‘Passing a looped and knotted string between their hands’. The Bible, the Women’s Liberation Movement and Women’s Bonds in Michèle Roberts’s The Wild Girl
Streszczenie
This is paper claims that through a feminist rewriting of the Bible, Michèle Roberts’s
novel The Wild Girl (1984) articulates the ambivalences and insecurities that emerged
in the British Women’s Liberation movement after its initial period of great energy,
hopefulness and enthusiasm of the 1970s. By rewriting the biblical insistence on female
rivalry and competition, and revising biblical “gynotypes” and “fragmented women”,
the novel not only exposes the patriarchal discourses of the Bible, but also critically
revisits the WLM’s utopian visions of unity, and re-imagines the ways in which women
can cooperate while preserving their differences. When juxtaposed with more recent
women’s rewritings, often driven by (and catering to) market economy and consumer
culture, Roberts’s novel is a useful remainder of the still consequential need to “look
back in order to move forward” (Plate 406). The novel’s small-scale, grass-roots level
sisterhood, never altogether free from tensions, is a quietly optimistic vision of women’s
bonds, a “secret gospel” proclaiming the good news about the precarious and changeable
relationship among women, and about the need of its incessant reworking.
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