Jeanette Winterson

3 Key excerpts on "Jeanette Winterson"

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  Jeanette Winterson

  • Sonya Andermahr(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  It discusses the critically acclaimed early adaptation of her first novel for BBC TV, and the stage adapta-tion of The PowerBook by Deborah Warner. In addition, the chapter 32 INTRODUCTION examines Winterson’s interest in cyber technologies, the dissem-ination of her work on the Internet and the role her website plays for her many web-based fans. Finally, Chapter 8 provides a com-prehensive review of the critical reception of Winterson’s work, treating the variety of theoretical paradigms which have informed it. The chapter highlights both her work’s perceived strengths and shortcomings, and discusses the way in which criticism of her writing and persona often overlap. The study concludes with selected works by Jeanette Winterson and a complete list of works cited. 2 A BIOGRAPHICAL READING I prefer myself as a character in my own fiction. ( Art Objects , p. 53) In a recent interview with the author, Kate Kellaway comments, She has been written about so much – and has written about herself so much, above all in her celebrated autobiographical first novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), that it is easy to feel, without having met her, that Jeanette Winterson is a known quantity. Easy – but a mistake. (2006, online) Winterson would no doubt approve of this assessment, not only because it warns against a too easy elision of life and art, but because it suggests that she retains the ability to surprise an audi-ence. The facts of her early life are well known: Jeanette Winterson was born in Manchester on 27 August 1959 and afterwards adopted and brought up by a working-class couple in Accring-ton, Lancashire. From an early age she attended a Pentecostal church with her devoutly religious mother whose ambition was for Jeanette to become a missionary.

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  Heterosexual Plots and Lesbian Narratives

  • Marilyn Farwell(Author)
  • 1996(Publication Date)
  • NYU Press

    (Publisher)

  All of these stories problematize closure, that point in the narrative where the reader expects to have the subjects and identities settled. In fact, postmodernism intends to defy meaning on a variety of fronts, but its particular aversion to closure functions as its most disturbing as well as powerful characteristic. Closure is the final positioning of the figures that move through the text. In relying on plot movement for this deconstruction, the modern subject is dispersed by nonlinearity and therefore cannot be maintained. Thus nonlinearity in the modernist guise of lyricism is the perfect element for the alienated, nonessentialist modern subject, and the denial of closure is the ironic affirmation of the alienated and dispersed subject. Without closure there is no fixed identity. Whether set out in Lacanian terms of psychological alienation or the linguistic terms of Derrida’s deconstruction, the alienation of the subject from itself has been the crucial way to tell modernism and postmodernism from the liberal enlightenment subject that dominates nineteenth-century realism. Jeanette Winterson is a postmodernist writer who tests the precepts of postmodernism, and in the process she can also be defined differently from the male or the gay male postmodern writer. I would argue that she is more closely affiliated with the lesbian writing tradition which includes the lesbian-feminists than with male postmodernism.

  Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry and Written on the Body interrogate the narrative system by positioning the metaphoric lesbian body as an excessive female body in both the heroic and romantic plots’ categories of agent and narrator. Yet while each text disrupts the narrative’s expected binary system as well as, at times, its linearity, closure is surprisingly totalizing. While these novels call attention to and challenge the narrative form, they both desire and suspect totalization. Winterson is a postmodern writer, one whom Susan Rubin Suleiman calls a “feminist postmodernist” (248n23), who is willing to “name names” and risk closure. In a previous novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Winterson portrays a young lesbian growing to sexual awareness in a fundamentalist religious community. The two books under consideration in this chapter, however, do not trade directly on lesbian images and themes. In fact, they seem to avoid making lesbianism a narrative concern. Sexing the Cherry contains a number of minor lesbian characters, but the primary female character, Dog-Woman, is heterosexual, although only in a technical sense because her fantastical size defeats her few attempted sexual liaisons. This fantasy of an impossibly huge woman in seventeenth-century England and her son, Jordan, whose journeys defy time and space, leaves little obvious room for lesbian interpretation. The second book entices the critic of lesbian fiction but remains problematically aloof. In Written on the Body,

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  Sexy Bodies

  The Strange Carnalities of Feminism

  • Elizabeth Grosz, Elspeth Probyn, Elizabeth Grosz, Elspeth Probyn(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Perhaps, then, Winterson’s novels will be the last we read as new forms of representation emerge under the pressure of the postmodern conditions in which the physical world, decaying economically and environmentally, seems increasingly inadequate as a medium of exchange. Like the fantasies of the Net and the ’zines, Winterson’s characters offer us hitherto unrepresented experiences of the body as disparately gendered, inconsistently sexualized, capable of acts and emotions that never make it to the realm of the physical. The bodily moments that don’t add up to recognizable identities are the ones we have been trained not to acknowledge. These postmodern lesbian fictions are troubling because they insist on the intransigence of these disruptive moments – moments that, under the glare of these fictions, we can no longer successfully deny, even while we suspect that they may be neither innocent nor wholly liberating.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I’d like to thank the following friends and colleagues for their invaluable editorial advice and insights about lesbian theory, postmodernism, Winterson and more: Sabrina Barton, Ann Cvetkovich, Kim Emery and Naja Fuglsang-Damgaard. The writing of this essay would have been a much less pleasurable and even possible task without their work. I’d also like to thank my research assistant, Janet Hayes, for her painstaking bibliographical work.

  NOTES

  1 More accuarately, we might say that Winterson is not ‘imagining’ such a body but simply trying to describe it, since such a chaotic relation to the material is presumably what identity exists to distract us from, and hence something we do, on some level, experience.

  2

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