11 1. Introduction The angel of the LORD found Hagar near a spring in the desert […] "Hagar, servant of Sarai, where have you come from, and where are you going?" "I'm running away from my mistress Sarai," she answered. Then the angel of the LORD told her, "Go back to your mistress and submit to her." The angel added, "I will so increase your descendants that they will be too numerous to count." […] She gave this name to the LORD who spoke to her: "You are the God who sees me," for she said, "I have now seen the One who sees me.1 Ah wanted to preach a great sermon about colored women sittin’ on high, but they wasn’t no pulpit for me […] Freedom found me wid a baby daughter in mah arms, so Ah said Ah’s take a broom and a cook-pot and throw up a highway though de wilderness for her. She would expound what Ah felt. But somehow she got lost offa de highway and next thing Ah knowed here was you in de world. So whilst Ah was tendin’ you of nights Ah said Ah’d save de text for you.2 A few years short of the turn of the 19th century, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, an out- spoken leading figure in the early women’s rights movement, refused to attend a suffragists prayer meeting that was to begin with the singing of the hymn Guide Us, O Thou Great Jehovah. Her reasons for not attending, recounts Elisabeth Schüssler-Fiorenza in In Memory Of Her, was her conviction that the Biblical Jehovah had “never taken any active part in the suffrage movement”3 and that ecclesiastical teachings made Christian women falsely believe that any man had “ever [seen] or talked with God.”4 Her experience of the seeming indifference of a patriarchal Yahweh figure preached in church towards the rights of the op- pressed sparked her deep personal conviction that the Bible itself carried great political influence. In the ensuing project which became known as The Woman’s Bible which was to gather and re-interpret all statements referring to women in the Bible, she outlined her critical insight into a radical feminist theology: “(1) The Bible is not a ‘neutral’ book, but a political weapon against women’s strug- gle for liberation. (2) This is so because the Bible bears the imprint of men who 1 Genesis 16:7-13 New International Version (NIV). If not otherwise stated, Biblical cita tions in this work are based on the New International Version (NIV) of the Christian Bible. 2 Zora Neale Hurston,Their Eyes Were Watching God. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978) 15-6. 3 Barbara Welter, “Something Remains to Dare: Introduction to the Women’s Bible,” The Original Feminist Attack on the Bible: The Woman’s Bible. Ed. Elizabeth Cady Stanton et al. (New York: Arno 1974) xxii. 4 Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: a Feminist Theological Reconstructi- on of Christian Origins. (New York: Crossroad, 1983) 12. 12 never saw or talked with God.”5 She met the accusations of clergymen that this book was the “work of women and the devil,” with biting wit: This is a grave mistake. His Satanic Majesty was not to join the Revising Committee which [sic] consists of women alone. Moreover, he has been so busy of late years attend- ing Synods, General Assemblies and Conferences, to prevent the recognition of women delegates, that he has no time to study the languages and “higher criticism.”6 Indeed, the struggle for an insight into the relationship between Biblical- historical interpretation and feminist reconstruction of women’s image has been, and still is, somewhat of an “intellectual and emotional minefield”7 that has also been explored by literary writers. The example of the Egyptian slave girl Hagar illustrates this. The Biblical portrayal of Hagar as a powerless and feeble subject to her owners, Abraham and Sarah, and mere bodily vessel to her son Ishmael, has, through the centuries, become a complex and powerful point for negotiating female emotional and physical resilience in the face of oppressive, patriarchic structures and practices. Mistreated and abused by her owners, Hagar flees into the desert where she encounters God, the one who truly sees her. This image has, throughout the 19th century, been appropriated mostly by white women writers (E.D.E.N. Southworth, Harriet Marion Stephens and others) telling the story of a Black woman who, involved in sexual relations outside of marriage, defies patriarchal tyranny and embarks on a quest of self-expression. Among the first African American female writers to reclaim the Hagar myth was Pauline Hopkins who in the serially published novel Hagar’s Daughter (1901/1902) at- tempts a critical response to the systematic undermining of black female identity and actively resists the sexualization of Black women. Iconic Black women writers of the 20th century, among them Gayl Jones and Toni Morrison pick up the thread of Hagar’s narrative by challenging in their writing the stigmatization of Black women’s sexuality in a white patriarchal society. After the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, the narrative sur- rounding the slave girl Hagar started to open up the forgotten door to a hitherto male-dominated theosophical discussion, pointing the way to a newly re-covered understanding of women with regards to themselves, divinity and creation.8 Dur- 5 Schüssler Fiorenza 7. 