Jeanette Winterson's Narratives of Desire

Rethinking Fetishism

Shareena Z. Hamzah-Osbourne

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350178052
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria feminista

Putting forward a new theory of fetishism - alternative fetishism - this book provides an up-to-date examination of the work of Jeanette Winterson, offering fresh perspectives and new insights on the topics of gender, sexuality, and identity in her writing. Combining contemporary theories in psychoanalytical and cultural studies, it proposes that a rethinking of fetishism allows Winterson's works to be brought into sharper critical focus by repositioning fetishism as a daily practice in society. In so doing, it argues that Winterson's work challenges orthodox, normative, and contemporary views of fetishism to reveal her own alternative version. Containing the transcript of an email Q&A with Winterson herself and covering the majority of Winterson's oeuvre, from her first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), up to the most recent, Frankissstein (2019), the book is divided into three main chapters that each discuss a particular theme in Winterson's fiction: bodily fetishism, food fetishism, and sexual fetishism. While the book's focus is on Winterson, the theoretical framework it proposes can be applied to other authors and disciplines in the Arts and Humanities, such as theatre and film, offering new ways of thinking about topics such as fetishism, feminism, psychoanalytical theory, postmodernism, gender, and sexuality.

Part I

Bodily fetishism

The body is the supreme object of knowledge in Jeanette Winterson’s fiction. Written on it, in ‘a secret code only visible in certain lights’, are stories and histories to be discovered and appreciated, regardless of its gender, sexuality and identity.¹ This section illustrates how Winterson’s texts reconceptualize the body through an alternative fetishism that rethinks corporeal materiality by transcribing the body and its parts in ways that resist mind/body dualism and blur subjectivity and objectivity. In Winterson’s novels, acts of extreme obsession often lead to worship and madness and are transformed into mourning and melancholy of the subject (self) and bodies (others). Winterson’s fetishistic discourse presents the diverse desires and pleasures directed towards, and enacted upon, bodies; as Elizabeth Grosz says, ‘the body can and does function to represent, to symbolize, social and collective fantasies and obsessions.’² In Winterson’s fiction, ‘the life of the body is scrutinised with the introspective intensity which puritans used to invest in the life of the soul’, according to Ina Schabert.³ This section shows how Winterson’s scrutiny of the body challenges its boundary norms through her depictions of the diverse desires and pleasures of the bodily self and the other. She is obsessed not only with the beauty of the body but also the body of difference: the monstrous and the divine, the decaying and the enduring, alike. Bodies are worshipped in Winterson’s novels regardless of their shape or condition, as both a manifestation of extreme obsession and of worship turning into madness and melancholy for the lost object. A broad theoretical understanding of fetishism enables a more productive engagement with the specificities of Winterson’s work, and this chapter discusses the work of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault, along with more recent feminist perspectives from Elizabeth Grosz, Teresa de Lauretis, Julia Kristeva and Judith Butler. Winterson’s work repays analyses made with respect to their literary and cultural theorizing, as her novels engage with, respond to and adapt such views on gender, sexuality and identity. Her texts refashion normative material into alternative situations through sensuous and sensual language, revealing the fluid and diverse pleasures of the body and its parts. Grosz addresses very adroitly the oppositions and contradictions that are, literally, embodied:

The body is a most peculiar ‘thing’, for it is never quite reducible to being merely a thing; nor does it ever quite manage to rise above the status of thing. Thus it is both a thing and a nonthing, an object, but an object which somehow contains or coexists with an interiority, an object able to take itself and others as subjects, a unique kind of object not reducible to other objects. Human bodies, indeed all animate bodies, stretch and extend the notion of physicality that dominates the physical sciences, for animate bodies are objects necessarily different from other objects; they are materialities that are uncontainable in physicalist terms alone. If bodies are objects or things, they are like no others, for they are the centers of perspective, insight, reflection, desire, agency.⁴

Winterson’s fetishistic approach to language depicts the ‘tensions and harmonies between word and meaning that gradually can be resolved into form’.⁵ The bodies discussed in this chapter regularly fall outside binary classifications of male or female; rather, they are fluid and the desires they evoke and enact depend on the cultural and physical environment. Grosz states that ‘for Foucault the body is the field on which the play of powers, knowledges, and resistances is worked out, for Nietzsche the body is the agent and active cause of knowledge’.⁶ In Winterson’s writing, the body is both field of play and active agent; the bodily self and the other venture on circular journeys through time and space, in search of diverse pleasures and desires. Hence, the discussion here also shows how Winterson’s works treat the body and its parts as spaces to discover and conquer, which embrace fetishistic desire. The body is portrayed as an object of obsession, seduction, memorialization and idolization that enables narcissistic investment and the expression of innate drives, often to the benefit of the subject.

