; Christ wants women’s literature to be theology, to provide positive, empowering and unequivocal ideals that can guide the ‘spiritual quests’ of women readers. Her demand for literature to be straightforwardly applicable to the lives of ‘realistic’ women seems to overlook the fact that a novel is a work of fiction. Rather than exploring what a literary text can do, and be, that distinguishes it from a theological text, Christ wants to corral women writers – and women readers – into a tight space far removed from fantasy, myth, ambiguity, aesthetics and experimental or post-modern literature. Furthermore, Christ’s emphasis on a monolithic concept of ‘women’s experience’ assumes that what is experienced, what is ‘real’, translates easily and directly into language. However, Irigaray’s work reveals that what it means to be a woman does not merely need to be articulated; it needs to be conceptualized, created anew, with the full force of the imagination and through the slippery, imprecise medium of language. The first monograph by a literary critic to engage with feminist revisionary fiction is Barbara Hill Rigney’s Lilith’s Daughters: Women and Religion in Contemporary Fiction (1982). This short study, which is less than one hundred pages, seeks to ‘explore some of the ways in which contemporary women are perceiving, revising and exorcizing the archetypal images and ideas of traditional religions’ (Rigney 1982, p. 3). Choosing to work ‘through literary analysis rather than theological treatise’, Rigney argues that the force of the women’s movement and the rise of existential atheism have offered women renewed freedom to challenge and revise traditional religious myths and to ‘exercise the mythopoetic function in creating new symbols for spiritual transcendence’ (1982, pp. 3–4). Rigney asserts that there is an ‘urgency in

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contemporary fiction . . . especially in that written by women to fill spiritual and psychological gaps’ that remain in the wake of widespread secularization (1982, p. 3). Rigney’s book focuses on the revision of several key archetypes in Christianity: Jesus, Mary, Eve and the Garden of Eden. Rigney recognizes, as do I, that though many contemporary women writers share a common interest in religion, their interactions with traditional religion vary widely. Some attempt the work of rendering ‘the old religious and traditional systems more palatable’, while others use religious symbolism ironically, as ‘points of rejection’ (1982, p. 6). According to Rigney, then, these women’s works ‘are both exorcism and celebration’ and reveal an attempt to ‘reclaim women’s right to name, if not God, then more importantly, the world and the self ’ (1982, p. 10). Rigney raises some of the central questions and assertions of this project, namely the presence of active religious concerns in many contemporary novels by women, and hints at the connection between religious revision and the construction of female subjectivity. She does not, however, develop these ideas in great depth or with any theoretical aid. Her work opens the door for feminist literary critics to begin engaging with the religious interests of women writers, interests that seem more apparent to feminist theologians, yet the vast territory beyond that door remains largely unmapped. My work continues the work initially and briefly picked up by Rigney, but, through the lens of Irigaray’s theories, attempts to unpack the relationship between literary religious revision and the articulation of a divinity and subjectivity in the feminine. Aside from Barbara Rigney’s work, which analyses the revision of key Christian archetypes, most of the attention given by literary critics to religious themes in women’s writing has focused on the literary revision of the Bible.3 Alicia Ostriker is arguably the most prominent feminist literary critic working in this area; her 1993 book Feminist Revision and the Bible includes two lectures that address the impact and implications of feminist biblical revision, particularly in the context of women’s poetry, as well as several of her own poems that re-imagine the mythic character Lilith of Jewish lore. As both a critic and a poet, Ostriker states that she is ‘involved in a collective enterprise which . . . has as its ultimate goal the radical transformation of what used to be called “the Judeo-Christian tradition”’ (1993, p. 30). She is, to use Irigaray’s words, rethinking religion on two fronts: the academic and the literary. In an earlier article, ‘The Thieves of Language: Women Poets and Revisionist Mythmaking’, Ostriker first formulates the notion of feminist ‘revisionist mythmaking’, or the literary revision of myths by women writers. There, Ostriker

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describes women’s revisions of classical myths ‘as an invasion of the sanctuaries of existing language’, specifically ‘the treasuries where our meanings for “male” and “female” are themselves preserved’ (1982, p. 70). To engage and refigure classical mythology, then, is to interrogate fundamental concepts of what it means to be a woman. In Feminist Revision and the Bible, Ostriker turns to revisionist mythmaking in the context of the Bible, which she calls ‘the ur-text of patriarchy, that particular set of canonized tales from which our theory and practice of canonicity derives’ (1993, p. 27). Ostriker sees her turn towards biblical revision as a continuation of her work on the revision of classical mythology, albeit a riskier and more threatening endeavour, because the myths of Judeo-Christianity ‘so much more intimately govern our society and our behaviour’ (1993, p. 21). Like the revision of classical myth, biblical revisionist mythmaking interrogates ideas of gender, as well as notions of authority and silence, for a closed canon of scripture excludes certain voices – namely those of women. For Ostriker, the Bible exemplifies ‘the process whereby patriarchy constitutes itself: a process in which female power is erased, but always imperfectly erased so that the erasure has to be obsessively repeated’ (1993, p. 56). Revisionist mythmaking, she argues, interrupts this process of erasure through asserting a female voice and female authority. In Feminist Revision and the Bible, analysing the poetry of Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti and H. D., Ostriker locates a ‘triple model of (re)interpretative modes’ utilized by these revisionist poets: a hermeneutics of suspicion, a hermeneutics of desire and a hermeneutics of indeterminacy (1993, p. 57). The hermeneutics of suspicion refers to the way the female (re)writer ‘mistrusts, resists, and attacks the embodiment of patriarchal power’ within a text (1993, p. 66). This concept of a hermeneutic of suspicion is featured in the work of Amy Benson Brown, as will be discussed later, and also appears regularly in works of feminist theology and biblical scholarship.4 What I find particularly insightful in Ostriker’s analysis is her notion of a hermeneutic of desire, which describes how the revisionist project is driven by a desire to draw meaning from a text; to use Ostriker’s words, ‘one finds in the text what one desires to find, one bends it to one’s wish’ (1993, p. 66). For the feminist re-writer, this often means ‘eroticizing [the text] by inserting herself into the story’ and ‘identifying its spiritualities with her own sensualities’ (1993, p. 66). This recalls Irigaray’s demand that women revise religious discourse by discovering their own word(s) and ‘interweaving it with their bodies, make it a living and spiritual flesh’ (2004e, p. 151). The third hermeneutic that Ostriker describes, which

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noticeably distinguishes her work from Carol Christ, is one of indeterminacy, which refers to how revisionist writers resist making monolithic truth claims. Instead, the (re)writer cultivates ‘a plurality of contingent truths’, a multiplicity of meanings within a text (1993, p. 67). Though Ostriker uses these three hermeneutics in the context of specifically biblical revision, I find them equally applicable when looking at contemporary women novelists’ revision of Western religious discourse more broadly. The women writers explored in this book employ each of these hermeneutics, at times simultaneously; they revise in order to attack and reject, and they revise in order to enter the text and transform it, to break open the old words and fill them with new meaning. Ostriker argues that, ‘far from destroying sacred Scripture’, biblical revisionist mythmaking is ‘designed to revitalize [Scripture] and make it sacred indeed to that half of the human population which has been degraded by it’ (1993, p. 31). Like my own work, Ostriker’s criticism reads literary religious revision as both a deconstructive and constructive project. These writers are not attempting to merely critique and reject religious myth; they are attempting, as Irigaray puts it, to conserve and create, to rewrite the old stories so that they become newly meaningful. Following Ostriker, two of the more recent works on women writers and religion also focus on feminist biblical revision. Jeannette King, in her book Women and the Word: Contemporary Women Novelists and the Bible (2000), asks and attempts to answer the question: why are contemporary women writers so preoccupied with the Bible? King, like Ostriker, posits a repressed maternal dimension that must be uncovered by rewriting patriarchal texts. At times in King’s work, this dimension reflects the lost Mother Goddess of pre-history, at other times, the imaginary mother of psychoanalytic theory – a conflation that becomes confusing. King is also primarily concerned with biblical revision as a means of reshaping women’s place in society and asserting an authoritative female voice: 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. (2000, p. 5)

In creating a context for her work, King draws from certain historians and archaeologists to construct a matriarchal goddess-centred past that was

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supplanted by patriarchy’s invention of monotheistic religion.5 As Colleen Cullinan writes in her review of King’s book, this matriarchal view of pre-history is problematic and contested by most mainstream archaeologists, historians and religious scholars, who ‘do not support the idea that early human history was dominated by a peaceful, woman-centred, goddess-worshipping social system that was eventually destroyed by patriarchy’ (2002, p. 653). King’s work pays the much-needed attention to the prevalence of religious themes in contemporary women’s fiction, and I have found it helpful to read King’s criticism of Michèle Roberts’ and Alice Walker’s fiction. I would argue, however, that King’s work is constrained by a theoretical framework that sets up an idealized matriarchal space in opposition to a religion polluted by patriarchy, which suggests that women must reject the latter to enter the former. This reveals the benefits of an Irigarayan, post-structuralist approach in engaging with women’s revisionist fiction. I argue that women’s revisionary writing does not merely critique religion, but also draws meaning from religion, albeit in complex and subtle ways.6 My work is attentive to the ways in which these writers both deconstruct and affirm traditional religious discourse, and in this way, Irigaray provides a helpful theoretical framework as she asserts the need to rethink religion and the ways in which it has negated the development of a feminine subjectivity. She does not, however, advocate complete and total rejection of existing religious traditions. Instead, she argues that we must ‘become adult and responsible towards our tradition and that which it has produced in ourselves: that is, neither to remain children nor to become iconoclasts’ (2004d, p. 145). The construction of a new religious dimension, she asserts, ‘cannot take place to the detriment of what precedes us . . . . The present and the future must not scorn what, in the past, was worthwhile’ (2004c, p. 187). In addition, Irigaray does not hearken back to an idealized matriarchy, or advocate a return to the goddess. She warns against a mere regression to ‘siren goddesses, who fight against men gods’, instead asserting that we must work towards the divine incarnation of each woman (1993b, p. 160). Another literary critic who has produced work on feminist biblical revision is Amy Benson Brown. Like Ostriker, Brown’s Rewriting the Word: American Women Writers and the Bible (1999) analyses feminist biblical revision by American women writers, focusing largely on a broad range of women poets, such as Anne Sexton, Emily Dickinson and H. D. She does, however, include one chapter on novelists Toni Morrison and Gloria Naylor. Brown situates these women writers in relation to various religious movements, such as Puritanism. Brown’s work focuses specifically on revisions of biblical texts, but much of her articulation of

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feminist revision as a literary discourse is also applicable to the broader project of religious revision, not merely biblical revision. Brown explains her focus on biblical revision by highlighting how the Bible is ‘woven into the literary canon’ and ‘often symbolizes the ultimate form of patriarchal textual authority’ (1999, p. 14). While I agree with this, it is important not to overlook the writers who, though not directly engaging biblical texts, nonetheless revise how these texts have been interpreted into theology and upheld through Christian tradition. It is necessary, then, to also look at feminist revisionist hagiography, such as Michèle Roberts’ Impossible Saints, and literary works that illuminate how the (mis) interpretation of biblical texts can be used as a cultural force against women, as in Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. The writers included in this book do not engage and revise only the Bible, but religious ideology itself. Brown’s study includes chapters on specific themes, such as family relations, war and audience, and the thread that connects these themes is ‘the woman writer’s quest to construct a different basis for her authority’ (1999, p. 163). Brown is less interested in biblical revisionist writing as a tool for transforming religious and cultural discourses than as a means for women writers to assert their own literary authority. Brown does not read the concept of ‘The Word’ in its plurality, as described in Chapter 1 (Word as God, Word as creative power, Word as authoritative text); for Brown the Word functions merely as a ‘site/cite for the woman question, for articulating female identity and authority’ (1999, p. 165). As such, Brown argues that ‘the central subject of feminist biblical revision is not the Bible’ but ‘the problems and possibilities of women’s authority in a culture shaped by the masculine hegemony that the Bible has come to represent’ (1999, p. 163). The Bible is significant not because it is the fundamental text of Western religious discourse, but because it represents male authority. Ultimately, both Brown and King read women writers’ revisions not as attempts to rethink religion and thereby female subjectivity, but as attempts to assert female voice and authority. Though I find it helpful that these projects primarily engage the literary rather than the theological, I would suggest that King and Brown’s efforts to evade the fundamentally religious nature of these revisions obscures their revolutionary potential. These women writers are certainly asserting female literary authority, but more than that, they are redefining divinity, redefining truth and redefining the boundaries of the religious itself. Heather Ingman, in her book Women’s Spirituality in the Twentieth Century: An Exploration Through Fiction (2004), addresses the fact that much of the attention given to spiritual themes in women’s fiction is from feminist theologians, not

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literary critics. In this work, Ingman sets out to reverse the typical tactic of using women’s literature as a resource for theology by instead using feminist theology to interpret literary texts.7 Despite this ostensible reversal, Ingman does not successfully undo the hierarchical opposition between theology and literature, as her literary analyses closely follow and do not deviate from the trajectory of feminist theological discourse. What is helpful about Ingman’s book, which is the most recent study on religion and women’s literature, is her elucidation of a significant blind spot in feminist literary criticism when it comes to religious themes in women’s writing: Women’s spirituality is a topic which has largely been neglected by feminist literary critics among whom the assumption often is that to be a feminist is to define oneself in opposition to any kind of religious orthodoxy. This secularism is evidenced, for instance, in the downplaying of spiritual themes in theorists such as Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva whose work is otherwise widely used by feminist literary critics. (2004, p. 9)

Ingman goes on to assert that feminist scholarship largely fails to recognize ‘the significance of religion in many women’s lives . . . and the role of religion in shaping Western thought’ (2004, p. 9). This is an idea repeatedly expressed by Irigaray; to negate the existence of God, for example, is not sufficient, because this does nothing to uproot the concept of a patriarchal God from our minds and imaginations. In Je, tu, nous: Towards a Culture of Difference (1993), which is quoted by Ingman, Irigaray writes that: Many of us are under the impression that all we have to do is not enter a church, refuse to practice the sacraments, and never read the sacred texts in order to be free from the influence of religion on our lives. . . . Thus we are all imbued with the many Greek, Latin, Oriental, Jewish, and Christian traditions, at least, particularly through the art, philosophy, and myths we live by, exchange, and perpetuate, often without our realizing. The passage from one era to the next cannot be made simply by negating what already exists. (1993c, pp. 10–11)

This passage evokes Irigaray’s call to ‘rethink’ religion, not merely reject religion. Ingman argues that feminist literary criticism must not overlook that our sociopolitical reality is, in many ways, ‘underpinned by traditional myths and images of women’ that are inherited from religious discourse (2004, p. 11). Ingman writes that without an ‘analysis of the sacred, our picture of twentiethcentury women’s fiction is incomplete’, and her study aims to ‘sketch out some preliminary areas of investigation’ (2004, p. 11).

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While I largely agree with Ingman’s analysis regarding this blind spot in feminist literary scholarship, I would argue that perhaps the tide is beginning to shift and more feminist literary critics are awakening to religious themes in women’s writing. As this survey of existing works on religion and women’s fiction has shown, there are only a handful written (or edited) by literary critics, and half of those were written in roughly the past decade. Furthermore, two additional works on spirituality and women’s writing were published in 2000 and 2004 respectively: Australian critic Elaine Lindsay’s Rewriting God: Spirituality in Contemporary Australian Women’s Fiction, which seeks to articulate a distinctly feminine and Australian spirituality through reading the work of several novelists, and Kristina Groover’s edited collection Things of the Spirit: Women Writers Constructing Spirituality, which traces the tradition of women’s spiritual writing from early modern mysticism to postmodernity.8 Nonetheless, since 2004, the only significant works on women’s literary writing and religion have been written by a theologian, Heather Walton, who also highlights the lack of theory-intensive, in-depth readings of religious themes in women’s writing.

Breaking new ground According to Heather Walton, the inter-disciplinary study of theology and literature remains grossly male-centred and male-dominated. As she writes, although women have made ‘vivid and insightful’ contributions to ‘conversations between literature and theology, their work has not entered the mainstream of debate and has been largely ignored by male scholars’ (2007b, p. xii). To support this conclusion, Walton uses her six years as editor of Literature and Theology, a leading journal in its field, as a case study, and finds that the majority of articles published were written by men, and the 38 per cent that were authored by women were largely commissioned by the editorial board (2007b, p. 26). She writes: Disappointing as the picture of men actively seeking publication and women being enticed into this field might be, it is not particularly shocking. What I did find a much more startling result of my research was the fact that many articles contained no reference to women at all. In over 90 per cent of men’s articles the only reference to women was as incidental characters in books, plays or films or in minor academic supporting roles (such as footnote references). None of these articles focused on the work of significant women authors or theorists. Of the

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remaining articles written by men in which women did appear, the majority were on the canonized female authors (such as Austen, Eliot and Woolf). There was one article critiquing male power and two contained significant references to the work of both genders. (2007b, p. 26)

As for articles written by women, nearly half were concerned solely with the works of male writers and theorists; overall, ‘nearly three-quarters of published articles were exclusively concerned with the work of men’ (2007b, p. 27). In addition, ‘women contributed fewer theory-based articles, accounting for only 15 per cent of their contributions’ (2007b, p. 28). Walton observes that feminist critics seem reluctant to use theory, particularly post-structuralist theory, in their exploration of literature and theology, instead relying on gynocritical approaches (2007b, p. 31). To summarize Walton’s findings: feminist critics often overlook or disregard religious themes in a text, and those few who acknowledge them are suspicious of rigorously using theory to analyse these themes – and their work is then largely overlooked in this male-dominated field. My own research confirms the relative dearth of work done by feminist critics on religion in women’s literature, particularly work that is both theory-intensive and that which provides close textual analyses. Literary critics who engage with women’s revisionist writing seem particularly averse to post-structuralist theoretical approaches. Ostriker, for example, is markedly critical of feminist theory that, like Irigaray’s work, affirms but seeks to reconceptualize sexuate difference: The reification of female difference which occurs in both French and AngloAmerican feminist theory . . . merely mirrors the ancient male tactic of turning women into the Other, the Object. I am amazed that women still fall for this tactic. It perpetuates the slave mentality, the status of woman as victim. (1993, p. 106)

This general avoidance of post-structuralist theory is unfortunate, as much of the recent groundbreaking work on religion and the feminine is being produced by French feminists such as Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Catherine Clément and Hélène Cixous.9 Furthermore, several of the studies cited above, namely those written by Carol Christ, Barbara Rigney and Heather Ingman, seem introductory in their depth and scope; Ingman, whose work is the most recent, specifically states her aim to ‘sketch out some preliminary areas of investigation’ in the field of women’s literary religious revision (2004, p. 11). Yet these calls to confront the secular bias in feminist criticism and open new areas of investigation

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remain largely unanswered. I have encountered two varieties of studies on religion and women’s literature: first, those conducted by theologians, who tend to overlook the literary nature of the writing, instead using literature as a mere resource for theological exploration; secondly, there are several studies by literary critics that tend to avoid a rigorous theoretical framework and are either introductory in nature (Ingman and Rigney) or limit their investigations to biblical revision primarily as a means of asserting female authority (Ostriker, King and Brown). Walton’s work, of course, differs from these two general approaches in its attempt to theorize the relationship between literature and theology from a feminist perspective; her work has been important for contextualizing my own project, but does not include close readings of women’s literary texts. Like in nearly all the works featured in this chapter, my work corroborates the observation that there are a number of contemporary women writers with active interests in religious concerns, concerns which are often overlooked by critics, and a common thread among their works is an attempt to more closely reconcile oppositional concepts of divinity and humanity, flesh and spirit and body and Word – particularly as they affect the lives and experiences of women. The selection of novels in this book shows, sometimes in violent detail, that the way God and the religious have been conceptualized justifies bodily violence and enforces negative views of female sexuality. These writers portray how the traditional binary schema of Western religious discourse can paralyse the development of a subjectivity in the feminine, and they also point to the transformative potential of a refigured divinity found within, rather than in opposition to, the erotic and embodied female subject. Employing an Irigarayan lens, my book contributes to this field of feminist revisionist writing by providing work that is theory-intensive and performs close textual readings. However, rather than looking at women’s religious revision primarily as a means of asserting female authority and questioning the patriarchal truths upheld in religious mythology and theology, I argue that these women writers, in addition to critiquing patriarchal religion, articulate ways of being and knowing that resist the binary logic of appropriation that dominates Western religious discourse. And in this way, they begin the work of constructing a subjectivity in the feminine. This project is situated in the context of Irigaray’s notions of sexuate difference, though it deals specifically with Irigaray’s assertion that women must become divine and develop their own subjectivity, independent of that of men, which then lays the groundwork for a culture

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of two subjects.10 Where other studies have downplayed the overtly religious elements of texts, reading religion primarily as a cultural tool that enforces patriarchal norms, values and constructions of gender, my study expands these interests to include an attention to how women writers not only critique but also draw meaning from religion and voice a desire to express experiences of the divine that exceed the boundaries of religious orthodoxy. It is not enough to analyse how women writers use literature to critique religion; following Irigaray, I would argue that it is equally, if not more important, to see how women writers imagine and articulate refigured religious concepts, values and experiences. My work, rather than affirming the traditional privileged place of theology over literature, offers the realm of literature as a viable space to engage in religious discourse. In an Irigarayan model, which I argue is reflected in these works, conceptualizing the religious must always be an incarnated gesture, which is best reflected in a literary work, rather than an abstract theological treatise. In closing, I would like to address a fundamental question regarding the merits of feminist revision. In Imagining Theology (2007), Walton cites a criticism commonly waged against the feminist revisionist project, which is that ‘the effect of offering multiple re-readings of a sacred tradition is to strengthen that tradition rather than to challenge it’ (2007b, p. 86). This relates to an earlier discussion regarding women’s ability to speak in the phallogocentric order: is the logos all-too-pervasive and all-powerful to be destabilized? Does feminist rewriting undermine or rather affirm the tradition with which it engages? Susan Sellers addresses these questions in her work on women’s rewritings of fairy tale and myth. Drawing largely on the post-structuralist theories of Derrida, Cixous and Kristeva, Sellers affirms the revolutionary potential of re-writing.11 According to Sellers, Derrida offers writing as a means of revealing what escapes and exceeds the logos, as writing ‘retains the knowledge of its own creation’, and ‘a text can always be made to reveal its history, including its manipulations and suppressions’ (2001, p. 25). By creating texts that feature a multiplicity of styles and possible readings, Derrida argues, writers can ‘keep the opportunities for meanings open’, and thereby undermine the power of the logos (Sellers 2001, p. 25). Cixous similarly theorizes a mode of ‘feminine’ writing that ‘actively inscribe[s] the heterogeneous promptings that are thrown up by the process of writing, an endeavour that will bring into being an alternative mode of perception, relation and expression to that decreed by the prevailing schema’ (Sellers 2001, p. 26).12 Ultimately, Sellers concludes:

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Irigaray, Incarnation and Contemporary Woman’s Fiction Feminist rewriting can thus be thought of in two categories: as an act of demolition, exposing and detonating the stories that have hampered women, and as a task of construction—of bringing into being enabling alternatives. (2001, p. 30.)

Sellers’ analysis evokes two central contentions of this book: (1) feminist revision is a dual movement of ‘demolition’ and ‘construction’ and (2) the literary refiguring of religious myths and traditions is a viable means of subverting the violent, hierarchical logic of the phallocentric order.

Notes 1 Numerous feminist theologians have turned to literature by women as illustrative or representative of certain theological ideas, such as the sacredness of the body and the immanence of the divine. For examples of feminist theologians interacting with literature in this way, see Rita Brock, Journeys by Heart: A Christology of Erotic Power (1988); Daphne Hampson, Theology and Feminism (1990); Kathleen Sands, Escape from Paradise: Evil and Tragedy in Feminist Theology (1994); Kelly Brown Douglas, ‘Twenty Years a Womanist: An Affirming Challenge’ (2006). See also Carol P. Christ, Divine Deep and Surfacing: Women Writers on Spiritual Quest (1980) and Heather Walton, Literature, Theology and Feminism (2007) and Imagining Theology (2007), which are discussed in this chapter. 2 Heather Walton’s work, as mentioned earlier, stands alone in its attempt to theorize the murky interdisciplinary region where theology/religious studies and literature intersect. 3 I would argue that literary approaches to revisionist writing overwhelmingly focus on biblical revision because, as mentioned earlier, the Bible maintains a dual space as both a sacred text and a foundational work of Western literature. For example, Jeannette King, whose study on feminist biblical revision is discussed below, explicitly states her reluctance to engage the Bible as a religious text: ‘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’ (2000, p. 3). Engaging with feminist biblical revision, then, allows literary critics to stay more or less safely within the boundaries of literary studies, rather than venturing into the murky, interdisciplinary realm of literature and theology, which, as is explored in detail under the subheading ‘Breaking new ground’ in this chapter, remains under-theorized and dominated by male critics. 4 For more on the hermeneutics of suspicion, see in particular the following works of Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza: In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (1983); But She Said: Feminist Practices of

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Biblical Interpretation (1992); Sharing Her Word: Feminist Biblical Interpretation in Context (1998). King cites the works of historians Gerda Lerner and Karen Armstrong, as well as archaeologist Riane Eisler. King also relies heavily on Kristeva’s essay ‘On Chinese Women’, though she remains at the same time oddly wary of French feminists’ theoretical approaches, particularly any that privilege sexuate difference or overly emphasize the female body. See particularly Chapters 4 and 6 of this book, which respectively explore the fiction of Roberts and Kennedy. As stated earlier, most feminist theologians who interact with women’s literature, such as Christ, read fictional works as rather straightforwardly transmitting theological ideas and use them as a resource to illustrate their theological observations and assertions. Ingman asserts that she is, in contrast, employing ‘the insights of feminist theologians to illuminate my reading of some twentiethcentury women’s fiction’ (2004, p. 1). Instead of using literature to illuminate theology, then, she is using theology to illuminate literature. See Elaine Lindsay, Rewriting God: Spirituality in Contemporary Australian Women’s Fiction (2000), and Kristina Groover, Things of the Spirit: Women Writers Constructing Spirituality (2004). One additional and fairly recent publication that deals, albeit not directly, with feminist revisionist literature is Dawn Llewellyn and Deborah F. Sawyer, Reading Spiritualities: Constructing and Representing the Sacred (2008). This collection of essays reconsiders the notion of the ‘sacred text’ and includes an interview with novelist Michèle Roberts and an essay by Heather Walton that discusses material found in her monograph Literature, Theology, Feminism (2007). See Morny Joy, Kathleen O’Grady and Judith Poxon, French Feminists on Religion: A Reader (2002) and Religion in French Feminist Thought: Critical Perspectives (2003) for a good introduction to and overview of religion in French feminist thought beyond Irigaray. See also Catherine Clément and Julia Kristeva, The Feminine and the Sacred (2001). Cf. Grosz, ‘Irigaray and the Divine’: ‘Irigaray seeks to create at least some of the conditions necessary for women to develop an autonomous self-conception. Among the necessary conditions is a concept of God and the divine, that is, a [sic] historically possible future. For it is only if women have their own concepts of the divine that a divine fecundity between the sexes may occur’ (1993, p. 212.) Adrienne Rich, in her influential essay ‘When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision’, likewise affirms the revolutionary potential of revisionist writing, going as far as to call it ‘an act of survival’: ‘Re-vision – the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction – is for us more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we can

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understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for woman, is more than a search for identity: it is part of her refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society’ (1972, p. 18). 12 Sellers also references Julia Kristeva’s concept of ‘dissident writing’, which imparts the ability to ‘reject what unfairly binds us while reaffirming our allegiance to what is productive’ (2001, p. 30). In addition, Sellers cites the earlier work of Irigaray to suggest that, in Irigaray’s view, women are only able to ‘mimic’ discourse and cannot resist reproducing its ‘repressive hierarchy’ (2001, p. 27). I do not disagree with her reading, taken largely from This Sex Which is Not One, but I would argue that Irigaray’s second and third phases present a more optimistic account of women’s ability to wield language and deconstruct phallocentric discourse, hence her calls for women to reconceptualize divinity and sexuate difference.

3

‘In Love with Either/Or’: Religion and Oppositional Logic in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale

Margaret Atwood is a prolific and award-winning Canadian writer whose work regularly exposes the destructive and oppressive forces at work in society, particularly as they affect women. Though Atwood refers to herself as a ‘strict agnostic’, she maintains an interest in religion, which is evident in her fictional work (Moyers 2006).1 Atwood’s second novel, Surfacing (1973), has received a fair amount of critical attention for its religious themes and is examined in both Carol Christ’s Diving Deep and Surfacing and Barbara Rigney’s work Lilith’s Daughters.2 Atwood’s Cat’s Eye (1989), with its mystical Marian imagery, has also been explored by critics of religion and literature.3 In her most recent novel, The Year of the Flood (2009), Atwood again turns her attention to the religious dimension of human culture through her depiction of an eco-religion called God’s Gardeners and a heroine who is a new convert. Atwood’s recurrent interest in religion stems from her belief ‘that religion – that is, the stories we tell ourselves about where we come from and where we are going – is hard-wired into us: that there is no escape, so long as we remain human beings’ (Wagner 2009). Moreover, Atwood recognizes the pervasiveness of religion in Western culture; she describes herself as not being ‘raised with religion’, but rather ‘within one. Because I grew up within a culture where it was all over the place – including in the school system in Canada’ (Wagner 2009). The Atwood novel that engages the values and assumptions of Western religion to an arguably greater depth than the rest of her work is The Handmaid’s Tale (1985).4 This novel is an incisive exposé of women’s marginalization in Western religious discourse, particularly regarding their corporeality, sexuality and autonomy. Set in the late twentieth century, The Handmaid’s Tale is a work of speculative fiction that depicts a United States splintered into warring religious

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factions; what was once New England has become the Republic of Gilead, a totalitarian theocracy. Relying on biblical precedent, Gilead enforces extreme gender roles; women are banned from reading and writing, owning property, earning money and they are allocated to different positions in society based upon social class and fertility. In response to declining birth rates, Gilead has returned to the practise of using concubines (Handmaids), servant women who give birth on behalf of their mistresses. The novel’s protagonist, Offred, is one such Handmaid and the novel is told from her perspective as she tries to cope with her newly restricted circumstances. Offred’s narrative does not unfold in a linear fashion, but weaves through past and present as she recalls her former life with her husband and daughter, the swift takeover of the Gilead regime, her indoctrination at The Rachel and Leah Centre, and her present situation as a Handmaid in the house of the Commander, an important political and military figure in Gilead. The epilogue of the novel, which takes place two hundred years in the future, long after the fall of Gilead, reveals that Offred’s tale has been pieced together by male historians from a series of unearthed tape recordings that were ostensibly made by Offred as she attempted to escape from Gilead through ‘The Underground Femaleroad’.5 The novel ends ambiguously; Offred’s fate as well as many other questions about her life, ultimately, remain unknown.6 Out of Atwood’s sizable canon, this novel has garnered the most critical attention, largely because of its multi-levelled irony and scathing political analysis.7 While critics acknowledge that Gilead is a fundamentalist totalitarian regime, many of them fail to read past the political elements to the underlying critique of Western religious discourse. Peter Stillman and S. Anne Johnson (1994, p. 70) read The Handmaid’s Tale as an ‘explicitly political novel’, while Coral Howells declares the book to be ‘entirely social and political in its agenda’ (2006, p. 163).8 These critics rightly recognize The Handmaid’s Tale as a novel of power and sexual politics, yet simultaneously overlook the fact that religion can be seen as antecedent to these power imbalances, not merely a manifestation of them. Stillman and Johnson, for example, read the religious elements of Gilead as a superficial means to a political end, rather than the driving force of Gilead’s power: ‘The founders of Gilead generated a right-wing fundamentalist reading of the Bible, grafted it onto patriarchal attitudes, and imposed it throughout society’ (1994, p. 71). In other words, they primarily read religion serving politics in Gilead, rather than politics conforming to religious precepts.

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A smaller number of critics recognize how the Republic of Gilead incorporates and synthesizes elements of several Western religious movements into one monolithic regime. Janet Lawson (1987) reads Gilead as the ‘religion-based state of our continuing American Puritan tradition’, a connection that is made within the novel itself when Offred visits a museum and refers to the Puritans as ‘ancestors’ (HT: 31). Perhaps the most overt textual allusion is ‘the strong infusion of the American New Right Ideology of the 1980s’, of which Gilead can be seen as a direct extension (Howells 1996, p. 127). Gilead, then, has tentacles throughout history, in both religious and secular societies, and can in this sense be read as a conglomeration of Western religious ideals, uniting Old Testament patriarchy with Protestant Puritanism and New Right traditional values. These so-called traditional values, i.e. enforced gender roles, male hegemony, state control over women’s bodies, biological reductivism, strict (hetero)sexual mores and the equation of natural and normal, ‘are expressed in terms of universal truths’, truths that are underpinned by the authoritative Word of God as selectively interpreted and enforced by the men in power (Staels 1995, p. 457). In this analysis of Atwood’s novel, I will argue that The Handmaid’s Tale is not merely a political critique, but a pessimistic evaluation of women’s place in Western religious thought. Using the mode of speculative fiction, Atwood creates a world where the oppositional logic of Western religious discourse is brought into sharp relief. Through her depiction of Gilead, Atwood exposes the consequences of a religious ideology built upon hierarchies that isolate femininity from divinity, the body from the Word, and deprive women of sexual and spiritual autonomy.

