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Feminist Revisionist Fiction and the Bible

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Feminist Revisionist Fiction and the Bible View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Stellenbosch University SUNScholar Repository “Stealing the Story, Salvaging the She”: Feminist Revisionist Fiction and the Bible by Adri Goosen Thesis presented in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree MA English Studies at the University of Stellenbosch Supervisor: Dr. Tina Steiner Co-supervisor: Prof. Dirk Klopper Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Department of English December 2010 Declaration By submitting this thesis/dissertation electronically, I declare that the entirety of the work contained therein is my own, original work, and that I have not previously in its entirety or in part submitted it for obtaining any qualification. December 2010 Copyright © 2010 University of Stellenbosch All rights reserved Abstract This thesis analyses six novels by different women writers, each of which rewrites an originally androcentric biblical story from a female perspective. These novels are The Red Tent by Anita Diamant, The Garden by Elsie Aidinoff, Leaving Eden by Ann Chamberlin, The Moon under her Feet by Clysta Kinstler, The Wild Girl by Michelle Roberts and Wisdom’s Daughter by India Edghill. By classifying these novels as feminist revisionist fiction, this study considers how they both subvert and revise the biblical narratives they are based on in order to offer readers new and gynocentric alternatives. With the intention of establishing the significance of such an endeavor, the study therefore employs the findings of feminist critique and theology to expose how the Bible, as a sexist text, has inspired, directly or indirectly, many of the patriarchal values that govern Western society and religion. Having established how biblical narratives have promoted and justified visions of women as marginal, subordinate and outside the realm of the sacred, we move on to explore how feminist rewritings of such narratives might function to challenge and transform androcentric ideology, patriarchal myth and phallocentric theology. The aim is to show that the new and different stories constructed within these revisionist novels re-conceptualise and re-imagine women, their place in society and their relation to the divine. Thus, as the title suggests, this thesis ultimately considers how women writers ‘steal’ the original biblical stories and transform them in ways that prove liberating for women. Opsomming Hierdie tesis analiseer ses romans deur verskillende vroue skrywers - romans wat die oorspronklik androsentriese bybelse stories herskryf vanuit ’n vroulike perspektief. Die romans sluit in The Red Tent deur Anita Diamant, The Garden deur Elsie Aidinoff, Leaving Eden deur Ann Chamberlin, The Moon under her Feet deur Clysta Kinstler, The Wild Girl deur Michelle Roberts en Wisdom’s Daughter deur India Edghill. Deur hierdie romans te klassifiseer as feministiese revisionistiese fiksie, oorweeg hierdie studie hoe hulle die bybelse verhale waarop hulle gebaseer is, beide ondermyn en hersien om sodoende lesers nuwe en ginosentriese alternatiewe te bied. Met die voorneme om die betekenisvolheid van so ’n poging vas te stel, wend hierdie tesis dus die bevindings van feministiese kritiek en -teologie aan om bloot te lê hoe die Bybel, as ‘n seksistiese teks, baie van die patriargale waardes van die Westerse samelewing en godsdiens, direk of indirek, geïnspireer het. Nadat vasgestel is hoe bybelse verhale sienings van vroue as marginaal, ondergeskik en buite die sfeer van heiligheid bevorder en regverdig, beweeg die tesis aan om te ondersoek hoe feministiese herskrywings van sulke verhale, androsentriese ideologie, patriargale mite en fallosentriese teologie uitdaag en herskep. Die doelwit is om te wys dat die nuwe en anderste stories saamgestel in hierdie revisionistiese romans, vroue, hul plek in die samelewing en hul betrekking tot die goddelike, kan heroorweeg en herdink. Dus, soos die titel voorstel, oorweeg hierdie tesis primêr hoe vroue skrywers die oorspronklike bybelse stories ‘steel’ en herskep op maniere wat bevrydend vir vrouens blyk te wees. ii Acknowledgements This study has been as much a personal journey as an academic endeavor and for that reason I would like to thank the people that helped me make this wonderful and, at times, very difficult, intellectual en spiritual voyage. Borrowing the words of one of the fictional characters I write about, I would firstly like to thank Anita Diamant, whose novel, The Red Tent, opened up a gate in my mind – one I was unaware existed until this study began. Similarly I would like to acknowledge Dr. Meg Samuelson, whose feminism elective I took in 2008. I strongly suspect that The Red Tent wouldn’t have had the same effect on me had I not been ‘prepared’ for it by the feminist ideas and concepts I learned in Dr. Samuelson’s classes. I must also express my appreciation to Prof. Dirk Klopper who eagerly encouraged