Becoming Divine Women: Miriam Toews’ Women Talking as Parable1

Abstract

This article attends to the ways in which Canadian Mennonite novelist Miriam Toews’ Women Talking crafts a feminist theological parable of women envoicing and incarnating pacifism in the context of a purportedly pacifist colony devastated by patriarchal violence. I argue that the novel, like the biblical parables, functions as a ‘mythos (a heuristic fiction) which has the mimetic power of “redescribing” [pained] human existence’ in reparative terms (Ricoeur). More particularly, as a feminist theological parable, the novel displays in literary form what Luce Irigaray philosophically conceives of as ‘becoming divine women’. I first explore definitions of biblical parables and divine becomings, prior to turning my attention to the Bolivian crisis, and then to Toews’ hopeful, revisionist narrative.