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

College Literature, Winter 2002 by Roessner, Jeffrey

As a challenge to this rationalist tradition, the novel celebrates the power of desire, which in Winterson's work is continually linked to homosexual relationships. At one point, Jordan notes that those who want to contain desire do so with the "chains" of marriage and family ties-these are the legal, social, and religious institutions that sanction love between a man and woman (1989, 37-38). Winterson intimates that those who do not chain desire must accept it as an unpredictable and unruly force that does not necessarily lead to a heterosexual marriage. In "The Story of the Twelve Dancing Princesses," for example, none of the marriages between men and women succeed.The husbands are homosexual or unfaithful, or they treat their wives as possessions. Consequently, most of the princesses either leave or kill their princes. The three princesses who do find brief happiness-before men destroy it-do so with other women (48, 54). Suggesting that the only way to achieve satisfaction is to follow this passion wherever it leads, Winterson invites readers to accept alternatives to heterosexuality, particularly lesbianism, as natural expressions of a basic human quest for love.

The celebration of unfettered desire in Winterson's fiction has led Christy Burns to argue that "Desire is what is real in Winterson, more so than historical events or material objects" (1996, 302). Burns sees this vision of desire as part of the novel's fantasy, which works to "open up a space for alternative lifestyles" (304). This reading, however, downplays Winterson's use of passion not simply to open a space for, but to naturalize lesbian desire. In fact, the vision of desire here can be read as a new kind of instinctualism that Patricia Waugh has identified as a hazardous temptation for postmodern writers. Waugh argues that the deconstruction of Enlightenment ideals of rationality, progress, and the autonomous human subject has led to the celebration of irrationality.2 Specifically, she explains that the disintegration of older forms of authority resulted in the search for a new, non-rational foundation for identity, one that "often displaces the notion of nature with a notion of the body in a new instinctual foundationalism . . ." (1992, 193).

Because this new instinctualism springs from the fear of the loss of patriarchal grand narratives, Waugh contends that it is particularly attractive to male writers. Citing a tradition that runs from Friedrich Nietzsche through Thomas Pynchon, she argues that these writers tend to elide the material existence of women by using them as symbols of irrationality Discussing Pynchon's V (1963), for example, she notes that the novel's "dissolution of human subjectivity into textual play" has frequently been read as a strategy of resistance (1992, 192). But she suggests that "for a feminist, the first difficulty with this argument must surely be that V is a woman and even if she is constructed to expose the dehumanizing effects of idealistic patriarchy, she also perpetuates them in her very form" (192).The issue then is how to read the dissolution of V's subjectivity. Is it a critique of idealistic patriarchy? Or does it erase the female body and so continue the tradition of presenting women as symbolic alternatives to masculine reason or logic? Ultimately, Waugh contends that in this use of "metaphorical femininity," postmodern works such as Pynchon's V reinscribe the feminine as an Other that represents "the possibility of a space of immediacy, outside language, an incitement to transgression" (192).3 Becoming symbols of mystical Otherness, women in postmodern fiction are too often depicted as fragmented subjects without material bodies. Ultimately, such a depiction reflects a persistent, debilitating gender stereotype of women as intuitive, emotional, and irrational.