Transgressing Boundaries in Jeanette Winterson's Fiction 9783653005158, 9783631589533, 3653005159

Citation preview

www.peterlang.de

LCT 31-Front 58953HCA5-AM neu.indd 1

Sonia Front · Transgressing Boundaries in Jeanette Winterson’s Fiction

Sonia Front earned her Ph.D. in 2007 from the University of Silesia (Poland). She has published on cinema and English literature. Her research interests cover the issue of time as well as contemporary cinema. She teaches English literature and culture and American literature.

HKS 37

Literar y and Cultural Theor y

Sonia Front

Lang

The subsequent chapters of the book deal with selected questions from ­Jeanette Winterson’s fiction, such as gender issues, love and eroticism, language and time, constituting areas within which Winterson’s characters seek their identity. As they contest and repudiate clichés, stereotypes and patterns, their journey of self-discovery is accomplished through transgression. The book analyzes how the subversion of phallogocentric narrative and scenarios entails the reenvisaging of relations between the genders and reconceptualization of female desire. The author attempts to determine the consequences of Winterson’s manipulations with gender, sexuality and time, and her disruption of the binary system.

HKS 91

31

Transgressing Boundaries in Jeanette Winterson’s Fiction Constructing Knowledge in Detective Fiction

PETER LANG

Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften

27.11.2009 2:55:40 Uhr

www.peterlang.de

LCT 31-Front 58953HCA5-AM neu.indd 1

Sonia Front · Transgressing Boundaries in Jeanette Winterson’s Fiction

Sonia Front earned her Ph.D. in 2007 from the University of Silesia (Poland). She has published on cinema and English literature. Her research interests cover the issue of time as well as contemporary cinema. She teaches English literature and culture and American literature.

HKS 37

Literar y and Cultural Theor y

Sonia Front

Lang

The subsequent chapters of the book deal with selected questions from ­Jeanette Winterson’s fiction, such as gender issues, love and eroticism, language and time, constituting areas within which Winterson’s characters seek their identity. As they contest and repudiate clichés, stereotypes and patterns, their journey of self-discovery is accomplished through transgression. The book analyzes how the subversion of phallogocentric narrative and scenarios entails the reenvisaging of relations between the genders and reconceptualization of female desire. The author attempts to determine the consequences of Winterson’s manipulations with gender, sexuality and time, and her disruption of the binary system.

HKS 91

31

Transgressing Boundaries in Jeanette Winterson’s Fiction Constructing Knowledge in Detective Fiction

PETER LANG

Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften

27.11.2009 2:55:40 Uhr

Transgressing Boundaries in Jeanette Winterson’s Fiction

Literar y and Cultural Theor y General Editor: Wojciech H. Kalaga

Vol. 31

L

Peter Lang

Frankfurt am Main · Berlin · Bern · Bruxelles · New York · Oxford · Wien

Sonia Front

Transgressing Boundaries in Jeanette Winterson’s Fiction

Ä

Peter Lang

Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften Frankfurt am Main · Berlin · Bern · Bruxelles · New York · Oxford · Wien

Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

Published with financial support of the University of Silesia.

E­ISBN 978­3­653­00515­8 ISSN 1434-0313 ISBN 978-3-631-58953-3 © Peter Lang GmbH Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften Frankfurt am Main 2009 All rights reserved. All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. www.peterlang.de

Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction

7 9

I. What if image smashed the glass?' — The Mise-en-scne of the Conflict 19 II. `It's the clichs that cause the trouble.' — Looking for the Language of Rapture 49 III. 'Take off your clothes. Take off your body.' — Erotic Configurations and the World of Collapsed Binaries 101 IV. Somewhere it is still in the original' — The Quest 131 V. "The path not taken and the forgotten angle" — Time, Memory, and History 159 Conclusions Bibliography

201 205

Acknowledgements

This book was submitted as PhD dissertation in 2007. It is the result of several years' work and has been supported throughout by individuals to whom I owe a debt of gratitude. My special thanks to Prof. dr hab. Zbigniew Bialas for his invaluable help and intellectual guidance. Without his support and insightful observations this project would not have been possible at all. I would also like to thank Prof. dr hab. Wojciech Kalaga for helpful comments an some parts of the book presented as work-in-progress during several conferences as well as for the final review of the book.

Introduction 1 had no idea where to look, or what 1 was looking for, but I know now that all important journeys start that way. /Jeanette Winterson: Lighthousekeepingl

Jeanette Winterson has been actively engaged in the concerns governing postmodern debates within cultural and literary studies. Her oeuvre includes novels: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), Boating for Beginners (1985), The Passion (1987), Sexing the Cherry (1989), Written on the Body (1992), Art&Lies. A Piece for Three Voices and a Bawd (1994), Gut Symmetries (1997), The PowerBook (2000) and Lighthousekeeping (2004); a short story "The Architect of Unrest" (1989), a collection of short stories The World and Other Places (1998); unpublished short stories: "The Mistletoe Bride," "The White Room," "Roman Holiday," "The Snow Horse" and "How to Die" to be found at her official webside www.jeanettewinterson.com; Weight (2005) constituting a part of "The Myths Series" written by different authors; children's stories: The King of Capri (2003) and Tanglewreck (2006); essays: "Dreams and Buildings" in Whose Cities? edited by Mark Fisher and Ursula Owen (1992), "Jeanette Winterson" in The Pleasure of Reading, edited by Antonia Fraser (1992), "Virginia Woolf. Monks House, Rodmell, E. Sussex" in Writers and Their Houses. A Guide To the Writer's Houses of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, edited by Kate Marsh (1993); a collection of essays Art Objects. Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery (1995); scripts: Static (1988), Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit: The Script (1990), Great Moments in Aviation (1994); a fitness book, Fit for the Future: The Guide for Women Who Want to Live Well (1986); The Dreaming House (1998), a short text published to "celebrate the centenary of the building of the house `Le Bois Des Moutiers' designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens in 1898" in an exclusive edition of 176 copies; editing a collection of short stories Passion Fruit: Romantic Fiction with a Twist (1986) and Vintage series of Virginia Woolf s novels (2000) with Margaret Reynolds; a few introductions and a great deal of journalism. In her novels Winterson focuses on the subjects of identity, gender and sexuality, the deconstruction of the binaries and the overriding models of history, questioning grand narratives, closure, a single meaning and stability. Her innovative and invigorating historiographic metafictions employ distinctive postmodernist techniques, such as intertextuality, pastiche, parody, self-reflexivity, fragmentation and others. In so doing, they utilize the potential of poststructuralist arguments and concepts for feminist and lesbian critiques of the prevalent social order. Winterson's feminist preoccupations overlap historical and philosophical

10

Introduction

issues as well as the lesbian/lesbian feminist/queer, mirroring their theoretical developments. Winterson's first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, embedded in her autobiography, has achieved a tremendous commercial success, like some of her other books have later. Oranges, despite being `a portrait of a lesbian as a young artist', as some critics have called it, evaded the restriction to a lesbian readership for a variety of reasons. Apart from its originality and a sense of humour, the timing of the book was very good as it was published when the women's movement was still thriving before its division around the question of sexuality, and when lesbian feminist politics and works had already prepared the ground, for example Sara Maitland's Virgin Territory. Sarah Waters identifies the 1980s as the time exhibiting appetite for ambitious texts that also incidentally depicted desire between women. At that time, in mainstream texts homosexuals served to delineate and corroborate heterosexuality located in the central position while in lesbian books the heroines usually committed suicide or got married. Winterson proposed a new twist of the plot: her protagonist, Jeanette, accepts her sexual preference and does not attempt to combat it. It is heterosexuality which is othered' here and its attitude to homosexuals. Furthermore, turning Oranges into the BBC TV series, invested with the sense of humour and `innocene erotic scenes along with presenting lesbianism as a stage in life, positioned the audience on Jeanette's side. Winterson's second book, Boating for Beginners, like Oranges rewriting the Bible and exploring the relationship between fact and fiction, has remained underestimated. It has received little critical consideration, however comic it is in its mockery of the tabloid press, popular literature and the media that can advertise and seil anything, even `Hallelujah Hamburger'. It also introduces an androgynous character, followed by The Passion, and Sexing the Cherry's hybridization of reproduction. Their advocacy of fluid gender and sexuality as well as Written on the Body's, locate the books within the postmodernist discussion more than feminist or lesbian. Throughout her whole oeuvre Winterson's notion of romantic love is informed with ambivalence, as Lynne Pearce argues, concentrating on a tension between love as timeless non-gendered universal and love as an ideology subverted by language and sexual preference. This depiction of love together with the factors surrounding the publication of Oranges have influenced Winterson's popularity and position in the mainstream fiction, which she has occupied together with other lesbian writers, like Sara Maitland and Emma Donoghue. Winterson has named herself 'an heir to Virginia Woolf. She does draw on modemists like Woolf, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, D.H. Lawrence and T.S. Eliot. Winterson's commitment to lyric intensity and faith in the accuracy of language has been seen as a Modernist strategy. In her collection of essays on art and culture, Art Objects. Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontely, which constitutes a declaration of her aesthetic and a tribute to the main Modernist writers, she positions

Introduction

11

herself in a lineage of Modernism. She argues for Modernism's continuing insurrection of language. Her writing enters a sophisticated dialogue not only with all the distinguished propensities in contemporary British writing, but also with Modernism then. Like Modemists, she worships language and art, proclaiming, like T.S. Eliot, that art transcends time and equating it with religion. Sexing the Cherry poses contemplation on the themes undertaken by Eliot in Four Quartets, yet, Winterson extends his preoccupations by experimenting with gender and sexual identities, as well as reenvisaging the female body and romantic love. Concurrently, she gestures back at Woolf s Orlando. Her endeavour for an intricate and innovatory style has been linked with D.H. Lawrence's writing about passion. Moreover, her repetitions have been affiliated with Gertrude Stein's style of 'insistence'. Winterson returns particularly to love stories and triangular relationships so as to examine the capacity for various options within the template. Nonetheless, despite Winterson's claims to Modernism, her playful and exigent books have been more often than not seen as indebted to Angela Carter whose prose is a point of reference also to other British women writers, like Sara Maitland, Fay Weldon, Emma Tenant and Marina Warner. They share the use of fantasy/magic realism in their rewritings of fairy tales, myths and portrayals of female grotesque monstrous characters to oppose patriarchy. Winterson's purpose, like other feminist writers', is to interrogate traditional views of gender, redefine femininity, reveal it as socially constructed, reclaim woman's body for her pleasure, liberate it of masculine colonizing discourse, grant her subjectivity, as well as to question family values, depict mother-daughter bond and the relationships between women under patriarchy. Furthermore, she is engaged in the lesbian agenda of interrogating the traditional views on same-sex relationships, displacing and subverting the dichotomies, and the queer political programme of intermingling the hetero and homosexual binary. Not only femininity is rewritten here, however, but also masculinity, which poses an extraordinary strategy for a lesbian writer. In spite of the possibility of liberal humanist reading of her texts, Winterson pursues a specifically lesbian aesthetic and discourse of desire. She consistently implements imagery characteristic of lesbian textuality. Through this she creates a decidedly lesbian erotica which, like in French feminists, disallows traditional formulas of desire. Rejecting the linear masculine patterns of medicine, physics, history and cartography, Winterson's characters, both men and women, embark on a quest, a female labyrinthine journey, conceptualizing the process of attaining a new identity. The quest is central to Winterson's thematic preoccupations. The characters search for the Holy Grail which is love, uniting safety and risk, and concomitant approval by the community they live in, yet, to be able to enter mature relationships, they have to find themselves first. The self-discovery journey is usually displaced into travelling for other reasons, like individuation from the mother (Oranges, Boating for Beginners), naturalist expeditions and the search for a

12

Introduction

dancer (Sexing the Cherry), war and regaining the heart (The Passion), following the medical map of the body (Written on the Body), leaving home (Art&Lies, Lighthousekeeping), or virtual journeys (The PowerBook). It is only in the process of those explorations that the characters gain self-knowledge and realize the multi-facetedness of their selves to have a liberating potential of trying out various scenarios. As the need and wish for wholeness is rooted in every human being, Winterson's protagonists attempt to find it through love and art. Her genuine love surpasses all divisions: of gender, age, time, identity, dass and culture. For her love is a universal absolute value, which has been seen as Romantic, yet, to pay attention only to the universalizing strategies entails overseeing the writer's claim that not all the people can experience the `true' love enriching one's life, granting it meaning and worth sacrificing anything. Winterson repeatedly returns to the destructive trajectory of the heterosexual relationship, proclaiming the feasibility of reciprocal feeling only for lesbian type of bonds, devoid of the tendency to subjugate and colonize. The writer reinscribes the sexual landscape so that it would become a site where violence or the desire to control are not admitted, and where the partners are equal in their emotional and erotic exchanges because gender or sexual orientation do not matter any more. The celebration of lesbian love is therefore accompanied by the celebration of lesbian eroticism. Whether through exploiting gambling, cross-dressing or mirroring, or following the palimpsestic routes of the body, or mouth-watering Images with food in the foreground, Winterson worships the female body and its power to give and receive pleasure. To celebrate love and eroticism and to revitalize the clich&l lover's discourse, the writer innovatively experiments with patterns of desire and employs sensual embodied language of eros against the bankruptcy of the postmodern culture and the hollowing of its language. This concem about recuperating the debased language through its eroticizing has been read as Romantic agenda. Concurrently, her belief in the power of language has been affected by the poststructuralist emphasis on the constitutive role of language in structuring perception. Upholding the belief in language, love and beauty, Winterson has infused the texture of her prose with poetry, creating her own recognizable Wintersonian' style. Her beautiful episodes of poetic prose, abundant in linguistic play and Invention MichMe Roberts has called "word sculptures." Winterson's project links her with the third wave of feminists as defined by Julia Kristeva in her essay "Woman's Time." While, according to the commonest division of sociopolitical feminism, the first wave of feminists sought to join the sociosymbolic order without its questioning, the second wave discarded it for the sake of difference. Kristeva argues that the third wave's agenda is to combine the two previous ones through inclusion into history and the refusal of the subjective restrictions enforced by historical time, as well as to realize that the psychosymbolic structure is embedded in a metaphysics of identity and difference where one sex constitutes the competitor of the other. This trend demands think-

Introduction

13

ing beyond dichotomies, therefore Winterson's amalgamation of binaries and her refusal of their hierarchization seem to be the enactment of Kristeva's tasks for the third wave of feminism. In addition, Winterson's reinscription of masculinity poses a response to Kristeva's plea for all people to bring about a new ethical vision. Negotiating the space beyond the dichotomies demands a new notion of temporality. Thus, Winterson creates dissonant chronotopic frameworks, repudiating linear temporality and spatiality. She figures time through water imagery; as a vortex, river or sea. The fluidity of time and water resonate in timeless floating subjectivity, characters, cities, love along with shifting postmodern world, genders and sexualities. The concept is supported by the theories of new physics or virtual reality. The strategy, together with multiple narration, opens up the possibility to illustrate the plurality of the selves within the subject. The interest in the fragmentariness of identity, characteristic of the feminist writing, is visible in Winterson's and Tennant's doubles, and Winterson's and Carter's twins and androgyny alike. In keeping with the postructuralist approach to subjectivity, Winterson creates thus fluid mobile contradictory subjects in process who exist in different presents simultaneously. Their portrayal is enhanced by the complexity and multi-layering of the texts which resist the categorizations of the postmodern, realist, fantasy/magic realism, constituting rather a mMange of genres. Although some of Winterson's books' plots take place in the past, she employs history for the present concerns, which is validated by the chronotopic frameworks and parallels drawn in Sexing the Cherry between the seventeenth and twentieth century protagonists. The similarities denote the fact that prejudices are still in force and the space for transgressions still needs to be negotiated. This negotiation takes place also through story-telling, a political act here since the "repetition-with-difference" of history and mapping "journeys not made" betoken the link between the past and present, posing an opportunity to redraw the future. This offers an interesting circumstance for resistance and critique of the present that takes place also in futuristic novels by Carter, Tennant or Doris Lessing. Furthermore, Winterson participates in the project of writing herstory, inscribing women's experience onto the history of the world. Literary criticism of Winterson's work has concentrated either on feminist/lesbian/queer or postmodern issues. The articles encompassing the former evolve around the images of femininity, the portrayal of lesbians and their oppression by heterosexuality, disruption of the dichotomies, fluidity of gender and passion, and rewriting the paradigms of desire (especially in Written on the Body and The Passion). They also make an attempt to trace lesbian aesthetic in Winterson's books and to decide whether her writings effectively fulfill lesbian agenda. Some of them criticize the possibility of liberal humanist readings of her books, some conclude this is a successful political lesbian project because it manifests the persecution of lesbians within the heterosexual economy that punishes them for the

14

Introduction

endeavour to surpass compulsory heterosexuality; other papers assert that Winterson's fiction is not politically lesbian though efficient in the deconstruction of the binaries. The estimation of the efficacy of Winterson's texts mirrors the progress in the theory. The above preoccupations constitute the majority of critical discussion. Comparatively little has been written about love in spite of its significant position among Winterson's themes. Lynne Pearce in her article "Written on the Tablets of Stone'?: Jeanette Winterson, Roland Barthes and the Discourse of Romantic Love" concentrates on the ambivalent status of romantic love in Winterson's fiction and reads her romances through the lens of Barthes's formula of ravishment, that is love at first sight. Lauren Rusk devotes one section of "The Refusal of Otherness. Winterson's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit" to love as grail in Oranges. Moreover, Carolyn Allen in her "Jeanette Winterson. The Erotics of Risk" inspects love in connection with passion, risk, loss, intimacy and comfort. Lisa Moore in "Teledildonics: Virtual lesbian in the Fiction of Jeanette Winterson" focuses on Winterson's belief in the transforming power of love. Jean-Michel Ganteau in "Hearts Object: Jeanette Winterson and the Ethics of Absolutist Romance" concentrates on the canon of romance as delineated by the British and American traditions and its contemporary refractions epitomized in Winterson's work, particularly in The PowerBook. There have also been a few articles situating Winterson within the feminist debates or mainstream fiction as well as portraying the reception of her books and the film based on Oranges, and scrutinizing Romantic or Modernist echoes. The papers tackling postmodern problematics discuss the questions of identity, language, particularly Winterson's rejection of clichs and her revitalization of language; the relationship between story-telling and history and the time frameworks. Winterson's explorations of scientific discourses along with her deployment of postmodern techniques and evolution of style have also been dealt with. Oranges has probably provoked the most critical considerations. The Passion, Sexing the Cheriy and Written on the Body have also been extensively written about, as opposed to Art&Lies and Gut Symmetries. I have come across only one paper discussing The PowerBook, and not a single one about Lighthousekeeping or Weight. This may be connected with their reception, cold reviews mingling with enthusiastic ones, although Lighthousekeeping has had a favourable response; as well as the fact that the critical debate on Winterson usually commences four to eight years after the publication of the given novel. Merja Makinen substantiates this with the claim that Winterson's novels are ahead of their times. Seven monographs on Winterson have been published. So Far So Linear: Responses to the Work of Jeanette Winterson (1997) by Christopher Pressler includes six essays, each devoted to one of the novels, where he maps out the complex structures of the novels employing a method of cross-culture analysis. The second edition comprises an essay on The World and Other Places, probably the

Introduction

15

only one about this collection of short stories ever. 7'm telling you stories': Jeanette Winterson and the Politics of Reading (1998), edited by Helena Grice and Tim Woods includes ten critical essays representative of the literary criticism on Winterson's texts. In the Writers and their Work series Margaret Reynolds's Jeanette Winterson (1998) poses an introductory study. Sponsored by Demons: The Art of Jeanette Winterson (1999), edited by Helene Bengtson, Marianne Borch and Cindie Maagaard constitutes an effect of a collaboration between students and teachers affiliated with the University of Southern Denmark - Odense and the University of Copenhagen, and includes seven critical essays. York Notes Advanced: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Kathryn Simpson (2001) poses an introduction of the novel to advanced level and undergraduate students. Merja Makinen's The Novels of Jeanette Winterson. A Reader's Guide to Essential Criticism (2005) explores the critical material which Winterson's work has received. Some books on contemporary British literature, recognizing her significance, devote one chapter to her oeuvre, for instance Introduction to Contemporary Fiction (1999), Contemporary British Fictions (2003), edited by Rod Mengham and Richard Lane and Jago Morrison's Contemporary Fiction (2003). As regards Polish publications, to my knowledge, there are only few publications: a short essay by Jerzy Jarniewicz "Zapisane na ciele. W niewoli Wyka" included in his book Lista obecnos'ci. Szkice o dwudziestowiecznej prozie Inytyjskiej i irlandzkiej (2000), self-published M.A. thesis Revising Sexual Differente: a Study of Sex and Gender Relation by Katarzyna Kasznia (2006) and Zbigniew Bialas's article "Pulapki plciologocentryzmu: Esej o przekladaniu Written on the Body Jeanette Winterson na jezyk polski przepleciony kilkoma dygresjami na temat Shakespeare'a" ["The Traps of Sex-logocentrism: An Essay on Translating Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body into Polish and a few remarks on Shakespeare"], included in Ple6 przekladu (Przeklad artystyczny, volume XV), ed. Piotr Fast (2007). My book poses an attempt to fill in the gap both on Polish critical arena and on the international one, extending the discussion with my own ideas and interpretations of some of the already discussed themes and also, among others, the exploration of two quantitatively different conceptions of love; the pleasure of sex displaced into the pleasure of food, figuration of time, memory and water imagery. In my discussion I cover all Winterson's fictions, from Oranges, through all the novels and short stories, to Weight, wherever they appear relevant to my argument. The dissertation is organized around a selection of subjects which overlap to mirror circularity and anti-linearity of Winterson's texts. The division is artificial then and there are many possibilities of other groupings. The intricacy of the writer's works encourages some alternative interpretations, and mine are by no means authoritative or exhaustive. They do not demonstrate what Winterson's fiction means but what it may mean. One of the consequences is that sometimes I utilize the same quote to illustrate different points. I devote three chapters to the

16

Introduction

questions of gender, sexuality and love as these are extremely important issues in Winterson. Even the argument concerning language requires a feminist/lesbian perspective because of Winterson's linkage of textuality to sexuality. Although the last chapter handles time, memory and history, still, there are points of convergence with the previous trajectories as Winterson's time framework can be said to create space for unbounded love and hybrid creatures. Chapter I: "'What if image smashed the glass?' - the Mise-en-scene of the Conflict" deploys mainly the feminist theories to discuss the issues constituting the object of the divergente between the sexes in the patriarchal sociosymbolic order of Winterson's books. The starting point is Judith Butler's theory of gender constructivism and performativity, Elisabeth Grosz's presumption of plasticity of the body and Michel Foucault's views of bodily discipline to depict how the body is policed within the patriarchal matrix and how Winterson interrogates the categories of sex, gender and name through their refusal. The Wintersonian images of femininity and masculinity and their burdens are discussed, which include both those which obey the phallogocentric regime and those which attempt to subvert it. The emphasis is laid on the aesthetic objectivizations of femininity, treating women as sexual objects, the issues of marriage and family and motherdaughter relationship. I also start to discuss Winterson's male characters' need to search for their feminine side to continue in chapters two and three as it overlaps with other topics. Chapter II: "It's the cliches that cause the trouble.' — Looking for the Language of Rapture" seeks to explore Winterson's repudiation of cliches, both in language and in human relationships. First I pursue Winterson's exposition of the debasement of language as well as emotional and erotic bonds, particularly in married couples. Roland Barthes's Lover's Discourse. Fragments has appeared invaluable not only here but also throughout the whole dissertation. Winterson reveals lover's discourse as hackneyed and unoriginal and therefore in need of renewal. The protagonists reject hypocrisy and disrupt the trite bonds to look for the eroticized language and for deep relationships based on reciprocity and authentic intimacy. I hope to demonstrate the link between language, body and identity as evident in Winterson's texts. To do that, I elaborate on bodily textuality strictly connected with erotic peregrinations. What is the risk and consequences of letting the lover familiarize with the palimpsest of one's body? Deploying feminist and lesbian theories I discuss Winterson's repudiation of the male discourse which colonizes the female body and the way she reenvisages the erotic routes on the body in non-phallic terms. Then, I explore the eroticization of food and its function in erotic encounters. The last section of the chapter deals with the characteristics of female language and nonverbal communicative conduct in view of feminist and psychological theories as dissonant from the male one, as well as differentes between every personal idiolect and their influence on communication.

Introduction

17

Chapter III: —Take off your clothes. Take off your body.' — Erotic Configurations and the World of Collapsed Binaries" seeks to anatomize Winterson's hybrid identities and sexualities by means of lesbian/queer methodology. The section concerning androgyny embarks upon both people and cities and the impact they exert on each other. Homosexuality, bisexuality, cross-dressing and the practice of grafting are considered as the strategies which offer potential to disrupt heteronormative regime. The next part scrutinizes political implications of lesbianism along with the aesthetic Winterson implements in her books. In the section about erotic triangles the point of departure is Eve Sedgwick's thesis about homosocial relationships in the society and Terry Castle's definition of lesbian fiction. I attempt to decide whether Winterson's fictions fulfill that formula. In chapter IV: — Somewhere it is still in the original' — the Quest" I propose the distinction between the formulas of love in Winterson: 'wild love' and `true love' constituting the object of the quest. I commence with the displacement of love into war in The Passion, elucidating the issue with Erich Fromm's, Elaine Scarry's and others' views on destructiveness and war. Then I move on to examine gambling as the embodiment of passion or wild love. The section intersects with the previous one as it studies the significance of gambling in war and in passion. I proceed to an attempt at defining Winterson's blueprint of wild love with psychoanalytical theories, and genuine love, particularly through Fromm's and lesbian theories. The last part of the chapter illustrates Winterson's figuration of `true' love and her characters' search for it. Chapter V: — The path not taken and the forgotten angle' — Time, Memory, and History" I start with the psychoanalytical employment of archaeology as a metaphor for memory to look at Winterson's depiction of the rules governing memory, her emphasis put on the interdependence between the past, present and future and her enactment of the rhetoric in the shape of dislodged linearity. Understanding the processes of memory is crucial for the protagonists to comprehend their personal history and thus satisfy their need for a point of departure. How do the inability to pinpoint facts, apparent also in science and historiography, affect them? How do they manage recollections and past traumas? From memory I move on to history and story-telling to scrutinize them through the lens of postmodernist theory, mainly Hayden V. White's, Jean-Fran9ois Lyotard's and new historicists' views on history. I discuss Winterson's figuration of history, her disputation of the Bible and advocacy of the import of alternative versions of history. Winterson posits story-telling as essential in constructing subjectivity since it teaches agency and opens up the possibility of remapping one's future. Moreover, I discuss Winterson's exploration of the past as an invented city where fictional characters meet the historical figures and the way she appropriates history for her purposes. Tackling herstory I employ feminist and lesbian theory again and examine how Winterson's female and male characters follow female anti-linear routes on their emotional journey. How does she render a `new man'? How does her narrative

18

Introduction

strategy disrupt the symbolic to mediate space for the female expression? Further on, discussing the theme of time, I engage the theories of new physics as well as Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of the chronotope. Then the chapter deals with plural chronotopes in the novels clashing with each other to demonstrate the interdependence between consciousness, time and space. Winterson uses the time framework to validate her notion of volatile plural subjectivity. Later on I consider the writer's conceptualization of time, congruous with Bruno Latour's and its significance, to proceed to the imagery connected with water, abundant in Winterson's writings and its encodings. I also make an attempt to reply the question why her heroes and heroines strive for the vicinity of water. The whole book attempts thus to demonstrate the variety of Jeanette Winterson's preoccupations and her disruption of conventional forms, and to look at them in a fresh manner. I hope that it will subscribe to a reading and understanding of the import of her writing, and perhaps encourage some critical debates, offering alternative interpretations, particularly on the neglected works or aspects. Although Winterson's fiction centers on the exploration of sexuality and gender, these themes are by no means exclusive and I would very much like to read arguments concerning the other issues.

Chapter I: 'What if image smashed the glass?' — The Mise-en-scne of the Conflict Everyone, at some time in their life, must choose whether to stay with a ready-made world that may be safe but which is also limiting, or to push forward, often past the frontiers of commonsense, into a personal space, unknown and untried. /Jeanette Winterson: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruitl

Jeanette Winterson's characters live in the patriarchal culture in which gender entails the attribution of social roles, appearance and sexual orientation. As they do not identify themselves with these significations inscribed on their bodies, gender becomes a burden for them. They decline to be bestowed identity on the basis of gender, and therefore they seek to reformulate their selves. Winterson's protagonists refuse to accept the world where gender serves the heterosexual imperative, and one can surpass neither gender nor heterosexuality, otherwise one risks ostracism, as Judith Butler asserts. Each act of performing gender poses repetition of the codes connected with femaleness and maleness, taking part in the masquerade with pre-given roles and costumes. To become a subject recognized in the social arena, one must move within the boundaries of heterosexual matrix, complying with reiteration of a set of permissible ways of behaviour, the code of dressing and the way of moving which are already infused with social meanings. The formulae pose the vindication of non-existence of the pre-inscriptive body, which many theorists, including Butler, support, proclaiming that "there is no recourse to a body that has not always already been interpreted by cultural meanings."' The body is thus a text engraved with social standards, which Michael Foucault has defined as the "inscribed surface of events," and which, as Elisabeth Grosz argues, "can no longer be regarded as a fixed, concrete substance, a pre-cultural given. It has a determinate form only by being socially inscribed."2 The emergence of bodies as "sign systems, texts, narratives, rendered meaningful and integrated into forms capable of being read," as Grosz points out, is enacted thanks to plasticity of the body, that is its vulnerability to be shaped and organized.3 The plasticity is used to 1 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble. Ferninism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 8. 2 After Pippa Brush, "Metaphors of Inscription: Discipline, Plasticity and the Rhetoric of Choice," Feminist Review, 58 (1998), p. 25. 3 After Brush, "Metaphors of Inscription," p. 27.

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Chapter I

manipulate the body through the disciplinary exertion of power. One of the most influential means of power, Foucault proposes in Discipline and Punish, is the "power of the Norm." The structures of power produce a homogenous norm which individuals are trained to obey. The discipline operates through "simple instruments: hierarchical observation, normalizing judgement and their combination" to police the individuals' conduct and produce "docile bodies."4 The body surface is thus engraved with gender, and models of femininity and masculinity Learning the schemes, one is thereby forced to "do gender." The term proposed by Candice West and Don H. Zimmerman encompasses reinforcing the category of sex through creating differentes between girls and boys, women and men that are not natural, biological or essential. Consequently, one is rid of the possession of gender since it becomes a feature of social situations; the Basis and product of various social systems. The process of doing gender is possible owing to the existente and importance of predefined gender categories, constantly attributed to the parties of interaction.5 "Gender attribution," as described by Suzanne Kessler and Wendy McKenna, is the foundation of all human interactions, and because it is inevitable, differentiating between people due to gender is always possible, and, as a result, doing gender is always possible and inevitable.6 The issue is illustrated in Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson where the reader gets enmeshed in the game of attribution of gender when confronted with an ungendered bisexual narrator. The reader attempts to determine the narrator's sex, like in case of some of Shakespeare's sonnets, taking what they believe decides about gender, into consideration. And so, when submitted a scene in which the narrator, for instance, walks the lover home for safety reasons, or is about to hit her: "I came at her with the leg of the chair. I wanted to run it straight across her perfectly made-up face,"7 or reaches for a shirt after having sex, or declares that s/he has always had a sports car, or employs the language of a dominant colonizer to describe emotions at the moment of seeing the naked lover: "How could I cover this land? Did Columbus feel like this on sighting Americas?"8 the reader identifies the narrator as a man, and the frame of reference are generalizations, stereotypes and cliches. Contemporaneously, the reader concludes the narrator is a woman when presented with situations in which, for example, the narrator has a Greek salad for a meal in a restaurant, or when s/he 4 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979), p. 184. 5 After Katarzyna Gawlicz, „Odnajdywanie i gubienie malej dziewczynki. Praktyka zakochiwania siQ a wytwarzanie oraz zawieszanie plci," in: W poszukiwaniu malej dziewczynki, ed. Izabela Kowalczyk and Edyta Zierkiewicz (Wroclaw: Konsola, 2003), pp. 153-154. 6 After Gawlicz, „Odnajdywanie i gubienie malej dziewczynki," p. 154. 7 Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body (London: Vintage, 1995), p. 45. 8 Winterson, Written on the Body, p. 52.

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wonders: "Why do men like doing everything together?"9 or participates with the girlfriend in destroying urinals which they deem as the symbol of patriarchy, or asks friends for help with laying a new carpet, or, on another occasion, delights at "the wetness sudden beneath my teer'° when s/he goes out into the garden at night. Compelling the reader to attribute gender to the narrator, Winterson makes one realize the fragile bases on which one poses assumptions about gender, and the power which stereotypes and clichs exert over one.11 Eschewing names is also Winterson's attempt to discover the boundary of representation, to enquire how the categories of sex, gender, and name pose signifiers of identity, in what way they indicate presence and materiality of the body. Winterson seems to enter into a dialogue with Butler's Gender Trouble and venture a reply to some of her interrogations: to what extent the indication of gender makes the body come into being, constitute identity and the internal congruity of the subject; what remains when the body, consistent through the mark of sex, is dismembered — is there a possibility of re-membering it; to what extent gender identity, constituting the interdependence of sex, gender, sexuality and desire, is the outcome of obligatory heterosexuality.I2 As the stress on how the body performs gender, sexuality and race contests with the view that the body possesses these features, Written on the Body explores the contingencies of how the body performs and possesses identity.13 The relation of consistence and continuity among sex, gender, sexuality and desire sustain the intelligibility of a person, as Butler points out, and pose socially imposed norms of intelligibility rather than analytic or logical traits.14 Winterson's denial to grant her narrator sex and, by inference, her repudiation of patriarchal oppression of names and identities it induces, results in the risk of the body's unintelligibility because the body is considered to supply irrefutable confirmation of sex and gender, and eventually of unique identity; "[t]he body coalesces under the name of sex. The erotic body is mapped through acts, zones, desires, all of which usually cite sex as identification."15 In other words, sex functions as the constituent of the materiality of the body and its viability, as Butler argues. What is more, the beings with undetermined gender are treated as abject and their personhood and humanness are interrogated.16 9 Winterson, Written an the Body, p. 22. 10 Winterson, Written on the Body, p. 42. 11 Jerzy Jarniewicz, „Zapisane na ciele. W niewoli jczyka," in: Lista obecnojci (Poznan: Rebis, 2000), pp. 207-208. 12 Butler, Gender Trouble, pp. 8, 16, 18, 127. 13 Leigh Gilmore, "Without Names. An Anatomy of Absence in Jeanette Winterson's Written an the Body," in: The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony, ed. Leigh Gilmore (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2001), p. 125. 14 Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 17. 15 Gilmore, "Without Names," pp. 124, 131. 16 Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 17.

22

Chapter I

Furthermore, the name, according to Lacan, establishes and emblematizes the paternal law and upholds the integrity of the body. Because the name fixing gender and kinship operates as a political performative, to be named means to be implanted into the Law of the Father and bodily shaped by it.17 The act of naming of sex, Monique Wittig elucidates, poses thereby the sign of coercion and domination over the bodies which are constructed correspondingly to the rules of sexual difference. This exposes the categories of man and woman as political rather than natural.'8 To receive a name signifies thus yielding the body to the paternal law, which Winterson refuses to do. Through the concealment of gender sexuality is questioned here, and an enunciation is offered that gender and sexuality neither resolve themselves to each other nor corroborate the narrator's identity.19 Winterson effects Foucault's argument that sex enforces the contrivance of unity and univocity upon a series of ontologically divergent meanings and functions which otherwise display no link or continuity with one another.2° The omission of the name indicates a successful escape from the fixity implied in naming, and "a redirection of the representation of identity, and this provisional freedom from fixity as well as nostalgia are welded together in Written on the Body, and both circulate through the representation of gender and sexuality."21 Jeanette in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit does not want to follow the conventions, either, but she also submits herself to the process of gender attribution, therefore she questions her orange demon on its sex. The demon, nevertheless, replies, "Doesn't matter does it?"22 averting her attempt to make gender-based assumptions since the identification of sex is always, according to Butler, accompanied by culturally established norms and taboos.23 The lack of gender attribution is also visible in Jeanette's alter egos in the allegorical parts of the book for she is conferred both a male one — Sir Perceval seeking the grail, and a female one — a girl called Winnet. The alter egos begin to conjoin towards the end of the book when Jeanette's story is repeatedly interwoven with the two fantasy ones. Additionally, her mother is represented by a male sorcerer. The shifting genders constitute a repudiation of patriarchal constructions of genders. However, Written on the Body with its refusal to disclose the narrator's gender, and thereby questioning the stereotypical determinants of identity, serves 17 Butler after Gilmore, "Without Names," pp. 137-138. 18 After Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 115. 19 Gilmore, "Without Names," p. 129. 20 Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 101. 21 Gilmore, "Without Names," p. 133. 22 Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (London: Vintage, 2001), p. 107. 23 After Lauren Rusk, "The Refusal of Othemess. Winterson's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit," in: The Life Writing of Otherness: Woolf Baldwin, Kingston & Winterson (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), p. 111.

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Winterson also to draw attention to the fact that the narrator is a human being capable of feeling. The ability to love, suffer, sacrifice oneself, and not gender and sexual preferences is significant when defining a person's identity. The origin of passion and pain is a body of a human being, not of a woman or a lesbian. Love, desire and pain are universal emotions, not contingent upon gender, orientation, race or other features. Nevertheless, this way of perceiving the world is alien to the patriarchal society that finds the categories of gender and name indispensable in establishing boundaries and giving labels. Gender marks boundaries which people are trained to abide by since childhood. In Winterson, training a girl, which embraces training both her body and psyche, finds expression through a set of dos and don'ts: Stay inside, don't walk the streets, bar the windows, keep your mouth shut, keep your legs together, strap your purse around your neck, don't wear valuables, don't look up, don't talk to strangers, don't risk it, don't try it. He means she except when it means Men. This is a Private Club.24

A girl's body becomes her enemy that she is expected to subjugate so as to adapt/adopt it to the future role of a woman. Nonetheless, when she grows up, a woman still has to fight with her body, adapting it constantly, improving, exercising, embellishing it, even to the extent of hurting it. She is often expected to suffer, only to make her body fit in with the paradigm: "It's cold in here, very cold. The women suffer most. Their shoulders bared and white like hard-boiled eggs."25 Regarded as flawed and defective, the natural body is thus pathologized, Elisabeth Grosz argues, and the coercion of improvement and correction is infringed upon it.26 A woman must engage in Lacanian masquerade which is a "performative production of a sexual ontology"27 because her sexual attractiveness and submitting to the expectations and social stereotypes are the condition of acceptance and approval in the patriarchal culture. A woman's body is read as a signifier of her identity, therefore Louise in Written on the Body is meant to be her husband's ornament: "He knew I was beautiful, that I was a prize. He wanted something showy but not vulgar. He wanted to go up to the world and say, 'Look what I've got,'"28 as well as the bride in Winterson's Mistletoe Bride: "He would rather I shine beside him,"29 and Alice in Gut Symmetries: "At his side I was access and envy (What a showpiece. Where did you find her?)."3° 24 Jeanette Winterson, "The Poetics of Sex," in: The World and Other Places (London: Jonathan Cape, 1998), p. 41. 25 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, p. 87. 26 After Brush, "Metaphors of Inscription," p. 30. 27 Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 47. 28 Winterson, Written on the Body, p. 34. 29 Jeanette Winterson, The Mistletoe Bride, 30 Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries (London: Granta, 1997), p. 104.

Chapter I

24

Buying a bright pink raincoat for Jeanette in Oranges is her mother's attempt to teach her to live up to social expectations. She does not pay attention to her daughter's objections, and in consequence, Jeanette feels miserable since she associates the colour both with revolting or bland things: I hated her. I looked at the shrimps. They were pink all over too. There was a woman next to me carrying a Battenburg cake. lt had pink icing and little pink roses. I felt sick.3I

Jeanette refuses to fulfill a model of girl as a well-behaved and pretty creature, so when she receives sweets with a comment, "Sweet hearts for a sweet heart,"32 she is furious: That day I had almost strangled my dog with rage, and been dragged from the house by a desperate mother. Sweet I was not. But I was a little girl, ergo, I was sweet, and here were sweets to prove it. I looked in the bag. Yellow and pink and sky blue and orange, and all of them heart-shaped.33

'Sweet' colours, the motif of heart and pink clothes can be definitely classified as girlie, and to be a girl, a woman, according to popular culture which is a handbook of femininity, means to surround with girlie things; with aesthetic objectifications of femininity and possess a lot of products which accompany gaining perfect appearance since the cultural indicators define femininity as the approval of aesthetic ideal of femininity.34 With a view to becoming as close to the ideal as possible, a woman gives in to the discipline of a mirror as the body and her femininity has become the standard of estimating and a determiner of her identity. Looking at herself in the mirror, she is a model and a male gazer simultaneously, and she creates and estimates the boundaries of her form an the basis of the paradigm in force. The Foucaultian practised and subjected "docile bodies" are thus generated by "panopticism," a type of inspection which pushes one to observe oneself since one imagines being observed by others.35 Being 31 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, p. 78. 32 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, p. 70. 33 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, p. 70. 34 Rachel Russel, Melissa Tyler after Kowalczyk, "Introduction," in: W poszukiwaniu malej dziewczynki, p. 14. 35 After Sandra Bartky, "Foucault, Femininity and the Modernisation of Patriarchal Power," in: Women's Studies. A Reader, ed. Stevi Jackson, Karen Atkinson, Deirdre Beddoe, Teri Brewer, Sue Faulkner, Anthem Hucklesby, Rose Pearson, Helen Power, Jane Prince, Michele Ryan and Pauline Young (New York, London, Toronto, Sydney, Tokio, Singapore: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), p. 227.

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attractive appears to be the main criterion for a woman to deserve a man's love: "He points out famous lesbians to sight-seers who always say, `But she's so attractive! or `She's so ugly!'"36 This is because the phallogocentric culture submits the female body to the standards of classification; defining the category of femininity, setting boundaries, and deciding what evokes desire or disgust; in other words, it submits women to the process of normalization. The oppressive consequence of those activities is demonstrated in the tale about the prince's search for a flawless woman in Oranges. Concomitantly, Winterson mocks and parodies this overestimating of the aesthetic model of femininity in a short story "O'Brien's First Christmas." O'Brien is perceived as a failure as she does not have any of the things people value most: "[m]arriage, children, a career, travel, a home, enough money, lots of money."37 One night a fairy visits her and promises to fulfill her wish. Taking her for a drunk participant of a party next door, O'Brien demands to be blonde, just to get rid of the intruder. The following day she discovers she has really turned blonde and her life changes as if by magic; everybody pays her compliments and she meets a nice man with whom she is going to spend Christmas. Another burden of fernale gender Winterson pays attention to is being treated as sexual fetish and object of male desire. Popular culture and commercials have stripped female bodies, converting them into a kind of nude which to Lynda Nead has its source in the desire to subjugate the female body.38 The false manipulated image of a woman meant to influence the attractiveness and efficiency of sale, addresses people who erroneously identify sex with love, and therefore have sex as a way of suppressing hunger for love. Omnipresent sex is thus regarded as one of consumer goods offered by the consumer society, which is remarked upon in The PowerBook: "What a strange world it is where you can have as much sex as you like but love is taboo,"39 and in Art&Lies: "I was paying for pleasure as men do to whom money comes easily and affection so much harder."46 Furthermore, lesbians are transposed into a male sexual fantasy. In "The Poetics of Sex" the couple's neighbour, Salami, begs the women to let him watch their erotic act, offering money. Salami always behaves in the same way: "In half an hour he'll be violent and when he's threatened us enough, he'll go to the sleeze pit and watch two girls for the price of a steak."41 The female body is

36 Winterson "The Poetics of Sex," p. 44. 37 Jeanette Winterson, "O'Brien's First Christmas," in: The World and Other Places, p. 81. 38 Lynda Nead, Akt kobiecy. Sztuka, obscena i seksualnoSi. [The Female Nude. Art, Obscenity and Sexuality], trans. Ewa Franus (Rebis: Poznati, 1998), p. 23. 39 Jeanette Winterson, The PowerBook (London: Vintage, 2000), p. 51. 40 Jeanette Winterson, Art&Lies. A Piece for Three Voices and a Bawd, (London: Vintage, 1995), pp. 182-183. 41 Winterson, "The Poetics of Sex," p. 40.

26

Chapter I

then more often than not treated instrumentally, merely as a sex object, and corporeality is reduced to sexuality. It is a woman's duty to provide a man with sexual pleasure. The DogWoman, for instance, recalls hearing her parents having sex when she was a girl. Her father's "steady grunts"42 were accompanied by her mother's silence. Later her mother explained that "men take pleasure and women give it," which she said "in a matter-of-fact way, in the same tone of voice she used to teil me how to feed the dogs or make bread."43 This betokens the fact that sex does not constitute anything exciting for her and she treats it as one of many duties, a man's appetite for sex being insatiable: "men's members, if bitten off or otherwise severed, do not grow again. This seems a great mistake an the part of nature, since men are so careless with their members and will put them anywhere without thinking. I believe they would force them in a hole in the wall if no better could be found,"44 the Dog-Woman observes. The situation engenders woman's feeling that her body never belongs to her entirely. The need for love intertwines in a woman with fear of disapproval, which can be paralyzing, but can also incite to sacrifices. As Erich Fromm observes, a range of fears is connected with this: a woman is afraid to be left by a man in an emotional and social way and detests the fact that she is dependent an him. Since she relies an male desire and potency, she must be attractive for him, and she must prove to herself that she can attract. While a man must attract a woman sexually to win her over, employing at the same time physical strength, or, more importantly, social status or money, a woman can only take advantage of her sexual attractiveness.45 Treating a woman mainly as a sexual being and defining her through her biological function makes man call her 'the weaker sex'.46 Her weakness is also demonstrated in greater propensity to evil, as the pastor in Oranges believes. The Edenic gender hierarchy is invoked when he indicates Jeanette to exemplify the menace of the devil: "This little lily could herself be a house of demons. It has been known for the most holy men to be suddenly filled with evil. And how much more a woman, and how much more a child. Parents, watch your children for the signs. Husbands, watch your wives."47 A woman is then treated as somebody subordinated to a man, as his part. In Art&Lies Jack Hamilton treats his wife likewise. He sells her shares to make an investment, but he does not consider it 42 Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry (London: Vintage, 2001), p. 107. 43 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 107. 44 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 106. 45 Erich Fromm, Milos'4 pled i matriarchat [Love, Sexuality and Matriarchy], trans. Beata Radomska, Grzegorz Sowifiski (Poznan: Rebis, 1997), pp. 113-114. 46 Simone de Beavoir, Druga pled, I, [Second Sex], trans. Gabriela Mycielska (Krak6w: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1972), p. 27. 47 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, p. 12.