Opposites that tear the world apart Atwood’s depiction of the violent and divisive hierarchies within the Gilead regime corresponds in many ways to Luce Irigaray’s analysis of Western discourse. Irigaray’s oeuvre can be read as an attempt to expose and undo the oppositional logic that has ‘dominated the West since the time of the Greeks’ (1985b, p. 25). Similarly, Hélène Cixous’ interrogation of phallogocentrism observes that in the West ‘thought has always worked through opposition’, and she asserts that hierarchy and dichotomization are pervasive, colouring ‘all concepts, codes and values’ (1986, pp. 63–4). According to the analyses of both Irigaray and Cixous, patriarchal discourse is founded on binary oppositions,

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in which privileged concepts are defined against other, less valued terms. The primary of these oppositions is the unitary (masculine) self that retains coherency through its opposition to an (feminine) ‘other’, just as the ‘master’ requires a ‘slave’ in Hegel’s dialectic. As Elizabeth Grosz explains in her work on French feminist thought, this oppositional logic creates a dialectic of dominance and oppression: ‘Dichotomous thinking necessarily hierarchizes and ranks the two polarized terms so that one becomes the privileged term and the other its suppressed, subordinated, negative counterpart’ (Grosz 1994b, p. 3). It is through conceptual oppositions such as Man/Woman, Mind/Body, Culture/Nature and Reason/Passion, that ‘the patriarchal social body constructs itself hierarchically, excluding difference’ (Irigaray 1993c, p. 45). Irigaray’s work on the religious reveals that this either/or mentality of oppositional dualism manifests itself in religious discourse as well, through the fundamental binaries of Divine/Human, Word/Body and Spirit/Flesh.9 Feminine subjectivity cannot emerge in this paradigm of oppositional logic, wherein the feminine is appropriated and subjugated in order to define the masculine. And as Irigaray’s work reveals, the oppositional hierarchy of Man/Woman is fundamentally connected to the way divinity has been appropriated by men in Western culture: The positive connotation of the masculine as word gender derives from the time of the establishment of patriarchal and phallocratic power, notably by men’s appropriation of the divine. This is not a secondary matter. It is very important. Without divine power, men could not have supplanted mother-daughter relations and their attributions concerning nature and society. But man becomes God by giving himself an invisible father, a father language. Man becomes God as the Word, then as the Word made flesh. (1993c, p. 68)

The God of monotheism, Irigaray writes, ‘has been created out of man’s gender’ (1993b, p. 61), and the Father God of monotheism, the ‘Self-Same He’, serves as ‘the sole source of sameness’ that guarantees male subjectivity (1985a, p. 357). A divine conceived in the masculine perpetuates the economy of sameness and oppositional logic that enforces male subjectivity and female alterity; a transcendent, immutable, masculine God is ‘indispensable . . . in distinguishing and subordinating Same and Other’ (1985a, p. 331). As Irigaray asserts, the question of divinity is not peripheral but central to the construction of a feminine subjectivity. Irigaray conceptualizes subjectivity as an ongoing process, as continual becoming, and this process of becoming requires a ‘horizon’ that can facilitate ongoing, autonomous development.10 In current discourse, women

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have no such horizon, as the feminine is conceptualized only through its opposition to the masculine. Man has posited the masculine, immutable God of monotheism to guarantee his subjectivity, and without a notion of the divine conceived in feminine terms, woman is ‘fated to remain a slave to the logic of the essence of man’ (1993b, p. 67). Atwood’s Republic of Gilead is an eerily pitch-perfect depiction of the masculine appropriation of the divine – the ‘one reality that determines identities, rights, symbols, and discourse’ – and the subsequent debilitating effects on feminine subjectivity (1991a, p. 76). In the Gilead theocracy, monotheism enforces a monolithic system of values, a system that is closed and idealized into absolute truth. At the centre of this monolith is Man, with the power of the Word of God; on the fringes are the women, robbed of language and reduced to empty vessels. As Deborah Hooker points out, ‘the theological imaginary that Gilead imposes with a vengeance’ consists of a ‘single, unembodied, all-seeing God’ with a resolutely ‘masculine profile’ (2006, pp. 278–9). The masculinity of the monotheistic God is unquestioned and used to justify female subservience; in other words, the ‘forces arrayed to silence female dissent’ are not soldiers and guns, but religious ideals, which are imposed upon women by God-ordained male authority, and then internalized and enforced by the women themselves (Hooker 2006, p. 289). The figure of Aunt Lydia, who trains women to serve as Handmaids at The Rachel and Leah Centre, is the emblem of this internalization, functioning as a parrot for patriarchal values inside Offred’s mind throughout her narrative.11 As a sort of grotesque mother figure, Aunt Lydia soothingly assures the Handmaids that Gilead is a place of ‘freedom’ for women, and the unfamiliar restrictions will soon enough seem ‘ordinary’ (HT: 8, 24, 33). Aunt Lydia is described as ‘in love with either/or’ and her character continually vocalizes the violent oppositions inherent in Gilead’s ideology, the most fundamental, of course, being the opposition of Man/Woman (HT: 8). In Gilead, the opposition of sexuate difference is articulated through violent reductivism; individual women are stripped of their names and identities and relegated to specific functions according to biological and social roles. The rigidity of sexual difference is articulated primarily by Aunt Lydia and the Commander in the novel, who defend Gileadean practices through their definitions of male sexuality and female (a) sexuality.12 According to Lydia, men prey upon women sexually because ‘God made them that way’, while women, who in contrast have no sexual urges themselves, are responsible for curbing male sexual behaviour (HT: 45).13 The Commander echoes these sentiments, appealing

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to the ‘procreational strategy’ of divinely created ‘Nature’, which justifies and naturalizes male promiscuity (HT: 237). Gilead, he claims, has simply returned society to ‘Nature’s norm’ (HT: 220). The irony is that, for all these appeals to natural, God-ordained difference, Gilead is a society that obscures difference in favour of uniformity. This uniformity is most obviously evident in the persistence of uniforms, which point not to an economy of difference, but to sameness. In her analysis of oppositional patriarchal thought, Irigaray describes ‘its power to reduce all others to the economy of the Same’ (1985b, p. 74). This ‘teleologically constructive project . . . is always also a project of diversion, deflection, reduction of the other in the same’ (1985b, p. 74). Such reduction eradicates difference, propagating the unified standard of the masculine subject and defining women in contrast. Cixous refers to this economy as ‘The Empire of the Selfsame’, in which ‘“difference” is always perceived and carried out as an opposition’ and ‘masculinity/femininity are opposed in such a way that it is male privilege that is affirmed’ (1986, p. 80). Reflecting this ‘male privilege’, all women in Gilead wear costumes that signify their role in relation to men. The Wives wear blue, the Marthas green and the Handmaids are clad in blood-red robes with white veils. These costumes emphasize the ‘infinite interchangeability’ of women (Stein 1991, p. 271).14 Karen Stein notes this connection between the uniforms and reductive sexual difference: ‘Colour-coded in this way, the Handmaids become interchangeable, identified only by their biological function, childbearing’ (1991, p. 271). The re-naming of the Handmaids also reflects their interchangeability, as women are deprived of individual identities and forced to take on titles which name, not themselves, but their relationships to specific men. Offred’s Commander is called Fred, so Offred is Of-Fred, and if she were to be placed under another master, her name would change to reflect new ownership. When Offred’s shopping partner and confidant, Ofglen, fails to appear and another Handmaid comes in her place, Offred’s attempts to trace her friend’s whereabouts prove futile, as she is now nameless, having been replaced by the new Ofglen who acquired the name. Through the power of de-naming and re-naming, the Handmaids are given transient identities that are governed solely by the shifting currents of male power and desire. Sheila Conboy points out in her article that the men of Gilead and their power to name women recalls Adam’s privilege in the Genesis creation story, ‘while the men are only implicitly Adam figures, they explicitly employ Genesis to authorize control over female identity and to restrict the female body in its most threatening and powerful capacities: sex and

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childbirth’ (1993, p. 351). Adam’s name for Eve, ‘wo-man’ or ‘of man’, is likewise derivative, denoting man as origin and woman as different from, yet belonging to man.15 Gilead, with its mandates of men as rulers and women as helpmeets and child bearers, exemplifies the model of sexual difference established in the biblical creation myth. For the Handmaids, any potential becoming is reduced to reproduction and necessitates the obliteration of individual identity. As mentioned earlier, in her work on the development of the female subject, Irigaray maintains that the process of becoming necessitates a ‘horizon that assures us the passage between past and future’ (1993b, p. 67). Without such a horizon, women ‘become parts or multiples without a future of our own’, which ‘means simply that we are leaving it up to the other, or the Other of the other, to put us together’ (1993b, p. 61). In Gilead, women are not allowed to conceive subjectivity in their own terms; they are constructed by the ruling discourse and restricted to the male-defined horizon of procreation. Several critics note that within Offred’s narrative, envisioning survival and subjectivity necessitates imaginable futurity. Survival is not merely physical, but requires ‘seeing beyond the present moment’ (1996, p. 135). The women of Gilead ‘are allowed to see only the flat surfaces of the present’ (Staels 1995, p. 457), which ‘is the only acceptable reality’ in Gilead’ (LeBihan 1991, p. 96). The Handmaids’ veils serve as blinders, and within this uniform(ity), it is nearly impossible to get a ‘full view’ of ‘anything’ (HT: 30). Encumbered in this way, the Handmaids learn to see the surrounding world ‘in gasps’ (HT: 30), because, as Staels notes, their eyes ‘are not allowed to move beyond the prescribed edges’ (Staels 1996, p. 457). Offred recognizes her lack of future, of horizon and its detriment to her self-conception: ‘What I need is perspective. . . . Time’s a trap, I’m caught in it. I must forget about my secret name and all ways back’ (HT: 143). Without a horizon to orient her becoming as an autonomous subject, Offred is left only with the names and definitions ascribed to her by the ruling ideology; she ‘must suffer [the] adjectives’ of Gilead (HT: 114). In this state of suspended becoming, Offred begins to submit to her role as Handmaid. Staels asserts that ‘Offred is forced to lead a paralyzed existence’ in Gilead, ‘caught in the trap of the “here and now”’ (1995, p. 459). This paralysis is continually signalled by Offred herself, who describes her existence as characterized by ‘blank time’ and ‘long parentheses of nothing’; her life is now ‘a space to be filled’ (HT: 70, 69, 224). Towards the end of her narrative, Offred laments that it is not merely space and time, but her very self that is empty: ‘I am a blank, here, between parentheses’ (HT: 228). Time

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and again, Offred expresses her own paralysis, her lack of becoming, under Gilead’s enforced religious ideals. Though Offred resists internalizing the ideas and values of Gilead throughout and via her narrative, this same narrative serves to ‘chronicle’ her own ‘shifts in perspective’ under Gilead’s influence, which eventually ‘effect[s] change in her imaginative conceptualization of her self ’ (Howells 1996, p. 138). After the loss of her ally Ofglen, Offred begins, internally, to acquiesce to the God of Gilead: ‘Dear God, I think, I will do anything you like. . . . I’ll obliterate myself, if that’s what you really want . . . I resign my body freely, to the uses of others’ (HT: 286). This prayer echoes the collective prayers the Handmaids are forced to say at The Rachel and Leah Centre during their indoctrination; it is similarly a prayer of abdication, of self-sacrifice: ‘Oh God, obliterate me. Make me fruitful. Mortify my flesh, that I may be multiplied’ (HT: 194). For much of the narrative, Offred resists the ideology of Gilead; the prayers to be obliterated are initially empty words. However, by the end of the narrative, when Offred has lost hope, the words imposed by Aunt Lydia become her own, and the true power of patriarchal religious discourse reveals itself.

Bodies and word(s) The most effective control tactic of the Gilead regime is its appropriation of Logos, of the Word. Irigaray’s interrogation of Western discourse exposes the fact that the patriarchal foundations of our culture are ‘marked in the deep economy of language’ and that ‘sexual difference cannot therefore be reduced to a simple, extra-linguistic fact of nature’ (1993c, p. 20). She writes that because women are ‘excluded and denied’ in the ‘patriarchal linguistic order’, they cannot ‘be women and speak in a sensible, coherent manner’ (1993c, p. 20). The Handmaid’s Tale reflects patriarchy’s deep inscription in the economy of language through portraying how Gilead grants men complete control of culture and language while relegating women to the realm of nature and pushing them into a preliterate sphere. In Gilead, women are restricted from all forms of written language and reduced to their supposed natural function of childbearing. Reading is considered sinful for women and is punished by the severing of a hand (HT: 89). In public spaces where women are allowed to go, such as the market, words are replaced by pictorial symbols. Even women’s spoken words to each other are tightly controlled and reflect the religious ideology of Gilead. Certain words, such

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as free, are outlawed entirely (HT: 54). The Handmaids have prescribed greetings for one another – ‘Blessed be the fruit’ and ‘May the Lord open’ – that affirm their reproductive roles, and the official farewell – ‘Under His Eye’ – signals their lack of freedom and the regime’s pervasive power over their bodies (HT: 19, 45). These sanctioned exchanges underscore the subjection of the female body and its procreative value to the authority of the masculine Word. Irigaray cites this subjection as a fundamental failing of Western religious discourse, writing that ‘as a feminine body subjected to a masculine Word going from the Father to the Son through Mary, I cannot truly love myself, nor the other, nor God’ (2004e, p. 150). In Christian monotheism, the Word (Logos) has dual meanings as the authoritative word of God as well as God Himself.16 In Gilead, men are placed in a direct position to receive, embody and convey the Word, whereas women maintain a marginal position to both language and divinity. Staels observes that the leaders of Gilead ‘highly esteem the values of logocentrism’ and indeed enact a tight control of language in which ‘the potential polysemy of discourse is replaced by absolutely homogenous, univocal signs’ (1995, p. 457). This ‘univocal’ Word occupies the centre of Gileadean power, and women are strictly banished to the periphery, barred from all literacy. Mario Klarer neatly summarizes women’s positions in the regime: ‘In Gilead, being a woman means to become pre-literate and to follow the pre-scriptions of men’ (1995, p. 132). The Bible, God’s revealed Word and the basis of Gilead’s theocracy, is tightly controlled and used as an oppressive tool. Though its mandates dictate their existence, women have no direct access to the Bible; only select passages that prescribe gender roles are read to women, and always by a man.17 Before the Ceremony, during which the Commander attempts to impregnate his Handmaid in a wordless sex ritual, he reads aloud prescriptive passages from the Bible that he alone can access, because it is kept under lock and key: ‘It is an incendiary device: who knows what we’d make of it, if we ever got our hands on it? We can be read to from it, by him, but we cannot read’ (HT: 87). The Commander’s power lies in his power over language, specifically divine language. As Offred describes, he has something the women of Gilead lack; ‘he has the word’ (HT: 88). This ‘word’ that the Commander possesses is literally a control of written word, as well as an allusion to God-as-Word, reflecting that men alone have access to divinity. According to Janet Larson, ‘the Word of the Lord licenses [Gilead’s] righteous reign of terror against difference’ (1989, p. 38), and Dorota Filipczak reads The Handmaid’s Tale as pointing to ‘the Bible as the source of a most pervasive and sinister myth’ of female subordination and male privilege

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(1993, p. 181). Gilead’s monopoly on biblical interpretation serves to perpetuate this myth, and ‘the possibilities of Offred’s life in Gilead are . . . circumscribed . . . fixed by the literate effects of monotheistic ideology’ (Hooker 2006, p. 289). When the Commander wields this power and uses the Bible, he reads only selections that emphasize the logocentrism of Gilead and the restriction of women to male-defined roles. In this way, the divine Word is appropriated and used as a weapon against women, justifying and endorsing their systematic oppression. The male appropriation of language within Gilead reinforces the fundamental binaries of Western religious discourse, which ‘oppose a positive, masculine transcendence to the unfocused, irrational ontology of the mythological, nature, and women’, while simultaneously stripping women of their ability to perform their own interpretations of authoritative texts and write beyond the myths of female subordination (Hooker 2006, p. 279). Banned from literacy and categorized according to reproductive capacity, the women in Gilead are relegated to the realm of body and ruled by men, the keepers of the Word. In her analysis of Atwood’s novel, Madonne Miner goes as far as to say that within Gilead, ‘women and flesh are interchangeable’ (1991, p. 153). This reduction of ‘woman’ to ‘body’ is continually referenced by Offred, who describes herself and her fellow Handmaids as ‘two-legged wombs’ and ‘ambulatory chalices’ (HT: 136). The bodies to which women have been reduced are devoid of identity and autonomy, and this reductive redefinition of female difference in terms of corporeality ironically creates an experience of disembodiment that Offred describes throughout her narrative: I used to think of my body as an instrument, . . . an implement for the accomplishment of my will. . . . Now the flesh arranges itself differently. I’m a cloud, congealed around a central object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real that I am. (HT: 73–4)

In the above quotation, Offred describes how the Word of Gilead has fundamentally altered her relationship with her own body; what used to be an integrated part of herself, an ‘instrument’ animated by her desires and will, has been fully subjected to the authoritative religious discourse of Gilead. Irigaray writes that ‘the female body’ must not ‘remain the object of men’s discourse’, but must rather become ‘the object of a female subjectivity experiencing and identifying itself ’ (1993c, p. 59). Offred’s narrative reflects her inability to develop her own subjectivity while her body remains an ‘object of men’s discourse’, as Irigaray describes. When Gilead’s oppressive and prescriptive concept of womanhood is imposed upon Offred’s individual body, she experiences a dualistic schism as her difference is

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reduced to the pear-shaped womb and her destiny determined by the fertility cycle. Madeleine Davies notes that, throughout the novel, the female body ‘is linked with metaphors of disembodiment, a failure to be completely there’ (2006, p. 58). Offred describes her womb as ‘more real’ than she is and avoids looking at her own body, which now ‘determines [her] so completely’ (HT: 74, 63). Offred’s narrative depicts, in intricate detail, how the Word of Gilead is inflicted upon and internalized by individual bodies. For Offred, menses becomes a fearful, dreaded event that signals her failure to meet the expectations of Gilead, ‘which have become [her] own’ (HT: 73). The articulation of the female body as vacant flesh, valuable only through fertility, alters Offred’s sense of her own bodily experience: ‘I am like a room where things once happened and now nothing does’ (HT: 104). Several critics note that Offred is not merely disembodied through Gilead’s ideals; she is dismembered.18 According to Glenn Willmott, Offred’s ‘narrative shows how the body is taken apart into fragments according to fertility, sexuality, age or whatever, and controlled and monitored in each fragment; a kind of categorical dismemberment’ (1995, p. 175). Offred likens her experience of the Ceremony to ‘being on an operating table’ and embraces a disembodied ‘state of absence’ in order to cope (HT: 160–1).19 In response to this tyranny of the masculine Word over the female body, which I argue is portrayed in The Handmaid’s Tale, Irigaray asserts that women must cultivate a ‘theology of incarnation’: First of all, this means not considering myself as purely body, with only a natural capacity for engendering children. . . . Putting myself in search of my word, my words, seems to be the first fidelity to a theology of incarnation. (2004e, p. 151)

As Irigaray’s work and Atwood’s novel show, these two gestures – no longer considering oneself as purely body and discovering one’s own words – are deeply connected. Without language, Offred cannot conceive and express an alternative conception of her corporeality; without access to words, Offred cannot reclaim her body. The central thrust of Atwood’s narrative is Offred’s effort to carve out an identity for herself within the oppressive Gilead regime: ‘My self is a thing I must now compose, as one composes a speech’ (HT: 66). Yet Offred’s alienation from her body and her fragmented sense of self reveal this effort to ‘compose’ an identity as fraught with difficulty. Even as she narrates her story, Offred repeatedly expresses a deep-seated hunger for words. In her room, there is a cushion with the word FAITH carved on it that has been overlooked, and Offred is described as spending long

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stretches of time combing her eyes over the letters; this cushion is the only thing she’s been allowed to read since becoming a Handmaid (HT: 57). At one point, Offred finds a message scratched inside her cabinet, presumably left by the Handmaid who lived there before. The message reads: Nolite te bastardes carborundorum – Don’t let the bastards grind you down – and this phrase becomes a symbol of resistance for Offred: . . . it was a message, and it was in writing, forbidden by that very fact, and it hadn’t yet been discovered. Except by me, for whom it was intended. . . . It pleases me to ponder this message. It pleases me to think I’m communing with her, this unknown woman. (HT: 52)

Even though Offred does not initially know what the words mean, the fact that they were carved by another woman, a woman in her situation, and left for her to find gives her hope and fortitude. In fact, these words become a prayer for her, the only words she feels able to say to God. This message alleviates Offred’s isolation by connecting her to the presence of another woman, a woman who sat in this room and slept in her bed, a woman subjected to the same constrained fate. Yet these words are also words of rebellion, signalling the subversive potential of language and women’s ability to steal back the Word. Offred’s intense desire to read and write, to express herself through language, is fuelled by this secret message and ultimately manipulated by the Commander, who brings Offred to his office for illicit sessions of reading and playing Scrabble. The Commander’s office is described as ‘an oasis of the forbidden’, full of numerous books that are displayed openly, rather than locked away, off limits (HT: 137). Scrabble, once an innocuous board game, is now as tantalizing and illicit as a drug. For Offred, the prospect of word-making is intoxicating and described in intensely sensual, even erotic, language: ‘I hold the glossy counters with their smooth edges, finger the letters. The feeling is voluptuous. The counters are like candies, made of peppermint, . . . I would like to put them into my mouth’ (HT: 139). In addition to Scrabble, the Commander entices Offred with contraband women’s magazines, from the pre-Gilead era. He flaunts these magazines ‘like fish bait’ in front of Offred, whose overwhelming desire for them makes her ‘fingers ache’ (HT: 156). In the Commander’s office, under his voyeur’s eye, she reads ‘voraciously’: ‘If it were eating it would be the gluttony of the famished; if it were sex it would be a swift furtive stand-up in an alley somewhere’ (HT: 184). Atwood’s vivid descriptions of Offred’s word-lust, and the intense physical pleasure Offred experiences when she reads and spells, disrupts the schism between word and body. By emphasizing the sensuality of

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language, the linguistic expression of bodily desires and the pure pleasure of word-making, Atwood subverts the oppositional logic that isolates the Word from bodily experience. At the same time, however, Atwood problematizes this subversion by highlighting the omnipresence of the Commander’s gaze; Offred’s limited opportunities to read and play word games are always facilitated and monitored by her master, one of the founders and leaders of Gilead. While she is in his office, the Commander never takes his eyes from her; his scrutiny is ‘curiously sexual’, making Offred feel naked and exposed (HT: 184). In addition to reading material, he also, upon her request, supplies Offred with hand lotion – another banned substance for Handmaids, whose physical beauty is immaterial to their reproductive potential – and he watches her rub it over her hands and face. During these illicit rendezvous, there is an illusion that Offred is able to step beyond the rigid confines of the Handmaid’s existence, however fleetingly; by using lotion, making conversation, playing with words, and reading magazines, she exceeds the reductive role of a walking womb. But these ‘subversive’ activities always occur under the watchful eye of the Commander, never freely. By completely controlling the terms of both her imprisonment and her limited, illusory freedoms, the Commander demonstrates to Offred his ‘mastery’ over her world, a mastery that overpowers any fleeting subversions, including the seemingly seditious message left by Offred’s predecessor (HT: 236). The Commander regularly allows Offred to read in his office, but never to write, until she asks the meaning of Nolite te bastardes carborundorum, but is unsure how to pronounce it. The Commander gives her a pen and paper, and for the first time in the novel, Offred writes. This experience is once again described in sensual terms: ‘The pen between my fingers is sensuous, alive almost, I can feel its power, the power of the words it contains’ (HT: 186). Offred learns from the Commander that the Handmaid before her, who ultimately killed herself, had sat in this same office, dabbling in language games with the Commander. The phrase carved in the cabinet, the message that had inspired and galvanized Offred, was merely a school boy’s joke, taken from one of the Commander’s own books. Don’t let the bastards grind you down: what was once for Offred a prayer, a symbol of hope, now becomes an emblem of futility and inevitable defeat. The Handmaid’s Tale, by recounting Offred’s attempts to overcome the oppositional hierarchy of the masculine Word and the female body, is a narrative of a feminine subjectivity attempting to emerge within patriarchal religious discourse, but the portrait Atwood paints is a bleak one that leaves little room for optimism,

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instead affirming the overwhelming power of language and the damage done when women have no access to the Word.

Chaste vessels and unholy harlots In her essay, ‘Equal to Whom?’, Irigaray describes how men ‘define the systems of representation and exchange by and for themselves. And while women may possibly gain access to these systems, divine identity and divine rite are not accorded them’ (1991a, p. 78). The world Atwood constructs in her novel exemplifies this notion. In Gilead, the men in power define and control the systems of representation, particularly language and though Offred is able to gain illicit access to reading and writing material in the Commander’s office, the terms of even this limited access are completely dictated by the Commander. Estranged from ‘divine identity and divine rite’, the women of Gilead remain alienated from their own words and reduced to mere corporeality. This schism between Word and the (female) body is compellingly depicted in Atwood’s fictional account, and I would argue that Irigaray’s work on the religious reveals Atwood’s depiction to be illustrative of the status of all women in patriarchal religious discourse. In addition to the male control of the Word, The Handmaid’s Tale recounts the objectification of women in a patriarchal system of exchange, a system that relies on reductive notions of sexual difference, so women can be relegated to distinct, a/sexual roles. Irigaray describes how oppositional conceptualizations of female sexuality disrupt becoming and inhibit the ability of the feminine to exceed and confound such dichotomies: She resists the limits he intends to impose on her, including his strategy of the opposites . . . . She brings together within herself the opposites: both mother(s) of god and whore, for example. But the poles between which he tears her apart . . . interrupt her becoming. (2012, p. 67)

Reflecting this ‘strategy of the opposites’, Gilead’s monotheistic, patriarchal Word enforces an oppositional either/or conception of female sexuality by enforcing biblical female archetypes. The few, elite Wives reflect the wives of the Old Testament patriarchs. The Handmaids, whose title alludes to the Virgin Mary, are defined solely by their reproductive power. Like the Handmaids, the Marthas are asexual servants, but they have no reproductive capacity; reflecting the figure of Martha from the gospels, their role is limited to preparing food and keeping

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house. In direct contrast to these are the women who work as prostitutes at the nightclub Jezebel’s; these women, named for the biblical villainess, are reduced to sexual objects of pleasure for the powerful men of Gilead.20 Though Handmaids hold a primarily sexual function as concubines and childbearers, the women themselves are entirely desexualized. The question of female pleasure and desire is disregarded completely within Gilead. As quoted earlier, Aunt Lydia, the parrot of patriarchal discourse throughout the novel, teaches the Handmaids that, unlike men, God did not design women as sexually charged and desiring beings (HT: 45). Offred describes the sexual ceremony as utterly devoid of ‘passion or love’; the desire and arousal of the women involved is immaterial and the goal of orgasm, for women, is no longer deemed necessary (HT: 94).21 The pleasure of women is seen as irrelevant to the Handmaid’s sole purpose of childbearing, which is fanatically idealized in Gilead society. As noted earlier, the designation of Handmaid is an allusion to the Virgin Mary, a figure that embodies the Gileadean ideal of asexuality, chastity and fertility. On the surface, this asexuality is displayed as women are categorized according to reproductive potential. The sex act itself is no longer voluntary for women, but sacralized and institutionalized, occurring only under the authority of men. Through the Aunts, the Handmaids are schooled to be meek, modest and invisible, in order to become ‘worthy vessel[s]’ (HT: 28, 65). The definition of women’s worth and roles through these biblical female archetypes is underpinned by the authority of the Word; prescriptive Bible passages are read by men in power on certain, official occasions, such as the Prayvaganza: I will that women adorn themselves in modest apparel . . . with shamefacedness . . . Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. . . . And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression. Notwithstanding she shall be saved by childbearing. (HT: 221)

Though Gilead enforces the obedience and asexuality of women through biblical discourse on the surface, there exists an underbelly where women are kept as sexual objects of pleasure rather than asexual objects of reproductive function. The night club Jezebel’s finds its namesake in a notorious biblical villainess and houses the harlots of Gilead, who have all been sterilized. The juxtaposition of the Jezebels and the Handmaids demonstrates the virgin mother/whore dichotomy of female sexuality that is institutionalized in Gilead. Offred recognizes that the Handmaids are not harlots or ‘courtesans’, because they are so thoroughly desexualized, reduced to mere ‘two-legged wombs’ (HT: 136). This either/or

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articulation of female sexuality – either chaste maternal vessel or sexual object – leaves no room for the expression of an autonomous, sexually empowered woman. Coad argues that the Gileadean ideal ‘not only exposes a puritan fear of the flesh, but more specifically suggests a deep-seated masculine fear of female sexuality’ (2001, p. 64). Despite their contrasting roles, neither side of the virgin/whore spectrum presents a model of autonomous sexuality. Throughout the novel all articulations of female sexuality, sanctioned and illicit, are based on passivity. Offred’s unsanctioned sex with the Commander at Jezebel’s elicits the same disembodied submission as the Ceremony: ‘I lie there like a dead bird. . . . Fake it, I scream at myself inside my head. . . . Move your flesh around, breathe audibly’ (HT: 255). Even Offred’s affair with Nick, which seems to awaken her sexual desires, is steeped in passivity, as Miner argues in her article on romance in The Handmaid’s Tale. According to Miner’s reading, the affair between Nick and Offred is fraught with ambivalence. Though apparently a source of pleasure for Offred, she can only speak of her affair with Nick in the ‘traditional grammar’ of romance, where men play the role of rescuer and women are ‘damsels in distress’ (Miner 1991, p. 164). Offred recognizes the lie of reductive difference that subjugates women in Gilead—‘One and one and one and one doesn’t equal four. Each one remains unique [and] cannot be exchanged, one for the other’—yet she is unable to conceive of female sexuality outside passive fairy-tale romance roles (HT: 192). Miner asserts that ‘Offred can individuate neither herself nor Nick; both fall into roles assigned to them by fairy tales and romances’ (1991, p. 164). In Atwood’s novel, even seemingly positive interactions between the sexes are steeped in power inequality. It is hardly incidental that Nick remains a shadowy character of little depth; Offred’s relationship with Nick is a masquerade, an illusion, a lapse into a familiar fairy-tale plot: ‘Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion . . . We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh’ (HT: 225–6). As explored in Chapter 1, Irigaray asserts that the concept of incarnation, of ‘word made flesh’, has the potential to convey a collusion of opposites and subvert the hierarchical logic that upholds patriarchal discourse, but this potential remains unrealized, not yet interpreted: Et incarnatus est would mean the manifestation of a paradigm that henceforward is applicable everywhere. . . . No space, no moment, no actors, no author, want to represent that tragedy as such. No work apparently. There is only a play between the forces of On High and here below, of Heaven and earth, of Truth and error,

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of Good and evil, of God and idols, of divine and human nature, of Life and its mortal errancy . . . of all those pairs of opposites that continue to tear the world apart. (1991b, p. 168)

Offred’s meditation on falling in love demonstrates that women’s only experience of ‘incarnation’ in Gilead is through submissive heterosexuality. Women, alienated from the Word and reduced to maternal or sexual objects, are unable to incarnate themselves and become divine; instead, Offred seeks out incarnation through a relationship with a man. Offred is herself a falling/fallen woman; she falls for Luke and Nick, becoming ‘a woman who surrenders herself to a plot already written, a story already told’ (1991, p. 166). Through her romantic idealizations, Offred falls from autonomy into passivity. Her affair with Nick makes her want to submit to the Gilead regime, to finally acquiesce. When she begins sleeping with Nick, Offred loses interest in conspiring with Ofglen, her shopping partner and secret member of the resistance. Ofglen perceives a shift in Offred and withdraws into meaningless small talk, which makes Offred feel relieved (HT: 271). In depicting Offred’s lapse into passivity, The Handmaid’s Tale does not criticize heterosexual love or sex per se, but rather how it is, and has always been, articulated along the lines of reductive sexual difference. Irigaray’s inquisition of Western metaphysics exposes a lack of ‘fecundity’ between the sexes that stems from ‘the dissociation of body and soul, of sexuality and spirituality’ (1993a, p. 15). She asserts the need to conceive of sexual difference ‘without reducing fecundity to the reproduction of bodies and flesh’, and her analysis reveals that this conceptualization is not limited to the fictional Gilead but pervades religious thought (1993a, p. 7). Irigaray has written extensively on how female sexuality has only ever been interpreted through the lens of male desire. In This Sex Which is Not One, Irigaray describes the fate of woman as ‘an obliging prop for men’s fantasies’ (1985b, p. 25). Caught in this logic of opposites, woman can no longer express her own desires, because ‘she does not know, or no longer knows, what she wants’ (1985b, p. 25). In her reading of Irigaray’s writing on the religious, Morny Joy asserts that by ‘refusing to let women remain the basis of the male economy of sameness, Irigaray’s intention is for women to recognize their own desires’ (2006, p. 11). Women’s alienation from desire is a central theme in The Handmaid’s Tale. Despite Offred’s ‘hunger to commit the act of touch’ (HT: 11), Stillman and Johnson observe in their analysis that ‘in her acts of touch with Luke, the Commander and Nick there seems to be little or no re-writing of women’s desire into a more authentic form. All those relations appear one-sided’ (1994, p. 76). According

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to Janet Montelaro, in The Handmaid’s Tale, ‘Atwood unmistakably represents a sexual economy which never quite contains feminine desire’, and I would add that she explicitly links this sexual economy with patriarchal religious ideals (1995, p. 239). Montelaro notes that, in Gilead, ‘women’s sexuality is conveniently defined according to the reproductive function’ and is ‘described metonymically’ by Offred as “an egg”’ (1995, p. 240). What Montelaro fails to note, however, is that in the same passage, Offred also envisions God as an egg; in Gilead, both female sexuality and divinity are anchored in the ideal of motherhood (HT: 110–11). Gilead’s reductive ideology classifies women ‘either barren or fruitful’ and presents maternity as ‘the primary function of women’s sexuality’ (1995, p. 234). The only divine horizon to which Offred can orient herself is reproduc­ tion; she cannot incarnate her own divinity, but can only hope, like the Virgin Mary, to incarnate the masculine Word of Gilead through childbearing. In ‘Divine Women’, Irigaray critiques the either/or articulation of female sexuality and shows it to be emblematic of Western religious discourse as a whole: Our tradition presents and represents the radiant glory of the mother, but rarely shows us a fulfilled woman. And it forces us to make murderous choices: either mother (given that a boy child is what makes us truly mothers) or woman (prostitute and property of the male). . . . But, as long as woman lacks a divine made in her image she cannot establish her subjectivity or achieve a goal of her own. She lacks an ideal that would be her goal or path in becoming. Woman scatters and becomes an agent of destruction and annihilation because she has no other of her own that she can become. (1993b, pp. 63–4)

This passage exemplifies the status of women in Gilead with almost startling accuracy: the Gilead theocracy idolizes maternity at the expense of women’s desires and fulfilment. Offred, and the other Handmaids of Gilead, are forced into ‘murderous choices’; they can either be servants and concubines to the men in power and bear their sons, or they can be sterilized prostitutes that the men in power turn to for pleasure. Offred’s preoccupations with her body and sexuality, as well as her repeated attempts to voice her own desires and bodily experiences, do not reinforce the misogynist association of women and carnality, but rather expose its inadequacies. Patriarchal religious discourse, the discourse of Gilead, cannot express women’s bodies, their sexualities, which exceed the oppositional logic of culture/nature, male/female, word/body. A central contention in this chapter, which will be further explored in the following section, is that in many ways, Gilead is not a horrific depiction of a world radically different from our own,

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but rather illustrates the place of women in current religious discourse, where the embodied experiences and desires of women have yet to be articulated.

