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Woman's body as colony: Impossible Saints.

Article Excerpt
Michele Roberts, Impossible Saints. (London: Virago, 1998), 308 pages ISBN 1860494560

Michele Roberts's novel, translated and published by Imge Yayinevi into Turkish (Kutsanmamis Azizeler), is so rich a novel that it virtually provides material for several courses such as the instruction of one-semester-history-of-Middle Ages, Sociology, Political Science and Feminist culture. There is no need to talk about Literature. It is already there.

In one of her interviews Michele Roberts says that because she had been "a Catholic and the body is very scorned in Catholicism-particularly the female body-(she) wanted to rescue the body and cherish it and love it and touch it and smell it and make it into language" with "a feminist urge" and that has become her sole "political reason" to write. That is to say, like Jonathan Swift in Gulliver's Travels, Roberts too, applies a method which makes use of the human body as an object as a means of analysing the social order. She is one of those writers who can look accurately into human anatomy while seeing a parallelism between social and sexual politics and therefore opens up the human body for discussion. Like Swift, Roberts is a satirist whose work is marked with farcical comedy. The strategy of her satire is based on religious fanaticism and sexual degradation of women.

At this point, however, one has to remember her catholic background: as is the case with every other writer whose writing becomes a product of his/her past. Roberts is also a product of her own Catholic past no matter how much she rebels against it. Like a good Catholic, she cannot help giving that gloomy, fatalistic message to the world that...

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