“Passing a looped and knotted string between their hands”. The Bible, the Women’s Liberation Movement and Women’s Bonds in Michèle Roberts’s <i>The Wild Girl</i>

Abstract This paper claims that through a feminist rewriting of the Bible, Michèle Roberts’s novel The Wild Girl (1984) articulates ambivalences and insecurities emerged in British Women’s Liberation movement after its initial period great energy, hopefulness enthusiasm 1970s. By biblical insistence on female rivalry competition, revising “gynotypes” “fragmented women”, not only exposes patriarchal discourses but also critically revisits WLM’s utopian visions unity, re-imagines ways which women can cooperate while preserving their differences. When juxtaposed with more recent women’s rewritings, often driven by (and catering to) market economy consumer culture, is useful remainder still consequential need to “look back order move forward” (Plate 406). novel’s small-scale, grass-roots level sisterhood, never altogether free from tensions, quietly optimistic vision bonds, “secret gospel” proclaiming good news about precarious changeable relationship among women, incessant reworking.