Sex, Sin, and Our Selves. Anna Fisk

“who build in a rhetoric of self-abnegation . . . end up writing autobiographically.”101 Maitland’s love of silence has led her to consider deeply the nature of language and narrative—these things that structure human experience and yet are opposite to the silence she finds so profoundly fulfilling. Novels (at least the kind of novels that Maitland once wrote) involve “narrative, plot and resolution or closure, all of which are linear or time-bound and therefore deeply alien to silence.”102 Maitland’s account of silence, repeatedly retold in articles, interviews and speaking engagements, is both a narrative she has constructed, and a way of being that is resistant to narrative, especially narrative closure. This is something that comes to the fore in the final paragraph of A Book of Silence:

I am finding it hard to finish this book, because I don’t feel that I am at the end of anything. Back in Warkton, at the very beginning, I tried to design a garden that would open out into infinity; that would forgo the satisfaction of closure, in the hope of finding the jouissance of the unresolved, the open-ended. Now I am trying to design a whole life that will do that. For me silence is both the instrument and content of that life.103

      Michèle Roberts’s Life Story

      If Sara Maitland’s writing of her self comes to be defined by silence, Michèle Roberts’s is in some ways the very opposite: being a writer is absolutely essential to her sense of self, and is a theme of nearly all her fiction. Roberts is a particularly interesting writer to consider in terms of autobiography, because her self-writing is entwined with her theorization of the process of doing so. The self that Michèle Roberts discloses—or narrates—in her writing and interviews is projected clearly, and in bright colors. This autobiographical fiction is not stable, and flickers in and out of her novels, taking a different guise when read in the light of her memoirs, but it is indisputably there, throughout all her work.

Michèle Roberts was born in 1949 to a French mother and an English father. She has a brother and two sisters, one of which is her twin. Roberts’s childhood was divided between Edgware in Surrey and summers in rural Normandy, and her potted biographies usually open with the information that she is “half-French,” making this detail significant to her identity as a writer, despite the fact that all her published works are in English. Her fiction is sometimes set in France, but usually involves a character that is in some way both French and English, or else an English person living in France or vice-versa. In an interview with Jenny Newman, Roberts describes how growing up with the feeling of “having two families and two homes, and [having] to move back and forth across the sea to join them up” was an important impetus for becoming a writer.104 The awkwardness of growing up not-quite English and not-quite French—the dual identity that results from being raised in two places, two cultures, divided by language and by the sea—is given to Roberts’s protagonists Julie in A Piece of the Night and Léonie in Daughters of the House, and explored autobiographically in “Une Glossaire/A Glossary.” In the latter, the division is represented linguistically—with each section headed by a French word and its English meaning—by the oblique between the two languages. Roberts’s repeated recreation of a childhood in rural Normandy—particularly evocative of the material and domestic—represents the attempt to restore a sense of closeness to her mother. Childhood is also an important aspect of Roberts’s writing because “[w]hen you’re young, you’re very open to the world, you’re vulnerable, you’re soft-shelled. I think your childhood stamps you, wounds you, shapes you . . . you struggle to turn it into language and make something of it.”105

The childhood “wound” that opens again and again in Roberts’s writing is the Roman Catholicism she inherited from her mother and from convent school. She describes its influence as all-pervasive: “as integral as the blood in my veins, passed on to me by my mother like milk. Catholicism was a language itself: a complete system of images, and such a rich one, within which to live and name the world.”106 Roberts had been devoutly religious as a child, and believed she had a vocation to become a nun, but lost her faith once leaving home and going to university.107 Looking back—in anger—on her religious childhood and adolescence, she came to regard church teaching on women, sexuality, sin, and judgment as a cause of great harm: “the Catholic split between body and soul . . . damaged me almost irreparably, I would say, as a young woman growing up, because it made me feel so bad about desire, sex, pleasure, myself, my own body. Part of what my work’s been trying to do is to repair damage.”108

Thus a devout young girl’s struggle with Catholicism and sexuality appears again and again in Roberts’s fiction, and in an especially autobiographical way in the characters of Julie in A Piece of the Night, Helen in The Visitation and Thérèse in Daughters of the House. Thirteen-year-old Thérèse, who wants to be a nun, copes with her mother’s terminal cancer by focusing on the purity of piety: “she lay on the floor in the shape of a cross, and prayed. . .What comforted her, when from time to time she opened her eyes and squinted upwards, was the sight of her statue of Our Lady of Lourdes. The Madonna with a heavenly look, a light veil over her fair hair, blue sash about her girlish waist.”109 Yet this is disturbed by her developing body: “[s]he hated her stomach which stuck out as though she were pregnant however hard she tried to suck it in. She hated her breasts.”110 This echoes Roberts’s own experience of adolescence and the onset of menstruation,111 of seeing herself as female within a church whose symbolism denies the physicality of womanhood. For Julie at convent school on the feast day of Joseph the worker, dedicated to the Virgin: “[t]his is our day, the little girls’ day, when we sing of pearls, of lilies, of bleeding hearts, of secret soft places visited by God. Only my hands are slimy with heat and perspiration, there is a sanitary towel strapped like a dead rabbit between my legs.”112 In The Visitation the conflict between the church and teenage sexuality is played out in Helen’s guilt at kissing a boy at the church youth club dance; her twin brother and her friend caught having sex in her father’s car headlights, the priest calling them whores. That night she thinks of how “[t]he nuns teach her how to compose herself for sleep: lie on your back, arms folded across your breast, and think of the four last things. Death, judgment, heaven and hell.”113

Having moved away from religious faith, Roberts’s teenage spiritual fervor was channeled into the desire to be a writer; a parallel she draws explicitly: “I lost my religious vocation easily, in my first term at Somerville [College, Oxford], standing on the staircase outside the college library cradling copies of Paradise Lost and Beowulf . . . I realised that nuns were not allowed to stay up all night reading. Very well, then. Don’t be a nun. That was that.”114 This narrative of having exchanged God for books would be told in terms of swapping one vocation for another: from being a nun to being a writer. Yet Roberts acknowledges the relationship between her Catholic heritage and the desire to write, because of the images and stories integral to the Catholic tradition, the women saints she learnt about at convent school, and the medieval mystics she studied at university. The image of saint as writer and writer as saint is a significant motif throughout her work.

The sense of vocation—including a willed poverty—took her to London after university, to write and train to be a librarian at the British Museum. Her experience working in the Department of Printed Books feeds into the image at the heart of The Book of Mrs Noah, of the Ark as a great library for women;