Female authority and the word: biblical revision in Plath, Broumas, Morrison

Title from first page of PDF file (viewed September 14, 2010)Includes bibliographical references (p. 74-77)As such a strong charge in America's cultural history, the Bible has helped shape western thought and practice in regards to women's place in society. As a written text the Bible's authority is in part a product of and a force behind the western literary canon. One of the goals of Postmodern literature is to center authors and stories who have been pushed to the margins of society as an attempt to rebalance patriarchy's subjective history and power. This paper looks at three female Postmodern authors, Sylvia Plath, Olga Broumas, and Toni Morrison, and the ways that their work acts as "biblical revision," a literary process of claiming biblical authority for women. This paper gives a brief history of the ways that the Bible has been used by Christianity to define the roles of women, slaves, and gays in American society. It discusses the biblical arguments made against their liberation and the biblical arguments many made to obtain freedom. Plath's "Lady Lazarus," Broumas's "Sleeping Beauty," and Morrison's Beloved each act as cultural work restoring authority to women from each of these oppressed groups by subverting biblical imagery and claiming the Bible's power as their own