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her contribution, "so his conceit that he was a seif-made man was not strictly accurate, unless one counted his wife as his rib, which he did."48 This conviction is echoed in Ruggiero's words: "Women are venom and rot. Women are the sweet painted screen around the night-soil trough. Women are the lure of passing flesh stretched over the everlasting carcass. There is no sin that a woman does not know, no goodness that she knows of her own accord."49 The patriarchal society being a mirror in which a woman looks at herself seeking approval and acceptance, Winterson poses a question, "We reflect our reality. Our reality reflects us. What would happen if the image smashed the glass?"5° wondering what would happen if women ventured to reject the patriarchal culture and compulsory heterosexuality. She portrays female characters that frustrate the traditional construction of femininity. Yet, it turns out that women who cross the boundaries of Mainland into the wild are not tolerated but punished and placed in the social invisibility. The Dog-Woman in Sexing the Cherty disrupts the stereotypical definition of femininity through the natural ponderousness which is overwhelming in her, and the appearance straying strongly from the pattern. Principally, the estimation of a person's attractiveness relies upon the ideal of the species, but for Georges Bataille there is another factor playing a significant role here: a person is beautiful as much as they recede from animalism since anything in a human being recalling an animal develops disgust. The erotic value of female figure is stronger when the natural ponderousness fades away. The less female body is subordinated to the physiological animal functions of the human body, the more tempting a woman is. Bataille observes a contradiction here that takes place between the sexual instinct and erotic desire: the picture of an alluring woman would be bland if it did not forecast hidden animal aspect; sexual instinct makes men desire the hairy animal parts of a woman's body. Sexual instinct and erotic desire thereby oppose each other — beauty denying animalism engenders desire which, in its intensification, worships the animal parts of the body.51 Animalism is an attribute strongly accentuated in the appearance and character of the Dog-Woman, therefore she cannot be regarded as attractive. She describes herself as `hideous': "My nose is flat, my eyebrows are heavy. I have only a few teeth and these are a poor show, being black and broken. I had smallpox when I was a girl and the caves in my face are home enough for fleas."52 Her grotesque body recalls those of the Rabelaisian giants. Her extraordinary size and ugliness, similarly to Frankenstein's creature's countenance or Swift's female monsters, engender fear, terror and aggression. Her father even wants to exhibit 48 Winterson, Art&Lies, p. 173. 49 Winterson, Art&Lies, p. 61. 50 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 18. 51 Georges Bataille, Eroticism (London: Penguin Books, 2001), pp. 143-144. 52 Winterson, Sexing the Cherty, p. 24.

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her so as to earn some money but his wife refuses. Later he attempts to seil his daughter for which she requites with murder. The Dog-Woman's twentieth century incarnation, an unnamed ecologist, is also rejected as a monster due to her views. She handles with pollution research and protests against contamination of rivers, becoming an object of derision, and denigrated as "a loony housewife."53 Her obesity is her psychological response to being disregarded by others and their exerting power over her: I wasn't fat because I was greedy; I hardly ate at all. I was fat because I wanted to be bigger than all the things that were bigger than me. All the things that had power over me. It was a battle I intended to win. It seems obvious, doesn't it, that someone who is ignored and overlooked will expand to the point where they have to be noticed, even if the noticing is fear and disgust.54

Her size, like Angela Carter's Fevvers's, signifies independence. She is disapproved of even by her parents for she does not resemble them in the least, nor does she lead the kind of life they expect: My parents found me difficult, not the child they wanted. I was too intense, too physically awkward and too quiet for them.... Parents want to see themselves passed an in their children. lt comforts them to recognize a twist of the head or a way of talking. If there are no points of recognition, if the child is genuinely alien, their do their best to feed and clothe, but they don't love. Not in the transforming way of love.55

Also the Dog-Woman recalls her childhood as "a bleak and unnecessary time, full of longing and lost hope."56 Both women are impelled to learn "to be alone and to take pleasure in the dark where no one could see [them] and where [they] could look at the stars and invent a world where there was no gravity, no holding force."57 The Dog-Woman feels her appearance is an insurmountable obstacle to enter a relationship: "Fm too huge for love. No one, male or female, has ever dared to approach me. They are afraid to scale mountains."58 Similarly, the ecologist does not delude herself it is feasible for her to have a family. Although she loses weight when she leaves her parents' home and emerges as an attractive woman, the weight still persists in her mind. She surmises she is going mad as she hallucinates about the Dog-Woman and believes her to be her alter ego, her 53 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 127. 54 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 124. 55 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 124. 56 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 108. 57 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 108. 58 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 34.

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"patron samt," lurking inside and inevitable to discover that "it won't work. Who'd want to live with a monster? I may not look like a monster any more but I couldn't hide it for long. I'd break out, splitting my dress, throwing the dishes at the milkman if he leered at me and said, darling.'"59 Being a mother proves the only chance for the Dog-Woman to experience love. However, she cannot have her own child as "there's no man who's a match for [her]"66 but she finds a baby in the Thames and names him Jordan. Jordan is the only person who takes no notice of her appearance: "We were happy together, and if he noticed that I am bigger than most he never mentioned it. He was proud of me because no other child had a mother who could hold a dozen oranges in her mouth at once."61 In a way, he even prides himself on having an extraordinary mother then, as it is an opportunity for him to distinguish himself from his peers. In the patriarchal society marriage functions as an act of exchange between two patrilineal clans, as Uvi-Strauss argues in The Elementary Structures of Kinship. The bride poses an object of exchange to execute the functional and symbolic reinforcement of bonds. She does not possess identity then but mirrors the male one.62 A woman who does not belong to a man is thus devoid of value and pushed to the margin of social life, and she can blame only herself since she is believed to have a natural propensity to hysterical and masochist behaviour, as Freud proposed. Alice in Gut Symmetries recalls: know that my father feared for me a lonely old age and a lonely young one too. He did not say so, but the words behind the words told me that he would rather have launched me into a good marriage than watch me row against the tide at my own work. It remains that a woman with an incomplete emotional life has herself to blame, while a man with no time for his heart just needs a wife.63

Alice chooses work although in the childhood her headmaster tells her father that "She'll never be top drawer,"64 maneuvering her into the denigrated position of a person with low intellectual abilities. She cannot even defy them since she believes they would neither listen to her nor treat her seriously: "I felt myself caught between two metal plates, crushing me. The pressure on my head was intense. I wanted to say `Waie but I was so low down that they could not possibly hear me. I lived in a world below their belts, not an adult not a child, smaller than small at the indeterminate age."65 As intellectualism is gendered male, low 59 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, pp. 125, 127. 60 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 11. 61 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 26. 62 After Butler, Gender Trouble, pp. 38-39. 63 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 22. 64 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 20. 65 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 20.

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Chapter I

acumen stands for the missing phallus, that is Alice is short of the symbolic power men wield in culture.66 After the meeting, Alice attempts to figure out what her headmaster meant she would not be. In her father's top drawer she finds various kinds of handkerchiefs and a gold watch. For Alice the watch stands for solidity, value, reliability, conspicuousness, extravagance and rarity, whereas the handkerchiefs signify impudence, usefulness, beauty, fancy, multiplicity, variety, wit and joy, so she concludes these are the traits she is never supposed to gain. The watch and handkerchief seem to be arranged in gender opposition: as an intelligent woman Alice can be neither male nor traditionally female.67 Her education constitutes a struggle to prove her father, with whom she has a special bond and who she describes as Zeus and herself as Athena generated from his head, that she can be "top drawer," that is as good as a man. With the voracity for knowledge, she refutes the gender-based assumption about limitations in women: "My limitations, I call the boundaries of what can be known."68 In that, she dissociates herself from her mother who, although well-educated, has found it appropriate to conceal it. After getting married she continues her hobbies, such as the piano, watercolours and singing, nonetheless, she sacrifices the rest of her mind to the family, becoming the model wife and mother: "My mother. Miss 1950s. The perfect post-war wife. She was pretty, she was charming, she was clever enough but not too."69 Alice formulates her identity through her father's standards as she is afraid her mother will not let her grow up: "I knew that she never remembered to wind the Glock and that I would stay the same age forever. Only with my father could there be a chance."79 Working in physics, a man-dominated field, Alice attempts to shake off her limitation', that is her femininity: "I wear a white coat, tie my hair back and assume the proper attitude to what I call my life."71 "The proper attitude" seems to be scientific cold manner producing the ability to separate emotions from facts, subjectivity from objectivity, science which promotes "work[ing] towards certainties" from humanity which is "moving away from them."72 Following the appropriate dress code and applying scientific approach to both Alice's work and private life are accompanied by the omission of the language that assigns the gendered position in the culture: "I sign myself `Dr' deliberately, to avoid the intrusion of Mrs? or Miss?, as if my marital status had anything to do with the rest

66 Ann McClellan, "Science Fictions: British Women Scientists and Jeanette Winterson's Gut Symmetries," Women's Studies, 33 (2004), p. 1066. 67 McClellan, "Science Fictions," p. 1063. 68 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 12. 69 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 58. 70 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 22. 71 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 121. 72 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 27.

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of the world. When there is no evidence it is assumed I am a man Inevitably."73 It seems more pulpable to her that a man rather than a woman is credited with higher intellectual ability and is assumed to make a scientific career. Although Alice gets a scholarship to Cambridge and wins many prizes for physics, when she Looks into the mirror, she does not see herself but the contents of her father's lower drawers. Her headmaster's opinion influences her seif-confidence then and, in fact, she herself does not believe she is able to succeed. "Undeceive yourself Alice, a great part of you is trash,"74 she addresses herself. Marriage in Winterson's characters' world is considered a safe place for a woman, filling her `natural emptiness' with meaning: "Outside her marriage there would be nothing to hold her, nothing to shape her. The space she found would be outer space. Space without gravity or weight, where bit by bit the seif disintegrates."75 The male body appears meaningful in itself whereas the female one is perceived as meaningless unless a man is mentioned; a woman is unthinkable without a man then, her body gains meaning under the influence of values imposed an it by the dominant culture. She organizes her life around her husband and his needs, passively approving of her fate: "Like many women of her generation she expected to let time run its course through her without attempting to alter it. Her timepiece was my father, and it was by his movement that she regulated her life."76 In Lacanian terms, while a man has the Phallus, a woman is the Phallus, that is she constitutes the object, the Other of male desire, concomitantly connoting the Phallus through being its lack.77 Through the masquerade, Irigaray argues, women are allowed to take part in man's desire but an the condition that they renounce their own.78 Cixous demonstrates in "The (Feminine)" how a woman's need to anchor herself and fear of solitude and "death" are generated through histories which avert her from approaching the moment of her birth. Seeking the bond with her "source," a man as a stable referent,79 a woman is considered destinied to get married: "'She needs to be married,' said father who knew that a single woman is unnatural."8° A woman remaining single would be treated as somebody infringing an nature. When the perfect woman in one of the tales in Oranges is informed that the prince may please to marry her, and she replies, "'I'm not getting married. It's not something I'm very interested in,'"81 her interlocutor is appalled and indignant. 73 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, pp. 138-139. 74 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 26. 75 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 39. 76 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 22. 77 After Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 44. 78 After Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 47. 79 After Susan Sellers ed., Cixous Reader (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 61-62. 80 Winterson, Art&Lies, p. 159. 81 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, p. 61.

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Similarly, when Jeanette's aunt in Oranges suggests, "There's time for [her] to get a boy," and meets with Jeanette's resistance, "I don't think I want one," she is rebuked, "There's what we want ... and there's what we get, remember that."82 In this assertion she gestures back at Foucault's anatomy of a disciplinary regime whose success depends partly on the construction in the disciplined body of the desire to be controlled and to comply with the paradigm; power is therefore strong because "it produces effects at the level of desire."83 Through the relationship with a man, a woman is supposed to enter the male world which expects her to participate in it in a passive invisible way. The requirement of her altruistic and passive approach is justified and accounted for by the already mentioned myth of `female masochism'. Passivity is the only option for "[e]ither a woman is passive; or she doesn't exist. What is left is unthinkable, unthought of," as Cixous notes.84 Therefore in Winterson's The Mistletoe Bride marriage shows itself as the necessity to meet the society's expectations and a set of obligations: "The more my soon-husband talked amiably of my duties as his lady, the more I felt myself caught in a long day of orders to give, and visits to receive. It world not be fitting for the Lord's wife to throw a cloak over her shoulders and Tun out into the rain."85 A woman's identity is granted here concurrently with the act of being chosen by a man. This event determines her priorities and sets her path of life where a man becomes her tutor and guide. A woman is only what her husband designs her to be; thereby the bride feels trapped in marriage and the necessity to fulfill the imposed role. Getting married is the end of spontaneity and jauntiness identified with childhood, but also an injunction not to gratify the woman's own desires, wishes or needs as she is supposed to submit to her husband's ones. She must thus resign from her identity and assume a new one, designated by the template: As we rode, my childhood seif rode with me for part of the way. Then at crossroads, she tumed her horse, and waved goodbye. I had thought of my life at home, and nothing else, for miles and miles. I knew that I was leaving a house and a family, but I was leaving myself too. I wept a little when she had gone, and my maid thought I was tired, and held my hand. There were other selves who disappeared on that bleak road: My free, careless, unconsidered self — the one I am when alone, could not come with me, though she tried.86

82 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, p. 72. 83 After Brush, "Metaphors of Inscription," p. 36. 84 H61Cne Cixous, "Sorties" in: Modern Criticism and Theory A Reader, ed. David Lodge and Nigel Wood (London: Longman, 2000), p. 268. 85 Winterson, "The Mistletoe Bride." 86 Winterson, "The Mistletoe Bride."

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The definition of womanhood includes the notions of marriage and motherhood which are perceived as the acts symbolizing adulthood and maturity: But this was growing up, and surely nothing to fear. A new seif was waiting to meet me. The person I would become was standing at the castle gate. Is that her — looking older, graver, darker? She nodded to me as I rode over the tongue of the drawbridge. She did not smile.87

Winterson excoriates the patriarchal culture for subjugating female body, like colonizers, allowing a woman to appear only in a few configurations: "On the Mainland, Woman is largely extinct in all but a couple of obvious forms. She is still cultivated as a cash crop but is nowhere to be found growing wild."88 The "wild zone" of the women's culture has been defined by Edward Ardener as the area alien to the "dominant (male) group." Ardener designates women "a muted group" and claims that the boundaries of women's reality and culture overlap with the prevailing group but it does not comprise them totally. He examines the "wild zone" of women's culture spatially, experimentally and metaphysically. Spatially it refers to an area illicit to men, whereas experimentally it signifies the questions of the female life-style contrary to male. Yet, in both cases, there are corresponding spheres of male experience unfamiliar to women. However, considering the wild zone metaphysically, it has no counterpart in the male space for all male consciousness is encompassed by the. dominant structure and therefore attainable by language or construed by it; therefore in this sense, the "wild" is always fictitious; from the male point of view, it might pose "the projection of the unconscious." Although women have never experienced the male Zone, they know it as it is imparted in legends.89 The twelve dancing princesses in Sexing the Cherry, the brothers' Grimm rewritten tale, for example, defy patriarchy and "grow wild," living in accordance with their tastes. They establish "lesbian continuum" (Rich) living together, first, nonetheless, they have to go through the childhood subordinated to their father. Every night the sisters leave home to join the inhabitants of the floating city. Dancing with them, the princesses liberate themselves from the imposed social roles and thus feel happy. They decide to inhabit the city but their plan is discovered by one of the princes employed by the sisters' father to watch them. They are chained while waiting for marriage with the prince and his eleven brothers. Marriage manifests itself here, like elsewhere in Winterson, a patriarchal 87 Winterson, "The Mistletoe Bride." 88 Winterson, "The Poetics of Sex," p. 41. 89 After Elaine Showalter, "Feminist Critics in the Wilderness," in: Modern Criticism and Theoly, ed. Lodge and Wood, pp. 322-323.

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institution designed to control the women. After some time, however, the sisters get rid of the yoke of marriage in which they are either betrayed or neglected or disrespected. Some of them punish their husbands with murder, some abandon them for a woman. One of the princesses enjoys a very intense and intimate bond with another woman, with whom she lives in a castle in complete isolation. When they are discovered, the princess admits, "The man I had married was a woman."9° This statement, Doan argues, poses countermeasure against the arraign of contravention since it employs the conditions which legitimize the heterosexual relationship and artlessly replaces one of them. In scrutinizing the imitation of a heterosexual marriage as a way to destabilize gender ideology, Winterson disapproves of it, as the couple's relationship ends up with death — the princess prefers to kill her lover rather than let her be burned by the guardians of morality.9I Fortunata is the only one who does not marry the prince as she escapes from the wedding and becomes independent, working as a dancer. Dancing seems to be the manifestation of her distinctive personality, not comprised by the common rules, and the courage to create her self. Her story and Artemis's are related since they both resign from marriage and choose to live independently in secluded wilderness. Artemis contests with the insistence that a woman ought to be a homemaker for she feels the need to fulfill herself in a different way: "She didn't want to get married and sit out some war, while her man, god or not, underwent the ritual metamorphosis from palace prince to craggy hero. She didn't want children. She wanted to hunt. Hunting did her good."92 Choosing her own way of life and deciding to live in the forest, she respects people who make different choices but wants to be conferred the right to behave as she pleases, her gender not being a determinant: She had envied men their long-legged freedom to roam the world and return full of glory to wives who only waited. She knew about the history-makers and the homemakers, the great division that made life possible. Without rejecting it, she had simply hoped to take an the freedoms that belonged to the other side, but what if she travelled the world and the seven seas like a hero?93

90 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 54. 91 Laura Doan, "Jeanette Winterson's Sexing the Postmodern," in: The Lesbian Postmodern, ed. Laura Doan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 138. 92 Jeanette Winterson, "Orion," in: The World and Other Places, p. 57. The short story "Orion" is very similar to Tortunata's story' in Sexing the Cherry. 93 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 131.

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She wonders whether the reversal of traditional gender roles can be permanent: "Would she find something different or the old things in different disguises?"94 Artemis, the female hunter, constitutes a divergent cultural metaphor to Man the Hunter one, as described by Helen Haste in The Sexual Metaphor. Strong, swift and observant like a man, she is not analogous to Man the Hunter who is interested in a bloodthirsty conquest of nature; Artemis and her female followers aspire to a mystical unity with nature. Man the Hunter follows the conventional male role while mysterious Artemis defies the female one; the man returns home to his wife who approves of and admires him, while Artemis discards men altogether.95 However, Artemis is declined the right to lead her own lifestyle overthrowing traditional roles, and consequently, she is punished with rape for encroaching on the male territory. Orion, a "mighty bunter"96 who lives the life of destruction, manifests the conviction that the one who is strong physically is also powerful, by which he aims at proving it to Artemis that she is meaningless without a man. "He had been looking for her. She was a curiosity,"97 only to demonstrate to her where her place is, to mark her, to grant her meaning. He therefore assumes the function of Derridian style, which always deals with considering the significance of a pointed object that is employed to attack the surface in order to leave a mark there or grant it shape.98 For Artemis, like for every violated woman, rape is a traumatic experience and exerts influence on the rest of her life: "Artemis sees her past changed by a single act. The future is still intact, still unredeemed, but the past is irredeemable. She is not who she thought she was," "All she knew was that she had arrived at the frontiers of common sense and crossed over," "She thought about that time for years" although "Mt took a few moments only."99 Trauma becomes the source of crisis of identity, and its subsequent alteration as it always results in the redefinition of self. Yet, Artemis wreaks immediate vengeance on Orion, using another pointed object, the scorpion's sting, refusing thereby to be granted style. The rapist manages to humiliate and terrify the woman, but he does not succeed in inducing her to return to the Mainland. Both Artemis's story and the Princesses' ones underline the spectrum of power men exert over them and the punishments they mete out for surpassing the role assigned by the phallogocentric culture. Analogously, whether disclosing inclinations towards men or women, Villanelle in The Passion is unendingly subjected to the phallogocentric economy 94 Winterson, "Orion," p. 57. 95 On Man the Hunter and the female hunter see Helen Haste, The Sexual Metaphor (New York, London, Toronto, Sydney, Tokyo, Singapore: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), pp. 26-29. 96 Winterson, "Orion," p. 56. 97 Winterson, "Orion," p. 59. 98 After Nead, Akt kobiecy, pp. 101-102. 99 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, pp. 132, 134, 132.

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which usurps the right to her body. It is very easy, for example, to be accosted in the street by one of "too many drunken hands" in one of "too many dark alleys,"1°° therefore Villanelle cross-dresses and glues a moustache as protection. However, the permissible society does not condemn acts of violence performed on a woman, transposing the responsibility on herself and regarding her very act of going out into the street as the assent to be raped. On another occasion, when Villanelle drinks champagne and thinks about her lover, the cook takes liberty to touch her. Disgusted with this, she shouts she would never marry him, to which he responds with a threat of disposing her of her job and hits her. Having been offended, the cook seeks to punish Villanelle, and he chooses the way he can easily get away with: "[hie started to laugh and coming towards me squashed me flat against the wall. It was like being under a pile of fish. I didn't try to move, he was twice my weight at least and I'm no heroine. ... He left a stain on my shirt and threw a coin at me by way of goodbye."101 As a socially invisible person, the heroine does not delude herself that justice can be done and returns straight to work. Her bitter comment, "What did I expect from a meat man?"1°2 is the expression of the fact that such events are frequent, normal, to be expected. Glimpsing the Queen's married comfort from the position of the voyeur, Villanelle notices insignia of the same heterosexual discourse: the Queen's husband kiss on her forehead endorses his possession and marks his control. Similarly, when Villanelle marries the meat man he incessantly reaffirms his ownership of her, even when they have separated and he has another woman. He sells her with meat as a prostitute for generals in the army. After her escape and return to Venice with Henri, once again her husband claims his rights. Thus the book enacts lesbian dismissal of obligatory heterosexuality and its oppression on lesbians, lessening their social and sexual freedom to impede the relations between them. Picasso in Art&Lies also experiences the trauma of rape. In her case, however, it lasts ten years during which she is molested by her brother Matthew. Her parents pretend not to notice her injuries, such as broken wrists and a dislocated hip; they are "certain I am inventing. It is easier that way. Memory can be murder."103 Even the vicar refuses to help her, belittling the harassment and calling it "a bit of horseplay."104 He counts it as one of many problems each family grapples with, and advises Picasso to talk to her mother, assuring her that her brother is a good person as he plays the organ. Matthew treats his sister's body as "a weapon rest"105 and his possession. Subduing her, he feels "the familiar 100 Winterson, The Passion, p. 55. 101 Winterson, The Passion, p. 64. 102 Winterson, The Passion, p. 65. 103 Winterson, Art&Lies, p. 155. 104 Winterson, Art&Lies, p. 84. 105 Winterson, Art&Lies, p. 156.

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pleasure of ownership. These were his acres, my body, my blood. I was his liegeland."1°6 Subsequently, Picasso feels punished for being attractive and develops hatred towards her body because her brother has declared to love it. On one occasion, when their father finds Matthew, half-naked sleeping on the floor after another rape, it is Picasso who he blames. He believes his son who claims that Picasso attacked him She confesses that Matthew raped her but her father does not credit her words, calling her "little slut," and pushing off the window after she has threatened to notify the police. The incident is reported as a suicide attempt and Picasso is taken to a madhouse where nobody believes her confessions, either. She is thus designated as non-subject; disregarded and made voiceless through her whole life. The portrayal of her family serves as critique of patriarchal family values. The trauma of her childhood and youth makes Picasso incapable of differentiating between love, desire and sex. Being repeatedly assured, 'I love you' by her brother, she ponders on the relationship between love and sex. The discourse of love is entirely unintelligible to her, as she cannot recognise its sincerity. 'I love you' is for her a dead, worn-out and meaningless phrase, murder weapon of family life."1°7 When her callous and hypocritical mother addresses her with the words, she feels overwhelmed with pain but pretends to feel nothing. Her mother reproaches her for heartlessness and demands of her to fulfill the paradigm of behaviour proper for well-behaved girls: —Why don't you smile like other little girls?' Tome on darling, do smile.' Picasso did smile. She learned the rictus of the jaw that indicates pleasure in the female sex."108 Picasso's countenance indicating contentment, it refutes her abuse. Yet, it is written on her body and Picasso must find a way of expressing the trauma to incite the process of healing. The act of being seen and read by Sappho with her understanding and consoling hands is what can bring release: Lie beside me. Let me see the division of your pores. Let me see the web of scars made by your family's claws and you their fumiture. Let me see the wounds that they denied. The battleground of family life that has been your body. Let me see the bruised red lines that signal their encampment. Let me see the routed place where they are gone. Lie beside me and let the seeing be the healing. No need to hide. No need for either darkness or light. Let me see you as you are.1°9

Fed up with "the sick semantics of family life," Picasso discovers in herself some courage and "a piece unkilled by the loving hands of my family,"11° and 106 Winterson, Art&Lies, p. 156. 107 Winterson, Art&Lies, p. 154. 108 Winterson, Art&Lies, p. 85. 109 Winterson, Art&Lies, p. 136. 110 Winterson, Art&Lies, pp. 82, 154.

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resolves to leave, painted all over her body. She realizes that to break out of the family prison she has to give up their methods and language. The word, "VICTORY" becomes for her an idiom to speak out the unspeakable and to transpose the imaginary into the real: "The word won't let me down. The single word that can release me from all that unuttered weight."111 The pain and body are thus translated into a language which has a visible and palpable potential to bring about change:112 Victory. The word undressed me. The word took off the neat blazer and low shoes I wore to family parties. I looked at my body in the mirror. lt was not pukka-proud the way you strutted yours. It was a body unused to light. My shoulder blades were sharp rebukes. My belly was an unploughed field. Weeds had grown over my pubic hair. I was a nun among nettles. Victory.' I picked up my paint brush and began.113

Her violent emotions are transformed into a piece of art seething with bright colours: she paints her family in guilt; her father is purple, her younger brother is blue, the mother spills tea coloured plum and she castrates Matthew changing him into a girl in an envy-green tutu. Picasso's painting poses an act of rebellion, symbolically giving her power over her family and herself. She also paints a new herself, granting herself new qualities and inducing the process of rebirth: I painted my uncertain breasts with strong black arrows and ran a silver quiver down my spine. I took out my lipstick and drew my lips into a red bow bent. You were my target. I painted my legs with dangerous yellow chevrons and bathed my heels in mercury. I would need to move fast. I circled my buttocks with gold rings and gave my navel its own blue diamond. Thinking of your Victory hat I dyed my hair purple.114

Through the act of painting she heralds her future regaining the ownership of the body. Even though she fears her strange body, she hopes she will feel the "acute sensuality" known from the pictures which "told her of a fire she did not know," and is determined to leave the past behind and "find [the fire] or light it in herself somehow even if the coals were her bones and her heart the kindle."115 Jeanette in Oranges challenges the patriarchal authority as well. The world of Oranges is woman-centered; it is men who are 'the other' here, rendered as pigs and beasts, like in The Odyssey where Circe, playing an their desire, drugs a 111 Winterson, Art&Lies, p. 137. 112 Celia Schiffer, "`You see, I am no stranger to love': Jeanette Winterson and the Extasy of the Word," Critique, vol. 46, no. 1 (2004), p. 32. 113 Winterson, Art&Lies, p. 45. 114 Winterson, Art&Lies, p. 45. 115 Winterson, Art&Lies, p. 82.

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band of Odysseus's men and turns them into pigs, or like in the fairy tale about the enchanted hog that turns into a man only at night. The depiction of men as animals is introduced when Jeanette has a recurrent dream of her wedding where the groom appears to be, among others, a pig. Later Jeanette is confronted with her neighbour's confession that she married a pig, which the child comprehends literally. After that she observes the man for the signs of his animalism. The `proofs' she discovers are his eyes close together and bright pink skin, and she attempts "to imagine him without his clothes on," concluding that he must be Ihiorrid."116 Only his being clever is incongruous with the image. Jeanette observes other men as well and she infers, "Other men I knew weren't much better," for instance the man from the post office is "bald and shiny with hands too fat for the sweet jars," or her uncle Bill is "horrible, and hairy."H7 Another neighbour, Doreen, declares that her husband is "up to no good" as he betrays her although she tries to please him, cooking dinner on time so as not "to give him an excuse,"118 and even making their daughter's future dependent on his wishes — she cannot go to university for her father wants grandchildren. Another example is Hilda's husband who "drinks every penny, and she daren't go to the police."1 1 9 Jeanette also considers Pastor Finch and "how horrible he was. His teeth stuck out, and his voice was squeaky, even though he tried to make it deep and stern. Poor Mrs Finch. How did she live with him?"1 2° Reading "Beauty and the Beast" and "Little Red Riding Hood" and thinking of "the spotty boy who took girls down backs" and couples who "made noises that sounded painful, and the girls were always squashed against the wall," Jeanette attempts to understand why the women she knows married such repugnant men since "[e]veryone always said you found the right man."12 1 She interrogates her aunt about it but her uncle retorts that the women would not love them otherwise, and rubs his stubble against Jeanette's face, which for him is a sign of affection. Following Bettelheim's psychoanalytical interpretation of the fairy tales, Jeanette's consideration of "Little Red Riding Hood" may indicate the conflict between that which is allowed and the pleasure principle, whereas her rumination about "Beauty and the Beast" points to her judgment that the sphere of (heterosexual) sex is the sphere of repugnant animalism. Jeanette wonders how to behave when your husband appears to be a beast: "It was clear that I stumbled on terrible conspiracy. There are women in the world. There are men in the world. And there are beasts. What do you do if you marry a beast? Kissing them didn't

116 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, p. 69. 117 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, pp. 69, 69-70, 70. 118 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, pp. 73, 75. 119 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, p. 74. 120 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, p. 13. 121 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, p. 70.

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always help. And beasts are crafty. They disguise themselves like you and I."122 She is confused as the women concede that it is impossible to prefigure a man is a beast until you get married. The only positive pictures of men in the book are Jeanette's mother's opinion of her husband being a good man, though shy, and Elsie's tender memory of her late husband as well as Nellie's, though she is rejoined that her husband "were dead ten years before they laid him out."I23 Consequently, Jeanette develops aversion towards marriage. Taking all her considerations into account, she concludes that not getting married may not be anything negative. She is not attracted to men and feels there is no common ground for them: "As far as I was concerned men were something you had around the place, not particularly interesting, but quite harmless. I had never shown the slightest feeling for them, and apart from my never wearing a skirt, saw nothing else in common between us."124 She defies thus the power of heterosexual imperative — the fact that one is supposed to desire somebody one does not identify with, as Butler asserts.I25 The ecologist in Sexing the Cherry does not find men interesting, either. Her sexual experiences have been disappointing: "in out in out. A soundtrack of grunts and a big sigh at the end."126 She ascertains men are reluctant to work an the relationship: "I don't hate men, I just wish they'd try harder. They all want to be heroes and all we want is for them to stay at home and help with the housework and the kids. That's not the kind of heroism they enj oy."127 Figuration of men as beasts and pigs reverses the Pauline power structure of male superiority and oppressiveness and overturns gender roles.128 In Jeanette' s family her father is always in the background, emotionally distant, meek and reticent, and scarcely referred to, while her mother, Louie, is the dominant figure. Having a masculine nickname and alter egos of the patriarchal king and sorcerer in the allegorical sections of the book, she functions as a demanding father.129 She is an active member of the church Sisterhood, and proffers new ideas and projects all the time. Jeanette compares her mother's creativity with William Blake's "visions and dreams."13° She has ability to affect and inspire people. For instance, she is noted for designing gifts that encourage new members to join the church community, or when the Society for the Lost is about to go bankrupt, she writes letters to members asking for funds and receives an impressive response. Then she 122 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, p. 71. 123 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, pp. 72-73. 124 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, p. 126. 125 Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 149. 126 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 127. 127 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 127. 128 Rusk, "The Refusal of Otherness," p. 113. 129 Rusk, "The Refusal of Otherness," p. 128. 130 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, p. 9.

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buys a CB radio by means of which she communicates with Christians all over England, and plans a meeting for them, as well as a newsletter. The community has also other strong women who can preach and who organize church events. The church thus provides an opportunity for women to be recognized and valued outside the private sphere. Yet, although they act independently of the men within the society, they act in service of the patriarchal ideology and are subordinated to male figures of authority, such as God and the pastor. Jeanette, who becomes their leader, is aware of the power the women wield: "The women in our church were strong and organised. If you want to talk in terms of power I had enough to keep Mussolini happy,"131 which the community deems both the symptom and cause of her disgrace.132 Women have rarely been as powerful as Jeanette has before her opprobrium. She is accused of undertaking male power in the church "flout[ing] God's law and try[ing] to do it sexually. ... So there I was, my success in the pulpit being the reason for my downfall. The devil had attacked me at my weakest point: the inability to realize the limitations of my sex."133 First, she is granted power in church, and later, when her "unnatural passion" is revealed, she is accused of usurping the power. In addition to this contradictory situation, her mother, equally contradictorily, blames her for disdaining her vocation, since she regards missionary work as very important to a woman, so as to wield improper power an the ecclesiastical home arena, while women ought to limit their ministry to each other, their children and pagans. The mother's inconsistent opinions are always agreed upon with the pastor; and being his puppet, she supports the male dominion of church, asserting that "the message belonged to the men."134 Therefore Jeanette concludes, "If there's such a thing as spiritual adultery, my mother was a whore."135 Louie betrays another conviction shared with her daughter, too — of women's spiritual independence in the church.136 Wielding appreciable local power, she renounces it concurrently. She reduces her role readily only to detach Jeanette more distinctly. The repercussion of Jeanette's discard of heterosexuality entails thus deprivation of power and the cancellation of the community's, and most conspicuously, her mother's love. On the family and church grounds, she becomes thus the body that does not matter, to adjust Butler's formula. After the denouncement, Jeanette's mother forsakes her emotionally and afterwards physically, which is rendered in the chapter entitled "Joshua," all the 131 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, p. 121. 132 Rebecca O'Rourke, "Fingers in the Fruit Basket: A Feminist Reading of Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit," in: Feminist Criticism, Theory and Practice, ed. Susan Seilers (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), p. 66. 133 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, pp. 131-132. 134 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, p. 131. 135 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, p. 132. 136 Rusk, "The Refusal of Othemess," p. 116.

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chapters being named after the first eight books of the Bible. Burning the remembrances of Jeanette and Melanie's relationship, Louie destroys the dose and strong spiritual bond she has shared with her daughter: While I lay shivering in the parlour she took a toothcomb to my room and found all the letters, all the cards, all the jottings of my own, and burnt them one night in the background. There are different sorts of treachery, but betrayal is betrayal wherever you find it. She burnt a lot more than the letters that night in the backyard. 1 don't think she knew. In her head she was still queen, but not my queen any more. Walls protect and walls limit.137

The walls, which have designated security, have thereby become the signifiers of confinement, underlined in the interlude about King Arthur: "There was a stone that held a bright sword and no one could pull the sword because their minds were fixed on the stone."1 38 The walls can be construed literally here, as the walls of the house in which two dose people have become strangers, and metaphorically, as the walls of the world that is based on discord. The safety of the walls of the world within which the mother and daughter have been a kind of other' turns into division for Jeanette's otherness is not included in her mother's rules. Louie's outlook is founded on dichotomies: She had never heard of mixed feelings. There were friends and there were enemies. Enemies were: The Devil (in his many forms) Next door Sex (in its many forms) Slugs Friends were: God Our dog Auntie Madge The novels of Charlotte Brontä Slug pellets and me, at first, 1 had been brought in to join her in a tag match against the Rest of the World. I 39

Jeanette's assertion that she loves both Melanie and God, which is impossible for the pastor, subverts her mother's dualism since Jeanette encompasses both God and sex.14° Jeanette does not regard humanity and divinity as contradictory also 137 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, p. 110. 138 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, p. 127. 139 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, p. 3. 140 Rusk, "The Refusal of Otherness," p. 122.

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when she concludes, "The body that contains a spirit is the one true god."14I When Jeanette discovers the adoption papers Louie asserts fiercely that she is her mother and terms the biological one "a carrying case,"142 nonetheless, after the discovery of Jeanette's lesbianism she disclaims the child. Jeanette's sexual orientation is thus enough to cancel the ties the two women were bound with and to marginalize her. Yet, Jeanette's attachment to her mother is strong after her eventful childhood: "she had tied a thread around my button to tug when she pleased."143 The course of the relationship with her mother affects her future relationships with women: One thing I am certain of, I do not want to be betrayed, but that's quite hard to say, casually, at the beginning of the relationship. It's not a word people use very often, which confuses me, because there are different kinds of infidelity, but betrayal is betrayal wherever you find it. By betrayal, I mean promising to be on your side, then being on somebody else' S.144

This inability to trust women results also from other betrayals: by her biological mother, Melanie, Jeanette's first lover, Miss Jewsbury who seduces her, Katy, her another girlfriend, and her friend Elsie who dies. In fact, Elsie appears the only person loyal to Jeanette as she regards the talk about demons "a load of old twaddle."145 The bonds between women in the female-dominated world of Oranges manifest themselves as negative. Therefore, they undermine Adrienne Rich's formula of "lesbian continuum" of women sharing emotional bonds, since they are not solidary with each other while they serve the patriarchal community. The situation mirrors lesbian feminists' disappointment with the possibility of sisterhood. Jeanette resolves to repent eventually, and she is exorcized. When the elders kneel down to pray for her, she, learning from her mistakes, fakes a fervent prayer, but assures her demon that she is not dispensing with it, only the decision is the best one to deal with the situation. From now on, she is sentenced to homosexual melancholy. After some time, when `demons' subdue her once again and she refuses to repent, she is banished from home. The necessity to leave home is elucidated in the story about Winnet Stonejar. Her demon, a raven, urges her to abandon her father's castle, otherwise the requisite to comply with his rules will leave no room for own desires and thus turn her heart to a pebble, like the raven's. 141 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, p. 110. 142 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, p. 99. 143 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, p. 171. 144 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, pp. 165-166. 145 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, p. 132.

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Chapter I

Jeanette continues her quest for unfailing and durable bond, like biblical Ruth and Naomi's, alluded to by the last chapter's title, "Ruth."146 Naomi comprises a number of women: the romantic partner Jeanette would like to tie with, a friend offering approval and love, her mother and the more caring mother she yearns for.147 Not being able to find the bonds, Jeanette is overwhelmed by melancholy. Heterosexual melancholy, that is subconscious grief after the loss of forbidden homosexual love, is a crucial mechanism, Freud maintains, of creating human ego. Melancholy constitutes the response for the loss of the beloved who did not die but ceased existing as the object of love. Homosexual melancholy, an the other hand, deals with the inability to express the conscious loss. Because of the cultural taboo, the grief cannot be executed, and the loss cannot be reconciled, which is crucial for recovering from the loss, since, being the social subjects, people need the support of others to survive. Subsequently, the sadness is internalized and life is stamped with constant lack,148 as is Jeanette's: "I was trembling with fear. As far as I was concerned Melanie was dead. No one mentioned her, and as her mother never came to church, there was no need to remember."149 Betrayed by her mother, Jeanette resolves not to reveal her feelings any more: "I knew I couldn't cope, so I didn't try. I would let the feeling out later, when it was safe. For now, I had to be hard and white."15° She often lives internally now, which is manifested by the last chapter frequently cut by two interspersed stories since "stories helped you to understand the world."151 In her case the emotions are internalized, but, as Butler points out, in some cases the negative feelings can be pushed outwards and take an the shape of aversion to homosexuals,152 which is the case of Jeanette's mother. Jealousy is perhaps the reason, The PowerBook attempts to elucidate: "'This love has destroyed us,' you said. 'Not love. But others' envy of it.'"153 However, Winterson's male characters also experience their gender as a burden. The reasons can be found in Fromm's writings where he maintains that a man is afraid of a failure in meeting expectations, thus craving for prestige is something that is to protect him from that fear. In consequence, a man feels interminable need to prove to himself, his partner, and all the other people that he can live up to expectations. This approach is strictly connected with

146 Rusk, "The Refusal of Otherness," p. 129. 147 Rusk, "The Refusal of Otherness," p. 131. 148 Joanna Mizieli6ska, „Melancholia malej dziewczynki. RozwaZania o melancholii w kontekgcie prac Zygmunta Freuda i Judith Butler," in: W poszukiwaniu malej dziewczynki, ed. Kowalczyk and Zierkiewicz, pp. 115, 128, 131. 149 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, p. 118. 150 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, p. 134. 151 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, p. 29. 152 Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 145. 153 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 73.

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competitiveness. Since a person full of fear feels rid of value and strength, recognition, popularity and priority over rivals become his imperative. It is social and cultural factors that contribute to an average person's desire for prestige and competition.I54 The predicament of a continuous test is a yoke for a man who would like to free himself from it. Henri in The Passion, Jordan in Sexing the Cherry and Handel in Art&Lies fail to fulfill the traditional masculine roles, which results in their anxiety. Displaying definitely feminine features, they redefine their masculinity breaching gender boundaries and travelling back to the maternal. Involved in gender expectations that designate proper female and male conduct, Jordan would like to fulfill the traditional role of a man, to be courageous and admired, and to have a beautiful wife, children and a grand house to come back to after exciting adventures. At the commencement he wishes to pursue the masculine model of travelling represented by Tradescant,155 his name pointing to trade's cant (Jargon) and aligning him with collecting and hunting. He poses the embodiment of Man the Hunter; his journeys are predictable, realizable and purposeful; he plans to "bring back rarities and he does."156 On return to his city, he shares his glory and success with the members of his community. Yet, what hinders Jordan from following that model of traveling and thereby living up to to the percepts of a hero is the impression of gender reversal with his mother who enacts the percepts much more efficiently. He feels lost in her as she is superior to him in respect of size and strength, which he feels, should be the case with a son. She is also reticent, "the way men are supposed to be,"157 and so she does not talk about her feelings, neither appears to be emotional. His mother is an authority for him; he would like to be just like her, not caring for the appearance but for the actions. The reversal of gender roles is symbolized by the graphic symbol of pineapple in the parts of the book set in Restoration times and preceding the sections of the book narrated by Jordan, and the phallic symbol of banana preluding the ones narrated by the Dog-Woman, symbolizing the reversal of gender roles and disturbing the cultural assumptions about masculinity and femininity In the passages set contemporarily the pineapple cut into two halves heralds the narrative by Nicholas Jordan, whereas the peeled banana with its top cut announces a woman without a name. Meanwhile, Jordan feels trapped between gender expectations and his emotional needs: "I had myself to begin with, and that is what I lost. ... But lost it more importantly in the gap between my ideal of myself and my pounding 154 Fromm, MilasY, plec i matriarchat, pp. 110-111. 155 Cath Stowers, "Journeying with Jeanette: Transgressive Travels in Winterson's Fiction," in: (Hetero)Sexual Politics, ed. Mary Maynard and June Purvis (London: Taylor & Francis, 1995), pp. 145, 149. 156 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 101. 157 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 101.

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Chapter I

heart."158 He wishes his mother, as well as Fortunata, a woman he falls in love with, to ask hin to stay, and feels hurt when his mother does not show sadness when he intends to leave her so as to travel. Jordan's journeys aim at discovering love reciprocated by Fortunata and his mother then, although the covert aim, he barely recognizes, is self-discovery: I am searching for a dancer, who may or may not exist, though I was never conscious of beginning this journey. Only in the course of it have I realized its true aim. When I left England I thought I was running away. Running away from uncertainty and confusion but most of all running away from myself. I thought I might become someone else in time, grafted an to something better and stronger. And then I saw that the running away was a running towards. An effort to catch up with my fleetfooted seif, living another life in a different way.159

Jordan's search for Fortunata figures the search for his feminine side.16° Eager to rid themselves of the burdens of their gender, Winterson' s characters strive to redefine their identity. Seeking truth about oneself, it is impossible to avoid confronting one's body, which is conducted most emphatically through intense emotions, like pain or passion. Grosz deems body flexible material that can be shaped in a new manner, in agreement with new classification schemes, other than our binary models. She believes that it is feasible for a body, being a social subject, to be redefined and its functions, forms and place in culture to be disputed.161 Winterson seems to agree with her showing how gender dichotomies can be upset. Redefinition of the body operates as a pivot in Winterson's characters' search for identity. They contest and repudiate the stereotypes and patterns, looking for their own territory and realizing that they must resolve whether they prefer following the comfortable patterns or enter their own path: "Everyone, at some time in their life, must choose whether to stay with a ready-made world that may be safe but which is also limiting, or to push forward, often past the frontiers of commonsense, into a personal space, unknown and untried."162 Winterson's characters are often lost desperate people who, having realized that they have been leading sham lives, seek a new way of life,

158 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 101. 159 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 80. 160 Lynne Pearce after Merja Makinen, The Novels of Jeanette Winterson. A Reader's Guide to Essential Criticism (Hampshire, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 88. 161 After Nead, Akt kobiecy, p. 124. 162 Winterson, "Introduction," in: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, p. xiv.

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trying to find a way out, or maybe just an air vent, or a window, a different view that would calm and steady [them] against this mounting desperation. lt's not too Tate, even though [they are] already half out of the ejector seat, losing [their] grip, breaking up, classic symptoms of a bottled life.I63

They feel "bottled," constrained and wearied with the social masks they have to put on so as to be accepted. The roles instilled in them by the society are disguises for them, concealing the seif. They have lived abiding by the mies established by the hypocritical society in which they have to keep up appearances: "We have to cope, don't we? Get on with life, pull ourselves together, be positive, look ahead. Therapy or drugs will be freely offered. I can get help. We live in a very caring society. It cares very much that we should all be seen to cope."'m Nevertheless, following the rules and patterns has brought neither happiness nor fulfillment since "That's not flying. That's following the road."165 Just the opposite: as "passenger[s] of [their] own life,"166 they feel profoundly disappointed and unhappy, and they experience the crisis of identity, as they do not know who they are: "That night, I knew I would get away, better myself. Not because I despised who I was, but because I did not know who I was. I was waiting to be invented. I was waiting to invent myself."167 Their lives have come to a standstill, they feel they "go round in circles,"168 seeking something not even knowing what it is. Nonetheless, they do not follow simple solutions while rediscovering the sense of life. Hanging somewhere in between they long for freedom, even if, like in The PowerBook, they can enjoy it only for a while, taking part in the story designed for them by an e-writer: Here, in these long lines of laptop DNA. Here we take your chromosomes, twentythree pairs, and alter your height, eyes, teeth, sex. This is an invented world. You can be free just for one night. Undress. Take off your clothes. Take off your body. Hang them up behind the door. Tonight we can go deeper than disguise.' 69

The constituents of identity, such as sex, gender, nationality, race, appearance, sexual orientation, social roles become thus burdens, however, Winterson's 163 Jeanette Winterson, "A Green Square," in: The World And Other Places, p. 200. 164 Winterson, "A Green Square," pp. 195-196. 165 Jeanette Winterson, "The World and Other Places," in: The World And Other Places, p. 93. 166 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 145. 167 Winterson, "The World and Other Places," p. 92. 168 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 40. 169 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 4.