6 Welter 2.7. 7 Schüssler Fiorenza 3. 8 Prior to that, throughout the 19th century, it was mostly white women writers (E.D.E.N. Southworth, Harriet Marion Stephens and others) appropriating the Hagar myth which they portrayed as a story of a black woman exhibiting sexuality outside marriage, defying patriarchal tyranny and embarking on a quest of self-expression. However, these white women novelists more or less eliminated Hagar’s blackness 13 ing her studies in the 1970s at the New York Union Theological Seminary, the now renowned scholar and theologian Delores S. Williams learned of the star- tling absence of black women’s experiences from Christian theology and began to construct a worldview from the perspective of African-American women.9 It was in this inconspicuous slave girl Hagar that Williams discovered a vantage point for this “second tradition of African-American biblical [sic] appropria- tion”10 that allowed for the significance of the Black woman’s experience within the Bible but also in real life as the analogies between Hagar and Black women in the US delivered historically identical testimonies of sexual slavery and loss of identity. The novelist Gloria Naylor, herself deeply influenced by her upbringing in the restorationist Christian sect of the Jehova’s Witnesses that promotes the idea of the imminent establishment of a divine kingdom on earth, emulates Williams’ considerations in her fictional writing and keenly incorporates her matricentral concept within the cultural paradigm of Africana Womanism. In this book, I will show that the contemporary African-American novelist Glo- ria Naylor not only partakes in this tradition of Biblical appropriation, but also develops it further in her fiction: I argue that through the literary appropriation of Biblical master narratives and Judeo-Christian imagery, and through the in- corporation of Africana Womanist elements as a subtext, Naylor provides an from her character in order to make it an “acceptable” character for the white readers- hip. In Hagar the Egyptian, Savina Teubal points out that Hagar’s story is in fact not only indicative of a slave-owner relationship but also about the relationship of women among each other.The fact that surrogate motherhood (Hagar acted as surrogate mother for the barren Sarah) was commonplace leads Teubal to the conclusion that Hagar’s and Sarah’s troubled relationship is indeed indicative of misperceptions and prejudices of one woman towards another (Savina J. Teubal, Hagar the Egyptian: The Lost Tradition of the Matriarchs (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1990). 9 Delores Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1993) 1-2. Her goal was to “shape a theology that is at once committed to black women’s issues and life -struggled and simultaneously addresses the black community’s historic struggle to survive and develop a positive, productive quality of life in the face of death […] [to] design theological language and devise theological methods that not only speak in the academy but also speak to African-American women and the African-American co mmunity in a language they can understand.” In the course of her research, she disc overed that “For over a hundred years, the community had appropriated the Bible in such a way that black women’s experience figured just as eminently as black men’s in the community’s memory, in its self-understanding and in its understanding of God’s relation to its life” (xii). 10 Williams, Sisters 2. 14 alternative view on the Christian discourse on suffering and arrives at a liberat- ing, matricentric theosophy that is juxtaposed to the traditional, patriarchal, fic- tional world. This is a two-tiered endeavor: on the one hand, Naylor offers her African American characters, through the revision and appropriation of identity- creating cultural master narratives, the possibility to redeem themselves from century-old sexist, racist and classist stigmatization. On the other hand, she transforms, through the recovery and integration of the female perspective within these narratives, the textual fragments of female archetypes into complete and autonomous existences through which the female creative principle survives side by side with the male. In a close-reading analysis of the literary pillars of Naylor’s fictional New World Order, i.e.