ABSTRACT
This paper examines the literary appropriation of the Eucharist by two twentiethcentury novelists, Virginia Woolf and Michèle Roberts in To the Lighthouse and Daughters of the House. These writers share a common purpose, to elevate and celebrate the feminine, and both present a version of female spirituality which subverts patriarchal Christian religion. Both Woolf and Roberts present scenes centring on food to explore the feminine principle and reform the Eucharist, but convey different attitudes towards the physical body. The Bible is ambivalent towards the body and presents food primarily as a vehicle for the Lord's spirit. In Woolf s text the physical tends to be transformed into symbol so that the spirit is privileged over the body. Irrespective of Woolf s particular psycho-sexual make-up and the symbolic pull of high modernism, both of which could explain the tendency to transcend the physical, she was writing before the active promotion of female sexuality which marked second wave feminism. Roberts, on the other hand, firmly ties the spirit to the body; she presents food and sex as legitimate pleasures in themselves as well as comprising an essential element of female spirituality. In spite of this difference, both writers can nevertheless be associated with écriture feminine: Woolf avant la lettre, writes a prose which could be described as hysterically charged, writing the female body while Roberts knowingly incorporates the theoretical discourse in her fiction.
