Resisting the Oppressive Paternal Metaphor of God in Michèle Roberts’s "Impossible Saints"

Tomasz Dobrogoszcz

doi:10.18778/2353-6098.6.11

Authors

Tomasz Dobrogoszcz University of Łódź https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4579-7143

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/2353-6098.6.11

Keywords:

Michèle Roberts, feminism, religion, Catholic Church, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan

Abstract

The protagonist of Michèle Roberts’s Impossible Saints, Josephine, establishes a nonconformist convent for women who seek communion with God by following an unorthodox path of sensual spirituality. Impossible Saints intersperses Josephine’s story with a number of miniature narratives depicting fictional lives of saints, rewritten in a feminist manner, portraying both the female predicament in the patriarchally structured society and women’s struggle for empowerment in which they rebel against masculinist conventions. The article employs feminist thought, derived mainly from Julia Kristeva, to examine the way in which Roberts problematizes the relation of the Catholic Church to the position of women as well its concern with the human body. The bodily dimension of the divine, as proposed by Luce Irigaray, manifesting in the emancipatory communal experience of women in Josephine’s convent, greatly contrasts with the Catholic regulatory character of religiosity. The analysis also situates the patriarchal institution of the Church in the context of the Lacanian order of the symbolic and his notion of the Name-of-the-Father. It culminates in exploring the issue of the metaphor of God as seen through the traditional patriarchal frame which pictures God as masculine.

Author Biography

Tomasz Dobrogoszcz, University of Łódź

Tomasz Dobrogoszcz is an associate professor at the Department of British Literature and Culture, University of Lodz, teaching courses and seminars in British literature and literary translation. His main fields of research include contemporary British and postcolonial literature, poststructuralist and psychoanalytical literary theory, contemporary film and culture studies. He has published articles on such writers as Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, Michel Faber, Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie, Ali Smith and Jeanette Winterson. He is the editor of Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition: Cultural Contexts in Monty Python (Rowman and Littlefield, 2014). He also published a monograph Family and Relationships in Ian McEwan’s Fiction (Lexington Press, 2018). He is the co-editor of Reading Graham Swift (Lexington Press, 2020). He translated into Polish a seminal work in postcolonial theory, The Location of Culture by Homi K. Bhabha, as well as many other critical and literary texts, for instance by Hayden White and Dipesh Chakrabarty.

References

Bastida Rodríguez, Patricia. “Rethinking Female Sainthood: Michèle Roberts’ Spiritual Quest in Impossible Saints.” Feminist Theology 15.1 (2006): 70–83. https://doi.org/10.1177/0966735006068850
Google Scholar DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0966735006068850

Beck, Richard. “Feeling Queasy About the Incarnation: Terror Management Theory, Death, and the Body of Jesus.” Journal of Psychology and Theology 36.4 (2008): 303–13. https://doi.org/10.1177/009164710803600406
Google Scholar DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/009164710803600406

Cain, Ruth. “The Buried Madonna: Matricide, Maternal Power and the Novels of Michèle Roberts.” Women’s Studies 42.4 (2013): 408–38. https://doi.org/10.1080/00497878.2013.772875
Google Scholar DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/00497878.2013.772875

Daly, Mary. Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation. Boston: Beacon, 1985.
Google Scholar

Falcus, Sarah. Michèle Roberts: Myths, Mothers and Memories. Bern: Lang, 2007.
Google Scholar

Hall, M. Elizabeth Lewis and Erik Thoennes. “At Home in Our Bodies: Implications of the Incarnation for Embodiment and Christian Higher Education.” Christian Scholar’s Review 36 (2006): 29–46.
Google Scholar

Homer, Sean. Jacques Lacan. London: Routledge, 2005. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203347232
Google Scholar DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203347232

Irigaray, Luce. An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill. London: Continuum, 2004.
Google Scholar

Jacobson, Heather L., M. Elizabeth Lewis Hall, Tamara L. Anderson and Michele M. Willingham. “Temple or Prison: Religious Beliefs and Attitudes Toward the Body.” Journal of Religion and Health 55.6 (2016): 2154–73. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10943-016-0266-z
Google Scholar DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10943-016-0266-z

Joy, Morny. “Autonomy and Divinity: A Double-Edged Experiment.” Thinking with Irigaray. Ed. Mary C. Rawlinson, Sabrina L. Hom and Serene J. Khader. New York: State U of New York P, 2011. 221–45.
Google Scholar

Kristeva, Julia. The Kristeva Reader. Ed. Toril Moi. New York: Columbia UP, 1986.
Google Scholar

Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: Norton, 2006.
Google Scholar

Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Dennis Porter. London: Routledge, 2008.
Google Scholar

Parker, Emma. “From House to Home: A Kristevan Reading of Michèle Roberts’s Daughters of the House.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 41.2 (2000): 153–73. https://doi.org/10.1080/00111610009601584
Google Scholar DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/00111610009601584

Parker, Emma. “Sex Changes: The Politics of Pleasure in the Novels of Michèle Roberts.” Literature Interpretation Theory 17.3–4 (2006): 325–51. https://doi.org/10.1080/10436920601000336
Google Scholar DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/10436920601000336

Roberts, Michèle. Impossible Saints. London: Virago, 1998.
Google Scholar

Roberts, Michèle. “On Women, Christianity, and History.” Interview with Patricia Bastida Rodríguez. Atlantis 25.1 (2003): 93–107.
Google Scholar

Ruether, Rosemary Radford. “Sexism and Misogyny in the Christian Tradition: Liberating Alternatives.” Buddhist-Christian Studies 34 (2014): 83–94. https://doi.org/10.1353/bcs.2014.0020
Google Scholar DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/bcs.2014.0020