This chapter looks at several of Winterson’s novels, including Written on the Body, The Passion, Oranges, Sexing the Cherry, The PowerBook and Frankissstein, to illustrate the alternative mode of fetishism with which she depicts the body. The idea of subjective unity is challenged in her texts by fluid gender performances, free-floating sexuality and the deconstructed body. In addition, many seemingly divergent subjects are linked back to the body by the plurality of Winterson’s discourse: gastronomy, typography, anatomy and cartography all add complex layers of symbolic and metaphoric representation to the desires and pleasures of the physical body. Winterson’s fetishistic approach to language is the means by which all other fetishes are revealed and traced, and desire provides the linguistic, emotional and psychosexual energy; as de Lauretis argues:

desire itself, with its movement between subject and object, between the self and an other, is founded on difference – the difference and separateness of one from the other. And what signifies desire is a sign which both elides and remarks that separation in describing both the object and its absence. This sign, I am arguing, is a fetish.⁷

The body and its parts, therefore, p rovide the physical signifiers of difference and the borders that separate the self and the other required for fetishism. Obsession over an absent object is a recurring theme in Winterson’s works, and she often portrays acts of worship of the body that are transformed by loss into mourning and melancholy. To Freud, melancholy results from an aggrieved or unacknowledged loss. However, in Winterson’s writing, such losses invariably create the desire for a replacement. The embrace of this substitute converts disavowal into avowal, overlaying the negative emotions linked to the loss of the original object with beneficial ones.

1

Fetishistic desire

Versatile bodies

The body is a prominent image and a central narrative component in all of Winterson’s works, and I now explore and assess how the versatility of the body responds to the diverse desires and drives of her characters in all the varying and volatile situations they encounter. Winterson’s writing questions gender and sexuality norms and opposes gender stereotypes, leaving the essential nature of love as a focal point of desire between the self and the other. In her novels, conventional and gendered perceptions of the body are disturbed, while desire prompts the reassessment of gender, sexuality and identity. Winterson’s fiction uses the materiality of the body to communicate and translate the language of fluid desires and pleasures into visible and acceptable forms, which can be seen as non-pathological acts of fetishism. The body’s relationship with the mind is a crucial component of the alternative bodily fetishism in Winterson’s texts, and the correspondence between the two is complex and changeable. Grosz believes that ‘the body functions, not simply as a biological entity but as a psychical, lived relation’ and conversely that ‘the psyche is a projection of the body’s form’.¹ This mutually productive and constitutive relationship within an individual is further complicated by the subject’s body image, which does not consider the self in isolation but as necessarily involved with ‘the relations between the body, the surrounding space, other objects and bodies’.² Hence, the desires and pleasures that lead to bodily fetishism arrive at an individual through a shifting matrix of origins, viewpoints and references. Bodies of difference and diverse desires in Winterson’s fiction are presented in a variety of ways according to the effect and influence of internal and external energies and how they resist social, cultural and political norms.

In Written on the Body, Winterson uses metaphors of corporeal inscription to question and rewrite conventional views of the body, while the narrative forms a confession of how the quest for love can deleteriously affect it. Initially, Louise’s body is admired externally by the Unnamed Narrator’s physical, psychological and emotional perceptions.³ In the second part of the novel, when illness has set into Louise’s body, the Unnamed Narrator imagines seeing into its interior, analysing its parts and organs, to meet the gaze of the decaying body with the language of medical knowledge. Consequently, Louise becomes transparent when perceived through such extreme obsession and desire for the other body. Heather Nunn argues that the ripping apart of the body in Written on the Body, and the focus on body parts, such as sinew, scars and bones, ‘challeng[es] the fetishization of the female body by worshipping all of its elements’.⁴ However, I propose that this living autopsy in fact reveals the alternative fetishism in Winterson’s writing. The conventional fetishization of women may be disrupted by the Unnamed Narrator’s forensic dissection of Louise’s body, but this reduction to parts also leads to a non-pathological outcome as it ultimately enables the Unnamed Narrator to work through their emotional obsession to the point where they can (at least attempt to) reconnect with Louise. That is to say, through the Unnamed Narrator’s desire for Louise’s deconstructed body and her individual body parts, Winterson’s notions of fetishism defy conventional ideas to become beneficial practices.

