Because of Beauvoir: Christianity and the Cultivation of Female Genius

7. Michèle Roberts

139 a 7 Michèle roberts Then it seemed to her she was in her cell, watching the cocoon crack open. Out struggled a creature with great wet, dragging wings that were stuck together. It twitched and flared. Shook out flags of billowing colour, reared its head . . . she woke up screaming, convinced she was going to die. Not a nightmare but real. The great wings beating above her, the hot pulse of its desire, so close, the fireball eyes staring into hers. The butterfly filled the tiny room. It trembled. It was ready. At last she realised it had come out of herself. —Michèle Roberts, Impossible Saints Early Years Michèle Roberts was born in 1949 and brought up in the London suburb of Edgware. The daughter of a French Roman Catholic mother and an Anglican father, she attended Roman Catholic schools in London before going to university in Oxford in 1967 to study English literature. After graduating, she intended to train as a librarian, but instead she fell in love with feminism and committed herself to the life of a writer and feminist activist in London.1 She has written fourteen novels, three collections of poetry, a play, and two 1 Michèle Roberts, Paper Houses: A Memoir of the ’70s and Beyond (London: Virago, 2007), 35. 140 Because of Beauvoir works of nonfiction. She won the Booker Prize in 1992 for Daughters of the House and was made Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government. She is emeritus professor of creative writing at the University of East Anglia, UK. She is presented here as a case study for female genius—as previously defined—in respect of her life, her literary work, and what I would describe as her theology. The idea of the female theologian continues to be problematic to some degree; Christian theology, it seems, has always been the province of the institutionally commissioned or ordained male leader or the divinely inspired male scholar,2 and a woman’s place, according to this view, is not to teach or have authority over men nor to tell the powerful theological story for herself. She had better confine herself to literature, for example, an acceptable field for women, according to some views, precisely because literature has been seen to require the guiding masculine hand of theology or philosophy to gain legitimacy.3 However, within a theological culture that continues to be viewed as normatively male, even if less so than in the past, Roberts exemplifies the female genius who works and creates in pursuit of her desires—including her desire to understand and communicate her reflections on God—without bracketing off all she is as a woman. Roberts exemplifies Kristeva’s view that values are not static or frozen standards but that it is in the process of tending to the—maternally instigated —capacity for thought by calling standards into question, whether on the level of the individual’s psychic life or in relation to societies at large, that they acquire “a sense of mobility, polyvalence and life.”4 So, in Roberts’ novels and poetry, prefaces and introductions, as well as in her autobiographical Paper Houses (2007), she generates a sense of mobility, polyvalence, and life by vigorously challenging what she experiences as the static immobility of traditional institutions—for example, patriarchal attitudes toward women as they are enshrined within the Roman Catholic Church’s teaching and 2 Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza is, of course, one feminist scholar who has sought to reread this historical assumption in her work on the history of early Christianity with a focus on egalitarian narratives within New Testament traditions relating to Jesus’ own ministry and teaching. See In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (London: SCM Press, 1983). 3 Heather Walton, Imagining Theology: Women Writing and God (London: T&T Clark Theology, 2007), 34–48. 4 Julia Kristeva, Revolt, She Said, trans. Brian O’Keeffe (Los Angeles: Semiotext[e], 2002), 12. Michèle Roberts 141 practice. Her singular practices of writing question Catholicism’s theological structures and cast the nature of God’s relationship with the world in terms of conceptual and social relationships that she fashions for herself as a woman. She questions notions of God as disembodied male and the body as sacrificial, expendable, and female, through the sensual evocations of carefully crafted words that produce, for example, a God...