this study right from the start and who helped me set out the parameters that would come to define the final work. Furthermore, my most sincere gratitude goes out to my ‘eventual’ supervisor, Dr. Tina Steiner. Her support, patience, friendship and unfailing enthusiasm over the last year have helped me push through the gloomiest of moments and have ensured the ultimate success of this thesis. Thank you also to Nadia Krige and Jennifer Rees, two of my close friends and co-thesis-slaves, both of who acted as living thesauruses while they, sometimes unwillingly, shared my ups and downs. In this sense, I must also acknowledge and thank Dr. Rob Gaylard for the proofreading of my work. The continuation of my postgraduate studies has been made possible by the University of Stellenbosch and the NRF- having provided financial assistance in the form of bursaries and grants for which I am most grateful. My chief financial assistance has, however, come from my parents. Above all I would like to thank them. Although they haven’t always agreed with my direction of research, I am eternally thankful for their love, encouragement and their belief in my potential. Finally, I must thank my fiancé, Francois Marais, for his unwavering support. He has endured much over the last two years and still managed to recently pop that most important of questions without which I might have procrastinated my way through another year of study. Thank you to you all. iii To My Matriarch My Goddess My Strong and Beautiful Mother iv Since stories are the heart of tradition, we [can] question and create tradition by telling a new story within the framework of an old one. - Judith Plaskow, “The Coming of Lilith: Towards a Feminist Theology” If the imagination is to transcend and transform experience it has to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives… nothing can be too sacred for the imagination to turn into its opposite or experimentally call by another name. - Adrienne Rich, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision” v Table of Contents Introduction: The Red Tent Phenomenon page 1 Chapter 1: “His Story, Her Loss”: Reading the Bible as an Sexist Text 13 “That Is Why I Became a Footnote”: Biblical ‘His Story’ and the Females Underfoot 14 “That’s Going To Be Hard To Escape”: Prescriptive Texts and the Proper Place of Women 21 “It Is For Men To Come After [Christ]”: A Sacred Text that Sanctifies Only Men 27 Chapter 2: “Repossessing Ideology”: From Biblical ‘His Story’ to Feminist ‘Her Story’ 35 Section One: The Textual Strategies of Revisionist Fiction 36 Female Characters as Protagonists: Confronting the Issue of Centrality 36 First- Person Narration and Character Embellishment: Obtaining Autonomy and Humanity 43 Ideological Dislocation: In Positions of Power 50 Section Two: Feminist Desires and Feminist Utopias 56 Wisdom’s Daughter as Feminist Utopian Fiction 58 Chapter 3: “Rewriting the Story”: Genesis, Gender and Revisionist Mythmaking 65 Elsie Aidinoff’s The Garden and the Reversal of Genesis Gender Roles 67 Rethinking the First Couple 69 The Alternative and Not-So-Biblical Eve 71 Ann Chamberlin’s Leaving Eden as an Alternative Version of ‘The Beginning’ 77 The Original Eden 78 The Fall of Man 81 Chapter 4: “Reclaiming the Sacred”: From Exclusive Theology to Inclusive Thealogy 87 Alternative Visions of Divinity: From God to Goddess 88 New Forms of Female Spirituality: From the Margin to the Centre 94 The Goddess’s Gift: Reclaiming the Female Body as Sacred Space 97 Conclusion: 107 List of Works Cited: 109 vi Introduction The Red Tent Phenomenon [The Red Tent] is the book that every author who writes about women of the bible wishes they had written. There is nothing like it before Anita Diamant or after. IT IS THE ONE. -Bette B. Prater 1 The feminist thinker who tinkers with biblical narratives puts herself in the position of Salman Rushdie’s. She is pitting her own imagination against orthodoxy. -Alicia Ostriker 2 In 1997 Anita Diamant wrote a rather controversial book titled The Red Tent. Taking as inspiration the story found in Genesis 34, it re-imagines the story of Dinah, that obscure biblical daughter who is merely a footnote in the tale of the biblical patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. However, as Diamant admits in the Reading Group Guide made available by Barnes and Noble, the novel is a “radical departure from the historical text” and as such the tale it presents is very much unlike the one on which it is based. Focusing not only on Dinah, who is the narrator of the tale, but also on the marginal matriarchs who are her mother-aunts and grandmothers, The Red Tent reconstructs a gynocentric version of the biblical story and centres the narrative on a community of Goddess- worshipping women, their relationships, experiences and pre-patriarchal practices within the red menstrual tent from which the novel takes its name. Initially, the novel was a complete failure, selling roughly 10 000 copies in its first year of release (Godes and Myzlin 1).
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