Description

• Title:
  “Let me hear Thy voice”: Michèle Roberts’s Refiguring of Mary Magdalene in the Light of The Song of Songs
• Creator:
  Filipczak, Dorota
• Contributor:
  University of Łódź;
  Dorota Filipczak teaches literatures in English and translation theory in the Institute of English Studies, University of Łódź. Her monograph on Malcolm Lowry was published in The Malcolm Lowry Review (Wilfrid Laurier University, Ontario, 1998–99). Her publications include Unheroic Heroines: The Portrayal of Women in the Writings of Margaret Laurence (Łódź UP, 2007), “Is Literature Any Help in Liberating Eve and Mary?” in New Topics in Feminist Philosophy of Religion, ed. Pamela Sue Anderson (Springer, 2010), “Gender and Space in ‘The Albanian Virgin’” in Alice Munro: Understanding, Adapting and Teaching, ed. Mirosława Buchholtz (Springer, 2016), and Brian Moore’s Eponymous Heroines: Representations of Women and Authorial Boundaries (Peter Lang, 2018). She has published seven books of poetry, and is a member of the Association of Polish Writers.;
  dorota.filipczak@uni.lodz.pl
• Description:
  The article engages with the protagonist of The Secret Gospel of Mary Magdalene by Michèle Roberts, first published in 1984 as The Wild Girl. Filipczak discusses scholarly publications that analyze the role of Mary Magdalene, and redeem her from the sexist bias which reduced her to a repentant whore despite the lack of evidence for this in the Gospels. The very same analyses demonstrate that the role of Mary Magdalene as Christ’s first apostle silenced by patriarchal tradition was unique. While Roberts draws on the composite character of Mary Magdalene embedded in the traditional association between women, sexuality and sin, she also moves far beyond this, by reclaiming the female imaginary as an important part of human connection to the divine. At the same time, Roberts recovers the conjunction between sexuality and spirituality by framing the relationship of Christ and Mary Magdalene with The Song of Songs, which provides the abject saint from Catholic tradition with an entirely different legacy of autonomy and expression of female desire, be it sexual, maternal or spiritual. The intertext connected with The Song of Songs runs consistently through The Secret Gospel of Mary Magdalene. This, in turn, sensitizes the readers to the traces of the Song in the Gospels, which never quote from it, but they rely heavily on the association between Christ and the Bridegroom, while John 20 shows the encounter between the risen Christ and Mary Magdalene in the garden whose imagery is strongly suggestive of the nuptial meeting in The Song of Songs.
• Object availability:
  free access
• Rights:
  This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License.;
  http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
• Date:
  2019.11.22;
  2019
• Type:
  Article
• Language:
  English
• Format:
  application/pdf
• Publisher:
  Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego
• Relation:
  Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture; 9
• Subject:
  Michèle Roberts;
  The Song of Songs;
  „The Secret Gospel of Mary Magdalene”
• Identifier:
  2084-574X;
  http://hdl.handle.net/11089/30837 ;
  2083-2931;
  10.18778/2083-2931.09.12
• Data provider:
  Repozytorium Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego
• Can I use it?:
  check license
• Type:
  image