speaks.”160 In Roberts’s annunciation, in which words are made flesh and the flesh makes new words, the woman writer conceives herself, in giving herself subjectivity and speech. This image of writing oneself as a giving birth to oneself reminds me of a phrase of Hélène Cixous: “[w]riting, dreaming, delivering; being my own daughter of each day.”161
Maitland also writes of the annunciation, imagining Mary’s “assent” as “the moment of conception,”162 “an assent to the totality of herself, to a womanhood so vital and empowered that it could break free of biology and submission, any dependence on or need for masculine sexuality.”163 Her 1999 novel Brittle Joys portrays the annunciation as the invention of the craft of glass-blowing: “[l]ying on the leather that covers her hand is a sphere, her glowing blue, light-refracting, light-distorting bubble, free of the rod, free and filled with inspiration. It has a navel, a small round scar, that joins it to her and to history, but she has set it free . . . She is pregnant, breathed into, inspired by the spirit. This is the annunciation.”164 This, as in Roberts’s image, presents a woman’s inspiration in artistic creativity as part of her bodily capacity to nurture new life.
Writing-as-mothering, as “annunciation,” is particularly appropriate as an image of the fiction of autobiography, while maintaining a sense of the very close connection between the writer and the subject of the autobiography. The self that writes a life is not the same person who lived the events being remembered and narrated; the person disclosed on the page is in many ways an entirely separate creation, a daughter, almost. As Roberts reflects in Paper Houses, “[w]ho was that ‘I,’ that young woman of twenty-one? I reconstruct her. I invent a new ‘me’ composed of the girl I was, according to my diaries, my memories (and the gaps between them), and the self remembering her. She stands in between the two. A third term. She’s a character in my story and she tells it too. She’s like a daughter. Looking back at her, thinking about her, I mother myself.”165
I find the image of annunciation helpful both in terms of the presentation of my own stories—the insertion of an autobiographical self who is in some sense my own creation—and in terms of my understanding of the authors Michèle Roberts and Sara Maitland’s incarnation in their writing. In the following chapter I stay with the symbolism of the Virgin Mary, by considering “reading these stories beside my own”166 in terms of encounter, that of visitation.
1. Hartsock, Feminist Standpoint.
2. Jolly, “Speaking Personally,” 214.
3. Miller, Getting Personal, 121.
4. Ibid., 20.
5. Henderson, “Introduction,” 13.
6. Harbord, “Platitudes,” 24.
7. Miller, Getting Personal, xii.
8. Cavarero, Relating Narratives, 76.
9. Miller, Getting Personal, 1.
10. Brock and Parker, Proverbs of Ashes, 6.
11. McCallum, “Anonymity Desirable,” 51.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology; Queer God; From Feminist Theology to Indecent Theology.
15. Althaus-Reid, Queer God, 10.
16. Pattison, “Suffer Little Children”; Shame.
17. Kitzberger, Personal Voice in Biblical Interpretation; Autobiographical Biblical Criticism.
18. Slee, Praying Like a Woman.
19. Gilbert, “Life Studies,” 853.
20. Kennard, “Personally Speaking,” 141.
21. Probyn, Sexing the Self, 13.
22. Kennard, “Personally Speaking,” 143.
23. Tompkins, “Me and My Shadow,” 169.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid., 173.
26. Miller, Getting Personal, 23.
27. Ibid., 25.
28. Ibid., xi.
29. Ibid., 23.
30. Probyn, “This Body Which is Not One,” 113.
31. Tompkins, “Me and My Shadow,” 173.
32. Veeser, “Case for Confessional Criticism,” x.
33. Probyn, Sexing the Self, 84.
34. Ibid., 4.
35. Ibid., 20.