Written on the Body presents the fetishistic body here through the deconstruction of its unity and beauty, defying normative notions of attraction. However, the Unnamed Narrator’s extreme obsession with Louise has to work through madness and melancholy before it can become beneficial. The Unnamed Narrator determines to trace the working of Louise’s body and its parts through different terminologies, one of which argues that the body is unstable, thus questioning the traditional view that the female body must be beautiful to be desired. Instead, no matter what the condition of the body, it should be admired even if it is decayed or monstrous. Bodies in Winterson’s novels are worshipped whether they are healthy or sick, and their diverse desires and pleasures stand revealed through language. Winterson’s language of worshipping the body shows how a person can cross the boundaries of normality of desire and pleasure in order to fulfil one’s inner and external needs. Written on the Body is narrated in the first person throughout, allowing readers intimate access to the Unnamed Narrator’s thoughts and feelings and thereby creating an accessible path to survey the expressions of love and loss. The language often contains colloquial speech that imbues the narration with a conversational tone, certainly towards the start of the novel. For instance, the Unnamed Narrator refers to a previous lover as ‘The clap-giver’.⁵ This type of narration encourages the reader to understand the Unnamed Narrator’s diverse desires as non-pathological.

The tone of the language changes in the second half of the book, in which a bodily obsession is revealed. This is shown by the anatomical language used for chapter headings, such as ‘The Cells, Tissues, Systems and Cavities of the Body’.⁶ The specificity of this medical terminology articulates the depth of the Unnamed Narrator’s desires for, and obsession with, Louise’s body. The Unnamed Narrator initially views Louise’s body holistically, as a complete physical unit, but following her cancer diagnosis they move on to look at her body’s internal operations and its separate parts. Following the break-up of their relationship, the Unnamed Narrator uses medical books as substitutes for the lost object of Louise’s body, determined to trace the working of its parts to divert their melancholy. The unstable body questions any traditional view of the female body as coherent, whole and beautiful, but in this particular situation, these acts of diversion and replacement produce a non-pathological process that benefits the psyche of the Unnamed Narrator. As it is in most of Winterson’s work, the fetishism in Written on the Body is interchangeable and fluid and goes beyond the previous theorizing of first-wave and second-wave fetishism – it is not so much about bodies and loss as the transformation and re-inscription of the desire and pleasure of the fluidly gendered body. This offers a site of resistance and dissidence to patriarchal hegemony as the Unnamed Narrator experiences the fluidity of desire and pleasure, rather than repressing the internal and external desires of the bodily self. The body subjected to fetishism in Winterson’s fiction is not only separated but also expanded, moving beyond notions of surface perfection to something deeper, even in monstrous or diseased bodies. Thus, obsession with the beauty of the other is not a romantic or clichéd gesture but an act of alternative fetishism that can provide relief to the subject in the face of absence – absence that is effaced and overwritten by the inscription of language.

A fetishistic treatment of the body has been in Winterson’s fiction from the start of her career, with the publication of Oranges in 1985. Concerns and themes found in this book, such as an obsessive focus on the correlation between body and mind, can be detected in all her subsequent novels. In Oranges, the obsessions of Jeanette and her mother, Mrs Winterson, transform into mourning and melancholia of the bodily self and the other, and tip into madness. Mrs Winterson’s religious obsession results in abuse to her body and her psyche as she devotes both to the church, at the expense of her own mental and physical well-being. In terms of desire and fetishism, the novel positions Jeanette’s fascination with Melanie against Mrs Winterson’s passion for God. Winterson dismantles the conventional perception of diverse desire through these two characters, producing an alternative fetishization from their transferal of obsession. Mrs Winterson dedicates her body and soul to the worship of God and forces Jeanette to do likewise. The result is confusion between Jeanette’s love of God and her religion, and her love and desire for another person; for instance, she enters dangerously sacrilegious ground when she tells Melanie, ‘I love you almost as much as I love the Lord’.⁷ As Mrs Winterson says, Jeanette ‘had flouted God’s law and had tried to do it sexually’.⁸ Due to her evangelical background and the relative values she has learnt in school, she tries to be honest with her orthodox mother, hoping she will understand her inner feelings and help her resolve her confusion. She tells her mother about her feelings for Melanie and how she ‘needed that kind of friend’.⁹ The devout Mrs Winterson is horrified by Jeanette’s same-sex passions and tells her that ‘romantic love for another woman was a sin’.¹⁰ Mrs Wi...