Feminism and Faith: Exploring Christian Spaces in the Writing of Sara Maitland and Michèle Roberts
In 1983, British feminists Sara Maitland and Jo Garcia edited Walking on the Water (London: Virago), a collection of “essays, stories, poems and pictures by women about spirituality”. Contributors had been invited in particular to explore the relationship between their feminist identity and their re...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Laboratoire d’Etudes et de Recherches sur le Monde Anglophone (LERMA)
2011-03-01
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| Series: | E-REA |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://journals.openedition.org/erea/1563 |
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| Summary: | In 1983, British feminists Sara Maitland and Jo Garcia edited Walking on the Water (London: Virago), a collection of “essays, stories, poems and pictures by women about spirituality”. Contributors had been invited in particular to explore the relationship between their feminist identity and their religious beliefs. The tone of these contributions was extremely diverse, ranging from the passionate urge to reconcile the goals of feminism with Christianity to a complete rejection of the Church as the paramount patriarchal institution.This essay engages with these diametrically opposed narratives on Christianity and feminism as pictured in the writing of two of the contributors, Sara Maitland (1950-) and Michèle Roberts (1949-). Both writers have been actively involved in the feminist movements of the 1970s, and have struggled to come to terms with their Christian heritage. Nonetheless while Maitland focused on revising Christianity by making it incorporate essential points on the feminist agenda, Roberts felt the imperious need to discard her religious identity in order to become “her own woman”; moreover, in her 2007 autobiography Paper Houses she describes her Catholic upbringing as “authoritarian and misogynistic” (16).My essay addresses questions regarding the challenge of articulating one’s spiritual identity as a concatenation of feminism and faith; with this end in mind, I am drawing a comparative perspective between Maitland’s collection of short-stories A Book of Spells, in conjunction with selected essays, on the one hand, and Roberts” acclaimed novel Daughters of the House, on the other. In these writings, Maitland and Roberts share a common goal: to renegotiate women’s place in Christian history, which they both acknowledge – though admittedly from different perspectives – as formative of contemporary Western identity. Whatever their personal choices, Christian spirituality turns out to be a key factor in determining the specific place they – or indeed their fictional heroines – occupy in the social world. Taking as a starting point the idea that “the identities of place are always unfixed, contested and multiple” (Doreen Massey), this essay focuses on these writers” efforts to assert women’s spiritual identity against the rigid boundaries of the social spaces they are often confined into. |
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| ISSN: | 1638-1718 |