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

College Literature, Winter 2002 by Roessner, Jeffrey

Such questions are at the heart of recent debates about feminist historiography, particularly in discussions concerning the role of personal experience as historical evidence. In particular, Joan Scott makes a compelling case for the need to theorize the part experience plays in writing any history of difference a history told from a marginalized perspective. Scott contends that alternative histories are too often grounded on an uncritical appeal to the truth of experience. In such cases, personal testimony of oppression or exclusion is brought in as "uncontestable evidence and as originary point of explanation" (1996, 24). She illustrates her point with reference to feminist historians who expose the "masculine bias" of traditional histories by "providing documentation about women in the past which calls into question existing interpretations made without considerations of gender" (30). Attempting to recover the voices of women consigned to the margins, these alternative histories find their authority in an appeal to experience as selfevident. In this way, they do not significantly challenge the form or epistemology of traditional historical narratives: the experiential evidence simply provides new facts or referents to be emplotted in the familiar linear, progressive narrative of history. For Scott, this reliance on experience as a transparent window to truth needs to be interrogated for the way it upholds oppressive categories of gender identity.

Ultimately, such uncritical use of experience reinforces rather than critiques the categories of identity on which histories have traditionally been based. Scott claims that when historians rely on experience in this way, "the vision of the individual subject ... becomes the bedrock of evidence upon which explanation is built" (1996, 25). By installing a concept of the individual as the basis of his or her narrative, the historian ultimately risks naturalizing "categories such as man, woman, black, white, heterosexual, or homosexual by treating them as given characteristics of individuals" (27). In other words, the appeal to women's experience relies on a simplistic dichotomy between man and woman, and naturalizes these categories by presenting them as reflections of a reality outside discourse, and so beyond change. To combat this tendency, Scott urges historians of difference to explore "the ways in which female subjectivity is produced, the ways in which agency is made possible ... the ways in which identity is a conflicted terrain, the site of multiple and conflicting claims" (31). Refusing to treat experience as foundational, such a history would not reinforce categories of identity such as man or woman. Instead, by historicizing experience, it would help ensure the critique of rigid gender distinctions and the concept of the individual subject that reinforces them.

Although initially offering the kind of history Scott critiques as Dora promises to reveal "the entire family's closetful of secrets" (1996, 48), Wise Children is never simply driven by Dora's anger or spite, for it quickly becomes an interrogation of the historical forces and social myths that helped produce her experiences.6 Indeed, Dora's memoir stands as compelling history because, rather than simply offering testimony against her pretentious, self-absorbed father, the novel invites readers to ask why Dora and Nora have the experiences they do.7 Specifically, the novel records their struggle with the patriarchal ideal of the two-parent family headed by the biological father. It charts the progression from Dora's initial acceptance of this ideal to her ultimate rebellion against the restrictive sex roles that such an ideal of the family has traditionally supported. By so doing, the novel becomes-in Scott's terms-an investigation into the "complex and changing discursive processes by which identities are ascribed, resisted, or embraced . . ." (33).