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

College Literature, Winter 2002 by Roessner, Jeffrey

In fact, in its celebration of passion, the novel actually denies corporeal existence to many female characters, and repeatedly represents the body as an impediment to fulfilling an idealized vision of love. For example, Jordan's first imaginative journey results from his desire "to escape the weight of the world" and "leave his body where it is" (Winterson 1989, 11). Later, he laments the plight of those "who while on earth in these suits of lead sense the presence of one we love, not far away but too far to touch" (39). This urge to transcend the limitations of the physical self ultimately finds expression in Fortunata's dance: teaching her pupils to "become points of light," she sets them spinning "until all features are blurred, until the human being most resembles a freed spirit from a darkened jar" (76). This drive to escape the confinement of physical existence is reinforced as the dancing pupils transcend their bodies and Fortunata "hears music escaping from their heads and backs and livers and spleens" (76). The bodily organs undergo a mystical transformation that takes the dancers beyond language, concept, and time.

Along with presenting a consistent urge to escape the confines of the body, the novel ultimately employs Fortunate herself as a metaphorical object of Jordan's spiritual rather than simply physical desire. While his love for Fortunate inspires Jordan's journeys, he finally questions whether she is the object of his quest or a symbol: he asks, "Was I searching for a dancer whose name I did not know or was I searching for the dancing part of myself?" (Winterson 1989, 39). Marilyn Farwell has suggested that Jordan's quest is important because he never succeeds in capturing Fortunate: "It is a search that goes for naught because when he finds her, she refuses to go with him. In effect, she refuses to be the closure of his story" (1996, 80). In arguing for the radical nature of the narrative arch of Jordan's story, Farwell seems to suggest that traditional, patriarchal plot lines inevitably end with resolution-for example, the marriage that typically closes the romantic comedy. But this reading downplays another very traditional plot line, one that ends with unrequited love and relies on a spiritual figure such as Beatrice, the woman who initially motivates Dante's quest, who can never be attained but who nonetheless sustains his journey to self-knowledge. The postmodern refusal of closure in Jordan's narrative does not undermine the romantic strain in the plot. Throughout, Fortunate is denied a body; as a desirable woman, she stands as a figure for the spiritual quest that Jordan undertakes. In this way, Sexing the Cherry exhibits elements of postmodernism in its "desire mode" that conflict with the feminist values upheld in other aspects of the narrative. Presenting Fortunate as a symbol of an irrational, ungovernable passion, the novel actually perpetuates the mythic use of the desirable woman as an Other to masculine rationality In so doing, it risks stripping her of a position of agency from which to contest her status as the pursued object.