Telling Women's Lives: Vision As Historical Revision in the Work of Michele Roberts (Impossible Saints, Novel‪)‬

Within the recent trend in postmodern fiction which disavows the grand recit of History and promotes individual stories by means of autobiography, in Impossible Saints (1997) the feminist author Michele Roberts rewrites ah important body of texts belonging to the Christian tradition: hagiographies, or the lives of women saints, in her case. In this novel, the former inspired texts appear merely as accounts of "personal history", since they go through a process of revision that results in the demystification of both the patriarchal discourse, and the female-prototypes imposed by the gender construction of femininity, and fostered by Christianity. In Impossible Saints, the constant fictionalization of Josephine's experiences, similar in many respects to Teresa of Avila's, as well as the rewriting of many female saints's life stories, illustrate, in the first place, the end of history as we know it, and secondly, the political end of autobiography, in so far as it provides the only space for female representation in the official discourse of Christianity, and eludes a unique interpretation in favor of plurality and heterogeneity. **********