Writing a history of difference: Jeanette Winterson's Sexing the Cherry and Angela Carter's Wise Children

College Literature, Winter 2002 by Roessner, Jeffrey

Reveling in elements of fantasy and grotesquerie and foregrounding a complex intertextual lineage, the fiction of Jeanette Winterson and Angela Carter reveals a host of common stylistic traits and thematic preoccupations. However, an even more compelling reason to read them together emerges when we consider their distinct feminist perspectives, particularly regarding historiographic issues. I want to focus here on Winterson s Sexing the Cherry (1989) and Carters Wise Children (1992), two paradigmatic fictional attempts to challenge the gender stereotypes often upheld in traditional histories. Winterson sets much of her story against the backdrop of the English Revolution while Carter offers a contemporary woman s account of her life and several generations in her family s history. In telling their stories, they historicize the larger patriarchal forces that shaped the lives of their characters, and expose the contingency of supposedly universal values, including the naturalness of heterosexuality and the father's authority in a patrilineal culture. In so doing,Winterson and Carter ultimately develop distinct feminist approaches to history. While Winterson premises her celebration of lesbian desire on the complete rejection of patriarchal history and its linear temporality, Carter suggests her characters can never utterly escape the sway of patrilineal history, though they come to challenge it in practical ways. Sexing the Cherry and Wise Children, then, reflect the range of narrative tactics used to destabilize gender categories such as man and woman, hetero and homosexual, and reading the novels together helps us map an important and ongoing debate in feminist historiography.

The focus of feminist historiographers has steadily shifted from recovering the neglected past experience of women to historicizing the patriarchal values that helped produce such experience. In an early essay on this trend, Linda Gordon suggests that initially, "Women historians sought to proclaim a truth heretofore denied, disguised, distorted, defamed, and thereby to expose the meretricious lies of earlier mandarins" (1986, 22). Gordon here stresses women's desire to celebrate their presence at, and participation in, past events. In this way, earlier feminist historians promised the recognition denied women in the record of public events and wars traditionally called "history." This emphasis on the recovery of suppressed facts, however, has more recently come under scrutiny by feminists such as Linda Anderson who suspect not only the content, but also the methodology of traditional, linear narratives of the past. In particular, Anderson cautions against "the constant danger that by using categories and genres which are implicated in patriarchal ideology we are simply rewriting our own oppression" (1990, 134). In order to avoid such a rewriting, Anderson calls for the interrogation of categories such as male and female, and emphasizes the need to question the supposedly transparent truth of recovered facts. The stress here on historicizing difference raises compelling questions about what such a history would entail: what tactics would challenge not only the content but also the form and methodology of patriarchal histories? How can the historian document oppression while destabilizing an essentialized notion of female identity?

Such questions are at the heart of Julia Kristeva's influential essay "Women's Time." In it, Kristeva identifies three waves of feminism, each posing a unique challenge to the progressive, linear temporality of traditional histories written by men. According to Kristeva, first-wave feminists relied on "cursive" time as they "aspired to gain a place in linear time as the time of project and history" (1986, 474). Seeking political and economic equality, this generation embraced the diachronic temporality associated with histories written by men, and thus risked identification with the "very power structures previously considered as frustrating, oppressive, or inaccessible" (479). In contrast, second-wave feminists sought to avoid identifying with male power structures. Denying linear temporality, they sought a wholly new sense of narrative time in which to express "intrasubjective and corporeal experiences left mute by culture in the past" (474). This rejection of linear time, however, reflects a disturbing tendency. By suggesting that female identity remains unrepresentable in historical forms traditionally associated with men, the second wave institutes what Kristeva terms a "kind of inverted sexism" (480). As Sandra Bermann suggests, feminists who celebrate an essential femaleness and utterly reject the dictates of linear time risk advancing a "countersexism-either violent or mystic-but ethically no better than the patriarchy from which they emerge" (1990-91, 104).

For Kristeva, such countersexism is challenged by an emerging third wave of feminism, which she believes will exist simultaneously with the other two. Rather than superceding the previous waves, this third wave will combine elements of the first two by embodying both "insertion into history and the radical refusal of the subjective limitations imposed by historical time" (1986, 475). Essentially, these feminists will attempt to remedy the first wave's identification with male power and the second wave's reification of a female countersociety. But most important, the coming generation raises the hope that "the very dichotomy man/woman as an opposition between two rival entities may be understood as belonging to metaphysics" (483). This emerging trend would require thinking beyond the binary distinctions that have proved intractable for earlier feminists, and that in turn would mean developing a concept of temporality that neither simply replicates nor repudiates the diachronic time of patriarchal history.