The Gilead within In her interview with Bill Moyers on his television series Faith and Reason, Atwood asserts that the world depicted in The Handmaid’s Tale is not alien to our own, but drawn completely from it: ‘I made it a rule for the writing of this book that I would not put anything into it that human societies have not already done’ (2006). As Atwood’s Professor Pieixoto remarks in the epilogue of The Handmaid’s Tale, little was unique within Gilead; rather, ‘its genius was synthesis’ (HT: 307). The world of Gilead – its rituals, symbols, beliefs and laws – reflect the underlying values and categories of patriarchal religion, and Atwood explicitly draws from religious history and philosophy to create Gilead. Aside from the concluding comments of Professor Pieixoto, Atwood makes the unoriginality of Gilead apparent through Offred’s narration, which repeatedly links the Gilead regime to the pre-Gilead world of contemporary American society. Offred’s narrative makes clear that the either/or articulation of female sexuality and male privilege is not unique to Gilead, but exists in preGilead society as well. At The Rachel and Leah Centre, the Handmaids are forced to watch pornography featuring: women on their knees ‘sucking penises or guns, . . . women being raped, beaten up, killed’ (HT: 118). This is all part of the brainwashing process for the Handmaids, with the intent of demonstrating that female sexual exploitation is a thing of the past and no longer present in Gilead. Offred, however, makes clear that sexual exploitation continues to thrive, and her entire narrative repeatedly draws connections between pre-Gilead society and the theocratic regime. Indeed, as Sarah Morrison writes, ‘Offred’s plight as a Handmaid . . . comes to seem less and less a bizarre aberration occurring only in Gilead and more and more women’s historical condition under patriarchy’ (2002, p. 323). That fact that Jezebel’s is housed in the hotel where Offred once carried on an illicit affair with Luke underscores the parallel between the supposedly liberated past and the fundamentalist present (HT: 234). Despite Offred’s protestations that her relationship with Luke is radically different from her relationship with the Commander, the text insists on linking the two men; they mirror one another (Miner 1991, p. 160). In each relationship, men hold the power and

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are the leaders, initiators and Offred responds accordingly. Before and within Gilead, Offred remains on the outskirts of discourse, relying on Luke and the Commander to translate for her, and ‘both men wield their language prowess so as to keep women in the position of the unempowered’ (Miner 1991, p. 155).22 Furthermore, in each relationship Offred experiences the sensation of being owned. When the Gilead takeover begins and Offred is forced to leave her job, she is disturbed by Luke’s nonchalant reaction, suspecting that he might even like this shift in power dynamics: ‘He doesn’t mind it at all. . . . We are not each other’s, anymore. Instead, I am his’ (HT: 182). Due to her sudden dependence on him, Offred is afraid to question Luke’s true feelings, because losing him would put her in an even more powerless position. Atwood also makes a subtle link between Luke and Aunt Lydia. Like the patriarchal puppet, Aunt Lydia, Luke voices simplistic ideas of women’s difference from men. At one point, Offred presents two parallel memories of Luke and Aunt Lydia that both cite, using the same wording, unspecified studies that ostensibly prove reductive sexuate difference (HT: 63, 65). By linking Luke and Lydia, Atwood emphasizes that this vision of prescriptive gender roles is not unique to Gilead, but has been used as a weapon against women throughout history. Both before and during her life in Gilead, Offred constructs her identity around the men in her life. Offred describes heterosexual love as being ‘central’ to how ‘you understood yourself ’ (HT: 225). Her narrative, in fact, conflates all three men in her life: Luke, Nick and the Commander. When she first kisses Nick, she speaks to Luke in her mind, ‘It’s you here, in another body’ (HT: 99). As Miner writes, this ‘merging’ of the three men ‘requires us to reassess supposed distinctions between husbands, lovers, and commanders’ (1991, p. 154). Even in the epilogue depicting a future beyond Gilead, a future not unlike our present, ‘[Offred’s] desires – for love, for the freedom to choose – are interpreted through the prism of [Pieixoto’s] desires’, as the professor edits and analyses Offred’s account according to his own interests (Stein 1991, p. 273). Pieixoto’s repeated sexual/sexist jokes reveal continuing contempt for women and the female body, and his search for a ‘metaphysics of truth’ and ‘closed interpretation’ echo the monologic and oppositional discourse of Gilead (Staels 1995, pp. 464–5). The androcentric academics express disappointment that Offred did not record more facts about the inner-workings of the male world of Gilead, its command structure and military tactics; her expressions of her own oppression, her meditations on her body and her desires hold less historical value for them than the political power plays of men. Furthermore, it is the misogynist male academics who piece

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together Offred’s narrative, as it is recorded on various tapes with no labels, in no particular order. This epilogue reveals that even Offred’s own narrative, her attempt at ‘composing a self ’ is edited, organized and mediated by patriarchal authority. The epilogue serves to highlight the pervasiveness of religious discourse in Western thought and culture; before, after and during Gilead, men exercise control over women’s words and authoritative discourse. Through abrasively depicting a regime of God-ordained sexism and then conflating this regime with our past and present, The Handmaid’s Tale brings to harsh light the religious origins and ideals that continue to influence secular Western society. As Lawson (1987) succinctly puts it: ‘The biblical past . . . cannot be obliterated from the Western past’. The ideal of virile male leadership and the passive, reproductive femininity prevails, though no longer merely clothed in the guise of Adam and Eve. Atwood’s characterization of Aunt Lydia represents the pervasive internalization of patriarchal religious discourse. Her words continually surface throughout the novel, interrupting Offred’s stream of consciousness narration and inserting the dictates of Gilead. As Aunt Lydia says in one such interjection: ‘Gilead is within you’ (HT: 23, emphasis mine). Atwood’s Gilead, as a synthesis of religious history, theology and philosophy, reveals the extent to which patriarchal religious ideas are steeped within society at a collective and individual level. Gilead, indeed, is within Western discourse and continues to influence the ways in which man, woman and God are hierarchically defined. Is there, then, any room for optimism in the midst of Atwood’s bleak portrait of the Gilead within? While all critics duly note the overall pessimism of Atwood’s speculative novel, there are small windows of possibility that gesture towards an understanding of humanity, sexuality and divinity that reach beyond the limits of patriarchal religion. One such instance is Offred’s almost mystical experience in Serena’s flower garden: There is something subversive about this garden of Serena’s, a sense of buried things bursting upwards, wordlessly, into the light, as if to point, to say: Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard, though silently. . . . Rendezvous, it says, terraces; the sibilants run up my spine, a shiver as if in fever. The summer dress rustles against the flesh of my thighs . . . metamorphosis run wild. Goddesses are possible now and the air suffuses with desire. (HT: 153)

In the midst of a narrative that primarily voices disembodiment, isolation, misery and subjugation, this passage leaps from the page as it depicts the experiences for

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which Offred deeply hungers. Amidst the romping sensuality of Serena’s garden, Offred describes the momentary intermingling of words and flesh. Her senses, so often deprived by the blank white walls of her small room, drink in the rampant colour and the warm caresses of the sun and wind. Words that she is no longer allowed to read or write return to her as this sensual experience gives rise to language. As Coral Howells notes, Offred’s ‘celebration of the garden’ as ‘a place of fertility and sensuous delights’ is a full-blown ‘rhapsody of the flesh’ (1996, pp. 140–1). Staels, however, sees this passage as Offred’s attempt to restore ‘contact with the Great Goddess and creative energy’ (1995, p. 462). While creative energy certainly abounds in this passage, I disagree that Offred feels connected to any unitary transcendent deity, even one in female form.23 Offred finds meaning and possibility in sensual, embodied experience, not by attempting to transcend her humanity. This experience in the garden momentarily redeems her body from the violently reductive definitions of Gilead. Goddesses are suddenly possible, because Offred’s reclamation of her body, of her self, seems possible; the garden temporarily subverts the control Gilead exercises over Offred’s sensuality and her use of language. This episode in the garden upends the myth of Eve in Eden, a myth that is central to patriarchal religious discourse. In the original biblical account, Eve embraces her desire for knowledge and divinity, a desire to be like God. She accepts the fruit from the serpent and tastes its fruit, and is consequently punished by God and expelled from the garden forever. In this myth, Eve’s desires push her away from divinity into the realm of humanity; she ‘falls’ away from the sinless, perfect garden where she and Adam walk with God into a world of sin where her fate is to painfully give birth to the human race. In Atwood’s reversal of this myth, Offred mirrors Eve, as her identity has been reduced to her capacity to give birth; in this garden, however, rather than desire and sensuality luring her away from God, Offred ‘tastes’ the fruits of the garden and, for the first and only time in her narrative, is able to realize (however briefly) the possibility of her own divinity. Atwood’s garden is not, like Eden, the place where the human and divine are violently separated; it is a realm where the divine, the human and the feminine are reconciled in a lush fusion of colour, warmth and fecundity. For both Atwood and Irigaray, I would argue, the divine feminine relates to the development of women’s subjectivity, not a transcendent Goddess. As Irigaray writes in ‘Divine Women’, she is ‘far from suggesting today that we must once again deify ourselves’ or ‘regress to siren goddesses, who fight against men gods’; instead, she asserts that women must ask ‘why we have been held back

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from becoming divine women’ (‘Divine Women’, p. 60). Similarly, when Offred is able briefly to see beyond the closed model of male divinity in the garden, she glimpses a new horizon of lived desire, new possibilities of autonomous, embodied female subjectivity. This subjectivity, as Hooker describes, is not merely a female version of the male model, but something distinct, characterized by flow and multiplicity: In contrast to Gilead’s rigidly circumscribed roles for women . . . Offred’s oral, synesthetic experience of the mythologically resonant garden suggests a world of more fluid subjectivities, where the boundaries between the human and natural world are not so rigidly drawn, a realm in which, she declares, “metamorphoses run wild.” And Offred associates this metamorphic freedom to move and change with an ethos that accommodates female divinity. (2006, pp. 280–1)

This ‘divinity’ is not depicted as transcendent to humanity or the realm of the senses, but is rooted within it, a depiction that reverses the traditional concept of the God that is enforced in Gilead and critiqued throughout Irigaray’s works. The God of Western discourse is completely removed from the physical world to a ‘transcendental realm where all ties to the world of sensation have been severed’ (1993a, p. 15): How, then, does God know the sensible face of things, given that his relationship with them must be wholly theoretical? Only in Principle does he have correspondance [sic] with existence, for his word sustains the logical and geometrical order of the life of this Universe without his ever participating in it. (1985a, p. 338)

This radical transcendence is problematic for Irigaray, because divinity is thus conceived as severed from the human experience, rather than ‘interpreted as the infinite that resides within us and among us, the god in us, the Other for us, becoming with and in us’ (1993b, p. 63). God’s transcendence is likewise depicted as a source of alienation and paralysed becoming in The Handmaid’s Tale. When Offred offers her own revision of the Lord’s Prayer in her narrative, she addresses herself to: ‘My God. Who Art in the Kingdom of Heaven, which is within. I wish you would tell me Your Name, the real one I mean’ (HT: 194, emphasis mine). Offred has no interest in relating to the masculine tyrant God of Gilead; she wants to discover and cultivate her own divinity and interiority. Offred’s prayer remains unanswered, however; God does not respond, and Offred feels her prayers bounce back to her (HT: 195). This prayer is Offred’s attempt to speak her own God into existence, much as God speaks the world

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into being in Genesis. Without access to the creative power of her own divine Word, however, she is ultimately unable to do so. Her own divinity remains nameless and silent, losing the struggle with the Gilead within, that still small voice of subjugation. As this prayer reveals, Offred’s resistance is rooted in her attempts to reclaim her identity – her own words for herself – and her capacity for divinity. Even though the Gilead regime attempts to strip the Handmaids of their identities through patronymic re-naming, Offred clings to her real name, which is never revealed in the novel, as a secret talisman: ‘I keep the knowledge of this name like something hidden, some treasure I’ll come back to dig up, one day’ (HT: 84). This name functions as a password to her own horizon of subjectivity, as a ‘guarantee of her future life after Gilead’, as well as to the part of her that resists the definitions imposed by Gilead (Howells 2006, p. 165). This self-naming parallels Offred’s attempts to repossess her body, and her subversive narrative can be read as an effort ‘to give expression to repressed corporeal and affective processes’ (Staels 1995, p. 460). As Howells argues, ‘Offred’s only real hope centres on her own body’; though she cannot outwardly resist the power of Gilead, inwardly she has ‘the power to defy patriarchal prescriptions by aligning herself differently through her private narrative about her body’ (2006, 167). I would build on Howell’s analysis to argue that Offred’s hope does not centre on her own body, but on her ability to reconcile body with word, to autonomously conceptualize, define and express her embodiment. Offred’s narrative, as her continual attempt to ‘compose a self ’ in her own words and on her own terms, is her greatest weapon of resistance against Gilead, and if there is any hope to be found in Atwood’s pessimistic account, it is that Offred does ultimately tell her story and that story survives long after Gilead has fallen. Though Offred’s narrative ends ambiguously – when the Eyes come to take her away, she does not know whether it is a rescue operation, or if she is being imprisoned by the regime – the epilogue suggests that she made it into the Underground Femaleroad and somewhere along the way recorded her story. As Offred states, this story-telling is not compulsory, but is an attempt to reclaim the identity and memories that have been stripped away from her, an attempt to keep herself from acquiescing to the regime: ‘I don’t have to tell it. . . . I could withdraw. It’s possible to go so far in, so far down and back, they could never get you out’ (HT: 225). Offred does not only tell her story to maintain a connection with herself; by telling her story, she is also professing faith in an other, an audience who will receive this story: ‘I keep on going with this sad and

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hungry and sordid, this limping and mutilated story, because after all I want you to hear it . . . . By telling you anything at all . . . I believe you into being. I tell, therefore you are’ (HT: 267–8). This unnamed other, this ‘you’ who will one day receive her story acts as a horizon for Offred, a hope that she has a future beyond Gilead, that she will one day escape. Through her narrative, Offred resists the definitions imposed upon her by the Gilead theocracy, and she also resists her overwhelming isolation by reaching out into the future for someone who will hear her story. An important question remains, however: in the fictional world created by Atwood, which in many ways reflects our own, is Offred’s voice ever heard? In her groundbreaking essay, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, post-colonialist feminist theorist Gayatri Spivak discusses ‘the subaltern as female’ and asserts that she ‘cannot be heard or read’ (1988, p. 308). Spivak critiques the work of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, who each assert that the oppressed (the subaltern) can speak, if only given the chance. According to Spivak, however, ‘there is no space from which the sexed subaltern can speak’ (1988, p. 307), because as soon as she tries to speak, her voice is obscured as her narrative is subsumed into the dominant discourse: Within the effaced itinerary of the subaltern subject, the track of sexual difference is double effaced. . . . both as object of colonialist historiography and as subject of insurgency, the ideological construction of gender keeps the male dominant. If, in the context of colonial production, the subaltern has no history and cannot speak, the subaltern as female is more deeply in shadow. (1988, p. 287)

Spivak’s analysis, of course, is rooted in post-colonial theory; she is primarily concerned with the subaltern as the oppressed inhabitant of the Third World, but she also discusses the subaltern in a more general sense, as the one ‘whose identity is its difference’ and is denied access to systems of representation (1988, p. 285). In this way, Spivak’s premise is useful in exploring the narrative frame of The Handmaid’s Tale, which situates Offred’s narrative as a fragmented object pieced together by male-centred academic discourse. In her account of Spivak’s assertion of the subaltern’s inescapable silence, Susan Sellers writes: Spivak . . . suggest[s] that it is impossible to restore a voice that has been dispossessed, since the very act serves to re-cover it; an assessment that points to the more general dilemma of how to rewrite a text without ‘mastering’ its source and so reproducing the objectifying and annihilating procedures of binary law. (Sellers 2001, pp. 27–8)

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There is no doubt that Atwood’s epilogue depicts Professor Piexioto’s attempts to ‘master’ Offred’s text, and his dismissive, sexist remarks reveal that patriarchal discourse is alive and well and the co-opting of women’s voices is not confined to Gilead. Yet is this academic ‘mastery’ of Offred’s story successful to the point that she is completely dispossessed of a voice? On the one hand, it is important to note that Offred does speak; her narrative is not entirely subsumed by the hegemonic discourse, but manages to critique and unmask its violent, oppositional logic. Her self-narration exceeds and resists the limited interpretation of Piexioto. As an epilogue immediately following Offred’s story in her own words – rather than a prologue, which would begin with Piexioto’s interpretation – it becomes glaringly evident how much escapes Piexioto’s attention and understanding, and how his misogyny blinds him to the subversive value of Offred’s narrative. A more complicated question, however, is whether or not Offred is heard within the world of the text. Although Offred extends her words as a gift to a future, unnamed reader, in the epilogue this reader emerges with a name (Piexioto) and has clearly failed to hear and understand her story. The effect of reading his flagrant misappropriation of her voice recalls the moment when nolite te bastardes carborundorum lost its subversive, exhilarating meaning for Offred, through the mediation of the Commander, who reduces the meaning of those words to a schoolboy joke and reveals the dismal fate of the woman who wrote them. Both Offred and this unnamed handmaid speak, they offer up the gift of words, but once these words are twisted through the interpretation of male authority, it is unclear whether they are ever really heard. Although I would argue that the glimmers of optimism found in The Handmaid’s Tale prevent it from lapsing into total futility, those fleeting moments of redemption do not ultimately undermine the overall pessimism of the novel, which depicts patriarchal discourse as almost insurmountable and human society as unable to learn lessons from history.

Conclusion The Handmaid’s Tale presents an account of women’s exclusion from divinity as sexuate difference is coded to sustain the masculine economy of sameness. In ‘Fulfilling Our Humanity’, Irigaray argues that Western religious discourse is characterized by a ‘unique vertical transcendence annulling differences between human subjectivities’ (p. 189). These religious ‘models inspired by the same, the

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similar, the identical, the equal’ seek to obscure alterity and difference (2004c, p. 189). Offred’s narrative continually highlights how the imposed uniformity of Gilead leads to the ‘infinite interchangeability’ of all women, and this masking of individual and sexuate difference alienates Offred from her body and her sense of self, as she gradually internalizes the reductive categories imposed upon her. In this novel, Atwood presents a tyrannical monotheocracy that is characterized by violence, particularly violence against the female body. As stated earlier, several critics note the dismemberment and bodily alienation articulated by Offred, as well as the systemization of rape in Gilead as women are stripped of sexual autonomy. The violence done to women in Gilead’s economy of the same is self-evident: they are subjugated, depersonalized and objectified. Near the end of Offred’s narrative, an event occurs that underscores how the violence of reductive sexual difference generates further violence: The Particicution, a ritual in which a man charged with rape and infanticide is executed by a group of Handmaids. Offred, despite her resistance to Gilead’s system of violence, feels herself wanting to ‘tear, gouge, rend’ (HT: 279). Earlier in the novel, Offred observes that in order to do violence, one must ‘create an it’, and as the Handmaids begin to kill the man bare-handed, under the eyes of spectators, Offred realizes that the man has, indeed, ‘become an it’ (HT: 193, 280). In an economy of oppositional sameness, the violence is not always one-sided; given the opportunity, the victim may become the victimizer. The Particicution is a ghoulish illustration of how, when sexuate difference is (mis) appropriated, each sex participates in the execution of the other. Both Atwood’s novel and Irigaray’s theories of the religious emphasize the importance of becoming. Offred, in her blank, parenthetical existence, has no horizon to orient her development as a subject. Caught in the oppositional logic of religious discourse, she remains trapped in the limited present, seeing the world only in ‘gasps’, looking backwards, but never forward (HT: 30). This mirrors Irigaray’s description of the paralysis of feminine becoming due to the absence of a divine horizon. As Irigaray writes, ‘religious power has substituted itself, deliberately or not, for a free development of the subject towards its accomplishment’ resulting in ‘a permanent fossilization of the subjective in an objective, which, imposing itself as a norm, paralyzes becoming’ (2004c, p. 192). Elizabeth Grosz, in her work on Irigaray and divinity, asserts that ‘the divine is . . . a projection of the past into a future that gives the present new meaning and direction’ (1993, p. 210). Reflecting this notion, Offred’s narrative, as an effort to connect to a sympathetic, hypothetical other, weaves through past, present and

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possible futures, repeatedly voicing the need for a purpose and perspective – for ‘new meaning and direction’ – that extend beyond the constraints of Western religious discourse. Offred’s narrative also serves to illuminate what is obscured or excluded within that conceptual framework – namely the reconciliation of the female body with the divine Word. As Irigaray writes, ‘what incarnation, including that of the relation to the divine, can thus be taken out of the world of becoming?’ (1991b, p. 169). Offred, no longer in a ‘world of becoming’, struggles to make her own words incarnate. In ‘Divine Women’, Irigaray writes that: . . . deprived of God, [women] are forced to comply with models that do not match them, that exile, double, mask them, cut them off from themselves and from one another, stripping away their ability to move forward into love, art, thought, towards their ideal and divine fulfilment. (1993b, p. 64)

In this chapter, I have argued that this analysis of women’s place in religious discourse is precisely what is portrayed in The Handmaid’s Tale. The women of Gilead, cut off from the Word, are forced to comply with reductive models that alienate them from their own bodies and the other women around them. In recounting moments like Offred’s revival in the garden, her revisionist prayer and her ongoing attempts to compose her self, Atwood’s narrative occasionally points to the emergence of a subjectivity and divinity envisioned in the feminine, but under the religious regime of Gilead, where women are ‘deprived of God’, such visions are never fully realized. Atwood’s novel, by depicting the regime of Gilead and the more insidious Gilead within, offers a scathing critique of Western religious ideals, particularly in relation to sexuate difference, and this critique mirrors much of Irigaray’s own interrogations. While Atwood’s narrative does not flesh out viable alternatives to existing discourse in an in-depth way, particularly in comparison to the works analysed in subsequent chapters, her novel does exceed mere criticism by alluding to areas that must be rethought to accommodate feminine becoming: the cultivation of non-reductive sexuate difference, the location of divinity in sensible reality and human experience, and the reconciliation of the female body with the creative power and authority of the Word.

Notes 1 During an interview with Bill Moyers (2006), Atwood calls herself an agnostic, because claims about God and/or ultimate reality cannot be described as

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knowledge, only belief: ‘A strict agnostic says, you cannot pronounce, as knowledge, anything you cannot demonstrate. In other words if you’re going to call it knowledge you have to be able to run an experiment on it that’s repeatable. You can’t run an experiment on whether God exists or not, therefore you can’t say anything about it as knowledge. You can have a belief if you want to, or if that is what grabs you, if you were called in that direction, if you have a subjective experience of that kind, that would be your belief system. You just can’t call it knowledge’. For more on these two works, see Chapter 2. For more on theological readings of Surfacing, see also Carol P. Christ, ‘Margaret Atwood: The Surfacing of Women’s Spiritual Quest and Vision’ (1976), and Judith Plaskow, ‘On Carol Christ on Margaret Atwood: Some Theological Reflections’, (1976). For a literary critic’s perspective, see Ann-Janine Morey, ‘Margaret Atwood and Toni Morrison: Reflections on Postmodernism and the Study of Religion and Literature’ (1992). See Sonia Gernes, ‘Transcendent Women: Uses of the Mystical in Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye’ and Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping’ (1991), and Liza Potvin, ‘Voodooism and Female Quest Patterns in Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye’ (2003). All references to Atwood’s novel in this chapter are taken from the following edition: The Handmaid’s Tale (New York: Quality Paperback Books, 1990). In the novel, The Underground Femaleroad is a system of stations leading oppressed women out of Gilead into Canada. As this is one of Atwood’s most well-known works, I am assuming some familiarity with the novel on the part of my audience. As such, my plot synopses will remain cursory throughout this chapter. For articles on Atwood’s use of irony and satire in The Handmaid’s Tale, see Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor, ‘From Irony to Affiliation in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale’ (2003), and Stephanie Barbé Hammer, ‘The World as It Will Be? Female Satire and the Technology of Power in The Handmaid’s Tale’ (1990). Daniel Coad echoes these sentiments in his article, ‘Hymens, Lips and Masks: The Veil in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale’. He asserts that ‘Atwood’s interest in The Handmaid’s Tale is overtly political’ (2001, p. 54). For more on the opposition between divine and human, see Irigaray’s 1993 essay ‘Divine Women’. For more on the subjection of body to word, see ‘The Redemption of Women’, in Key Writings (2004). For more on the separation of flesh and spirit, see ‘Sexual Difference’, in An Ethics of Sexual Difference (1993). See also the explication of Irigaray’s religious thought in Chapter 1 of this book. See Irigaray’s essay ‘Divine Women’. ‘The Rachel and Leah Center’ alludes to the biblical wives of Jacob, the patriarch whose twelve sons establish the twelve tribes of Israel. Both Rachel and Leah, who

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Irigaray, Incarnation and Contemporary Woman’s Fiction are sisters, bear several sons for Jacob, but Jacob also has concubines through which he produces even more children. One of the epigraphs that opens The Handmaid’s Tale refers directly to the account of these two women in Genesis 30:1–3: ‘And when Rachel saw that she bare Jacob no children, Rachel envied her sister, and said unto Jacob, Give me children, or else I die. And Jacob’s anger was kindled against Rachel; and he said, Am I in God’s stead, who hath withheld from thee the fruit of the womb? And she said, Behold my maid Bilhah, go in unto her; and she shall bear upon my knees, that I may also have children by her’. (NB: All biblical references throughout this book are taken from the King James Version.) The Commander is Offred’s master, as well as an important military and political figure in the Gilead regime. Even the women who work as prostitutes at the nightclub Jezebel’s, which will be discussed later, function purely as sexual objects, void of any sexual agency and desire. Sheila Conboy also references the ‘interchangeability’ of the Handmaids in her article, ‘Scripted, Conscripted, and Circumscribed: Body Language in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale’ (1993, p. 354). In the Genesis account, Adam is commissioned with naming all the animals, but none are found to be a suitable helpmate for him, so God then creates Eve out of Adam’s rib. Genesis 2:21–23 reads: ‘And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept; and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof. And the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man’. Dorota Filipczak notes the parallels between Adam’s naming of Eve and the naming of Handmaids in Gilead in her article ‘Is There No Balm in Gilead? – Biblical Intertext in The Handmaid’s Tale’ (1993): ‘Reality in Atwood’s book mirrors the limitations of the patriarchal mentality that generated the Yahwist myth. Alluding to the generosity of Yahweh, who creates the first woman as a suitable help for man, the author presents the feminine half of the Gileadite community in the role of objects that are ready for use on the horizon of male existence and provide it with biological continuum. . . . Women are defined by men in the same way as Eve is defined by Adam when he gives her the name “iszsza” derived from Hebrew “isz”’ (pp. 180–1). In Hebrew, ‘isz’ or ‘ish’ means man, and the word for ‘woman’ (‘iszsza’ or ‘ishah’) means ‘of man’. As it says in the Gospel of John 1:1–3, ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made’. See also Chapter 1 of this book.

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17 Even in The Rachel and Leah Center, which is run by the Aunts, the women listen to the Bible on tape, and it is read in a man’s voice (HT: 89). 18 See Roberta Rubenstein, ‘Nature and Nurture in Dystopia: The Handmaid’s Tale’, and Staels. Rubenstein observes that ‘imagery of mutilation and dismemberment permeates the narrator’s own language’ (1988, p. 105), while Staels asserts that Offred’s articulation of her body ‘signals its dismembered condition’ (1995, p. 458). 19 In her analysis of the ceremony – the sex ritual in which the Commander attempts to impregnate the Handmaid, while she lies between the Wife’s legs – Conboy argues that the symbolic fusion of the two women fails, because ‘the result is not fusion but disembodiment for the women involved’ (1993, p. 352). 20 Jezebel is a Queen of Israel who is vilified in the biblical books I and II Kings. A Phoenician princess who marries King Ahab of Israel, Jezebel kills numerous Jewish prophets in her efforts to oust Hebrew monotheism and reintroduce Baal worship to Israel. Though Jezebel is not a prostitute, the name has come to hold connotations of promiscuity and immorality. The phrase ‘painted Jezebel’ is based on II Kings 9:30–33, which describes how Jezebel paints her face and adorns her head right before she is killed and eaten by dogs. 21 Serena is the Commander’s wife and Offred’s mistress, who is also compelled to participate in the ceremony. 22 See also HT: 10, 44, 186–7. 23 Staels notes that Offred’s forbidden narrative is itself a means of resistance that ‘revives the capacity for individual spiritual and emotional life’ (1995, p. 459), and I agree with this analysis.

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‘Where God Begins’: Reconciling the Female Body and the Divine Word in Michèle Roberts’ The Book of Mrs Noah and Impossible Saints

The wide-ranging and award-winning fiction of Michèle Roberts continually addresses the religious dimension of women’s lives. Born to a French Catholic mother and an Anglican father, Roberts’ childhood was permeated with religion; she ‘grew up knowing that the Bible was the founding sacred book’ and discovered ‘rapturously beautiful things in it’ (Llewellyn and Sawyer 2008, p. 17). As an adult, however, after encountering Marxism and feminism at the university, Roberts describes herself as becoming ‘self-conscious’ about her religious upbringing and its formative effects on her (Llewellyn and Sawyer 2008, p. 17). A sudden awareness of the invisibility and oppression of the women in the Bible awakened Roberts’ desire to revise the traditional religious narratives of her childhood: I just could see that the sacred book didn’t have enough women in! They were just ignored, and I found that very inspiring. So I was trying to – I don’t know what I was trying to do! I just felt enraged that we’d been suppressed, and sort of wiped out and denied and misunderstood and vilified. And actually, it felt like to save my own life I had to re-write these stories and put women at the centre of them. (Llewellyn and Sawyer 2008, p. 17)

For Roberts, this need to rewrite religious narratives and revive the women within them became a means of redeeming the ‘images and metaphors and stories’ of Catholicism, which remained alive in her unconscious even after she lost faith in the God of Christianity (Llewellyn and Sawyer 2008, p. 15).1 Several critics have noted that Roberts’ interest in the religious and its impact on women distinguishes her work from much of contemporary literature. Heather Ingman, in her study of twentieth-century women’s spirituality, asserts that

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Roberts ‘is one of the most important of contemporary English fiction writers because of her willingness as a feminist to explore spiritual themes in a secular age’ (2004, p. 161).2 Another critic, Heather Walton, characterizes Roberts’ work as explicitly revisionist, ‘concerned with nothing less than the radical revisioning of religious traditions’ (2007a, p. 544). I agree that Roberts’ fiction undoubtedly has a prominent revisionist element, and that, as Susan Rowland puts it, her novels ‘become a form of theorising about gender and the sacred’ (1999, p. 36). Roberts’ incisive critiques of religious tradition reflect a revisionary religious perspective that maintains a tentative connection to Christian imagery and myth while simultaneously recasting the relationship between the (female) body and the (divine) word. Two novels in particular stand out in Roberts’ canon as works that emphatically attempt to redefine the connection between women, writing and divinity: The Book of Mrs Noah (1987) and Impossible Saints (1997).3 Though ten years separate the publication of these books, they are in many ways sister narratives in their treatment of religion. Like Atwood’s Offred, the heroines of these novels struggle against male-centred religious discourse in an effort to articulate their own experiences, and, as in The Handmaid’s Tale, their struggle with God is revealed to be simultaneously a struggle with language and creative autonomy. The spectre of disembodiment found in Gilead is recalled in Roberts’ novels, which portray, in violent detail, the dualism within Christian tradition that ‘puts women on the side of the body and the emotions, and downgrades both’ (Ingman 2004, p. 152). As a way out of this struggle, Roberts asserts the power of writing. By telling their own stories and allowing the body to break into their words, women can shatter the myths of female subordination and reclaim creative agency. Rather than merely mediating the incarnation of a masculine deity, women should, as Irigaray describes, ‘discover their word(s), be faithful to it and, interweaving it with their bodies, make it a living and spiritual flesh’ (2004e, p. 151).

‘The Word that structures difference’ The Book of Mrs Noah is a voyage of myth-breaking and myth-making. The titular character, a librarian visiting Venice with her partner, Noah, embarks on an inward journey that takes her deep into the quandaries and conflicts of women’s experiences. Joining Mrs Noah on her conjured Ark are five

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storytelling sibyls, a handful of ordinary women with diverse backgrounds and desires, united by a shared problem: writer’s block. The overarching narrative of the novel is formed by several distinct strands: the narrations of Mrs Noah as she struggles to make sense of her maternal desires are inter-woven with the individual narratives of each sibyl and the stories they create in their workshops aboard the Ark. Any universal and romanticized definition of Woman is resisted through the stark individual differences between the six women, who squabble over language, writing techniques and theoretical frameworks during their group interactions. Their allegorical names underscore differences in philosophy and circumstance: Deftly, Forsaken, Babble-On, Re-Vision and Correct. Besides collective writer’s block, there are few commonalities among the sibyls, but a prominent one lies in a shared struggle with dominant discourses, particularly religious discourse, though this struggle manifests differently for each woman.4 Aside from Mrs Noah and the sibyls, there is one other passenger aboard the Ark: the primary interloper and token male, known as the Gaffer. The Gaffer gives voice and personification to the Word as conceptualized in Christianity; he is the ‘speaker of the Word of God’ (MN: 51). He plays a pivotal role in the novel by bringing the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation to the foreground and highlighting its androcentrism in his opening monologue: I am truth incarnate . . . I’ve never needed to imagine women creating because I can do it all by myself. Women are receptive, yes. They’re great at listening for my Word and taking it in. Take Mary, for example . . . . She was this terrific incubator of my ideas. . . . It’s the male who represents humanity, creativity, spiritual quest, after all. . . . I’m convinced you can write properly only when you rise above your bodies and forget them. . . . To put it bluntly, when you are virile. (MN: 55–6)

As the Gaffer’s speech reveals, though the doctrine of the Incarnation evokes a possible union of humanity and divinity, in its traditional interpretation, women are all but excised from the equation. For it is a resolutely masculine deity that is incarnated, through Mary, into a male human being. Mary’s role in this miracle, however, is completely passive. Her body is reduced to an empty receptacle, an ‘incubator’ for an alien Word and the creative impetus of the Word does not originate within her, but penetrates her from outside. Mary enables the Incarnation of Christ; her own divine incarnation, however, is never realized. In Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, Irigaray unravels the traditional interpretation of Christ’s conception and incarnation, asserting that ‘this mysterious conception leads, first of all, to the repudiation of the woman in

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which it takes place’ (164). In Irigaray’s account of this traditional reading, Mary functions as a mere ‘vehicle for the Other’: She, a dumb virgin with lips closed, occasionally receives the favor of a word, which she must bring into the world in the shape of a child of God. Mediatrix between Word and flesh, she is the means by which the (male) One passes into the other. Receptacle that, faithfully, welcomes and reproduces only the will of the Father. (1991b, p. 166)

According to Irigaray, the process of incarnating the Word of a masculine God replaces and excludes her own incarnation; Mary’s ‘“yes” is equally a “no”: a no to her own life. To her conception, her birth, her generation, her flowering. No to everything, except the Word of the Father’ (1991b, p. 167).5 In an essay entitled ‘The Flesh Made Word’, Roberts presents a similar interpretation of Mary’s traditional place in Christian myth, in which ‘the woman’s body is merely a seedbed’ for the ‘divine sperm’ of God the Father (1998a, p. 41). Echoing Irigaray, Roberts asserts that this conceptualization of Mary as a ‘flower-bed in which [God] planted his seed’ suggests that women cannot, therefore, ‘be actively creative and procreative; thus there is no need for God to be Mother too’ (1998a, p. 34). The Book of Mrs Noah reflects this analysis; Mary’s role in Christian discourse – as the mediatrix of the masculine Word rather than creatrix of her own incarnating word – is articulated by the Gaffer and throughout the course of the novel it is linked to the ongoing denigration of the female body and each woman’s struggle to write. The presence of the Gaffer makes an explicit connection between the place of women in Christian discourse and women’s creative agency, or lack thereof. As I will argue throughout this chapter, Roberts’ critique of the doctrine of the Word suggests that a relationship to divinity and a relationship to language and creativity are irrevocably linked. The character of the Gaffer is significant in other ways. The Bible is presented as the Gaffer’s novel, a work of fiction and, as Jeannette King points out, this ‘implicitly attacks the logocentric belief that behind the “Word” lies God, a unique originating “I” guaranteeing its meaning and truth’ (2000, p. 42). In addition, the Gaffer’s presence on the Ark, which is conjured by Mrs Noah, signals that Christian discourse has infiltrated the unconscious and remains alive in Western culture and imagination, despite widespread secularization. The Gaffer appears unbidden on the Ark, as the ‘uninvited guest’ who interrupts the first gathering between Mrs Noah and the sibyls (MN: 53). The Forsaken Sibyl also attests to

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the inescapable presence of Christian myth and thought when describing her unavoidable encounter with the Gaffer’s novel, i.e. the Bible, which was the ‘set text’ of her childhood that she ‘couldn’t avoid’ (MN: 69). Recalling Irigaray’s essay ‘Divine Women’, Roberts’ novels expose the degenerative impact that an explicitly masculine concept of divinity has on women. As Irigaray asserts, ‘God has been created out of man’s gender’, and this male ideal has been ‘imposed upon women’ (1993b, pp. 61, 64). In current religious discourse, women have no direct access to divinity; as Irigaray states, the ‘most human and the most divine goal woman can conceive is to become man’ (1993b, p. 64). The monolithic masculinity of divinity, as described by Irigaray, excludes women from the incarnating power of the divine Word, which has become ‘enclosed and cut off from a living becoming because of a desire for mastery’ (Irigaray 2012, p. 11). In Roberts’ novel, this exclusion is voiced by the Correct Sibyl as she considers the gendered language of the Christian creeds during one of her musings: ‘I believe in God, the Father Almighty, . . . . He is just a word. The Word that structures difference . . . . He defines all that is not-him’ (MN: 191). God, then, is not only Word, but Father as well. This twofold doctrine, God as Word and God as Father, irrevocably links language and divinity with maleness. In the Bible, the opening of John’s gospel declares that ‘in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’, and according to Susan Sellers’ reading of Irigaray, this statement is: . . . an accurate description of patriarchy’s functioning which, she maintains, has appropriated language for its own ends. She argues that unless woman can represent herself through the instating of a female divine in the realm of the symbolic, women will remain . . . immured within an exclusively male set of paradigms. (2001, p. 74)

The Correct Sibyl expresses how the doctrine of the masculine Word disturbs her access to language and identity: ‘What can I possibly write that does not take its shape, its bent, from accepting or rejecting him? Can I really write I and mean something else?’ (MN: 190–1). The Correct Sibyl is, in fact, experiencing acute writer’s block; her creativity has ‘dried up’ (MN: 30). Once able to turn out novels with consistent regularity, the words no longer flow. She feels the urge to write ‘gruesome’ tales of revenge, but since this conflicts with her ‘tolerant self-image’ she instead forces herself to write in an unnatural, ‘dry’ and ‘unfeeling’ language, full of ‘technical terms rigorously arranged’ (MN: 175). She experiences her lack

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of creativity as ‘emptiness’, evoking the image of woman as a vacant vessel, filled only through the creative energy of a masculine deity (MN: 31). It is not only the Correct Sibyl who feels cut off from language; all five sibyls are experiencing writer’s block and creative emptiness, and their journey aboard the Ark is an attempt to regain creative agency. The Re-Vision Sibyl, who writes women’s novels, is stranded in ‘the middle of a story’, with no clear ending in sight (MN: 25). The Deftly Sibyl has found herself helplessly pulled into orbit around her husband, and living in his ‘space’ and ‘rhythm’, she finds it impossible to write (MN: 24). Like the Correct Sibyl, the Babble-On Sibyl finds herself writing in a voice, in a language that is not her own, particularly when trying to express her own sexuality. Ever since falling in love with her current partner, Babble-On has been blocked creatively, primarily because she is afraid to write ‘honestly about her own sexuality’, about what she has learnt and experienced through being in love (MN: 92–3). She is caught between two existing discourses on sex: on the one hand, ‘conventional feminine terms, discreet and romantic’, and on the other hand, self-objectification, writing ‘through men’s eyes, in their . . . language’ (MN: 93). The Forsaken Sibyl longs to overcome her stifled voice by inventing her own unique mode of expression and revising the meaning of words that have become harmful; specifically, she wants to ‘re-invent feminine so that it simply meant: pertaining to a woman’, so that each woman could embody that word differently, and fill it with new meaning (MN: 141). The sibyls’ paralysed creativity is mirrored by a sense of suppressed spirituality. The Correct Sibyl, as seen above, struggles with the masculine language of Christianity. The Babble-On Sibyl experiences the Church as a dead sacred space ‘which holds nothing for her now’ (MN: 28). The Re-Vision Sibyl has concluded that Christianity has no room for the excessive, messy female body and the Forsaken Sibyl, though experiencing a nascent spirituality, has found no viable means of expressing it, so she ‘keeps quiet’ (MN: 26–7, 208). For each woman, her stifled spirituality and inability to write are deeply connected. The constant and vocal presence of the Gaffer serves to reiterate that women’s lack of creative autonomy is linked with their exclusion from God qua divine horizon and God qua Word. And, interestingly enough, the Gaffer himself is experiencing the writer’s block: he finds himself unable to write a sequel to the Bible (MN: 55). This signals the stagnation of current Christian discourse, and its inability to speak to women’s experiences. For these women, the Word has fallen silent.