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protagonists are determined enough to cross the boundaries on the way to reformulating their identity. Their disintegration of identity is divulged in polyphonic narration, which, however, has a positive import as well. The process of gaining seif-knowledge is delineated by means of a metaphor of a voyage in the course of which the subject looks on the other side of a "bolted door" where there is a mirror in which "I will have to see myself. I'm not afraid of what I am. I'm afraid I will see what I'm not."1" Their journey of self-discovery is accomplished through transgression.

170 Winterson, "The World and Other Places," p. 96.

Chapter II: `It's the clichds that cause the trouble.' — Looking for the Language of Rapture What is desire? Desire is a restaurant. /Jeanette Winterson: "The White Room"/

In her oeuvre, Winterson consistently demonstrates the debasement of language through clichds, media, advertising and the locking of individuals into the meaning of roles assigned by the patriarchal society. Language semantically constructs the reality one observes and senses, therefore the clichdd formulas and flattened language entail the deadening of desire, and, by inference, the deadening of the subject. Winterson enacts the rejection of clichds in her fiction as well as erotic reappropriation of language excluding cold rationality. Furthermore, she negates stereotypical roles in the society, allowing her characters to enter the wilderness and try out various possibilities, also of erotic configurations.

1. ClicHs Winterson declares war an ehelids in her first book, Oranges Are Not die Only Fruit, where the protagonist is continuously brazened out with narrow-minded advocates of clichds. At school her efforts in art classes are never appreciated since they stand out against typical works of other students. Therefore Jeanette's creativity and Imagination are thwarted and misunderstood. She realizes that herself: My needlework teacher suffered from a problein of vision. She recognized things according to expectation and environment. If you were in a particular place, you expected to see particular things. Sheep and hills, sea and fish; if there was an elephant in the supermarket, she'd either not see it at all, or call it Mrs Jones and talk about fishcakes. But most likely, she'd do what most people do when confronted with something they don't understand. Panic. What constitutes the problem is not the thing, or the environment where we find the thing, but the conjunction of the two; something unexpected in an usual place (our favourite aunt in our favourite poker parlour) or something usual in an unexpected place (our favourite poker in our favourite aunt).1

Jeanette ascertains that her work possesses a relative value as her friend Elsie adores it. Still, Jeanette believes her prejudiced teacher should make her aware of 1 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, pp. 43-44.

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Chapter II

countering positions about art's value: absolute and relative. She world like her teacher to respect different points of view, as Jeanette does herself. Jeanette withstands being labelled and defies off-the-peg categories and narrow-minded suppositions. She applies relativism also when she thinks about love, unmistaken to her, but wrong to the church. This censure analogizes with the repudiation of her artwork by school teachers.2 Winterson continues to wage the war against cliches through her other works, essentializing the subject in Written on the Body. The book constitutes meditation on love, passion and loss, romance and marriage, sharing the themes with Graham Swift's Ever After. It criticizes sarcastically the comfort and boredom of marriage, and juxtaposes them with the excitement and risk of passion. The narrator, a kind of Lothario, is involved in a series of affairs with married women, all of whom return to the comfort of their marriage in the end. This makes the narrator reflect bitterly on traditional romance formulas, which she classifies as cliches, declaring that "It's the cliches that cause the trouble."3 The hackneyed phrases deployed to delineate romantic relationships become cliches as a result of cultural repetition that generates a truth-effect because they teach that their announcements are worth while:4 "How happy we will be. How happy everyone will be."5 They "cause the trouble" since social expectations demand that one follow them: "my grandma and granddad did it my parents did it, now I will do it, won't I."6 Fulfilling the cliches is a measure of personal success in love; as Barthes claims, "the love story is the tribute the lover must pay to the world in order to be reconciled with it."' The ironic meditations draw both on the practice of love and on its discourse. They proclaim the love discourse to be unoriginal and commonplace: love you' is always a quotation,"8 which confirms Barthes's conviction that 'I love you' is "ultimately the most worn-down of stereotypes."9 Then Winterson moves on to parodying a number of discourses on love, commencing with the biblical style, reminiscent of Hymn on Love: "Love will not stay still, stay silent, be good, be modest, be seen and not heard, no. It will break out in tongues of praise, the high note that smashes the glass and spills the liquid."10 Then love is com-

2 Rusk, "The Refusal of Othemess," p. 127. 3 Winterson, Written on the Body, p. 10. 4 Carolyn Allen, "Jeanette Winterson. The Erotics of Risk," in: Following Djuna: Women Lovers and the Erotics of Loss (Bloomington, Indiana: IUP, 1996), p. 68. 5 Allen, "Jeanette Winterson. The Erotics of Risk," p. 68. 6 Winterson, Written on the Body, p. 10. 7 Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse. Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (London: Vintage, 2002), p. 7. 8 Winterson, Written on the Body, p. 9. 9 Barthes, A Lover's Discourse, p. 151. 10 Winterson, Written on the Body, p. 9.

7t 's the clichgs that cause the trouble' — Looking for the Language of Rapture 51 pared to "a big game hunter,"I I to give way to popular culture slogans: "Love makes the world go round. Love is blind. All you need is love. Nobody ever died of a broken heart. You'll get over it. It'll be different when you get married. Think of the children. Time's a great healer. Still waiting for Mr Right? Miss Right?"I2 Another amorous discourse to be mentioned is that of fairy tales: "And they all lived happily ever after."13 Later on the narrator offers a fragment of a soap opera script, and then she renders dinner with Louise in terms of poetry: "When she lifted the soup spoon to her lips how I longed to be that innocent piece of stainless steel. I would gladly have traded the blood in my body for half a pint of vegetable stock."m There are also long passages addressed to Louise, which can be read as a love-letter, and the whole novel poses memoir of a love story. Furthermore, diel-16s construct the dichotomy between comfort and passion through the summary of cultural mores of romance, and then the summary is employed as a signifier of the commonplace in the amorous relationship which the narrator's story of `true love' is contrasted with25 The narrator's numerous relationships are thus depicted in terms of the standard cultural formlos of romance and the experience of 'genuine love' is distinguished from them by the use of lyrical poetic language. However, incipiently the narrator considers the affairs an escape from ordinariness and routine in search of everlasting intensity: "the perfect coupling; the never-sleep non-stop mighty orgasm. Ecstasy without end."16 Nonetheless, she" realizes she is "trapped in a clich6 every bit as redundant as my parents' roses round the door" because "the candles and champagne, the roses, the down breakfasts, the transatlantic telephone calls and the impulsive plane rides" she "had done to death" are just "romantic follies" designed "as ways out of real situations"; sentimental and clich6d, and belong to "the slop-bucket of romance"I8 which she strived to evade so much. The narrator's trite affairs always begin in the same way: The door was open. True, she didn't exactly open it herself. Her butler opened it for her. His name was Boredom. She said, `Boredom, fetch me a plaything.' He said, `Very good ma'am'; and putting an his white gloves so that the fingerprints would not show he tapped at my heart and I thought he said his name was Love.19

II Winterson, Written an the Body, p. 10. 12 Winterson, Written an the Body, p. 10. 13 Winterson, Written an the Body, p. 10. 14 Winterson, Written an the Body, p. 36. 15 Allen, "Jeanette Winterson. The Erotics of Risk," p. 68. 16 Winterson, Written an the Body, p. 21. 17 Although the narrator's gender is not revealed in the book, there are a number of reasons for which I read the narrator as a woman. They are explained later on. 18 Winterson, Written an the Body, pp. 21, 55. 19 Winterson, Written an the Body, pp. 15-16.

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The affairs are treatment for boredom then, and they are undertaken because of the excitement and temptation that novelty and risk produce. The married woman usually elucidates her adultery with its absolutely exceptional circumstances: I wanted to teil you that I don't usually do this. Pve never done it before. I don't think I could do it again. With someone eise that is. I love my husband you know. I do love him. He's not like other men. I couldn't have married him if he was. He's different, we've got a lot in common. We talk. I've tried to get you out of my head but I can't seem to get you out of my flesh. I think about your body day and ilight.zo

The narrator, however, mocks those explanations as hackneyed as well. In the proceedings of the affair, the wives always maintain they are "happily married," which the narrator deems as hypocrisy. She calls such marriages `shells' that people keep for the sake of appearances: lt has shrivelled, lies limp and unused, the shell of a marriage, its inhabitants both fled. People collect shells though don't they? They spend money on them and display them on their window ledges. Other people admire them. ... Where I've left cracking too severe to mend the owners have simply turned the bad part to the shade.21

Although the amorous exchanges between the spouses ceased to be the mise en scene for passion and tenderness long ago ("the dull colds of her soul where nothing has warmed her for more summers than she can count,"22) each of the "I"'s lovers invariably comes back to the comfort of the husband who "lies over her like a tarpaulin. He wades into her as though she were a bog. She loves him and he loves her. They're still married aren't they?"23 Disposed to fall into habits, people construct shields of protection against genuine emotions. They deceive themselves about their feelings and their marriages as they dread changes and loss of social status and other people's esteem in case of divorce. Therefore, instead of parting, they prefer to `make an agreement'. In Written on the Body Elgin neglects his wife when he becomes a workaholic but Louise resolves to stay with him to lead her own life — a similar situation to that of the redheads in The Passion and The PowerBook — and when she falls in love with "I", Elgin lets her meet the Lothario while Louise does not mind his visiting prostitutes, assuming betrayal to be unavoidable anyway: "his proclivities would have made that inevitable even in a more traditional marriage."24 Stella in Gut Symmetries calls her marriage of 20 Winterson, 21 Winterson, 22 Winterson, 23 Winterson, 24 Winterson,

Written on the Body, pp. 14-15. Written on the Body, p. 15. Written on the Body, p. 73. Written on the Body, p. 73. Written on the Body, p. 68.

's the clichA that cause the trouble' — Looking for the Language of Rapture 53 appearances "a tower" and "a trophy" which the couple gladly exhibit while virtually it poses a "cracked shell": Other people envied Jove and me. We were clean, wholesome, sexy, together. We displayed our marriage like a trophy and we did think that we had won it well. We polished the trophy but forgot to polish ourselves. As it shone brighter we dimmed. Did it matter if we were a little dusty, a little worn? Our marriage became a thing apart; that is, a thing apart from the two of us. Both of us had a touching faith in its talismanic powers of protection, and it is true that for a time a symbol can outlive the plain fact that the symbol makers have turned elsewhere.25

Despite the problems and boredom, they stay together, which Stella vindicates as the only reasonable alternative: "Don't imagine I torture myself with yesterday's washing up. A woman who slaves for a man does not have a marriage; she has a master. I don't want him at any price but I thought we had negotiated the price. Why did he go back to the market place looking for something cheaper?"26 Yet, her fury aller discovering her husband's love affair is so violent as if it were the first time: she unscrews the door so as to prohibit any privacy, saws the bed into halves and throws Jove's things out of the window. Although the liaison is Jove's fifth one, Stella does not treat it as passing but as another threat to the safety of the marriage. This is because she considers love and sex to be inseparable, the conviction that Jove dismisses as a confusion of love and sex, and declares his feelings toward Stella to remain unchanged. Other opportunities to glimpse married boredom and indifference present themselves when "I" in Written an die Body walks with one of her girlfriends round the posh houses and looks into their windows. She ponders what the people think and feel when they see so familiar a face of their spouse, whether they still love, desire and long for each other. She observes that in real life, contrary to the image rendered in the movies, in the evenings people are passive, listless and indifferent: "Sometimes I panicked and told Catherine we'd have to call the ambulance. `No-one can sit still for that long,' I said. `She must be dead. Look at her, rigor mortis has set in. "'27 The narrator derides at their calling such a life-indeath existence "sane sensible lives."28 So do the protagonists of Art&Lies, Handel, representing music, Picasso, standing for painting, and Sappho, named for poetry, who do not fit in the modern callous age brimming with "the cemeteries of the Dead."29 The notion, appropriated to render postmodern world inhabited by insensitive people leading routine artificial lives, "slave[s] to advertising, to fashion, to habit and to the 25 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 40. 26 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 38. 27 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 60. 28 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 58. 29 Winterson, Art&Lies, p. 83.

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media,"3° is tantamount to Guy Debord's concept of the "society of the spectacle." Drawing an his work, Julia Kristeva claims that the "society of the spectacle," which she also terms the "culture of the show," is produced as a result of anaesthetization to semiotic energy through excessive exposure to the stimuli of empty images.3I The media and advertising provide the modeln of conduct and reactions, superseding creative responses and upholding fragmentation. The media attack Handel's contemporaries with images of violence, proposing sitcom and soap opera clichds as the only counterpoise, sparking sentimental reactions. The media-absorbed society is confronted by simulacra, Jean Baudrillard argues, that is imitations with no original that refer to other signifiers and images, or, in Debord' s terms, by an enormous accumulation of spectacles, everything lived directly that has turned into a representation.32 This phenomenon, as it is pictured in Art&Lies, engenders dulling of feeling, deadening the psyche and subjugation to economy with its artificial production of needs and commodities to satisfy them. The greed for money is so big that the protagonist's sister in the short story "Disappearance I" has given up sleeping so as to work twenty four hours in two time zones. In this world sleeping has become both a luxury, as nobody can afford to do it any more, and a perversion, SNOOZE magazine being classified as worse than pornography and "incest magazines," and as illness to be treated with "waking pills."33 Handel, a priest and doctor, diagnoses emotional withdrawal in men to be accompanied by immaturity and lack of deeper spiritual life, but fortified from this lack by his social position, work, loving wife and a young lover. As regards women, they grow up in the belief that "self-sacrifice is the highest female virtue,"34 yet, after making it, they discover it is not appreciated but rather taken for granted, and the frustration develops together with the cancer. Work being the surrogate for life, those people lack self-knowledge, "ask them who they are and they will offer you a wallet or a child. 'What do you do?' is the party line, where doing is a substitute for being."35 The busy life provides comfort and safety; safety from thinking and feeling: "left alone with my own thoughts I might find I have none. And left to my own emotions? Is there much beyond a childish rage and sentimentality that passes for love?"36 In his quest for the meaning, Handel recognises the greatest crime to be "a failure of feeling,"37 which Kristeva theorizes as withering of psychic space. She elucidates that modern man is 30 Winterson, Art&Lies, pp. 83, 185, 186. 31 Noelle McAfee, Julia Kristeva (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), p. 106. 32 After McAfee, Julia Kristeva, p. 108. 33 Jeanette Winterson, "Disapearance 1," in: The World and Other Places, p. 107. 34 Winterson, Art&Lies, p. 24. 35 Winterson, Art&Lies, p. 24. 36 Winterson, Art&Lies, p. 24. 37 Winterson, Art&Lies, p. 120.

71's the dich& that cause the trouble' — Looking for the Language of Rapture 55 ignorant of losing his soul since "the psychic apparatus is what registers representations and their meaningful values for the subject."38 Handel finds the mixture of the lack of emotions and greediness, for money and sexual experience, repulsive. He observes people seek cohesion through an attempt either to satisfy their desires (men) or to suppress them (women) as they imagine the seif poses "a random collection of stray desires."39 Handel believes this is a false defmition of identity, but he cannot put forward his own: "[w]ho am I anyway? Who indeed. What identifies a man? His job? His children? His religion? His dental record?"49 To escape from the numbness and indifferente, Handel himself prefers voracity, "to hold my desires just out of reach of appetite, to keep myself honed and sharp. I want the keen edge of longing,"41 nonetheless, the result is a cold distance from desires as well as desensitised self-absorption. Mocking other people's consumerism, sham life and lack of self-knowledge, he realises he is one of the dead people, sharing their derivative parrot-like thinking and deficiency in familiarity with oneself. He hides behind the dog-collar and doctor's white coat, incapable of coming into deep relationships with other souls and bodies, busy with dissecting them: I can see into the fiery furnace, I know it is real, but I can only carry a few lukewarm coals. It is not the only time that 1 have preferred a fraudulent response to one that had been genuine. She rightly read the moment while I stumbled through a secondhand text. I loved her and I lied. ... How do I spend my days? Not by the living body but by the marble slab, black arts of scalpel and blade, dissection of what I love.42

Employing the symbolic incessantly and allowing himself to lose touch with the semiotic, Handel has become an automaton. Years after the rejected love he lacks the capacity to spiritual feeling, positing fear of risk and loss over the potential gain: "There was a dead place in him that reason could not quicken. A roped-off Every day he killed in himself the starts of feeling he tomb unvisited by love. feared. A daily suicide gone unnoticed by those who assumed he was still alive."43 When religion does not appear to be the guarantee of a meaningful life, he resigns from it, both with horror and relief. As his anxieties are joined by the remorse for removing one of the patients' wrong breast, he resolves to flee the dead city "into unknown currents, a voyager through strange seas alone."44 He thus undertakes to pursue his need for revolt - against the society of the spectacle, rigid symbolic

38 After McAfee, Julia Kristeva, p. 109. 39 Winterson, Art&Lies, p. 24. 40 Winterson, Art&Lies, p. 176. 41 Winterson, Art&Lies, p. 7. 42 Winterson, Art&Lies, p. 113. 43 Winterson, Art&Lies, p. 178. 44 Winterson, Art&Lies, p. 33.

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order, and homogenous identities - which, Kristeva points out, is necessary to maintain psychic life.45 The Lothario in Written an the Body also despises the sham life and shallow relationships because she despises hypocrisy and lying. Fugitive as her relationships may be, they are grounded in truth and honesty towards the lover: "I know what I did and what I was doing at the time. But I didn't walk down the aisle ... and swear to be faithful unto death. I wouldn't dare. I didn't say, 'With my body I thee worship."46 She mocks the conviction that marriage can be a shield against temptation, like Philip Roth does in The Dying Animal, sharing Winterson's opinions about marriage and sex. She reflects it could perhaps be achieved if one gained the absolute control over the body and mind, and relinquished the dreams and senses ("if you patrol your weak points day and night, don't look don't smell, don't dream."47). Winterson criticizes the tendency in adulterers not to blame themselves, but to believe the external factors to be culpable: "Adultery is as much about disillusionment as it is about sex. The charm didn't work. You paid that money, ate the cake and it didn't work. It's not your fault is it?"48 Erich Fromm also points to the propensity to attribute guilt for the unsuccessful marriage to the other person. He claims people imagine everything will change when they change the partner, discerning the reason for the marriage failure in the inappropriate one. Fromm regards their conclusions as false and diagnoses the problem to lie in the inability to love. He argues that it is particularly difficult to persist in love when boredom appears.49 Winterson voices the same conclusions while articulating reasons for divorces: "Death did part them; dead to feeling, dead to beauty, dead to all but the most obvious pleasures, they were soon dead to one another and each blamed the other for the boredom that was theirs."5° Also Bataille calls attention to boredom in marriage, contending that habit blunts the intensity of experience, and subsequently the erotic act is worthless as regards bliss and pleasure since its repetition is guaranteed by its non-transgressive character and the lack of risk.51 That is why Winterson ascertains, "Marriage is the flimsiest weapon against desire."52 And presents marriage rather as the subjugator of passion: "love, if it be allowed at all, must be kept tame by marriage vows and family ties so that its fiery heat warms

45 McAfee, Julia Kristeva, p. 118. 46 Winterson, Written on the Body, p. 16. 47 Winterson, Written on the Body, p. 78. 48 Winterson, Written on the Body, p. 78. 49 Fromm, Milos, ple6 i matriarchat, pp. 133-134. 50 Winterson, Art&Lies, p. 83. 51 Bataille, Eroticism, p. 111. 52 Winterson, Written on the Body, p. 78.

7t's the dich& that cause the trouble' — Looking for the Language of Rapture 57 the hearth but does not burn down the house."53 She contrasts an extramarital (lesbian) affair, compared to "fiery furnace" with "central heating"54 of marriage. John Fowles notes that it is the assumptions about marriage that are to blame since it should be "an affirmation of love," and not "a mere licensing of sex"55 because the result is that love and sex are incompatible. The affirmation of this position is enacted in Winterson's short story, "The Green Man." Its protagonist, enmeshed in the social roles of a husband and father, experiences both marriage and the patriarchal mores of masculinity of "adventure, manliness, action"56 as burdens. He feels trapped in routine and a cobweb of duties: "On Friday Daddy cuts the lawn. On Saturday Daddy waters it. On Sunday Daddy barbecues on the lawn. On Monday Daddy leaves it and looks with half regret on his close-cropped green-eyed doll. His manhood is buried there and next weekend he'll spike it,"57 stifled by his wife who is preoccupied with keeping up with the Joneses and thus planning her husband's spare time: I am still building an extension she designed two years ago. I have to fit it in with my job and the garden and time for my daughter who loves me. My wife strides us on into prosperity and fulfilment and I shuffle behind clutching the bills and a tool box. She was right to make me drain the lawn. All our friends admire its rollered curves. I admire my wife. Admire our success. We were nothing and she has coaxed out the grit in me and held me to my job.58

Their life is locked in schemes and "the daily calculations of money and sex. How much of one, how little of the other, the see-saw of married life."59 With bitterness he observes marriage as a conqueror of desire and wonders why his wife rations sex: "I am a heterosexual male. My wife is a heterosexual female. Are we too normal to enjoy our bed?"69 His observations coincide with Bataille's who proposes that it is calculations, prospects and effects that count in marriage and not the intensity of emotions.61 The protagonist's wife making most decisions and not taking his preferences into consideration, he feels like a puppet, "voodooed head to foot."62 Compelled to listen to his wife's inane complaints and rebukes, which incur him to feel like a failure, he estimates their life as paper and superficial: "My cartoon wife. 53 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 38. 54 Winterson, Written on the Body, p. 21. 55 John Fowles, The Aristos (London: Picador, 1993), p. 171. 56 Winterson, "The World and Other Places," p. 98. 57 Winterson, "The Green Man," p. 134. 58 Winterson, "The Green Man," p. 143. 59 Winterson, "The Green Man," p. 140. 60 Winterson, "The Green Man," p. 140. 61 Bataille, Eroticism, p. 111. 62 Winterson, "The Green Man," p. 135.

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Her cartoon husband. Waving their arms and blowing bubbles at the crowd."63 He is careful to adjust to the mies his wife has set so as not to encourage conflicts. Being the prisoner of her choices and habits, he conforms to the costume of a `good husband' and invents his own semantics to support his wife's position: "Till death us do part. ... I don't go out to bars. I'm a family man and proud of it. We like to eat together and share a bottle of wine. My wife buys it from the Family Wine Club. We usually get the Mystery Mix and it's always the same. I would prefer beer but I don't do the shopping."64 Although he totalizes their marriage as successful, he misses the spontaneity, intensity and freshness of emotions they shared in their youth. He ponders on the reasons for the change: "I courted my wife because when she moved she seemed to take the earth with her. What happened to us holding hands side by side? Why do I wish we were young again and she would hold me in her arms?"65 Sometimes he even thinks of leaving his family, however, he recognises this is no solution since a friend of his did it and lives with no responsibilities, but he is still unhappy. In fact, the protagonist cannot see any way out: "I love them both, sincerely I do, and I can't explain how you can love a thing and want to be parted from it forever. Sometimes I wish she would kill me, collect the insurance, go on with her life and free me from the guilt of staying, the guilt of going."66 Lost spontaneity, exhilaration and passion return when he makes love to a wandering Gypsy woman in her caravan: "it was with the same surprise as all those years ago when Alison and I had walked in the woods and made love among the bluebells. I had the perfect freedom of loving her and although we have never given up sex we never have found those woods again."67 Yet, when he wakes up at night, he sneaks away hurriedly overwhelmed by the sense of his comfortable safe world threatened. On the way home when he meets his daughter riding a horse she has dreamt of, he realizes the girl is "the only thing that mattered."68 Partly therefore, when later on his Gypsy woman brings the horse to their house to seil it, even though it occurs to him that he could elope with her, he pushes the thought away when his daughter appears. Nevertheless, it is his lack of courage and fear of risk that prevail, hence he gives up his longings for the sake of married comfort: "my own heart stopped as she turned and walked away up the empty road."69 Returning to his routine, the man chooses to repress his dreams and emotions: "What I fear I avoid. What I fear I pretend does not exist. What I fear is 63 Winterson, "The Green Man," p. 139. 64 Winterson, "The Green Man," pp. 139-140. 65 Winterson, "The Green Man," pp. 142-143. 66 Winterson, "The Green Man," p. 140. 67 Winterson, "The Green Man," pp. 144-145. 68 Winterson, "The Green Man," p. 145. 69 Winterson, "The Green Man," p. 148.

`It's the clichj.s that cause the trouble' — Looking for the Language of Rapture 59 quietly killing me. Would there were a festival for my fears, a ritual burning of what is coward in me, what is lost in me."7° Similarly, in Written on the Body Winterson gives a hint of marriage as the other to erotic contentment through the gaze of heterosexuals in a scene where "I" and her lover swim nude under resentful looks of families.71 This scene positions spontaneity, light-heartedness and intensity on the side of an affair, and boredom, safety and habit on the side of marriage in which the spouses do not talk to each other, the wife's attempts being dismissed with the eternal, "Tan't you see I'm without turning round."72 Breaching the perimeters watching television?' said of familial and sexual protoco1,73 the narrator and lover create the private universe: "You said, `There's nobody here but us.' I looked up and the banks were empty."74 Risking rejection, they yearn to create "a little cosmos" governed by "its own time, its own logic" and inhabited only by "the two of us," and they consider "[e]verything from the inside [as] a threat; either in the form of boredom or in the form of injury,"75 to use Barthes' s words again. Painful and short as the "I"'s affairs are, they constitute precautionary measure against intimacy and involvement since she is afraid to love: It's so terrifying, love, that all I can do is shove it under a dump bin of pink cuddly I am deeply distracted. I am looking the other way so that love won't see me. toys I want the diluted version, the sloppy language, the insignificant gestures. The saggy armchair of clichds. It's all right, millions of bottoms have sat here before me. The springs are well wom, the fabric smelly and familiar.76

It is the risk of the unknown, of mapping a new territory that she fears. She is also haunted by the same doubt as other Winterson's female characters: "[c]ould a woman love a woman for more than a night?"77 Weary of her temporary liaisons, "I" retires into a comfortable and safe relationship with Jacqueline who she does not love and does not intend to love. Running through her "shipwrecks" she admits that passion is a temporary feeling; it will bum out eventually and "That home girl gonna get you in the end," as "passion is for holidays, not homecoming."78 She identifies the process of passion fading as maturing. The relationship with Jacqueline appears comfortable and easy because Jacqueline is not very demanding and she has fallen in love with the 70 Winterson, "The Green Man," p. 141. 71 Allen, "Jeanette Winterson. The Erotics of Risk," p. 64. 72 Winterson, Written on the Body, p. 11. 73 Allen, "Jeanette Winterson. The Erotics of Risk," p. 64. 74 Winterson, Written on the Body, p. 11. 75 Barthes, A Lover's Discourse, p. 139. 76 Winterson, Written on the Body, p. 10. 77 Winterson, The Passion, p. 69. 78 Winterson, Written an the Body, pp. 21, 27.

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narrator. Now the latter does not have to bother about the romantic `frame' of the relationship; she argues herself into the belief that she is proud of its simplicity and ordinariness: "Its worth lies in its neatness."79 Yet, then, like in most marriages, boredom emerges, which "I" struggles to vindicate: "The worm in the bud. So what? Most buds do have worms. You spray, you fuss, you hope the hole won't be too big and you pray for sunshine. Just let the flower bloom and no-one will notice the ragged edges,"8° forgetting that not so long ago she abhorred the hypocrisy of a cracked "shell of marriage" turned to the shade. Now she does not mind concealing the worm and "ragged edges" herself. Nevertheless, the narrator reforms and realizes Jacqueline to be an escape from emotions who has blunted her senses: Jacqueline was an overcoat. She muffled my senses. With her 1 forgot about feeling and wallowed in contentment. Contentment is a feeling you say? Are you sure it's not an absence of feeling? I liken it to that particular numbness one gets after a visit to the dentist. Not in pain nor out of it, slightly drugged. Contentment is a positive side of resignation. It has its appeal but it's no good wearing an overcoat ... when what the body really wants is to be naked.81

Not surprisingly then, the relationship with Jacqueline is soon replaced by an affair with another married woman, Louise. This time the narrator believes it is `true love' as Louise declares to leave her husband so as to stay truthful to her feelings and offer her more than marital infidelity: "I love you and my love for you makes any other life a lie."82 The risk of commitment and loss of control fall the narrator with fear: "Yes, you do frighten me. You act as though we will be together for ever. You act as though there is infinite pleasure and time without end. How can I know that? My experience has been that time always ends."83 "I" might also be afraid of the lack of boundaries since her desire is based on them and the necessity to cross them. Although the married women returning to their husbands after an affair are the object of bitterness and irony in Written on the Body, they provide the narrator with the excitement of a secretive relationship in which she is forced to surpass barriers, and from which she could disentangle easily. It poses a safe deal simultaneously then because the lover is not available all the time. It is the thrill of novelty that is so agitating, and the whole background and fuss about the affair: waiting, seducing, scheming, rule-breaking and secretive meetings. The narrator prefers to end the affair rather than let habit into it: "I'm addicted to the first six months. It's midnight calls, the bursts of energy, the beloved as battery for all 79 Winterson, 80 Winterson, 81 Winterson, 82 Winterson, 83 Winterson,

Written on the Body, p. 27. Written on the Body, p. 28. Written on the Body, p. 76. Written on the Body, p. 19. Written on the Body, p. 18.

7t's the dich& that cause the trouble' — Looking for the Language of Rapture 61 those fading cells,"84 which becomes an instance of Fromm's conviction about the inability to love. In case of Louise, however, fear of loss predominates over the above risks: "If I rush at this relationship it's because I fear for it. I fear you have a door I cannot see and that any minute now the door will open and you'll be gone."85 Nonetheless, the relationship with Louise, being the `true love', provides the opportunity to experience both passion and comfort: "With Louise I want to do something different. I want the holiday and the homecoming together. She is the edge and the excitement for me but I have to believe it beyond six months," "In the presence of love, hearth and quest become one."86 With Louise the metaphor of an overcoat shifts its meaning. The narrator comes an hour before their meeting, just to be alone but the pleasure of being alone is determined by "the luxury of knowing that soon someone would push open the heavy door and look for me. It was the pleasure of walking in the snow in a warm coat, that choosing to be alone. Who wants to walk in the snow naked?"87 Contrary to Jacqueline, Louise stimulates the narrator's senses and concurrently provides the comfort of a safe steady relationship. Love is figured as a perilous journey in a boat88 against the storms of life: I put my arms around her, not sure whether I was a lover or a child. I wanted her to hide me beneath her skirts against all menace. Sharp points of desire were still there but there was too a sleepy safe rest like being in a boat I had as a child. She rocked me against her, sea-calm, sea under a clear sky, a glass-bottomed boat and nothing to fear.89

The comfort of the relationship is underlined here by the imagery of nurturing and also to Barthes the embrace of a lover possesses the qualities of sleep; it is "a motionless cradling" where the lovers get "enchanted, bewitched: ... in the realm of sleep, without sleeping." He describes the embrace as "the return to the mother," and calls it "companionable incest" in which "everything is suspended: time, law, prohibition," therefore the lovers want nothing, as the needs and desires

84 Winterson, Written an the Body, p. 76. 85 Winterson, Written an the Body, p. 18. 86 Winterson, Written an the Body, pp. 79, 81. 87 Winterson, Written an the Body, p. 181. Villanelle in The Passion feels in a similar fashion: "Now, I am wholly given over to selfishness. I think about myself, I get up when I like, instead of at the crack of dawn just to watch her open the shutters. I Hirt with waiters and gamblers and remember that I enjoy that. I sing to myself and I bask in churches. Is this freedom delicious because rare? Is any respite from love welcome because temporary? If she were gone for ever these days of mine would not be lit up. Is it because she will return that I take pleasure in being alone?" (p. 73). 88 Allen, "Jeanette Winterson. The Erotics of Risk," p. 66. 89 Winterson, Written an the Body, p. 80.

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are fulfilled.99 Although the person is nurtured, calm and content, the position does not encompass passivity. Winterson appropriates agency to love: Love it was that drove them forth. Love that brought them home again. Love hardened their hands against the oar and heated their sinews against the rain. The journeys they made were beyond common sense; who leaves the hearth for the open sea? especially without the compass, especially in winter, especially alone. What you risk reveals what you value.9I

Winterson reveals the reason for intimacy being so risky. She deploys the metaphor of light to point to the risk of a lover being burned by the intensity of the relationship:92 "Shall I submit myself sundial-wise beneath Louise's direct gaze? It's a risk; human beings go mad without a little shade, but how to break the habit of a lifetime else?"93 The intensity is strictly connected with the singlemindedness and all-time availability, as opposed to irregular encounters with married women. Winterson concludes, "There is no sense in loving someone you can wake up to except by chance."94 Therefore Villanelle in The Passion prefers to resign from the relationship than from the intensity of "fiery furnace," "burning flesh" and "roaring tide,"95 for she sees no future in "meeting in caf6s and always dressing too soon."96 Her decision is hastened by the sight of the comfort of her lover's marriage: "He kissed her forehead and she smiled. I watched them together and saw more in a moment than I could have pondered in another year. They did not live in a fiery furnace she and I inhabited, but they had a calm and a way that put a knife to my heart."97 Incipient tension and thrill accruing from the risk of loss turn into anxiety then. Winterson's lesbians appear "absolutists," who want "All or nothing," negating "the middle ground" so as not to "go round and round in circles like everyone else."98 The position is illustrated by the scene with two Dalmatians fetching red tennis balls to their owner. The imagery turns to "a grainy movie," the dichotomy ruling over the choice that is `black and white' and therefore clear. However, although the women must not choose black=homosexuality, they do due to "a red ball of desire"99 in the mouth. Intimacy is hazardous also because it

90 Barthes, A Lover's Discourse, p. 104. 91 Winterson, Written on the Body, p. 81. 92 Allen, "Jeanette Winterson. The Erotics of Risk," p. 66. 93 Winterson, Written on the Body, p. 80. 94 Winterson, The Passion, p. 95. 95 Winterson, Written on the Body, p. 20. 96 Winterson, The Passion, p. 75. 97 Winterson, The Passion, p. 75. 98 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 40. 99 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 47.

7t's the cliches that cause the trouble' — Looking for the Language of Rapture 63 discloses dark places within oneself,1°° "a slide into craziness I can recognise but can't control. Can control. Had controlled for years until I met Louise. She opened up the dark places as well as the light. That's the risk you take."101 This is echoed in Gut Symmetries: "When a fissure opens up in the seif, half-known beasts climb out of it."1°2 The ending of the book is open and ambiguous. Although it pictures Louise coming back, the scene can be read as projection of the narrator's wish only since she is ironic about happy endings, regarding them as compromises and cliches, and fills the story with references on invention, textuality and fictionalizing quality of retrospective narration.103 When the ending is read as the 'unhappy' one, it undermines the romance convention, together with the concept of ungendered narrator. When one imagines the narrator as a woman, the book reworks the convention of lesbian romance in which an experienced lesbian seduces married women, and twists it with Louise, a married woman deciding to stay with the seducer; whereas when one reads the Lothario as a man, the novel shifts the focus from the conventionally woman's perspective; and the language depicting feelings critiques the macho masculinity.104 Nonetheless, fighting with cliches, the narrator renders the feeling toward Louise in a style recalling traditional love discourses, and constructs a story based on the risk of love loss.105 It seems that "I" wishes clichs to prove only clich6s. The hackneyed conviction that marriage is merely boring comfort turns out only a stereotype, for instance in case of Jacqueline — the couple is not married, and yet their relationship is dull and rid of intense feelings. Also, if the narrator did not believe the clichs about marriage to be only cliches, she would not get married to Louise, however symbolically: What did we do that night? We must have walked wrapped around each other to a caf6 that was a church and eaten a Greek salad that tasted like a wedding feast. We met a cat who agreed to be best man and our bouquets were Ragged Robin from the side of the canal. We had about two thousand guests, mostly midges and we felt we were old enough to give ourselves away.1°6

The marriage with Louise constitutes the expression of hope that their case is going to be different, their passion will last. The belief is grounded in the conviction that it is the treasure this time, and that the same repetitiveness and habit which are the source of ennui in other couples, in their case will allow deepening 100 Allen, "Jeanette Winterson. The Erotics of Risk," p. 67. 101 Winterson, Written on die Body, p. 80. 102 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 43. 103 Allen, "Jeanette Winterson. The Erotics of Risk," p. 72. 104 Allen, "Jeanette Winterson. The Erotics of Risk," pp. 70-71. 105 Allen, "Jeanette Winterson. The Erotics of Risk," p. 72. 106 Winterson, Written on die Body, p. 19.

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the bond. The intimate understanding between the partners matures only with time, Bataille explains, otherwise the relationship is superficial, hasty and furtive, and the supposed ecstasy refuses to appear.1°7 The PowerBook does not propose a fresh plot. The redhead is also bored with her 'sensible' marriage, devoid of any spontaneity or surprises. She describes her husband as "built like a dining car — solid, welcoming, always about to serve lunch," nevertheless, sometimes she prefers "a couchette."1°8 Her marriage is marriage merely by name, in fact, she and her spouse are growing apart: "You keep the form and the habit of what you have, but gradually you empty it of meaning."1°9 She has told her insightful husband with whom she has 'an agreement' only some of the truth. Unlike Louise, she feels vindicated to lie since she considers it kinder than blunt accuracy, which is a means for marriage to survive an its own merits. Although she suffocates in their marriage and longs for freedom and risk, she does not mean to leave her husband as she declares to still love him, and also because she is too afraid of the risk: "Inside her marriage there were too many clocks and not enough time. Too much furniture and too little space. Outside her marriage there would be nothing to hold her," "We were walking the course all the time, but when the moment came to jump we still refused."11° In fact, she covets both safety and risk but does not obtain them in one relationship. Ali dismisses her arguments as clichdd and unreliable, favouring comfort and compromise at the expense of the heart. Interrogating the formulas of romance, Winterson, like Barthes, depicts romantic love as a discourse. Although one cannot get out of its dogma completely, one can rebuff the hackneyed scenario to create one's own. The first step to redraw the script of love is breaking out of the dead language through invigorating it so as to make it responsive to eroticism again. The strategy is connected with Winterson's belief in the power of language: "Change the words and you will change the meaning, perhaps not today or tomorrow, but the day after."111 To delineate eroticism Winterson deploys the tropes of travel, gambling, cross-dressing, food, palimpsestic body, mirroring, scientific discourse, and others in an attempt to resuscitate the clichdd symbolic.

2. Body as Palimpsest Eroticism appears to Winterson's characters lingua franca, in contrast to language, since each person employs their own private subjective version of lan107 Bataille, Eroticism, p. 111. 108 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 38. 109 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 39. 110 Winterson, The PowerBook, pp. 39, 106. 111 Jeanette Winterson, "Holy Matrimony," in: The World and (»her Places, p. 183.

7t's the dich& that cause the trouble' — Looking for the Language of Rapture 65 guage, tinged with personal history and individual view of the world. The sensual experience is the only authentic one, ensuring direct intimate contact with the other. The authenticity stems from the fact that the play of bodies is not contingent on the lovers' conscious will but on the inner experience of sexual plethora, as Georges Bataille points out. Violence of the flesh, independent of reason, takes control of the body, enlivens it and pushes to the explosion,112 to the "little death." The body can thereby become more expressive than words, since, as Roland Barthes believes, it is feasible to lie with words but not with the body; what one attempts to hide with their language, their body reveals.113 It is the somatic that speaks, like in case of lady Chatterley, where — in her reading of her body — her breasts become eyes, and her navel is lips, and she ponders whether the body can have its own life. Wintersonian characters realize that body language is the best way to get to know another human being: "How else can I know you but through the body you rent? Forgive me if I love it too much."114 The body becomes one's laboratory; it is the place where one processes sensations and experience: "We know the world by and through our bodies. This is our lab; we can't experiment without it."115 The corporeality is essential in the lovers' exchanges then, and in love the binary opposition body-mind gets merged. Octavio Paz elucidates the apotheosis of the body with the assertion that for a lover the desired body is a soul, therefore s/he speaks to it with the language which can be comprehended only with the body and skin, not with mind.116 Margaret Reynolds posits the same: "Love recognizes the existence of something beyond the seif. It takes many shapes. But as our physical shape is rounded by the body, love must always be known on the skin."117 As in an erotic act one loses control of their body, Bataille explains, they cover its announcement, nakedness,118 for to be naked means to be exposed, as in Winterson's "The Poetics of Sex": "When she sheds she sheds it all. Her skin comes away with her clothes. On those days I have been able to see the blooddepot of her heart,"119 or in Written on the Body: "I like to keep my body rolled up away from prying eyes. Never unfold too much, teil the whole story."129 Nakedness is here far from exploited and objectified female nude; it is rather, like for 112 Bataille, Eroticism, pp. 92-93. 113 Barthes, A Lover's Discourses, p. 44. 114 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 217. 115 Jeanette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping (London and New York: Fourth Estate, 2004), p. 171. 116 Octavio Paz, Mitas'C i erotyzm [The Double Flame], trans. Piotr Fornelski (Krak6w: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1996), pp. 134-135. 117 Margaret Reynolds ed., Erotica. Women's Writing from Sappho to Margaret Atwood (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1990), p. xxviii. 118 Bataille, Eroticism, p. 18. 119 Winterson, "The Poetics of Sex," p. 32. 120 Winterson, Written on the Body, p. 89.

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Whitman and other metaphysical male poets, an emblem of authenticity and openness to the other person, and signifies being oneself, unmasked, raw, which entails the risk of rejection and loss of control. In spite of that, one yearns to be naked as it is the condition of genuine feelings: "It's no good wearing an overcoat ... when what the body really wants is to be naked,"121 "If this is going to succeed it will take years. I will have to find the years because I want to stand before you naked. I want to love you well."122 The fear of loss of control issues from the fact that a person's body is the diary of their personal history. The body manifests itself as an entity inscribed not only by cultural discourses, but also by the layers of lifetime experiences, forming a palimpsest: "Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain light; the accumulations of a lifetime gather there. In places the palimpsest is so heavily worked that the letters feel like braille."123 The narrator's body is the register of the past, particularly of the erotic one. Winterson accentuates that the body, a map of one's experience, is a map of one's identity. The body, which is the source of emotions, fantasies and passions, and where behaviour and actions of the subject are fulfilled, is for Grosz essential in forming identity.124 For Freud Ego is first and foremost of bodily nature, it is the projection of the body surface.126 Also Kaschack appreciates the interdependence between the body and mind. She claims that the body stores experiences in the same way as the mental sphere does; experience is reflected on the face, hands, the musculature of the body, and even in the structure of bones. Consequently, we are what we experience, in all the aspects — material and symbolic, visible and hidden. Experience is included and expressed in the body, and the aspects encompass and influence each other. Memory is stored everywhere, not only in the mind.126 The desire to decipher the partner's body, to anatomize that territory is an attempt to understand the lover through learning about their past and their identity. On the other hand, reading and unravelling can aim at taking control. The narrator of Written on the Body lingers to permit to be read as this entails the risk of vulnerability, of being disclosed, naked. As a result, her relationships, both with men and women, appear evanescent. It is only with Louise, a married woman, that "I" feels something deeper. Reluctant to open the book of the body, the narrator strives to read Louise's from cover to cover. When "I" learns about Louise's leukaemia, she leaves her with her husband, a cancer specialist, who — 121 Winterson, Written 071 the Body, p. 76. 122 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 206. 123 Winterson, Written on the Body, p. 89. 124 After Nead, Akt kobiecv, p. 124. 125 After Nead, Akt kobiecy, p. 24. 126 Ellyn Kaschack, Nowa psychologia kobiety [Engendered Lives. A New Psychology of Women's Experience] (Gdatisk: Gdmiskie Wydawnictwo Psychologiczne, 1996), pp. 60, 62, 63, 96, 181.

It's the clichjs that cause the trouble' — Looking for the Language of Rapture 67 positioning himself as the master of medical language — has offered to `properly' take care of Louise. The narrator's disappearance is the husband's condition. In despair, the heart-broken lover reads medical literature, about anatomy and the illness, and the story breaks to let room for meditations on them. Each section of the four ones entitled, "The Cells, Tissues, Systems and Cavities of the Body," "The Skin," "The Skeleton" and "The Special Senses" begins with a passage from an anatomy book and is followed by the narrator's memories and musings about the lost lover and her illness, resisting the cold medical discourse. Winterson constructs a textual universe in which all the formulations of the body are simulacral, in contrast to the lover's absent body.127 Reading about anatomy and imagining herself inside Louise, "I" strives to find out about Louise's body as much as possible so as to map it; to come into an even more intimate contact with the beloved, "more intimately than the skin, hair and voice that I craved. I would have her plasma, her spieen, her synovial fluid."128 Mapping the body signifies here subjugating, pinning down, categorizing, which in Winterson comes under a heading `destroyer' and is recognized as masculine. In Winterson, if there are exchanges of power in a lesbian relationship, they are agreed upon, and pose "a game between equals who might not always choose to be equals."129 Therefore the narrator of Written on the Body expresses a wish to be guided and possessed by Louise: "I had no dreams to possess you but I wanted you to possess me," "I still wanted her to be the leader of our expedition," "you will redraw me according to your will," "if Louise were a volcano then I might be Pompen."'" She wants Louise to be like a mother to her, protective and caring: "the heat of her hands ... will warm me, feed me and care for me. I will hold on to this pulse against other rhythms,"131 "I was in Louise's arms, and she was bending over me, fingers on my forehead, soothing me, whispering to me."132 Their erotic tension is thus informed by the `pursuer and the pursued' game which attracts them.133 Although the narrator obsessively longs to possess Louise in all viable dimensions ("her bones, her blood, her tissues, the sinews that bound her together"), she only incipiently pursues the masculine paradigms of anatomical explorations, which aim at colonizing and fixing. She analyzes and parodies them, merely to repudiate them eventually134: 127 Gilmore, "Without Names," p. 134. 128 Winterson, Written on the Body, p. 111. 129 Winterson, Written on the Body, p. 67. 130 Winterson, Written on the Body, pp. 52, 91, 20, 49. 131 Winterson, Written on the Body, p. 51. 132 Winterson, Written on the Body, p. 69. 133 Allen, "Jeanette Winterson. The Erotics of Risk," p. 74. 134 Stowers, "Journeying with Jeanette," pp. 150-151. Also the narrator of "The Poetics of Sex" realizes that labelling is not the way to learn about people: "Pin her down? She's not a

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Let me penetrate you. I am the archaeologist of tombs. 1 would devote my life to marking your passageways, the entrances and exits of that impressive mausoleum, your body.... I can't enter you in clothes that won't show the stains, my hands full of tools to record and analyse. If I come to you with a torch and a notebook, a medical diagram and a cloth to mop up the mess, I'll have you bagged neat and tidy. 1'11 store you in plastic like chicken livers. Womb,fut, brain, neatly labelled and returned. Is that how to know another human being?

