“We will call the damsel, and enquire at her mouth”. Re-writing Biblical Women in Contemporary British Novels

Abstract

In this paper I focus on four contemporary British novels which re-write parts of the Bible [Jenny Diski’s Only Human: A Comedy (2000) and her After These Things: A Novel (2004); Michele Roberts’s The Wild Girl (1984) and The Book of Mrs Noah (1987)] and examine the way those novels deal with the androcentric (male-centred) character of biblical narratives. Drawing on the taxonomy proposed by Elizabeth Shussler Fiorenza, I argue that Diski’s and Roberts’s re-writings engage in a complex and subtle relationship with the Bible, in the course of which they do much more than merely trying to reverse or undo biblical patriarchalism and androcentrism. I explain and give examples of how the four novels rely on strategies similar to Fiorenza’s types of feminist hermeneutics (the hermeneutics of suspicion, the hermeneutics of remembrance, and the hermeneutics of imagination). To account for the nuanced selfconsciousness of Diski’s and Roberts’s novels, I introduce the concept of the hermeneutics of weakening, which –emerging from Gianni Vattimo’s il pensiero debole– is meant to conceptualise the enfeebled mode of truth. I see as established by the two woman writers.