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Subjecting the flesh At the heart of Christianity’s silencing of women lies the pervasive view of the corrupt female body. This theme, though raised in The Book of Mrs Noah, is given greater treatment in the novel Impossible Saints, which further develops the conflation of God and Father, and the impact this doctrine has on the female body and its connection to the Word. Like The Book of Mrs Noah, Impossible Saints is not a single, cohesive story, but a tapestry of many narratives, each exploring the role women have played in Christian tradition and history. The central narrative of the novel follows Saint Josephine in her journey from childhood to monastic life, and into a new theology of her own making. One layer of Josephine’s story is the official, canonized version: here, she is a pure, self-effacing and resolutely orthodox nun whose body is transfigured into an incorrupt relic after death. The other, submerged layer of Josephine’s story reveals her struggles with her faith, her Father, her body and her eventual discovery of a unique voice and sense of spirituality. Woven through Josephine’s life stories are the stories of other female saints who originally appear in The Golden Legend, and are retold here in a drastically different light.6 Josephine’s first encounters with religion are at the feet of her father, who teaches her to painstakingly memorize, word by word, the theological tenets of Christianity. The most fundamental of these truths is the eternality and masculinity of God: ‘Before everything, God was. . . . God was a man. An invisible one. A spirit with no body, but male nonetheless’ (IS: 36). Throughout the novel, the Word, in its many connotations – as language, knowledge, writing, divinity – is explicitly linked to the figure of the Father and set in direct opposition against the female body. As Rodriguez points out, in her analysis of Impossible Saints: In agreement with Irigaray’s theories, it is significant that the conflicts experienced in the novel by the female characters are all closely related to the existence of a male Christian God, who is perceived as the father of humankind and often identified in the family with paternal authority. (2006, p. 78)

Mother figures, in contrast, are absent, spectral and linked to death, underscoring the fact that the religious realm is populated solely by masculine figures of authority, and all female genealogies have been suppressed.7 As Roberts explains in a 2003 interview, writing Impossible Saints was a way of exploring the role of the Father, particularly in religious discourse. Not only is God overtly presented as father, but, as Roberts states, ‘the father is presented like a god’ (Rodriguez

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2003, p. 101). Josephine expresses this idea when, after her father’s death, she is able to look back and realize that he had been her ‘horizon’ (IS: 109).8 The story of St Thais echoes this sentiment, describing Thais’ father as her ‘mirror’ who ‘framed and shaped’ her (IS: 168–9). The language Roberts uses to describe the overpowering influence of the Father over the daughters’ identities directly corresponds with Irigaray’s descriptions of God the Father having a paralysing effect on female becoming. As noted earlier, in her essay ‘Divine Women’, Irigaray asserts that the divine functions as a horizon for becoming that cultivates the development of subjectivity. In current religious discourse, which expresses only the concept of an all-powerful masculine God, women lack such a horizon and are therefore unable to fully become: The impotence, the formlessness, the deformity associated with women, the way they are equated with something other than the human and split between the human and the inhuman (half-woman, half-animal), their duty to be adorned, masked, and made up, etc., rather than being allowed their own physical, bodily beauty, their own skin, their own form(s), all this is symptomatic of the fact that women lack a female god who can open up the perspective in which their flesh can be transfigured. (Irigaray 1993b, p. 64)

The divine, in Irigaray’s theories, represents the perfection and idealization of (male) subjectivity, and this ideal is currently conceived as a masculine, disembodied, transcendent spirit, which sits in direct opposition to the earthbound, flesh-bound female body. When the purest and most powerful being is presented as bodiless yet male, in the oppositional logic of religious discourse this affirms that the most corrupt manifestation of being is its complete opposite: female corporeality. In ‘The Flesh Made Word’, Roberts describes the female body as ‘marvellously democratic, wonderfully cutting down hierarchies and slashing through either/ or thinking . . . the body comes, weeps, cries out, thrashes about, hungers, is sated – that’s the truth, however we choose to interpret it’ (1998a, p. 40). The female body undermines and exceeds the reductive, oppositional logic of religious discourse, and is in turn suppressed and subjugated by the masculine Word. In Impossible Saints, Josephine’s story tracks the gradual subjugation of her own corporeality. As a girl, Josephine experiences her body and nascent sexuality as positive and enjoyable. She looks back to her childhood, when she had revelled in the ‘comfort of bodies’, and lived ‘inside herself ’ without being ‘ashamed at all’ (IS: 189). She remembers the ‘smell of herself, like fresh curds’, enjoying and taking pride in the femaleness of her body (IS: 188). Soon enough, however, she

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learns to feel shame and disgust towards her embodied self; she learns to regard her physical body as ‘foul, evil-smelling, like a heap of carrion attracting gross, buzzing flies’ (IS: 189). For Josephine, the fall from innocence comes when she learns to subjugate her own body to the masculine Word, which is imparted to her by her father, Ferdinand. His intense fear and disgust for female sexuality is revealed when he sends Josephine away after finding her drinking sherry and playfully discussing sex with her cousin Magdalena. In this silly, sensual teenage romp, Ferdinand sees sin and lasciviousness. His tipsy and giggling daughter becomes a ‘whore’, ‘drunk, half naked and in possession of a filthy book’ (IS: 51). After this scandal, Josephine is sent to a convent school, where she can be ‘controlled, chaperoned, and taught about God’ (IS: 52). This experience spurs deeper hatred towards her own corporeality; Josephine perceives herself as a ‘diseased lump of flesh’ that has been ‘cast aside’, and her ‘one desire [is] to bury herself ’ (IS: 62). Even her breath, she believes, is capable of corrupting others and breeding wickedness. This rampant shame is what ultimately leads her to the conclusion that to ‘annihilate her evil self ’ she must join a convent and embrace a life of ‘penance and mortification’; she must be ‘crushed, like apples in a press’ (IS: 63). At the convent, Josephine learns the art of self-effacement and the importance of unquestioned hierarchy; there, her life is marked by is ‘concealment, obscurity, humility’ (IS: 75). Despite this acquired disdain for her body and sexuality, Josephine cannot fully erase herself. She begins to experience conflicting desires: on the one hand, she desires to ‘become holy’ and obliterate her ‘old self ’; on the other hand, she longs to ‘remain Josephine’ (IS: 71). Even as she submits to certain acts of mortification, Josephine continues to experience God’s presence corporeally, in the form of a ‘powerful tingling across her shoulder blades’ (IS: 32). Ten years into her monastic life, she begins to receive powerful, tangible visions where Jesus appears at her bedside in a ‘blaze of light’ and envelops her in his arms (IS: 77). These unbidden visions draw attention to Josephine, including the unwelcome attention of church authorities. Emma Parker describes how Josephine’s spiritual mentors, Fathers Peter and Lucian, are ‘disturbed by the carnality of Josephine’s visions’ and ‘attempt to shift the locus of her relationship with God from her body to her mind by pressing her to analyze her visions’ (2006, p. 338). To deflect charges of suspected heresy, Josephine begins to write her first book, ‘under obedience’ to her male confessors (IS: 32). In composing this orthodox, official version of her Life, Josephine writes in a church-sanctioned language, deploying words and concepts that the Church Fathers had ‘designed’

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(IS: 33). She is careful to debase herself and affirm church authority through self-effacing terms. However, once she begins to analyse her visions through the lens of orthodoxy, at the behest of her male confessors, the visions cease. Parker suggests that this alludes to a God that ‘disapproves of the repression of the body’, and I would add that the interference of the Fathers also serves to expose how, in Western religious tradition, women’s knowledge of God must be mediated through male authority, which prevents them from conceiving and encountering the divine in their own right (2006, p. 338). The Word, which is denied to women, is an authoritative word, signifying God’s creative power and His absolute truth. As was explored in Chapter 3, the traditional concept of divinity enforces the hierarchical opposition of Man/Woman. A divine in the masculine guarantees a subjectivity in the masculine, as its ideal, and this subjectivity defines itself against the feminine. In other words, God signifies the perfection of man, and woman signifies what man is not. Under this model, women are barred from unmediated access to the divine, which is depicted in Roberts’ novel as Josephine is dissuaded from experiencing God directly, without mediation by male figures of authority. And as Josephine submits to this model, going deeper into a religious tradition that distrusts corporeal knowledge, especially in women, she ceases to experience any sense of the divine altogether. Several of the other saints’ stories in the novel also reinforce how women’s sexuality is seen as aberrant, a barrier to the divine. Thecla, for example, is able to cultivate a pleasurable, autonomous sexuality – until she begins a love affair with Saint Paul, a supreme authority figure in Christianity, who ultimately rejects her for a ‘fragile’ and ‘feminine’ woman, a woman who experiences pain rather than pleasure during sex (IS: 93). After this rejection, Thecla is no longer fulfilled by her sexuality, but experiences it as grotesque. She begins to perceive herself as an ‘insatiable monster’, ‘gross and huge’ – while at the same time utterly powerless, tiny enough to be ‘squashed under Paul’s foot’ (IS: 94). In her mind, she conflates Paul and God, describing Paul as the ‘voice of God thundering to his creature the universe’, while she remains ‘silent and speechless’ (IS: 94). This experience convinces her that there is a terrible flaw at the core of her being that only the ‘all-powerful’ Paul could have explained (IS: 94). The story ends with an image of fatal frigidity: the once-vibrant Thecla dead, frozen in an icy cave. The story of St Agnes exposes how a woman’s sexuality is tightly controlled, and how her virginity is the basis of her value. Agnes is a young virgin, who tames her ‘wild’ hair into long golden braids, as a ‘resplendent sign’ of her chastity

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(IS: 139–40). One night, Agnes is ‘summoned’ out of her bed by a ‘soft insistent drumbeat’ from a nearby bar (IS: 141). She lingers outside the bar, dancing to herself, until her drunken father stumbles out of the bar and, mistaking her for a whore, proceeds to accost her before realizing that she is his daughter. The next morning, at the command of her father, Agnes is stripped naked and her head is shorn, signalling her new status as ‘damaged goods’ (IS: 138).9 Agnes’ story underscores how autonomous female sexuality, however subdued, is seen as depraved; women can be only virgins or whores. Josephine’s story, as well as the stories of the other ‘impossible saints’, reveals that the traditional notion of sainthood and female carnality are diametrically opposed. The body is corrupt, an impediment to the divine, and perfection is attained by resisting, escaping, debasing the flesh. As Josephine’s niece Isabel muses, near the end of the novel: A saint is: what I am not. A saint is: over there. Not here. A saint is invisible, . . . she has run away out of sight, she hovers just ahead of me, the air trembles with her departure . . . . She is a woman who is dead. A saint is absence. Always somewhere else, not here. (IS: 273)

Sainthood, as traditionally conceived, entails a denial of humanity, of femaleness, of corporeality, of desire. Indeed, all of the stories in Impossible Saints end with the demise of the body, and often with its complete disappearance. This is the case with Josephine, as the novel begins at the end, with her dismemberment. Months after her death, according to the official legend, Josephine’s body is exhumed and discovered to be incorrupt, untouched by decomposition. Her body does not remain intact for long, however. Josephine’s right hand is cut off by Peter, her former confessor, and faithful pilgrims who flock to see Josephine’s body disguise bites as reverent kisses, departing with ‘little chunks of her flesh’ hidden inside their mouths (IS: 13–14). Eventually, Sister Maria, the new prioress of the convent, decides to sell the body as relics, and Josephine is dismembered into small parts: bit by bit, ‘they dismembered her. Jo. se. phine’ (IS: 4). In further efforts to establish Josephine’s sainthood, Maria abandons Josephine’s rule, denies all knowledge of her unorthodox writings, and champions the story of her transfiguration: ‘Of course she was a saint. Her Life makes that clear. And now her incorrupt body! All those relics!’ (IS: 269). In the end, Josephine’s body as well as her words are taken apart and buried beneath a Church-sanctioned narrative, in which Josephine is praised for being ‘amongst the most humble and self-effacing of her sex’ (IS: 308).

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Josephine’s bones, boiled clean by Maria, end up in a golden house, a chapel filled with the tangled bones of 11,000 unnamed women. Rodriguez, in her analysis, argues that the golden house is an example of female community: ‘The confusion and anonymity of their bones in the chapel help to emphasize the reader’s perception of the saints as having a collective identity’ (2006, p. 72). I would argue, however, that the mass tomb obliterates identity all together; in this ‘disorderly house full of dead women’, the names and lives of the individual women have been lost (IS: 1). This image of widespread female dismemberment frames the entire novel, as it begins and ends with glimpses into the golden house. And as certain critics, such as Sonia López and Patricia Rodriguez, have observed, the motif of bodily dismemberment is mirrored in the structure of the text itself. López notes that the ‘fragmented structure’ of Josephine’s story ‘rejects the order imposed by traditional historiography’, and further points out that ‘the ruptures and fragments of the text find their parallel in the disturbances the body is subjected to, particularly as Josephine is literally dismembered by the faithful’ (2001, p. 181). Rodriguez expounds on this notion, asserting that ‘the fragmented form of the novel itself . . . conveys a sense of fragmentation also supported by the accumulation of images of female physical dismemberment, which act as powerful metaphors for women’s fragmented identities in Christianity’ (2006, p. 77). Although both Impossible Saints and The Book of Mrs Noah recount the repression and fragmentation of the body within Christian thought and history, the critique does not end there. Both novels also contain narratives of more extreme violence towards the female body that go beyond mere subjection to annihilation. Roberts, in an interview, describes the ‘long tradition of women saints sometimes doing without food to transcend the body’, because ‘Catholicism taught you that the female body was somehow more corrupt and more evil than the male one and you had to rise above it to find God’ (Rodriguez 2003, p. 102). In Impossible Saints, this tradition is exemplified in the story of St Paula, which depicts how the Christian view of the female body can be taken to drastic extremes. St Paula is a widow who, after becoming a disciple of St Jerome, ‘learned to mortify her flesh’ and to ‘regret’ her past married life and enjoyment of sex (IS: 20). In this story, Jerome becomes the voice for Christianity’s tradition of degrading the body: . . . the more you dominate your senses and your desires, the more you ignore your body, the closer you will get to God! . . . Suffering and evil enter the world through

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the medium of the body, its cravings and desires. . . . How much happier we would be if we had no bodies and never wanted anything! (IS: 21)

Paula’s daughter, Blesilla, is initially resistant to the teachings of Jerome. She is a deeply sensual being, who prefers ‘life here and now’ to the distant promise of heaven; she takes pleasure in the ‘caress of silk and linen on her skin’, and ‘making love’ to her husband (IS: 22). After her husband’s death, however, the grief-stricken Blesilla starts to heed Jerome’s teachings. She begins to blame her own sexuality for her husband’s death, believing that her sexual drive had ‘worn him out’ (IS: 23). Little by little, Blesilla trades the ‘arts of love’ for the art of ‘self-abnegation’: ‘Instead of loving her body she fought it. Instead of desiring to be given pleasure she rooted out that desire and wished only for pain and punishment’ (IS: 24). Jerome praises her efforts, calling her ‘his female man of God’, and Blesilla’s asceticism soon spirals into a pathological fear of bodily nourishment (IS: 25). Food becomes ‘dangerous’, a hiding place for the devil and his temptations (IS: 27). In an effort to escape her body, to ‘transcend her hunger’, Blesilla starves herself to death; she withers away, until the woman she once was ‘completely vanished’ (IS: 27, 29). As Susan Sellers notes in her reading of Irigaray, ‘there is an irony in women’s attempt to redeem ourselves through chastity and suffering since the body is what we have been traditionally allocated: woman is flesh, nature, earth, carnality, in contradistinction to man’s intellect and spirit’ (2001, p. 67). Women are relegated to the realm of the body, which is gendered female and set in opposition to the transcendent, masculine realm of the divine. In order for women to encounter the divine in this oppositional, phallocentric model of the religious, their bodies must be sacrificed, as is portrayed in the story of Blesilla. Her body marks her as female, thus both her gender and corporeality must be suppressed in order to be redeemed in the eyes of God. Violent attempts to transcend the (female) body are also recounted in the nun’s story in The Book of Mrs Noah, which in many respects prefigures the story of Josephine in Impossible Saints. Like Josephine, the unnamed protagonist in this story is motherless and very close to her father, whom she initially conflates with God: ‘I see God as a doctor and philosopher . . . like my father’ (MN: 109). When her father decides to take a new wife, she feels a keen sense of betrayal, and receives her first vision of God, who comes to her as three male flagellants bearing scourges: ‘Little sister of the precious blood, they whisper: we will teach you the true ecstasy of the flesh, . . . the high song of pain. We will show you the strait [sic] and narrow way to perfection’ (MN: 111). The scourges of this

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sadistic, triune God send her into a ‘red spiral of agony’ (MN: 111). Shortly after this first vision, she joins a convent, which she sees as an ‘Ark’ full of women ‘sailing towards salvation’ (MN: 112). At first, the protagonist encounters God on this Ark as an unapproachable, red-robed figure with ‘four pairs of fiery red wings’ (MN: 112). For the most part, however, she experiences the acute absence of God, and drives herself to mortify her body, to find consolation through pain. Once a week, she scourges herself, and during this scourging her visions of the three flagellants return to assist her in self-mutilation. For five years, these visions continue, until she ceases to experience God at all: God slips away from me. I can no longer rise above my throbbing and tormented body into that high pure place where God flies gaily in the green sweet-smelling garden. I live only in my dreadful body. I punish it, through redoubled fasting and mortification. (MN: 113)

Like Blesilla, this nun violently tries to escape her femaleness and corporeality to reach God, and echoing Josephine, as she goes deeper into the life of the church, she becomes more alienated from both her body and the divine, believing that if she sufficiently punishes the former, she will be finally be able to access the latter. Unlike Blesilla, however, the nun does not punish her body to the point of death; her escalating self-mutilation marks a turning point in the story, when the protagonist’s sister, Joanna, enters the narrative and voices an alternative conception of the religious that does not set the female body and divinity in violent opposition. Joanna urges her sister to honour God with a ‘healthy life’ and body, affirming that loving God does not necessitate fearing the ‘body’s desires’ (MN: 117). Joanna’s visit, and her tidings of a religious perspective that attempts to undo soul/body dualism, allow her sister to experience a rebirth; she puts away her scourge and banishes the three flagellants, who never visit her again. The nun now perceives her sadistic theology in a newly negative light, as a force that ‘maims and rips’ the body ‘in the name of love’, thus ‘crush[ing] the spirit rather than freeing it’ (MN: 106). As the protagonist moves beyond this perspective, a renewed conception of the religious begins to emerge in the form of visions that evoke an entirely different experience of God, who is no longer transcendent from the body, but conceived within it. In the first of these visions, the heretical nun enters a womb-like basilica, ‘blown like a bubble in stone, rounded and airy, swelling upwards’ (MN: 122). In the embrace of this basilica, she can revel in spirit and body, by playing, praying, dancing and sleeping (MN: 122). Within the church/womb, she encounters God ‘quickening in this kiln of

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dark pink bricks’, and realizes that this ‘church is the woman’s body, where God begins’ (MN: 122). Her second vision reveals the soul as memory, as becoming, and inextricable from the body: My soul: a necessary word. . . . My soul simply holds my memory together, is the knot tying me into the dancing web of creation. Through my body I am part of the universe in its constant becoming and changing and dying and transformation . . . . (MN: 122–3)

Through these visions, central concepts within traditional religious discourse are completely recast. The female body, rather than anathema to divinity, becomes a place where divinity is engendered; a woman’s body is ‘where God begins’. The soul is now divine word, not the Word imposed by a masculine deity, but an incarnating word that enables becoming. Not only are the body and word reconceptualized, so is divine creation itself. Rather than a one-time occurrence at the Word of a masculine God, creation springs from the female body and is continual and incessant, ‘happening . . . unceasingly’ (MN: 123). This passage evokes the reconciliation of the female body with the divine word by presenting the body of woman as a site of divine becoming where a woman’s words for herself become incarnate. The nun’s story in The Book of Mrs Noah is a microcosm of what is occurring throughout these two novels: a harsh critique of the treatment of female corporeality in religious discourse, paired with renewed, emerging conceptions of the body and divinity that do not reject religion outright, but reveal the means of its redemption. As is starkly evident in the two works, despite the systematic exclusion of women’s experiences, a longing for religious renewal persists. The Forsaken Sibyl, arguably the most radical feminist aboard the Ark, finds herself drawn to religion despite herself: . . . when she’s by herself and safely invisible, she gets the urge to fall on her knees and pray. To something both inside her and outside her. . . . Of course she tells no one. Her friends would edge away, if she admitted to having religious experiences and desires. Yet she doesn’t want to . . . worship some sentimental icon of a lost Mother Goddess. . . . So she keeps quiet. (MN: 207–8)

Despite her awareness of how traditional religion oppresses and excludes women, Forsaken voices a longing for the religious, a desire to experience and connect with the divine. As a politically-motivated feminist, however, she is unsure how to engage with religion; her thoroughly secular friends would see her religious inclinations as wilful ignorance, a step backwards – and modish

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New Age paganism does not offer a feasible alternative. With no viable outlet for her desires, the Forsaken Sibyl remains silent, keeping her religious experiences bottled inside. By depicting this inner conflict, Roberts suggests that traditional religious discourse is not sufficient to express and satisfy the desires of women, but neither is the secular model that disregards any sense of the religious whatsoever. This echoes Irigaray’s assertion that religion cannot simply be rejected; it must be rethought, interpreted anew. Roberts’ novels do not merely express this inner conflict between religious criticism and religious desire; her novels point to a way out, by conceiving a religious dimension that would enable women to recast the relationship between body and Word, and thus become incarnate. Irigaray asserts that ‘putting myself in search of my word, my words, seems to be the first fidelity to a theology of incarnation’ (2004e, p. 151). In other words, the first step towards an incarnational vision of the religious is the reconciliation of the female body and the divine word – the relocation of creative agency from the Word of a masculine God to the divine bodies and wills of women. Language itself, particularly religious language, must be reclaimed, and women’s stories told and retold. And for each of these elements to unfold, it is also essential that women excavate an autonomous sacred space, where religious becoming can continually occur.

Incarnating new words As Roberts describes in her essay ‘The Flesh Made Word’, the traditional interpretation of the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation posits men as ‘the creators, the makers’, and women as mere empty vessels for the divine Word made flesh: Pictures of the male God’s sperm, disguised as a dove, shooting into Mary’s vagina, disguised as her ear, are very common. That was supposed to depict the Word being made flesh: the Logos substituted for the penis, becoming the phallus, and became fantastically important: what men said was correct and true; they were the creators, the makers. By sleight of hand, women were deprived of creative power and of speech. (1998, p. 41)

This passage underscores a primary contention of this chapter: the Word signifies divinity, language and creative power, and also genders these as masculine; therefore, putting women in a merely mediatory role debases the

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female body and deprives women of creative agency and a relationship with the divine. Roberts’ novels echo this reading of current religious discourse and corroborate the analyses of Irigaray, who asserts that, in order to undo the subjugation of the female body to the masculine Word, women must take ownership of both body and word, and through their own creative power, cultivate their incarnation.10 The character of Mrs Noah expresses this idea during one of her final trips ashore, when a painting of the Annunciation in a deserted chapel sparks a sudden epiphany. In the painting, the Virgin Mary is portrayed as a young girl, reading: Meditating on words, her half-shut eyes cast down, . . . she conceives other words; new words. She creates the Word inside herself, by herself, using her own power. . . . Then the alchemy: new words made out of old; new words she will offer others in her turn. . . . She is the Ark, the maker of the Word. . . . Meditating on the Old Testament, then discarding it, she will write a new text, with herself as the subject that speaks. (MN: 214–15)

This image and its interpretation exemplify the theology of incarnation reflected in both Roberts’ and Irigaray’s writings. First, Mary is transformed from a passive mediator to a creative subject. She is the author, the word-maker. As such, the Word(s) originates within her, through her own power. Recalling Irigaray, she creates her own words, rather than simply incubating the words of another. Thirdly, this linguistic act of creation is expressed as conception, occurring within and through the body. Mary is inspired from outside, but creates from within; she takes words and ideas inside of herself, where the ‘new words’ are born. Lastly, this ‘alchemy’ is explicitly revisionist alchemy: these new words do not spring ex nihilo, but are transfigured from the old. This need for transfigured language is echoed by the Babble-On Sibyl who, struggling to articulate her body and sexuality, describes her own search for new words. For her, the work of revision is communal, a process in which words are incarnated, exchanged and incarnated again. She sees revisionist use of language as a way of reaching out relationally to others, extending words that others will ‘understand, take in, recreate, give back to you’ (MN: 95). This communal discovery of new words and concepts that are continually (re)created through alliance, not opposition, does not advocate the creation of an entirely separate discourse, but is rather a coup from within existing discourse, a ‘sabotage’ of the ‘enemy’s language’ (MN: 95). The strategy of reinterpreting the words and concepts central to religious discourse, in order to accommodate a divinity and subjectivity in the feminine,

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is also found throughout Irigaray’s work. Much of her writing on the religious is marked by the use of paleonomy, as she reinterprets traditional religious concepts and narratives by deploying old words with refigured meanings. Irigaray’s work, in its (re)appropriation of key concepts such as divinity, incarnation, sin, grace, virginity and the religious, reflects the revisionist strategy advocated by Roberts in The Book of Mrs Noah.11 Adrienne Rich, in her celebrated essay ‘When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision’, likewise underscores the importance of revisionist reading and writing: Re-vision . . . is an act of survival. Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to selfknowledge, for woman, is more than a search for identity: it is part of her refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society. (1972, p. 18)

For women to be able to articulate a divinity and subjectivity in the feminine, revision of phallocentric assumptions in existing discourse is a necessity. In particular, women must reclaim the Word/words of religious discourse, and in order to do that, they must understand how they have been determined by the old words, which then must be transformed. Rich affirms that ‘nothing can be too sacred for the imagination . . . to call experimentally by another name. For writing is re-naming’ (1972, p. 23). Stagnant words and religious concepts that paralyse feminine becoming must be broken open and filled with renewed meaning. As Babble-On concludes, this entails the discovery and articulation of experiences that already exist, but remain unspoken in current discourse: ‘To invent simply means to find. What’s inside’ (MN: 95). In Roberts’ fiction, the work of revisionist writing is notably depicted as an embodied, incarnational process. The Forsaken Sibyl, who expresses a longing for creative agency, describes writing as a bridge between body and word, a means to incarnation: Writing is like meditation: you focus, concentrate on the breath going in and out of the body, accept the stream of images passing through. . . . Not only must you let yourself be a conduit for that flow of images moving from outside to inside and then out again . . .; you must translate it, anchor it in your own bodily existence. (MN: 208)

Here, the body is presented as essential to the writing process, as a ‘conduit’ between interiority and exteriority. The body, then, is what conceives and expresses the word, which in turn gives voice to and makes sense of embodied existence.

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The idea of writing as an incarnating act is also presented in Impossible Saints. Heather Walton, in her chapter on Roberts, concludes that the novel affirms ‘the impossibility of restoring the past and the limits of remembering’ and asserts that, ultimately, Josephine’s ‘words are lost; really lost’ (2007b, p. 85). I contend that Walton’s reading of Impossible Saints is unduly pessimistic, in that it fails to recognize the redemptive moments of Impossible Saints, when Josephine revels in words and incarnates herself through writing. After penning her first, orthodox autobiography, Josephine begins to conceive another Life. This alternate Life lurked between the pages of the first book, yet remained ‘glossed over’ and ‘shut up’, ‘breathing quietly under the surface of the prose’ (IS: 34). Twenty years later, Josephine finally gives voice to this second, secret Life, the silenced sister of her first book. Recalling Offred, Josephine finds space to record her hidden life at night; in the ‘darkness of her cell’, she writes this new autobiography ‘between the lines of the first’ (IS: 34–5). At last, Josephine is able to express the facets of her experience that have been silenced by the Church; she is able to conceive herself in her own words and reclaim creative agency. Allowing her body to break into her words, her writing becomes an ecstatic, corporeal act: These were the happiest moments in her life . . ., when currents of language poured through her, molten gold, when that feeling she called God, burned and shivered and danced up and down her spine. . . . Words fell on her and fed her like manna. (IS: 35)

When these suppressed words are finally allowed to break free, Josephine experiences a rebirth, a metamorphosis. She recasts the relationship between her body and language, abandoning her former mode of writing. Now, her written words enclose her body as a ‘golden cocoon’, in which she extinguishes her old life of self-censorship and self-mortification (IS: 35). From this cocoon, ‘out of herself ’, emerges an entirely new creature, a fearsome winged insect (IS: 36). She is born again – by her own creative, incarnational act. The composition of her second Life marks a turning point in Josephine’s spiritual journey, where she moves beyond Christian orthodoxy into a distinctly embodied sense of the religious. The language of these two novels evokes a reconciliation of body and word, as the writing itself articulates the sensual dimension of experience. In Mrs Noah, the Re-Vision Sibyl expresses her sensual religious experiences not only through writing, but also the art of cooking, which Roberts regards as ‘a very ancient traditional image for female creativity’ (Rodriguez 2003, p. 102). For the Re-Vision Sibyl, language is as ‘delicious as food, coming from outside her to

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inside’ (MN: 127). This movement echoes the Virgin Mary’s alchemical process, described earlier, which draws inspiration from the outside world into an interior space, where new words and ideas are born. Re-Vision does not only see/hear language; she tastes and touches words that ‘fascinate her’ and desires to ‘make them part of herself ’ (MN: 127). This parallel between food and words serves as a reminder that, for both eating and writing, the body is integral, an idea that also appears in Roberts’ non-fiction writing: I want to put in a word on food and its relationship to writing, because it matters to me. Writing is a physical act. . . . Writing feels like pulling something out of my insides; I’ve made it inside, now must draw it out, put it out. It’s painful or pleasurable, depending on how the work’s going, but it diminishes and empties me, I’ve lost part of myself, I become hungry. (1998b, pp. 199–200)

This connection between writing and nourishment, between language and hunger, recalls The Handmaid’s Tale, in which Offred expresses a deep-seated hunger to name herself through words, and that hunger is sated, briefly, when she is able to wield language. By linking writing and eating, Roberts underscores the corporeal nature of the act of writing; a woman’s words are not disembodied, but come from within the body and are expelled physically, an act that is both creative and physical, one requiring bodily nourishment. Similarly, as presented through the Re-Vision Sibyl, words themselves have sensual qualities, and writing feeds a physical desire much as food does. For women to nourish an embodied sense of self, they must be able to express that self through language. For Re-Vision, some words, in fact, contain enough sensual power to bring on jouissance, an ‘orgasm felt in the throat, fountain of sweetness overflowing’ (MN: 128). Mrs Noah, in her frequent narrations, also connects body and word through her parallels between books and food, reading and sex. At one point, she cooks an elaborate meal for her sibyls, illustrating her belief that ‘sensual’ treats spur creativity (MN: 102). By nurturing the physical self, rather than debasing and enslaving it, creative energy can be unleashed. On her Ark, in fact, ‘mind and body are not split’; the whole self is nourished through the consumption of food, as well as words and ideas (MN: 210). Like her comrade the Re-Vision Sibyl, and Atwood’s Offred, for Mrs Noah ‘books are food’; ‘reading is joy felt in the body’, eliciting the same pleasures as sex: ‘you hunger, you yearn, . . . you take it in. The body, the book’ (MN: 210, 244, emphasis mine). The sensuality of language and the parallels between words and food are also expressed in Impossible Saints. Though Josephine first learns about the Word from her father, her initial ecstatic encounters with words came from her

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mother’s collection of books, which are kept in an ornate chest. The ‘parcels of words’ hidden in that chest nourished Josephine’s young self: She imagined words lingering in the chest’s corners like husks of cardamom, gratings of nutmeg and mace. Words spilled like beads, that you could sift between your fingers. Words that stuck under your fingernails like tiny jewels and were scented and sharp. (IS: 42)

The act of reading evokes pleasure and desire within young Josephine; books are like ‘powerful caressing hands’, and reading makes her ‘insides turn over’ and brings ‘juices surging into her mouth’ (IS: 43). Later in the novel, Isabel expresses how words not only bring pleasure, but can induce bodily pain. For her, ‘words of censure’ are ‘like pins scratching and tearing her flesh’, and these sensations linger ‘like mosquito bites, itching and irritating [her] to the point of frenzy’ (IS: 235–6). Parker, in her article on pleasure in Roberts’ works, observes how she ‘revels in the sensuality of language’ (2006, p. 329). I certainly agree, and would add that she connects this sensuality to spirituality, by showing the influence religious language has on the body, particularly upon women’s bodies. Roberts makes explicit the fact that language acts upon the body and interprets the body in ways that can be either degenerative or transformative. She presents, through her detailed accounts of self-mutilation, the harm that results when the body is defined and articulated by dualistic, patriarchal religious discourse. She also, however, shows the transformative potential of a spirituality that embraces embodied experience and its creative expression. Josephine’s spiritual transformation culminates when she is at last able to recognize divinity, not only in her own body, but in the body of the earth itself: What was going on was this earth language, with Josephine now a part of its grammar . . . . She and the earth were the same body. The one body was both of them. Now she could see that the earth was alive, teeming with life, holding everything in a continuous dance, it was a vast memory swarming with past, present and future life, this was what God was, this profound understanding, in this untranslatable speech, that we were all made the same, part of each other. (IS: 190)

For Josephine, the creative energy of the divine is spoken through tangible, physical reality, and she is finally able to encounter that energy in its fullness, to speak and be spoken to by the Word. Corporeality, then, is revealed as the foundation of spirituality – not antithetical, but elemental to divinity.