The cold clinical disaggregating language of male science does not suffice to describe a human being, but manifests itself as necrophiliac instead. The narrator reflects: What are the characteristics of living things. At school, in biology I was told the following: Excretion, growth, irritability, locomotion, nutrition, reproduction and respiration. This does not seem like a very lively list to me. If that's all there is to being a living thing I may as well be dead. What of that other characteristic prevalent in human living things, the longing to be loved?136

Medical discourse imposes the segmentation of the body and thus produces heterogeneity, medicalizing the body as `sensations', `functions' and `drives', which posits medical discourse as the repressive juridical law,137 as Foucault argues and enacts in his journals of a hermaphrodite, Herculine Barbin. In addition, it transpires that the traditional lover's discourse does not encompass fatal illnesses or human mortality. Discarding the masculine models, the narrator rejects the stereotypical rote of a woman as passive object of penetration and exploration, and re-envisages the formula of heterosexual desire. It is through the catalogue of the parts of the lover's body and their reassembling and reinscribing into an erotic eulogy that Winterson, like Monique Wittig in The Lesbian Body, refigures the discourse of desire, simultaneously renouncing the restriction of erotogeneity to genitality. Instead they propose, like Irigaray or Cixous, that the whole body is the erotogenic zone. The distinctly feminine type of erotic diffusion acts as a counterpoise to the reproductive associations of genitality. The queer interest with castratos and the Dog-Woman's sexual experiences also interrogate the significance of the phallus for female ecstasy and for masculinity In a similar fashion, Silver in Lighthousekeeping is confronted with clichdd stances. Caught by the police in the process of stealing a book, she is subjected to observation. The theft of the book, and formerly of a talking parrot is enough for the doctor to question her sanity. Here she is confronted with the male

butterfly. I'm not a wrestler. She's not a target. not Lot no. 27 and I'm not one to brag." (p. 33). 135 Winterson, Written an the Body, pp. 119-120. 136 Stowers, "Journeying with Jeanette," p. 108. 137 Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 101.

not a gun. Tell you what she is? She's

7t's the dich& that cause the trouble' — Looking for the Language of Rapture 69 linear way of thinking The male psychiatrist prescribes her Prozac and attempts to argue her into the belief that she needs help as she suffers from psychosis which in her case takes an the shape of lamn obsession with meaning, at the expense of the ordinary shape of life."138 He defines psychosis as "being out of touch with reality," and Silver scorns his simplified formula: "Since then, I have been trying to find out what reality is, so that I can touch it."139 Therapy manifests itself here what Mary Daly unmasks in the word, that is a kind of rape as in 'therapist', and `re-cover' signifies to cover anew,14° which is what the psychiatrist attempts to do: destroy Silver' s female mode of thinking and seeing the world and cover it with the patriarchal perspective. For him, like for other Winterson's representatives of science, including Elgin and Jove, identity demonstrates itself as something consistent, a beginning, a middle, and an end, while the female characters feel it impossible to tell a single story. Instead of "who am I?" they rather ask themselves the Cixousian, "who are I?" since I is "changing, mobile, because living-speaking-thinking-dreaming."141 Through Silver' s and Louise's cases Winterson accuses male medicine of the reification of the female body then, which is also demonstrated in Art&Lies in Handel's performing unnecessary mastectomies. The multiplicity of selves Silver believes in is demonstrated through the story of Babel Dark told to her by the lighthouse keeper. Dark, "a hypocrite, an adulterer and a liar,"142 leads two parallel lives, of Henry Jekyll and Edward Hyde, with two wives in different cities. He describes his life in two journals, "the first, a mild and scholarly account of a clergyman's life in Scotland. The second, a wild and tom folder of scattered pages, disordered, unnumbered, punctured where his nib had bitten the paper."143 He thus compartmentalises himself like Anna Wolf in Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook so as to find a way out of chaos and disintegration. The masculine patterns are replaced here with the feminine explorations, figured, like in all Winterson's writings, in terms of labyrinthine interior journeys: "My mind took me up tortuous staircases that opened into doors that opened into nothing,"144 "Doors opening onto rooms that opened into doors that opened into rooms."145 The identity being fluent, labyrinthine and abundant in selves, it cannot be discovered by means of any guiding principles, including medical discourse, 138 Winterson, Lighthousekeeping, p. 195. 139 Winterson, Lighthousekeeping, p. 196. 140 Chris Weedon, Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theoy (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), p. 128. 141 After Susan Seilers ed., Cixous Reader, pp. xvii, xviii. 142 Winterson, Lighthousekeeping, p. 187. 143 Winterson, Lighthousekeeping, p. 57. 144 Winterson, Written an the Body, p. 92. 145 Winterson, Lighthousekeeping, p. 218.

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"the clinical language, through the dispassionate view of the sucking, sweating, greedy, defecating self."146 Contrary to masculine trophy hunting, Winterson proffers reciprocity: "No, it doesn't come under the heading Reproduction. I have no desire to reproduce but I still seek out love."147 In this yearning, the narrator becomes the exemplification of the Barthesian figure of `fulfillment': "The fulfilled lover has no need to write, to transmit, to reproduce"; she is satisfied with what she has, and wants to keep it etemally the same.148 The female erotic and desire do not lodge in the body solely but, as Rich argues, pose energy omnipresent in the sharing, and, Grosz adds, become part of intensity of life itself.149 The Lothario does not long to colonize the other, but offers herself as a source of pleasure,15° which becomes, according to Cixous, the augmentation of the results of the imprint of desire over every part of the body and the lover's body.151 Such intimate erotic exchanges between the bodies generate the erotogenic surface and imprint it, subsequently producing a singular intensity, which constitutes a process common to all lesbian relationships, as Grosz points out. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, Lyotard, and others, she perceives desire and sexual exchanges in terms of bodies, pleasures, intensities, energies, surfaces, movements, inscriptions, and not in terms of lack, yeamings and wishes, characteristic of traditional psychoanalytical discourses of desire. Like Winterson, Grosz draws attention to the patterns and quality of the intensities, which are submitted to metamorphoses, evoke further intensities, and open up new 5paces.152 To comprehend the intensity, which for Grosz is strongest at the contiguity of two surfaces, she advises to put aside the conception of a being as a combined entirety of elements, and concentrate on the parts instead. Two contiguous surfaces are pervaded with Eros that makes them pulsate "for their own sake and not for the benefit of the entity or organism as a whole. In other words, they come to have a life of their own, functioning according to their own rhythms."153 In her celebration of the female body through its parts in Written on the Body Winterson enacts this assumption as well as Cixous's similar declaration that a woman poses "a whole composed of parts that are wholes, not 146 Winterson, Written on the Body, p. 111. 147 Winterson, Written on the Body, p. 108. 148 Barthes, A Lover's Discourse, p. 56. 149 See Adrienne Rich, "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence," Journal of Women's History, fall 2003, vol. 15, issue 3, database: Academic Search Premier, p. 28; Elisabeth Grosz, "Refiguring Lesbian Desire," in The Lesbian Postmodern, ed. Laura Doan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 77. 150 Stowers, "Journeying with Jeanette," p. 151. 151 Eldlane Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa," in: Feminisms. An Anthology of Literary Theoty and Criticism, ed. Robyn Warhol and Diane Price Hemd! (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997), p. 354. 152 Grosz, "Refiguring Lesbian Desire," pp. 72, 76-78, 81. 153 Grosz, "Refiguring Lesbian Desire," p. 78.

7t's the cliches that cause the trouble' — Looking for the Language of Rapture 71 simple partial objects but a moving, limitlessly changing assemble, a cosmos tirelessly traversed by Eros."154 The dismemberment of the body practiced by medicine and synonymous with Lacan's body-in-pieces, standing for fragmentation, is criticized and refigured into lesbian festivity of parts as wholes constituting one whole at the same time. Winterson constructs a new version of skin, tissues, skeleton and systems which do not serve as the object of study any more but for love. To refigure the phallogocentric trajectory of desire into the female one the narrator converts the medical language into "a love-poem," the language of intimacy that turns into the language of self-recognition: `Explore me,' you said and I collected my ropes, flasks and maps, expecting to be home soon. I dropped into the mass of you and I cannot find the way out. Sometimes I think I'm free, coughed up like Jonah from the whale, but then I turn a corner and recognise myself again. Myself in your skin, myself lodged in your bones, myself floating in the cavities that decorate every surgeon's wall. That is how I know you. You are what I know.155

Rendering trauma of lost love is juxtaposed with rendering the seif; the turn toward the other by means of memory entails a turn toward the seif as the subject of mourning.156 The narrator's body appears the register of the lover's presence and absence: "It was a game, fitting bone on bone. I thought difference was rated to be the largest part of sexual attraction but there are so many things about us that are the same. Bone of my bone. Flesh of my flesh. To remember you it's my own body I touch. Thus she was, here and here."157 The "I"'s body is a map of the relationship; Louise left some marks including "hand prints all over my body," Louise's face "embossed on [the] hands" and "the L that tattoos me on the inside" which "is not visible to the naked eye."158 The reciprocity and intimacy produce such a strong bond that, together with resemblance, they pose a threat of shifting body boundaries to the point of losing the seif in the partner. Resemblance is rendered by the lesbian tropes of mirroring, twinning, subsumption and engulfment, which can be read as a prompt to the narrator's gender but does not determine it univocally. The narrator declares the perfect communion of bodies with the lover: You said, `I'm going to leave him because my love for you makes any other life a lie.' I've hidden those words in the lining of my coat. I take them out like a jewel thief when no-one's watching. They haven't faded. Nothing about you has faded. 154 Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa," pp. 357-358. 155 Winterson, Written on the Body, pp. 111, 120. 156 Gilmore, "Without Names," p. 134. 157 Winterson, Written on die Body, pp. 129-130. 158 Winterson, Written on the Body, pp. 106, 189, 118.

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Chapter II You are still the colour of my blood. You are my blood. When I look in the mirror it's not my own face I see. Your body is twice. Once you once me. Can I be sure which is which?'59

Boundary volatility seems to augment the attachment and attraction, rather than threatens with the dissolution of the person in the other. Likeness imposes the narrator's body being the palimpsestic record not only of its owner's experience, but also of the lover's, since the partners are similar: "Your face, mirror-smooth and mirror clear. Your face under the moon, silvered with cool reflection, your face in its mystery, revealing me."16° Being the twins, the narrator ascertains to experience the same emotions as Louise: "if Louise is well then I am well," "if you are broken then so am I."161 Also disease can be felt in both bodies; Louise has fallen ill but her lover suffers from bodily disintegration, too: "I am fighting helplessly without hope. I grapple but my body slithers away," "I am rid of life."162 Yet, the sameness and unity of feeling must tun out illusory in the end for there are no two people who are the same. The power of love cannot change it, as Barthes claims, and although one identifies oneself with the other's suffering, in fact the suffering takes place without them, dissociating them from the amorous subject so she can only feel compassion163 or empathy. The narrator thus realizes she made a mistake leaving Louise, even if she meant her `good'. In fact, she made the decision without Louise but now she reflects she has no right to decide about anybody's way of life or death. Therefore, she tries to find her, yet, to no avail. Although the boundary loss is framed as risk, Winterson eroticizes it, defining it as both danger and temptation.164 The temptation relies upon the kind of unity in which the partners retain their singularity: 1 was holding Louise's hand, conscious of it, but sensing too that a further intimacy might begin, the recognition of another person that is deeper than consciousness, lodged in the body more than held in the mind. I didn't understand that sensing, I wondered if it might be bogus, I'd never known it myself although I'd seen it in a couple who'd been together for a very long time. Time had not diminished their love. They seemed to have become one another without losing their very individual selves.I65

159 Winterson, Written on the Body, pp. 98-99. 160 Winterson, Written on the Body, p. 132. 161 Winterson, Written on the Body, pp. 154, 125. 162 Winterson, Written on the Body, pp. 101, 119. 163 Barthes, A Lover's Discourse, pp. 57-58. 164 Allen, "Jeanette Winterson. The Erotics of Risk," p. 76. 165 Winterson, Written on the Body, p. 82.

'It's the dich& that cause the trouble' — Looking for the Language of Rapture 73 In case of Louise, "I" hopes to achieve the kind of intimacy asleep in the body and woken in the act of recognition, which is common to all Winterson's lovers. The notion is very similar to that of love at first sight, in Barthes figured as "ravishment." While one can fall in love many a time, however, the act of recognition is uniquely associated with genuine love. In the short story "How to Die" the protagonist declares: love you' he said. `You don't know me.' I recognise you.' I nodded. Love is recognition. Love is re-cognition; a re-thinking of all we know, and all we are, because someone stands in front of us like a mirror.":66 In Lighthousekeeping the same act of recognition helps Silver to surmount shyness and embarrassment when she meets her lover-to-be in the chapel: "I thought I recognized you from somewhere a long way down, somewhere at the bottom of the sea. Somewhere in me."167 The narrator of Written on the Body feels similarly about Louise: "The odd thing about Louise, being with Louise, was d6jä vu. I couldn't know her well and yet I did know her well. Not facts or figures, rather a particular trust. That afternoon, it seemed to me I had always been here with Louise, we were familiar."168 Evelyn Ender theorizes this sensory knowledge of the other originating in the body as "held in the flesh, kept alive through a congeries of tactile, cutaneous, and kinesthetic sensations" which proves productive in resignifying desire as well as in liberating sexual identities from the precepts of gender.169 In case of Henri the scene is not only visual but also invested aurally: "Then she said, `They're all different."What?"Snowflakes. Think of that.' I did think of that and I fell in love with her."179 Barthes elucidates this as falling in love with a spoken sentence that triggers desire and dwells in the lover as memory.171 It is perhaps this familiarity, this act of re-cognition that makes Louise capable of decoding the narrator's body, contrary to the previous numerous partners: "I didn't know that Louise would have reading hands. She has translated me into her own book," "You deciphered me and now I am plain to read."172 The narrator hopes that lesbian reciprocity will be a release, "a space uncluttered by association" offering freedom: "We shall cross one another's boundaries and make ourselves one nation. Scoop me in your hands for I am good soil."173 The liberty comes from the fact that lesbian eroticism turns out the wild zone, the territory outside the dictate of patriarchal culture. The women's, and 166 Jeanette Winterson, "How to Die," 167 Winterson, Lighthousekeeping, pp. 200-201. 168 Winterson, Written an the Body, p. 82. 169 Evelyn Ender, — Speculating Carnally' or, Some Reflections on the Modernist Body," Yale Journal of Criticism, 12.1 (1999), p. 117. 170 Winterson, The Passion, p. 88. 171 Barthes, A Lover's Discourse, p. 192. 172 Winterson, Written on the Body, pp. 89, 106. 173 Winterson, Written an the Body, pp. 81, 20.

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especially lesbian, territory is thereby unmapped, unknown, undefined: "Some of the territory is wilder and reports do not tally. The guides are only good for so much. In these wild places I become part of the map, part of the story, adding my version to the versions there. This Talmudic layering of story on story, map on map, multiples possibilities but also wams me of the weight of accumulation."174 Becoming "part of the map" and adding her "version to the versions there" may express the wild territory's respect for individuality, subjectivity and freedom. This is the territory that is not going to be tamed or colonized: "That's all right boys, so is this. This delicious unacknowledged island where we are naked with each other. The boat that brings us here will crack beneath your weight. This is territory you cannot invade," "On this island where we live, keeping what we do not tell, we have found the infinite variety of Woman."175 Freedom without boundaries is also emphasized in the final scene of the book in which Louise comes back into bursting space replete with tropes of textuality and circularity: This is where the story starts, in this threadbare room. The walls are exploding. The windows have turned into telescopes. Moon and stars are magnified in this room. The sun hangs over the mantelpiece. I stretch out my hand and reach the corners of the world. The world is bundled up in this room. Beyond the door, where the river is, where the roads are, we shall be. We can take the world with us when we go and sling the sun under your arm. Hurry now, it's getting late. I don't know if this is a happy ending but here we are let loose in open fields.I76

The ending of the narrative, open, ambiguous and undefined, becomes the spiralling return to the beginning, the figure often deployed by female travellers, as well as the 'green world' metaphor and journey to the universe of liberated desire and female authenticity.177 Being "loose in the open fields" may be construed as the longing to experience the limitlessness similar to that expressed by the lack of the narrator's gender or name.178 It may be also interpreted as putting a woman back to her body, at the centre of her own sexuality, to explore the "wild zone." Winterson, however, does not refuse men the right to reciprocity in love. Although she regards them as destroyers and the ones who desire to be in control, she also believes, "There are exceptions and I hope they are happy."179 She portrays such exceptions - Henri in The Passion, Jordan in Sexing the Cherry and Handel in Art&Lies. 174 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 54. 175 Winterson, "The Poetics of Sex," pp. 39, 41. 176 Winterson, Written on the Body, p. 190. 177 Stowers, "Journeying with Jeanette," p. 152. 178 Gilmore, "Without Names," p. 141. 179 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, p. 165.

7t's the dich& that cause the trouble' — Looking for the Language of Rapture 75 Winterson's association of sexuality with textuality may be read as a response to Nancy Miller' s suggestion that the signature of feminine writing should be sought in those places of the text where writing and female body meet,' t° since a distinctly female writing should articulate the body, reconnect "the book with the body and with pleasure,"181 as Chantal Chawaf argues. This assumption echoes Barthes's idea of interpretation depicted in The Pleasure of the Text where he asserts that the text can be made an object of pleasure either through connecting it to the pleasures of life, and later adding "the personal catalogue of our sensualities," or through inducing the text "to breach bliss [...] thereby identifying this text with the purest moments of perversion."182 Fulfilling distinctively lesbian goals, that is creating textual space in which she posits herself a subject and destabilizes the praxis of sexuality and textuality, the narrator in Written on the Body coalesces into "the lesbian-as-sign" of Zimmerman's metaphor.183 In Winterson, the reconnection of the text, body and pleasure takes on the shape of the textual body to effect, like in The Lesbian Body, Wittig's proposition that the body of the text encompasses all the words of the female body, and to declaim one's body and the lover's one means to declaim the word which the book consists of.184 The imprints on the body translate it into the text, and sexuality into textuality as they "coagulate corporeal signifiers into signs, producing all the effects of meaning, representation, depth,"185 as Grosz explains. In Written on the Body Winterson employs different forms in the three sections of the book, which represent different patterns of writing on the body, and constitute an experiment in the morphology of sexuality, of the lover's body and of the body of text.186 The body becomes thus a fetish, as the displaced locale of embodied knowledge,187 which becomes the reflection of Barthes's conviction that text is a fetish that desires the reader. The text having a human shape, corpus, it is the anagram of the body, but of the erotic one. Considering the implications of the etymology of the word `text', as the Latin word `textum' signifies 'web', Barthes claims that "Text means tissue" that is generated in a constant interweaving, therefore interpreting the text is not tantamount to giving it a 180 Nancy K. Miller, Subject to Change. Reading Feminist Writing (New York: Columbia UP, 1988), p.129. 181 After Showalter, "Feminist Criticism in the Wildemess," p. 316. 182 Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text,

183 Bonnie Zimmerman, "Lesbians Like This and That," New Lesbian Criticism, ed. Sally Munt (Herne! Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), p. 4. 184 Monique Wittig, "Introduction," in: The Lesbian Body (London: Peter Owen, 1975), pp. 67. 185 After Brush, "Metaphors of Inscription," p. 7. 186 Gilmore, "Without Names," p. 140. 187 Gilmore, "Without Names," p. 135.

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meaning, but appreciating "that plural which constitutes it. In this text, the networks are many and interact, without any one of them being able to surpass the rest; this text is a galaxy of signifiers."188 Also Cixous proposes that a woman's body brims with "the profusion of meanings that run through it in every direction."189 By the same token, to read the Wintersonian palimpsestic body with its personal history and identity inscribed on it cannot result in granting it `meaning', that is a label. The masculine paradigms must be repudiated because of "a galaxy of signifiers," the plurality of interpretations of the body and thus identity consisting in "interior cities," mazes and "zig-zags." Winterson employs the interlaced figures of body and book to render erotics between the characters. The lovers are compared to books and the erotic exchanges take on the shape of turning the pages, reading the codes and creating the private language: Making love we made a dictionary of forbidden words. We are words, sentences, stories, books. You're my New Testament. We are a gospel to each other, I am your annunciation, revelation. Your're my St Mark ... It's not simple this lexographic love. Let me leaf through you before I read you out loud.19°

The invitation to read one's body becomes the invitation to make love; to worship each other's bodies in a religious exultation. It is the act of opening oneself to the other: "Read me. Read me now. Words in your mouth that will modify your gut. Words that will become you. Recite me until you know me off by heart. Lift up a flap of skin and the word sings."191 The elaborate linkage between language, body and identity is also underscored in Art&Lies. Sappho, her own poems burned, attempts to break out of the template of the symbolic to revitalize the dead language and reopen the body to erotic stimuli. The symbolic poses the locale of "dead words" which have been "tortured and killed"192 to trap their meaning, to pinpoint objects and feelings. Sappho tries to resuscitate language through its erotic appropriation, especially depicting lesbian desire, excluded from the symbolic and constituting, "[t]he Word 188 Roland Barthes, Pleasure of the Text, . 189 Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa," p. 355. 190 Winterson, "The Poetics of Sex," pp. 40, 44. 191 Winterson, Art&Lies, p. 144. Winterson's imagery is strongly suggestive of Tee Corinne's in Dreams of the Woman Who Loved Sex: "You have become my text, my love; your body, your words. I have bound your letters into a volume I carry with me, read at night before I sleep, at dawn before I move into the day...Where your hands have been, I am yours, and your hands have been everywhere. Your words enter my soil like rain." (Erotica, ed. Reynolds, p. 332). 192 Winterson, Art&Lies, p. 64.

7t's the clichg.s that cause the trouble' — Looking for the Language of Rapture 77 ignored. The Word unspoken and unheard. ... the word in exile."193 The poetess takes on an active position towards the phallic language, being thereby able to bestow it a new quality: "She takes a word, straps it on, penetrates me hard. The word inside me, I become it.s194 Infusing the description of her position with the male trajectory of desire, Winterson grants her agency of deconstructing meanings and reappropriating them. To rediscover the potential of language is to make the words palpable through lyricism, metaphor, alliteration, refrains and word play; and thus to endow them with corporeality and voluptuousness: "How can I come close to the meaning of my days? I will lasso them to me with the whirling word. The word carried quietly at my side, the word spun out, vigorous, precise, the word that traps time before time traps me."I95 Granting words with body impacts their connotations, dimension, and associations: "New meanings expand from my thighs. we prefer to ignore that those smooth, romantic words, and dig instead for a roue's pleasure. The mature word, ripe, through centuries of change, the word deep layered with associative delights."196 The connection of body and language results in reviving contingencies of language bound with passion and voracity, and in restoring vitality and jouissance to language, making it again "[t]he winged word. The mercurial word. The word that is both moth and lamp. The word that rises above itself. The word that is itself and more. The associative word light with meanings. The word not netted by meaning. The exact word wide. The word not whore or cenobite. The word unlied."197 Sappho, being a poet and "a sexualist," embodies the word herself; language and sex become one in her: "Say my name and you say sex," she is the outcome of "the union of language and lust."198 Language and sex converge through the eroticization of speaking, synecdochically concentrating on the mouth and playing with the sensate qualities of language, such as sounds, rhythm and the effect of uttering the words.I99 Words, the medium of literature, bridge the mental with corporeal, the real with the imaginary, and to Sappho, like to Winterson, sex and desire are real. Therefore she ties language with sensual experience, since it is embedded in corporeality. Linguistic signification exposes language as a component of the sensate universe. The articulation of meaning in speech constitutes the translation of bodily modes of signification as well as emotions into words. Mourning the harm done to her and reinscribing the poetry of homosexual desire, Sappho produces a eulogy of sensual lesbian love and desire, sometimes

193 Winterson, Art&Lies, p. 64. 194 Winterson, Art&Lies, p. 74. 195 Winterson, Art&Lies, p. 138. 196 Winterson, Art&Lies, p. 74. 197 Winterson, Art&Lies, p. 137. 198 Winterson, Art&Lies, pp. 51, 74. 199 Bums, "Fantastic Language," pp. 293-294.

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tingling with scriptural undertone. Mouth, for example, is enacted as a temple that worships words, sex and love:20° Kiss me with the hollow of your mouth, the indentation of desire. Kiss me with the pulled-apart open space, demolition of propriety, rebuilding the place of worship She kisses me. The words that there are, fly up from her lips, a flock of birds cawing at the sky. An engine of wings migrating through the world but she makes her home in me. Her lips form the words. She scalds me with them. The cold, clear mould of her, melts, and gives way, she pours the warm honey of a long night's work. The word and the kiss are one.20I

Mouth serves as the place where words are conveyed, their container, "the excavation where the words are dug" to become the link between "the poet and the word,"202 the present and the past, the body and mind. The kiss, the sign of two bodies transgressing their boundaries to come together, operates to transfer inscribing the body into the rea1,203 "translates the incoherent flesh into an airy syntax."204 An experience of two people in an erotic encounter serves to revive and expand the possibilities of language, to construct a new language of love opposed to the cliched symbolic: "My mouth an yours forms words I do not know."205 If the body serves as the terrain of knowledge about a human being, the act of reading one's body necessitates discovering the truth about one. The kiss can therefore function also as the means to reveal lies and deceptions. When kissing her husband, Stella is able to sense and taste Jove's feelings as they have become almost tangible: "To betray with a kiss. The reek of Judas. ... Kiss of life, kiss of death. Come kiss me so that I can read your lips, deceptions scripted and waiting to be staged. His lying heart in his mouth. When I kissed him this morning I tasted his fear."206 Jove's words appear worthless; he does not attach as much importance to them as Stella does, "words are cheap. Words are light things that change nothing. Shuttlecock words raqueted between us. Nothing real only skill in the play."207 He does not ascribe causation to them; the power to influence and alter things, and he disparages their power as superficial: "Words, words."208 Yet, to Stella words possess the ability to wound and to heal. She has treated Jove's words seriously; her body has been imprinted with their private language along with the history of their erotic love. In the face of betrayal she 200 Schiffer, "`You see, I am no stranger to love'," p. 43. 201 Winterson, Art&Lies, p. 66. 202 Winterson, Art&Lies, p. 65. 203 Schiffer, "`You see, I am no stranger to love'," p. 43. 204 Winterson, Art&Lies, p. 73. 205 Winterson, Art&Lies, p. 66. 206 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 39. 207 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 31. 208 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 32.

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cannot dispose of words which have become a part of her: "my fingers were sticky. Hate. Anger. Pain. The words would not fall. I was bleeding words. I went into the bathroom to try to wash them away but when I drew back my hand from the clear cold water, the words welled up again, red and liquid, danger words, broken words, the cracked vessel of my love for him."209 Words are once more conferred body, endowed with the properties characteristic of the carnal: they bleed, swell and get broken. The pain can be relieved only by disposing of words, yet, for the time being the pain is too acute to put it into words, to contain it in them and thus bring a release. It is unattainable to remove the layer as "[t]he words resist erasure,"21° piercing the skin deeply and painfully. Only time can relieve the pain, and writing the body with another layer. The event must be processed and incorporated in the structure of experience so as not to return to haunt one, Freud argues. The Lyotardian "authentic articulation" strictly connected with suffering must take place, that is a conversion of sufferings of the soul into writing, literature or arts.211 A struggle with words and translating the weights of inner experience into language is figured in Sexing the Cherry as the process of sluicing a city from the excess of words and their import: The people who throng the streets shout at each other Their words, rising up, form the thick cloud over the city, which every so often must be thoroughly cleansed of too muck language. Men and women in balloons fly up from the main square and, armed with mops and scrubbing brushes, do battle with the canopy of words trapped under the sun. The words resist erasure. The oldest and most stubborn form a thick crust of chattering rage. Cleaners have been bitten by words still quarrelling, and in one famous lawsuit a woman whose mop had been eaten and whose hand was badly mauled by a vicious row sought to bring the original antagonists to court. The men responsible made their defence on the grounds that the words no longer belonged to them. ... Indeed I was sorry to see the love-sighs of young girls swept away. My companion, though she told me that was strictly forbidden, caught a sonnet into a wooden box and gave it to me as a memento. If I open the box by the timest amount 1 may hear it, repeating itself endlessly as it is destined to do until someone sets it free. Towards the end of the day we joined with the other balloons brushing away the last few stray and vagabond words. we saw, passing us by from time to time, new flocks of words coming from people in the streets who, not content with the weight of their lives, continually turned the heaviest of things into the lightest of properties.212

209 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 32. 210 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 17. 211 After Veronica Vasterling, "Body and Language: Butler, Merleau-Ponty and Lyotard on the Speaking Embodied Subject," International Journal of Philosophical Studies, vol. 11(2), p. 216. 212 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, pp. 17-18.

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Bestowing corporeality, shape and texture on words, apportioning them and hemming in transfers them into the carriers of burdens which one can contro1.213 Rooted in presence and granted body, words come to be mortal and thereby less pernicious, yet, they still possess the power to impact the real world.214 With this prospect Henri in The Passion writes a diary, which exposes a contradiction of his refusal of wholeness and the concomitant struggle to re-enact it.215 The diary is abundant in repetitions that are crucial in re-establishing the fractured ego, as Freud suggests.216 Naming things supports controlling the trauma: "Words like devastation, rape, slaughter, carnage, starvation are lock and key words to keep the pain at bay. Words about war that are easy on the eye."217 To be able to transcribe pain means not to allow to be overwhelmed by it. Another way in which Winterson enacts the erotic aspects of language is the connection of food and sex. Leisurely savouring the sensual language and erotic encounters where food is crucial, Winterson plays with the reader's appetite. Engaging the tangible voluptuous discourse Winterson effects a paean to the senses, making them the teachers of the geography of the body. 3. Displacement of sex into food Devouring passion and love are usually connected with the wish to shift body boundaries so as to become oneness with the lover, which can be achieved through eroticism. The willingness to dissolve body boundaries, according to Bataille, converses eroticism into the disturbance of balance, which results in a person's conscious questioning oneself, questioning one's existence.218 The declaration `You're so sweet! I could eat you up!' constitutes the desire to come into such an intimate contact with the lover as with food which is being the other absorbed by one's body. Both food and the lover are something external that is intrnalized, and then externalized again. The acts of love display thus affinity with the consumption of food, the mouth being their common feature. The affinity is also demonstrated in language which makes use of the same phrases for love and food, and in some languages the phrases that denote the acts of love and eating are the same, as Claude Levi-Strauss noticed. A bed can thereby be compared with a table, and a lover with a dainty. This assumption seems central to Winterson's declaration: "What is desire? Desire is a restaurant. Desire is watch213 Schiffer, "`You see, I am no stranger to love'," p. 44. 214 Schiffer, —You see, I am no stranger to love'," p. 44. 215 Judith Seaboyer, "Second Death in Venice: Romanticism and the Compulsion to Repeat in Jeanette Winterson's The Passion," Contemporaty Literature, Vol. 38, No. 3 (1997), p. 494. 216 After Seaboyer, "Second Death in Venice," p. 509. 217 Winterson, The Passion, p. 5. 218 Bataille, Eroticism, p. 31.

7t 's the dich& that cause the trouble' — Looking for the Language of Rapture 81 ing you eat. Desire is pouring wine with you. Desire is looking at the menu and wondering what it would be like to kiss you. Desire is the surprise of your skin."219 Collating desire to a restaurant, Winterson ascertains that they both object to the routine, requiring sophistication and finesse. The menu in a restaurant is situated outside the usual daily course of consumption, unlike the domestic menu adjusted to the social structure of a particular family22° and the individual tastes of its members. In a restaurant dishes are prepared and served in a more exquisite and elaborate way, therefore surprise may ensue at their look or taste, as the same dish is usually served in a different way in different restaurants, or even in a different way in one restaurant. Sex depends on the same rule - governed by passion, not by routine - it is always different depending on the shade and intensity of emotions. Spontaneity and flexibility, behaviour "out of habit, without need for thought or self-scrutiny"221 on the part of the eater are thereby allowed and demanded. This is also the case with desire and passion — being "[t]he unpredictable wild card that never comes when it should," they slip out of control: "It commands us and very rarely in the way we would choose."222 Margaret Visser construes meals as staged events with the performative characteristics: the table becomes the stage on which meals are presented, and the diners are the viewers.223 Similarly, bed can be interpreted as a stage on which the lovers present their naked bodies to each other, being the performers and viewers in turns. Both in sex and "at meals people look at each other and react."224 Meals, performances and sexual acts take stages to be consumed: course by course, scene by scene, centimeter by centimeter. They are transitory shared events grounded in carnal pleasure and entailing satisfaction,225 if only momentary. The phrase, "Desire is watching you eat" sets a chain of associations into motion. The sensual nature of food and its consumption proffers voyeuristic pleasure. The viewer's imagination is flooded with mouth-watering images of the eater taking their body parts into their mouth, biting, `eating' him/her; s/he can observe his/her tongue and lips in motion. The pleasure of consumption of sex is displaced into the pleasure of consumption of food. Sitting individually, usually opposite each other in a restaurant creates an intimate atmosphere, but also separates the diners, which can 219 Jeanette Winterson, "The White Room," 220 Gaye Poole, "Reel Meals: Food and Public Dining, Food and Sex, Food and Revenge," in: Viands, Wines and Spirits, Nourishment and (In)Digestion in the Culture of Literacy, ed. Wojciech Kalaga and Tadeusz Rachwal (Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Skskiego, 2003), p. 15. 221 Joanne Finkelstein after Poole, "Reel Meals," p. 16. 222 Winterson, The Passion, p. 144. 223 After Poole, "Reel Meals," pp. 13-14. 224 After Poole, "Reel Meals," p. 13. 225 Poole, "Reel Meals," p. 13. Poole compares meals and performances only; I expand the interpretation with desire and sex.

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feed the desire. "Desire is looking at the menu and wondering how it would be like to kiss you" indicates reflection on the taste the partner has; on what his/her taste can be compared with the menu. Spinoza draws similarities between desire and appetite: "between appetite and desire, there is no differente we deem a thing to be good, because we strive for it, wish for it, long for it or desire it."226 In Winterson's books erotic appetite is often whetted in restaurants, bars and cafds, then moves on to one of the partners' flat. Food serves thus as an encouragement to making love; a meal is a means of creating the proper intimate atmosphere, a state of arousal: "Then there are candle-lit dinners and those leering waistcoated waiters with outsize pepperpots. There are, too, simple picnics on the beach which only work when you're in love because otherwise you couldn't bear the sand in the brie."227 The table changes into bed then and vice versa as sexual acts are here not only preceded but also followed by eating out. The connection of the appetite for food and sex suggests that the two things share common sensual delight. The proposition is also included in the question: "Inevitably it is not only the gastric juices that are stimulated by luxury and fresh air. What could be nicer than a pre-prandial fellatio in a foreign tongue?"228 The meal, "watching you eat," can become a fore-play: Context is all, or so I thought, until I started eating with Louise. When she lifted the soup spoon to her lips how I longed to be that innocent piece of stainless steel. I would gladly have traded the blood in my body for half a pint of vegetable stock. Let me be diced carrot, vermicelli, just so that you will take me in your mouth. I envied the French stick. I watched her break and butter each piece, soak it slowly in her bowl, let it float, grow heavy and fat, sink in the deep red weight and then be resurrected to the glorious pleasure of her teeth.229

The viewer expresses her desire to be touched, kissed, bitten by Louise; there is also a suggestion of oral sex. Through food the narrator strives to trace Louise' s taste, touch or smell as it is the only chance for her to come into intimate contact with her: The potatoes, the celery, the tomatoes, all had been under her hands. When I ate my own soup I strained to taste her skin. She had been there, there must be something of her left. I would find her in the oil and onions, detect her through the garlic. I knew that she Spat in the frying pan to determine the readiness of the oil. It's an old trick, every chef does it, or did. And so I knew when I asked her what was in the soup that she had deleted the essential ingredient. I will taste you if only through your cooking. She dribbled viscous juices down her chin and before I could help her wiped them

226 After Grosz, "Refiguring Lesbian Desire," p. 82. 227 Winterson, Written on the Body, p. 36. 228 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 14. 229 Winterson, Written on the Body, p. 36.

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away. I eyed the napkin; could I steal it? Already my hand was creeping over the tablecloth like something out of Poe.23°

All food becomes aphrodisiacs then; only because it is prepared by the woman the narrator feels passion for. The abject saliva, which is normally treated as repugnant, in this case becomes something desirable, and the narrator seems to share the opinion about saliva with The Thousand and One Night Tale in which it is presented as a liquid sweeter than grape juice and capable of satiating the greatest thirst. Saliva is far from abject in Sexing the Cherry, too, as the princess employs it to polish her lover's teeth. "You were milk-white and fresh to drink"231 can also indicate the readiness to be kissed, to have the saliva drunk like milk, or generally the readiness to make love. Milk is also a signifier of care and acceptance,232 Fromm asserts. On another occasion the lovers can experience the power of viands specifically marked as aphrodisiacs in the erotic discourse. Seafood and alcohol, for instance, intensify the already hot dates: One night, after a seafood lasagne and a bottle of champagne we made love so vigorously that the Lady's Occasional [bed for guests] was driven across the floor by the turbine of our lust. We began by the window and ended by the door. It's wellknown that mollusks are aphrodisiac, Casanova ate his mussels raw before pleasuring a lady but then he also believed in the stimulating powers of hot chocolate.233

The ties between the eater and the food are strong as food becomes the body, which entails the connection with the food preparer as s/he must be trusted about the whole process of cooking. The eater seems to realize the power of food: Well, here I am at half past four with fruit bread and a cup of tea and instead of taking hold of myself I can only think of taking hold of Louise. It's the food that's doing it. There could not be a more unromantic moment than this and yet the yeasty smell of raisins and rye is exciting me more than any Playboy banana.234

Having a meal after making love can be treated as after play. In The PowerBook Afi explains her love for food with its "direct pleasure." The same can be said about sex. Cooking constitutes for Ali "a way of forcing order back into chaos a way of reestablishing [her]self'235 after making love and a difficult conversation with her lover. This function of food is congruent with Poole's observations, in 230 Winterson, Written an the Body, pp. 36-37. 231 Winterson, Written an the Body, p. 125. 232 Erich Fromm, 0 sztuce milaci [The Art of Loving], trans. Aleksander Bogdanski (Poznan: Rebis, 2003), p. 48. 233 Winterson, Written an the Body, p. 89. 234 Winterson, Written an the Body, p. 39. 235 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 182.

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which he deems food as an essential "barometer" of the attitudes and psychological condition of protagonists.236 After steamy moments Ali serves "the steamy plate[s]" of salsa di pomodori and includes the recipe: SALSA DI POMODORI Take a dozen plum tomatoes and slice them lengthways as though they were your enemy. Fasten them into a lidded pot and heat for ten minutes. Chop an onion without tears. Dice a carrot without regret. Shard a celery as though its Hutes and grooves were the indentations of your past. Add to the tomatoes and cook unlidded for as long it takes them to yield. Throw in salt, pepper and a twist of sugar. Pound the lot through a sieve or a mouli or blender. Remember — they are the vegetables, you are the cook. Return to a soft flame and lubricate with olive oil. Add a spoonful at a time, stirring like an old witch, until you achieve the right balance of slippery firmness. Serve on top of fresh spaghetti. Cover with rough new parmesan and cut basil. Raw emotion can be added now. Serve. Eat. Reflect.237

As the recipe evinces, cooking good spaghetti with tomato sauce demands emotional passionate commitment, similarly to making love or dancing salsa. The recipe alludes to the sexual act — the tomatoes need to "yield" on a "soft flame" and should be "lubricated" with oil. "Raw emotion" may signify spontaneity, ardour and openness, and the call to remember "you are the cook" is a reminder that the cook is the active part, the master who should be in control. A tomato has erotic connotations itself since it is calledpomme d'amour — the apple of love. Ali declares, "Food tastes better in Italian"238 probably because the Italians are regarded as passionate emotional people, which can be ascribed to the climate, "the southern sun, whose power, it is known, weakens both natural and moral bonds,"239 to deploy Julian Bames' s assertion. The connection between food and sex may be explained by a similar way in which the nervous system handles sexual arousal and hunger, for the sex organs and the mouth possess the same, very sensitive, nerve structure. Moreover, a 236 Poole, "Reel Meals," p. 10. 237 Winterson, The PowerBook, pp. 182-183. 238 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 183. 239 Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters (London: Picador, 1989), p. 115.

7t's the dich& that cause the trouble' — Looking for the Language of Rapture 85 parallel between "the sensory surfaces of the sex organs and the taste buds in the mouth" can be noticed, "which may explain why sexual desire and a delicious aroma both cause the mouth to water."24° It is also the case with perfume — the senses may get confused since the ingredients aiming at evoking pleasure include food: "I sniffed the bottles. Here were the secrets of irresistible skin and satt smells of pearl and oyster. Lemon, brine, seaweed, sandalwood, musk, bitter rockrose, frankincense and myrrh. Not here the floral notes of the high-octave female."24I The lover is seeking the perfume her partner uses, however, she cannot recognize it in any of the bottles. It is so because what the lover knows is the conflation of the smells of perfume, skin, femininity and emotions producing an irresistible spell: From beyond the front door my nose is twitching, I can smell her coming down the hall towards me. She is a perfumier of sandalwood and hops. I want to uncork her. I want to push my head against the open wall of her loins. She is firm and ripe, a dark compound of sweet cattle straw and Madonna of the Incense. She is frankincense and myn-h.242

Erotic desire, food and aromas influencing the taste buds, it is not surprising that the distance from table to bed and vice versa is so short. Sometimes it is difficult to distinguish which is which, as the difference is almost overlooked: "We used to come here together after sex. You were always hungry after we had made love. You said it was me you wanted to eat so it was decent of you to settle for a toasted sandwich. Sorry, Croque Monsieur, according to the menu," "After sex you tigertear your food, let your mouth run over with grease. Sometimes it's me you bite, leaving shallow wounds in my shoulders,"243 "our love-making was rhythmed to the regular whoosh and grind of the espresso machine and the thin whirr of the blade for the parma ham. Our bed was a board balanced on six huge drums of olive oil, the spaces between infilled with cartons of Signora Rosetti's pasta ready for sale."244 "Is food sexy?" Winterson inquires in Written on die Body and responds in "The White Room": "Desire is watching you eat." Roland Barthes agrees with her, pointing out that the physicality and carnality of food constitutes a space for the expression of meanings; makes food "a system of communication, a body of

240 Peter Farb and George Armelagos, Consuming Passions (Boston: Houghton Miffin, 1980), 87. 241 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 121. 242 Winterson, Written on the Body, p. 136. 243 Winterson, Written on the Body, pp. 179, 118. 244 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 174.

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images, a protocol of usages, situations and behaviour."245 Some viands are erotically coded, being reminiscent in their shape of parts of human body. A banana, for example, serves this purpose, and that is why in Sexing the Cherry Londoners are amused when presented with the fruit from the Island of Bermuda for the first time: "the crowd roared and nudged each other and demanded to know what poor fool had been so reduced as to seil his vitality."246 The person who presents the fruit explains: "THIS IS NOT SOME UNFORTUNATE'S RAKE. IT IS THE FRUIT OF A TREE. IT IS TO BE PEELED AND EATEN."247 Yet, the audience considers eating a banana as something indecent: "At this there was unanimous retching. There was no good woman could put that to her mouth, and for a man it was the practice of cannibals. We had not gone to church all these years and been washed in the blood of Jesus only to eat ourselves up the way the Heathen do."248 Bananas and other food are widely employed as explicit carriers of meaning laden with sexual connotations to entice people to sex: "Playboy regularly features stories about asparagus and bananas and leeks and courgettes or being smeared with honey or the chocolate chip ice-cream."249 Nevertheless, they do not always bring the desired effect: "I once bought some erotic body oil, authentic Pina Colada flavour, and poured it over myself but it made my lover's tongue come out in a rash,"25° the narrator of Written on the Body confesses. Whilst a banana is sexed as male, an orange serves as the female counterpart. In Sexing the Cherry the Dog-Woman's lover compares her clitoris to an orange. First, he makes an attempt to have sex with her but fails as he gets stuck in his enormous partner. The Dog-Woman manifests herself here a mythical vagina dentata which menaces to castrate through incorporation. Her vagina becomes a cannibalistic mouth threatening to devour. The scene is man's greatest fear coming true: fear of castration which may be performed by a woman The concept of a woman as castrating other is advocated by Barbara Creed in The Monstrous-Feminine, disrupting Freudian and Lacanian theory, according to which woman terrifies because she is castrated and this reminds man of his contingent castration. Set free by means of a crowbar, the Dog-Woman's partner proposes to give her oral pleasure as a way of compensation. The woman gives in willingly: "I

245 After Susanne Mühleisen, "Globalized Tongues: The Cultural Semantics of Food Names," in: Eating Culture. The Politics and Poetics of Food, ed. Tobias Döring, Markus Heide, Suzanne Mühleisen (Heidelberd: Univesitätsverlag, 2003), p. 79. 246 Winterson, Sexing die Cherry, p. 12. 247 Winterson, Sexing die Cherry, pp. 12-13. 248 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 13. 249 Winterson, Written on the Body, p. 36. 250 Winterson, Written on the Body, p. 36.

's the clichg.s that cause the trouble' — Looking for the Language of Rapture 87 was very comfortable about this, having nothing to be bitten off."251 Yet, this activity cannot be conducted, either, for the man declares: "I cannot take that orange in my mouth. It will not fit. Neither can I run my tongue over it. You are too big."252 The Dog-Woman, however, does not share his opinion. She feels compassion for him and treats him to wine. As she does not know which of her organs he called the 'orange', she scrutinizes her sex after his departure and concludes: "It seemed all in proportion to me. These gentlemen are very timid."253 Her conclusion becomes the illustration of Susan Lurie's argument that a man is afraid of woman because she is not castrated, "not mutilated like a man might be if he were castrated; woman is physically whole, intact and in possession of all her sexual powers."254 The Dog-Woman's acceptance of the intimate parts of her body proves that she cannot be interpreted as a castrated being, jealous of the male organ. In fact, she situates herself in a superior position to man since she is not tormented by castration anxiety, having "nothing to be bitten off" and does not experience any lack ("It seemed all in proportion to me"255). An orange emerges also in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit growing an an orange tree in a "secret garden" to signify female eroticism. Another fruit full of erotic connotations is a fig. In ancient Greece it was a symbol of fertility and physical love, and generally it symbolizes female sexual organs, and in some places homosexuals. In The PowerBook Afi compares her lover or her lover's intimate parts to figs after she eats her out: "I kissed her breasts and her belly. I kissed her lower than her belly and was pleased with the ripples of pleasure I found there. She was dainty and sweet, a dish of figs in fine weather."256 This comparison is consistent with D.H. Lawrence's one in the poem Figs in which he calls a fig an explicitly naked "fruit of the female mystery, covert and inward." A fig is considered a symbol of oral sex by the authors of Three in Love. Mbiages ci Trois from Ancient to Modern Times, in whose opinion it was the fruit eaten by Adam and Eve257 who also, needless to say, used fig leaves to cover their intimate parts. The description of eating an olive, where Louise is compared to an olive tree with pungent fruit, seems to be an act of oral sex too: "It is my joy to get at the stone of her. The little stone of her hard by the tongue. Her thick-fleshed salt251 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 107. 252 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 107. 253 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 107. 254 After Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 6. 255 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 107. 256 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 20. 257 Barbara Foster, Michael Foster and Letha Hadady, Milosc we troje. Mblages d Trois od starojytnaki po czasy wspölczesne [Three in Love. Magnes ä Trois from Ancient to Modern Times], trans. ElZbieta Abramowicz, Agnieszka Smith (Warszawa: Jacek Santorski&CO Wydawnictwo, 1997), p. 51.

