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

College Literature, Winter 2002 by Roessner, Jeffrey

Here I want to explore how the tension between Kristeva's second and third waves is reflected in Winterson's Sexing the Cherry and Carter's Wise Children, two novels that historicize sexual difference rather than assuming it to be an unassailable fact. Specifically,Winterson dismantles the heterosexual-homosexual dichotomy by suggesting alternative ways of imagining sexual identity, while Carter undercuts the gender stereotypes associated with the roles of mother and father in the patriarchal family. Ultimately, however, Winterson rejects linear temporality and endorses an apocalyptic urge to escape history and the power structures of a male-dominated society. In this way, Sexing the Cherry risks lapsing into the very kind of countersexism that Kristeva cautions against. In contrast, Wise Children suggests that the myth of the patriarchal family is too deeply entrenched in Western culture to be simply rejected by any individual. Rather than championing a utopian desire to escape history, Carter presents the patriarchal family as a social construct and suggests that although the gender roles ascribed in it cannot be utterly escaped, they can be contested by an agent working within history In this way, Carter s novel reflects Kristeva s aspirations for a third wave of feminism seeking to overcome the metaphysical foundations of sexual difference.

"The third is not given : Jeanette Winterson's Sexing tire Cherry

In a meditation on identity in Jeanette Winterson s Sexing the Cherry, Jordan, one of the novels narrators, asserts that The inward life tells us we are multiple not single, and that our existence is really countless existences holding hands like those cut-out paper dolls... (1989, 100). This emphasis on the multiplicity of the self has been read as part of Winterson s postmodern critique of traditional categories of gender identity. For example, Laura Doan contends that Winterson employs narrative tactics such as intertextuality, parody, pastiche, self-reflexivity to subvert patriarchal and heterosexist discourses and engage a radical oppositional critique (1994, 138). Similarly, Jim Collins argues that Winterson s denial of basic temporal and spatial categories in the novels epigraphs helps her overcome gender subordination and repression of desire through the complete rejection of historical demarcation in the traditional sense (1995, 85). While employing tactics of narrative disruption and ironic appropriation, however, Winterson is not content simply to challenge an older model of historiography or to destabilize traditional categories of gender identity. In fact, in her revisionist account of the Puritan Revolution, Winterson ultimately develops a counter-historical framework that naturalizes lesbian desire.

In creating a space for the expression of lesbian desire, Winterson s novel marks a decisive shift from the deconstructive aims of earlier postmodern fiction such as D.M. Thomas s The White Hotel (1981) and Toni Morrison s Tar Baby (1981). Linda Hutcheon contends that these works try to avoid the trap of reversing and valorizing the other, of making the margin into a center ... (1988, 65). While Hutcheon argues convincingly that Thomas and Morrison dodge the temptation to universalize the experience of women or African-Americans, her theory does not help us account for the way more recent fiction such as Sexing the Cherry seeks to center previously marginalized categories of identity, particularly by celebrating the irrational forces that animate history. In her retelling of events surrounding the Puritan Revolution, Winterson presents passion as an instinctual and uncontrollable force that cannot be repressed without harsh consequences. Indicating that this force often leads to happy and healthy lesbian relationships, Winterson depicts lesbianism as a more natural expression of desire than either heterosexuality or male homosexuality. In so doing, she ultimately risks compromising the feminist currents in the novel, particularly by installing desire itself as a new instinctual foundation for identity.