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While elaborating the facets of Roberts’ incarnational religious revision, it is important to address the potential problems of emphasizing the corporeal dimension of female spirituality. As Heather Walton argues, Roberts’ vision of an ‘erotic, fleshly, earth-related, and ecstatic’ spirituality could be seen to ‘perpetuate binary and hierarchical understandings of masculine and feminine spheres rather than radically challenging our understandings of gendered identity’ (2007a, p. 555). This is a valid issue to raise, but I would argue that Roberts successfully recasts, rather than reinforces, traditional binaries. As Irigaray asserts in ‘The Redemption of Women’, in order to become divine, women must no longer consider themselves ‘as purely body, with only a natural capacity for engendering children’ (p. 151). At the same time, it is equally important that women not scorn their bodies and gender. As Irigaray puts it, woman should not be forced to ‘renounce’ (2004b, p. 167) who she is in order to encounter the divine. Revisionist writing, then, has to deal with the body, but in such a way that the body is transfigured beyond phallocentric concepts, and I would argue that Roberts’ work accomplishes this delicate task. In her fiction, women are not relegated to the realm of the body; rather, they gain access to language, divinity and creative power without having to escape or erase their femaleness. Most importantly, in Roberts’ work the female body is no longer devalued as an incubator and linked irrevocably to procreation. The body becomes the site and facilitator of autonomous creative action. In this way, Roberts does not perpetuate the traditional masculine and feminine realms, but merges them, successfully reconciling the divide between the (female) body and the Word.

Rejection, revision, renewal Another facet of an incarnational concept of the religious that is presented in these two novels is the need for women to not only tell their own stories, but to hear the stories of other women. As Susan Sellers notes in her reading of The Book of Mrs Noah, Roberts’ novel ‘indicates’: . . . that other women’s stories – whether they are those of forgotten saints or sibylline visions – offer women inspiration and models for the becoming we have been denied. The continual telling of these stories ensures that their mythos will not replicate patriarchy’s definitive and legislating account. (2001, p. 78)

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This is particularly true in religious contexts, as women, when allowed to enter the Christian narrative at all, play subordinate and passive roles, as epitomized by the Virgin Mary. The Forsaken Sibyl, who highlights the omnipresence of biblical mythology, also voices her awareness of something missing within the biblical narrative. She accuses the Gaffer of leaving gaps in his version of events, particularly in Genesis. In response, Mrs Noah and the sibyls decide to ‘fill in one of his gaps’ and rewrite the biblical myth of the Flood, with Noah’s (renamed Jack) wife as the protagonist (MN: 70). Under this new authorship, the events of the Flood, as well as the nature of God and the origins of written language are retold, with a woman and her corporeal experience of the divine in the foreground. As this retelling unfolds, two contrasting concepts of God quickly emerge. Jack (the Noah figure) worships a ‘mighty father in the sky’, who reveals his power through destructive forces, such as famines and plagues (MN: 72). This God is too transcendent to be seen by human eyes, and Jack’s wife, the unnamed protagonist of the story, pictures Jack’s God as frightening and vengeful, poised to throw ‘thunderbolts’ (MN: 73). She, in contrast, has a radically different and deeply immanent experience of the divine; the divine is not transcendent from the human realm, but encountered in ordinary, embodied existence, through the senses. Unlike Jack, she meets God in the realm of the ‘ordinary’; her God is not a deity wholly separate from herself, but is ‘all over the place’, a presence that she stumbles into ‘at the oddest times’ (MN: 73). The most striking difference between these two Gods is the location of creative agency. Jack, on the one hand, plays the role of an obedient messenger to his God, transmitting divine commands to his wife and children. Jack’s wife, in contrast, is the actor in her relationship with God; she is the creator impelled by divine energy that infuses her actions: ‘God is in my hands as they . . . knead, scour, caress, sew, carve. I act, I create, and God pours through me’ (MN: 72). Throughout this account of the Flood, Jack’s wife anticipates the commands of Jack’s God. She has a dream of the earth as a woman giving birth, whose waters break as a massive flood. After hearing her dream, Jack goes to speak with his God, only to return bearing news of an impending, disastrous deluge. Inspired by another dream, Jack’s wife comes up with the idea of a floating house, a buoyant shelter that could save them from the coming storm. Jack, the next day, announces God’s command to build an Ark. Once the rain begins and the rainbow appears, Jack’s wife sees it as a sign of safety from her God, and Jack

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predictably brings word that the rainbow is a sign of God’s paternal protection. These exchanges highlight the forces of appropriation and misinterpretation that have subsumed the dreams and desires of women into a distinctly male-centred religious paradigm. Perhaps the biggest misinterpretation is the nature of the Flood itself. For Jack, the Flood is retribution, the cleansing water of God’s wrath that will scour the earth of depravity. Jack’s wife, however, does not see the Flood as punishment for the wicked, or herself as one of God’s chosen; she mourns for her lost friends. For her, the Flood is a rebirth, a renewal – a destruction that brings with it the hope of a new life. In her narrative, in fact, they remain in the Ark for a total of nine months before they are borne/birthed onto dry land. This post-Flood world offers Jack’s wife the opportunity to form a different world, a world of her ‘own choosing’ (MN: 82). This world is one of choice and flexibility, one that welcomes and accommodates continual change. She no longer submits blindly to her role of a wife and reproaches the new directive from Jack’s God to dominate nature and all other living creatures. Rather than subduing the earth, she decides to rename it; she begins to ‘wrestle with words’, to find new ways of expressing her understanding of God and creation. She finds this process of renaming as joyful, intoxicating, worshipful – yet also tinged with mourning, because the ‘renaming’ necessitates the contemplation of what she has ‘lost’ (MN: 86). This need for renaming affirms the notion of language as a vehicle for the divine. If our language reflects hierarchy, inequality and violence, God becomes a God of oppression. To reconceive God, new names, new words must be chosen. As Sellers notes, in Roberts’ fiction, ‘God is consequently an immanent reality . . . and manifest in our endeavours to make and remake the world’ (2001, p. 78). In the original biblical narrative, of course, only one God is presented: the masculine, authoritarian Father-God of Noah, and Noah’s wife has no voice at all. Through this retelling, the sibyls suffuse an old story with new meaning, meaning that expresses and affirms their distinct experiences of divinity. This revisionist act has a twofold impact by both challenging the authority of the existing narrative and offering a renewed interpretation. The story of Jack’s wife ends with her discovery of writing. Out of clay, she forms tangible symbols that reflect the meaning and form of a spoken word. She shares this discovery with her daughter-in-law, Sara, as a gift that will endure beyond her death and can be passed down to her daughter’s daughters. This gift of writing offers the promise of ongoing female connection, and the means to reclaim and rewrite the stories of our foremothers. This vision of collective, connective story-telling, as well as the symbol of the rainbow, is revisited at the

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end of The Book of Mrs Noah, when Mrs Noah encounters a group of women writers from throughout history who have been buried and unknown, ‘whose names [she has] not been allowed to know’ (MN: 271). She realizes that, in her flood story, the rainbow is a ‘rope of stories’ connecting her with all these women, and that she must add her own story; she must add ‘the colour that’s missing’ (MN: 274). As Heather Ingman notes, the art of storytelling serves as a means to redeem what is excluded in Christian discourse, ‘namely, bonds between women and between women and nature, the female body, female autonomy and creativity’ (2004, p. 158). The writing and rewriting of stories facilitates the development of a distinctly incarnational vision of the religious. In order for this development, this incarnation, to take place, each woman must be able to locate and cultivate her own autonomous sacred space. As Roberts writes in ‘The Flesh Made Word’: ‘We are our bodies and what is sacred is our capacity to make symbols of our bodily life. The numinous consists not in looking upwards, denying our bodily existence, but looking outwards and inwards, rejoicing in it, celebrating it’ (1998a, p. 40). This process of revisionist symbol-making requires that women cultivate an interior sacred space, where new words and symbols are conceived, as well as an outward, Woolfian space of one’s own where these symbols can be made manifest.12 The need for a sacred space – an inward space as well as an outward space – is emphasized in each of Roberts’ novels, and this space is often presented as situated both within and surrounding the body. In The Book of Mrs Noah, the most prominent sacred space is the Ark itself, which Mrs Noah imagines into existence as a communal refuge for outcast women that will allow them to cultivate their creativity. At the end of the novel, the Ark is conflated with the body; it is simultaneously ‘the house of words’ and the body, ‘the bone-house’ (MN: 273–4). Mrs Noah’s quest for alternate words and renewed religious meaning ultimately leads back to herself; she realizes that this room of her own that she seeks is within her, and this ark/body is where ‘creation’ begins (MN: 274). Body and word are fully reconciled through the symbol of the Ark, as the capacities for creativity and language are located within the body itself. While aboard the Ark, each sibyl also carves out her own sacred space, a space that sparks the creative process and allows each woman to overcome her writer’s block. Sellers, reading Irigaray, asserts that ‘one of the problems women face is that we lack a space for self-contemplation in which we can limit our exposure to the defining gaze of the other’ (2001, p. 65). These spaces created by the sibyls, like the Ark itself, are spaces for self-contemplation; they are both

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internal and external, rooms that surround the body while opening an interior creative space. The Deftly Sibyl, who was unable to write while living in her husband’s space, creates an infirmary. Under the guise of illness, she sequesters herself and finds the power rest alone with herself and ‘be still’ (MN: 61). Here, at last, she is able to write, to reignite the ‘deepest pleasure’ of creative inspiration, the ‘certainty that the words are there, hidden underwater, and will come when she calls’ (MN: 62). The Babble-On Sibyl invents a decadent boudoir where she confronts her inability to express her sexuality. After cutting off her long hair as a symbol of her newfound autonomy, she begins to write (MN: 94). The Re-Vision Sibyl finds creative space in a kitchen, where she feeds her body with food and words, and the Correct Sibyl creates a wardrobe that enables her to try on, and confront, alternate identities (MN: 126, 172). The Forsaken Sibyl voices an acute longing for creative space where she can perform ‘her own sacred rites’ (MN: 207). To fill this need, aboard the Ark she conjures a ‘circular garden’ that is both ‘enclosure and wilderness’ (MN: 205–6). Within this garden, she is able to express the religious desires and experiences she otherwise conceals. For all six women, the formation of an external autonomous space enables them to locate an internal sacred space where creativity and divinity are cultivated. The need for sacred spaces both within and beyond the body is also a prominent theme in Impossible Saints. As Josephine grows increasingly dissatisfied with convent life, what she once experienced as a holy, communal space to encounter God becomes a ‘dumping-ground for spinsters’, who, for various reasons, have failed to fulfil the roles of wife and mother and ‘had no say in their destiny’ (IS: 102). This convent, far from being an autonomous sacred space, does not cultivate creativity but unrelenting ennui. Josephine, spiritually constrained and creatively uninspired, fantasizes about being a ‘one of those desert saints who . . . were left alone, surly and silent, to get on with their own work, praying or writing or whatever it might be’ (IS: 104). Josephine’s desire for religious and creative autonomy begins to manifest at night, while she is asleep. She dreams of a house, a house she is desperately trying to find, but it is ‘always somewhere else. . . . Invisible. Beckoning’ (IS: 125). Recalling Mrs Noah, who embarked on a long journey to find what was always within her, Josephine is convinced that if she could find the house, the ‘restless wandering of her heart’ would cease, and when her dreams do allow her to enter the house, she realizes that it has indeed been with her ‘all these years. Extremely close’ (IS: 125–6). Josephine decides to pursue this ‘living house’, to draw it out of her dreams (IS: 126). She leaves the convent to stay with her cousin Magdalena, and resolves to begin writing the second,

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unauthorized book, to locate her own words for herself. After taking these steps towards autonomy, after losing her faith in Catholicism and discovering a faith all her own, Josephine is able to design her house, an autonomous sacred space that reconciles the divine and corporeal worlds. This house is ‘a double house, looking two ways’, with an entrance on each side (IS: 192). One door would lead to a convent ‘where God manifest[s] in sensual joy’, and each woman could establish her own schedule, her desired blend of community and solitude, and pursue her own chosen vocation (IS: 193–4). In this communal and sensual convent, a kitchen would replace the chapel and altar, where a shared meal would take the place of mass. The other door of the house would lead to the kind of life excluded by traditional monasticism, the ‘convivial, social, chatty, sexual, dancing and feasting life’ (IS: 194). Josephine’s design for her convent accommodates the development of the vibrant, inner spiritual life as well as the outward communal life. Initially, life in Josephine’s convent would require strict secrecy. Each woman would have to live a ‘double life’ and conceal the existence of her house’s other half (IS: 192). She retains the word convent because it conveys that entering this sacred space entails giving oneself ‘completely to the life within’ (IS: 192–3). Josephine’s double-faced house symbolizes the reconciliation of the inner life and outer life, the corporeal and the divine. Roberts offers a parallel symbol for this reconciliation in ‘The Flesh Made Word’ when she describes Piero della Francesca’s painting Madonna del Parto: Piero’s Madonna fuses and reintegrates the physical and the divine: her swelling body is both the image of fertility, fecundity, hope and faith in the future; and also the symbol of the body as interior space, the site of the imagination, God’s dark pavilion . . . . She tells us that the interior life matters, and can be mapped on to the exterior word. The angels exist both inside and outside her. Here’s an end to that traditional splitting between inside world – female – and outside world – male. . . . She moves between the conscious and unconscious domains, and links them. Bringing God into the light of day, she demonstrates to us how we can find God in darkness, in our own unconscious. (1998a, p. 42)

Like this painting, Roberts’ depiction of Josephine’s house represents a union of the inside world and the outside world, of women’s interiority and exteriority, as described in the passage above. This house links ‘that experience of blissful “inner” connectedness with the “outside” world, the universe’ (Roberts 1998a, p. 44); it symbolizes a space within which women can cultivate their own becoming, a space that enables them to form a relationship with the infinite, while maintaining a connection to the finite world of the flesh. This house

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bridges the oppositional schisms of religious discourse that keep women from conceiving and articulating a subjectivity in the feminine. As Sellers notes, ‘echoing Irigaray’s insistence that becoming is never complete but is always in gestation, Josephine foresees that each inmate of the house will pass backwards and forwards between the two sides, as her needs and predilections dictate’ (2001, p. 68). The fact that the inner portion of the house must be kept secret signifies that, at a fundamental level, women’s inner lives have no viable outlet in current religious discourse and remain unexpressed. I would also argue that Josephine’s double house reflects a go-between connecting the sacred and the secular realms, suggesting that these realms, at a fundamental level, are still incommensurable in traditional Christian discourse. But Josephine saw this secrecy, this division as temporary – a necessary transition towards a religious that does not separate the sacred and secular, the inner and outer lives: ‘In time, Josephine prophesied: the existence of the other side of the house will be able to be revealed. The double house will not need to be kept a secret for ever’ (IS: 196).

Conclusion Roberts’ fiction evokes a complex and ambivalent relationship with traditional Christianity. Inarguably, there are elements of Christian discourse that Roberts completely deconstructs, namely the pervasive sexism that taints Christian theology and history, as well as ‘its deeply-rooted ideology regarding the body and sexuality’ (Rodriguez 2006, p. 73). In her analysis, Sonia López groups Roberts with those ‘female innovators’ who ‘do not reject tradition’, but rather ‘assimilate the canon in order to revisit it’ (2001, p. 177). Ultimately, however, López concludes that Impossible Saints ‘consciously works to dissociate itself . . . from the religious doctrine of Christianity’ and ends ‘without providing definite answers to the conflicts raised’ (2001, pp. 185–6). While I agree that there is some ambiguity and ambivalence in the conclusion of this novel, I also see two crucial moments of redemption that seem to gesture towards renewal and revision, rather than complete dissociation. At one point in Impossible Saints, while taking her leave from the convent life, Josephine visits the cathedral of her girlhood and has an unexpected encounter with a God she had forgotten. She experiences this God sensually, as a ‘shiver across her shoulder-blades’ that builds into a ‘molten intensity which poured through her until she felt she would rise into the air’ (IS: 183). This God ‘was not Father, not Lord and King’, but ‘blackness,

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darkness, sweetness, limited to no one shape but part of everything’ (IS: 182). The cathedral itself is expressed as the ‘body of God, a great heart beating in darkness, a rounded interior in which you curled up, carried by God’ (IS: 182). Rather than being inimical to an experience of the divine, the cathedral enables an encounter between Josephine and her immanent, sensual God. The fact that this encounter occurs in a Christian space, while exceeding traditional Christian concepts of God, presents the possibility that certain facets of Christian tradition could facilitate a radically different experience of the divine. In addition, the last saint’s story in the novel is the tale of St Mary of Egypt, a woman who teaches a clergyman the pleasures of the body. This is the only story in the novel that does not end tragically, but rather presents a happy, longlasting union between a preacher and a promiscuous woman. Where the rest of the hagiographies in Impossible Saints depict women being marginalized, damaged, even killed in the name of religion, this story is one of reconciliation, in which the figure of church authority, the priest, is enlightened and awakened by a sexually autonomous woman. For the first time in his life, he experiences the joys of the flesh and becomes a new man, leaving his pious ways for a love affair that endures to the grave. This positive depiction of a love relation between sensuality and religion is the last hagiography presented in Impossible Saints and expresses a guarded hope that certain religious elements can be transformed and reconciled with embodied, sensual, female experience. The above two examples, along with the description of the double-faced convent that one day will not have to be hidden, present the possibility of an incarnational concept of the religious that draws meaning from tradition, while simultaneously exceeding and refiguring it. The hopeful ambivalence towards religion in Impossible Saints also appears in Mrs Noah, with added emphasis. During her spiritual journey aboard the Ark, Mrs Noah recasts the significance of the rainbow from the original myth of Noah’s Ark: . . . the rainbow signifies the rebirth of humanity. Not just once, . . . but over and over again. . . . renewal has to be achieved repeatedly, by each of us, by each community. The divine child has to be born, with labour and struggle, in each of us. (MN: 101)

Here, Roberts gives an explicit call for the continual revision and renewal of religious discourse. Divinity is not something that was incarnated only once in Christ, but something that must be incarnated again and again in each

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individual.13 Rather than concluding that traditional Christianity is utterly devoid of meaning, both novels point towards the work of revision, and in the above quote, this becomes an ethical imperative that must occur at individual and collective levels. Among the critics who recognize the revisionist work in Roberts’ fiction, there is some debate concerning the merits of revision. Heather Walton suggests that Impossible Saints reveals the limits of revisionist writing, as the reader is ‘confronted with the bleak awareness that the revisionist writer is calling up shadows and spectres from the past. She is unable to breathe life into dry bones’ (2007a, p. 554). I would disagree with Walton’s conclusion here, and argue that the recurrent dismemberment and obliteration of female saints in Roberts’ novel highlights the ways in which women are erased in Christian history and tradition. Granted, the past cannot be written anew, but the future can. In Impossible Saints, Josephine’s second, secret life comes alive through the creative, reconstructive act of her niece Isabel, who, in the last chapter, is revealed to be the narrator of Josephine’s story; the Josephine we encounter is a resurrected, reinterpreted Josephine. Ultimately, I would argue, Isabel is able to breathe life into Josephine’s dry bones. Susan Sellers, in her work on myth in contemporary women’s fiction, argues that Roberts’ novels deconstruct the myth of a male Father-God in order to ‘inaugurate a new and more enabling mythology’ (2001, p. 78). Reading Irigaray, Sellers asserts that the establishment of female divinity ‘must not derive exclusively from our criticism of or opposition to the prevailing order but must involve the incarnation of new values’ (2001, p. 73). I agree with Sellers’ analyses, and would add that Irigaray’s recent work expounds on this balance between rejection and renewal that is evoked in Roberts’ fiction. In ‘Fulfilling Our Humanity’, Irigaray asserts that the ‘spiritual task’ of our age is to ‘pursue human becoming to its divine fulfilment’, to not merely ‘submit to already-established truths, dogmas and rites, but to search for the way of a human flourishing still to come’ (2004c, p. 186). For Irigaray, blind submission to existing religious discourse is a ‘nonreligious gesture’ that ‘paralyzes becoming’ (2004c, p. 188). At the same time, however, Irigaray contends that complete rejection of the religious dimension and the traditions that shape us ignores their influence on our subjectivity. She advocates instead a balance between conservation and creation, a mode of religious becoming that questions the past and retains what is valuable in order to progress beyond it, towards a more meaningful and incarnational spirituality. I would argue that Roberts’ work aligns with this perspective by being situated

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in relation to Christianity, while at the same time exceeding its boundaries. Both Impossible Saints and The Book of Mrs Noah resoundingly reject the concept of a transcendent Father God, yet nonetheless affirm the need for women to cultivate an incarnational relationship with the divine. Though Roberts’ novels are critical of Christianity, they point towards a middle ground where certain elements of Christianity are retained and revised, rather than blindly accepted or rejected outright.

Notes 1 In this interview, Roberts discusses the influence that Jungian thought has had on her religious views, and her belief that ‘God’s in the unconscious. That’s where I think God is. In the darkness, as a mystery and it’s not a gendered God, it’s the unconscious, it’s the not knowing, it could be in the writing of a poem’ (2008b, p. 22). Roberts also reveals that her work is influenced by French feminist theory, including Luce Irigaray’s, through which she discovered ‘a kind of project to look at language, and investigate language, and remake language’ and to know that she ‘wasn’t alone’ in her revisionist efforts (2008b, p. 16). For more on Roberts’ nontheistic religious perspectives and her interaction with Irigaray’s work, see this interview in its entirety. 2 This book reveals that there is, in fact, wide-ranging interest in religion among contemporary women writers, though Roberts certainly stands out among them, as her entire oeuvre from the 1970s to the present has engaged with spiritual themes from a feminist perspective. For more on Ingman, see Chapter 2. 3 All references to these two novels in this chapter are from the following editions: The Book of Mrs Noah (London: Minerva, 1994), and Impossible Saints (London: Quality Paperbacks Direct, 1997). For those familiar with Roberts’ fiction, her novel The Wild Girl (republished in 2007 as The Gospel of Mary Magdalene) might seem to be conspicuously absent in this chapter. Though the novel certainly exhibits an incarnational perspective on the religious, it focuses more explicitly on the connection between eroticism and divinity, rather than on language, body and divinity, the theme of this chapter. 4 Deftly, for example, reflects on the rules and images of her upbringing in convent school (MN: 58); Forsaken voices the omnipresence of the Bible and her struggles to express her nascent religious experiences (MN: 69, 207–8); Babble-On remarks how her barrenness is mirrored by the cold, dead space of the church, which no longer holds meaning for her (MN: 28); Correct muses about the masculinity of God and the language of the Christian creeds (MN: 191); Re-Vision critiques how

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Irigaray, Incarnation and Contemporary Women’s Fiction Christianity suppresses and excludes the female body (MN: 26–7). Furthermore, throughout the entire novel, all five sibyls and Mrs Noah debate with the Gaffer, who personifies the Word of God. It is important to note that, in Marine Lover, Irigaray is not asserting that the figure of Mary is inherently a figure of self-subjugation. Rather, she is critiquing how the story of the Annunciation has been traditionally interpreted in a way that reduces Mary to a purely submissive, intermediary figure, one that is then imposed upon women as an ideal of self-surrender. In her essay ‘The Redemption of Women’, Irigaray offers a revisionist reading of the Annunciation that interprets Mary’s virginity as the cultivation of her own interiority. In Irigaray’s re-reading, Mary’s assent to God is simultaneously an assent to her own development as a subject. The Golden Legend, a medieval book of saints’ lives, was compiled in 1260 by Jacobus de Voragine and remains one of the most prominent pieces of hagiographical literature. For a recent edition, see The Golden Legend: Selections (1998). For a detailed analysis of how maternal myths function in these two novels, see Sellers, Myth and Fairy Tale in Contemporary Women’s Fiction (2001) and King, Rewriting the Word: Contemporary Women Novelists and the Bible (2000). The conflation of God/Father is further underscored in this novel when Josephine’s faith in God dies after the death of her father. For more about how the virgin archetype functions in Roberts’ novels, see Rowland. See Irigaray (2004e, p. 151). For more on Irigaray’s reinterpretation of these words, see ‘The Redemption of Women’, ‘The Age of the Breath’, ‘Spiritual Tasks for Our Age’ and ‘Fulfilling Our Humanity’ in Key Writings (2004, pp. 145–94). See also the introduction and Chapter 1 of this book. Sellers makes a similar parallel between Woolf ’s ‘room of one’s own’ and Roberts’ work (2001, p. 77). This idea is also expressed in Roberts’ non-fiction, where she builds upon the doctrine of Christ’s incarnation to suggest that the divine is incarnated in each individual: ‘God’s come down from the sky and become part of us. The Christian myth takes us so far and no further. . . . I’ve now ended up wondering whether God isn’t inside everybody, not just Jesus Christ. We don’t know, most of us, that we’ve got God inside us. We don’t dare imagine it. (1998a, p. 40).

5

‘Sucked into the Black Cloth’: Religion, Race and Sexual Shame in Alice Walker’s By the Light of My Father’s Smile

Alice Walker’s writing consistently explores the influence of religion, both in her own life and, more broadly, in contemporary Western culture. Walker describes herself as imprinted by Christianity as a child, and though she feels ‘immense sorrow over the way enforced Christianity, the white-supremacist version, wrecked and ruined [her] people’s innate spiritual integrity’, she nonetheless finds meaning in the ‘Christ spirit’ as a ‘love of humanity’ and a ‘love of what is compassionate and just’ (2006, pp. 118–19). Though Walker’s spirituality resists a unifying label, she has described herself as a ‘born-again pagan’ (1996, p. 25) reconnecting with African and Native American roots that emphasize communion with Nature rather than a distant, transcendent God. Walker is typically credited with coining the term and concept of womanism as an alternative to feminism, which too often privileges the interrogation of gender difference over other forms of difference, such as race.1 In her wellknown collection of essays In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens (1983), Walker offers a definition of womanism in the preface, wherein she describes a ‘womanist’ as ‘a black feminist or feminist of color’ who is ‘committed to the survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female’ (xi). According to Cynthia Cole Robinson, womanism is primarily concerned with ‘liberation from all types of oppression for African-American women’, but it also ‘expands the field of black feminism’ (2009, p. 307) by locating its purpose in combating all forms of oppression, not merely the oppression of women. Walker’s definition also draws a connection between womanism and spirituality, as she defines a womanist as a woman who ‘loves the Spirit’ and ‘loves herself ’ (1983, p. xii). The inclusion of a woman who ‘loves the Spirit’ in Walker’s definition places spirituality as an integral part of womanism, and this concept of ‘spirit’

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has been explored and interpreted in myriad ways by womanist theologians, as will be discussed later in this chapter. Walker’s distinctive vision of the religious is not revealed only in her nonfiction works; in fact, her fiction often provides a means to flesh out her ‘theology’ in greater depth. Discussing her most famous work, The Colour Purple (1982), Walker writes how this novel enabled her ‘to understand and to offer a new gospel, The Gospel According to Shug’ (2006, p. 133).2 Rather than elucidating this ‘gospel’ in an abstract or theological treatise, Walker chose to use the medium of fiction, of story – a choice that is examined throughout this chapter. In one of her most recent novels, By the Light of My Father’s Smile (1998), Alice Walker continues to explore, but with greater intensity, key themes found in her earlier and more famous works – namely the relationship between fathers and daughters, the connection between sexuality and spirituality and how these two relations have been (mis)articulated in Western religious discourse.3 What sets this novel apart from her earlier works, however, is Walker’s nuanced characterization of the African American patriarch and her direct confrontation of religious sexual taboos. In frank detail, Walker depicts the destructive influence of Western religious imperialism by showing it as a source of debilitating sexual shame. By focusing on the father-daughter bond and highlighting the father’s central role in transmitting and enforcing religious values, Walker explores the inter-subjective nature of shame, suggesting that progress beyond shame can only be made when both self and other are transformed.

Religion as an imperialist force Despite the fact that By the Light of My Father’s Smile shares themes present in Walker’s acclaimed and Pulitzer-winning novel The Colour Purple, critics have largely panned or entirely ignored the later novel. Some of the more scathing responses have come from Richard Bernstein, Francine Prose and Wendy Shalit. In his review for The New York Times, Bernstein characterizes Walker’s work since The Colour Purple as ‘a mannered and tendentious litany of New Age clichés’, and dismisses By the Light of My Father’s Smile as ‘limp, new-age nonsense’ (1998). Prose, also writing for The New York Times, similarly labels the novel as ‘New Age hocus pocus and goddess religion baloney’ (1998). Shalit’s review (1999) echoes these sentiments, but with more indignation than condescension; she compares Alice Walker to pornographer Larry Flynt and reads By the Light of My Father’s

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Smile as an exploration, even an affirmation, of incestuous desire. Maria Lauret offers a more measured account of Alice Walker’s later works in her book on Walker, though she also describes the ‘controversial’ recent novels as full of ‘new age philosophy’ and what some see as ‘crackpot ideas’ (2000, pp. 3, 12–13). She does, however, defend Walker’s work from its harshest critics, while at the same time acknowledging what she sees as its shortcomings: When Walker is dismissed as an ideologue whose work is a mere vehicle for leftist, racially divisive, feminist or wacky New Age ideas, the significance of that work as art and as political/cultural/spiritual intervention is diminished or misrecognized. But this does not mean that it does not misfire, at times, on one, the other, or both fronts. (2000, p. 196)

Aside from these largely negative reviews, By the Light of My Father’s Smile has received little attention from critics. Lauret is one exception, as she includes a short postscript on the novel in her book, and a 2002 article by Ozlem Gorey offers a psychoanalytic reading of the novel. Gerri Bates’ Alice Walker: A Critical Companion (2005) includes an extensive bibliography of Alice Walker criticism, featuring literally hundreds of sources, but does not list a single source exclusively on By the Light of My Father’s Smile. It is my contention, however, that this novel has been unjustly overlooked and disparaged, and that Walker’s complex post-Christian spirituality has been dismissively mislabelled ‘new age’.4 Far from being ‘limp’ new age tripe that disparages men and affirms incestuous desire, By the Light of My Father’s Smile takes a direct and uncensored look at the role of the father in a woman’s development as a sexual and spiritual being and openly interrogates Western religious taboos surrounding female sexuality. In writing an explicit account of shame and its effects within the complex nexus of sexism and racism experienced by African American women, Walker connects women’s sexual shame to the forces of Western religion and imperialism, while also illuminating ways of rethinking religion that empower, rather than degrade, women of colour. In this novel, Walker continues the pattern of expressing her own conception of the religious through fiction, one that celebrates eroticism and reconciles the divide between body and spirit. By the Light of My Father’s Smile recounts the story of the Robinson family, who live as Christian missionaries among the Mundo people, a mixed-race tribe of African and Indian descent in Mexico. The father, whose first name is never given, and his wife, Langley, have two daughters, Magdalena and Susannah, and

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their allegorical names reflect how they are perceived by their father. Magdalena, of course, is an allusion to Mary Magdalene, who has been conflated in Christian tradition with the prostitute of the Gospels who washes Christ’s feet with her hair.5 Susannah alludes to the apocryphal account of the chaste Susanna in the Book of Daniel.6 In their father’s mind, reflecting these namesakes, the two sisters embody the virgin/whore dichotomy: Magdalena is seen by her father as sexually voracious and promiscuous, while Susannah is ostensibly chaste and virtuous. Robinson is unable to cope with his eldest headstrong and sexually curious daughter, who eventually has a sexual encounter with a Mundo boy, Manuelito. Robinson, after his daughter’s so-called transgression, reacts with violence and beats her with a leather belt decorated with silver discs, a gift from Manuelito. The entire novel centres on this act of violence and traces its effects in the lives of the Robinson family. The impact of this trauma on Magdalena and Susannah will be discussed in detail later; what I would like to explore here is Walker’s complex portrayal of Robinson as a victim of religious imperialism whose intrinsic love for women is perverted into abusive patriarchy. In an interview from early in her career, Walker expresses her interest ‘in Christianity as an imperialist tool’, a theme she continually explores through her fiction and one that features prominently in By the Light of My Father’s Smile (Walker 1983, p. 266). Though Walker is concerned with the fate of her people as a whole, in this novel she explores the oppressive, even violent, effects of religion on individuals – particularly upon African American women. As Wirba Mainimo writes in her article on Walker’s religious perspectives, black women experience a ‘triple consciousness’ (2002, p. 122) as women, as black and as black women – a consciousness that distinguishes them from white women, and from both white and black men. Though Walker is certainly concerned with sexism and the experiences of women under patriarchy, this is never separated from concerns about racist and imperialist oppression. Mainimo asserts that in Walker’s novel The Temple of My Familiar (1989), ‘Walker reinforces her firm conviction that racism, sexism and sexual and economic exploitation – all bogeys of black women the world over – are deeply entrenched in the modern Christian religion’ (2002, p. 128), and I would argue that the same can be said for By the Light of My Father’s Smile. Although Walker’s womanism and her ‘literary gospels’ have empowered and inspired black female theologians within Christianity, as Arisika Razak notes, ‘Walker’s spiritual vision stands outside mainstream Christian religious beliefs’ and ‘indicts the Euro-American Church for its racism and colonizing role’, as well as ‘the African American Christian Church for its

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sexism’ (2009, p. 93). I agree that, though her background is Christian, Walker situates herself in an often-critical stance outside of Christianity and portrays sexism, racism and sexual repression as rooted in traditional Euro-American Christianity. I would also further argue that, in By the Light of My Father’s Smile, Walker portrays sexism within African American Christianity as an inheritance of Western religious imperialism. Robinson and his wife are anthropologists, but as African Americans in the mid-twentieth century, they are unable to get funding for their research. Instead, they have to rely on church funding, ‘as black people always do when all other sources of sustenance fail’ (FS: 14). Although they are agnostics, Robinson is sent to be a ‘spiritual advisor’ to the Mundo, and his wife has to play the part of a preacher’s wife (FS: 14). Their roles as Christian missionaries begin, then, as a mere front for anthropological study, but for Robinson this ruse soon becomes real. He falls quickly into the role of preacher; instead of observing and attempting to understand Mundo culture, he begins to enforce Christian mores and eventually even ‘elevate[s]’ himself to the role of a priest (FS: 29). Mundo hymns, which express the idea of unity with creation, are banned from the church, while Christian hymns, such as ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’, are translated into the Mundo language. Magdalena’s wild spirit and frank curiosity about sex greatly trouble Robinson, who feels compelled to ‘tame’ his eldest daughter (FS:  18). The Mundo embrace and honour her wildness, giving her the moniker Mad Dog, which Robinson decides is unfitting for a priest’s daughter (FS: 19). Later, as adults, Magdalena and Susannah discuss how their father has transformed from a loving father and anthropologist into a dogmatic patriarch: ‘he really did change himself into a priest; it was as if all his Bible reading and acting to fool the Mundo became part of who he was. . . . The church enslaved [him]’ (FS: 90–1). This internal enslavement is also narrated by Robinson himself: There was something in me, I found, that followed ideas, beliefs, edicts, that had been put into practice, into motion, before I was born. And this “something” was like an internalized voice, a voice that drowned out my own. . . . In some odd way I was, the self of me, canceled out. I was a man mouthing words that sparkled, but going through the motions of my own life. (FS: 30–1)

Through this characterization of Robinson, Walker portrays sexism within African American Christianity as an inheritance of Western religious imperialism. The puritanical way of thinking and being does not come naturally to Robinson, quite the opposite; it suppresses his deepest instincts, his self

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(FS: 31). By describing Robinson’s own internal oppression, Walker is careful to connect his violent, misogynist behaviour to the religion of his oppressors. Walker further highlights the disjunct between Robinson the priest and Robinson the man through her depiction of his relationship with his wife, Langley. It is in his ‘most private life’ that Robinson the man – not the priest – reveals himself (FS: 31). Robinson is devoted to his wife, and their close bond is rooted in sexual passion. Walker describes their lovemaking in vibrant detail; he relishes the carefree eroticism of his wife, who doesn’t own a nightgown, but insists on being naked with him each night. Their relationship is not one of ownership, but of mutual enjoyment. Robinson all but worships his wife’s body; he is in awe of her powerful and feminine sexuality. What he violently forbids in the life of his daughter, he relishes in his own bed with Langley. As Robinson narrates, he feels grounded ‘in her arms’ and finds in ‘her warm naked body the fire of life’ (FS: 31). Through depicting Robinson’s private and sexually passionate life alongside his puritanical role as priest, Walker connects sexual repression with Christian discourse and situates both of these in opposition to the erotic, which Walker presents as both natural and good. Robinson’s priestly garb, the black cloth, becomes a symbol for religious oppression and sexual suppression; it is only when he takes off this black cloth, stripping down to his naked skin, that Robinson is able to escape the voice of a shaming, body-disdaining religious ideology that is overwhelming his own. Walker, when writing about this novel, describes Robinson as ‘a man who has become an unwilling prisoner of a puritanical Christianity’ and is led to believe that ‘his daughter’s sexuality is evil’ (2006, p. 41). By showing the process of this unwilling enslavement and portraying Robinson’s dual selves as an oppressive priest and a devoted lover, Walker indicts his hypocrisy while partially displacing his culpability. Walker certainly depicts Robinson as directly responsible for the trauma in his daughters’ lives, yet she carefully highlights that Robinson is violently enforcing what has also been imposed upon him. The character of Langley, in fact, makes this connection explicit when she compares her husband’s abuse of Magdalena to the beatings of African American slaves by their owners. In this nuanced characterization, Robinson is both victimizer and victim; as an African American, a descendent of slaves, he suffers under the imperialism of Euro-American Christianity, even while he transmits that suffering by colonizing the Mundo and punishing his daughter’s burgeoning sexuality in the name of religion. I would argue, then, that the primary ‘villain’ of Walker’s novel is not Robinson, but the religious dimension to which he has capitulated.