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veined swaddle stone. Who eats an olive without first puncturing the swaddle? The waited moment when the teeth shoot a strong burst of clear juice."258 The depiction is reminiscent of Mary Fallon's Working Hot where a woman is figured as "a split fruit" and the lovers are not "afraid to sink [their] teeth into the peach" when they collaborate "on a book called The Pleasures of the Flesh Made Simple."259 Both olives, peaches and stones emerge as what Paulina Benett terms "clitoral imagery"26° to take part in the palpable enactment of eroticism. An apple can be qualified as a sexy fruit, too. In Art&Lies Picasso, looking at a stranger sleeping on the train, contemplates his Adam apple which "warned them both that he and other men had been vulnerable before" and wonders if he is interested in a new erotic relationship, "If she stretched out her hand to offer him fruit would he take it?"261 She Imagines them standing in the garden under the tree, herself holding an apple, and him thinking about snakes. Years before, the same man, Handel, rejects the apple from the hand of his friend whom he invites to stay with him over Christmas at his parents' house. They go together to collect some mistletoe and a short erotic scene ensues under the tree: the girl kisses him and puts his "chilled hands through on to her breasts."262 Yet, later in the same evening, Handel turns away from the girl waiting for him naked in bed, although he has fallen in love with her. He becomes thus the endorsement of Kristeva's claim that a man desires woman, nevertheless, he "raust protect himself from that sinful food that consumes him and that he craves."263 Haunted by the memory of his childhood lover, the Cardinal, Handel decides to continue in celibate. Apples appear also in the garden of Hesperides in Weight, Winterson's reworking of the myth of Atlas and Heracles. Ordinary apple trees are adjoined by one with golden apples, "sweet-scented and heavy,"264 with the serpent Ladon sent by Hera to guard it. The basket of fruit can be joined by plums "the colour of bruises,"265 cherries "like Garbo kisses"266 and pomegranate. Looking at Louise's red hair with squinted eyes, her lover reflects: "I felt like a seed in pomegranate. Some say that the pomegranate was the real apple of Eve, fruit of the womb, I would eat my way into perdition to taste you."267 Fruit being particularly sensual food, usually sweet, they point to similar 258 Winterson, Written on the Body, p. 137. 259 After Grosz, "Refiguring Lesbian Desire," p. 80. 260 After Zimmerman, "What Has Never Been," p. 85. 261 Winterson, Art&Lies, p. 81. 262 Winterson, Art&Lies, p. 111. 263 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 127. 264 Jeanette Winterson, Weight (Edinburgh, NY, Melbourne: Canongate, 2005), p. 18. 265 Winterson, Written on the Body, p. 17. 266 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 55. 267 Winterson, Written on the Body, p. 91.

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qualities of the relationship: "Our private grove is heavy with fruit."268 The union is fruitful; it is "love's fruition" and, as Barthes proposes, "with its initial fricative and shifting vowels before the mourning final syllable, the word increases the delight it speaks of by an oral pleasure; saying it, I enjoy this union in my mouth."269 The union is relished in the mouth also when the Invitation, "Eat of me and let me be sweet"27° occurs. The sweetness is emphasized by the image of honey, which, in Fromm's symbolism, signifies the sweetness of life.271 Louise's lover finds her breasts sweet like honey: "Your skin tastes salty and slightly citrus. When I run my tongue in a long wet line across your breasts I can feel the tiny hairs, the puckering of the aureole, the cone of your nipple. Your breasts are beehives pouring honey."272 Eating artichoke, though it is a vegetable, can be sexy too as it entails the ritual process of stripping it. Whether a person likes it or not can determine what kind of a lover they are. Those who like artichoke can most probably relish making love: The artichoke arrived and I began to peel it away, fold by fold, layer by layer, dipping it. There is no secret about eating artichoke, or what the act resembles. Nothing else gives itself up so satisfyingly towards its centre. Nothing else promises and rewards. The tiny hairs are part of the pleasure. What should I have eaten? Beetroot, I suppose. A friend once warned me never to consider taking as a lover anyone who disliked either artichokes or champagne. That was good advice, but better advice might have been never to order artichokes or champagne with someone who should not be your lover.273

The moment when the abstract desire becomes sexual is kissing, considered the exchange of lovers' souls. Kissing is the occasion to taste somebody's mouth that usually appears `sweet': "You kissed me and I tasted the relish of your skin," "my mouth was full of Louise," "She kissed me and in her kiss lay the complexity of passion. ... her taste was fresh an my mouth."274 The lovers also taste each other through biting: "I grew bolder and kissed her mouth, biting a little at the lower lip,"275 "The moulds of your teeth are easy to see under my shirt,"276 "We kissed often, our mouth filling up with tongue and teeth and spit and blood when I bit her lower lip."277 Winterson renders a kiss "a red ball of desire,"278 which is 268 Winterson, Written an the Body, p. 137. 269 Barthes, A Lover's Discourse, p. 226. 270 Winterson, Written an the Body, p. 20. 271 Fromm, 0 sztuce milosci, p. 58. 272 Winterson, Written an the Body, p. 123. 273 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 49. 274 Winterson, Written an the Body, pp. 51, 41, 81-82. 275 Winterson, The Passion, p. 67. 276 Winterson, Written an the Body, p. 118. 277 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 54.

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convergent with Nicole Brossard's depiction of a kiss in French Kiss, or A Pang's Progress: "The kiss, a ball of fire."279 But to take the deepest sweetness from kissing, one must know the art of kissing. The Passion teaches that the best way is to focus on the lips, like Venetian acrobats who swinging "snatch a kiss from whoever is standing below." Such kisses "fill the mouth and leave the body free. To kiss well one must kiss solely. No groping hands or stammering hearts. The lips and the lips alone are the pleasure. Passion is sweeter split strand by strand. Divided and re-divided like mercury then gathered up only at the last moment."28° As French kissing is regarded as a euphemistical metaphor for a sexual act, in The Passion it becomes the replacement for making love as this is what the married woman refuses to do: And so, from the first, we separated our pleasure. She lay on the rug and 1 lay at right angles to her so that only our lips might meet. Kissing in this way is the strangest of distractions. The greedy body that clamours for satisfaction is forced to content itself with a single sensation and, just as the blind hear more acutely and the deaf can feel the grass grow, so the mouth becomes the focus of love and all things pass through it and are re-defined. It is a sweet and precise torture.281

The erotic tension relies thus on establishing boundaries and wielding power over the lover through rationing and savouring pleasure, like a gourmet; simmering the excitement but never satisfying it, never letting it burn out. Teasing the lover's appetite is another way of gambling, and the Queen of spades' house becomes the counterpart of the casino. In Winterson the outcome of consumption/consummation is not only communion of bodies but also of blood as lovers become communicating vessels. Blood is the symbol of life, and love is compared to a wound here: "To vow yourself to someone is to open a wound. From it blood flows freely, life of you to them. ... The vow of me to you and you to me is a red vulnerability on a grey shuttered world. We risk ourselves for each other, take the impossible step. ... We transfused each other."282 Although a wound is for Barbara Creed a sign of abjection in that it "violates the skin which forms a border between the inside and outside of the body,"283 in Gut Symmetries blood, like saliva mentioned before, is not abject. Loving, one accepts the abject parts of the partner's body.284 The 278 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 47. 279 Nicole Brossard, "French Kiss, or A Pang's Progress," in: Erotica, ed. Reynolds, p. 276. 280 Winterson, The Passion, p. 59. 281 Winterson, The Passion, p. 67. 282 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 37. 283 Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine, p. 82. 284 Other Winterson's books share this opinion, e. g. "There is nothing distasteful about you to me; not sweat nor grime, not disease and its dull markings. Put your foot in my lap and 1 will cut your nails and ease the tightness of a long day" (Writtan on the Body, p. 124.).

's the cliches that cause die trouble' — Looking for the Language of Rapture 91 vulnerability indicates that a person in love is as sore, sensitive and exposed as a wound — it is easy to get hurt. Kathy Acker calls it in The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec by Henri Toulouse Lautrec "being out of control and not knowing it. Being in total danger and believing that you're safer than you've ever been in your life, you're inside and so you can open yourself and make yourself raw to the other person."285 In Wittig, like in Winterson, the lovers spill into each other and mingle; they share blood and body: "I spill m/yself into you, you mingle with m/e ... I feel our intestines uncoiling gliding among themselves ... the outflow of the mingled blood is not perceptible."286 This declaration in Winterson corresponds to guts bound together: "Impossible that she should be dead. My gut was still connected to her."287 Absorbed into each other, the Wintersonian partners become twins: "We had four arms and four legs, and in the afternoons, when we read in the cool orchard, we did so sitting back to back,"288 "What we were we were in equal parts, souls to one another."289 However, when the partner is betrayed, the blood vessel is broken: Here is the knife that kills me in your hand. ... Now you want me to bleed to death.... My fingers were sticky. Hate. Anger. Pain. The words would not fall. I was bleeding words. I went into the bathroom to try to wash them away but when I drew back my hand from the clear cold water, the words welled up again, red and liquid, danger words, broken words, the cracked vessel of my love for him.29°

The broken vessel is the counterpart of the broken heart here. The abandoned partner becomes an open wound. Hurt with her husband's words, she tries to forget them effacing them like lady Macbeth. Nonetheless, they keep coming back together with broken promises and perhaps with words of their private language, now useless, "bleeding." Blood becomes abject; it is something she wants to get rid of since it has turned into the Symbol of death — death of love. In The Passion the desire to be oneness with the partner, in body and blood, leads to the desire to take control of the lover, which can be accomplished by possessing their heart. The Queen of spades steals Villanelle's heart when they fall in love with each other. In consequence, Villanelle loses her sense of seif control, and is overwhelmed by pain; she spends weeks "in a hectic stupor,"291 an the verge of sanity, working all the time, not thinking, not remembering to eat or sleep. She 285 Kathy Acker, "The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec by Henri Toulouse Lautrec," Erotica, ed. Reynolds, p. 296. 286 Wittig, The Lesbian Body, pp. 51-52. 287 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 198. 288 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 54. 289 Winterson,"The Poetics of Sex," p. 41. 290 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, pp. 37, 32. 291 Winterson, The Passion, p. 62

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experiences the Split of identity: "I looked at my palms trying to see the other life, the parallel life. The point at which my selves broke away and one married a fat man and the other stayed here, in this elegant house to eat dinner night after night from an oval table."292 Nonetheless, she 'loses her heart' not only figurativelly, but also literally, therefore she begs Henri to collect it for her from her lover's house when he is absent. Henri does not treat her request seriously, endorsing Barthes's claim that the heart, being the organ of desire, is located "within the domain of the Imagerepertoire."293 Walking through the house, however, he hears a sound similar to the heartbeat: It was low down, concealed. On my A regular steady noise, like a heartbeat. hands and knees I crawled under one of the clothes rails and found a silk shift wrapped round an indigo jar. The jar was throbbing. I did not dare to unstopper it. I did not dare to check this valuable, fabulous thing and I carried it, still in the shift, down the last two floors and out into the empty night.'-94

When delivered the jar, Villanelle makes Henri turn away, and he can hear her uncork the dish and a sound like gas escaping: "Then she began to make terrible swallowing and choaking noises and only my fear kept me sitting at the other end of the boat, perhaps hearing her die. There was quiet. She touched my back and when I turned round took my hand again and placed it on her breast. Her heart was beating. Not possible. I tell you her heart was beating."295 Villanelle conducts the act of cannibalism on her own body, but this instance of cannibalism is different from the `usual' ones since she is not rid of any part of her body as a result, but regains it, puts it in its place by swallowing. Regaining her heart means retrieving control over her emotions. She is not consumed by passion any more; it is reason that triumphs. Therefore she brings herself to reject the Queen of spades when they meet again: No. If I smell her skin, find the mute curves of her nakedness, she will reach in her hand and withdraw my heart like a bird's egg. I have not had time to cover my heart in shellfish bamacles to elude her. If I give in to this passion, my real life, the most solid, the best known, will dissapear and I will feed on shadows again like those sad spirits whom Orpheus fled.296

She is reborn — does not feel the need to crossdress any more, and has a daughter. She is 'herseif again. 292 Winterson, The Passion, p. 144. 293 Barthes, A Lover's Discourse, p. 52. 294 Winterson, The Passion, p. 120. 295 Winterson, The Passion, pp. 120-121. 296 Winterson, The Passion, p. 146.

'ICs the clichds that cause the trouble' — Looking for the Language of Rapture 93 Learning that in the Queen's sewing room there is a tapestry picturing Villanelle, three quarters finished, she goes pale for "if the tapestry had been finished and the woman had woven in her heart she would have been a prisoner for ever."297 Her passion being contingent upon setting barriers, the Queen of spades aims at taking the whole control over her lover, appearing to be a kind of witch. She wants to turn Villanelle into a puppet, like a stuffed beast in her hall, or fish in cormorants' beaks on the map in another room. Heart becomes food in Gut Symmetries, too. In the pangs of pain caused by her husband's betrayal, Stella throws her "heart to the dogs," and comments: "Never mind. No one will notice how much is missing from the inside, will they?"298 When she is betrayed, desire for cannibal feast appears. She searches her bedroom, the place where her husband made love to his lover, for the signs of her rival: Whatever bits of hair and flesh she has left behind. 1 will find and crucible her. Give me a pot and let me turn cannibal. I will feast on her with greater delight than he. If she is his titbit then I will gourmet her. Come here and discover what it is to be spiced, racked and savoured. I will eat her slowly to make her last longer. Whatever he has done I will do. Did he eat her? Then so will I. And spit her out.299

Through the consumption of her husband's lover Stella expects to take possession of her attributes, her essence and soul, probably to discover why she has become her husband's dainty. The absorption of the body is tantamount to the absorption of its owner's personality then. However, Stella does not want to keep it, she intends to "spit her out." Some time later Stella does have a chance to discover the reason for her husband's choice. She meets the lover, Alice, in a caf6, and surprisingly to them both, Alice kisses Stella. Later they make love in Stella's house, where the longed-for subsumption takes place: "Her breasts as my breasts, her mouth as my mouth."30° Ravished with Alice, Stella examines her lover's neck with her Fingers and concludes, see why he likes you.'"301 Yet, she denies that why you're doing it?' I don't know this is the reason for her actions: what I'm doing.'"302 Finally, erotic devouring turns into literal cannibalism. Bed turns into table in Gut Symmetries, where Stella and her husband Jove drift on the sea in the damaged boat, in a scene reminescent of the castaways on the raft in Julian Barnes' s A History of the World in 101/2 Chapters. The lack of food and water, and little hope left, bring delirious ideas to Jove' s mind: 297 Winterson, The Passion, p. 121. 298 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 43. 299 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 29. 300 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 119. 301 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 119. 302 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 119.

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Chapter II His eyes and teeth were wolfish. He: There isn't anything to eat. Me: No. He: Would you like to eat me. Me: What? He: sure there are certain parts of me you wouldn't object to lopping off. Me: Stop this. He: No, seriously, what's it to be? Die with both legs, survive with one? How much of me could we eat and still say that I am alive? Arms. Legs. Slices of rump. Your grandfather was a butcher. Try me. He reached over for the curved filleting knife, gave it to me, and raised his bottom into the air.303

Stella receives this suggestion, reminescent of Little Red Riding Hood's, it with a burst of laughter, and in a moment `wolfish' Jove initiates sex for the first time since Stella started an affair with Alice. Jove is haunted by the memory of the evening when he and Alice were eating liver. Liver. I couldn't get my mind off the liver. When Stella and I frnished the last of the cheese biscuits I was salivating liver. I'm sure you know it is the largest internal organ in the body weighing between two and five pounds. When I looked at Stella what I saw was her liver.304

He falls into a dream, or "a hunger trance305 in which he is a boy fed by his mother with olives, bread and ham. The dream is pervaded by the sound of the slicer, "the swish, swish of the keen edge, through the easy pink."306 At the end of the meal Jove's mother serves liver and onions, and he wakes up smelling liver. Now it is him who, desiring Stella's flesh, slices "through the easy pink," taking advantage of her unconsciousness after banging her head: I made the cut so carefully. I made it like a surgeon not a butcher. My knife was sharp as a laser. I did it with dignity, hungry though I was. I did it so that it would not have disgusted either of us. She was my wife. I was her husband. We were one flesh. With my body I thee worship. In sickness and in health. For better or for worse. Till death us do part. I parted the flesh from the bone and I ate it. I had to do it. She was dead. She was nearly dead or I could not have done it. If I had not done it she would have died anyway. I did it because I had to. What else could I have done?307

303 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, pp. 184-185. 304 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 194. 305 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 195. 306 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 195. 307 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, pp. 195-196.

7t's the dich& that cause the trouble' — Looking for the Language of Rapture 95 He repeats the justification like a refrain. He elucidates turning his wife into meat with the argument that she had already been meat, or would have been soon. In so doing, he enacts Marquis de Sade's assertion that the weak are humiliated by the strong, used by them and turned into meat.308 Stella's lunar position, that is her state of unconsciousness, makes her weak and passive, which gives rise to Jove's phantasms about satisfying his desires.309 Through that he confirms Bataille's claim that treating a human being like an object is necessary for desire to create shape which is the most suitable for it; passivity itself poses an answer to the desire.31° The marital communion of bodies ("We were one flesh") becomes Jove's excuse to usurp the right to Stella's body. He appropriates the function of death parting his wife's flesh from her body, which is juxtaposed with death parting the spouses ("Till death us do part."). Her flesh becomes his literally: "You are what you eat."311 When Alice finds the couple eventually, she is presented with a terrible sight: Stella lies "in a Pool of blood" whereas Jove " dragged himself up out of the cabin, his upper lip and chin bearded with blood,"312 like a vampire's. Paradoxieally, through the cannibalistic act Jove awakens Stella to active participation in life and to satisfy her greedy passion: after the operation — for it appears that she is still alive — she decides to divorce her husband and stay with Alice. Marriage emerges as another kind of cannibal feast for the communion of bodies is only apparent. In fact, the woman is forced to wash her selfhood away in her husband, and her needs are marginalised or excluded. The transfusion of blood appears one-sided; the husband functions as a passive receiver, a destroyer, whilst the wife bleeds to death, still being accused of not giving enough. Jove vindicates his betrayal with Stella' s moving away from him, by which he means her refusal for her life to consist in their marriage only. Also the bride in Winterson's "Holy Matrimony" reflects bitterly: I am getting married. Spiritually speaking we shall unite as one flesh but for all practical purposes my husband will remain a cut above me. `Do you take this woman to be your lawful wedded Sunday joint? Will you roll her and bone her garnish and consume her? She has been sealed in her juices unto this perfect day. Please, sit down and eat, we are all cannibals now.'313

308 Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman. An Exercise in Cultural History (London: Virago Press, 1992), p. 136. 309 On the woman subjected to the lunar time see Maria Janion, Wampir. Biografia symboliczna (Gdatisk: slowo/obraz terytoria, 2002), p. 200. 310 After Janion, Wampir, p. 200. 311 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 193. 312 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 209. 313 Winterson, "Holy Matrimony," p. 182.

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The comparison with meat appears also in "The Poetics of Sex." The narrator colludes her lover to a bull and her body to various kinds of meat: Squat like a Sumo, ham thighs, loins of pork, beefy upper cuts and breasts of lamb. She rushes for me bull-subtle, butching at the gate as if she's come to stud. She bellows at the window, bloods the pavement with desire. ... She can smell the dirt on me and that makes her swell. That's what makes my lithe lover bulrush-thin fat me. How she fats me. She plumps me, pats me, squeezes and feeds me. Feeds me up with lust till I'm as fat as she is. We're fat for each other we sapling girls. We get thick with sex. My bull-lover makes a matador out of Ille.314

The comparison to meat, however, this time does not point to objectification of the lover but to the intensity of desire and the dynamics of erotic acts. The lovers are controlled by animal instincts and the confrontations between them become feverish and visceral, figured in terms of bullfights, eruption, overflow. They do not peck on each other but gorge, and feed each other with passion. This depiction of erotics between women gestures back at Grosz's paradigm of lesbian desire marked by delights and ardour, educing further intensities. lt also fulfills Irigaray's blueprint, envisaging female sexuality to be governed by multiplicity and abundance, and not by lack of penis:315 "Oh yes, women get erect, today my body is stiff with sex,"316 "My lover is cocked and ready to fire. She consumes me when she comes in thin white smoke smelling of saltpetre."317 Another juxtaposition of eroticism and food may be that of passion and hunger as both of them can be satisfied only temporarily. In The Passion Winterson collates desire to a leopard, revising a story from Agamemnon by Aeschylus: You might reason that you can easily feed a leopard and that your garden is big enough, but you will know in your dreams at least that no leopard is ever satisfied with what is given. After nine nights must come ten and every desperate meeting only leaves you desperate for another. There is never enough to eat, there is never enough garden for your love.318

It is impossible to tame passion; it will always remain wild and unpredictable, being on the side of nature, like a leopard is. A passionate lover is always greedy for more. Benvenuto and Kennedy elucidate the unfeasibility of satisfying desire 314 Winterson, "The Poetics of Sex," p. 31. 315 Luce Irigaray, "This Sex Which Is Not One," in: Feininisms, ed. Warhol and Herndl, p. 366. 316 Winterson, "The Poetics of Sex," pp. 38-39. 317 Winterson, Written on the Body, p. 136. 318 Winterson, The Passion, p. 62.

7t's the dich& that cause the trouble' — Looking for the Language of Rapture 97 in this way: "The basic structure of desire would follow from the law of the signifier, in that it signifies something only in relation to another signifier, so desire is always desire for another thing."319 Through the tropes of eroticized food Winterson effects the lesbian intensity Grosz describes. For her the greatest concentration of pleasure takes place at the conjunction of two surfaces, for example fingers and a breast, a mouth and food.32° Moreover, this sensuous language and imagery add up to the attempt to break out of clich6s and reappropriate language in female terms. 4. Male versus female versus personal language During his voyages Jordan meets "a number of people who, anxious to be free of the burdens of their gender, have dressed themselves men as women and women as men.„321 In other words, through cross-dressing they escape their gender and take control of their body, however illusorily. Jordan also takes this measure, which appears necessary to make enquiries among prostitutes about Fortunata. Nevertheless, the female appearance is not tantamount to being a woman — other women can detect the trick, since Jordan makes use of what Dale Spender has termed "man-made language.” Although women fall under the symbolic as well, they have formed their own "private language. A language not dependent an the constructions of men but structured by signs and expressions, and that uses ordinary words as code-words meaning something other."322 The female language has been theorized by Irigaray as marked by multiplicity and abundance; in her language a woman "sets off in all directions leaving `him' unable to discern the coherence of any meaning. Hers are contradictory words, somewhat mad from the standpoint of reason, inaudible for whoever listens to them with ready-made grids, with a fully elaborated code in hand."323 Christine Makward characterizes the female language as "open, nonlinear, unfinished, fluid, exploded, fragmented, polysemic, attempting to speak the body i.e. the unconscious, involving silence, incorporating the simultaneity of life as opposed to or clearly different from preconceived, oriented, masterly or `didactic' languages."324 Subsequently, Jordan feels as though he were a foreigner: "In my petticoats I was a traveller in a foreign country. I did not speak the language. I was regarded with suspicion."325 The appearance of a woman does not grant him im319 After Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine, p. 160. 320 Grosz, "Refiguring Lesbian Desire," p. 78. 321 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 31. 322 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 31. 323 Irigaray, "This Sex Which is Not One," p. 366. 324 After Nina Baym, "The Madwoman and Her Languages. Why I don't do ferninist literary theory," in: Feminisms, ed. Warhol and Hemdl, p. 282. 325 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 31.

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mediate access to the female world. This is because he is unable to imitate the metaphysical aspect of the aforementioned "wild zone" of women's culture as it has no equivalent male space, all the male consciousness embraced by the dominant structure and therefore formed by or available to the symbolic. Accordingly, Jordan cannot partake women's culture although he senses it: "I watched women flirting with men, pleasing men, doing business with men, and then I watched them collapsing into laughter, sharing a joke, while the men, all unknowing, felt themselves master of the situation and went off to brag in barrooms and preach from pulpits the folly of the weaker sex."326 Since, as Gerda Lerner has pointed out, women pose members of the general culture and of female culture,327 Jordan calls this conduct "conspiracy of women," and observes "how much they hate us or how deeply they pity us. They think we are children with too much pocket money."328 The woman who employs masqueraded Jordan writes "a rule book" for him, aiming at teaching him about men. Jordan is agitated to read the first page describing typical male behaviour and habits, yet, having considered himself and other men around, he cedes its reliability. Not only language, nevertheless, constitutes the discrepancies between genders but also worldview and nonverbal communicative behaviour. As regards outlook, Carol Gilligan, maintaining a psychological perspective, argues that female identity gyrates around relationships and interconnectedness, while the male one emphasizes independence and separation.329 The worldview, that is the culture's attitude towards such concepts as humanity, God, universe, nature and other philosophical notions connected with the issue of being,33° impacts the usage of language and the choice of conversational styles. Women regard verbal communication as the essence of a relationship, whereas men utilize talk to reinforce status, exercise control and uphold independence.331 This is exemplified in Winterson's short story "Lives of Saints" where after the woman's affair her husband enquires whether she intends to leave him or stay, and being replied that she is staying, he teils her not to mention `this' again. In this way he attempts to command the situation and reestablish bis power in the marriage. She indeed does not mention this, neither anything else. Her refusal to

326 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, pp. 31-32. 327 After Showalter, "Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness," p. 322. 328 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 32. 329 After Diana K. Ivy and Phil Backlund, Exploring Gender Speak: Personal Effectiveness in Gender Communication (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994), p. 57. 330 Richard Porter and Larry Samovar, "Approaching Intercultural Communication," in: Intercultural Communication: A Reader, ed. Richard Porter and Lan-y Samovar (Belmont CA: Wadsworth, 1985), p. 26. 331 Julia T. Wood, Gendered Lives: Communication, Gender and Culture (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1994), pp. 141-143.

7t 's die clichds that cause the trouble' — Looking for the Language of Rapture 99 speak poses the refusal to continue the relationship. If her husband does not wish to discuss her feelings and what has been wrong in their marriage, the woman does not see any point in talking at all. Language, worldview and nonverbal communication are identified as constituents of intercultural communication. Given that those signifiers differ between the genders, gender communication can be perceived as a form of intercultural communication. Jordan's experience demonstrates that men do not realize this phenomenon, "all unknowing," imagining to be "master[s] of the situation" and usurping the right to preach about the other sex. The consequent lack of understanding is demonstrated for instance in Oranges when Jeanette is told that men are pigs, and the literal understanding of the sentence evokes confusion in the girl who has not been acquainted with female "code words." For Stella in Gut Symmetries, like for many women, sex ensues from emotional engagement, but for Jove it signifies mere pleasure, therefore after the betrayal he claims that his feelings for her have remained unaltered. For Stella love entails monogamy; she admits she desires other men but does not sleep with them because she loves her husband. Yet, Jove dismisses her claims with "Men and women are different,"332 as though expecting that that statement elucidates and justifies everything. Apart from the difficulties in understanding between genders, Winterson accentuates the strenuousness of understanding between individuals, no matter of what gender. Communication theorists agree that language is subjective, valueladen; communication makes claims and takes stances. Each person's idiolect is tinted with the personal worldview, beliefs, experiences and thoughts: "Common and rare, to sit face to face like this. Common that people do, rare that they understand each other. Each speaks a private language and assumes it to be the lingua franca."333 As the dialogue becomes the confrontation of irreducible othernesses, communication becomes a strenuous process. Ambiguity and equivocation cannot be evaded. Alice realizes: "I cannot assume you will understand me. It is just as likely that as I invent what I want to say, you will invent what you want to hear."334 Winterson's protagonists, nevertheless, take up the difficulty in an attempt to build the bridge: I go an puzzling over new joints for words, hoping that this time, one pace will slide smooth against the next. 1 wanted her to understand me. I wanted to find a word, even one, that would have the same meaning for each of us. A word not bound and sealed in dictionaries of our own.335

332 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 33. 333 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 163. 334 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 24. 335 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, pp. 24, 163-164.

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They take the effort since they believe that in spite of all the subjectivity and bias, communication is feasible and worth while. At times, moments of perfect understanding occur: "Sometimes words dock and there is a cheer at port and cargo to unload and such relief that the voyage was worth it. `You understand me then?-336 Love poses another form of communication and a chance for being understood. Yet, Winterson advocates that the perfect union of two persons, constituting dissimilar worlds, is as implausible as meeting an extraterrestrial being, yet, she does not dismiss making attempts at communication as futile: "Some story we must have. Stray words an crumpled paper. A weak signal into the outer space of each other. The probability of separate worlds meeting is very small. The Jure of it is immense. We send starships. We fall in love."337 If there is a lingua franca in Winterson, it is certainly eroticism.

336 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 163. 337 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 25.

Chapter III: 'Take off your clothes. Take off your body.' — Erotic Configurations and the World of Collapsed Binaries You play, you win. You play, you lose. You play. /Jeanette Winterson: The Passion)

With a view to freeing her characters of the yokes of gender, Winterson deconstructs their gender and makes them contravene boundaries. Frustrating the choice between the dichotomies, Winterson conjoins them instead, which takes an the shape of androgyny and bisexuality. On the other hand, she dismisses difference in favour of sameness, which is articulated in lesbianism and distinctly lesbian discourse of desire. Some of the characters function in erotic triangles, however, this offers a temporary solution, ultimately superseded by either a lesbian or heterosexual trajectory. Still, the triangles pose an attempt at exploding the binaries. 1. Androgyny Winterson's androgynous characters encompass both people and cities. One of the cities is Venice in The Passion enacted as a feminine uncanny city liberated from any rules of fixity. The borders of binary oppositions are incessantly infringed upon here so as to create an abject mixture,1 echoing Thomas Mann's Death in Venice and Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. Dissolution of boundaries is also characteristic of the floating city in Winterson's Sexing the Cherry, in which the buildings have no floors (displaying similarity to the city of Armilla in Calvino's Invisible Cities) as gravity has deserted the place. The city of Venice demonstrates its two faces. The first one is the visible mercurial maze of canals, demarcated by the sea and penetrated by water. The London Spitalfields in The PowerBook match this portrayal as an amphibious maze of streets where "[t]he noise of the river is nearby, but the water itself is unseen. It is as though the water is everywhere and nowhere, perhaps under the streets, perhaps inside the houses, with their watery windows where the old glass reflects the light."2 Venice, the "living city" abundant in surprises, is impossible to be learnt as things change here, developing into other things, therefore "your bloodhound nose will not serve you here. Your course in compass reading will fail you. Your confident instructions to passers-by will send them to squares they have never heard of, over canals not listed in the notes."3 The same happens in the city 1 Seaboyer, "Second Death in Venice," p. 484. 2 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 165. 3 Winterson, The Passion, p. 49.

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which Jordan in Sexing the Cherry visits during one of his voyages — its buildings "are never in the same place from one day to the next,"4 which is the embodiment of the inhabitants' longing to be attached to one place and to abandon it. The gallery of odd places is completed by Silver's house in Salts in Lighthousekeeping. The slanted house, where the chairs are nailed to the floor and only food that sticks to the plate must be eaten, is cut into a steep slope and assaults any mies of fixity. The inhabitants of Venice yield to pleasure, losing themselves in a continuous ete and displaying propensity to games of chance. They are passionate people, "conversant with the nature of greed and desire, holding hands with the Devil and God,"5 not afraid to take risks, therefore Venice constitutes "an enchanted island for the mad, the rich, the bored, the perverted."6 In this dimension Venice is similar to Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria which represents, among others, the fever of sexual freedom, rich in "variety and profusion," where "[t]he symbolic lovers of free Hellenic world are replaced [...] by something different, something androgynous, inverted upon itself';7 Alexandria whose temperament is demonstrated in the characters' thoughts and actions. Wintersonian Venice appears "the city of disguises" as well as its dwellers: "There are women of every kind and not all of them are women."8 Also Aschenbach in Death in Venice submits to the charm of the city of masquerade and puts on a mask of make-up which is supposed to rejuvenate him. The negative portrayal of Italians in Death in Venice enhances the image of the city as a place of deceit, artifice and moral decay. Eros is juxtaposed with Thanatos here; carnival with death, signalled by funeral gondolas sailing under the cover of the night to the cemetery. The other face of Venice is "the city within the city," "the inner city"9 known only by boatmen. It constitutes a fluctuation of meanings and border transgressions forming a labyrinth, a rheumy space of lability and peril that represents psychic inward journey.I9 The journey aims at discovering one's identity through interior exploration "along the blood vessels" and coming "to the cities of the interior"" which are not marked on any map. Both faces of Venice, defined by water and penetrated by it, contribute to a metacity which is a ground for ambivalence coded in the female body and theories of urbanity, and which

4 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 42. 5 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 57. 6 Winterson, Sexing die Cherry, p. 52. 7 Lawrence Durrell, Alexandria Quartet. Justine (New York: Pocket Books, 1961), p. 4. 8 Winterson, The Passion, pp. 56, 58. 9 Winterson, The Passion, p. 53. 10 Seaboyer, "Second Death in Venice," p. 485. 11 Winterson, The Passion, p. 68.

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becomes the mirror for the reformulations of gender, human violence12 and identity. The flux of the androgynous city reverberates in the protagonist, Villanelle, her name alluding to an elaborate poetic form characterized by regular repetition of lines, like Villanelle's stories interwoven in her narrative, or like mazes in the city. Her body crosses over the boundaries of binary opposites, too, her identity being fickle for it is a conflation of a man and a woman, a human and animal, and the double identification is encoded in her body and sexual orientation. She is endowed with webbed feet, a feature characteristic of boatmen, thanks to which they can walk on water. The masculine feet constitute "a kind of cultural fantasy, a phallic signifier of secret power"13 which must never be disclosed so as not to challenge the epistemic order. But her feet are also bird-like: "She unfolds them like a fan and folds them in on themselves in the same way."14 In her birdlikeness she resembles Fevvers in Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus, a woman with no navel, hatched from an egg and possessing wings. Villanelle's body is as amphibious as Venice's. Even though on the girl's birth the midwife endeavours to remove her double gender encoding through the incision on the tissue between her toes, and thus inscribe other cultural values onto her body, the keife springs "from the skin leaving no mark."15 Winterson adumbrates here, unlike in Oranges and Sexing the Cherry, that such cultural impositions pose a contravention of nature, which invites the reading of the natural imprint on Villanelle's body as an inclination to survey manifold and fragmented tales of identity.16 Since a girl is not welcome in many professions, and Villanelle cannot perform her dreamt job of a boatwoman because of her sex, she cross-dresses to work in the Casino, gaining thus the power to choose gender. The appearance of a boy is required there but the foreign pleasure-seekers do not identify it with the male sex as they realize the arbitrariness between clothes and sexuality: "It was part of the game, trying to decide which sex was hidden behind tight breeches and extravagant face-paste."17 Through the disguise Villanelle destabilizes the consistency of sex, gender and coherent seif: "what was myself? Was this breeches and boots self any less real than my garters? What was it about me that interested her? You play you win. You play you lose. You play."18 Yet, the feet reduce the gender masquerade merely to a game — Villanelle pretends that she is a man but in fact she is a hermaphrodite and thus she can choose to be either a man or a woman

12 Seaboyer, "Second Death in Venice," p. 485. 13 Seaboyer, "Second Death in Venice," p. 501. 14 Winterson, The Passion, p. 136. 15 Winterson, The Passion, p. 52. 16 Doan, "Jeanette Winterson's Sexing the Postmodern," p. 149. 17 Winterson, The Passion, p. 54. 18 Winterson, The Passion, pp. 65-66.

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in the eyes of the world19 that demands the order of one sex at a time and receives the undifferentiated with the mixture of horror and fascination, as Bataille and Kristeva argue.2° Disturbing "identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite" that combines both polarized notions,21 a hermaphrodite would be treated as abject. The gender play becomes thereby Villanelle's hiding-place since the revelation of her masculine feature would result in a more radical disturbance of gender boundaries.22 It is at the Casino where Villanelle meets a woman in a mask and falls in love with her. The Queen of spades takes her for a man, which causes Villanelle's anxiety: "She thought I was a young man. I was not. Should I go to see her as myself and joke about the mistake and leave gracefully? My heart shrivelled at this thought. To lose her again so soon."23 Yet, the risk-taking and fear of discovery and possible loss become the source of Villanelle's erotic tension, and her passion is partly contingent upon them since, as Jean Baudrillard posits, it is the play of veils that eradicates the body by means of which seduction takes place:24 "Every game threatens a wild card. The unpredictable, the out of control. Even with a steady hand and a crystal ball we couldn't rule the would the way we wanted it. There are storms at sea and there are other storms inland. Only the convent windows look serenely out on both."25 Fear of revelation results in the passion for Villanelle kisses the Queen to divert her attention from the disguise. The fear vanishes when the Queen has guessed Villanelle's gender, and what follows is not rejection but sex: "I went back to her house and banged on the door. She opened it a little. She looked surprised. 'I'm a woman,' I said, lifting up my shirt and risking the catarrh. She smiled. 'I know.' I didn't go home. I stayed."26 The Queen's passion depends thus on gender ambiguity entailing the pleasure of the viewer that leads to decoding, but also on constructing barriers and wielding power over her lover:27 "Does she do this often? Does she walk the streets, when her husband goes away, looking for someone like me? ... Does she invite them to supper and hold them with her eyes and explain, a little sadly, that she can't make love? Perhaps this is her passion. Passion out of passion obstacles."28 Villanelle's need for

19 Allen, "Jeanette Winterson. The Erotics of Risk," p. 55. 20 After Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine, p. 10. 21 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 4. 22 Allen, "Jeanette Winterson. The Erotics of Risk," p. 55. 23 Winterson, The Passion, p. 65. 24 Jean Baudrillard, Seduction, trans. Brian Singer (Montreal: New World Perspectives, 2001), p. 33. 25 Winterson, The Passion, p. 71. 26 Winterson, The Passion, p. 71. 27 Allen, "Jeanette Winterson. The Erotics of Risk," pp. 56-57. 28 Winterson, The Passion, p. 71.

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the unpredictable and the Queen's need for control are satisfied by the doubly taboo affair — homosexual and extramarital. Although the Queen of spades seems to reciprocate Villanelle's passion, she does not resign from her marriage and, subsequently, Villanelle undertakes a desperate step of getting married to a man she disgusts and despises. She takes advantage of his fortune to travel round the world, and in return she is expected to carry on dressing as a boy for her husband's sexual pleasure. However, after some time she returns to the matemal city for, like all Venetians, she has a Siamese soul — she and the city are part of each other and reflected in each other. Villanelle's mutability of disguises corresponds with the city's; her identity is as incoherent and fluent as Venice's. As "the inner city" seems to stand for the soul, the heart, the identity whose "geography is uncertain,"29 it cannot be discovered by means of any guiding principles. The instructions and maps of the city will lead one astray, as well as the stereotypical determinants of identity, such as appearance, sex, or sexual orientation. Contradicting them, Winterson shows that one cannot determine a person's identity on the basis of them. Deconstructing gender proves that the person's identity does not change. Winterson's notion of the signifiers of identity seems congruent with Woolf s one in Orlando since "[t]he change of [Orlando's] sex did nothing whatever to alter their identity,"3° whereas Angela Carter in The Passion of New Eve declares just the opposite. For her sex is an essential determinant of identity, therefore Evelyn changed into a woman feels trapped in a strange body: "When I looked in the mirror I saw Eve; I did not see myself. I saw a young woman who, though she was I, I could in no way acknowledge as myself."31 Venice is also the city visited in Art&Lies by Aschenbach's incarnation, seventy-year-old Cardinal and his ten-year-old lover, Handel, who give in to "purposeful pleasure."32 Winterson depicts love surpassing the restrictions of age and touches upon the controversial subject of children's sexuality. Demonstrating children's eroticism and the Cardinal's pedophiliac preferences in no derogatory light aligns her with films directed by Todd Solondz. The objective of the couple's holiday is to submit Handel to the Operation of being transformed into "a boy woman" through "a small but decisive incision," making him a perfect Person, just like Madonna "who needed no man to make her complete," or Adam who became the male mother, or God: "Male and Female he created Them. And in His image."33 Handel and the Cardinal deem the operation as the act of putting

29 Winterson, The Passion, p. 68. 30 Virginia Woolf, Orlando (London: Bloomsbury Classics, 1993), p. 96. 31 Angela Carter, The Passion of New Eve (London: Virago, 1982), pp. 74-75. 32 Winterson, Art&Lies, p. 199. 33 Winterson, Art&Lies, pp. 194, 197, 198.

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a woman "back into man" and "Meturn[ing] to a man his femininity,"34 making him an original Platonic androgyne. It also takes place when Marlene in Boating for Beginners undergoes the Operation of changing sex from male to female, yet, on second thoughts, she wants her penis back, keeping the breasts. Another strategy is castrating men. The Cardinal recollects the castrato, Cardinal Borghese's favourite, working as a prima donna in Rome, whom the whole town found very appealing and tempting. He was thereby a kind of drag queen, a phenomenon which Butler construes as an allegory of heterosexual melancholy over the loss of same-sex object of love, which must not be revealed or mourned in any other way accepted by the society: "It was obvious that he hoped to inspire the love of those who liked him as a man, and probably would not have done so as a woman."35 Various forms of drag then, including cross-dressing, Butler explains, fully overthrow "the distinction between inner and outer psychic space and effectively mock[] both the expressive model of gender and the notion of a true gender identity." The possibility of imitating gender exposes it as imitative itself.36 Cross-dressing appears to be a form of getting rid of the tension connected with keeping the social order; a kind of acceptable escape from the social role, which brings catharsis. Yet, it is also enticing as the speil drag queens cast originates from sexual vacillation, as Baudrillard elucidates in Seduction. They love the game of signs and attempt "to seduce the signs themselves," and sex in their case is a total, gestural, voluptuous and ritual game in which they turn everything into theatre and seduction. Moreover, it is easier for a non-woman to deploy the signs and "take seduction to the limit; and to engender fascination because of being more seductive than sexual.37 This sort of escape, entailing crossing the boundaries, is approved of particularly in Venice as here, "What you are one day will not constrain you on the next. You may explore yourself freely, and if you have wit or wealth, no one will stand in your way."38 Here the characters in Death in Venice, The Passion and Art&Lies indulge in their repressed desires and surrender to their passionate drives, fluctuating from one sexual incarnation to another. A musical score of Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier closing Art&Lies indicates those fluctuations since opera is read as a symbol of queer art. It is also an escape from the social role that forces Ali in The PowerBook to cross-dress as a boy. She is accustomed to it, living in disguise all her life, for another daughter would be a burden to her parents: "By the mystic laws of gender and economics, it ruins a peasant to place half of bowl of figs in front of his daughter, while his son may gorge on the whole tree, burn it for firewood and piss

34 Winterson, Art&Lies, pp. 195-196. 35 Winterson, Art&Lies, p. 195. 36 Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 137. 37 Baudrillard, Seduction, pp. 12-13. 38 Winterson, The Passion, p. 150.

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on the stump, and still be reckoned a blessing to his father."39 Living in the patriarchal society, in which a human being is estimated on the basis of their body, and thus forced to cross-dress, Ali dissociates herself from her body: "But what if my body is the disguise? What if skin, bone, liver, veins, are the things I use to hide myself? I have put them on and I can't take them off. Does that trap me or free me?"49 She does not feel her body to be the integral part of her self, and to determine her identity since her body is not the expression of her personality, but adjusted to the society's expectations. The detachment from the body, according to Ellyn Kaschack, results from the ambivalent sense of identity. The female corporeality is a construct which is supposed to be and not to be experienced at the same time. In consequence, a woman splits into parts and a range of identities emerges instead of one. Yet, none of them is the real one. The disintegration reveals the woman's invisibility — she cannot be hurt as her oppressor does not know where she is.4I In this sense Ali can read her body as both a trap and freedom. It appears a kind of disguise — disguises can change but the identity stays the same, just like in case of Orlando whose male body changes into the female one but whose seif remains unaltered. When Ali is entrusted with the clandestine mission of delivering tulip bulbs to Holland, she conceals "a priceless pair of bulbs" of Lover's Dream and Key of Pleasure species in "the same place as a priceless pair of balls"42 with an embalmed stem in the middle to divert suspicions. In this way she becomes a man "by means of a little horticultural grafting."43 Sold by the pirates, Ali is assigned to be the Princess's sex teacher before she gets married. As the Princess has never seen a naked man before, she is easily deceived by the tulip organs. However, while the Princess caresses the tulip, Ali's "sensations grew exquisite" and, to her astonishment, she "fett [her] disguise come to life. The tulip began to stand."44 She appears not only drag then, but also androgynous. The androgynous Ali, referred to as or `she', as well as Villanelle, both making up stories, can be said to fulfill Virginia Woolf s plea for artists to have androgynous minds in which the feminine and the masculine elements exist in equilibrium. The division between female and male is for Woolf artificial and impoverishing. As a matter of fact, she supports the thesis that nobody has a stable sexual identity: "Different though the sexes are, they intermix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness."45 Her conviction that everyone is 39 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 10. 40 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 15. 41 Kaschack, Nowa psychologia kobiety, pp. 96, 181. 42 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 15. 43 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 12. 44 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 22. 45 Virginia Woolf, Orlando, pp. 133-134.

