rather than set me free, that my identity had been so tied up with certain narratives that other possibilities were closed off. It seems that my belief in the worthiness of my self and my life is dependent upon the realization of certain narrative outcomes. It also seems that deep and long-lasting anguish results from people having conflicting narrative versions of the same events. Having lost faith in the grand religious narratives, I had also come to doubt the good of the smaller-scale life narratives—especially my own.
I have told a story of how I came to distrust story. It is, in a sense, fiction, in that I made it, though over time, and not always consciously. I looked back over memory and chose certain experiences and interpretations (often remembering the interpretation rather than any direct recollection of the experience), I wrought them into sentences and I laid them out in a certain shape. Yet I still would not want to say that that I made it up. Rather, a multitude of different stories could be told in a survey of the same young life; a multitude of different voices adopted, different masks worn. In writing about myself, I am creating certain versions of myself. It is not pretense, but it is artifice. The trouble with narrative is when its artfulness is confused for the natural, not that the artfulness is bad in itself. These recognitions about narrative and selfhood have been helpful, in both personal and academic terms, to my understanding of certain things. But it is important that I wear this particular story lightly, that I do not give it a unity that becomes prescriptive.
Writing an entire book on feminist theology and literature without mentioning my own stories, adopting an impersonal voice, is not an option for me. But I am making golden bone collages, rather than weaving tapestries. In this book I read the stories of Michèle Roberts and Sara Maitland beside my own, but in the recognition that this is not an appeal to direct and unmediated experience, and that my writing is, in a sense, just as much a fiction as theirs. I read these stories beside my own because admitting the instability of one’s standpoint does not imply that it is better to try to speak from nowhere. I read these stories beside my own because that is the best way I know to continually remind myself that I do not speak for everybody, that my reading and theology can only ever be that of a British, middle-class, well-educated white woman—but that acknowledgement should not be a rushed apology, placed at the beginning of a piece of academic work, and not referred to again.
Writing the Self in Sara Maitland
and Michèle Roberts
In the second section of this chapter, I discuss the life-(or self-)writing of Michèle Roberts and Sara Maitland. I consider the ways in which the authorial self is composed and transmitted in their writing and interviews, and how they engage with the process of self-narration.
Sara Maitland: Voice and Silence
Sara Maitland was born in 1950, the second of six children, and grew up in London and then a mansion in south-west Scotland, her father’s childhood home. Maitland describes her parents as encouraging their children—who they viewed “in a slightly collectivized way”—to be “highly articulate, contentious, witty, and to hold all authority except theirs in a certain degree of contempt.”63 While introspection was discouraged, “[w]ithin the magical space they had created for us . . . we were given an enormous amount of physical freedom—to play, to roam, to have fights and adventures.”64 A large family in an ancestral home in Scotland is the setting of the novel Home Truths, but perhaps the most significant influence family life has had on Sara Maitland as a writer is the witty, bantering style of her authorial voice.
Maitland was “excessively well-educated at expensive girls’ schools in London and Wiltshire.”65 Her education would provide her with a love and sense of ownership of classical myth, so important in her short stories.66 Maitland describes boarding school as “a damaging, brutal experience, made worse by the fact that in my parents’ world not to enjoy your schooldays was proof that you were an inferior human being—you were supposed to be ‘a good mixer,’ to ‘take the rough with the smooth.’”67 The high expectations that Maitland grew up with, both at home and at school, perhaps feed into the explorations of religious guilt in her writing:
At home we were supposed to get into Cambridge, and wear long white gloves, a tartan silk sash and our deceased grandmother’s pearls, and dance at Highland Balls. I was expected to have my own political opinions, and have them turn out the same as my parents. We were expected to be sociable, active and witty, and hard-working, industrious and calm. We were meant to be sociable and popular and bizarrely chaste. At school we were meant to be educated, independent, self-assured and totally innocent.68
In a 1986 essay Maitland compares the demands her father made of his children—his “tribe”—to those of Yahweh in the Hebrew Bible: “his devotion and loyalty in exchange for keeping their law.”69 As an adolescent she was “a father-identified daughter” who “wanted to be Pallas Athene to his Zeus.”70 The protagonists of Maitland’s novels Daughter of Jerusalem, Virgin Territory and Three Times Table are women who have adoring relationships with demanding fathers. In “Two for the Price of One,” Maitland conceptualizes the oppressive ideal ‘Father’ that she has internalized as a being separate from her real father, who died of cancer in 1982: “[i]n my late teens I fled away from my father’s house; it has taken me a long time to realise that I carried with me the Father from whom I could not escape by escaping childhood, from whom I have not yet escaped, and from whom I have had, and still have, to wrest my loves, my voice, my feminism and my freedom.”71
Maitland’s upbringing in the Presbyterian Church of Scotland lent her “a great love of the Bible and a generally warm feeling about Christianity,” but she had no “sense of ‘personal conversion,’ of passion or commitment”; thus “[a]s a teenager the mantle of Christianity simply slipped off.”72 The Christianity she encountered at Oxford in the 1970s was not to her at odds with her new-found socialism and feminism amidst those heady days: “[i]t was this conviction of enormous possibility that brought me back to thinking about God . . . made brave by hope and anger, I was tough enough for the enormous God whom I met.”73 In 1972, Maitland converted to Anglicanism; the same year she married an American training to be a vicar. They were Anglo-Catholic, a culture Maitland enjoyed as “colourful, gossipy, close-knit, extravagant and deeply-ironic,” while believing that “the strongly sacramental constructions of high-church liturgical practice balanced the rationalist and individualist tendencies of much feminist theory.”74
Maitland had her first child, a daughter, in 1973, and living in London as a mother and vicar’s wife she became more involved with the feminist movement, and started to refer to herself as a writer. She wrote and published with the Women Writers Collective of Michelene Wandor, Zoe Fairbairns, Valerie Miner and Michèle Roberts; her 1978 novel Daughter of Jerusalem—a contemporary feminist’s ambivalent struggle with infertility, interspersed with the stories of biblical women—won the Somerset Maugham Award. In 1982 her son Adam was born; 1983 saw the publication of a non-fiction book about Christian feminism, A Map of the New Country, and a collection of short stories, Telling Tales. At this time she also wrote a third-person narrative of her experience as a feminist writer, “A Feminist Writer’s Progress,” with a fairy-tale structure, explaining her move from social realism to revisioning of myth.75