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The wound of sexual shame Walker’s account of Christianity directly highlights and challenges the influence of platonism on Christian ideology, an influence that womanist philosopher Kelly Brown Douglas connects with both sexist and racist readings of the body. Douglas points to a paradox within Christian thought, one that is also highlighted by Irigaray: despite the central doctrine of the Incarnation, which presents the human body ‘as a vessel of divine revelation’, Christianity has nonetheless ‘denigrated and demonized’ the body (2006, p. 153). As Irigaray writes, the radical potential of incarnation remains unrealized in current Christian discourse, which presents the body as oppositional to the spirit and divinity.7 Douglas’ analysis shows how the platonic veneration of the immaterial realm of reason and spirit, as opposed to the imperfect world of the flesh, infiltrated early Christian thought, producing a ‘body-devaluing ideology’ and a ‘“sacred” disdain for the sexual body’ in particular (2006, p. 153). While various feminist critics have shown how this sacred body-disdain has been directed towards women specifically, Douglas expands this critique to include other ‘socially oppressed and marginalized groups, such as black people and non-heterosexual men and women’ who, due to the influence of platonized Christianity, have been ‘routinely objectified according to their sexuality’ (2006, p. 154).8 Douglas connects platonized Christian views of the body to religious racism, which upholds a hyper-sexualized view of black women that ‘has allowed for the consistent dehumanization of them and the denigration of their bodies with relative “theological” impunity’ (2006, pp. 154–5). She argues that reconceptualizing human sexuality, particularly black female sexuality, and untangling its roots in oppositional religious discourse is a necessary step towards cultivating a womanist identity: ‘Womanist work must challenge this platonized view of sexuality. In so doing, it should make clear that it is this platonized view of sexuality that has suborned the sexualized terror of black people and the sexual oppression of women’ (2006, p. 154). I would argue that Walker’s novel fulfils this call, as it directly critiques and challenges the platonic Christian view of sexuality described by Douglas and clearly links this ideology to racial and sexual oppression.9 Repeatedly throughout her novel, Walker connects Christian discourse to debilitating sexual shame and oppression in the lives of women, and she does this most prominently through the character of Magdalena. Magdalena’s beating at the hands of her father is so traumatic primarily because it is a direct response to her initial experiences of intense physical

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pleasure. Before describing the beating, Walker recounts Magdalena’s lovemaking with Manuelito in detail, revealing not just an experience of passionate sexual awakening, but an experience that makes Magdalena feel ‘worshipped’, ‘safe’ and ‘innately holy’, affirming her value as a sexual, spiritual and incarnated subject (FS: 25). Her father’s consequential violent response to this awakening is incomprehensible to Magdalena: ‘I did not understand his violence, after I had just experienced so much pleasure’ (FS: 26). In Walker’s words, this violence leaves Magdalena a ‘broken’ woman; silently enduring the physical beating, Magdalena sends her ‘spirit flying out the window’ (FS: 26, 74). This explicit dualist schism between Magdalena’s spirit and her body echoes Douglas’ description of the platonic division of the spirit and flesh, and for Magdalena, this schism is never resolved, but perpetuated through a life of self-abuse. In response to her father’s discomfort with her wildness and sexuality, Magdalena begins to overeat and be less physically active. Though his wife is bothered by this change, Robinson welcomes it, and even ‘heap[s] more food on her plate’ (FS: 20). As an adult, Magdalena becomes morbidly obese, using her weight both to punish and isolate herself. She also inflicts pain on her own body in other ways, namely ‘through compulsive piercing (her nipples had small chains dangling from them, her labia a crucifix)’ (FS: 73). Walker is hardly being subtle here; a crucifix piercing through the labia is a potent symbol of Magdalena’s sexual trauma and its connection to religious ideology. Ironically, in contrast to her name and her father’s perception, Magdalena is far from promiscuous; she lives a lonely and celibate life, never taking another lover after her teenage tryst with Manuelito. Magdalena’s compulsive and continual self-harm reveals another central theme in Walker’s novel, namely the perniciousness of sexual shame and its impact on subjectivity. In her book Femininity and Domination, feminist philosopher Sandra Bartky draws from multiple shame theorists to offer an intricate account of women’s particular experiences of shame. Bartky argues that women are ‘more shame-prone than men’, and that shame is not merely a feeling, but a ‘pervasive affective attunement to the social environment’ (1990, p. 85). Rather than ‘merely an effect of subordination’, shame under patriarchy is ‘a profound mode of disclosure both of self and situation’ (1990, p. 85). According to Bartky, shame is the experience of oneself as ‘defective’ or ‘inferior’, an experience often spurred by a perceived violation of norms (1990, p. 87). Shame suggests a defect in one’s nature as opposed to one’s actions, and the experience of shame presupposes an audience, whether actual or internalized,

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whose standard of judgement is imposed (Bartky 1990, pp. 85–6). In this way, shame is fundamentally ‘intersubjective’, requiring ‘the recognition that I am, in some important sense, as I am seen to be’ (Barky 1990, p. 86). Bartky offers a scenario, borrowed from the work of Gabriele Taylor, to illustrate this concept: An artist’s model feels shame when she realizes that the artist, with whom she thought she had a purely business relationship, has come to regard her with desire. In this case, the model “need not see herself as a woman in the sense of ‘object of sexual interest’ . . . she does not identify with the audience, she sees rather how she appears to the artist”. (1990, p. 86)

In other words, the model does not need to view herself as a sex object in order to experience shame in response to the artist’s desire; his perception of her as a sexual object is enough to make her feel like one. This scenario illustrates the influence of shame on subjectivity. Rather than being self-determined, for a woman experiencing shame, it is determined by the perception of the other; as Bartky puts it: ‘Here, how I am and how I appear to the other converge’ (1990, p. 86). This relates to perhaps the most significant point raised by Bartky: shame is not chosen, but inflicted; a person does not have to share the standard of the judging other to feel shame from violating that standard. Walker’s novel clearly depicts and fleshes out Bartky’s analysis of shame. Magdalena does not share the religious beliefs or values of her father, yet his perception of her aberrant promiscuity, which is violently enforced, afflicts her throughout her life: I knew what being loved felt like, and then because of some religious bullshit I didn’t even subscribe to, enforced by my own father, who didn’t really believe it either, I didn’t have it in my life anymore. (FS: 122–3)

The emphasis on Magdalena and her father’s non-belief corroborates Bartky’s argument that ‘the revelatory character of shame’ does not ‘occur at the level of belief ’, and ‘the corrosive character of shame . . . lies in part in the very failure of these feelings to attain to the status of belief ’ (Bartky 1990, p. 95). In the novel, Magdalena professes no faith in Christian doctrine or ideology, yet she experiences crippling and ‘corrosive’ shame when she violates Christian sexual mores. Moreover, this shame is long-term and debilitating; even as an adult, she isolates herself from others and punishes her body, unable to have intimate relationships, sexual or otherwise. Towards the end of the novel, this self-abuse directly leads to Magdalena’s death. Although Magdalena, an intelligent woman

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with a successful career as an academic, is more than aware of the source of her trauma and her own self-abuse, she seems unable to heal. Awareness alone cannot undo the shaming damage done at the hands of her father: I wanted to be made whole again, goddammit! He’d taken the moment in my life when I was most secure in its meaning. . . . . The moment when I knew my life was given to me for me to own. He took that moment and he broke it into a million bits. He made it dirty and evil. (FS: 116)

By pointedly depicting the damaging effects of Christian ideology in the lives of characters who profess no religious belief, Walker’s novel highlights the pervasive and continual effects of religious discourse in the increasingly secular West, particularly regarding female sexuality. One does not have to profess religious belief to be negatively affected by religious ideology, and simply realizing the source of one’s shame is not enough to counteract its effects. Walker’s novel also emphasizes that the judging other, not merely the shameful self, must be transformed to counteract the intersubjective construction of shame, and I will return to this idea of transformation in the final section of this chapter. Magdalena is not the only character in the novel who serves to illustrate the connection between sexual shame and religious discourse; all of the female characters’ stories recount damage inflicted by Christian sexual ideology in the absence of religious belief. Aside from Magdalena herself, Susannah is the person most affected by her father’s violence towards Magdalena – which she witnesses by peeking through the keyhole – though these effects manifest differently. In contrast to her sister, as an adult Susannah has many sexual partners and relationships with both men and women; she lives a life of ‘experimentation, change’ (FS: 182). Irene, another character who will be discussed later, describes Susannah as ‘someone who left her body long ago’ and is now on a ‘journey’ back to her ‘own skin’ (FS: 62–3). This description evokes a similar, though less violent, version of the body/spirit schism experienced by Magdalena after her father’s beating. Though she has sexual relations with various partners, Susannah is unable to experience ‘searing passion’ and ‘ecstatic sex’ (FS: 28). When she tries to write a novel exploring a past relationship, she finds herself unable to write about sex, because she is ‘crippled in a place that should be free’, still haunted by the memory of her sister’s punishment and ‘the sound of the whistling silver belt’ (FS: 28). Both sisters remain ‘crippled’ in this way, unable to develop autonomous sexual subjectivities, because sex is always already connected to shame. The impact of the childhood trauma they experience does not ease with time, but worsens. As

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Susannah approaches middle age in the novel, her alienation from her own body increases; she cuts off her long hair and begins to constantly wear black. Walker describes Susannah as ‘about to be sucked into the black cloth’ (FS: 185). This symbol of the ‘black cloth’ recurs throughout the novel; when Robinson begins to internalize his role as priest to the Mundo, his priestly black garb serves to represent the oppressive and shaming influence of religion. As noted earlier, the black-robed Robinson stands in contrast to the naked and sexually free Robinson who enjoys a deep, erotic connection with his wife, Langley. Susannah, as an adult, also begins to be ‘sucked into the black cloth’, to move further away from sensual, embodied experience towards body/spirit schism and alienation. Aside from the two sisters, the characters of Irene and Lily Paul further illustrate Walker’s interrogation of anti-erotic religious ideology. Irene is a Greek dwarf whom Susannah meets when she travels to Greece. Irene’s mother became pregnant with her after being raped; her father and brothers refused to believe this, and beat and rejected her as a consequence of her perceived sin. She died giving birth to Irene, and Irene’s dwarfism was seen as divine punishment for her mother’s promiscuity. To atone for this sin, as a child Irene was given to the church to be a servant, and she lives by herself, isolated from others and ‘chained’ to the church, until she is middle-aged and finally decides to break free and travel the world (FS: 140). She is both friend and mentor to Susannah, urging her to find herself and resist the pull of the ‘black cloth’. Irene’s character also voices Walker’s criticism of Euro-American Christianity, telling Susannah of the witch hunts in the Middle Ages that were carried out by the ‘men who controlled the Christian Church’, and the later European colonizers who ‘cut Indian babies in half ’ and destroyed ‘black families in Africa by brutalizing and enslaving them’ (FS: 189). These atrocities, she says, often committed in the name of religion, caused Europe to lose its ‘strong mother’ and ‘shrink its spirit to half its size’ (FS: 189). Irene baldly describes Christian imperialism and colonization, which throughout this novel Walker suggests is still occurring, though on a more subtle level. Religious ideas, namely concerning women, otherness, the body and sexuality, are continuing to destroy black families and women’s lives, as is illustrated through the depiction of the Robinson family. Another character whose story shows the influence of misogynist Christian ideology is Lily Paul, Susannah’s lover, who is also called Pauline. Lily Paul was raised by devout Christian parents who believed ‘birth control meant murder’, which resulted in her mother’s body being consumed with recurrent pregnancy: ‘Babies dropped out of my mother’s body every year, like apples falling to the

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ground’ (FS: 102). Neither of her parents wanted ten children, but they thought it was their Christian duty to procreate and that ‘God would judge them harshly’ if they used contraception (FS: 127). Lily Paul’s parents were concerned that she seemed completely uninterested in boys, and when she was fifteen her family urged her into a relationship with an older man, eventually getting her drunk and leaving her alone with him to circumvent her disinterest. She was raped, impregnated and then married off to this man. Through all of these female characters, Walker highlights the role of parents in instilling sexual norms and values upon their daughters, as well as the violence against women that is justified from a religious perspective that shames and denigrates the female body and denies women sexual agency. Men are given sexual license, while women’s bodies belong to their husbands and are valued primarily through their ability to bear children. For a woman to have control over either her fertility or sexual agency is seen as transgressive – and transgressive is exactly what Lily Paul becomes as an adult as she embraces her homosexuality. Maria Lauret argues that Lily Paul’s name ‘combines the free sexuality of the biblical Lilith with the misogyny of St Paul, the church father’ (2000, p. 208). While Lauret sees this as a ‘dubious coupling’, I see the name as expressing the influence of Christian ideology in her life, as well as the transgressive sexual autonomy that she develops as an adult. Lilith, despite what Lauret states, is not a biblical character; rather, she resides in the realm of extra-canonical myth as Adam’s first wife who refuses to be subservient to him and leaves Eden of her own accord. The name ‘Lily Paul’, then, has allusions to both a central male figure in the Bible and a subversive figure that Christian orthodoxy has excluded. Both forces remain  alive in the characterization of Lily Paul; as she is making passionate love to Susannah during a visit to Kalimasa, in the first scene of the novel, Lily Paul is simultaneously fantasizing about a young Kalimasan man entering her from behind. This image of Lily Paul imagining a submissive heterosexual act while she dominates her lesbian lover expresses the duality inherent in Lily Paul’s name and character. Though both Susannah and Lily Paul do develop into sexual agents in the novel, specifically ones that subvert and transgress Christian sexual norms, neither is able to fully escape the influence of the shaming religious ideology that damaged them as children. In her article on Alice Walker’s paganism, one of the few articles to seriously engage religious themes in Walker’s later works, Razak writes that ‘Walker does not celebrate the social and sexual orderliness of Christian unions but

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has persisted in writing of socially tabooed transgressive sexual relationships’ (2009, p. 111). She also observes that, although transgressive sexuality in The Colour Purple ‘generated much discussion’, similar themes in Walker’s later novels, including By the Light of My Father’s Smile, ‘are less discussed’ (2009, pp. 111–12). According to Razak: Walker’s writing in these novels suggests linkages between women’s erotic freedom, social and cultural liberation, and sexual and spiritual redemption – all issues which Walker has explicitly coded in relationships that lie outside of society’s approval. (2009, p. 112)

I agree with Razak’s analysis, which serves as a helpful transition into the second half of my argument. In By the Light of My Father’s Smile, Walker does not merely offer a scathing critique of Euro-American religious ideology; by showing how it inhibits women’s ‘erotic freedom’ and therefore their ‘sexual and spiritual redemption’, she also offers an alternative theology that seeks to facilitate this redemption, a theology that resonates both with Luce Irigaray’s theology of incarnation and Audre Lorde’s notion of the erotic.

The healing spirit of Eros As stated in an interview, Alice Walker maintains that she is ‘preoccupied with the spiritual survival, the survival whole of my people’ (O’Brien 1993, p. 331). This oft-quoted statement, as Maria Lauret notes, is ‘rarely analyzed’ and signifies a central facet of Walker’s work: Spiritual survival equals wholeness, in this phrase, and it is a hallmark of Walker’s work as a black woman’s writing that the spiritual dimension is always foregrounded, not so much against a materialist or more obviously recognisable ‘political’ stance as necessary and integral to it. (2000, p. 1)

I agree with Lauret, and would argue that Walker’s sometimes scathing criticism of religion, particularly Christianity, must be read alongside her desire for spiritual wholeness. Walker’s work is not concerned merely with deconstructing Western religious discourse, but as I will show, also presents an alternative spiritual vision, one that can foster, rather than wound, the creative ‘spirit’ of black women.

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The notion of ‘spirit’ plays a central role in both Walker’s work and, more broadly, in womanist thought. Cynthia Robinson’s recent analysis of Alice Walker’s ‘evolution’ as a writer asserts that ‘the essence of Alice Walker is first and foremost womanist’ and ‘her literary works and political activities emanate from this identity’ (2009, pp. 293–4). As was noted earlier, Walker describes a womanist as a woman who ‘loves the Spirit’, thus presenting spirituality as an integral part of the womanist project (1983, pp. xi–xii). For Walker, ‘spirit’ is a concept rooted in her African-American and Native-American heritage; as she states in an interview, ‘if there is one thing African-Americans and Native Americans have retained . . . it is probably the belief that everything is inhabited by spirit’ (1983, p. 252). Jacqueline Grant, a prominent womanist theologian, draws on Walker’s The Colour Purple to elucidate key elements of the womanist ‘spirit’; she describes how Celie’s transformation unfolds as she reclaims her body, ‘her black vagina and her black breasts’ (1995, p. 111). Celie’s healing, Grant argues, emerges from the reconciliation of sexuality and spirituality, from transforming an ‘oppressive and distant God’ to an ‘immanent Spirit who permeates the world’ (1995, p. 111). Quoting The Colour Purple, Grant asserts that ‘Alice Walker’s construction: “God is inside of you and inside everybody else. You come into the world with God’” affirms the spirit ‘as a feature of Black femaleness’, and Grant describes womanist spirituality as ‘embodied, incarnational, holistic, a challenge to injustice, and a liberating and healing praxis’ (1995, p. 103).10 Grant’s description of the womanist religious perspective presented in The Colour Purple also, I would argue, reflects Walker’s project in By the Light of My Father’s Smile, as it confronts the violent effects of a body-disdaining spirituality and depicts a vision of the religious that reconciles the spirit with the flesh. Although some womanist theologians have adapted womanist spirituality to the paradigm of Christianity, it is important to recognize that Walker’s conception of ‘spirit’ exceeds the boundaries of Christian orthodoxy. Despite the fact that Walker was raised in Christianity, her ‘eclectic spirituality’ is a blend of ‘paganism, Buddhism, and shamanist-influenced experience’ (2006, p. 169). As stated earlier in this chapter, Walker consistently uses fiction to express her religious views; she has admitted, for example, that Shug’s spirituality in The Colour Purple is her own (2006, p. 171). Though most attention from literary critics and theologians has focused on religious themes exclusively in The Colour Purple, Walker’s later work likewise reveals her religious perspective, particularly in By the Light of My Father’s Smile, where Walker express her spiritual vision through the beliefs of the Mundo people. In an essay discussing her reasons

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for writing this novel, Walker describes how By the Light of My Father’s Smile was inspired by ‘the understanding that our human sexual life . . . has fallen into the pit’, and that writing the novel was her attempt to present an alternative conception of sexuality and its relationship to spirituality: The Mundo, a tribe of mixed-race black and Indian people I have created in this novel, are likewise unimpressed by a world concerned primarily with exploitation . . . . They treasure their relatedness to the Earth, and their own rituals, ceremonies and ways. . . . They are people who kiss where others cut . . . . And so they teach the father in this book . . . that sexuality is instead a mystery, a blessing and a wise teacher of the Self. (2006, pp. 40–1)

Walker is not only constructing the Mundo as teachers and transmitters of a sex-positive spirituality; she also asserts that ‘there is Mundo consciousness – the desire to honour instead of degrade, to kiss instead of cut – in every one of us’ and that ‘each of us has the knowledge of how to live life differently . . . and that we can find this knowledge inside ourselves and put it to use’ (2006, p. 42). The remaining half of this chapter is devoted to illuminating Walker’s representation of the ‘Mundo consciousness’ as a response to and revision of traditional religious discourse on female sexuality. I argue that, much like Walker uses Shug to present her own ‘gospel’ in The Colour Purple, Walker creates the fictional Mundo to express an alternative religious vision that does not debase but celebrates the body and sexuality as divine. The Mundo concept of God reflects Walker’s incarnational ‘spirit’ and the ‘God’ articulated in The Colour Purple, who is ‘inside of you and inside of everybody else’ (qtd. in Grant 1995, p. 103). The Mundo call their god ‘Mama’ or ‘the Great Spirit’, who is ‘everything that is’, and they believe that ‘the cathedral of the future’ is ‘nature’ (FS: 96, 150, 195). The Mundo share certain beliefs with Christianity, but these beliefs are intuitive and already understood, not transmitted to them through Christian missionaries: Did you really think we did not know we should love one another; that the person across from us is ourself? . . . That we are part of the Great Spirit and loved as such? What people do not know these things? (FS: 150)

Most of the Mundo beliefs articulated in the novel focus on the redemption of the body, particularly the female body, and on the connection between sexuality and spirituality. The Mundo response to the young Magdalena directly contrasts with Robinson’s. Unlike her father, the Mundo admire Magdalena’s wildness,

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recognizing her as what they call a ‘Changing Woman’, a woman free from shame, with an untamed spirit and infinite transformative potential (FS: 94). The Mundo see these traits of Magdalena’s as highly valuable and give her the nickname Mad Dog, which is a title of wisdom for the Mundo, because losing the mind is ‘one of the most difficult things in the world to do’ (FS: 92). Manuelito explains to Magdalena that in her world, the Euro-American world, ‘people put too much emphasis on the mind’ and have, in fact, ‘become mind only’ (FS: 93). Magdalena embraces this nickname, but her father is embarrassed by it, because it represents what he finds threatening and distasteful about his daughter. The symbol of the mad dog directly confronts platonized Christianity, as described earlier in the chapter, which venerates the mind over the body, producing a ‘body-devaluing ideology’ and a ‘“sacred” disdain for the sexual body’ (Douglas 2006, p. 153). Mundo culture and religion, in fact, represent the exact opposite of this, displaying a spirituality that celebrates the body and sexuality as sacred. The Mundo honour the life of the body, considering pregnancy to be ‘thoroughly shared’ between a man and a woman, who both endure substantial pains during labour, and they teach all their young people how to responsibly control their own fertility, rather than forbidding unsanctioned sexual activity (FS: 25). The Mundo, who believe that ‘spirituality resides in the groin, in the sexual organs’, sing a communal hymn of initiation before a person has sex for the first time, a hymn that expresses a ‘carnal message of unity with creation and no credit to a Creator’ (FS: 22). As part of the novel’s dedication, Walker describes human sexuality ‘as a light source that has been kept in the dark’, and within the novel, she uses the Mundo to imagine what human sexuality might look like if it were no longer secret or shameful, but brought into the light. In her acknowledgements at the end of the novel, Walker thanks ‘the spirit of Eros for its presence in my life’ (FS: 223). This naming of ‘Eros’ recalls the work of black feminist Audre Lorde, whose famous essay ‘Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power’ describes the erotic as ‘a resource within each of us [women] that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane’ (1984, p. 53).11 Women, however, ‘have been taught to suspect this resource, vilified, abused and devalued within western society’ (Lorde 1984, p. 53). Like Walker, Lorde sees the erotic as deeply connected to spirituality and to the most fundamental aspects of identity. Lorde defines the erotic as a ‘power which rises from our deepest and non-rational knowledge’, ‘a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings’, and an ‘internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire’ (1984, pp. 53–4). This description

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of the erotic corresponds with the Mundo’s idea of the mad dog’s wisdom, the wisdom to escape the dualist separation of mind/body, rational/emotional that dominates Western concepts of the self. Lorde similarly presents the need for women to escape dualism and experience new ways of being and knowing that do not exclude, but originate from the body and the senses: When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives. . . . The erotic is the nurturer or nursemaid of all our deepest knowledge. (1984, pp. 55–6)

The erotic, then, is not limited to sexual desire and activity, but rather infuses all aspects of embodied female experiences. Lorde describes how, in Western tradition, the erotic has been sequestered from the spiritual, ‘thereby reducing the spiritual to a world of flattened affect, a world of the ascetic who aspires to feel nothing’ (1984, p. 56). Walker’s description of Euro-American religion reflects this ‘world of flattened affect’ described by Lorde. It is a world separated from the senses, from the body, from sexuality, from nature – a world of denial. For Lorde, ‘the ascetic position is one of the highest fear, the gravest immobility’; asceticism does not discipline the self, but obliterates the self (1984, p. 56). This notion is echoed by Walker’s description of Robinson’s transformation from anthropologist into self-proclaimed priest, which is a description of his very self being erased: I had gone to study [the Mundo] and ended up knowing nothing, apparently, about them. I had been sucked into the black cloth. . . . once I agreed to “do what I could” toward towards your salvation in exchange for the church’s help, it was as if I had died to myself. (FS: 156)

The transformation, or malformation, of the untamed Magdalena into a woman at war with her own body similarly recounts a gradual obliteration of the self as Magdalena is alienated from her erotic power. Lorde argues that women have come to distrust the erotic, having been ‘warned against it all our lives by the male world, which values this depth of feeling enough to keep women around in order to exercise it in the service of men’, thus keeping women in a ‘distant/inferior position’ (1984, pp. 53–4). Female sexuality, then, has been tightly controlled and articulated solely in relation to male desire; men are allowed erotic freedom, while female erotic power is restrained. This dynamic is illustrated by Walker’s

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novel, which describes in detail Robinson’s satisfying erotic relationship with his wife, even while he beats his daughter for experiencing sexual pleasure herself. The character of Lily Paul also corroborates Lorde’s analysis, asserting that women have been ‘brainwashed to think sex is not meant to be pleasurable to them’, but only to men’ (FS: 130). Through Lily Paul, Walker describes the need for women to experience ‘orgasmic freedom’, which has always been thought of as a ‘male right’ (FS: 133). For Lily Paul, first experiencing this freedom was like being ‘reborn’; it was a ‘revelation’ that showed her she was ‘not forgotten by Creation’, but was ‘passionately, immeasurably loved’ (FS: 133). Perhaps the most important commonality between Walker and Lorde’s accounts of erotic freedom is the central role it plays in resisting oppression. For both Walker and Lorde, erotic freedom does not simply mean the freedom to experience sexual pleasure; both writers elaborate a connection between the erotic oppression of women and the oppression of women in a more general sense: The fear of our desires keeps them suspect and indiscriminately powerful, for to suppress any truth is to give it strength beyond endurance. The fear that we cannot grow beyond whatever distortions we may find within ourselves keeps us docile and loyal and obedient, externally defined, and leads us to accept many facets of our oppression as women. (1984, pp. 57–8)

To use Irigarayan terminology, erotic freedom is necessary for women’s spiritual becoming. Lorde and Walker share key commonalities with Irigaray’s theology of incarnation, which asserts the need for divisions between flesh/spirit, body/ word to be reconciled and the divine to become incarnate in each woman. In ‘The Redemption of Women’, one of several essays in Key Writings where Irigaray elaborates her incarnational theology in depth, Irigaray gives an account of sin in the feminine, describing how Christian conceptions of sin have contributed to women’s continued oppression. While man is ‘too enclosed’ in his gender, woman ‘too often abandons her own gender’; thus, ‘the “sin” of each is not the same’ (Irigaray 2004e, p. 155). In other words, a religious ethic that urges asceticism and self-denial, and portrays sin as a concern with the self at the expense of others, is elaborated from male subjectivity and experience. Women, in contrast, as the ‘other’ by which the male ‘self ’ is defined, are always already in a state of self-denial. Western religious tradition demands ‘a perpetual departure from the self by the woman towards the man and towards God, but without return to the self ’ (Irigaray 2004e, p. 154). Irigaray counters this with the idea that women should seek out a spiritual path that cultivates a woman’s ‘love relations’ with herself (2004e, p. 154). For women, Irigaray argues, the true

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‘sin’ or failing is ‘to submit myself to the desire of the other without return to myself ’; to sin is to renounce a ‘spiritual becoming’ that stems from the female self (2004e, p. 153). Central to women’s spiritual becoming is the reconceptualization of the body, and like Walker and Lorde, Irigaray asserts the need to redeem both the body and ‘carnal love’ from notions of corruption and transgression, which entails rethinking our conception of God: [The redemption of love] necessitates a God who does not stay outside of humanity and finally opposes it – for example in its carnal desire. This demands a God who coincides with the accomplishment of humanity itself, with its spiritual transmutation or transfiguration. . . . The divine heard and lived in such a manner opens up the path to a redemption of love, including carnal love that is part of humanity if it is cultivated, spiritualized and not left to a possessive or a reproductive instinct. (2004b, p. 169)

Irigaray argues that love, particularly carnal love, must be extricated from notions of original sin, exploitation and possession, instead refigured as an essential aspect of spiritual becoming. These notions, of a divine found and cultivated within humanity and of a non-possessive, spiritualized carnal love, can be found in Walker’s construction of Mundo culture and spiritual beliefs. The Mundo do not believe in a transcendent creator deity, but in a ‘spirit’ that infuses creation and is encountered through embodied human experience. Carnal love, for the Mundo, is deeply spiritual and presented as a non-possessive coupling, based on mutual love and desire that is blessed and celebrated by the entire community. Irigaray’s incarnational theology, like Audre Lorde’s philosophy of the erotic and Walker’s novel, urges a reconceptualization of the body, particularly the female body. Because women have traditionally been associated with the body, the carnal, the corporeal, in contrast to the mind, the spiritual and the rational, this reconceptualization must be a careful one that does not affirm these traditional oppositions, nor simply reverse them. As Irigaray writes, pursing a ‘more accomplished feminine identity . . . means not considering myself as purely body, with only a natural capacity for engendering children’ (2004e, p. 151). On the other hand, it is just as essential, she argues, that woman not be forced to ‘quit her body’ or ‘leave herself ’ to become divine (2004b, p. 167). To avoid these extremes, a feminine divine must not be conceived as radically separate from the body, or from nature, but instead must ‘transform’ or ‘transubstantiate’ the body into something not reduced or inimical to the spirit, but something that is transfigured by the spirit (Irigaray 2004b, p. 167).

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Transfiguring the African American female body is even more crucial, but also potentially more problematic. As Gayle Pemberton writes, ‘it is terribly risky for a novelist to confront the stereotype of black women as salacious and predatory by writing them into scenes of erotic intensity’, yet Walker does exactly this in her ‘attempt to redeem black female sexuality, making it quintessential to the development of the whole self ’ (1998, p. 20). Jeannette King, in her book Women and the Word: Contemporary Women Novelists and the Bible, writes: 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 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. . . . the first step towards . . . reconstructing religious traditions that restore female spirituality, without denying the female body, is to deconstruct the body/mind dichotomy. (2000, pp. 154–5)

King raises a valid point, though it is ironic that Luce Irigaray, one of the French feminists she facilely represents and quickly dismisses, is emphatically concerned with the deconstruction of mind/body dualism so that women are neither reduced to body nor forced to deny their embodied experience. Walker’s novel attempts this deconstruction by reuniting the spiritual with the erotic and representing the body and spirit as deeply connected, even inseparable. Magdalena, for example, suffers a ‘spirit fracture’ when she is beaten by her father, and this fracture manifests itself physically, in her self-inflicted obesity and extensive piercings (FS: 202). In this novel, Walker elaborates an innate divinity or ‘spirit’ that is given form and expressed by the body, as well as a body that is deeply spiritual and alive with desire. In doing so, Walker manages to escape the extremes described by both Irigaray and King, and she presents a fundamentally incarnational vision of female spirituality.