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in a way transgendered was probably influenced by Edward Carpenter's celebration of a `third' or Intermediate Sex', able to attain a sort of androgynous transgression of the constraints of heterosexuality.46 Also Cixous claims that the presence in the artist of "an abundance of the other, of the diverse" is necessary to create. Conceding the component of the other sex enriches the artist and makes them complex, strong, mobile and open beings who do not allow the sexual repression to make them "coded mannequins."47 Showalter, an the other hand, interprets Woolf' s concept of androgyny presented in A Room of One's Own as a kind of escapism "from the confrontation with femaleness or maleness."48 However, even if cross-dressing appears successful, it constitutes the cancellation of one sex in favour of the other. After inceptive catharsis, arising from the relief from enforced constraints, it probably leads to the necessity of accepting the burdens of the other sex, and turns into another kind of self-discipline, necessitated by doing gender'. The PowerBook proffers also another manner to get liberated from the burden of one's body: to take advantage of an e-writer's service who writes stories according to the client's wishes. The client enters the story following the writer's instructions: "Undress. Take off your clothes. Take off your body. Hang them up behind the door. Tonight we can go deeper than disguise."49 Angela Carter's character in The Tiger's Bride also `takes off her body, disclosing an animal: "'He will lick the skin off me!' And each stroke of his tongue ripped off skin after successive skin, all the skins of a life in the world, and left behind a nascent patina of shiny hairs."5° `Taking off' the body, like in Winterson, means here setting free of the social construct of the character' s person, and discovering alternative models of gender and sexuality. Similarly, in Wittig's The Lesbian Body ripping "off m/y skin with the claws of your paws"51 articulates the reappropriation of the discourse of desire. The body becomes abject then — it is something the protagonists long to get rid of, together with the set of rules it has to obey. Yet, enjoying "the freedom to be somebody else,"52 the e-writer's client runs the risk of leaving the story with an altered self since the whole `game' can get out of control and continue an its own. This is precisely what happens in The

46 Sandra M. Gilbert, "Introduction," in: Virginia Woolf, Orlando (London: Penguin Books, 1995), p. xvii. 47 Helene Cixous, "Sorties" in: Modern Criticism and Themy, ed. Lodge and Woods, p. 269. 48 Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Wonnen Novelists from Bronffi to Lessing (Princetown, New York: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. 289. 49 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 4. 50 Angela Carter, Burning Your Boats. Collected Short Stories (London: Chatto&Windus, 1995), p. 169. 51 Wittig, The Lesbian Body, p. 22. 52 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 4.

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PowerBook, despite the initial feeling of being able to subjugate it: "I can change the story. I am the story."53 In Sexing the Cherry crossing over gender manifests itself through grafting. Tampering with a plant and fusing it "into a harder member of its strain, and so the two take advantage of each other" results in creating "a third kind, without seed or parent"54 which displays a few advantages over the plants conceived in the natural way. The practice is disapproved by the church that dismisses it, like homosexualism, as unnatural, and by the Dog-Woman who deems the cherry as a monster and supports the opinion that the nature should not be manipulated with: "such things had no gender and were a confusion to themselves. `Let the world mate of its own accord.'"55 Her view is convergent with that expressed in "The Mower Against Gardens," a poem by Andrew Marvell. Declaring that "the cherry grew, and we have sexed it and it is female,"56 Jordan points to gender as the imposition and social construct, in Maria DiBattista's words, "not a fact, but a space in the psychic life, a hole or lapsus in identity onto which are projected the imagoes, archetypes, or stereotypes comprehended in terms male and female,"57 and to the culture's attachment to fossilized restrictions and binaries, as the process of creating the third sex proves the initial binarism to be redundant, rather than the culture's flexibility to examine better gender options.58 A cherry, a symbol of virginity and hymen, becomes thus seif-sufficient, similarly to aforementioned Adam and Madonna, and hints at a feasibility of plural scenarios of sexuality. Learning "the art of grafting," Jordan would like to exert it to himself for he discovers polyphony within himself: pursuing the female mode of travelling and exhibiting female features, he fantasizes about a homosexual union with Tradescant: "to have some of Tradescant grafted an to me so that I could be a hero like him."59 Declining to choose between binary opposites, Winterson brings the traditional dichotomies of mind/body, heart/mind, other/self, humanity/divinity, masculine/feminine, heterosexuality/homosexuality together, accepting both in each pair simultaneously. The necessity for confounding dualities is enunciated by Elsie in Oranges: — there's more to this world that meets the eye. There's this world,' she thumped the wall graphically, 'and there's this world,' she thumped her chest. `If you want to make sense of either, you have to take notice of both.'"6° Winnet Stonejar, Jeanette's alter ego, realizes "the need for the city" that 53 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 5. 54 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 78. 55 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 79. 56 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 79. 57 Maria DiBattista, Virginia Woolf's Major Novels: The Fables of Anon (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), p. 118. 58 Doan, "Jeanette Winterson's Sexing the Postmodern," p. 152. 59 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 79. 60 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, p. 32.

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"fastens her heart to her mind" and where "truth mattered, no one would betray her."6I She dreams of a spiral flight of stairs starting between her eyes and descending into her gut which she is supposed to pursue "to know the extent of her territory."62 The orange symbolizes resisting binarism as, on the one hand, the difference between the thick skin and soft inside suggests clear-cut division between inner and outer life, yet, on the other hand, one can conjoin the inside and outside of the orange by making marmalade,63 the recipe coming from Mrs. Beeton's cookery book included in Oranges as an epigraph: "When thick rinds are used the top must be thoroughly skimmed, or a scum will form marring the final appearance." Similarly, the lack of the narrator's gender in Written on the Body suggests that gender dichotomies can be disturbed. Although androgyny manifests itself as an effective political strategy to undercut the distinction between homo and heterosexuality, bisexuality may seem problematic. Since a bisexual woman assents to being a male sexual object, she cannot operate as a subject or lesbian Other/self. On the other hand, as Penelope Engelbrecht believes, lesbians possess the ability to shift from lesbian to male subject mode, therefore bisexual women can behave in the same manner.64 Failing to adjust to cultural definitions of gender identities, both the lesbian and bisexual pose an opposition to patriarchy and thereby have a potential to deconstruct it. 2. Lesbianism Beginning with Oranges Are not the Only Fruit, Winterson negates subdivision of love and ascribing it to gender, thereby she eschews names, gender and the name `lesbian' to prevent labels. This liberal humanist reading naturalizing lesbian desire and its depiction as another human experience, alienate the novels from political significance. However, although Winterson evades naming, she effects a coherent lesbian aesthetic and her writings fulfill lesbian aims. Touching upon feminist concerns, concomitantly she participates in affirming dissimilarities between lesbians and heterosexual women. Therefore the novels can be read politically, though their political dispute seems to be implicit. In Oranges with Jeanette's trauma comes the realization that love the church attracts with falls under the rubric of proper, and dissociates itself from other `Icinds' of love, proclaiming for itself the right to subdivide and estimate love. The community demonstrates spiritual blindness when they refuse to recognize love as a blessing. Lesbianism shows itself for them and the pastor as perversity, infection and possession by demons. Hence Jeanette accuses him• "To the 61 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, p. 154. 62 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, p. 155. 63 Doan, "Jeanette Winterson's Sexing the Postmodern," p. 147. 64 Penelope Engelbrecht, "'Lifting Belly is a Language': The Postmodern Lesbian Subject," Feminist Studies, vol. 16, issue 1, database: Literary Reference Center.

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pure all things are pure. ... It's you not us."65 Striving to eradicate Jeanette's orientation, the pastor explains that she is "the victim of a great evil. That I was afflicted and oppressed, that I had deceived the flock."66 In fact, it threatens the male authority over women as men become redundant for them. The blindness is remarked upon in the short story "The Poetics of Sex" as wen: "The world is full of blind people. They don't see Picasso and me dignified in our love. They see perverts, inverts, tribades, homosexuals. They see circus freaks and Satan worshippers, girl-catchers and porno turn-outs."67 The same assumptions of heterosexuals as in Oranges are voiced here with a series of clich6d questions: "Why Do You Sleep With Girls?", "Which One of You Is the Man?", "What Do Lesbians Do in Bed?", "Were You Born a Lesbian?", "Why Do You Hate Men?", "Don't You Find There's Something Missing?" which cut the story. The replies constitute a prurient eulogy of intense physical and emotional eroticism. Yet, Picasso and Sappho's position is continuously confronted with "queer looks" when they walk together holding hands. Sappho explains to her lover that people stare at them since they "can't help it, [they've] got something wrong with [their] eyes,"68 meaning that it is people's approach towards homosexuality that constitutes a problem, and not homosexuality itself. When the pastor notifies the parishioners in church about Jeanette and Melanie's `great sin', he questions Jeanette: "'Do you deny you love this woman with a love reserved for man and wife?"No, yes, I mean of course I love her. ">69 In this concomitant disavowal and confirmation Jeanette disclaims the stance that the love she feels for Melanie is `reserved for man and wife'.7° She declines to perceive a homosexual relationship as the imitation of a heterosexual one, nor does she treat a homosexual as the replacement of a person of the opposite sex, nor as somebody trapped in the body of the other gender.7I Such treatment, Butler argues, undervalues the erotic significance of these sexual practices and rates them as incomplete.72 Thus, when two men holding hands come to the church and Jeanette' s mother remarks that one of them should be a woman, Jeanette considers this idea as preposterous: "At that point I had no notion of sexual politics, I knew that a homosexual is further from a woman than a rhinoceros. Now that I do have a number of notions about sexual politics, this early observation holds good. There are shades of meaning, but a man is a man, wherever you find it."73 This 65 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, p. 103. 66 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, p. 129. 67 Winterson, "The Poetics of Sex," p. 37. 68 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, p. 36. 69 Winterson Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, p. 103. 70 Doan, "Jeanette Winterson's Sexing the Postmodern," p. 145. 71 Doan, "Jeanette Winterson's Sexing the Postmodern," pp. 145-146. 72 Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 123. 73 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, p. 126.

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may also imply that female homosexualism should by no means be equated with the male one, since, as feminist theorists insist, female erotic is completely diverse, based on different dynamics. Jeanette's mother expresses the hackneyed position when she remarks on Jeanette with revulsion, "Aping men."74 It is Jeanette's hypocritical mother who denounces her to the pastor when she has discovered her lesbianism although she herself has some lesbian experiences behind: "She's a woman of the world, even though she'd never admit it to me. She knows about feelings, especially women's feelings."75 Once, when Jeanette and her mother look through the photo album, the girl spots a photo of a beautiful woman in the `old flames' section. Her mother pretends the photo got there by mistake, and on the next occasion it is gone. As Judith Butler points out, the fear of repressed homosexuality and rejection by the society emerges as the perfect performing of gender.76 And so Jeanette's mother gets married and adopts a daughter as she is not interested in sex with a man: "She had a mysterious attitude towards the begetting of children; it wasn't that she couldn't do it, more than she didn't want to do it. She was very bitter about the Virgin Mary getting there first."77 She treats sexuality as a taboo subject, hence she has not explained anything about the facts of life to her daughter except for enjoining her to "never let anyone touch you Down There."78 She also condemns other people having nonprocreative sex, taking it for a sin, so, as a matter of fact, sexual life is not praised even in marriages, the model being the lack of sex. Louie and the whole community condemn homosexuals particularly and put them to the margin of community life. In the village there are a few lesbians, for instance, two women running a paper shop, who once invite Jeanette to go to the seaside with them. Her mother, however, refuses firmly and does not elucidate why, and forbids Jeanette to do shopping there. Some time later Jeanette hears Louie tell her neighbour that the women are possessed by unnatural passion and Jeanette supposes, "she meant they put chemicals in their sweets."79 In another eavesdropped conversation Nellie, a neighbour, persists that she likes the two women, and the fact that they bought a double bed, as Mrs Fergeson saw them, does not prove anything: "Me and Bert had one bed but we did nothing in it."8° Immediately Doreen retorts that two women are different but Jeanette does not find out what constitutes the difference. Her knowledge about the issue surfaces together with the voluptuous experience of the power held in her body. Doreen suspects her daughter to be a lesbian, too, and she checks her, worrying that she 74 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, p. 125. 75 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, p. 104. 76 After Mizielaska, „Melancholia male] dziewczynki," p. 118. 77 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, p. 3. 78 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, p. 86. 79 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, p. 7. 80 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, p. 75.

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spends too muck time with her friend. Doreen does not believe they do their homework all the time, and is anxious: "If she don't get a boyfriend folks will talk. If they're not careful folk will think they're like them two at the paper shop."8I The fact that her daughter is a lesbian does not seem as disturbing to her as other people's reaction then. According to Bataille, the act of transgression is allowed provided that nobody finds out about it,82 which in Jeanette's circumstance can be illustrated with Mrs. Jewsbury's rebuke: "No one need ever have found out if you hadn't tried to explain to that mother of yours."83 Similar approval of transgression takes place in case of the Princess in The Power•Book and the Queen of spades in The Passion who probably realize their lover's masquerade an the subconscious level, but both remain silent in fear of being rejected by others. Since the greatest bliss in love comes from the certainty that one behaves badly,84 the characters' fascination surmounts fear that only incites to transgressing boundaries, Bataille teaches. It is in human nature that one longs to transcend them at any cost and keep them simultaneously.85 Jeanette thus learns that her love must remain unpronounced to tonfirm Butler's assertion that sex serves the heterosexual imperative, that is one can transgress neither sex nor heterosexuality, yet, the price is ostracism and the well of loneliness: "lesbians are true, at least to one another if not to the world. It is no surprise that we do not always remember our name."86 Lesbians are denied not only recognition in the heterosexual economy, but also the right to happiness: "The real trouble is we have rescued a word not allowed to our kind. He hears it pounding through the wall day and night. He smells it an our clothes and sees it smeared an our faces. We are happy Picasso and I. Happy."87 Winterson escapes from gender stereotypes, yet, despite her attempt at deconstructing the dichotomies, she sanctions their existente, merely overturning their valuations. Conversely, Jeanette, taught to perceive the world through the binary oppositions of good associated with God and evil linked with demon, treats both love given from God and a pretty and pious lover as good. She wonders, "If I had a demon my weak point was Melanie, but she was beautiful and good and had loved me. Can love really belong to the demon?"88 Melanie's opinion consolidates her own conviction as the girl refers to the pastor's association of unnatural passion with something awful, and neither of the girls receives the relationship in negative terms. Thus Jeanette declines to choose between the binaries. Overturn81 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, p. 74. 82 Bataille, Eroticism, p. 219. 83 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, p. 103. 84 Charles Baudelaire after Bataille, Eroticism, p. 127. 85 Bataille, Eroticism, pp. 140, 138. 86 Winterson, "The Poetics of Sex," p. 36. 87 Winterson, "The Poetics of Sex," p. 41. 88 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, p. 106.

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ing the notion of normal and perverse, she regards the strictures on her love, "a gift from the Lord," which "it would be ungrateful not to appreciate,"89 as perversion. Winterson elucidates this in the introduction: Oranges "dares to suggest that what makes life difficult for homosexuals is not their perversity but other people's."9° The girl recognizes her sexual orientation as essentialist; the natural part of her self: "If they want to get at my demon they'll have to get at me,"91 and never demonstrates any interest in men. While Melanie's lesbian experience emerges as a transitional stage in her sexual development before she moves on to the `mature' one, as Freud would term it, and gets married, adjusting to the heterosexual norm, for Jeanette it is not just a stage, but a 'proper' orientation. Melanie's husband-to-be treats Melanie and Jeanette's experience in a forbearing manner, patting Jeanette's arm and declaring his forgiveness. Winterson also subverts the decasualization of the lesbian body, common in phallogocentric culture, not only through marginalizing heterosexuality and demonstrating dysfunctional heterosexual relationships, but also through showing Melanie's conversion from an attractive lesbian into a "vegetable";92 passive and unkempt wife and mother. Along with the essentialist view, the book proffers the social constructivist view on the heroine's lesbianism through its depiction of men, women and marriages. A lesbian is for Wittig a third sex, beyond the categories of a man or a woman. Through her discarding of these categories the lesbian reveals their cultural construction.93 Yet, the novel does not attempt to determine between the essentialist and constructionist source of Jeanette's orientation, but emphasizes her approval of it. The heroine's persistente in lesbianism offers a permanent deconstruction of the male/female binary since lesbian desire does not serve as Foucaldian function of power or a Lacanian prerogative of the subject but forms a mutually informing relationship of a lesbian Other/seif. Lesbianism in The Passion is definitive and illustrative of the kind of relationship Henri seeks. Apart from Villanelle's passion for the Queen of spades, Henri mentions a few minor characters whose lesbianism is not conspicuous. During his and other soldiers' visit to the brothel he disapproves of the cook's cruelty towards the prostitutes, "resigned" women who take recourse to each other's affection to counterbalance male brutality. Henri's esteem for lesbian bonds along with the feminine features of his character imply a lesbian standpoint made feasible by the employment of a male narrator.94 In so doing, his figure fills the void between the male and lesbian worlds, which poses a queer strategy as 89 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, p. 102. 90 Winterson, "Introduction," in: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, p. xiii. 91 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, p. 106. 92 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, p. 166. 93 After Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 113. 94 Lisa Moore after Makinen, The Novels of.1 eanette Winterson, p. 58.

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well as the deconstruction of hetero/homosexual dichotomy in the blend of erotic and brotherly love. Villanelle's passion for the Queen is figured in non-phallic designations, exemplified by the `method' of kissing where only lips touch, which can be associated with Irigaray's conceptualization of lesbian eroticism centralized an the mouth and vagina in "When Our Lips Speak Together."95 Villanelle's affairs with men are shallow temporary relationships either for pleasure or out of a kind of necessity, and her only true passion is for the Queen. Lesbian difference is underlined here by the poetics of excess enacted in the portrayal of the heroine's body. Her lesbianism allies her with monstrosity. Bertha Harris deems the lesbian as the prototype of the monster encompassing what is unspeakable about woman and exploding traditional concepts of femininity as characterized by passivity, virtue and compliance.96 By the same token, the Dog-Woman's excessive grotesque body, reminiscent of Ted Hughes's the Iron Woman's, stipulates postmodernism's metaphoric figuration of the lesbian body and therefore she is often interpreted as a quasi-lesbian or metaphorical lesbian. Furthermore, both her body and strength serve as the antithesis of power relationships in the patriarchal culture, as well as resistance to culture's effort to subdue the female body along with the unruly transgressive facet of femininity The character's enactment of gender patterns of behaviour, such as maternality, charity and affection challenges them as natural to women and reveals their artificiality as cultural constructs. The Dog-Woman is only theoretically heterosexual as her sexual encounters appear failures, suggesting the unfeasibility of heterosexuality in a woman who constructs herstory and demands the right to her own agency.97 Therefore she functions as Zimmerman's "lesbian-as-sign." She provides Jordan with a story alternative to his ideals of heroic values, and ultimately encapsulates her son's narrative with hers. Correspondingly, asking Henri to regain her heart and rejecting his marriage proposal transposes Villanelle into an agent. It also parodies the notion of `biology is destiny' and plays with heterosexual romances where a man, having performed an adventurous task for his princess and subsequently bringing her back to life, expects her as a remuneration.98 Villanelle, however, does not consent to take part in his story but impels him to conform to the conditions of herstory. In Written an the Body the idea of the excessive body is enacted through cancer, a disease multiplying itself uncontrollably in the cells, intimidating the stability of the body. The mutation of the body turning upon itself results in Louise's multiplicity; she is both present and absent, dead and alive, in the past

95 Moore after Makinen, The Novels of Jeanette Winterson, p. 58. 96 After Zimmerman, "What Has Never Been," pp. 85-86. 97 Marylin F. Farwell after Makinen, The Novels of Jeanette Winterson, p. 97. 98 Jago Morrison, Contemporaty Fiction (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 104.

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and feasible future.99 It is only a lesbian bond which allows mutuality so strong that the disease becomes dual. Other tropes supporting the reading of the narrator as a woman encompass the imagery of sameness, interwoven in the whole Winterson's oeuvre, as well as renouncing masculine discourse of medicine and paradigms of travelling. Instead, the narrator pursues the female mode of travelling, informed with metaphors of the maze, akin to The Passion's rendering of Venice. Furthermore, the metaphor of the body as text filled with palimpsestic inscriptions of the lover's erotic history allies the imagery with Nicole Brossard's The Aerial Letter where she proclaims the mutual desire of two women to be the commencement of the process of writing and reading on the partner's body. The project is available only to those who use the same language, in this case the lesbian one.10° Additionally, the Lothario's desire to obliterate clich&I gender roles associates her with the oppressed group, and Gilben and Gubar maintain that it is only the oppressed who strive to deconstruct the models of tyranny to return to genderfree disarray.1°1 Although the narrator pretends to identify both with men and women, only the male embodiments are exposed as masks, and "I" manifests solidarity and empathy for women, focalizing the interest on them.102 Still, the book is open to different reading. In Lighthousekeeping, conversely to Written on the Body, it is the lover's gender that is concealed, which is achieved by the use of invocations. If it is a lesbian bond, which is hinted at, it is devoid of any tensions connected with its transgressive character. The only mention of the problematic is a reference to Sexing the Cherry: "We burst through [t]he forbidden door that can only be opened with a small silver key. The door that is no door in Rapunzel's lonely tower."I°3 Rapunzel is one of the dancing princesses who hides with her woman lover in a tower with no door. Bursting through the door may point to the process of negotiating the private space where Silver does not have to hide her orientation. She does not meet with any prejudices, which, however, may be connected with the fact that Winterson provides the reader with the depiction of the couple's holiday in the forest, where there are no people anyway. Other hints at Silver's sexual preference can be her obsession with Death in Venice. The book might point to Silver's subconscious lesbian desire, fulfilled later in her life.

99 Morrison, Contemporcuy Fiction, p. 114. 100 After Engelbrecht, "'Lifting Belly is a Language'." 101 Ute Kauer, "Narration and Gender: The Rote of the First-Person Narrator in Written on the Body," in: 'I'm telling you stories': Jeanette Winterson and the Politics of Reading, ed. Helena Grice and Tim Woods (Amsterdam — Atlanta: Rodopi, 1998), p. 47. 102 Ute Kauer, "Narration and Gender," pp. 46-49. 103 Winterson, Lighthousekeeping, p. 219.

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3. Erotic Triangles Winterson theorises a dynamics of erotic triangles. Erotics relies here once again upon risk and the danger of loss. None of Winterson's books portrays mbiage ä trois which entails coexistence of the three partners on an equal basis, but the erotic triangle which encompasses envy, deceit and emulation. The Winterson's books portraying erotic triangles, The Passion, Written on the Body, Gut Symmetries and The PowerBook, fall into Terry Castle's category of lesbian fiction which she designates as the one including "subverted triangulation," that is a collapse of male-female-male erotic triangle dominating the English literature. The point of departure for Castle's formula is Eve Sedgwick's thesis that both English literature and life are homosocial, that is its concealed subject has always appeared male bonding negotiated between two men around, through or over the body of a woman who serves as a channel in a relationship in which the real partner is a man. As Castle notes, female bonding displaces the agreement, producing the female homosocial structure where one of the men from the incipient triangle inhabits the subordinated location of the mediator. In the transposition from homosocial to lesbian bonding the two women merge and the man is excluded; the male bonding becomes thus unattainable.104 The process is illustrated most poignantly in Gut Symmetries. The idea of male homosocial desire is introduced in the narrator's rumination about a triangle: If you want to know how a mistress marriage works, ask a triangle. In Euclidean geometry the angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees and parallel lines never meet. Everyone knows the score, and the women are held in tension, away from one another. The shape is beguiling and it could be understood as a new geometry of family life. Unfortunately, Euclidean theorems work only if space is flat. In curved space, the angles over-add themselves and parallel lines always meet.'°5

In contrast to Written on the Body, science is appropriated here as discourse capable of embracing love. The sexual configurations seem plunged in uncertainty which connects them with the new physics, suggesting that not only particles can be defined by both Opposition and concurrence, but also lovers changing partners in the erotic triangle.1°6 And so Stella, the wife, and Alice, the mistress, meet and, unexpectedly to them both, end up in bed. The erotic act is the revelation to them as it considerably differs in qualitative terms from the one with a man. They are another Wintersonian couple to discover lesbian desire to be informed by mutuality, sincerity and

104 Terry Castle, "Sylvia Townsend Warner and the Counterplot of Lesbian Fiction," in: Feminism, ed. Warhol and Herndl, pp. 533-537. 105 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, pp. 16- I 7. 106 Katy Emck after Makinen, The Novels of Jeanette Winterson, p. 144.

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intense pleasure, actively worked on by both of them. The women are positioned as equally desiring and desired subjects in a relationship in which it is the seif that is surmounted, rather than the partner: "I enjoyed looking at her in a way that was forbidden to me, this self on seif, self as desirer and desired, had a frankness to it I had not been invited to discover. Desiring her I felt my own desirability. It was an act of power but not power over her. I was my own conquest."1°2 Neither of them makes an attempt to dominate the other, therefore they are "no longer exhausted by someone else's shape over mine."108 Although they constitute "a mirror confusion of bodies and sighs, undifferentiated, she in me, me in she," it is not the narcissistic adoration as Alice declares, "It was not myself I fell in love with it was her."1°9 The psychoanalytic misconception of lesbian desire as narcissistic stems from the assumption that lesbianism requires the refutation of difference. Engelbrecht elucidates that the categories of Other/self are equal in value and power, however, they designate different modes.11° The relationship appears much different from the ones she has had with men, for example Stella's husband, Jove, for their exchanges are not marked by the dynamics of power. Their image of love does not presuppose invasion ("I do not want to be captured nor to hold a honeyed gun at your head,"m) but mutual fusion, non-conformism and overall approval. It is a man who locates himself as a dominating agent: "I had been annexed by Jove. What had begun as a comity of sovereign states had ended in invasion. He had invaded me sharing had come to be spelled capture."112 Winterson recognizes being the destroyer as a crucial trajectory of the masculine desire. Cixous describes the male mode of giving as "gift-that-takes" since a man is preoccupied with possessing and gives merely to underpin his masculinity and power, whereas a woman gives for the man's pleasure, but does not attempt to recuperate her expenses.113 Winterson mirrors Cixous's understanding of masculine and feminine approaches to giving, for instance in the words, "He absorbed her while she failed to absorb him. This was so normal that nobody noticed it."114 Fromm perceives the origin of a man's desire to dominate a woman to lie in man's fear of her and of being mocked by her. He compensates for the lack of natural creativity which a woman possesses with his ability to destroy,115 whereas Adrienne Rich perceives this desire to be induced by some primal dread of women and their sexual voracity. Men fear of women's indifference to them, 107 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 119. 108 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 119. 109 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 119. 110 Engelbrecht, "'Lifting Belly is a Language'." 111 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 127. 112 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 105. 113 See Susan Selters ed., Cixous Reader, pp. 43-44. 114 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 59. 115 Fromm, Miloje, plec i matriarchat, pp. 112, 116.

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and of being allowed emotional and sexual admittance to women only on terms determined by them.16 That is why Winterson does not deem a man as cut out for an amorous relationship: I can't settle, I want someone who is fierte and will love me until death and know that love is as strong as death, and be on my side for ever and ever. I want someone who will destroy and be destroyed by me. 1 would cross seas and suffer sunstroke and give away all I have, but not for a man, because they want to be the destroyer and never be destroyed. That is why they are unfit for romantic love.117

She rejects masculine paradigms of desire based on subjugating women, depicted as "swallow[ing] them like oysters,"118 which is similar to Bataille's description of an erotic act in which a man's objective is to reach a passive woman's most vulnerable site, to annihilate and dissolve her essence so as to subdue her to the intensity and vehemente that floods her from the outside. The woman's dissolution serves a man to achieve the state of fusion with the lover.119 As a result of erotic permutations, Alice is in love both with Stella and Jove and they are entangled in the net of mutual relationships: "One plus one is not necessarily two. I do the sum and the answer is an incipient third. Three pairs of two: Jove and Stella, Jove and Alice, Alice and Stella, and under the surface of each the head of the other."12° Making Alice and Jove physicists, Winterson utilizes the rules of quantum physics as a metaphor for the flux of identity when a chance element like love perturbs all the principles. Alice feels guilty of seducing a married man, and despising herself for that, calls herself a worm, yet, what petrifies her are the prospective consequences of the affair with Stella; she does not want her life to be destroyed by a lesbian liaison, forbidden in the society where heterosexuality is compulsory: When Stella kissed me I remember thinking, 'This is not allowed.' I was glad of the fog and the dark because I knew that if anyone saw us, the totality of our lives; history, complexity, nationality, intelligente, age achievement, status, would be shrunk up to the assumptions of our kiss. Whoever saw us would say, `There's a couple of...', and this kiss, tentative, ambivalent, would become a lock and key. I had seen it happen to others. I did not want it happen to me. At the same time I realised the absurdity of pinning anything onto a kiss. At the same time I realised that I would like to do much more kissing if it were not so complicated.121

116 Rich, "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence," p. 22. 117 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, p. 165. 118 Winterson, "The Poetics of Sex," p. 40. 119 Bataille, Eroticism, pp. 17, 92. 120 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, pp. 119-120. 121 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 118.

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However, she apprehends fate as deterministic power, and justifies her actions with the conviction that she had no choice as such decisions are made subconsciously. Having a homosexual affair for the first time in her life, she does not recognise herself, as her suppressed unconscious desires have been liberated: "What would happen if I come face to face with what I am? I think it is happening but because I do not recognise myself I say it is somebody else; him, her, them, who are responsible. Responsible for my terror."122 Accordingly, the whole arrangement of her life is demolished: "Every piece of furniture in the room has been destroyed."123 Like Jeanette in Oranges, she seems to hold the opinion that following only natural desires is justified, therefore she is very concerned with the naturalness of the relationship. Yet, there is a disparity between Jeanette's and Alice's understanding of 'natural'. Contrary to Jeanette, lesbian love does not manifest itself to Alice as natural. She regards the measure of the naturalness of the relationship to be feasible profits, and most importantly, the "biological necessity" of reproduction: "Would it be natural? You are not my clan, not of my kind, there is no biological necessity to want you. Instincts of tribal survival do not apply. I do not want to reproduce myself nor do I need your money. You will not grant me status. You will not make my life easier."124 She recognizes thus her lesbian desire to function as "excess within the heterosexual economy," as Bonnie Zimmerman has put it.125 The heterosexual economy with its command to reproduce manifests itself as a burden: "Where is the one for me? Biologically there are thousands of ones for me. If I want to rut I can rut. I should be wary of ties that are chains and hands that are handcuffs."126 However, the authenticity of emotions averts her from withdrawal: "My first serious emotion was for a married man. My first experience of authentic desire was with a married woman."I27 She renounces potential profits, like status, money or approval for the sake of love, identifying lesbian love as the manifestation of the "capacity for love in its higher forms," that is a bond "beyond self-interest"128 based on reciprocity. Alice's image of genuine love is sustained by imagery of water and nature that casts it on the lesbian map, heralding thus the trajectory of her desire: "What would it be to love? Would it be the fields under rain, the vivid green the grass takes? Would it be the air current the bird finds? Would it be the fox and the fox hole?"129 The same subliminal message governs Stella' s childhood imaginings of

122 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 121. 123 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 121. 124 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 127. 125 Zimmerman, "Lesbians Like This and That," p. 4. 126 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, pp. 26-27. 127 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 118. 128 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, pp. 127-128. 129 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 127.

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love as "a glass well," the image pervaded with water, well, pebbles and reflection: I could lean over and dabble my hands in it and come up shining. It was not a current or a torrent, but it was deep and at its bottom, flowing. I knew it was flowing by the noise of the water over the subterranean pebbles. Were the ships in there and ports that depended on it, and harbours that rople naturally built their settlements? I saw die world beneath only by reflection.

Nevertheless, Alice is not sure whether the lesbian bond would be evanescent "enchantment" or love that constitutes the objective of the quest: "Would it be lucky find or magic trick? Buried treasure or sleight of hand? Would I be the conjuror or the conjured? Would it be a spell or a song I sing?"131 She also seeks to know if another woman can satisfy all her needs: "If I am a wound would love be my salve? If I am speechless would love be a mouth?"132 Despite the various risks, her ruminations on the relationship and the nature of love constitute a manifesto for courage in love: "When I met Stella, I was so excited and appalled at making love to another woman that ... Old patterns of behaviour could not be reestablished because I had never known anything like this before. The shock of the new and it worked."133 The vibrancy and freshness of lesbian experience inclines Alice to combat her own feelings, and the Fight ceases with the conclusion that it is not her lover who is her enemy but her feelings conditioned by heterosexual intimidation. When Jove finds out about Alice and Stella's night together, he is infuriated, although he has betrayed his wife many a time. Alice entirely destabilizes smugness and conviction of their marriage infrangibility Jove and Stella share, as she is the perilous passionate other, ready to take emotional risk. In the face of a new configuration, Jove and Alice continue to work together, Stella and Alice sleep with each other, and Jove and Stella dine together once a week. Once a month they all meet "to discuss the finer points of our triune romance,"134 and to debate how to disentangle from this odd arrangement. Most usually they quarrel, Jove's mood oscillating between cracking jokes and fuming and threatening. He wants to move back in to live with Stella and claims his marital rights, as well as "insists on the rights of his penis"; that is, he proclaims the right to both women as he declares to be "big enough for the both of us."135 This reflects Jove's dream of sexual profusion, diversity and fullness, which the authors of Mjnage d Trois deem as one of the reasons for the erotic triangle. They also assert that in such an 130 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, pp. 39-40. 131 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 127. 132 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 127. 133 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 205. 134 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 129. 135 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 131.

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arrangement there is always somebody who steals love energy from the others, giving nothing in return, and revealing thus the narcissistic nature.I36 The contention proves productive in case of Jove who strives to dominate both women: "he shouted names as though he were giving directions. Perhaps that is what we were, elaborate ways for him to find himself."137 Jove and Stella participate in the exchanges of power, such as, for instance, packing and unpacking things in their flat, which serves to manifest superiority: "Jove wants her to know that everything is his, she wants him to realise that it all belongs to her."I38 This endorses Eve Sedgwick's avowal that the relation of rivalry between the two active participants of a triangle produces "a calculus of power"; that the bond connecting the two rivals is as strong and intense as the bond connecting the rivals to the person they emulate for. The bonds of emulation and love are thus exposed as equally potent,139 which is corroborated by Alice's impression that she is only a link between Jove and Stella, "a tie-beam; a beam connecting the lower ends of rafters to prevent them moving apart."149 Yet, an underlying anxiety haunts her that they are going to use her to reconcile and then dispose of her, which is also indicated to by the Tarot card describing her as the Fool: Someone had said to me, `Jove and Stella are inseparable.' I had smiled quietly at the time, assuming myself to be the object of desire and not the sacrifice. What do the alchemists say? Tertium non datur.' The third is not given, whatever it is that reconciles two opposites. If I was here to reconcile them were they planning to dump me overboard when the job was finished? Piratical Stella? Buccaneer Jove? Alice under the skull and crossbones of their love?141

When they all decide to have a sailing holiday and Alice is deterred by her father's illness, she is again tormented with doubts: My thoughts, such as they were, my panics, my suspicions, my hatred, blew easterly and blew sour. Wherever they were, they would be safe, moored in their love. They had known that my father was dying and they had abandoned me. ... As I waited, no word, I began to play a macabre game. If only one of them were alive, which one would 1 hope for? Champion Jove? Winning Stella? Which one of them did 1 love beyond the greedy love that we all shared? There was a bitterness to this dreadful game because I guessed that neither of them had chosen Me.142 136 Foster, Foster and Hadady, Milosc we troje, p. 266. 137 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 132. 138 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 132. 139 Eve Sedgwick, "Gender Asymmetry and Erotic Triangles," in: Feminisms, ed. Warhol and Herndl p. 524. 140 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, pp. 133. 141 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, pp. 137-138. 142 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, pp. 198, 200.

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Jove, nonetheless, has detained the information about the reason for Alice's absence from Stella, which poses another sign of his desire to control the situation. When lost on the sea and presumed dead, Jove and Stella have sex, a sentimental step, which is the proof of their despair and struggle to ding to the remnants of life in them: "I held onto him, holding onto the years in between, the years notched in his back, his vertebral column, twenty-four separate, moving irregular bones, the years of our life together."143 This is not the proof of their reunion, as Jove imagines, "We had made love. We were dose that night. We had talked and argued as we always did. ... It was our intimacy."144 In fact, Stella struggles to survive so as to castigate Jove for his deed. In the chapter narrated by Jove, Winterson reveals that it is him who writes to Stella on behalf of Alice. For him it is only a game and he is exhilarated and intrigued when his wife takes it up. He discloses himself as a voyeur, "the invisible other,"145 which is still another constituent of an erotic triangle,146 since he follows the women all the evening when they first meet, and imagines what they will do, though it has never occurred to him that they will make love. His objective is to pull the strings, his Tarot card being the Knave of Coins and Keeper of the Thunderbolt, nevertheless, the course of events has surprised him: "I made the mistake of thinking that I could control the experiment. I won't make that mistake again. This time it nearly cost me my life."147 He makes a final attempt to reinstate his patriarchal ownership of Stella's body when he commits the act of cannibalism on her. Ultimately, when the couple is rescued, the triangle is resolved; Jove returns to the safe comfortable world making no progress, and Stella intends to get divorced and stay with Alice, completing thus the conversion from homosocial to lesbian bonding. Both women undergo the process of maturing to the decision of being together in which the trauma is a decisive factor. In the face of death, Stella recognizes love for Alice to be her treasure. Explicating the reasons for their marriage failure, Jove lays the blame on Stella's unsteadiness and failure to recognize the disjunction between subjective and objective, the inner and outer, emotions and facts. What he first regarded as mesmeric energy in her, he now recognizes as madness: All of us have fantasies, dreams. A healthy society outlets those things into sport, hero-worship, harmless adultery, rock climbing, the movies. Unhealthy individuals understand their dreams and fantasies as something solid. An alternative world. They do not know how to subordinate their disruptive elements to a regulated order. My wife believed that she had a kind of interior universe as valid and as necessary as her day-to-day existence in reality. This failure to make a hierarchy, this failure to recog143 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 185. 144 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 194. 145 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 193. 146 Foster, Foster and Hadady, Mitosc we troje, p. 34. 147 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 193.

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Dismissing the feminine epistemology as "pathology" and locating it as inferior, Jove deems his to be that of normalcy and traditional values: "I thought that if Stella lived with me and my family in a normal family way that she might regain the equilibrium she needed."149 Ironically, both treating his wife as his rib and possession and the act of literal eating her body put Jove into the position of a representative of the pathology he accuses his wife of. It is him who does not mark disparities between inner and outer, husband and wife, self and other, the subjectivity of his fantasies and the objectivity of somebody else's body.15° Whilst Winterson highlights the fluidity of identity in the erotic union between Alice and Stella, she underlines the hazard of male identity's shifting borders, which relocates to subsume, not to fuse.151 Alice reads this mistakenly as disposing of the burden of herself, yet, later she recognizes it as the loss of self in favour of man the destroyer: he might Bubbling with love I had shown Jove how to calligraph himself as me. become me, he might free me. If he could be let go into myself, then I might be let loose into another seif. He might displace me as a heavy solid displaces water. At the time, I did not find this analogy sinister.152

However, Stella, her name being a signifier of a star, rejects masculine fixed linear Grand Unified Theory Jove upholds, to argue for a relational vision of the world, liberated from "conceptual frameworks, which are all and always provisional."153 She perceives the world as integral and connected and identity as the amalgamation of experience. The masculine theories of Einstein and Heisenberg are utilized in the book to opt for a feminist standpoint theory of the universe, only to be repudiated eventually as constraining the insights of the world and one's identities in it.154 Instead, Winterson intermingles different discourses, of physics, philosophy, alchemy, metaphysics to imply that human conceptualisation 148 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, pp. 190-191. 149 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 190. 150 Chloö Taylor Merleau, "Postmodern Ethics and the Expression of Differends in the Novels of Jeanette Winterson," Journal of Modern Literature, 26.3/4 (2003), p. 97. 151 Merleau, "Postmodern Ethics and the Expression of Differends," pp. 97-98. 152 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 139. 153 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 168. 154 Ann McClellan, "Science Fictions," pp. 1057, 1072. Standpoint theorists argue that "men's dominating position in social life results in partial and perverse understandings, whereas women's subjugated position provides the possibility of more complete and less perverse understandings." (Sandra Harding after McClellan, p. 1071).

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of the world should pose a conglomeration of various discourses since science, spirituality and mysticism are interrelated.155 Yet, connecting the scientific theories that celebrate relativity and fluidity with 'gut feelings', that is emotionality and intuitiveness and the Grand Unified Theory with linearity, rationality and intellectuality, and sexing them female and male respectively, Winterson once more underlines the dualism she attempts to subvert.156 On the other hand, she endeavours to destabilize binarism by introducing an erotic triangle, and although the man strives to locate himself in relation of power to the women, the triangle is superseded by the lesbian bond. Elgin in Written on the Body behaves analogously to Jove. When he learns about his wife's affair with "I", he strives for control over the situation, and his relationship with "I" becomes the register of power exchanges. Although Elgin concurs in Louise's demand that she be allowed to meet "I" whenever she wants, he challenges the couple after the torrid night, accusing them of spoiling his day in such a responsible job. He extorts the narrator's disappearance from Louise's life when she gets ill, and exposes his superiority claiming that, as a doctor, he can look after her in a better manner. Later, he holds back information about Louise's health and whereabouts. The narrator pays him back with battering his jaw. After some time of "I" and Louise's liaison it also appears that she still sleeps with her husband now and then. The triangles function thus as registers of bonds of power and meaning, and of "the play of desire and identification by which individuals negotiate with their societies for empowerment," as Irigaray, Lacan, Rubin and Chodorow and Dinnerstein treat them.157 The Mistletoe Bride also presents a kind of triangle. A seventeen-year-old girl leaves with her husband-to-be for the wedding ceremony. On Christmas Eve they play traditional hide-and-seek with the guests; everybody wears a mask and hides in the somewhat Carterian castle replete with twists, "tunet stairs" and "spiralling voices."158 The bride hides in an oak trunk, and soon she hears approaching steps. It is her husband with another woman kissing and touching in the dark passage and then having sex on the trunk. The bride becomes an unintentional voyeur and a participant of an erotic encounter: "I put my hand up, right under her belly. I ran my hand along the lid to the place where he must have entered her. I breathed with them both, and waited. This was my wedding night."159 After that incident she gets away to live in a convent, realizing now that she "would have

155 McClellan, "Science Fictions," p. 1076. 156 Helena Grice and Tim Woods, "(Dis)Unified Theories? Dislocated Discourses in Gut Symmetries," in: '1'm telling you stories', ed. Grice and Woods, p. 121. 157 After Sedgwick, "Gender Asymmetry and Erotic Triangles," p. 528. 158 Winterson, "The Mistletoe Bride." 159 Winterson, "The Mistletoe Bride."

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suffocated in his bed as surely as in his box,"16° leading life-in-death existence, "sane sensible life," filled only with duties and 'proper' behaviour. In The PowerBook Winterson employs the same scenario. Alix resents the idea of a night with a married woman as she has done it before and feil in love, but her lover did not want to resign from her husband, similarly to The Passion's plot. The redhead does not have such scruples; she prefers to seize the day and maintain that one only lives once. For her, an affair is just an escape from reality. Finally, Ali agrees to spend a night with her but on condition that it does not generate any complications. Yet, in the morning she is bitterly disappointed when she discovers her lover to have vanished since she realizes that is not what she really wanted. Lancelot's position in the interspersed revised story corresponds to Alix's one. Both do not care about their beloved being married, for they regard "a living love" superior to "a dead marriage."161 The description of Lancelot attempting to find Guinevere might be construed as a presage of Ali's search for the redhead. Moreover, both the Queen and the redhead refuse to break the marriage vow and stay with the lover. Another inset story, about Paolo and Francesca, is also a tale about desire and crossing the boundaries. The affair with Paolo is for Francesca rescue from "the grave of [her] married life" and rise "from the dead."162 In the course of their relationship they realize that pain is an inevitable component of love, which is illustrated in religious terms: "There is no love that does not pierce the hands and feet," later echoed in "love slices lengthways."163 The narrator puts forward an unfinished list of "great and ruinous lovers," discerning only three feasible endings: "Revenge. Tragedy. Forgiveness."164 Also Alix recognizes that romantic love, always connected with passion, entails pain: Love wounds. Love's exquisite happiness is also love's exquisite pain. I do not seek pain but there is pain. I do not seek suffering but there is suffering. It is better not to flinch, not to try and avoid those things in love's direction. lt is not easy, this love, but only the impossible is worth the effort.I65

Alix contends with the redhead's insistence that suffering is pointless: She thinks I'm holding on to pain. She thinks the pain is a souvenir. Perhaps she thinks that pain is the only way I can feel. As it is, the pain reminds me that my feelings are damaged. The pain doesn't stop me loving — only a false healing could do 160 Winterson, "The Mistletoe Bride." 161 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 68. 162 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 127. 163 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 128, 185. 164 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 78. 165 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 188.

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that — the pain teils me that neither my receptors nor my transmitters are in perfect working order. The pain is not feeling, but it has become an instrument of feeling.166

For Ali the ability to feel a range of emotions is a proof of being alive. She evades repressing pain since she understands that only reworking it can bring relief. She believes romantic love and passion worth while, even if they are brief and followed by pain. The view is supported with the story of George Mallory who died on climbing Everest. Pursuing his passion filled him with lightness and crystal music, and Alix is sure that if Mallory had been told about his forthcoming death in the attempt, he would not have resigned. Ali opposes suffering to healing of a broken heart. She disapproves of other people' s formula of healing that comprises silence, stupefaction and repression of feelings, which can be encapsulated by the redeployed clichd, "Time is a great deadener."167 For Ali, however, "It is not healing. A dead body feels no pain."I68 To her suffering is a requisite factor of recovering from the broken heart, and experiencing catharsis. On their third encounter the redhead admits she has treated the relationship as a game. After their night in Paris, she wants to meet Ali once again just to continue the game and see the results, but she has been "caught in [her] own net"169 as she has fallen in love. Her position is encapsulated in an ensuing story of a bunter who attempts to do anything to endear himself to the beloved princess. The redhead's stante is analogous to princess's; they both treat love as a game, as an escape from the commonplaces of daily life. Asking for more than the other person can give, they both become their own victims in the end, and have to pay their price. Alix claims that she is willing to pay it as the feeling itself is more important to her than its cost: You acted as though you were free, but you were a ransom note. I paid to watch. I watched your fingers, your red mouth. I watched you undress. I didn't see you go. Later I was still paying and I never counted the cost. You were worth it. Again and again you were worth it. My heart has unlimited funds. Draw on them. Draw them down. ... How muck? Everything? All right.17°

Yet, maintaining that she does not count the cost, she feels hurt concurrently, as the balance between giving and taking has been disturbed. The very act of speaking situates it in the exchange economy, as Barthes points out. The person, who alleges to give disinterestedly, subconsciously aims at yielding control in the relationship, and the gift appears the instrument of the test of strength.17I Reciprocity 166 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 52. 167 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, p. 166. 168 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 152. 169 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 178. 170 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 229. 171 Barthes, A Lover's Discoverse, pp. 76-77.

