Sex, Sin, and Our Selves. Anna Fisk

to describe experience in order not to be overwhelmed by it, to name the conflicts inside myself, to imagine solutions to them.”148 She often describes her novels as attempts at solving a particular problem, for example A Piece of the Night asks “what is a woman?” and The Visitation, “[h]ow do men and women love each other?”149 This is couched in terms of her relationships—for example Impossible Saints is concerned with her father; A Piece of the Night and Flesh and Blood are about the mother-daughter relationship. Writing about conflicts in relationships may bring further division rather than healing, because, as for Léonie and Thérèse, “versions clash.”150 Roberts’s mother hated A Piece of the Night, “finding it ugly, cruel and disgusting, and believed I had written it deliberately wanting to hurt her.”151 Novels cannot bring ultimate healing or redemption, and so for Roberts similar themes are brought up again and again; the “sense of constant failure, of not getting something good enough or beautiful enough” results in the writing of “another novel and another and another.”152 Psychoanalytic ideas about artistic creation as the attempt to make reparation for the loss of connection with the mother’s body have an important role in Roberts’s conception of writing. But there can be no final restoration to the primordial paradise, only the repeated attempt to cope with the anger and emptiness felt at its loss: “[w]e re-create the mother inside ourselves, over and over again.”153 Thus the healing, or redemption, brought about by writing one’s life or self is not final or complete, but nonetheless deeply valuable.

      Annunciation: Writing the Self as Birthing the Self

Speaking about the lack of finality and need for multiple attempts in writing novels to solve problems, Roberts comments, “I’m not saying I’m finding earth-shattering solutions, but I am interested in making the novel different every time,” for the same reasons that people have more than one child, and enjoy the differences between their children.154 Continuing the novel-as-child motif, she sees the way that each of her novels has been provoked, inspired or enabled in some way by another person in her life, as that person engendering a child with her: “a very problematic image to use—that making a book is like making a baby . . . but I think you could use pregnancy as an image, as a womanly creation . . . I haven’t had children myself—I was infertile—but I think I’ve had ten children by different people.”155

One of the reasons why this image is “problematic” for a woman novelist is related to the relationship between autobiography and fiction, what Domna Stanton refers to as “the age-old, pervasive decoding of all female writing as autobiographical.”156 Roberts has said that she is defensive when hers and other women novelists’ work is designated as “autobiographical,” as if to undermine the skill and artfulness of constructing a piece of writing.157 As Sidonie Smith suggests, men’s autobiography is viewed as “crafted,” whereas writing by women that is classified as “autobiographical” is “spontaneous” or “natural.”158 The conflation of women’s biology with their writing is satirized by Roberts in The Book of Mrs Noah in the character of the Gaffer, “Author of the Word of God”:

Women writers, well, they’re like leaky wombs, aren’t they, letting out the odd stream of verbiage, the odd undisciplined shriek. They don’t create. They just spill things out of that great empty space inside . . . It’s the male who represents humanity, creativity, spiritual quest, after all. How could a woman possibly do that? How could a mother know anything about human growth? Any fool can give birth. Writing a book is labour.159

Although there are troubling aspects to the image of writer-as-mother, the envisaging of the labor of writing a book as birth and childrearing has proved helpful to Roberts. Towards the end of The Book of Mrs Noah, a painting of the annunciation of the Virgin Mary is used to symbolize a woman’s act of creation in a way that collapses distinctions between the generativity of nature and the creative will of the Word. In the painting, Mary reads the story of Noah, while the angel speaks to her: “[m]editating on words, her half-shut eyes cast down, seeing nothing but the black marks on the white page, she conceives other words; new words. She creates the Word inside herself, by herself, using her own power . . . She is the Ark, the maker of the Word. She is the author. Meditating on the Old Testament, then discarding it, she will write a new text, with herself as the subject that 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.