Sex, Sin, and Our Selves. Anna Fisk

Friendship and Storytelling

      As with the annunciation, my notion of the visitation is structured by its retelling in the work of Roberts and Maitland. Michèle Roberts uses the first chapter of Luke to explore female friendship in a poem entitled “Magnificat,” which describes the friend coming over to comfort the heartbroken narrator as “fierce as a small archangel”; her sage words of comfort “an annunciation,” the declaration of “the birth of a new life / . . . you commanded me to sing of my redemption.” At the end of the poem she reflects on their friendship, “it was a holy communion / between women, a Visitation.”167 This presentation of women’s friendship in terms of religious imagery is paralleled in Roberts’s novel entitled The Visitation, with the protagonist’s spiritual quest punctuated by visits from Beth, her best friend from university. While their friendship has many points of tension and conflict, it is Beth who is the bearer of Helen’s moments of redemption: when she is struggling to write, Beth tells her that she admires her for continuing to try: “Beth’s words of recognition . . . a loving witnessing of how she feels . . . Suddenly she’s meeting her there, and in that barren place is a most warm consolation. Blessed are they that mourn, and show their trouble to friends, for that shall comfort them.”168 At the end of the novel, in conversation with a pregnant Beth, Helen comes to a cathartic understanding of her mental anguish, and this redemptive moment is described using imagery based on Luke 1:39-56: “saying, I am listening to you, saying, I am here . . . This is their loving labour, performed with one another, and it brings forth children, a mutual pregnancy, as they embrace and listen to each other, and the words inside them leap for joy . . . [Beth] commands her to sing of her redemption, her life, to speak, to write.”169

      A recasting of the visitation in terms of female friendship is more firmly placed in the context of the women’s movement in Maitland’s 1978 novel, Daughter of Jerusalem. Mary’s visit to Elizabeth is retold as a moment of feminist solidarity: “there in one another’s arms, and only there, they are affirmed, encouraged, borne up, freed . . . And in the arms of her friend, her sister, within the strength of another woman Mary conceives again: the flowering of the great song of praise and power and triumph, the love song that unites her not just to Elizabeth but to all the other difficult women everywhere and everywhen.”170

      Daughter of Jerusalem juxtaposes the stories of biblical women with the story of the present-day feminist Liz and her ambivalence towards her struggle to conceive a child. The retelling of the visitation occurs after a description of Liz’s consciousness-raising group, implicitly linking Elizabeth and Mary’s support of each other with the relationships between women that were central to the second-wave liberation movement.

      Consciousness-Raising

      The practice of feminist ‘consciousness-raising’ has its origins in the group New York Radical Women, of which early members included key feminist writers such as Shulamith Firestone, Robin Morgan and Kate Millett. Anne Forer recalls the invention of the term consciousness-raising in 1967:

      “[i]n the Old Left, they used to say that the workers don’t know they’re oppressed, so we have to raise their consciousness. One night at a meeting I said, ‘Would everybody please give me an example from their own life on how they experienced oppression as a woman? I need to hear it to raise my own consciousness.’ Kathie [Sarachild] was sitting behind me and the words rang in her mind. From then on she sort of made it an institution and called it consciousness-raising.”171

      In the following few years, this practice of women meeting regularly in groups to talk about their experiences would spread throughout the US and across the Atlantic. The organization of political activism was not separated from this primary activity of identifying the ways patriarchal oppression functions in all aspects of women’s lives, in ways not fully recognized until they were narrated and discussed. As Adrienne Rich asserts, “[t]he naming as political of women’s personal experiences, to be explored and compared in consciousness-raising [CR] sessions, was a keystone of radical feminist theory.” Rich draws attention to the practice of the consciousness-raising session itself, which would focus on “each woman’s individual testimony.”172 Carol Christ has emphasized the spiritual implications of this practice, referring to the CR group session as “a ritualized setting in which women gather together to share their stories.”173 In feminist theology, the importance of women’s sharing their stories with one another was encapsulated by Nelle Morton’s phrase “hearing into speech,” inspired by an incident at a week-long workshop she ran, in which a woman told the group her painful personal history, and the rest of the group sat and listened to her “in powerful silence.”174 The woman then said to the group, “you heard me to my own story. You heard me to my own speech.”175