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is a compulsory condition for the bond to develop, a conclusion common with Wilton S. Dillon's who, drawing an Marcel Mauss's ideas, proved that there is obligation to give, receive and reimburse, as otherwise self-respect and autonomy are upset, and undischarged obligations produce the sense of burden and guilt, as well as subconscious feeling of injustice.172 This is what takes place in Ali and the redhead's relationship. Alix declares readiness to pay every price but doing so is an expression both of the desire to dominate the lover, and of the fear of the intensity of the relationship. The intensity could stem from the deepened bond, a consequence of increased but balanced amount of gift exchanges between the partners. But also the redhead can be noted to be afraid of intimacy: "It's too intense. We'd wear each other out in six months."Fire doesn't burn itself."It bums out.'"173 She is afraid to leave her husband for Ali as she believes Ali's desire to be dependent an the necessity to transgress boundaries. Through the specifically lesbian discourse of desire Winterson pursues in her works, they participate in regaining the female body for female desire. Winterson texts, like other lesbian writings, display spiral-like designs which envisage the designs of desire and mind, suggesting a web of meanings and negating causeeffect structure, closure and the notion of a fixed identity. They fluctuate between realistic and fantastical modes, isolating the world of human experience. Fragmentation, parody and myth reworkings add up to that effect. Her texts become thus Cixousian volcanic texts; the locale of Irigarayian "expanding universe" with no fixed eircumferences:74 The exploding space along with grotesque and monstrosity invest the poetics of excess, which adds up to common figuration of the lesbian as an excess in the patriarchal economy. Deconstructing the patriarchal difference and lack, Winterson renders fluid erotic desire implanted in the ontology of sameness and reciprocity. Disrupting reality and proposing new correlations between signs Winterson fulfills lesbian agenda which is to "reinvent the word/world,"175 as Nicole Brossard points out. Undermining the notions of normal and natural, self and other, subject and object, Winterson constructs Marylin Farewell's "lesbian narrative space," or what Bonnie Zimmerman calls "the lesbian moment in the text."176 Blurring the homo/heterosexual dichotomy, Winterson is involved in a queer political project, and the fascination with cross-dressing poses an external demonstration of gender roles lesbians discard and reveals the constructed character of gender and sexuality. 172 Wilton S. Villon, Gifts and Nations. The Obligation to Give, Receive and Repay (The Hague, Paris: Mouton, 1968), pp. 45, 53, 72. 173 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 181. 174 Irigaray, "This Sex Which Is Not One," p. 367. 175 After Zimmerman, "Lesbians Like This and That," p. 10. 176 Zimmerman, "Lesbians Like This and That," p. 10.

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Winterson posits lesbian sexuality over the hegemony of heterosexualism, and in Oranges incites, as Doan argues, mapping an alternative social order which locates the lesbian at the centre. In such a world of collapsed binaries Doan spots a prospect of a lesbian postmodern, in Oranges emblematized by an orange''" and in the other books by androgynous characters. By instituting the lesbian body as a point of reference, Winterson, similarly to Monique Wittig, strives to displace the phallus corresponding to the Law of the Father. The lesbian operates as a pivot from which to undermine heterosexuality.

177 Doan, "Jeanette Winterson's Sexing the Postmodern," p. 145.

Chapter IV: `Somewhere it is still in the original' — the Quest Legend has it that the Ship, while seeking the Holy Grail, sailed off the end of the world and continued forever. At particular conjunctions of time and timelessness, it appears again as a bright light, shooting its course through the unfathomable universe, chasing that which has neither beginning nor end. /Jeanette Winterson: Gut Symmetriest

In her writings Winterson problematizes love in connection with passion, romance and marriage. She depicts several manifestations of love: romantic, familial, spiritual and aesthetic, yet, she focuses on its two trajectories: wild greedy passion and `true love' uniting risk and comfort. She considers romantic love as absolute and makes her characters search for it, which is an essential part of their quest for a meaningful existence and their identity. The characters' quest for love, the Holy Grail, is unalterably accompanied by the dread that one will never find it. 1. Displacement of love in The Passion The Passion depicts the masculine model of subjugation in which the male self seeks the female other by means of an analogy of the martial operation. The armed conflict is figured as a kind of erotic displacement in which the unconscious desire for death is disguised as love since the psychic urge is transposed from the quest for human love and other relationships into patriotism and nationalism:1 Napoleon "was in love with himself and France joined in. It was a romance. Perhaps all romance is like that; not a contract between equal parties but an explosion of dreams and desires that can find no outlet in everyday life."2 The connection between love and war is evident to Barthes who Claims that"[1] anhas long since posited the equivalence of love and war: in both cases, it guage is a matter of conquering, ravishing, capturing."3 The violent episode of ravishment takes place when a person falls in love at first sight: the `prey' exerts such a strong influence on the ravisher that Barthes compares the act to a rape. The trans-

1 Seaboyer, "Second Death in Venice," p. 487. 2 Winterson, The Passion, p. 13. 3 Barthes, A Lover 's Discourse, p. 188.

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position of power takes place here: the capturer is hypnotized and electrified, and successively ensnared.4 The French people, juxtaposed with the passionate Venetians, suppress their emotions as they are afraid of love: We're a lukewarm people for all our feast days and hard work. Not much touches us, but we long to be touched. We lie awake at night willing the darkness to part and show us a vision. Our children frighten us in their intimacy, but we make sure they grow up like us. Lukewarm like us.5

Instead, they choose to give vent to their feelings in warfare: "We are a lukewarm people and our longing for freedom is our longing for love. If we had the courage to love we would not so value these acts of war."6 Delineating the world of `soldiers and women' Winterson constructs gender oppositions. Henri and his friends despise the country life and dream of adventures, therefore they enroll the army as soon as the opportunity arises for "soldiering is a Eine life for a boy."7 In so doing, they rebel against the boredom and routine of everyday life, as war, even though it entails physical pain and the threat of losing one's life, is exciting and abundant in adventures. This quality of war, according to Fromm, constitutes one of the psychological factors that make war possible.8 The boys start to pursue Napoleon's linear travel characterized by conquest, exploitation and order: "Where Bonaparte goes, straight roads follow, buildings are rationalized, street signs may change to celebrate a battle but they are always clearly marked."9 To Henri killing is vindicated since he intends to kill `other', "[n]ot people, ... just the enemy."19 Winterson poses a question about the locale of violence — does it inhabit only the enemy other, or is it a general human condition? I I The masculine power is often connected here with physical strength, destroying, mutilation, smashing, challenging as well as revenge, humiliating, giving orders and inflicting pain. On the second day of Henri's service in the army, for instance, he is awoken by an officer's boot on his stomach and a subsequent kick on his buttocks, which is a way of wreaking his vengeance on Henri for challenging him In this situation Henri behaves passively, like chickens he is assigned to kill with "beaks and claws cut off, staring through the slats with 4 Barthes, A Lover's Discourse, pp. 188-189. 5 Winterson, The Passion, p. 7. 6 Winterson, The Passion, p. 154. 7 Winterson, The Passion, p. 8. 8 Erich Fromm, Anatomia ludzkiej destrukcyjnogci [The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness] trans. Jan Karlowski (Poznaii: Rebis, 1999), pp. 235-6. 9 Winterson, The Passion, p. 112. 10 Winterson, The Passion, p. 112. 11 Seaboyer, "Second Death in Venice," p. 489.

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dumb identical eyes."12 He is given a feminized work in the kitchen, and his battlefield activity is restricted merely to rescuing the wounded soldiers. His Profession, however, is heralded in his childhood when he sees his reflection in a polished pot. He rejects his father's shaving mirror since it presents him only with one face whereas in "the pot he can see all the distortions of his face. He sees many possible faces and so he sees what he might become,"13 choosing plurality and fluidity. The scene also indicates the direction in which he should construct his identity, which is the feminine, domesticity and the heart.I4 Working in the kitchen, Henri is not spared the sight of violence and mutilation. He is initiated into them in a brothel where he goes with his companions and where the cook, figured as a villain, treats brutally one of the prostitutes. Later he sees starving soldiers who cut off their arms to cook and eat them; when Henri's and his fellows' horses die of cold they sleep with their feet inside their slit bellies, his friend Domino has one side of the face blown away, Henri himself loses an eye, once he attempts to put together the body of a soldier parted in the battle, yet his legs appear indistinguishable from the other legs. To endure such macabre scenes as well as to survive, one must put aside conscience and scruples: Take the heart first. Then you don't feel the cold so much. The pain so much. With the heart gone, there' s no reason to stay your hand. Your eyes can Look an death and not tremble. It's the heart that betrays us, makes us weep, makes us bury our friends when we should be marching ahead. It's the heart that sickens us at night and makes us hate who we are. It's the heart that sings old songs and brings memories of warm days and makes us waver at another mile, another smouldering village. To survive the zero winter and the war we made a pyre of our hearts and put them aside for ever. There's no pawnshop for the heart. You can't take it and leave it awhile in a clean cloth and redeem it in better times. ... If you fett for every man you murdered, every life you broke in two, every slow and painful harvest you destroyed, every child whose future you stole, madness would throw her nose around your neck ... When I say I lived with heartless men, I use the word correctly.I5

During endless fights, after eight years there comes a moment when Henri decides to desert. He is pervasively disillusioned with his boyish naive ideals of conquest, courage and glory: "Death in battle seemed glorious when we were not in battle. But for the man who were bloodied and maimed and made to run through smoke that choked them into enemy lines where bayonets were waiting, death in battle seemed only what it was. Death."16 He realizes the enemy is 12 Winterson, The Passion, pp. 5-6. 13 Winterson, The Passion, p. 26. 14 Seaboyer, "Second Death in Venice," p. 499. 15 Winterson, The Passion, pp. 82-83. 16 Winterson, The Passion, p 108.

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imaginary: "Enemies like you and me with the same hopes and fears, neither good nor bad. I had been taught to look for monsters and devils and I found ordinary people."17 The objectives of war appear imaginary, too: "so much waste and for no purpose."18 His conclusion, "The dead are dead whatever side they fight on,"19 is convergent with Michael Walzer's one. In his analysis of just and unjust wars he states: "War kills; that is all it does."29 The injured or dead body is thus rid of cultural content; the referential bearing of the body is lost when soldiers face death.21 Henri reflects, "I was a bad soldier because I cared too much what happened next. I could never lose myself in the cannonfire, in the moment of combat and hate. My mind ran before me with pictures of dead fields and all that had taken years to make, lost in a day or so."22 The notion of freedom appears manipulation as well. Henri discovers he has been mistaken: I thought a soldier's uniform would make me free because soldiers are welcome and respected and they know what will happen from one day to the next and uncertainty need not torment them. I thought I was doing a service to the world, setting it free, setting myself free in the process. Years passed, I travelled distances that peasants never even think about and I found the air much the same in every country. There's a lot of talk about freedom. It's like the Holy Grail, we grow up hearing of it, we're sure of that, and every person has his own idea of where.23

This becomes an exemplification of Fromm's argument that as the desire for freedom is the biological reflex of the human organism, the promise of freedom appeals to everyone invariably, therefore the Leaders overuse it, even if their purpose is subjugation.24 Henri reflects that the milieu of freedom varies for different people; for his friend the priest it is in God, for Patrick it is in his interior, his "jumbled mind," and for Bonaparte it is in power and warfare. Henri has shared his conviction, however, later an he realizes that it is love that is real freedom as it assumes the rejection of one's egotism: Bonaparte taught us that freedom lay in our fighting arm, but in the legends of the Holy Grail no one won it by force. lt was Perceval, the gentle knight, who came to a ruined chapel and found what the others had overlooked, simply by sitting still. I think now that being free is not being powerful or rich or well regarded or without obligations but being able to love. To love someone else enough to forget about 17 Winterson, The Passion, p. 105. 18 Winterson, The Passion, p. 104. 19 Winterson, The Passion, p. 134. 20 After Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain. The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 81. 21 Winterson, The Passion, p. 118. 22 Winterson, The Passion, pp. 122-123. 23 Winterson, The Passion, p. 154. 24 Fromm, Anatomia ludzkiej destrukcyjnogci, pp. 219-220.

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yourself even for one moment is to be free. The mystics and the churchmen talk about throwing off this body and its desires, being no longer a slave to the flesh. They don't say that through the flesh we are set free. That our desire for another will lift us out of ourselves more cleanly than anything divine.25

Eventually, defeated by the manipulable world in which he feels a puppet overcome by the sense of powerlessness and losing control, Henri renounces his passion for Napoleon and the Napoleonian masculine world. As he feels cheated, his love is transposed into hatred. Instead he tums to the maternal Venice which represents female paradigms of desire rendered as fluid labyrinthine travel without the ultimate possession.26 His passion is located in Villanelle: "I am in love with her; not a fantasy or a myth or a creature of my own making. Her. A person who is not me. I invented Bonaparte as much as he invented himself."27 He thereby discards the model of heterosexual desire of Man the Hunter and subjugator, `destroyer', and opts for the female model. Although Henri has experienced the enslaving quality of love, and passion as "a demon," love for him entails also redefinition of one's seif, views and perception of the world. He believes every human being craves for love and intense feelings but one is ashamed to admit it. As people rarely experience powerful emotions, they do not understand them and sneer at them: without love we grope the tunnels of our lives and never see the sun. When I fell in love it was as though I looked into a mirror for the first time and saw myself. I lifted my hand in wonderment and feit my cheeks, my neck. This was me. Then, when I regarded myself for the first time, I regarded the world and saw it to be more various and beautiful than I thought. I longed for feeling though I could not have told you that. Words lifte passion and extasy, we learn them but they stay flat an the page. We fear passion and laugh at too much love and those who love too much. And still we long to fee1.28

Even if not reciprocal, love matters, and exerts transformative power, the power of reviewing "my future and my past in the light of this feeling. It is as though I wrote in a foreign language that I am suddenly able to read. Wordlessly, she explains me to myself," "My passion for her, even though she could never return it, showed me the differente between inventing a lover and falling in love. The one is about you, the other about someone else."29 Coming to Venice with Villanelle, Henri stamps the beginning of his new life with shaving off his beard and throwing it into the canal together with his past, as he believes and hopes: "So

25 Winterson, The Passion, p. 154. 26 Stowers, "Journeying with Jeanette," p. 155. 27 Winterson, The Passion, pp. 157-158. 28 Winterson, The Passion, pp. 154-155. 29 Winterson, The Passion, pp. 122, 158.

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the past had gone. I had escaped. Such things are possible."3° Yet, Henri is swallowed by Venice, incapable of moving around it, and it becomes the locale of shattering of his personality, and sinking into despair and madness. 2. Gambling Winterson characterizes gambling as common human condition: "We gamble. Some do it at the gaming table, some do not."31 She works out the formula of gambling, in war and love, so as to disclose various imports of passion which Henri and Villanelle experience. Gambling is Bataille's metaphor for how to live to illustrate his notion of sovereign existence. The manner of life, characteristic of that ruled by passion, rejects projects and plans for the future, opting for chance, peril and risk. The metaphor of gambling, B6nyei Tamäs argues, influences the narrative of The Passion itself. Both the narrative and gambling are marked by the tension between iteration, forgetting and chance. The transience of gambling rests on the rupture between the singular games, with the prior games sinking into oblivion, rather than on a causal proximity. The time of gambling is not convergent with a narrative time, which can account for the ruptured repetitive text, interspersed with refrains.32 Bataille reads gambling and passion as demonstrations of the search both for breaching the discontinuous self and for selfannihilation; for Life that measures itself against death. Acts undertaken in pursuit of seductive images of chance are the only ones that respond to the need to live like a flame. For it is human to bum and consume oneself to the point of suicide at the barracat table; even if the cards reflect a degraded form of good and bad fortune, their meaning, which wins or loses money, also possesses the virtue of signifying destiny (the queen of spades sometimes signifies death).33

Both Henri and Villanelle exemplify "the Devil's gambler[s]" as they risk the most valuable thing they possess, contrary to the other kind of gambler, a sly one, who always saves something to play with the next time. Gambling is a conflation of pleasure and hazard, and its eventual desire, Bataille and Winterson recognize, is to lose: "Pleasure on the edge of danger is sweet. It's the gambler's sense of losing that makes the winning an act of love."34 The risk the genuine gamblers take, which can be only once is the loss of the self, of integral identity — once fragmented it can never be retained again.35 30 Winterson, The Passion, p. 125. 31 Winterson, The Passion, p. 73. 32 Benyei Tamäs after Makinen, The Novels of Jeanette Winterson, p. 63. 33 After Makinen, The Novels of Jeanette Winterson, p. 62. 34 Winterson, The Passion, p. 137. 35 Seaboyer, "Second Death in Venice," p. 499.

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Henri' s "game of chance" is pursuing his passion for Napoleon to take part in the war since the trauma of war cannot be erased, and it is not viable to "go home and pick up where we had left off,"36 as they were forced to believe. The emotional baggage appears too heavy to carry, since, as Elaine Scarry puts it in The Body in Pain, war inflexibly appropriates for "its own interior content the interior content of the wounded and open human body."37 Pondering on Napoleon, Henri discusses the rules governing gambling, and counts him among "the Devil's gambler[s]." Bonaparte, ruled by an insatiable appetite and believing to be the world' s focal point, intends to swallow Europe with the same greed as he does chickens which he does not even have carved. Disregarding the costs, he hazards everything to make his ambitions come true. Henri recalls, "All France will be recruited, if necessary. Bonaparte will snatch up his country like a sponge and wring out every last drop."38 On one occasion he puts twenty five thousand soldiers out to sea, as if he threw dice, although the weather is extremely unfavourable and the officers dissuade him from practising that day. Napoleon's narcissism, impudence and conceit result in two thousand corpses. The survivors, however, do not rebel against their Emperor although Henri feels they would be right to do so: We should have turned on him, should have laughed in his face, should have shook the dead-men-seaweed-hair in his face. ... No one said, Let's leave him let's hate him. We held our bowls in both hands and drank our coffee with the brandy ration he send specially to every man.39

As Napoleon's idea of his greatness and infallibility is grounded in his narcissistic assertion about his self-value and not in his actual achievements as a human being, he desperately needs his soldiers' approval and support: "his face is always pleading with us to prove him right."46 The soldiers' morale remains still high then, though a little impaired, probably because of the tendency, both in warfare and in peacetime, to interpret political and physical power as moral authority. According to Napoleon's well-known dictum, the ratio of moral to physical factors in victory is three to one, which is to argue unjustly that victory is determined by physical courage that is translated into morale, and also morality.41 The translation takes place because physical and political superiority and power possess the ability to be identified with moral superiority:42 "Three madmen 36 Winterson, The Passion, p. 83. 37 Scarry, The Body in Pain, p. 81. 38 Winterson, The Passion, p. 8. 39 Winterson, The Passion, pp. 24-25. 40 Winterson, The Passion, p. 25. On narcissism see e.g. Fromm, Analomia Ludzkiej Destrukcyjnas'ci, pp. 221-225. 41 Scarry, The Body in Pain, pp. 104-105. 42 Winterson, The Passion, p. 105.

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versus one madman. Numbers win. Not righteousness."43 Therefore, in spite of Napoleon's irresponsibility, and his treatment of soldiers as numbers, battles as diagrams and intellectuals as a menace, the soldiers consider him "the most powernd man in the world" and remain blindly devoted and obedient, ready to comply with his even most absurd orders ("All folly, but I think if Bonaparte had asked us to strap an wings and fly to St James's Palace we would have set off as confidently as a child lets loose a kite."44). considerations of Napoleon in the context of gambling seem substantiated then. Also Elaine Scarry points to semantic resemblance between war, contest and game. Although considerable divergence in the range of consequences makes the association between game and war almost obscene, she observes that both activities emphasize the unilateral outcome.45 Henri reflects, "You play, you win, you play, you lose. You play. The end of every game is an anti-climax. What you thought you would feel you don't feel, what you thought was so important isn't any more. It's the game that's exciting."46 Therefore, when Napoleon loses eventually and is isolated an the rock, rid of any challenges or excitement, he is "bur[ied] alive"47 and dies soon. Henri presumes Bonaparte is beaten because he is weary of victories: "Victors lose when they are tired of winning. Perhaps they regret it later, but the impulse to gamble the valuable, fabulous thing is too strong. The impulse to be reckless again, to go barefoot, like he used to, before he inherited all those shoes."48 As a result, "he who survived the plagues of Egypt and the zero winter died in the mild damp."49 His madness and quick death confirm his narcissism since narcissistic personalities need success and applause to retain the psychic balance. The picture of war shown by Winterson through Henri's eyes works to confirm Carl Clausewitz's specification of the tendencies war is composed of. He distinguishes three of them:5° the first one is primordial violence, in The Passion utilized in the characters yielding to the death-drive, which Villanelle summarizes in the assertion, "Men are violent. That's all there is to it,"5I the second tendency is the play of chance and probability in relation to creativity, in The Passion fulfilled in the comparison of war to gambling; and the third tendency is a partially controlling component of rationality, exposed in Bonaparte's precipitate decisions and Henri's ponderings about the pointlessness of war. 43 Winterson, The Passion, p. 134. 44 Winterson, The Passion, pp. 13, 21. 45 Scarry, The Body in Pain, pp. 84-85. 46 Winterson, The Passion, p. 133. 47 Winterson, The Passion, p. 134. 48 Winterson, The Passion, p. 133. 49 Winterson, The Passion, pp. 133-134. 50 After Scarry, The Body in Pain, p. 339. 51 Winterson, The Passion, p. 109.

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The peril Villanelle and Henri inflict on themselves is manifested through the allegory of one of the gambler's case, who, bored with entering into a wager with money and possessions, seeks a new exhilarating challenge. And so, one night, he plays with a stranger and the stake is life which can be taken in any preferable manner and instruments. The stranger wins the game, and chooses "dismemberment piece by piece beginning with the hands,"52 and although the observers hope that the wager is only a joke and will be renounced, a few months later they receive "a pair of hands, manicured and quite white, mounted on green baize in a glass case. Between the finger and thumb of the left was a roulette ball and between the finger and thumb of a right, a domino."53 The parable illustrates the secret desire to lose, in Bataille's words, "the necessity of throwing oneself or something of oneself out of oneself remains the psychological or physiological mechanism that in certain cases has no other end than death."54 On the other hand, the pain of the Lacanian body-in-pieces recorded on the body stands for the shattering of the psyche.55 The gamblers appear thus the true ones as they venture what they can risk only once and by means of this discover what they treasure most. Thus they effect Winterson's leitmotif: "What you risk reveals what you value." Similarly to the gambler, both Henri and Villanelle lose. Much as Henri strives to flee the horror of the past, the escape turns out to be illusory after all; the past catches up with him and takes on the shape of Villanelle's husband who appears to be the army cook. Threatening to denounce Henri, he claims his marital right to Villanelle. In a struggle Henri stabs his enemy violently, holding another "wild card," that is risking everything. With the intention of verifying whether the cook has a heart ("`You said he had no heart, Villanelle, let's see.'"), he takes the organ out of the cook's body, "like coring an apple."56 Having dissociated himself from the violence all his life, now he recognizes it as located internally as well, and, unable to accept that, he plunges into despair and madness.57 Sentenced to life imprisonment in the madhouse on San Servolo, Henri discards Villanelle's attempts to free him, as he perceives the outside world as a threat and is convinced that killing would be requisite again: "Was she mad? I'd have to kill again."58 He thus recognizes the walls of the lunatic asylum as the protection against the violent part of his seif. Yet, the traumas layered on one another, they take possession of him. Trying to repress the awareness of his fierce Other and reestablish the split personality, he is visited by the ghosts from his 52 Winterson, The Passion, p. 93. 53 Winterson, The Passion, p. 94. 54 After Makinen, The Novels of Jeanette Winterson, p. 63. 55 Seaboyer, "Second Death in Venice," p. 499. 56 Winterson, The Passion, p. 128. 57 Seaboyer, "Second Death in Venice," p. 501. 58 Winterson, The Passion, p. 152.

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past. Frequented by the dead "watching [him] with their hollow eyes," he wakes up "screaming night after night, his hands round his throat, sometimes nearly choked from self-strangling."59 The nightmare thus recreates the fatal struggle between the two parts of his personality.6° Henri' s behaviour resembles that of the abhorrent cook — when Villanelle, pregnant with Henri, declines to marry him, he "put his hands to [her] throat and slowly pushed his tongue out of his mouth like a pink worm. Trn your husband,' he said. ... and he came leaning towards [her], his eyes round and glassy and his tongue so pinlc."61 The scene alludes to the last encounter with the cook when he tries to kiss Villanelle: "His ... pale and pink mouth, a cavern of flesh and then his tongue, just visible like a worm from his hole."62 Now he usurps his right to Villanelle like her envious and dominant husband did. His love, although transforming to himself, appears a part of the same destructive trajectory he detests in other men. Such love, invested with the wich to control and subjugate, is what Villanelle cannot and will not reciprocate. Her love is like for a brother; it lacks fervour and passion: "I love him, but in a brotherly incestuous way. He touches my heart, but he does not send it shattering through my body. He could never steal it."63 This seems to arise from the separation of the "affective current" from the "sensual" one, hence, as Freud points out, "[w]here they love they do not desire and where they desire they cannot love."64 Therefore after some time in the madhouse, Henri decides not to see Villanelle any more, though he still loves her, since, as he explains, "she hurts me too much."65 He understands he must put an end to hope as it can result in breakdown: "Once more, what difference could it make to be near her again? Only this. That if I start to cry I will never stop."66 He intends to retrieve control over his emotions so as not to be ruled by passion any more. In his diary, a conflation of spiritual autobiography and elegiac memoir, Henri portrays Napoleon as a madman who, fmally isolated an a rock, leads death-in-life existence: "He talks about his past obsessively because the dead have no future and their present is recollection. They are in eternity because time has stopped."67 However, this refers to Henri himself as well. Both the character and 59 Winterson, The Passion, pp. 142, 147. 60 Seaboyer, "Second Death in Venice," p. 500. 61 Winterson, The Passion, p. 148. 62 Winterson, The Passion, p. 128. 63 Winterson, The Passion, p. 146. 64 Sigmund Freud, "On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love," in: A Critical and Cultural Theory Reader, ed. Kate McDowan (Buckingham: Open Univerity Press, 1996), p. 139. The `rule' refers to the psycho-sexual development of a large number of men, but, Villanelle being an androgyne, 1 apply the rule also to her. 65 Winterson, The Passion, p. 151. 66 Winterson, The Passion, p. 159. 67 Winterson, The Passion, p. 134.

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his text become hystericized since "[h]ysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences,5,68 Joseph Breuer claims. Compulsively recreating the past and endeavouring to recapitulate its significance, he turns away from the future. He snubs to leave San Servolo as he has everything he needs there: "Why would I want to get out? They're so preoccupied with getting out they miss what's here. Where would I go? I have a room, a garden, company and time for myself. Aren't these the things people ask for?"69 He gives thus priority to the "cities of the interior" and safety of the madhouse over the exterior disillusioning world to which he does not wish to return for fear of loneliness. He would not like to change places with the wardens, for example, who, despite being `free', do not seem fulfilled: "Their faces are grey and unhappy even on the sunniest days."76 The wardens warn Henri that he "will never get out ... not if they think you're mad,"71 indicating that his conduct is classified as symptomatic of a mental illness. Dorothy Smith, drawing on Foucault, examines the process of recognizing the individual's behaviour as indicative of mental disease, which involves the comparison to the expectations and norms of the society. Subsequently, this confusion of the differentiation between madness and sanity with the socially formed differente between the normal and the abnormal, results in the possibility to classify all anomalous conduct as demonstrative of mental illness.72 Therefore in "A Green Square" an ungendered narrator who leaves her house in the morning "with no desire to return," overwhelmed by the multiplicity of social roles s/he is supposed to fulfill, feels s/he will be treated as mentally I shall become a thing of the past, worse than dead, a living dead, to be avoided or forgotten, to be abused because I shall have revealed myself as someone who can't cope. We have to cope, don't we? Get on with life, pull ourselves together, be positive, look ahead. Therapy or drugs will be freely offered. I can get help. We live in a very caring society. lt cares very much that we all should be seen to cope.73

Winterson, like Smith, points to the discursive quality of the process of recognizing a mental illness, confusing it with emotional problems and the Jemand for medical treatment. Against this medicalization of mental illness Sasha Claire Mclnnes protests, celebrating instead the instances of conduct seen as aberrant, and reading them as manifestations of her humanity and "of being alive that I choose and cherish over the half-life offered by brain, mind and heartnumbing legal drugs." Correspondingly, Henri in The Passion tries to enjoy life to the fall, as opposed to the wardens. Taught by Villanelle who celebrates the 68 After Makinen, The Novels of Jeanette Winterson ,p. 65. 69 Winterson, The Passion, p. 157. 70 Winterson, The Passion, p. 157. 71 Winterson, The Passion, p. 157. 72 Sara Mills, Michel Foucault (London and New York: Routledge), p. 25. 73 Winterson, "A Green Square," pp. 189, 195-196.

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lifestyle of excess, Henri is able to seize the day; to "find joy in the most unlikely places and still ... be surprised by the obvious." And so he takes his time walking to the garden every morning, touching the walls on his way just to feel their texture; he basks his face in the sun; breathes with attention attempting to discover the smell of the air; watches the stars; while working in the garden he digs and scrabbles at the soil with his fingers just because he wishes to feel, squeeze and crumble it. That is something the wardens, insisting on using a spade, do not comprehend, nor Henri's desire to dance naked in the rain at night so as to feel "the icy drops like arrows and the change the skin undergoes."74 Villanelle gambles her heart in "a game of chance" and loses it to the Queen of spades. Also Catherine Clement collates falling in love to gambling and Barthes a lover to a gambler "whose luck cannot fail, so that his hand unfailingly lands on the little piece which immediately completes the puzzle of his desire." To him, "a little prohibition" and "a good deal of play" combine to create a successful relationship.75 Villanelle loves extreme emotions, "passion ... to be among the desperate."76 Thus she seems to be in love with love itself. She claims passion has an odour; the smell of "urgency" which is "somewhere between fear and sex" since "[w]e gamble with the hope of winning, but it's the thought of what we might lose that excites us."77 Like all Venetians, she treats love as a game, which she assumes, can be controlled: "Love is a fashion these days and in this fashionable city we know how to make light of love and how to keep our hearts at bay," "My heart is a reliable organ."78 Nevertheless, the "wild love" dependent on violent and impulsive emotions, and similar to throwing oneself "over an unsuitable cliff, only to reel back in horror from a simple view out of the window," is not feasible to subjugate and evokes unpredictable response: "I thought of myself as a civilized woman and I found I was a savage. When I thought of losing her I wanted to drown both of us in some lonely place rather than feel myself a beast that has no friend." On the contrary, in an intense amorous relationship, one must submit oneself to the fervour of emotions; they cannot be steered: "Passion will not be commanded. It is no genie to grant us three wishes when we let it loose. It commands us and very rarely in the way we would choose."79 Analogously to Henri, to evade a breakdown, Villanelle brings herself to reject the Queen of spades who does not intend to resign from the relationship with her husband:

74 Winterson, The Passion, p. 90. 75 Winterson, The Passion, pp. 55, 89. 76 Winterson, The Passion, pp. 95, 94. 77 Winterson, Gut Symnetries, p. 204. 78 Winterson, The Passion, p. 95. 79 Winterson, The Passion, p. 144.

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One more night. How tempting. How innocent. I could stay tonight surely? What difference could it make, one more night? No. if I smell her skin, find the mute curves of her nakedness, she will reach in her hand and withdraw my heart like a bird's egg. ... If I give in to this passion, my real life, the most solid, the best known, will disappear and I will feed on shadows again like those sad Spirits whom Orpheus fled. I could gamble on another night, reduce myself a little more, but after the tenth night would come the eleventh and the twelfth and so on into the silent space that is the pain of never having enough.8°

Villanelle demands single-mindedness in love; she does not wish to share her lover. Both Henri and Villanelle cross over the boundary to reestablish it, for the dividing line between passion and obsession is "as thin and cruel as a Venetian knife."8I If passion is a component of love, obsession is connected with hatred: "I didn't know what hate felt like, not the hate that comes after love. It's huge and desperate and it longs to be proved wrong. And every day it's proved right it grows a little more monstrous. ... A need to see the once-loved weak and cowed and beneath pity. Disgust is dose and dignity is far away. The hate is not only for the once loved, it's for yourself too; how could you ever have loved this?"82 Hatred is what people who have everything gamble for: "When they have everything they play for more sophisticated stakes than the rest of us. There are no thrills left to that man. The sun will never rise and delight him. I can't buy him. I can't tempt him. He wants a life for a life."83 Passion eludes definition; it is situated in-between: "Somewhere between God and Devil passion is," "In between freezing and melting. In between love and despair. In between fear and sex."84 As its significance fluctuates, passion appears precarious and risky, and it is easy to approach the edge of fear and despair. Still, Villanelle, addicted to fierce emotions, is sure she will pick "the wild card" again and again, and thus venture her heart: "Will I gamble it again? Yes."85 In The PowerBook where a game appears not just a game, the redhead is supposed to make a conclusive decision. In the final confrontation at Paddington Station, Alice proffers, in a flush of despair, to renounce her whole life as well as her past, and begs the redhead to do the same: "What should stop me? What does a person need in this life except a roof, food, work and love? Here was the person I loved. I am able to work. Where the roof is and where the food is doesn't matter."86 Nevertheless, her partner is incapable of escaping from her past

80 Winterson, 81 Winterson, 82 Winterson, 83 Winterson, 84 Winterson, 85 Winterson, 86 Winterson,

The Passion, pp. 146, 96. The Passion, p. 153. The Passion, p. 84. The Passion, p. 139. The Passion, pp. 68, 76. The Passion, pp. 151. The PowerBook, p. 204.

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pressing against her and her love affair, and starting everything from the beginning; the luggage of her personal history appears too heavy: Inside that suitcase was a marriage, America, a life of which I knew nothing. Inside that suitcase were doors I had never opened into rooms I wouldn't recognise. The suitcase was stuffed with letters and an address book and a store card for a shopping mall, and dinner parties I had never been to, and wouldn't go to now. In that suitcase were invitations from friends and pre-sets on a car radio tuned to stations I had never heard. In that suitcase were bad dreams and secret hopes. The dirty linen was in a special nylon compartment. Her childhood was in there — the awkward child with rough plaits who grew into a beautiful heavy-haired woman ... Her husband was in there, or maybe he was strapped to the side, where you usually keep the lifeboats.87

At the station there is still one "moment when time is so still it stops a second when there is no time. The second that beats between your life and mine,"88 when the redhead can change her mind At this point Winterson offers two endings. The final passage is preceded by the rewritten story of the chosen people arriving at the Promised Land and rejecting it, for it appears too much. The quest for the Promised Land appears thus more significant than getting it; the sense is more important than the aim. In this light, the ending of the book in which the redhead opts for her husband, seems much more liable. The excitement and thrills of the liaison turn out more important than staying with the lover, "You know you like to view but not to buy."89 And so, when the ultimate decision must be made, the married safety and the familiar and predictable prevail over the Jure of novelty and risk, averting thus, like in The Passion, the conversion from homosocial to lesbian bonding. A very important factor in making the decision can also be a strong taboo on lesbian relationships. This poses the reason, Adrienne Rich notes, for persisting in unsuccessful marriages, rather than giving them up for the sake of a woman as a partner, although a bond with another woman enriches both of them and is abundant in diffuse energy and fondness.9° Afi admits that her lover's consent would frighten her terribly as she cannot be sure whether their relationship would work, but she would persist in her resolution, proving to be "an absolutist." Against all the conventions she dreams: I want to be able to call you. I want to be able to knock on your door. I want to be able to keep your key and to give you mine. I want to be seen with you in public. 1 want there to be no gossip. I want to make supper with you. I want to go shopping with you. I want to know that nothing can come between us except each other.71

87 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 203. 88 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 206. 89 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 127. 90 Rich, "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence," pp. 28, 32, 33. 91 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 109.

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The affair has shattered her life and she feels an urgent need to leave her life behind anyway: "How can you go back? How can I? I'll probably seil my house now anyway. My life doesn't make sense. Starting again, as clean as I can, is the only way I'm going to make sense of it."92 Ali appears more involved in the relationship and it is her who presses its closeness. Although the affair is electrifying for both of them, the redhead seeins to have much more to lose. The description of her suitcase suggests that Ali does not really know her. Ali's image of the redhead's life is only guesses and scraps of stories; in fact they have met only thrice, so she does not realize what she asks her for. This time it is Ali who asks for more than her partner can give. On the other hand, this means that Ali renounces the redhead's past and accepts her as she is. Alix resigns from her own past also because she recognizes "that love is enough and that possessions are borrowed pastimes," to use the pilot's words in The World and Other Places, and thus she "will float free through the exit sign" with merely a "toothbrush in [her] pocket." The married woman represents the position of "The ones who stayed up late, gathering and gathering like demented bees, will find that you can take it with you. The joke is that you have to carry it yourself."93 Another intercut story representing Ali's position is that of Orlando who, attempting to find his beloved kidnapped by horsemen, searches the palace in the forest. There are also other knights incessantly searching the building for "his lady, his falcon, his horse, the band of robbers who fired his house" and getting to know the place "better than ourselves. It was ourselves."94 When a seeker is about to give up his search, he hears a voice imploring him to return. Hitherto, none of the men can find what he seeks, as the palace is empty. One day a stranger comes to the castle, like all the others, lured there by a hallucination of his desire, and at one glance he recognizes it to be enchanted. Making the castle disappear, he sobers the seekers and Hicks off all the deceptions and illusions. Orlando notes, "The palace was gone, or rather, it was no longer outside myself."95 In the castle the seekers do not look for a person but for their desire; the palace embodies thus dreams, wishes and desires which ultimately appear illusions. Both in case of Orlando and Alix at that point of their lives a woman is the personification of the illusion. They seek love, yet, they seek in the wrong place. Alix realizes the redhead has not been so committed as she herself: "you seemed to be saying we had every choice, every chance. You acted as though you were free,"96 and thus she is not ready to sacrifice everything to this relationship; she is not willing to give actively, which to Barthes is a requisite of love,

92 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 205. 93 Winterson, "The World and Other Places," p. 91. 94 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 239. 95 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 241. 96 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 229. Emphasis mine.

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otherwise it poses merely being-in-love.97 Recognizing it is not `true love' and the redhead is the wrong person, Ali makes the "outside castle" vanish. To be aware of the illusory disposition of the outside palace and to differentiate between the outside and inside palaces is to gain self-knowledge. The story suggests the fulfillment of one's desires lies within oneself and starts with getting to know oneself. As regards love, the most important step is to learn to love, as Fromm posits, since love is the art everyone can learn, and not a gift from the fate, as Barthes insists, not "a stroke of luck" belonging "to the (Dionysiac) order of the Cast of the dice."98 Therefore, Alix concludes flabbergasted: "Everything I had sought had been under my feet from the beginning."99 It transpires that what she has experienced was in fact "enchantment," being in love, and not love itself. Barthes elucidates the dialectic of being-in-love and loving: loving is a noble feeling in which the amorous subject gives actively, whereas being-in-love is a morbid state, hallucination during which the lover is drugged, "enchanted, bewitched ... in the realm of sleep, without sleeping," "on the brink of reality" and does not retain control over their emotions.1°° Correspondingly, Winterson's characters observe being-in-love as a delirious condition, "a hectic stupor," the state "that most resembles a particular kind of mental disorder" which "manifests itself as a compulsion to be forever doing something, however meaningless. The body must move but the mind is blank. ... I found myself staring into space, forgetting where I was going."1°1 The amorous subject controls neither their feelings nor body that is disobedient: Lovers are not at their best when it matters. Mouths dry up, palms sweat, conversation flags and all the time the heart is threatening to fly from the body once and for all. Lovers have been known to have heart attacks. Lovers drink too much from nervousness and cannot perform. They eat too little and faint during their fervently wished consummation. They do not stroke the favoured cat and their facepaint comes loose. This is not all. Whatever you have set store by, your dress, your dinner, your poetry, will go wrong.102

The passage points to Barthes's contention that participating in a conversation paralyses and appals the person in love as s/he is excluded from the general language and from the outside world, which manifests itself as "a generalized hysteria."1°3 The withdrawal from the world can take on the shape of "unreality" 97 Barthes, A Lover's Discourse, p. 126. 98 Barthes, A Lover's Discourse, p. 199. Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 222. 99 100 Barthes, A Lover's Discourse, pp. 88-89, 104, 126, 198. 101 Winterson, The Passion, p. 62. 102 Winterson, The Passion, p. 66. "1" feels analogously: "Work harder, mix more cocktails, stay up late, don't sleep, don't think. I might have taken to the bottle had there been anything fit to drink." (Written an the Body, p. 142). 103 Barthes, A Lover's Discourse, p. 88.

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or "disreality," and both Villanelle and Alix go through the stages. In case of "unreality" the rejection of the outside world is stated through "a fantasy: everything around me changes value in relation to a function, which is the Imagerepertoire; the lover then cuts himself off from the world, he unrealizes it because he hallucinates from another aspect the peripeteias or the utopias of his love; he surrenders himself to the Image, in relation to which all `reality' disturbs him."1" The characterization seems applicable to the condition of being-in-love with its fervour of emotions; excitement, risk and despair. When the lover is given up, the category of "unreality" is transformed into "disreality" where no imaginary replacement can make up for the loss of reality; "Everything is frozen, petrified, immutable, i.e. unsubstitutable: the Image-repertoire is (temporarily) foreclosed."105 However, when the amorous subject realizes and utters their condition, they emerge from it; the "outside castle" disappears. Wintersonian concept of passionate wild love is embedded in the ontology of lack. The lovers' desire is contingent upon crossing the boundaries, which are usually constituted by taboo relationships, like homosexual and extramarital ones, and the dynamics of gender masquerade that makes the identification ambiguous. The erotic tension ensuing from the necessity to cross the boundaries is grounded in the erotics of risk, as Lauren Rusk insists; risk of commitment and intimacy, of loss of control, of loss of the self in the other, and of being left. The insatiable hungry love embraces suffering and anxiety since they ensue from lack and desire for what one does not have. What is more, the desire can only operate if it is left void, as Hegel adumbrates in The Phenomenology of Spirit. The object of desire is always another desire that cannot fill the lack.106 This is exemplified in the tale about the Leopard and in gambling. Villanelle supports this position: "Hopeless heart that thrives on paradox; that longs for the beloved and is secretly relieved when the beloved is not there. That gnaws away at the night-time hours desperate for a sign and appears at breakfast so self-composed. That longs for certainty, fidelity, compassion, and plays roulette with anything precious."I07 Supplied with its object, desire would be obliterated. In Winterson, the supposition may be corroborated by the married boredom and subsequent adultery, since desire thrives on risk, lack and longing. Love-as-passion is thereby "a force, a strength something which suggests energy, tension,"1°8 as Barthes asserts. The tension and necessity to transgress boundaries are the indispensable constituents of romantic love in Winterson. Vehemence and fierceness, and also the ability and willingness to take risks emerge as a measure of the temperature of the emotional engagement and its depth: 104 Barthes, A Lover's Discourse, p. 90. 105 Barthes, A Lover's Discourses, pp. 90-91. 106 After Grosz, "Refiguring Lesbian Desire," p. 71. 107 Winterson, The Passion, p. 73. 108 Barthes, A Lover's Discourse, p. 84.

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The wild love covers happiness concomitantly, however transient and uncertain, as it is associated with possessing. Possessing, nonetheless, according to Barthes, is a trajectory not of love, but of being-in-love although a certain quantity of love is included in being-in-love.'1° The contention may be illustrated with Villanelle' s words, Whoever it is you fall in love with for the first time, not just love but be in love with, is the one who will always make you angry, the one you can't be logical about. It may be that you are settled in another place, it may be that you are happy, but the one who took your heart wields final power. I was angry because she had wanted me and made me want her."

Also for Fromm, possessing and dependence on the partner and on the emotions indicate a symbiotic bond, being-in-love, but not `true love'. `True love' is for him grounded in productivity, therefore he calls it "productive love," and mentions responsibility, respect, concern and knowledge as its basic elements. Mature love is for him a union where the singularity and individuality of each of the partners are preserved. Love is thus an active energy in a human being uniting them with another human being, yet letting them preserve their integrality, freedom and independence.I12 Fromm's definition of love is congruent with Elisabeth Grosz's formula of lesbian desire, analogous to other lesbian feminists' one. She conceives desire in terms proposed by Spinoza — not as lack but production: "Desire is the force of positive production, the energy that creates things, makes alliances, and forges interactions between things."m Desire and sexuality are not tantamount to wishes, hopes or fantasies but to actions, energies, movements, excitations, pulses of feeling. The pleasure's sole purpose is its own escalation and proliferation. It is a creative production, but never reproduction.I14 Although Winterson's characters experience the wild passionate painful love, nevertheless, it is not this kind of love they set off in quest of. In fact they 109 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 189. 110 Barthes, A Lover's Discourse, p. 126. 111 Winterson, The Passion, p. 145. 112 On love see Fromm, 0 sztuce milag.ci, pp. 32-34, 66; Niech sig stanie czlowiek. Z psychologii etyki [Man for Himself], trans. Robert Saciuk (Warszawa-Wroclaw: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, 1999), pp. 84-87, 154-155; Milog ple6 i matriarchat, pp. 188-191. 113 Grosz, "Refiguring Lesbian Desire," p. 75. 114 Lesbian Desire," pp. 75, 78-79.

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search for the Frommian productive love figured in Winterson's books as Holy Grail or treasure. 4. Love as Holy Grail/treasure Jeanette in Oranges observes love to be trivialised and clicMd: "Romantic love has been diluted into paperback form and has sold thousands and millions of copies," yet, on the other hand, she believes the 'real love' is feasible to be found, "Somewhere it is still in the original, written on the tablets of stone."115 The genuine love embraces for her a balanced mixture of divine and human love: "[I]f God is your emotional role model, very few human relationships will match up to it. I have an idea that one day it might be possible, I thought once it had become possible, and that glimpse has set me wandering, trying to find the balance between earth and sky."116 Jeanette's grad embraces fulfillment through romantic love and through creativity, together with the approval of that fulfillment in the community of her origin.117 She is prepared to make sacrifices in search of her grad: "I would cross the seas and suffer sunstroke and give away all I have," and realizes this demands perseverance and courage: "Only a conviction that what she wanted could exist, if she dared to find it."'18 The Holy Grail is symbolized by an orange growing on an orange tree in a "secret garden." It stands for female eroticism, as elucidated by Winterson herself in Boating for Beginners: "the orange tree ... was to symbolize their womanhood."119 The story about a garden with a tree is intercepted in Oranges just before Jeanette decides to pursue her lesbian desire for good: On the banks of the Euphrates find a secret garden cunningly walled. There is an entrance, but the entrance is guarded. There is no way in for you. Inside you will find every plant that grows growing circular-wise like a target. Close to the heart is a sundial and at the heart an orange tree. This fruit has tripped up athletes while others have healed their wounds. All true quests end in this garden, where the Split fruit pours forth blood and the halved fruit is a full bowl for travellers and pilgrims. To eat of the fruit means to leave the garden because the fruit speaks of other things, other longings. So at dusk you say goodbye to the place you love, not knowing if you can ever return by the same way as this. lt may be, some other day, that you will open a gate by chance, and find yourself again on the other side of the wall.120

Although the oranges allude to the Eden fruit and also to the Holy Grail, the Wintersonian passage is pre-discursive — it does not advance ideals of good and 115 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, p. 165. 116 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, p. 165. 117 Rusk, "The Refusal of Otherness," p. 120. 118 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, pp. 165, 154. 119 Jeanette Winterson, Boating for Beginners (London: Minerva, 1990), p. 29. 120 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, p. 120.

