Sex, Sin, and Our Selves. Anna Fisk

work can seem just as artificial as the attempt to make oneself invisible. Thinking about whether or not I wanted to write in this way, whether bringing my own story into my theological writing would be essentially pornographic—staged and false, while pretending to be revealing to the point of obscenity—also led me to think more deeply about the problems of a redemptive view of narrative.

Beneath the over-arching narrative of modernity, “we are encouraged to think of our lives as coherent stories of success, progress and movement.”58 Even in tragic stories, the narrative form still inclines to closure, to resolution. In the narrative structure of the popular imagination there is often little difference between epiphany and catharsis, and perhaps the anguish of the distance between the narrative of our hopes, and how our lives actually turn out, is not that the drama did not pan out as we would have liked, but that it did not follow a satisfying dramatic structure; events have not unfolded in a successive whole. Or, if we are able to tell our life stories as emplotted narratives in which there is a distinct pattern to events, we have to be extremely selective about which elements of experience to draw on. Janet Stacey, writing as someone in remission from cancer, but attempting to avoid “[t]he dangers of the success story”59 and working with the recognition that “the accounts that we produce are structured by the formations of memory and the conventions of narrative,”60 argues that “conventional narrative structure cannot necessarily contain the demands of a changing world.”61

      I have had a significant—albeit shifting—sense of my own ‘story’ for a large part of my life. I grew up in an evangelical context in which it is not only believed that the history of the world is the unfolding of God’s perfect plan, but that one’s own life as an individual is also a story penned by God’s hand. Having been treated for depression from the age of thirteen, from an early age my self-understanding was shaped by a therapeutic paradigm in which the patient relates their emotions and experiences in order to arrive at a pattern of cause and effect, facilitating healing by making present distress explicable. I had lost interest in religion in the years leading up to my teens, which were characterized by stereotypically dysfunctional and rebellious behavior until I was ‘born again’ (again) aged fifteen. The severe depression did not lift, but it took on a different aspect, vacillating between elation and misery. The latter was dominated by religious guilt; this was compounded by the discord between my ‘testimony’—the narrative of how I had gone wrong but was now saved, and well, and happy—and how I actually felt a lot of the time. In my final year of school I had a breakdown and became agoraphobic for several months: this was after a school year in which I had been happier than ever before, thus undermining a model of gradual recovery and also my ability to assess my own mental health.

I did get through it, however, and left home for university, studied theology and philosophy, felt my dogmatic certainties gradually crumble and fall away—a narrative common to so many who come to the academic study of theology from a strict religious background. The left-wing and feminist values that I had always cherished, though they sat somewhat uncomfortably with evangelicalism, were able to flourish; I also felt able for the first time since I was fifteen to accept that I was not heterosexual, and nor did I want to be. So I also had a ‘coming out story’—a story of liberation from heteronormativity that would push aside my evangelical story of liberation from bondage to sin. Academically, I was for a while quite taken with canonical narrative theology,62 more attractive than the abstractions of systematic theology or analytic philosophy, and it seemed like a way of holding together my feminist beliefs with my resistance to theological study emptied of divine stories and symbols.

      After graduating, I wanted to give my mind a rest, get healthy spiritually and physically, and live in the countryside, before commencing a PhD program. So I spent a year living and working at a liberal Christian retreat center in the Dales National Park in North Yorkshire. That particular story did not work out as planned—in the course of my time there the charity ran out of money and the center had to close, despite the extreme hard work and fierce idealism of those involved. I felt like the whole experience—of living in a small, often troubled community in the middle of nowhere, and being part of a religious institution that has failed—had stripped me bare of all the stories and words that had previously defined me. Living in such a beautiful and isolated place, where the powers and cycles of nature are so manifest, my spirituality became oriented more towards the world around me than to the canonical Christian narratives. I also lost the idealism that enabled me to believe that feminist theology can follow the same pattern of the Christian story; that it can tear down and then rebuild the monoliths of Christian doctrine, as I had once hoped.

      In the early stages of my PhD study, I was encouraged to foreground my personal narratives in my theological engagement with literature. But this was colored by a nagging sense that in my autobiographical writing I was selecting certain parts of myself, certain ‘versions,’ presenting confessional writing as a mirror when it is more like a mask—something displayed for performance, rather than a slightly distorted reflection of reality. More troublingly, I started to suspect that throughout my life the narrating of my own stories had kept me trapped 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