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

College Literature, Winter 2002 by Roessner, Jeffrey

At least initially, however, the novel avoids this troubling kind of instinctualism as it offers a vivid critique of stereotypical gender roles, especially through the metaphor of grafting. As an explorer who brings exotic new fruits to England,Jordan at one point defines grafting as "the means whereby a plant ... is fused into a hardier member of its strain, and so the two take advantage of each other and produce a third kind, without seed or parent" (1992, 84).The third kind here-the hybrids produced-in one sense represents possible gender identities that are neither simply heterosexual nor homosexual. This reading forms the basis of Laura Doan's argument that Winterson employs a postmodern critique of binaries as she imagines new possibilities for gender identity: the hybrid here "illuminates the ways in which the dominant culture opts out of creatively and freely exploring boundless gender options and instead becomes mired in weary boundaries and binaries" (1994, 152). The metaphor of grafting as a "wholly new genesis of gender" (150) suggests Winterson's resistance to categorizing sexual identity with a simple distinction between hetero- and homosexuality.1

Although compelling, this reading of the image of grafting does not fully address Winterson's continued reliance on problematic binary distinctions in her depiction of lesbian desire. In fact, Doan herself suggests that Winterson continues to rely on rigid notions of gender identity as Sexing the Cherry begins "to map an alternative social order, one that positions the lesbian at the center" (1994, 145). Doan here acknowledges that the novel goes beyond simply challenging existing categories of gender identity. By positioning the lesbian at the "center" of this alternative social order, the novel inverts the binary logic that posits heterosexuality as the norm by which lesbianism is judged per-verse.

The novel sets up the reinscription of such binary terms mainly in its celebration of imaginative and irrational forces. Although the novel's title alludes to the process of grafting, a more telling figure for Winterson's project to transcend traditional gender roles occurs in a reference to the pseudo or mystical science of alchemy: "The alchemists have a saying, `Tertium non data': the third is not given. That is, the transformation from one element to another, from waste matter into best gold, is a process that cannot be documented" (1989, 150). In grafting, the transformation is scientifically informed; even though it produces a new gender "without seed or parent," the options arise from known elements. In contrast, the alchemical transformation cannot be rationally controlled or documented: occurring in a realm beyond logic, it signals the ascendancy of the irrational in Sexing the Cherry. Ultimately it is the novel's celebration of irrationality-rather than its critique of binary logic-which underpins Winterson's attempt to map a space for the expression of lesbian desire, particularly in her rewriting of the Puritan Revolution.