Conclusion Although By the Light of My Father’s Smile is primarily concerned with the experiences of black women, it also engages black men’s experiences under oppression to a new depth, when compared with Walker’s previous work. Walker’s Mundo have a saying that ‘it takes only one lie to unravel the world’, and they

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pinpoint one lie in particular that has led astray the Euro-American world – the lie that women are, to borrow Tertullian’s words, the ‘devil’s gateway’, an idea the Mundo find incomprehensible (FS: 81). Walker focuses her novel on the father’s role in transmitting and enforcing that lie, sometimes violently. It is Robinson who internalizes the ideological system imposed upon him, and then inflicts the consequences of that ideology on his daughters, significantly impairing their development as autonomous sexual and spiritual subjects. While much of this novel admittedly focuses on the damage wreaked by Robinson, it also eventually recounts his redemption, which is a step not always taken by Walker. Since The Colour Purple, in fact, Walker has received a fair amount of criticism for the characterization of African American men in her fiction, particularly in The Colour Purple. Gerri Bates writes that certain ‘African American male theorists and critics respond negatively to Walker’s male characters’, arguing that her representations vilify black men, portraying them as ‘mean or evil’ (2005, p. 19). Cynthia Cole Robinson, in her study of Alice Walker, notes that ‘many critics of Walker’s work posit that she is anti-black men’ (2009, p. 303).12 Walker responded to this criticism in an essay included in her collection Living by the Word: An early disappointment to me in some black men’s response to my work . . . is their apparent inability to empathize with black women’s suffering under sexism. . . . indeed, there are many black men who appear unaware that sexism exists (or do not even know what it is), or that women are oppressed in virtually all cultures, and if they do recognize there is abuse, their tendency is to minimize it or to deflect attention from it to themselves. (1989, p. 79)

By the Light of My Father’s Smile in many ways re-engages this controversy that primarily centred on Walker’s most acclaimed novel, The Colour Purple. At first glance, the figure of Robinson seems a thoroughly negative one: hypocritical, dogmatic and abusive. However, through the entire arc of the novel, this picture of the vilified African American patriarch, that many critics have accused Walker of constructing, is thoroughly destabilized and even de-vilified. Much of the novel, in fact, is narrated by Robinson himself, who reflects on his life and witnesses his daughters’ lives unfold after he dies and watches over them from the Mundo afterlife. As was discussed earlier in this chapter, Walker portrays Robinson as both an oppressor himself and a victim of oppression, taking care to describe how Robinson’s sexism and violence is inherited from Euro-American religious discourse as he is ‘sucked into the black cloth’ of antiwoman and anti-erotic ideology. Robinson’s central failing is not that he is a

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monster, but that he is ‘distracted’ by religious dogma from his ‘belief in woman’, in both ‘the woman he made love to’ and ‘the woman-to-be who was his own child’ (FS: 158). Particularly towards the end of the novel, Robinson becomes a more sympathetic character when he encounters Manuelito in the afterlife and begins to learn from the people he had once tried to convert. From his god’seye view, Robinson witnesses his daughters’ lives, both public and private, and the novel describes several scenes in which he observes his daughter Susannah making love. She seems to sense his presence, and begins to wear more black clothing, ‘as if in imitation of [Robinson’s] bogus priestly frock’, as she herself begins to be ‘sucked into the black cloth’ (FS: 151). Robinson gradually becomes aware of the damage he has done to his daughters, and seeks the guidance of Manuelito: And I, my nose pressed now against the window of [Susannah’s] love life, and especially her sex life. Trying to have a place in an area I had nearly destroyed. Was this natural? I asked Manuelito. It is completely natural, said Manuelito, though perhaps for you it is sometimes very embarrassing. (FS: 151)

Manuelito explains that Mundo fathers embrace their daughters as sexual beings and are happy that both their male and female children ‘enjoy what your culture calls sex’ (FS: 212). This paternal (and maternal) blessing of sexuality is celebrated in a ritual that shows how, in Mundo culture, sexuality is not hidden; there is no aura of secrecy or shame surrounding sex or ‘sexual’ parts of the body; rather, the parents welcome and bless the sexuality of their children. When a young Mundo man or woman prepares to take a lover for the first time, they sing an initiation hymn, and the two parents kiss their child’s hands, feet, ears, eyes, nose, mouth and genitals. This kissing is ‘respectful, the lightest touch’, and the kisses are also given when a baby is born, and to a loved one when he or she dies (FS: 164–5). Throughout the novel, Magdalena sings this initiation song to herself (a song that is banned in Robinson’s church), particularly the line: ‘by the light of my father’s smile’, which describes how the Mundo fathers smile upon their children’s sexuality. Hearing this ritual described by Manuelito gives Robinson an epiphany, as he finally realizes the depth of Magdalena’s wounds: I finally got it. That this was what my poor daughter had been singing about, all those years ago! . . . She had been begging me to see, to witness, the light that she had found. To love and bless what she loved. But I refused. . . . I had failed her and without reason destroyed her life. (FS: 212–3)

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When Magdalena dies, she crosses over to the Mundo afterlife and Robinson is finally able to perform the Mundo ritual of blessing, eliciting an intensely ‘raw’ sense of ‘gratitude’ from Magdalena (FS: 214). Although Walker does not dumb down her criticism of sexism within AfricanAmerican communities, this novel is fundamentally one of reconciliation between father and daughter, as Walker attempts to imagine what father-daughter relationships might look like beyond the bounds of sexism. Here, Walker’s volatile African American patriarch eventually becomes a humbled and loving father; he is refigured as a potentially positive figure, one who encourages his daughters to develop into autonomous sexual and spiritual subjects. This transformation does not come easily, but necessitates breaking taboos surrounding sexuality, taboos rooted solidly in Euro-American religious discourse. As Rudolph Byrd writes: . . . Walker calls for the rejection of all taboos and orthodoxies, in this instance those associated with Christianity, which would preclude a father’s acknowledgement and affirmation of his daughter’s sexuality. In Walker’s view, fathers must abandon the practice of confining their daughters to a perennial state of virginity . . . . (1999, p. 721)

Walker herself writes that taboos ‘keep us ignorant of our true nature’ and that our taboos surrounding sexuality ‘must be carefully brought to light, inspected in council, and probably broken’ in order for us to continue along ‘our evolutionary path’ (2006, p. 127). The frankness with which Walker confronts taboos in this novel explains, in part, some of the negative reactions to it, particularly from reviewers like Wendy Shalit, who concluded that Walker’s novel is about incestuous desire. I would agree that it does make for uncomfortable reading at times, but this is because the novel directly defies Western taboos, not because Robinson is a jealous or incestuous voyeur. Robinson’s task in the afterlife, after all, is to learn to acknowledge and accept his daughters’ sexual subjectivity, and eventually, by the end of the novel, to bless it. The fact that Walker places the reconciliation of father and daughter in the realm of the Mundo afterlife has interesting implications. Why reconciliation after death, and why in a Mundo realm? Is Walker expressing pessimism about our ability to refigure filial relationships without perfect hindsight and a spirit guide? I would argue that the answer lies in the fact that, throughout the novel, Walker explicitly links sexual shame and fractured father-daughter relationships to religious discourse. Robinson beats his daughter, after all, because he is ‘sucked into the black cloth’; he allows his own values to be subverted by a misogynist

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and dualistic religious ideology. Because Western religious discourse is so integral to Western culture, Robinson needed to reach a post-Christian space before he could escape ‘the black cloth’ and gain a new perspective on both his daughters and himself. When Robinson dies in the novel, he does not go to heaven, but crosses into the afterlife of the Mundo, which represents a realm beyond the confines of the religious ideology that enslaved him. Here, Robinson is not the priest attempting to convert the Mundo; he is the one being taught and transformed by Mundo theology. This reading does express some pessimism, however, as Walker is suggesting that we must first free ourselves from sexist and shame-inducing religious ideology before we can live in renewed relationships with one another and escape the correlation between (female) sexuality and shame. Walker writes that By the Light of My Father’s Smile is her attempt to redeem human sexuality from the ‘pit’ into which it has fallen, but her novel also reveals the magnitude of such an endeavour (2006, p. 40). Redeeming sexuality from shame requires a transformation of both self and other, both daughter and father, which in turn necessitates confronting millennia-old taboos and radically revising religious concepts of women, sexuality and the body.

Notes 1 In ‘Womanism: The Dynamics of the Contemporary Black Female Novel in English’ (1985), Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi claims to have ‘arrived at the term “womanism” independently’ of Walker, though she does not state where or how, perhaps insinuating that she herself came up with the term (p. 72). This is the only source I have encountered that does not attribute the coinage of ‘womanism’ to Walker. 2 Shug is a main character in The Colour Purple. 3 All references to Walker’s novel in this chapter are taken from the following edition: (2000) By the Light of My Father’s Smile. London: The Women’s Press. 4 One serious and nuanced reading of Alice Walker’s spirituality in her later novels is Arisika Razak’s article ‘Her Blue Body: A Pagan Reading of Alice Walker Womanism’ (2009). Though Razak does not address By the Light of My Father’s Smile explicitly, she does retrieve Walker’s religious perspectives from the new age ghetto. 5 Luke 7:36-50 recounts the story of a prostitute or ‘sinful’ woman who prostrates herself at Christ’s feet, weeping, ‘and began to wash his feet with tears, and did wipe them with the hairs of her head, and kissed his feet, and anointed them with the ointment’. Though the Bible never states that Mary Magdalene is a prostitute,

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she has nonetheless traditionally been considered a prostitute because she is conflated with this unnamed woman in Luke. Susanna’s story is found in the Book of Daniel chapter 13, in the Catholic Deuterocanon. Susanna is a delicate, beautiful wife who resists the advances of two lustful elders who demand to have sex with her, threatening to accuse her of promiscuity if she resists. Susanna decides it is preferable to face death than be shamed in the eyes of the Lord, so she refuses to have sex with the Elders, who themselves are ultimately caught in their web of lies and executed, while Susanna’s chastity remains intact. See the essays in the section entitled ‘Spirituality and Religion’ in Irigaray’s collection Key Writings. The schism of flesh and spirit, and its influence on negative views of the female body and sexuality, is discussed throughout this book, in Chapters 3, 4 and 6 particularly. This link between dualism and oppression is also apparent in the famous essay ‘In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens’, where Walker recounts the damage of body/ spirit dualism in the lives of her foremothers and connects it to religious racism and America’s legacy of slavery: ‘They stumbled blindly through their lives: creatures so abused and mutilated in body, so dimmed and confused by pain, that they considered themselves unworthy even of hope. In the selfless abstractions their bodies became to the men who used them, they became more than “sexual objects,” more even than mere women: they became “Saints.” Instead of being perceived as whole persons, their bodies became shrines: what was thought to be their minds became temples suitable for worship. . . . They forced their minds to desert their bodies and their striving spirits sought to rise, like frail whirlwinds from the hard red clay’ (1983, pp. 231–3). For further analysis of womanist spirituality, and its connection to Walker’s work, see Floyd-Thomas, Deeper Shades of Purple: Womanism in Religion and Society (2006). Alice Walker and Audre Lorde were familiar with each other’s work; Walker wrote an essay entitled ‘To Audre’, which is addressed to Lorde. In addition, both Walker and Lorde were nominated for the National Book Award in 1974. For more on this controversy, see: Mel Watkins, ‘Sexism, Racism and Black Women Writers’, The New York Times Book Review (June 1986); Trudier Harris, ‘On The Color Purple Stereotypes and Silence’, Black American Literature Forum (1984); David Denby, ‘Purple People-Eater’, New York (January 1986); Courtland Milloy, ‘A “Purple” Rage Over a Rip-Off ’, The Washington Post (December 1985); William H. Willimon, ‘Seeing Red Over The Color Purple’, Christian Century (April 1986); Salim Muwakkil, “Bad Image Blues,” In These Times (April 1986); Jacqueline Bobo, ‘Sifting Through the Controversy: Reading The Color Purple’, Callaloo (Spring 1989). See also Walker 1996, p. 23.

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‘Your Father Who is Tender Like a Furnace’: Divinity, Violence and Desire in A. L. Kennedy’s Original Bliss

Scottish writer A. L. Kennedy’s work continually investigates the complex connections between religion, sexual desire and violence and the impact these forces have on the development of the female subject.1 Her fiction has been recognized as ‘powerfully’ exposing ‘the effects of the male culture of violence in urban Scotland’ and it is the aim of this chapter to show how she also illuminates the religious roots of that culture (Bell 1995, p. 220). Kennedy, who has spoken openly about her Christian faith and background, refers to herself as a ‘self-hating Christian’, a phrase that reflects more than a little ambivalence towards her religious tradition (Bolonik 2005). This ambivalence, as well as the thorny relationship between Christian discourse and sexual desire, is confronted head-on in the novel Original Bliss (1997), which tells the story of Helen Brindle, a housewife trapped in an abusive marriage and her complicated love affair with Edward Gluck, a neuroscientist/self-help guru.2 Aside from Helen’s husband and lover, there is another prominent male character in Kennedy’s novel: God. Original Bliss is as much about Helen’s relationship with ‘Him’ as it is about her relationship with Edward. Indeed, as will be shown, Helen’s relationship with God is depicted as directly determining both her sense of self and her relationships with men, initially fostering dynamics of violence and masochism and eventually, by the end of the novel, enabling a newfound relationality that celebrates rather than censures sexual desire.

Someone to make her whole As Original Bliss opens, Helen is presented in a state of loss, feeling as though she has been abandoned by God. Despite this sense of abandonment, God remains

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acutely omnipresent in the narrative through his absence. Helen voices a bygone connection with God, yet even in the midst of this connection, she describes him as far removed from her earthly existence. The God that once filled the emptiness and gave ‘shape’ to Helen’s existence is primarily characterized in the text by his maleness, transcendence and radical otherness. Helen refers to God alternatively as a capitalized ‘He’ and as ‘Something Else’, signifying not only his greatness, but also his separation and difference. The concept of God initially presented in Original Bliss echoes feminist theologian Daphne Hampson’s assessment of divinity in Christian discourse and tradition: ‘God’s powerfulness is related to the fact that God is seen as separate, different and alone. God indeed is said to have aseity: he is entire unto himself and did not have to create anything else in order to be complete’ (1996, p. 126). This notion of divinity, according to Hampson, is ‘part of a dyad and affects how human beings, the other pole, are seen. By contrast with God’s greatness, humans know their smallness; by contrast with his goodness, their sinfulness. God is above, we below’ (Hampson 1996, p. 126). Helen defines herself through this dyad; in fact, as will be discussed later, her perception of herself as ‘below’ God, as corrupted and unworthy, intensifies as the novel progresses. Because her identity is tied to this dyad, Helen’s separation from God erodes her sense of self. She feels ‘lost in one vast, white amnesia’; as she describes to Edward, ‘“I am a person who has no faith. I’m over. That’s that”’ (OB: 34–5). Kennedy depicts Helen’s loss of God as entailing not only a loss of self, but a loss of transcendence and meaning; her faith in God had lifted her out of her ordinary life, cushioned her from an abusive marriage, but now, without God, Helen’s existence in the ‘real world’ has become ‘repetitive and meaningless’ (OB: 16). Reflecting the dyad described by Hampson, God is presented in opposition to the ordinary human realm, which can only become meaningful when an omnipotent God imbues it with transcendence. Hampson’s account of the opposition between divinity and humanity mirrors, in many ways, Irigaray’s description of the Western concept of God. According to Irigaray, God has been conceived as ‘an entity of the beyond whom we must try to approach, even though he remains . . . radically estranged from us, absolutely Other’ (2004f, p. 171). As has been discussed in previous chapters, this masculine, transcendent deity serves as the horizon of (male) subjectivity and anchors the binary logic of western discourse. There is no divine horizon that orients female subjectivity; instead, the current model ‘maintains a perpetual departure from the self by the women towards the man and towards God’ (2004e, p. 154). This ‘departure from

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the self ’ is reflected in Kennedy’s characterization of Helen, who throughout the novel subjugates herself to the men in her life and attempts to obliterate her carnal desires in order to earn the love and attention of God. Helen illustrates a woman’s loss of subjectivity when she defines herself through the masculine horizon of divinity. The hierarchical opposition between divinity and humanity is also evoked by the representation of Helen’s sexuality, which is initially tied to God rather than human relationships. Somewhat paradoxically, Helen’s relationship with her ‘out of reach’ God is her only relationship marked by sensuality and eroticism. To Helen, God was ‘a comfort in her flesh’, her ‘best kind of love’, the ‘hot Heart of it all’ (OB: 16). In sharp contrast to her erotic connection to God, Helen views a sexual relationship with a man in resolutely negative terms. To her, sexual diseases seem ‘correctly frightening’, a God-given consequence of ‘bad sex, wrong sex’ that could make one ‘explode inside’ because of ‘men and badness’ (OB: 131). This fear of men and sexuality is kept alive, even fuelled, by her violent and coercive marriage. Mr Brindle’s touch, in direct contrast to her erotic experience of God, is always depicted as a brutal invasion of her body. Mr Brindle never attempts to give Helen pleasure; his touch is a violation, a means of asserting dominance through causing pain. Even his foreplay reads like rape: ‘Mr. Brindle ripped at the cloth of her blouse, dug his cold, blunt fingers under her bra and wrenched it up, squeezed at her . . . enjoyed a twist’ (OB: 141). When the abuse escalates to the point where medical intervention is necessary, they go to a private doctor instead of hospital, because Helen’s injury at the hands of her husband is ‘an intimate thing between them which they didn’t need to share’ (OB: 104). This secret, affirmed by Helen’s silence, is the only glimmer of mutuality in their relationship, their once so-called intimacy. Sex, for Helen, is something that is done to her and years of abuse have convinced her that she is not in charge of her own sexuality; Mr Brindle is, and she has learnt that it is ‘unwise’ to refuse his unwanted sexual advances (OB: 98). Helen’s violent relationship with Brindle affirms her negative, transgressive view of sexual relations; for Helen, fear and sex have become inseparable, as she describes: ‘It makes me panic sometimes when [Mr Brindle] wants to touch me. . . . I don’t mind that, though. . . . fear seems to be good for me’ (OB: 44). This fear has been so fully internalized that, despite her practised denial, Helen’s body reacts against the thought of going home to Brindle; she experiences a ‘pale, metallic sensation in her limbs’ and her face begins ‘to feel clumsy and unpredictable’ (OB: 89). In Kennedy’s portrayal, Helen’s body, subjected to constant violence, has been reduced to a conduit of pain and fear.

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The intense fear that permeates Kennedy’s novel is emblematic of much of contemporary Scottish literature, where, according to Cairns Craig, ‘fearful selves proliferate’ (1999, p. 51). In his The Modern Scottish Novel: Narrative and the National Imagination, Craig makes the claim that the common motif of fearfulness in Scottish fiction reflects how ‘the potency of fear remains central to Scottish culture’ (1999, p. 37). This, he argues, is largely due to the ‘enduring legacy’ of Calvinist Christianity, which has ‘shaped’ Scottish identity and remains embedded in the ‘Scottish imagination’.3 Craig references Kennedy’s Looking for the Possible Dance (1993) as depicting this fearful Scottish imagination and I would argue that Original Bliss brings it into even sharper relief, as a decidedly Calvinist vision of a judgemental, merciless God looms over much of the narrative. In this novel, Kennedy exposes how the dialectic between ‘fear-stricken submission to a greater power’ and that which is ‘fear-inspiring’, as described by Craig, manifests in gendered relationships (1999, p. 37). Helen, in her fearful state, seems unable to hold together a coherent identity and so begins to seek out someone else to complete her, another male authority through which she can define herself. Edward Gluck enters the narrative first as a disembodied, authoritative voice over BBC Radio Two, and he makes an ample God-substitute, immediately exhibiting some of the characteristics of Helen’s God: he is masculine, authoritative, both removed and accessible. She seeks him out for advise, for an ultimate answer, but instead Helen discovers something even more life-altering: the full power of sexual desire. Helen unexpectedly experiences intense longing for Edward that is depicted in sensual detail. Rather than recoiling from physical touch, as she does with Mr Brindle, Helen relishes the slightest brush of Edward’s skin and aches for more. The view of pleasure she voices earlier in the novel begins to shift; she no longer sees ecstasy as an irrelevant facet of human experience, ‘neither usual or useful’ (OB: 16). Rather than continuing to believe, as she was taught in Biology class, that the female orgasm is a ‘pointless sexual extravagance’, in contrast to procreative male orgasms, Helen decides that she is now ‘in favour of pointless sexual extravagance’ (OB: 67). It is important to emphasize that Kennedy’s depiction of Helen’s burgeoning sexual desire is not resolutely positive, but emotionally complex; Helen’s excitement is mixed with a tumult of negative emotions, namely fear and shame. After her initial meeting with Edward, when she is not yet fully aware of her newfound yearnings, Helen’s burgeoning desire awakens a palpable sense of shame: ‘Mrs. Brindle’s skin, even under the covers, felt

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impossibly naked . . . . There was something unnatural about her’ (OB: 33). This description of Helen viewing her own naked body as ‘unnatural’ reveals the deep-rooted entanglement of shame and sexuality exhibited through Helen’s character. Helen believes she does not need to commit a sexual act to become dirty and diseased; thoughts and urges – even the sensual awareness of her own nakedness – are enough to corrupt. This perspective reflects a long history of Christian tradition that views the sexual desire of the ‘flesh’ as a facet of fallen and corrupt humanity, a force always at war with God. Feminist theologian Carter Heyward confirms this idea, asserting that ‘the relation between God and the erotic, spirituality and sexuality, in the history of christian [sic] control is largely one of violent opposition’ (1989, p. 89). Heyward’s assessment of traditional Christianity describes a religion suffering from ‘erotophobia’, which can be traced to the influence of Augustine, who ‘targeted’ sexuality as a ‘source of sin’, ‘setting in theological motion a violent antagonism which Christians (and others) have suffered to this day’ (1989, pp. 89–90). Elizabeth Stuart and Adrian Thatcher likewise assert that, since Augustine, Christian tradition has regarded desire ‘as a subversive, destabilizing force’ that needs to be ‘suppressed, mastered and controlled’ (1998, p. 203). Thatcher and Stuart go on to note that this war with desire is highly gendered, ‘acted out in male attempts to master others who represented the bodily and the sexual – women’ (1998, p. 203). Helen’s marriage certainly reflects this dynamic with Mr Brindle’s violent attempts to assert control over Helen’s body and sexuality.

Helen and the apple Soon after Helen meets with Edward and her desire for him begins to surface, God re-enters the narrative – not as her lover, but as a voyeuristic Judge. This judging God is no longer a ‘comfort in her flesh’, as described earlier in the novel. This God mirrors the Knoxian Calvinist vision of God, sternly brooding over the human realm, rendering judgement over fates already-written. He is characterized by his transcendence and disapproving gaze, which glares down when Helen and Edward tentatively explore physical contact. When they touch ‘hand in hand’, Helen feels a ‘rattle of alarm’ and senses that her ‘Maker’ is ‘observing’ their interactions. As the affair unfolds, this watchful judgement from God intensifies. While making yet another dinner date with Edward, Helen feels

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the ‘hot metal smell of prohibition’ rush in, signalling that ‘God might not be too far away’ and disapproved of her behaviour (OB: 79). This view of sexual desire as always transgressive comes through with even greater force while she sleeps: Her dream dipped closer, licked at her ear, hard and dark, and said, ‘Do not look at the man. Do not look at him unless you have to . . . . Then you can look, but you must never for a moment think that you want to fuck him . . . . Don’t think you want to blaze right over him like sin. (OB: 68)

Through depicting Helen’s dreams, Kennedy highlights that this internal struggle between fear and desire is waged deeply, on the subconscious level. Even while Helen actively resists acknowledging her longing, this dream expresses the force of her desire and its transgression by simultaneously voicing Helen’s desires while forbidding her to act on them. In her essay ‘Extreme Fidelity’, Cixous describes an ongoing internal struggle between desire, specifically desire for pleasure and fearful devotion to divine law. She connects this struggle to ‘the first story of all human stories, the story of Eve and the Apple’: . . . ever since the Bible and ever since bibles, we have been distributed as descendents of Eve and descendents of Adam. . . . The Book wrote that the person who had to deal with the question of pleasure was a woman, was woman; probably because it was indeed a woman who, in the system which has always been cultural, underwent this test, which men and women have been subjected to ever since. (1988, p. 15)

According to Cixous, this story of Eve’s temptation does not merely reflect the laws and values of culture, but helps create and sustain them. Cixous interprets the myth of Eve and the apple to illuminate two distinct ‘relationship[s] to pleasure’: the masculine and feminine libidinal economies. In this ‘first fable’, she writes, ‘there are two principal elements’ at work: ‘the word of the Law or the discourse of God and the Apple’ (1988, p. 16). This apple is pleasure, sensual pleasure, pleasure that can be touched and tasted. In Cixous’ analysis, the possibility of pleasure is always accompanied by prohibition; the individual standing before the apple is caught between the fulfilment of her desire and obedience to the law. Kennedy’s characterization of Helen reflects this dilemma; as soon as Helen begins to desire Edward, she encounters the God of prohibition. She finds herself up against the Law, ‘the law which is absolute, verbal, invisible, negative, it is a symbolic coup de force and its force is its invisibility, its non-existence, its force of

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denial, its “not”’ (Cixous 1988, p. 16). As Cixous describes, this struggle between the apple and the law is a struggle ‘between presence and absence’ (1988, p. 16). Similarly, Helen is caught between her desire for tangible, corporeal Edward and her compulsion to submit to the law of a distant, disembodied God – a God whose presence is hardly more than a gaping absence. In the original myth, Eve chooses the apple; she chooses and thereby gains ‘access to pleasure’, an access that ‘threatens society and must be controlled’ (Cixous 1988, p. 17), which is why Eve is punished. It is not incidental that the title of this novel is Original Bliss, a title that directly recalls the story of Eve and the genesis of original sin. Helen is in many ways a modern-day Eve, but as I will argue throughout this chapter, her eventual choice to ‘taste the apple’ does not lead to sin, but provides an escape from sin into bliss. In Cixous’ analysis, the relationship to pleasure embodied by Eve, who ultimately tastes the fruit of her desire in defiance of the law, reflects what Cixous calls a feminine economy. The biblical myth of Abraham, who unquestioningly submits to God’s incomprehensible command to murder his own son, demonstrates a masculine economy.4 Cixous argues that these economies reflect opposing ends of a spectrum and that each individual fluctuates between these extremes. In ‘Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays’, Cixous elaborates on feminine and masculine relationships to pleasure in the context of Hegel’s master/slave dialectic. Cixous discusses the fundamental binary logic of Western discourse, asserting that ‘the world is divided in half, organized hierarchically, and . . . it maintains this distribution through violence’ (1986, p. 70). This violence is specifically a violence that ‘murders’ the autonomy and alterity of the (feminine) other. As she writes, ‘in the (Hegelian) schema of recognition, there is no place for the other, for an equal other, for a whole and living woman’ (1986, p. 79). Cixous points out an ‘implied irony’ in this ‘master/slave dialectic’ and this is that ‘the body of what is strange must not disappear, but its force must be conquered and returned to the master’ (1986, p. 70). In other words, because the master defines himself through his relationship to the slave, this slave cannot be obliterated completely, but must rather be appropriated as an object that anchors his identity. This dialectic sustains itself by fulfilling and exciting the desire of the master, while denying and obscuring the desires of the slave. As an illustration of this dynamic, Cixous references the figure of Helen from Greek mythology, who by inciting the passions of Paris serves as a catalyst for the Trojan War. In the dialectic of the masculine master and feminine slave, the woman ‘is Helen’, ‘carried off from herself ’ to a place ‘where she revives’ the ‘restlessness and desire’ of the man: ‘Within his economy, she is

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the strangeness he likes to appropriate’ (1986, p. 68). It is striking that Kennedy’s protagonist alludes to this same mythic Helen, a woman caught up in the violent mechanizations of men, whose own desires remain largely unspoken. Cixous argues that in this phallic economy, woman is ‘no more than this shape made for him: a body caught in his gaze’; although women ‘represent the eternal heat’ (1986, p. 67) of men’s desires, their desire and jouissance are never fully articulated: For me, the question asked of women “What does she want?” – is a question that woman asks herself, in fact, because she is asked it. It is precisely because there is so little room for her desire in society that, because of not knowing what to do with it, she ends up not knowing where to put it or if she even has it. This question conceals the most immediate and urgent question: “How do I pleasure?”’ (1986, p. 82)

Cixous links this phallic dialectic to a woman’s sense of fear and shame regarding her body and sexuality. Women, she writes, have not yet explored the terrain of their bodies: ‘their sex still frightens them. Their bodies, which they haven’t dared enjoy, have been colonized’ (1986, p. 68). In a masculine economy, wherein woman is the object that sustains the male subject, ‘woman is disgusted by woman and fears her’ (Cixous 1986, p. 68). Throughout most of Original Bliss, Helen represents a woman existing in a phallic economy. She has a troubled relationship with desire and is far more accustomed to self-denial than self-indulgence. As she tells Edward, ‘I just don’t often do what I want’ (OB: 131). She has no relationship to her own pleasure, instead articulating a sense of alienation from her body, as well as extreme shame and disgust at her own sexual desires. She constructs a pathological sense of self around her masculine God, and when God abandons her, she looks to Edward for answers and guidance. In contrast to herself, she perceives that Edward, as a man, neither experiences the internal conflict nor the associated struggle with sexual shame that permeate her self-awareness and identity. This perception proves misguided, however; Edward is similarly caught in the violence of Hegel’s dialectic and by showing Helen’s obsequiousness and Edward’s self-loathing, Kennedy depicts the master/slave relation from both sides, revealing the violent consequences for both men and women. As Edward confesses in a late night phone call to Helen, he is addicted to violent pornography and is incapable of having a relationship with a woman: I am sorry, but, I have a picture here of a woman with two men inside her. . . . this is her ideal position in any case, because these photographs are meant to help us

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understand the whole of her truth. We have to see the suck and the prick. And the fuck. . . . the two men shoving themselves into pleasure, and the woman having none. She’s there to make them come, to make whoever’s looking come; that’s the entire reason for her . . . . I want to have her, too. And she would want me, the pictures make her made that way. I want to be in her while she’s raw, while she’s open all the way to her fucking womb. (OB: 92–5)

This startling confession exposes the Edward concealed behind Helen’s hero worship and reveals that his view of sexuality is not all that different from Helen’s: both present violent dynamics of female subjugation and masculine domination. Reflecting Cixous’ analysis, the woman is depersonalized, objectified and her pleasure is irrelevant. Moreover, even though Edward is rational enough to realize the sadistic nature of this pornography, his rationality is unable to curb his compulsive desire; he wants to subjugate the woman in the picture and this desire fills him with shame and self-loathing. When Helen and Edward eventually begin a physical relationship, they set strict ground rules, which actually enforce the master/slave trajectory described by Cixous. Their primary rule is the restriction of touch, which ‘would make things go wrong’ (OB: 168). During their first sexual encounter, Helen agrees to undress in front of Edward, so that he can ‘see’ more of her and he asks to cut her pubic hair (OB: 168). Even though Edward is gentle and whispers to Helen that she is ‘perfect’, that she isn’t like the women in his ‘pictures’, Helen nonetheless feels that they are merely enacting Edward’s violent fantasies: Edward didn’t have to tell her, she quite understood; he was making her look like one of the women in his films, like what he must want, a body pared down to its entrances, a splayed personality. But even her disgust yawed and clamoured for more of him when he was finally done and drew his hands away, because inside herself she was like the women in his films. (OB: 174)

I describe this episode in detail because it starkly reveals the underlying dynamic of Helen and Edward’s relationship and how each of their views of sex severely limit how they are able to interact with each other. Edward is unable to separate his desire and love for Helen from his ‘pictures’; even though he tells her how different she is, he is still comparing her to the ‘splayed’, commodified women in his pictures and altering her appearance to make her resemble them. Helen is similarly unable to conceive of sex outside of violence; her desire for Edward makes her feel dirty and degenerate. She forbids him to touch her, because it violates God’s moral law, and without ‘morality’s prohibition to protect her, she

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will be stripped down to her soul and the empty fault inside it’ (OB: 171). There is no place, in Helen’s self-conception, for a sexually active and desiring woman; for her, to be sexually active and embrace her desires is to become a subhuman and dismembered object of male pleasure. The presentation of Helen and Edward’s initial sexual encounter as problematic and destructive should not be read as a sex-negative indictment on pornography or sadomasochistic play per se. What is drawing critique is the shame-driven and violent nature of these interactions, which in fact actually stems from the sex-negativity voiced by both characters. For both Helen and Edward, sex is inherently iniquitous and depersonalizing. Even though Edward is not a religious man, the parallels between Helen’s and Edward’s views of sexuality reveal how deeply steeped these notions of shame and transgression are in the Western mind. Regina Schwartz argues that, because of ‘the Bible’s enormous cultural weight, identities born in violence can be traced to the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures’ and ‘become transcendentally authorized within a monotheistic belief system’ (cited in Hamman 2000, p. 320). Religious discourse has had, and continues to have, a formative effect on Western culture and this effect can clearly be seen in sexual norms. Both Helen and Edward, though one is religious and one is not, view their sexuality as shameful, as ‘dirty’ and best expressed in an inherently violent dynamic – one that they both find difficult to escape.

The ‘palpable gift’ of God’s judgement It might seem that although Helen’s relationship with Edward is characterized by subjugation, she is nonetheless presented as a woman beginning to take ownership of her desire for pleasure. However, I would argue that a closer reading reveals how Helen’s desire for Edward is entangled with a masochistic desire to be seen, judged and punished by God. Helen’s encounters with Edward are not depicted as titillating in and of themselves; part of the excitement is the fact that these transgressions, from Helen’s perspective, provoke God’s anger: Edward was an influence for good, . . . because keeping a trace of him with her tonight was bringing her up against the force of Law. She was doing a little wrong, and finding Someone there who would object. A touch of her God was back. His disapproval set a charge in the air, a palpable gift. (OB: 64)

Helen does not only want to touch and be touched by Edward; she wants the ‘gift’ of God’s judgement. Helen’s sexual desire is awakened early in her relationship

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with Edward, but she feels unable to challenge God’s Law. This inability to escape the ‘straight and narrow’ fills her with sadness – not because her desire for Edward remains unsated but because, after resisting temptation, ‘God no longer needed to keep her from urgent sin . . . He’d left her alone’ (OB: 107). This exposes a distinct pattern in Kennedy’s characterization of Helen: she feels sexual desire for Edward, which is primarily pleasurable because it elicits God’s wrath, the only remaining religious experience left to Helen. Even deeper than Helen’s sexual longing is her masochistic desire to both subvert her own will to God’s and be punished by him. Helen’s shame-driven relations with both Edward and God are most profoundly revealed in Kennedy’s accounts of her dreams. After the first sexual encounter with Edward, when he watches her undress and cuts her pubic hair, Helen dreams of being naked in a garden. As soon as she becomes aware of her own nakedness in the dream, lizards fall from the trees around her and flatten ‘themselves across her skin’ and ‘their claws tear at her’ (OB: 175). There is a bearded gardener present, who says that he could bless Helen with his sacred heart, but that a ‘blessing won’t do any good’, because she is ‘past saving’ and ‘underneath the lizards, there’s nothing to [her] anymore’ (OB: 176). Helen longs to touch the heart, knowing ‘it would forgive her and she would be saved’ (OB: 176). The heart rejects her touch, however, because Helen’s ‘badness’ would make it ‘burst’ and the open wound in the gardener’s chest closes, shattering the bones in her wrist – echoing the time Mr Brindle broke her hand in a drawer (OB: 176). In this dream, the allusive Edenic and reptilian imagery, as well as Helen’s sudden awareness of nakedness and subsequent shame, recalls the figure of Eve in Genesis. This dream signifies how Helen perceives herself as fundamentally flawed and desperately in need of redemption. Like Eve after the Fall, who by eating the apple allows sin to enter the world, Helen is rejected from the presence of God and her body is seen as monstrous, a source of pain. In God’s eyes, there is nothing to her but shameful flesh and God’s elusive heart remains out of reach. As I have argued, Helen’s relationships with men and her sense of self-worth are characterized by violence and self-abasement, and Original Bliss clearly roots Helen’s shame and self-loathing, as well as her ultimate attempt at self-sacrifice, in religious discourse and traditional (and notably Calvinist) conceptions of God. The fact that Helen’s masochism intensifies into complete self-sacrifice in the novel has interesting implications and turning to Irigaray proves helpful here, as her work Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche exposes the central role of self-sacrifice in the Christian paradigm. As she observes, the Christ ‘handed

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down to us by tradition’ is the ‘son of the Word’ who ‘will enter into his glory only when he has suffered crucifixion and death’ (1991b, pp. 164, 166). Though the vision of the ‘Word made flesh’ is a compelling one, it is significant that the incarnated one will ‘find communion with the whole and within the unique only through the sacrifice of his person to the Father’ (Irigaray 1991b, p. 164). Irigaray asks, ‘must the individual be immolated if unity with God is to be achieved?’ and the answer offered by Christian tradition, a ‘tradition that reveres the wound in the side of the crucified one’, seems to be yes (1991b, pp. 164, 166). ‘Agony and crucifixion’ are presented as the ‘passages from incarnation into eternal life’ with God (1991b, p. 165). In other words, under the traditional model, divinity is only accessible through suffering. Irigaray also describes how this ideal of selfsacrifice is coupled with the notion that a relationship with God necessitates a renunciation of the flesh and human sexual relationships. In Christ’s interactions with women throughout the gospels, ‘sex is virtually absent’; Christ ‘listens, but does not marry/make merry with women, for already he is bound to his heavenly Father’ (Irigaray 1991b, p. 166). ‘At best’, she writes, ‘he takes part in some symbolic union that ignores . . . the fulfillment of carnal exchange’ (1991b, p. 166). According to Irigaray’s analysis of Christian ideals, concupiscence is utterly at odds with the divine; the human body is meant to be a source of pain rather than pleasure, something that must be violently conquered for one to be united with God. Religious masochism, in this light, demands the complete annihilation of the desiring, sexual, embodied self. Helen exhibits the masochistic attitude described by Irigaray most strongly through her submission to abuse in an effort to redeem herself in the eyes of God. She does not only submit to the abuse, but invites it. She chooses, after leaving to have an affair with Gluck, to return home to Glasgow and Mr Brindle, for one reason only: to surrender to God’s will, which she knows will be delivered at the hands of her husband. Throughout the novel, in fact, Brindle and God are presented as having an alliance of sorts, at least from Helen’s perspective. Brindle, as her husband, is on the side of God’s law and his physical abuse is an enforcement of God’s justice: ‘She had come [home] to submit and Mr. Brindle would do God’s will to her, even though he was an atheist’ (OB: 182). With this ironic twist, Kennedy exposes how the influence of religion is not contingent upon belief. By depicting the atheistic Brindle as the primary enforcer of God’s punishing will, she shows how religious notions of fear, submission and divinelyordained violence remain embedded within the seemingly secular Scottish imagination. After severely beating Helen, Mr Brindle is convinced that he had killed her and subsequently takes a lethal dose of paracetamol. His desire to

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die after believing he murdered Helen underscores how his own identity was anchored in their abusive relationship, reflecting Hegel’s dialectic. During this climactic episode in the novel, the narrative shifts from third to second person, and ‘Helen’ disappears entirely. This shift in perspective places Helen in a distant object position; she has become utterly alienated from her sense of self. Helen’s fear and shame, her painful awareness of God’s judging gaze, have pushed her to the limits of her subjectivity. She has defined herself so completely through God’s detached ‘anatomising Stare’ that she cannot see herself any other way (OB: 189). She has ‘let God see it all’, all her perverse desires and actions, and feels her only possible redemption is self-sacrifice (OB: 190). . . . your Father who art in Heaven, but who is also much nearer and much more terrible than that; He will forgive you now. Forgiveness. Feel it pick you back down to the child, take you off your hinges and clean you to the bone. He’s here, your Father who is tender like a furnace and who will hold you for eternity, if you will only ask and He can make you ask. He can make you go through fear into somewhere else entirely. (OB: 190)

For Helen, to be forgiven is to be punished at the hands of her husband, who is the violent instrument of God’s justice. Echoing Irigaray’s assertion that divinity must be encountered through suffering, Helen submits herself to violence; she is a willing sacrifice. Even though she believes her husband will kill her, what matters most is not her own life or happiness, but God’s acceptance and approval, which can only be earned through the destruction of the flesh.

Coming to our senses Until the last twenty pages of the novel, after her self-sacrifice, Helen defines herself in self-effacing relation to God, a relation that determines not only Helen’s relationships with men, but also her sense of self, and it seems unlikely that Edward and Helen will be able to have a sexual relationship untarnished by violence and shame. After Helen’s self-sacrifice, however, a significant shift occurs. Helen wakes up in a hospital, surprised to be alive. Waking up is like a resurrection for her; she had intended to let herself be killed at the hands of Mr Brindle in order to redeem herself in God’s eyes, but instead she wakes to find that Mr Brindle is dead and she is alive. This resurrection is depicted as a rebirth; afterward, Helen’s conceptions of God, herself and her erotic desires are transformed. God becomes a lover rather than a damning judge. While she is

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recovering in the hospital, moving in and out of consciousness, Helen is visited by the gardener from her dreams and his ‘heart liked her now, it was warm and insistent against her fingertips’ (OB: 194). No longer rejecting her, deeming her beyond redemption, the gardener welcomes and blesses her. This dream is a reversal of the myth of Eve and original sin, which was affirmed in Helen’s earlier dream. The God-figure in this later dream does not see her as flawed, fallen and unworthy of his presence. Helen is no longer an object trapped in God’s disapproving gaze; rather, she is finally able to touch the heart of God. She has discovered a newfound faith, not just in a loving God, but in herself. This faith is characterized by a positive self-conception rather than blind obedience to an incomprehensible law: ‘I believe in Something – or Something believes in me. And I believe in me and I can do any and every living thing a living person does. I am alive’ (OB: 202). ‘Any and every living thing’ includes loving, desiring and at last touching Edward. As soon as Helen’s health permits, they fully consummate their love in a sexual encounter that is the stark opposite of their previous attempt. Touching is no longer forbidden, but indulged in fully; in bed, they explore each other and ‘begin the gentle, strenuous fight to cling and be still and kiss and move and touch every place when there are acres of places, all moving and turning and wanting to be touched’ (OB: 210). They are both now able to fully embrace their desires for each other, shame-free: ‘they have exactly what they want [and] they are holding it’ (OB: 210). Helen no longer views God as violently opposed to her love for Edward; she now knows ‘who she loves and precisely Who has let her love him’ (OB: 213). Carter Heyward’s work on the erotic and its connection to divinity sheds some light on Helen’s transformation. As discussed earlier, Heyward reads Christianity as erotophobic and because of Christianity’s overwhelming influence on Western culture, she asserts, all ‘westerners have been christianized’ and ‘have absorbed through [their] bodies sexual taboos’ (1989, p. 89). This influence can be seen in Original Bliss. Helen’s internalization of Christian taboos is quite blatantly linked to her religious faith and background, but her notion of sexuality as shameful and debasing is shared by the non-religious Edward. Heyward argues that this view of sexuality inherited by the Christian paradigm ‘produces antierotic (or pornographic) psyches and lives, in which our bodies and feelings are jerked off by abusive power dynamics’, dynamics of ‘domination, coercion, and violence’ (1989, p. 95). Suppressing the senses and sensual desire leads to self-alienation, as well as alienation in relationships with others, as can clearly be seen in the

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character of Helen. As a remedy, Heyward attempts to refigure the erotic and its connection to divinity. The divine, for Heyward, is not a transcendent entity removed from corporeal human experience; rather, the divine is ‘embodied between and among us insofar as we are moving more fully into, or towards, mutually empowering relationships’ (1989, p. 94). According to Heyward, mutuality is the process of ‘struggling to share power between/among ourselves’, a process that can be cultivated by eroticism, which ‘moves us to touch, not take over; transform, not subsume’ (1989, pp. 100, 104). The connection between the erotic and mutuality within love relations is also explored in the work of Luce Irigaray, who locates transformative potential in the dimension of touch. For Irigaray, touch is a means of overturning traditional power dynamics of feminine submission to masculine control. In An Ethics of Sexual Difference, Irigaray describes how touching limits ‘the reabsorption of the other in the same’ (1993a, p. 169). Much of Irigaray’s philosophy echoes Cixous’ account of the master/slave dynamic, recounting how the masculine defines itself in opposition to the feminine, which is paralysed in an object position to serve as the mirror for male subjectivity. Touch, however, has the potential to undermine this dynamic because ‘giving the other her contours, calling her to them, amounts to inviting her to live where she is without becoming other, without appropriating herself ’ (1993a, p. 169). In the traditional binary of masculine subject/feminine object the objectifying power of sight is privileged, but Irigaray argues that the sense of touch ‘transcends the gaze’ (1993a, p. 159) by perceiving itself and the other simultaneously. As Irigaray writes, through the sensual pleasure of touch one can ‘return to the evanescence of subject and object’ and undo the ‘schemas by which the other is defined’ (1993a, p. 154). Rather than reversing traditional power positions, touch serves as a reminder that each person is both the self and the other. When two lovers are touching each other, neither is fixed in the object position; their exchange is ‘untouched by mastery’ and ‘what is most interior and what is most exterior are mutually fruitful’ (Irigaray 1993a, pp. 155, 157). A caress creates pleasure without subsuming, for a touch reaffirms the physical boundaries, and thereby the autonomy, of the other. To use Irigaray’s words, ‘the other’s hands . . . give me back the borders of my body’; ‘eros’ has the potential to ‘arrive at that innocence which has never taken place’ (1993a, pp. 154–5) where the other is not appropriated but allowed to remain the other. Touch can lead to what Irigaray calls horizontal transcendence, when transcendence is experienced in relation to another person, rather than in relation to God. Christian tradition, ‘by measuring every subjectivity in relation’

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to a transcendent deity, has occluded ‘the importance of the alterity of the other’ (Irigaray 2004c, p. 189) within human relationships. Irigaray argues that affirming the mystery of the other is essential for spiritual and ethical becoming. Horizontal transcendence, in contrast to the vertical transcendence of God, is experienced sensually through the flesh rather than representing an escape from the flesh. Horizontal transcendence is central to Irigaray’s reinterpretation of divinity. In ‘The Age of the Breath’, Irigaray argues that the concept of God must be rethought in order for love between a man and a woman to be redeemed from violence and appropriation. This would require conceiving of a God ‘who does not stay outside of humanity and finally opposes it – for example in its carnal desire’ (Irigaray 2004b, p. 169). Irigaray’s recasting of divinity ‘coincides with the accomplishment of humanity itself ’; as she puts it, ‘God is us, we are divine, if we are woman and man in a perfect way’ (2004b, p. 169). For Irigaray, being man and woman ‘in a perfect way’ means cultivating a relationship of horizontal transcendence, in which each retains his and her sexuate difference and autonomous subjectivity. As Elizabeth Grosz describes, in her reading of Irigaray’s notion of the divine: Irigaray asks how to establish a time and place, subjectivities and positions, whereby the two sexes can touch each other without loss or residue: where one is not autonomous at the expense of the other; where one does not occupy the negative and the other the positive poles of a fixed opposition; where there is mutual recognition, mutual caressing, the satisfaction of the needs of both. Such a relation cannot exist if either sex has no positive identity, no relation of autoeroticism or positive evaluation of their bodies, and no positive relation to members and ideals of their own sex. (1993, p. 212)

Heyward echoes the notion of horizontal transcendence in her writing when she asserts that ‘the erotic’ is ‘the source of our capacity for transcendence, the “crossing over” among ourselves’ (1989, p. 99). As she describes, erotic touching affirms the self without harming the other: ‘lovemaking turns us simultaneously into and beyond ourselves’ (1989, p. 4). This is not to say that touch can never be violent or oppressive. The touch described by Heyward and Irigaray is more than just physical contact; it is not a violation but an affirmation and celebration of sensuality and alterity. For them, touch is a sensual expression of the desire for mutuality. In her book Elemental Passions, Irigaray describes how love between two people can be an instrument of violence and control, or, conversely, it can be a transformative, relational force that facilitates becoming:

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Love can be the becoming which appropriates the other for itself by consuming it, introjecting it into itself, to the point where the other disappears. Or love can be the motor of becoming, allowing both the one and the other to grow. For such a love, each must keep their body autonomous. The one should not be the source of the other nor the other of the one. Two lives should embrace and fertilise each other, without either being a fixed goal for the other. (1992, p. 27)

In describing the possibility of ecstasy between a couple, Irigaray makes a distinction between desire and need, defining need as an appropriating gesture that ‘always aims to fill’ and to own, whereas desire signifies ‘wanting to enter into relation with the other’ and ‘never wanting to possess or appropriate the other’ (2012, pp. 17–18). Learning to cultivate and guard a relational exchange of transcendence between two beings requires ‘man and woman working to transform their attraction into desire’ (2012, p. 21). Kennedy’s novel travels the length of this transformation, tracing Helen and Edward’s movements from relations of violence and appropriation to horizontal transcendence. As I have argued, by initially banishing touch from their relationship, Edward and Helen affirm dynamics of violence and control; their relationship is marked by attraction and need, rather than desire in an Irigarayan sense. After Helen’s near-death, however, their relationship is starkly different. The last few pages of the novel are a colourful, sensual romp. Touch is everywhere. Even Edward’s profession of love is experienced as touch: ‘it washed along, snug under her skin’ (OB: 203). And later, when they are about to make love for the first time, Edward’s words are tactile, ‘each of his syllables rubbing and snuggling in’ (OB: 208). As quoted above, their lovemaking is an exploration of touch, touch that not only arouses but satisfies: ‘she could never have fully imagined how completely satisfactory Edward’s skin would be’ (OB: 210). Touch has not only infused Helen’s relationship with Edward; in her dreams, she is also finally able to touch the heart of God, signifying that her conception of God, as well as her notion of her own self-worth, has changed. Rather than gazing in distant judgement, set apart from her desire for Edward, God is within their desire, within their love. And, having nothing more to say, Helen lets herself be. She is here and with Edward as he folds in around her and she around him and they are one completed motion under God the Patient, Jealous Lover: the Jealous, Patient Love. (OB: 214)

The violent God who demanded the sacrifice of the flesh seems to have died with Mr Brindle, replaced by a God with an open heart that Helen can – at last – touch.

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Conclusion There are clearly a number of positive developments unfolding as the novel closes: Helen is no longer ensnared in an abusive marriage and she is no longer responding to her sexual desires with shame and fear; Edward has broken his self-loathsome addiction to violent pornography and the two of them have entered into a new love relation of erotic mutuality. God’s imposing law seems to have vanished, and God is now more loving than judging, exhorting Helen to ‘go’ and ‘be satisfied’ with Edward. This is not an unambiguously happy ending, however, namely due to one unanswered question: have these transformations come about in spite of Helen’s self-sacrifice, or because of it? As Irigaray’s analysis shows, Christian tradition asserts that union with God must be achieved through violent self-sacrifice and it is ambiguous whether or not this notion is affirmed in Original Bliss. It remains unclear whether God’s law has been conquered or satisfied; after all, with the death of Mr Brindle, Helen and Edward’s affair is no longer adulterous. The transformations that have occurred are no doubt liberating and positive, but the fact that they came at the cost of Helen’s silent submission to Brindle’s violence remains problematic. Has Helen overcome her religious masochism, or has she simply fulfilled its mandate? Heyward’s thoughts on the erotic and sadomasochism prove helpful in addressing these ambiguities. As she writes: “Having sex,” if it is erotic, is about power-sharing. As such, it involves journeying together through places of brokenness and pain toward safety and tenderness. Sadomasochistic eroticism does not signal necessarily that something is wrong with us individually, but rather indicates, unmistakably, how fundamentally formed we are – emotionally, spiritually, physically – by the world we inhabit. We cannot journey entirely beyond sadomasochism because the culture breeds it faster than we are able to imagine expunging it from our midst. (1989, p. 108)

For Heyward, then, mutuality is an ongoing ‘relational process of moving through sadomasochism’, a continual effort to redirect ‘wrong relational power’ (1989, p. 106). She does not assert that sadomasochistic urges need to be completely denied; in fact her analysis shows how deeply embedded those urges are in Western culture. Heyward is not offering eros as a quick utopian fix, but as an ongoing movement towards better love relations, a process that will no doubt be fraught with setbacks and paradox. This fumbling movement towards mutuality, I would argue, is what is ultimately depicted in Original Bliss. An unambiguous

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ending in which Helen’s and Edward’s problems with shame, violence and selfabasement simply vanish would oversimplify the complexity of human sexuality. Helen’s conception of God has transformed, but the description of him as ‘jealous’ signals that there is still unresolved conflict between Helen’s relationship with God and her relationship with Edward. Feminist philosopher Sandra Bartky, in her book Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression, argues that feminine masochism is deeply rooted in patriarchal oppression and she criticizes the idea that a woman with masochistic desires can simply ‘reprogram her consciousness’ (1990, p. 57). This perspective, she argues, holds ‘a shallow view of the nature of patriarchal oppression’: Anything done can be undone, it is implied; nothing has been permanently damaged, nothing irretrievably lost. But this is tragically false. One of the evils of a system of oppression is that it may damage people in ways that cannot always be undone. Patriarchy invades the intimate recesses of personality where it may maim and cripple the spirit forever. . . . Many human beings . . . may have to live with a degree of psychic damage that can never be fully healed. (1990, p. 58)

The unanswered questions surrounding Helen’s religious masochism reveal that, although Helen has made startling progress ‘journeying . . . through places of brokenness’, as Heyward puts it, she has not fully freed herself from the violence of internalized religious discourse. I would argue that Kennedy points to the possibility of refiguring God and redeeming relationships from violent appropriation, but she simultaneously problematizes the possibility that God can be completely rewritten beyond the phallic economy. Although he becomes loving, and his will aligns with Helen’s desires, the God of Original Bliss ultimately remains possessive and masculine, retaining a somewhat Calvinist profile, as Helen believes her love for Edward has been explicitly permitted and approved by God. What Helen does seem fully freed from, however, is fear. Craig, in his account of fearfulness in the Scottish imagination, notes that ‘for many Scottish novelists, the conflict of the fearful and the fearless is unresolvable in the social – and male-dominated – world of Scotland’ (1999, p. 54). Kennedy, however, does seem to escape this dialectic through the demise of Mr Brindle and the transformation of a fear-inspiring God; in the final, fleshy revelry of this novel, no one is fearsome and no one is afraid. Kennedy’s novel ends with unresolved tensions, but what does remain clear is that Helen’s concept of God and her ability to embrace her desires and enter a love relation of mutuality are inextricably connected. How Helen perceives

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God determines, throughout the novel, how she relates to men. In this way, Original Bliss serves as both an exposé of religious erotophobia and a powerful model of Irigarayan mutuality, offering the idea that a God conceptualized as existing within human connections, particularly erotic ones, opens potential for renewed relationships that cultivate horizontal transcendence rather than fear and subjugation.

Notes 1 A handful of critics have noted Kennedy’s recurrent interest in religion and sexuality, albeit cursorily. Sarah Dunnigan states that Kennedy’s writing ‘redraws the permissible boundaries of the female erotic’, and observes that, although ‘Kennedy is not an overtly religious writer’, ‘religious metaphors underlie, or can be applied to, her fiction’ (2000, pp. 144, 153). Glenda Norquay similarly recognizes that Kennedy is ‘fascinated by the relationship between subjectivity and the body, as pain and pleasure define identity’, and she notes that Kennedy’s ‘interest in the body is fuelled as much by metaphysical speculation as it is by gender politics’ (2005, pp. 145, 147). In addition, David Borthwick mentions Kennedy’s fondness for ‘religious symbolism’ and her intermittent use of ‘divine interventions’ (2007, p. 268). Kaye Mitchell’s book-length work A. L. Kennedy gives more measured attention to Kennedy’s religious interests, specifically the exploration of ‘connections between religious faith or experience, romance and writing’ (2007, p. 68) in the novels So I am Glad, Everything You Need and Original Bliss. 2 Original Bliss was initially published in a collection of short stories of the same name, before being released as a self-contained novel. In this chapter, all textual references to Original Bliss appear parenthetically and refer to the New York Vintage edition, published in 1997. 3 In making this ambitious claim about the influence of Calvinism on Scottish culture and identity, Craig offers this caveat: ‘If there is a stress to my argument on the Calvinist inheritance of Scottish culture, that is not to ignore the significance of other religions and intellectual traditions in Scotland, but rather it is a recognition of the powerful role that Calvinism has played in shaping the institutions which have, in many ways, defined and maintained the nation in the absence of a national government’ (1999, p. 35). 4 Derrida’s analysis of this story in The Gift of Death similarly highlights how Abraham obeys, without question, a distant, silent God who refuses to disclose the reasons for his demands, which emphasizes God’s separateness as ‘wholly

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other [tout autre]’ (1995, p. 57). In the biblical account, Derrida asserts, ‘God is absolutely transcendent, hidden, secret, not giving any reason he can share in exchange for this doubly given death, not sharing anything in this dissymmetrical silence’ (p. 73). Derrida’s reading also notes the underlying masculine dynamic at work: ‘It is difficult not to be struck by the absence of woman’ in this story, which is fundamentally a story ‘of father and son, of masculine figures, of hierarchies among men’ (p. 75).

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Western religious discourse is a difficult entity to engage with from a feminist perspective. Not only do religious institutions have a history of oppressing women by excluding them from positions of authority and enforcing, often violently, patriarchal norms, values and constructions of gender, but the discourse on which these institutions are built is also in many ways phallocentric. Despite this, despite the damage that has been done to women by religion both individually and collectively, many women nonetheless endeavour to carve out and articulate a religious space that does not do violence to, but rather cultivates, feminine subjectivity. This project has sought to shed light on these revisionist endeavours, main­ taining that a thorough and feminist reading of women’s writing remains incomplete without an attention to religious themes. My research has inves­ tigated the revisionary movement in contemporary women’s fiction, and unlike in previous studies, I have shown that this literary revision is not confined to the rewriting of biblical texts, but rather engages with and refigures significant aspects of religious discourse itself. In the previous chapters, through close textual readings, I have argued that these novels display an incarnational approach to the religious, an approach that subverts traditional schisms between the female body and the authoritative divine Word; between the desiring, sexual flesh and the spirit; between a transcendent, immutable divinity and the changeable realm of sexuate humanity. Though it has, at times, been helpful to draw on the work of feminist theologians in explicating these fictional texts, I have argued that these works should not be read as feminist theology. As stated earlier, it is significant that women still choose to wrestle with religious discourse, despite its androcentrism, and it is perhaps even more significant that many choose to do this in the realm of literature. Literature, because of its difference from theology, is better able to express heterogeneous and ambiguous notions of truth, better able to express mystery, paradox and the embodied, sensual dimensions of sexuate human experience. These women writers are concerned with bringing the female body

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into the text, with making words flesh. If literature can be seen as incarnated writing, as I argued in Chapter 1, then it is literary writing that is best able to express an incarnated vision of the religious. It is important to clarify that, although I have argued that the religious and the divine can be reconceptualized, transforming institutionalized religion is fraught with more difficulty. I am not asserting that revisionist writing alone can transform patriarchal religious institutions. What I have argued is that this revisionary movement in women’s fiction enables alternative visions of the religious to emerge. This is an important aspect of deconstructing the power of traditional religious discourse, because it reveals that alternative possibilities and conceptions of the divine can and do exist. Furthermore, writing itself – especially literary, fictional writing – creates a space of ambiguity, a space of indeterminate, multiple truths and this is precisely why it is a viable space for rethinking religion beyond codified absolutes. During her seminar at Queen Mary College in  2008, Luce Irigaray made the assertion that there should be no suffering in encountering and cultivating divinity. This idea, that women should not have to suffer in order to become divine, is affirmed not only by Irigaray’s work, but by all of the women writers presented here. Each of these novels exposes how religion has been used violently, and all attempt, in various ways, to refigure the religious beyond hierarchical violence through a more incarnational conception of the sacred. Following Chapters 1 and 2, which contextualized this research in Luce Irigaray’s theories and outlined existing criticism of women’s revisionary writing, Chapter 3 analysed the portrayal of Western religious discourse in Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale. Through her dystopian depiction of the Gilead regime, Atwood reveals how religious discourse alienates women from their own bodies and their own words, reducing them to interchangeable objects; Atwood’s heroine is repeatedly raped and silenced, all in the name of God. This novel illustrates the violent power of a religious discourse that obliterates, rather than cultivates, feminine subjectivity by denying women’s access to divinity and language. Atwood also, however, depicts Offred’s inner resistance as she defies the religious ideology of Gilead by secretly telling and recording her own story in an attempt to reclaim her body, her words and her creative power. Like Atwood, Michèle Roberts, whose work was explored in Chapter 4, depicts access to language and the recovery of creative power as vital for figuring and articulating a feminine subjectivity. Her novels The Book of Mrs Noah and Impossible Saints highlight that women’s struggle with the God of Western religion is simultaneously a struggle with language and creative autonomy. She exposes the violence that occurs when

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the female body is subjugated to the divine word. The saints in her revisionist hagiography starve and mutilate themselves and desperately try to hide their femaleness in an attempt to reach God. The women aboard her myth-making Ark are crippled in their inner lives, initially unable to express their experiences and desires through writing. Roberts, like Irigaray, recognizes that the process of self-incarnation necessitates reclaiming language and she depicts her heroines’ journeys from being oppressed by religious mythology to forming a renewed sense of self through myth-breaking and myth-making. Significantly, Atwood’s and Roberts’ novels are built around their heroines’ fictionalized self-tellings. These novels are stories of women telling stories: Offred records her story on tapes; Josephine pens her own autobiography and the sibyls aboard the ark exchange stories on a range of subjects, including their own lives. In response to the violence of religion, these heroines attempt to undo the subjugation of body to Word, of humanity to divinity, by naming themselves and translating their sensual experiences, of both oppression and liberation, into language. In the final two chapters, the discussion shifts from the reconciliation of the female body and the divine Word to the relationship between eroticism and the religious – between the flesh and the spirit. Alice Walker’s characterizations of Susannah and Magdalena in By the Light of My Father’s Smile present the violent effects of a religious ideology that subjugates flesh to spirit and views female sexuality as particularly depraved. A. L. Kennedy’s novel Original Bliss, the subject of Chapter 6, similarly depicts the transformation of Kennedy’s heroine, Helen, whose violent relationships with men are tied to her conception of God as a masculine, all-powerful judge who despises human sexuality. Both Helen and Magdalena are portrayed as victims of continual bodily violence: Helen submits to her husband’s physical abuse almost to the point of death, believing him to be enforcing God’s will; Magdalena abuses herself with extreme piercings and eventually eats herself to death. Kennedy and Walker clearly connect the violence in their narratives to religious concepts of divinity and sexuality and both writers likewise highlight the redemption that is found when the erotic and the religious are no longer seen as violently antithetical, but as entwined forces of relationality. Kennedy’s Helen ultimately moves towards a relationship of love and mutuality with both God and her lover and Walker’s Robinson is finally reconciled to his daughters when he realizes the damage he has inflicted in the name of religion and is enlightened by the theology of the Mundo people, who prize sexuality as deeply spiritual. These novels portray the opposition between flesh and spirit as a source of violence, particularly against

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women, and show how renewed non-violent relationships between the self and the other can form when this opposition is subverted and the erotic is refigured as divine. I have argued that all these writers display an incarnational thinking in their religious revisions, but this key commonality should not obscure the differences between their works. Each writer maintains her own balance between conservation and creation, between critique and renewal. Atwood’s novel, for example, is more concerned with exposing the dangerous and violent power of religious discourse and less with articulating refigured religious concepts. Alice Walker and Michèle Roberts, in contrast, devote much of their narratives to describing alternative conceptions of the religious; Walker through her characterization of Mundo spiritual beliefs and Roberts through her revisionist hagiographies. In addition, though all of these writers are concerned with gender, Walker is just as concerned with race and how traditional religious discourse is a source of both misogyny and racism. A. L. Kennedy’s novel, unlike the others, ultimately retains the concept of a transcendent, personified God, who is referred to with a masculine pronoun. Though Kennedy’s narrative revises the traditional binary between eroticism and divinity by transforming this God from a judge to a lover, her revisions largely remain within the boundaries of Christianity. The noticeable differences among these works reveals the revisionary movement in contemporary women’s writing to be a heterogeneous one that expresses a range of perspectives. In contrast with traditional religious discourse, which attempts to systematize and define truth in universal terms, the literary discourse of feminist revisionist writing is more concerned with the particular and seeks to pluralize conceptualizations of the religious dimension in ways that reflect women’s diverse incarnations. While this book has contributed to the often-overlooked intersection between feminist literary studies and religion, there remains much to be explored and I would like to briefly outline possibilities for further research in this area. My project is limited to writers rethinking Western religious discourse; it would be interesting for future projects to consider whether revisionist writing is a peculiarly Western movement, or if women writers working in non-Western contexts are also engaged in critiquing and refiguring their religious traditions. Additionally, as Heather Walton has asserted in her work, there is considerable need for more feminist critics to theorize the relationship between theology/religious studies and literature.1 More than other aspects of literary studies, this intersection remains extremely

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male-centred. As this book has focused on women’s fictional writing and previous works on biblical revision have analysed women’s poetry, further work could examine religious revision in other genres, namely women’s literary non-fiction and autobiography.2 As mentioned earlier, several of the novels examined here contain fictionalized autobiographical writing; this revisionary movement in women’s writing is clearly concerned with the need for women to tell their own stories, for women to ‘discover their word(s) . . . and, interweaving it with their bodies, make it a living and spiritual flesh’ (Irigaray 2004e, p. 151). I would like to close with an anecdote from Irigaray’s Je, tu, nous: Towards a Culture of Difference in which Irigaray recounts an experience of jubilation upon seeing a statue of St Anne and her infant daughter, Mary, in an Italian museum. At first assuming that this is yet another depiction of Mary and the infant Jesus, Irigaray describes how the realization that ‘this Jesus was a girl’ affects her: In the museum there is a statue of a woman who resembles Mary, Jesus’ mother, sitting with the child before her on her knee, facing the observer. I was admiring this beautiful wooden sculpture when I noticed that this Jesus was a girl! That had a very significant effect on me, one of jubilation – mental and physical. I felt freed from the tensions of that cultural truth-imperative which is also practiced in art: a virgin-mother woman and her son depicted as the models of redemption we should believe in. Standing before this statue representing Mary and her mother, Anne, I felt once again at ease and joyous, in touch with my body, my emotions, and my history as a woman. I had before me an aesthetic and ethical figure that I need to be able to live without contempt for my incarnation, for that of my mother and other women. (p. 25)

This story illustrates the central focus of this book by highlighting the importance of aesthetic depictions and expressions in incarnating a feminine subjectivity. Irigaray describes her awareness that the Christ-child is actually a girl-child as deeply transformative. For Irigaray, this sculpture expresses the idea of a feminine incarnation, the divine Word made into female flesh, and it conveys this idea sensually, as a work of art that can be seen and touched. The literary works examined here function in much the same way, as works that move beyond an oppositional religious schema by providing new images and ideas that depict feminine incarnation and thereby cultivate feminine becoming. These visionary revisionists rewrite the religious dimension into a space where violent hierarchies are dissolved, where women can become divine without suffering. And as this

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anecdote suggests, just as the statue of Mary’s female divinity enables Irigaray to embrace her incarnation, so can the literary and aesthetic creations of revisionist writers serve as transformative models for women readers, who by encountering these words may feel their own divine incarnations affirmed.

Notes 1 See Chapter 2. 2 See the sections on Ostriker and Brown in Chapter 2.

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Index ‘The Age of the Breath’  18, 158 An Ethics of Sexual Difference  1, 13, 157 Anglo-American feminism  25 Atwood, M., Cat’s Eye  53 The Handmaid’s Tale  166 body and woman  62 divine feminine  74–6 divine identity and divine rite  66 female pleasure and desire  67 female subordination, myths of  61–2 feminine body subjection  61 feminine subjectivity  56 God of monotheism  56–7 heterosexuality  69, 72 incarnation  68–9 Particicution  79 patriarchal religious discourse  60, 65–6, 70, 73–4 reproductive function  67, 70 romance  68 sexual difference, rigidity of  57–8 uniforms and reductive sexual difference  58 Western religious thought, oppositional logic of  55 the Word  61 word and body  64–5 world of becoming  79–80 Surfacing  53 The Year of the Flood  53 Bartky, S., Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression  124, 161 Bates, G.  119, 137 Beattie, T.  12

Bernstein, R.  118 Bible, literary revision of  40–4 Brown, A. B.  43–4 Byrd, R.  139 Christ, C. P.  35, 37–9 Diving Deep and Surfacing  53 Cixous, H.  55 ‘Extreme Fidelity’  148 ‘Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays’  149 Conboy, S.  58 corporeality  19, 53, 62–3, 66, 92–3, 95, 98–9, 105 Craig, C.  161 The Modern Scottish Novel: Narrative and the National Imagination  146 Cullinan, C.  43 Davies, M.  63 Deutscher, P.  20 ‘Divine women’  4, 16, 19, 70, 74, 80, 89, 92 divinity  4, 6–7, 11–14, 18–20, 22, 48, 56, 61, 70, 73–6, 79–80, 87, 89, 94, 98–102, 105, 113–14, 144, 156–8, 165–8 Douglas, K. B.  123–4 Elemental Passions  158 ‘Equal to Whom?’  21–2, 66 Everyday Prayers  24, 26 feminine subjectivity  1–2, 6, 8, 9n. 8, 13–14, 16, 19, 23, 27, 29, 38, 43, 56–7, 65, 165–6, 169 Feuerbach, L.  16 Filipczak, D.  61 flesh and spirit  6, 20, 95, 113, 123, 167 ‘Fulfilling Our Humanity’  25, 78, 114

182 Gorey, O.  119 Grant, J.  130 Groover, K.  46 Grosz, E.  12, 18, 56, 158 Gunn, G.  36 Hampson, D.  144 Heyward, C.  147, 156, 158, 160 Hooker, D.  57 Howells, C.  54, 74 incarnation  3, 5–6, 19–24, 43, 63, 69, 86–7, 100–3, 109, 113, 123, 129, 134–6, 154, 165, 168–70 Ingman, H.  47, 85, 109 Women’s Spirituality in the Twentieth Century: An Exploration Th rough Fiction  44–5 In the Beginning, She Was  23, 28 Jantzen, G., Becoming Divine  11–12, 21 Je, tu, nous: Towards a Culture of Difference  45, 169 Johnson, S. A.  54, 69 Joy, M.  26, 69 Kennedy, A. L.  143 Looking for the Possible Dance  146 Original Bliss  167 Christian taboos  156 concept of God  144 desire and need  159 divinity vs humanity  145 erotic and mutuality  157 fear and sex  145–6 female subjugation and masculine domination  151 God’s judgement  147–8, 152–3 horizontal transcendence  157–8 myth of Eve and apple  148 phallic economy  150 pointless sexual extravagance  146 religious masochism  153–4, 161 resurrection  155 self-sacrifice  153, 155 sexual desire  146 shame  146–7

Index touch, sensual pleasure of  157, 159 violence  151 as self-hating Christian  143 King, J., Women and the Word: Contemporary Women Novelists and the Bible  42–3, 136 Klarer, M.  61 Lacan, J.  14 Larson, J.  61 Lauret, M.  119, 128–9 Lawson, J.  55, 73 Lindsay, E.  46 literary writing  11, 23–4, 26, 35, 46 literature and theology  27–9, 165–6 logos. see the Word López, S.  96, 112 Lorde, A.  132–4 Mainimo, W.  120 Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche  2, 21, 87, 153 Martin, A.  18 masculinity  14, 57, 89, 91 Miner, M.  62, 68 Montelaro, J.  70 Morrison, S.  71 Moyers, B.  71 Mulder, A.-C.  19 Ostriker, A.  24, 47 Feminist Revision and the Bible  40–2 Parker, E.  93, 105 Pemberton, G.  136 phallocentrism  1–3, 14–15, 17, 22, 25, 27, 49, 55, 97, 102, 106 phallogocentrism  14, 18, 49, 55 poetic language  24–5 post-structuralist theory  43, 47 Prose, F.  118 Razak, A.  120, 128 ‘The Redemption of Women’  106, 116n. 5, 134 the religious  4–5, 7, 12–13, 18, 24, 26–9, 35–6, 38, 40, 48–9, 56, 66, 69, 73, 79, 85, 91, 97–100, 106, 110, 112–14, 118–19, 166–9

Index religious masochism  153–4, 161 Rich, A.  102 Rigney, B. H., Lilith’s Daughters: Women and Religion in Contemporary Fiction  39–40, 53 Roberts, M., The Book of Mrs Noah  166–7 autonomous sacred space  109 facets  106 food and words, parallels between  104 ‘golden cocoon’  103 language, sensuality of  103–4 monolithic masculinity of divinity  89 revisionist strategy  102 suppressed spirituality  90 writer’s block and creative emptiness  89–90 ‘The Flesh Made Word’  88, 92, 100, 111 Impossible Saints  166–7 art of self-effacement  93–4 autonomous sacred space  110–11 body and Word  100 conflation of God and Father  91–2 facets  106 female physical dismemberment  95–6 female subjugation  92–3 language, sensuality of  105 merits of revision  114 patriarchal religious discourse  105 Sainthood  95 violence  97–9 woman’s sexuality  94–5 The Word  94 revisionist writing  106 Robinson, C. C.  117, 130, 137 Rodriguez, P. B.  91, 96 Rowland, S.  86 Schwartz, R.  152 secularism  11–13, 20, 32n. 12, 40, 47, 73, 88, 100, 112 Sellers, S.  25, 49–50, 77, 97, 108, 112, 114 Language and Sexual Difference  2

Sexes and Genealogies  2, 4, 9n. 6 sexuate difference  2–3, 13–17, 19–20, 22–3, 31n. 10, 47–8, 57, 72, 78–80, 158 Shalit, W.  118 social quest  37–8 Speculum of the Other Woman  1, 13 spiritual quest  37–8 ‘Spiritual Tasks for Our Age’  1, 12 Spivak, G.  77 Staels, H.  59, 61 Stein, K.  58 Stillman, P.  54, 69 Stuart, E.  21 Thatcher, A.  21 theology and literature  22–9, 165–6 This Sex Which is Not One  1, 13–14, 69 Walker, A., as ‘born-again pagan’  117 By the Light of My Father’s Smile  167 African American female body  117–22, 130, 136, 139 ‘black cloth’  127 ‘body-devaluing ideology’  123, 132 carnal love  135 eclectic spirituality  130 erotic freedom  134 female body  135 female erotic power  133–4 internal enslavement  121 Mundo consciousness  131 platonic Christian view of sexuality  123 racism  120–1 religious imperialism  120 religious oppression and sexual suppression  122 sexual and spiritual redemption  129 sexual shame  118, 124–5 womanist ‘spirit’  129 In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens  117

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The Temple of My Familiar  120 The Colour Purple  118, 129–31, 137 Walton, H.  1, 26–7, 29, 46, 49, 86, 103, 114 Western religion  1, 21, 23, 53, 119, 166 Willmott, G.  63

the Word  6, 15, 19–23, 44, 55, 60–2, 65–6, 69, 80, 87–91, 99–100, 104–6 womanism  120 and spirituality  117



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