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evil This inconsistency, along with the contradiction of "There is no other way in for you" and "Inside you will find" represent "the paradox of losing love because you love,"12I as Jeanette loses her mother's love ("the split fruit pours forth blood") when she decides not to give up her love to a woman On the other hand, "the halved fruit" symbolizes sharing of dose friends or lovers, like in case of Jeanette and Elsie eating oranges, half each. Oranges are given to Jeanette at difficult moments of her life, for example by her mother before the ear Operation, then instead of visiting her in hospital, when she was lying with fever, after the exorcism, or by Melanie after she Breaks up with Jeanette. An orange is a kind of compensation for insufficiency and it informs Jeanette about the contingencies of love and its failure.122 It is also the fruit that an orange demon comes out of to help her realize what she wants. An orange demon visits her when she is isolated, without food or light, in her room so as to consider her "unnatural passion" and repent. It informs her that everybody has a demon and their task is "to keep it in one piece, if you ignore us, you're quite likely to end up in two pieces, or lots of pieces," but they are not evil, "just different, and difficult."123 If Jeanette is courageous enough to keep the demon, that is pursue her desires, she will have a hard, different time but otherwise she can pay with a split identity. The demon personifies thus freedom and individuality, and the bright glow of Jeanette's demon indicates hearth-fire and the flicker of imagination.124 In one of the interspersed stories an orange from Winterson's tree of knowledge turns into a thorny crown, and the garden into King Arthur's Round Table, "decorated with every plant that grows growing circular-wise like a target. Near the centre is a sundial and at the centre a thorny crown."125 In another story Perceval dreams of the Holy Grail but when he reaches out, his hands fill with thorny. The imagery links Jeanette's experience to Jesus' as they are both ostracized and punished for life whose fulcrum is love.126 The interludes present the feelings Jeanette is faced with: mourning and loneliness after lost romantic love and rejection by her mother.I27 The imagery connected with circularity, a characteristic tool to depict female world, points to lesbian quality of the romantic love. The search for love, a stable pivot, cannot be completed without uncertainty, as Rusk notes, and the opposites of stability and uncertainty are brought together in Perceval whose "[o]ne hand was curious, sure and firm. His gentle, thoughtful hand. The hand for feeding a dog or strangling a demon. The 121 Rusk, "The Refusal of Othemess," p. 119. 122 Rusk, "The Refusal of Otherness," p. 120. 123 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, p. 106. 124 Rusk, "The Refusal of Otherness," p. 111. 125 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, p. 127. 126 Rusk, "The Refusal of Otherness," p. 120. 127 Rusk, "The Refusal of Otherness," pp. 120-121.

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other hand looked underfed. A stark, questioning, blank, uncomfortable hand. A scared hand but the hand for balancing."128 It is balance that Jeanette endeavours to find, having refused the pastor's ideal of perfection as flawlessness. Jeanette's divergence with the idea is demonstrated by means of the story of a prince looking for a flawless woman The woman he fancies does not deny her flaws; she claims to possess "a perfect balance of qualities and strengths,"129 since to her, perfection is not synonymous with flawlessness but with balance. The prince, however, cannot be convinced, and he orders to behead her, as he has done with everyone who disagreed with him. Thus, he continues to seek "what does not exist."I3° In The PowerBook love as Holy Graul assumes the narre of "the buried treasure." The narrator, Alix, is the one who is assigned to find it. She is adopted by the couple who wish to have "[a] charm. The smallest silver key on the heavy keyring. The key that opens the forbidden door."13I They sense that the treasure may start with having a baby but they are unable to use this knowledge, so they love Ali "as much as a pram with its wheels off' or "more than two bags full of washing-machine hoses."132 Alix's mother, filled both with cynicism and credulity, on the one hand believes in the treasure to be found in the Promised Land mapped in one's heart, but on the other hand, she cannot pursue the dictum of the heart, afraid of the risk and the unknown: "Even the near places seemed too far."133 Fearful of love and intimacy, she prefers to disavow that they really exist and can be enduring: "The fire will be out soon enough. There's nothing in the ashes but ash."134 She maintains that when she was young, the treasure was often found in the forest, and it was not concealed. She recalls an occasion on which she and the boy she was with believed they discovered a field of gold. It appeared a field of buttercups, and she elucidates their naivety with their youth; however, what she may imply is that it is easier for the young to open for love. She believed to be wealthy at the time for she was happy to walk with the boy holding his hand and spontaneously enjoying a beautiful summer day. She wams Alix that when one gets older, one seeks the treasure in the wrong place, or does not believe it exists. She explains that the only way to the Promised Land is through the Wilderness, and by the term Wilderness Ali's parents denote the space apart from the Muck House in which they live, and which is separated from the outside world with a high wall. Positioning the Muck House as the other to the Wilderness, the mother implies the life she leads is not her Promised Land and she would "pay anything not to live 128 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, p. 168. 129 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, p. 62. 130 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, p. 64. 131 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 137. 132 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 138. 133 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 195. 134 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 146.

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it."135 Acrimonious and locked in the clich6d world, she does not believe in the possibility to change anything in real life. On the mantelpiece there is still a rusty key which she found in her youth and which is "waiting for the door."136 Winterson appropriates the metaphor of the door many a time to designate love or a lover, for example with the words: "Love is a door in a blank wall,"137 "You are the door at the top of the stairs."138 The rusty key indicates the mother's heart waiting for treasure, the real love, not yet found then. Ali's mother's cynicism and bitterness make Ali determined to seek the treasure. She persuades herself in her thoughts many a time: "The buried treasure is really there."139 She realizes the method to find it is by breaking out of dich& and beaten tracks, and staying off organized excursions and planned routes as she suspects the treasure is "an encampment on the edge of the wilderness."146 Although she cannot be sure she will find it as "There's no guarantee ... I just have to risk it,"141 she is assured of the necessity and indispensability of the quest, and also of its value: "My search for you, your search for me, is a search after something that cannot be found. Only the impossible is worth the effort."142 She also realizes sometimes it is difficult to differentiate between an evanescent bond and true feelings: "Found objects wash up on the shores of my computer. Tin cans and old tyres mix with the pirate's stuff. The buried treasure is really there but caulked and outlandish. Hard to spot because unfamiliar, and few of us can see what has never been named."143 The unfamiliarity with the productive love may be engendered by the overuse and abuse of the word `love', as Fromm observes, which is ascribed to most romantic feelings.144 Winterson takes the same stance asserting that love has become a rare emotion: "What a strange world it is where you can have as much sex as you like but love has become a taboo,"145 and elucidates the sex rush with fear: "After loss of Identity, the most potent modern terror, is loss of sexuality."146 The subsequent elusiveness, though tinged with apparent familiarity, turns love into a "riddle of our lives."147 In an attempt to track the essence of love, "to scrape out the meaning,"148 one returns continuously to the same stories of "great and ruinous lovers." 135 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 229. 136 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 196. 137 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 202. 138 Winterson, Lighthousekeeping, p. 219. 139 Winterson, The PowerBook, pp. 63-64, 109, 188. 140 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 79. 141 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 228. 142 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 78. 143 Winterson, The PowerBook, pp. 63-64. 144 Fromm, Milos'4 plec i matriarchat, p. 189. 145 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 51. 146 Winterson, Art&Lies, p. 69. 147 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 78. 148 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 78.

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Alix's formula of love is similar to Jeanette's in Oranges; it is a conflation of human and divine elements: What we seek is love itself, revealed now and again in human form, but pushing us beyond our humanity into animal instinct and god-like success. The love we seek overrules human nature. It has a wildness in it and a glory that we want more than life itself. Love never counts the cost, to itself or others, and nothing is as cruel as love. Merely human love does not satisfy us, though we settle for it.149

The divine constituents seem to comprise sacrifice, patience and unendingness, whilst the human constituents include the passion and ferocity. Like for Fromm, `true love' issues here from abundance and freedom, rather than from lack: Intensified is a longing for love as it really is — as freedom, abundance, generosity, passion. What Dante calls 'the love that moves the sun and the other stars.' This love exists. Perhaps it is the only thing that exists. It is the buried treasure. The treasure is really there. Fragments, hints, clues, letters, persuade me on. I've come near it sometimes, but like Lancelot outside the Chapel of the Grail, I haven't been able to go in.I5°

Alix's concept of love as Holy Grail echoes the Lothario's one in Written on the Body as it once again comprises passion and comfort inclined in unendingness. Sexing the Cherry also attempts to answer the question about the essence of love. The Dog-Woman shows a disposition to wonder about love, encouraged by the pastor's conviction about the superiority of divine love over the human one: "only God can truly love us and the rest is lust and selfishness."151 To support the thesis and to warn the congregation against the sin, the church building is decorated with carvings of nudes, including homosexual ones. Along with religious love, the Dog-Woman considers the familial, romantic and physical one. She has experienced affection only from her son and dogs, and confesses she does not know what love feels like. Being no authority on love, the Dog-Woman regrets she cannot teach her son about it, yet, she believes she can teach him about its "lack and persuade him that there are worse things than loneliness."152 Her only notion of love is that of extreme pleasure mixed with suffering; "that cruelty which takes us straight to the gates of Paradise only to remind us they are closed for ever,"153 which she leamed when she feil in girlish love. She has sacrificed plenty of effort to perform the cultural standards of feminine behaviour so as to look attractive, but her endeavour is exposed as futile, since, although female by

149 Winterson, The PowerBook, pp. 78-79. 150 Winterson, The PowerBook, pp. 188-189. 151 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 34. 152 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 40. 153 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 35.

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sex, she is unable to forte her body to be feminine by gender. Therefore her lover faints out of terror at her posture and strength when she lifts him in her hand to kiss her. The heroine is familiar only with the sounds of love since she can hear them through the wall, and ponders, "What can it be like, two bodies slippery as eels on a mud-flat, panting like dogs after a pig?"154 Her experience of sex comprises two awkward and unsuccessful instances. Love and sex are inextricably connected with each other for her, thereby she rejects a job in a brothel as she supposes that the result of sex can be falling in love: "Surely such to-ing and froing as must go on night and day weakens the heart and inclines it to love? Not directly but indirectly, for Lust without romantic matter must be wearisome after a time."155 In his quest for love, The Dog-Woman's son comes across various views on love. During one of his imaginary journeys a philosopher dissuades him from the journey, warning him that "love is better ignored than explored," for pursuing "the trajectories of the heart"156 is extremely difficult. The philosopher elucidates two divergent attitudes to love: its subjugation and subjugating oneself to romantic passion. He approves of getting rid of love or keeping it under control, marriage being the best means to do that. He cites the people who support the view that only by yielding to temptation one can dispense of it, "that only passion freed the soul from its mud-hut, and that only by loosing the heart like a coursing bare and following it until sundown could a man or woman sleep quietly at night," but provides many examples in myths of the destructive quality of romantic love, "these passages of ancient literature which promise that those driven by desire, the fightest of things, suffer under weights they cannot bear. Weights far more terrible than to accept from the start that passion must spend its life in chains."157 In another place, Jordan meets a man who sells amulets against misfortunes and disease. Jordan requests him for a charm against love, but he cannot offer such, "for everyone is inclined to love. It is easy to bring on, impossible to end until it ends itself."158 The negative images of love are joined by the one claiming that it is a plague and should be evaded on any tost. Winterson portrays one of the cities Jordan visits on his way where love is a crime punished with death penalty as this epidemic has destroyed the population of the City three times. Only a monk and a whore were left and they produced a new population and invented law about love, recalling that of the dystopian worlds which take control of the citizens' private life:

154 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 35. 155 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 40. 156 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 38. 157 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, pp. 38, 39. 158 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 73.

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From their earliest moment children were wamed of their dire consequences, personal and social, of love. They were urged to put aside any romantic fancies, the sexes were carefully segregated and all marriages were arranged. Sex itself, tending as it does to fire the heart as well as the groin, was possible only for the purposes of childbearing, or on the filme festival nights when a troop of male and female prostitutes were hired from a neighbouring town and asked to satisfy the longings of the city dwellers.159

Although Jordan's experience of love comprises numerous affairs, none of the women loved him. It seemed to him then that he loved them but later he realizes, "I loved myself through them."16° He recalls a few occasions on which he was determined to leave his life behind for love. Yet, he hesitates between categorizing that feeling as love and the conclusion that "[s]uch a sacrifice must be the result of love."161 He ascribes the willingness to abandon everything to "the life itself worn out" and "a choice made in secret after nights of longing" implying that love possesses a meaning-granting quality. Jordan recognizes the reason for his affairs being unsuccessful is the lack of self-knowledge, "As for your beloved, she didn't understand you. The truth is, you never understood yourself."162 He realizes he deceives himself when he explains the affairs are not worthwhile, and that the beloved should play the minor role in his life, being merely "a shaping spirit for the lover's dreams."163 What he attempts to conceal from himself is that he is afraid of the risk of loss: "Naturally, these thoughts protect me, but they also render me entirely gullible or without discrimination. Suddenly the enchanted city fades and you are left alone again in the windy desert."164 When Jordan finds his elusive dream, Fortunata, eventually, he does not stay with her. They both experience the kind of liberating productive love that allows them to dispense with the wish to possess the partner and to free him/her to stay their essential self.165 Neither of them wishes to subsume the other's story, or to sacrifice their own. The girl formerly believed destiny appropriated someone for her, but later she learned to be alone. In Lighthousekeeping the love affair, designed to be a rather long-term relationship, seems calmer, devoid of any tensions, but not of intensity. Fear of loss and intimacy with a stranger, an unknown land, is Silver's only anxiety: "I didn't want to frighten you away. I didn't want to frighten myself away."166 Most of the chapter rendering Silver's relationship is devoted to the couple's holiday in

159 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 75. 160 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 74. 161 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 74. 162 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 74. 163 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 74. 164 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 74. 165 Jan Rosemergy after Makinen, The Novels of Jeanette Winterson, p. 104. 166 Winterson, Lighthousekeeping, p. 211.

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a hut on the rim of the forest where, surrounded by nature, they worship the ordinary, like drinking wine and champagne, preparing meals, walking in the forest, making love, listening to the lover's breathing in sleep. Silver reckons those small moments the miracles of everyday life, "talismans and treasure."167 She obeys Pew's teachings about love which should be governed by honesty and truth. He has also advised the child to always teil her beloved that she loved them. Like for other Winterson's characters, love is for Silver the Grail: "You are the carved low door into the chapel of the Grail."168 Winterson's reciprocal love demands naming which seems to be consonant with Antoine de Saint Exupery's notion of taming. Naming/taming signifies getting to know, looking after each other, creating the private language and rituals in the relationship. Thus Cixous's formula, "Loving: keeping alive: naming"169 finds expression in Jeanette's ruminations: There are many forms of love and affection, some people can spend their whole lives without knowing each other's names. Naming is a difficult and time-consuming process; it concerns essences, and it means power. But on the wild nights who can call you home? Only the one who knows your name.17°

Though naming poses a signifier of knowledge and a dose relationship, on the other hand it appears risky, as knowing somebody's name entails having power over them. Being named can be associated with violence, Judith Butler posits in her examination of the power of naming, therefore one strives to own one's name and, by inference, its meanings.171 The struggle is enacted in Oranges in the fairy story of Winnet Stonejar whose name is an anagram of Jeanette Winterson. The story starts with the figuration of one's territory. Winnet travels in the times when magic is vital and one's territory poses an expansion of a chalk circle one draws around to prevent intrusion. Circles, like walls, function either as division or protection. A chalk circle is a physical preliminary to imagining "a forte field" round oneself. One must not let others draw a circle around oneself because then they will be under their control. This symbolizes Jeanette's need to follow her own path, dissimilar from that determined by the heteromatrix, even though the consequence is ostracism. In the forest Winnet meets a wizard, representing Jeanette's mother, who know your name.' And so she stopped, afraid. If this follows her and threatens: were true she would be trapped. Naming meant power. Adam had named the 167 Winterson, Lighthousekeeping, p. 212. 168 Winterson, Lighthousekeeping, p. 219. 169 Seilers ed., Cixous Reader, p. 83. 170 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, p. 165. 171 See Sara Salih ed., The Judith Butler Reader (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), pp. 326, 337.

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animals and the animals came at his call."172 Lost in the forest, Winnet needs to cooperate with the sorcerer who traps her in the circle he draws. She does not possess the power to surpass the circle, and when the wizard guesses her name, she must fulfill his wishes. Hence William Golding's assertion, "What is given a name is given a seal, a chain,"173 is put into practice. He apprentices her to magic arts, like Louie trains Jeanette to become a missionary, and they live together until the girls fall in love with a wrong kind of person and are ordered to move out. The story highlights the irrational facet of the relationship between Winnet and the sorcerer, Jeanette and her mother and the magical power they exercise over their adopted daughters, tied to them by an invisible fibre, a kind of umbilical cord. A similar thread inclines Silver in Lighthousekeeping to respond when she hears her name screeched by a parrot. She realizes that is merely a coincidence, yet, it matches "a moment in me that was waiting for someone to call my name."174 Silver believes in the magic of names, even those ordinary ones which are still precious to "somebody somewhere."175 The moment of the parrot's calling constitutes the time of the rediscovery of her seif. A name poses a marker of identity then: "Every day the bird reminded me of my name, which is to say, who I am."176 Identity consolidates under a name, which can also be said about Jordan. He repeats many times, "My name is Jordan." Inchoately it can be read as a declaration of consistent identity and ontological and cultural determinant of the narrative voice. Later however, the association of name and individual crashes and becomes problematic since the subjectivity appears intangible and indefinable, and narrative voices multiply. The character's assertion, "My name is Jordan" poses thus a marker of his struggle to find unity. Furthermore, lesbians, who attempt to evade the heterosexual economy, are caught into it by labels. The labels of freaks, perverts or dykes reveal categorical violence of naming and settle those who pin them an the side of normalcy. Therefore, one of Winterson's lesbians poses: "It is no surprise we do not always remember our name."177 Here naming points to identity again which gets concealed under the palimpsest of abusive labels. However precarious and painful love may be, Winterson always expresses its affirmation as the highest value. It transpires that although the discourse of love is hackneyed and 'I love you' is the tritest of all clicMs, these are also the most desirable and irreplaceable words. Each couple of lovers has to discover them for itself. The confession can become a "private altar": "when you say it and 172 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, p. 138. 173 William Golding, Pincher Martin (London: Faber&Faber, 1956), p. 87. 174 Winterson, Lighthousekeeping, p. 155. 175 Winterson, Lighthousekeeping, p. 156. 176 Winterson, Lighthousekeeping, p. 158. 177 Winterson, "The Poetics of Sex," p. 36.

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when I say it we speak like savages who have found three words and worship them."I78 It is not the words' originality that matters here but their authenticity: I don't like to think of myself as an insincere person but if I say I love you and I don't mean it then what else am I? Will I cherish you, adore you, make way for you, make myself better for you, look at you and always see you, teil you the truth? And if love is not those things then what things?179

178 Winterson, Written on the Body, pp. I I, 9. 179 Winterson, Written on the Body, pp. 11-12.

Chapter V: "The path not taken and the forgotten angle" — Time, Memory, and History

All time is always present, but buried layer by layer under what people call Now. /Jeanette Winterson: The Tanglewreck/

Time is one of the themes Jeanette Winterson is obsessed with: the nature of time, its impact on people, and time's intersection with consciousness to create a sense of identity. Her writing is permeated with motifs of water: the river, sea, ocean, canals, voyaging, which is associated with time as well as the concept of nomadic subjectivity. Moreover, the theories of new physics along with virtual time function as conceptual framework for the writer's depiction of subjectivity. With time the issues of history and memory are strictly connected, and their depiction in accordance with postmodernist views opens up interesting opportunities for Winterson's characters. 1. Memory Freud employed archaeological excavation as a metaphor for memory and the process of remembering, which was later dismissed as misleading. In his article "Remembering and the Archaeology Metaphor" Steen F. Larsen argues that Freud's metaphor is still appropriate, provided that a revised contemporary understanding of archaeology is taken into account. Along the contemporary view of memory, as with excavated objects, no memory of the past is unbiased or complete, which is the consequence of several factors working to distort recollections: decontextualization, transforming the visual form of the event into its selective and restricted narrative counterpart, the description taking the place of the `historical facts' and then becoming the memory.1 Subsequently, recollections are irrevocably altered by the process of interrogation and remembering. The rhetoric of the archaeology metaphor poses a useful lens to examine the disordered time sequences in Winterson's books, her preoccupation with the past and emphasis put on depicting childhood to explore how memory constitutes the locale of identity. Sexing the Cherry explodes Locke's concept of identity as the continuance of consciousness through time since childhood memories appear a narrative

1 Steen F. Larsen, "Remembering and the Archaeology Metaphor," Metaphor and Symbolic Activity, 2(3) (1987), pp. 190, 191, 194.

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governed by the rules of memory, the narrative one repeats so as to elucidate oneself to oneself:2 Did my childhood happen? I must believe it did, but I don't have any proof. ... I will have to assume that I had a childhood, but I cannot assume to have had the one I remember. Everyone remembers things which never happened. And it is common knowledge that people often forget things which did. Either we are all fantasists and liars or the past has nothing definite in it. I have heard people say we are shaped by our childhood. But which one?3

Memory being unreliable, it is impossible to pinpoint knowledge. Accordingly, the Lockeian notion of identity is exposed as as fractured as other scientific and geographic ventures of Enlightenment.4 Although "There's no such thing as autobiography, there's only art and lies,"5 as Winterson claims, still, one attempts to comprehend the implications of the events and processes that shape one's identity. This is reflected in all Winterson's characters' descriptions of their childhood, and, in many cases, also their parents' childhood, to mirror the suggestion that identity is not formed through one lifetime. Bearing the qualities of the remembering process all the time in mind, Winterson questions factuality, objectivity and dependability not only of personal history but also of historiography and science. She exposes them to be contingent upon memory. Scientists must consider what they and others formerly recorded; take advantage of "past explanations, past explorations, the investigative technique that tests its theory against all known facts," nevertheless, a difficulty presents itself here since "not all facts are known and what is known is not necessarily a fact."6 Another difficulty Winterson draws attention to is the emotional engagement of the researcher with the research project. The action of registering 'facts' after a short span of time does not guarantee their truthfulness, either: I know how difficult it is to say exactly what happened even a moment earlier. If someone were with me, their testimony might corroborate my own, or it might not. And if there is a photograph? The camera always lies. The most awkward fact in all this doubt is this: remembering, which occurs now, at this split second, does not prove that what is being remembered actually occurred at some other time. I may be convinced that it did, especially if the number of others, the more the better, are convinced too. When I am alone, and the experience, the emotion, the event, was

2 Lisa Moore after Makinen, The Novels of Jeanette Winterson, p. 93. 3 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 92. 4 Moore after Makinen, The Novels of Jeanette Winterson, p. 93. 5 Winterson, Art&Lies, p. 141. 6 Winterson, Art&Lies, p. 29.

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mine and mine alone, how can I say for certain that I have not invented the entire episode, including the faithful memory of it?'

The capability to remember one's past ensures the awareness of selfhood and the sense of identity and its continuity. The inability to fix facts gives rise to anxiety over all the spheres of life being in a constant flux, and thereby not offering any point of departure. Handel in Art&Lies feels insecure because of that since human identity appears fluid as a result, and he seems to be in need of some stable referent: "On what can I depend, if not my past, if not objectivity, if not the clean white coats of science? Should I acknowledge the fiction that I am? A man made of nothing but space and light, a pinpoint on a pinpointed planet stitched among the stars? ... A man caught on Time's hook."8 Handel represents a common tendency for people to found life on a solid base, to possess "the personal landmarks they recognise."9 They need definitions, boundaries, and labels, yet, those cannot be appropriated to one's past or identity. Deeming one's selfhood as a static function, one may interrogate one's comprehension of the seif, therefore Handel questions: "Should I acknowledge the fiction that I am?" Nonetheless, this question includes also interrogation, `Who am I? Am I the sum of the past as it `really' happened or am I the sum of the past as it is carried in my memory?' Franco Ferrarotti resolves the doubt declaring that "we are what we remember we were" as one's identity is shaped through memory's process of selectivity and restoration of the past.1° Since memory manifests itself as treacherous, people start to fabricate recollections. Accordingly, they tend to turn to the past to reconstruct the time when they were happy, or it seems to them they were happy. The recreation process takes place from fragments to wholes. Objects are carriers of the past, therefore, as Sappho notes, when the houses have been demolished to make room for roads, people retum to look at their spectral homes, the locale full of meaning and the repository of their past. Ignoring the new developments, they imagine their former homes together with past happiness. The reason for such behaviour can be found in Simonides's association of memory with order. He has noticed that mental images associated with the order of places inform the process of recalling things. Quintillian sustains the opinion in Institutio Oratoria: "Places, impressed (signata) in the mind and used as seats of images, built the art on the experience that, when we retum to a place after a time, we not only recognise the

7 Winterson, Art&Lies, p. 30. 8 Winterson, Art&Lies, p. 30. 9 Winterson, Art&Lies, p. 44. 10 Franco Ferrarotti, Time, Memory, and Society (New York: Greenwood, 1990), p. 6.

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place but also recollect the persons we met there, and even the unuttered thoughts that occurred to us."11 If the storage of recollections constitutes a set of selective items, prevalently random and not distinctly bound, which the archaeology metaphor implies, decoding the past from objects and images must appear unsatisfactory. Decontextualization is detrimental since contextual evidente, a kind of resin or glue, fills the background in relation to which the events can be analyzed: The years fold up neatly into single images, single words, and what went between was like a glue or a resin that held up the important things in place, until, now, later, when they stand alone, the rest decayed, leaving certain moments as time's souvenirs. Should it daunt me that the things I thought would be important, my list of singularities and tide marks, is as useless as the inventory of a demolished house? I no longer recognise the urgency of my old diaries with their careful recording of what mattered. What I wrote down is in another person's handwriting. What has held me are the things I did not say, the things I put away. What returns, softly, or in floods, disturbs me by its newness. Its vividness. What returns are not the well-worn memories I have carefully recorded, but Spots of time that badge me out ... I am marked by those stubbom parts of me.12

The account of the past in the diary is not consistent with the shifting memories of the past. However, this does not mean that any of them is `true' because both the moment of writing and the moment(s) of remembering have taken place from the distance of time, and thereby are subordinated to the same problems of fallibility and interpretation. The present situation of each of the new attempts at recreation poses a new context in which the memory is implanted, and which blends with it. Thus Stella notes, "I can't go into the past and change it, but I have noticed that the future changes the past. What I call the past is my memory of it and my memory is conditioned by who I am now. Who I will be."13 Since identity changes along with the values, opinions and outlook, Stella does not recognize "the urgency of [her] old diaries"I4 and her `old' values. Who she was at the moment of writing the diary is revealed as something new and vivid to her. However, not only the present affects the past, but also the past informs the present. Henri Bergson ascertains that memory perpetuates the past pulling its pieces into the present, and subsequently the present encompasses incessantly fluctuating storage of the past.15 St Augustine in Book XI of his Confessions also 11 After Ewa Borkowska, "Memory as a Mode of Return," in: Memory and Forgetfulness. Essays in Cultural Practice, ed. Wojciech Kalaga and Tadeusz Rachwal (Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Slqskiego, 1999), p. 35. 12 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 79. 13 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 45. 14 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 79. 15 Henri Bergson, Wstgp do metafizyki, trans. P. Beylin, K. Blaszczynski (Warszawa: PWN, 1963), p. 40.

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stresses that only the present exists and time is relative. The past is perpetuated in human mind in the shape of present recollection and the future poses a present anticipation.16 Yet, apart from one's deliberate digging in the past in search of happy moments, the past has the quality of infringing itself upon the consciousness, particularly when it has been repressed. These recollections can inflict pain or even paralyze. Winterson figures the repressed pieces of the past in terms of "dead bodies" which still convey messages: When we killed what we were to become what we are, what did we do with the bodies? We did what most people do; buried them under the floorboards and got used to the smell. I've lived my life like a serial killer; finish with one part, strangle it and move on to the next. Life in neat little boxes is life in neat little coffins, the dead bodies of the past laid out side by side. I am discovering, now, in the Tate aftemoon of the day, that the dead still speak. Past? Present? Future? The language of the dead. Totality of time. I7

Handel too is constantly haunted by his spectral past, disturbing his rest: I keep my past in a trunk with old school clothes and dusty photographs. Things in the dark, things hidden away, not for the shafts of sunlight that Force the dust to dance. ... Jerky puppet movements of the past, I shield my eyes, but the motes are in them. Re-membering, the body of the past that was broken and lifeless, knitted together in a gruesome semblance of what was. I'm not there, it's gone, I know it has gone but my mind betrays me and pushes me back down winding tunnels to the chamber of the dead where a terrible pantomime is being performed.I8

Handel has not understood yet that the painful memories demand exorcism; that they have to be reworked to cease haunting him and imposing suffering, that it is "[Wetter to fight the hurt than to flee from it."19 Although the events took place long ago, they were inscribed on his body to prove that a person constitutes the totality of their experiences: "He cried out of the heart of him, cried up all the lost days and mortal indecisions that he had thought were gone but were still stored in the skin and bone of him, a tank of pain, tapped."2° Memory impedes Handel's sense of continuity and experience of selfhood since it thwarts his anticipation of future mental events. This is the case with Picasso in ArtrUies as well.

16 After Ole Bay-Petersen, "T.S. Eliot and Einstein. The Fourth Dimension in the Four Quarters," English Studies, 2 (1985), p. 154. 17 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 49. 18 Winterson, Art&Lies, p. 112. 19 Winterson, Art&Lies, p. 135. 20 Winterson, Art&Lies, p. 177.

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Picasso's past also exists just under her skin and completely arrests her movement forward. Her past traumas cannot be escaped, especially when she visits her family home: The past stands behind me as a house where 1 used to live. A house whose windows, from a distance, are clear and bright, but strangely shaded as I come near. A friend says, 'Show me where you used to live' and we hurry, arm in arm, to that street, to that house, to that time, which no longer exists, but which must exist, because I can find it again.2I

The sight of the house and her presence in it trigger all recollections of her abhorring childhood and her family who "used the past like a set of rooms to be Who were those people washed and decorated according to the latest fashion whose bodies were rotting with lies?"22 In the house she used a narrow staircase made of cold stone while all the other members of the family and guests used a broad oaken staircase, denying the existence of the other. Picasso's mother thwarts any information and erases memories of her daughter being raped at home, accusing her of inventing instead: "It is easier that way. Memory can be murder."23 Accordingly, she contravenes the existence of the room where her daughter was molested: "my mother's staircase sweeps past the door without stopping. There is no door there, she says, no room beyond."24 The mother has even compared her daughter's childhood to paradise and complains about Picasso's ungratefulness: `I did everything for you,' she said, and suddenly, she was back an her hands and knees, and I, a grown woman, was back in the hated high chair, swinging impotent legs above a shiny floor. `You'll never know the sacrifices I had to make,' she said, as she prepared to teil me about them once again. She ran up the complicit stairs and into one of her favourite memory rooms, the family parlour."25

The family's denial of tragedy and supplanting the past with their own fabricated version hinders Picasso from gaining psychological distance from the past so it continues to torment her. She returns to being a girl every time she visits her parents and relives her horror. It is only when she decides to paint her family in guilt and leave the house, its significance for her crumbles: "the house shrank up around the dolls in the window. My past, which every day had devoured every day, shrank to its proper size. There would be a beginning not consumed by it. A beginning outside of hurt. A beginning outside of fear. I had not been destroyed 21 Winterson, Art&Lies, p. 40. 22 Winterson, Art&Lies, p. 43. 23 Winterson, Art&Lies, p. 155. 24 Winterson, Art&Lies, p. 42. 25 Winterson, Art&Lies, p. 41.

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by gravity."26 The trauma reworked, time opens up the prospect of hope for Picasso, as it does for Ali in The PowerBook. This is underlined by the title of the chapter where she squares up to the past which Winterson calls "Empty Trash." 2. History / Storytelling The central chapter of Oranges, Deuteronomy, theorizes the essence of history and storytelling. History's claim to truth, objectivity and coherence is dismissed. Instead, the differentiation between history and storytelling crumbles to disclose postmodernist distrust of grand narratives. The narrator asserts that both history and stories depend an personal reconstruction, and given the slippery and contingent nature of memory, neither of them can provide an objective and consistent replay of events. The only approach advised is to appreciate the complexity of history: [T]hat is the way with stories; we make them what we will. It's a way of explaining the universe while leaving the universe unexplained, it's a way of keeping it all alive, not boxing it into time. Everyone who teils a story teils it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently. Some people say there are true things to be found, some people say all kind of things can be proved. I don't believe them. The only thing for certain is how complicated it all is, like string full of knots. It's all there but hard to find the beginning and impossible to fathom the end. The best you can do is to admire the cat's cradle, and maybe knot it up a bit more. History should be a hammock for swinging and a game of playing, the way cats play. Claw it, chew it, rearrange it and at bedtime it's still a ball of string full of knots. ... Some people make a lot of money out of it. Publishers do well, children, when bright, can come top. It's an all-purpose rainy day pursuit, this reducing of stories called history. People like to separate storytelling which is not fact from history which is fact. They do this so that they know what to believe and what not to believe.27

The notion of `truth' is questioned then and the possibility of authoritative overarching version of history is declined. This insight accords with Hayden V. White's who posits that in spite of objective and scientific pretensions of historical narratives, they constitute verbal fictions backed by philosophical theories of history aiming at authenticating their scenario. The scenario is organized around a selective choice of events and plot structures to shape a particular story. As philosophies of history are entangled in narrative strategies as well, in White's opinion, the question of legitimacy cannot be determined.28 The narrator of Oranges advocates a fluid subjective plurality of meanings instead. Like in Lyotard's formula, history consists here in the mosaic of discontinuous and fragmentary "little narratives": 26 Winterson, Art&Lies, p. 164. 27 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, p. 91. 28 David Macey, Dictionaty of Critical Theory (London: Penguin Books, 2000), pp. 396-397.

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Chapter V And so when someone teils me what they heard or saw, I believe them, and 1 believe their friend who also saw, but not in the same way, and 1 can put these accounts together and I will not have a seamless wonder but a sandwich Iaced with mustard of my own. If you always eat out you can never be sure what's going in, and received information is nobody's exercise. ... Here is some advice. If you want to keep your own teeth, make your own sandwiches.29

The dietary advice about sandwiches functions as a metaphor for intellectual integrity and implies the necessity of corroborating information for oneself.3° In her view of history Winterson supports New Historicists who repudiate the traditional outlook that history poses a unified or fixed series of facts, and identify instead the wegern history as an imperial account. Both them and Oranges perceive history as a biased manipulation which imposes the version favourable to those who create it and gags alternative accounts: "People have never had a problem disposing of the past when it gets too difficult. Flesh will burn, photos will burn, and memory, what is that? The imperfect ramblings of fools who will not see the need to forget. And if we can't dispose of it we can alter it. The dead don't shout."31 Therefore, becoming an imperial report history encompasses the ideology of the governing dass to promote their interests and legitimize their power, which is also Jean-Fran9ois Lyotard's stance. Winterson elucidates: "Knowing what to believe had its advantages. It built an empire and kept people where they belonged, in the bright realm of the wallet."32 The Foucaldian relationship of power and knowledge is exposed, like in Shame where Rushdie argues that "History is natural selection. ... Only the mutations of the strong survive. The weak, the anonymous, the defeated leave few marks."33 In addition, Oranges challenges the Bible, the most patriarchal explanation of the history of the world and humankind, yet, problematic in its `truthfulness'. The book employs biblical allusions in an incongruous or rewritten manner: the names of the books of the Old Testament emerge as a template for Bildungsroman and lesbian coming-out story. The parody of the Bible and the insertion of its references serve to deconstruct the borderline between history and fiction, between the novel and the Biblical original. Winterson's "Genesis" alludes to the immaculate conception, yet, excludes man from the procedure. The first chapter cites the Biblical gender hierarchy and introduces Jeanette's dominating mother who prepares her daughter to become an evangeli st :

29 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, p. 93. 30 Laurel Bollinger after Makinen, The Novels of Jeanette Winterson, p. 35. 31 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, p. 92. 32 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, p. 92. 33 After Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (London, New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 120.

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My mother, out walking that night, dreamed a dream and sustained it in daylight. She would get a child, train it, build it, dedicate it to the Lord: a missionary child, a servant of God, a blessing And so it was that on a particular day, some time later, she followed a star until it came to settle above an orphanage, and in that place was a crib, a child.34

"Exodus" parallels Jeanette's going to school with the escaping Israelites, both forced to find themselves in a new environment. "The pillar of cloud" guiding the Israelites by day appears to Jeanette "a fog, perplexing and impossible."35 Treated unfairly at school, she rearranges "their version of the facts"36 to elucidate the mies of new life and to comfort herself. "Leviticus," in the Bible a book establishing law, handles Jeanette's introduction to her missionary role, and "Numbers" refers to the "Holiness Code" to be followed by the chosen race of Hebrews on their way to salvation, whereas in Oranges the chapter includes the story of the prince seeking a perfect woman. The book of Numbers deals with the wandering of the Israelites in the Bible and with Jeanette's wandering off the teachings of the church to pursue her lesbian desire in Oranges. The original "Numbers" close with a few marriages while Winterson depicts Jeanette's aversion to marriage. "Deuteronomy" in both works constitutes a non-narrative chapter setting rules and encompassing dietetic tips. Biblical "Joshua" depicts the subjugation of the promised land with the siege of Jericho, whilst Winterson explores here the significance of walls and describes the exorcism. "Judges" depicts Jeanette's dismissal from the community for usurping male power in the church and from family home for being a `demon'. The employment of the Ruth story is more complex here. The book reflecting Ruth' s abandonment of her community to look after her mother-in-law, searching actively for the second husband in the meantime, is read by feminists as an assault on the patriarchal `traffic-in-women' and as an exemplification of female solidarity, a motif unusual in the Bible.37 The text mirrors Jeanette' s desire to find as faithful and devoted relationship as Ruth's, resulting in Jeanette's loyalty to her mother despite the latter's betrayal. The retum to mother confirms Jeanette's maturity and a deep bond with her, rather than dependence and immaturity as it occurs in traditional Bildungsroman where moving out of home necessitates the male protagonist's 'proper' adulthood.38 While the novel dis34 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, p. 10. 35 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, p. 47. 36 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, p. 47. 37 Bollinger after Makinen, The Novels of Jeanette Winterson, p. 35. 38 Bollinger after Makinen, The Novels 0.1...Jeanette Winterson, pp. 33, 36.

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regards the heterosexual marriage as the ending of Perceval's and Ruth's stories, it is Jeanette's mother who puts forward a celibate marriage, concealing from Jeanette the conclusion of Jane Eyre, another essential text in constructing her identity. The reliability of the Bible is problematized in Boating for Beginners, too, which self-reflexively gambles with its plot, like Deuteronomy in Oranges. Winterson satirizes the story of Noah's Ark here, followed by Sara Maitland's retelling the Noah's story in Arky Types. Along with religion and fundamentalism, she mocks a variety of issues: celebrities, romance books, sexism, cliches, food industry, fashion and consumerism. Noah, living in the commercialized world, recalling the contemporary one, in the process of advertizing Christianity puts on stage and films his play "Genesis or How I Did it," however, God decides to make it a reality show and use his power to flood the world. He also demands to have Genesis rewritten to conceal his true nature (in fact created by Noah out of decomposing ice-cream and gateau) and render him as mysterious, almighty and omnipresent. Noah and his sons invent the plot of Genesis, taking liberties with `truth' since after the flood people will not "have any memory, any photo albums, any pressure groups or state-founded anarchy. We can write what we want in our book, pass it down and call it the inspired word of God."39 The story is interwoven with Mrs Munde's and her daughter's one. Gloria, collecting animals for the film, learns about the planned deluge from a friend who eavesdrops on Noah and God. In the face of the deluge, the orange demon, who knows for sure God's plan will be fulfilled because he can move in time, encourages Gloria and her friends to do their best to survive so as to put forward an alternative version of the story, even if it is not a `true' one: "it doesn't even matter if you forget what really happened; if you need to, invent something else. The vital thing is to have an alternative so that people will realize that there's no such thing as a true story."4° The demon's prompting to deliberate fabrication points to the feasible mnemonic default of chronicled history and to permanent capacity for both intentional and accidental error. He opts for plural truths then and contends that inventiveness is not falseness per se, but just another truth, a view common with Julian Barnes's Flaubert 's Parrot, John Fowles's French Lieutenant 's Woman, Maggot or Timothy Findley's Famous Last Words. To rewrite the past is tantamount to opening it up to the present, denying it teleology or incontestability. The alternative version does survive and is discovered by Gardener, the Bible scholar many hundreds years after the deluge. He finds a short message in a bottle along with the remnants of a romance book in Hebrew. When he shows his 39 Winterson, Boating for Beginners, pp. 110-111. 40 Winterson, Boating for Beginners, p. 124.

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supervisor the message and is rebuked for making jokes, Gardener does not even attempt to share his finding, nor does he take notice of "an ancient bottle dump" which recalls "a French farmer's back yard."41 He likes to translate the romance when meeting his friends and they invariably burst into laughter deeming it a clever joke. The only discovery of his the Bible scholars and believers choose to notice is the gopher wood which validates the Bible account of the Hood. Given thus the tools to recreate the past, they reject them deliberately, selecting only those which corroborate their fiction and support their interests, which, in this case is fame, publicity, appreciation and money for further research. The postmodern subversion of narrative and fundamentalism is articulated here by the demon, along with an orange tree alluding to Winterson's first novel, through its advocacy of multiplicity. The paradigm is exploded and fluidities disrupted by other fruits; making the singular source of knowledge, symbolized by an apple, invite a shifting multiplicity.42 The PowerBook continues the preoccupations of Deuteronomy. History manifests itself here "a collection of found objects washed up through time."43 In an artistic sense, a found object indicates the deployment of an item which has not been created for the artistic purpose but for another one. In The PowerBook the tulip can be said to fulfill the function of a found object, that is performing another one to that designed for it, since a flower, an object of admiration and decoration, becomes a fake phallus. The unexpected element appears again in the story of archaeological excavation in London Spitalfields. Uncovering a sarcophagus the explorers and journalists expect to see the Roman Governor of London, a very influential persona, yet, they see a skeleton of a woman. Winterson seems to point to the fact that postmodern art, like found objects or ready mades, forefronting the approved, unexplored nature of the referential role of sign systems, operates to replace the legislative power of referential background with "the material assumption of a real context, a reality which it had been the mission of representation to repress."44 Moreover, Winterson implements the notion of found objects to indicate "the pirate's stuff' intermingling with "[t]in cans and old tyres" appearing "on the shores of [the] computer."45 The narrator believes the treasure is concealed within those findings, therefore, she attempts to see through the camouflage to find her seif and her lover's self. Searching for the past in the river of time, some artifacts remain at the bottom, others are brought by the tide. Still, like in Boating for Beginners, people do not fish out all the accessible data, but disregard some, which entails a constant change of explanations and interpretations: "Goods, 41 Winterson, Boating for Beginners, p. 159. 42 Mark Wormald after Makinen, The Novels of Jeanette Winterson, p. 54. 43 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 242. 44 Yve-Alain Bois after Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, p. 142. 45 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 63.

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ideas, personalities surface towards us, then sink away. Some we hook out, others we ignore, and as the pot-tern changes, so does the meaning. We cannot rely on the facts. Time, which returns everything, changes everything."46 The past is thus understood in a different way all over again, however, to understand it well, Winterson proposes one must not swagger to possess one overarching formula of the past, but must allow some space for imagination. The selective and volatile nature of history and the impossibility of basing its interpretation on any underlying paradigm makes Winterson call it "a madman's museum," "a chance" and "a jumble."47 Like historiographic metafiction she does not deny that the past took place, but questions one's accessibility to it. Given that, personal history becomes the landmark in a shifting world without any points of reference. Love and eroticism appear the only authentic experience, corroborated empirically, at least at this moment, now, before the tricky mechanism of memory alters it. `True love' is represented as timeless: "Love is keeper of the clocks. I took off my watch and dropped it into water. Time take it. Your face, your hands, the movement of your body... Your body is my Book of Hours. Open it. Read it. This is the true history of the world."48 Silver in Lighthousekeeping is another Winterson's character for whom storytelling is crucial in constructing her identity. After her mother's death, having no father either, the lonely child feels a desperate need for a place to anchor; to organize her life around material things which grant security and the sense of belonging: 1 had lost the few things I knew, and what was here [in the lighthouse] belonged to somebody else. Perhaps that would have been all right if what was inside me was my own, but there was no place to anchor. There were two Atlantics; one outside the lighthouse, and one inside me. The one inside me had no string of guiding lights.49

Storytelling, Pew teaches Silver, is as important as tending the light and it is her duty to learn the stories he knows and those he does not. Through his tales, exploring human desires and fears, Pew teaches the girl about values, providing her with "a string of guiding lights" which shapes her life. To him stories emerge as light out of the darkness and evoke the moments of illumination which give the illusion of life's continuity and coherence: "the stories themselves make the meaning. The continuous narrative of existence is a lie. There is no continuous narrative, there are lit-up moments, and the rest is dark."5° In the lighthouse, a familiar point in the darkness, a place where stability encounters motion, Silver 46 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 242. 47 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 242. 48 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 244. 49 Winterson, Lighthousekeeping, p. 21. 50 Winterson, Lighthousekeeping, p. 134.

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finds an anchor within the fluid world. This light, "visible across the sea and across the sea of time too" proves "a marker, a guide, comfort and warning"51 to Silver when she is once again deprived of home since the lighthouse is to be modernized. Yet, provided with resources of Pew's teachings, she does not insist I cried for a world that on solidity and unity of the world any more: "Years ago Pew taught me that nothing is gone, that everything could be stable and sure. can be recovered, not as it was, but in its changing form. `Nothing keeps the same form forever, child, not even Pew.'"52 Pew joins the gallery of Winterson's heroes for whom the divisions of time collapse. The job of a lighthouse keeper has been passed from generation to generation, however, Pew claims to be two hundred years old and to live in the lighthouse from the beginning of its existence and he indeed "has the Look of being there forever. He is as old as a unicorn."53 He maintains to possess the gilt of Second Sight thanks to which he can see the past and the future, but not the present which manifests itself to him as darkness. He compares Silver' s present to the all-surrounding sea, continually shifting where a "wave breaks, another follows,"54 evoking Eliot's comparison in Four Quartets. History is envisaged here as a fossil, a mglange of shapes and impressions Babel discovers on the wall of the cave walking along the cliff path. Feeling as if he infringed himself on "some presence," he recognizes them to be "like the tablets of stone given to Moses in the desert. They were God's history and the world's. They were his inviolable law; the creation of the world, saved in stone."55 When Dark notifies the Archaeological Society about his finding, even Darwin comes in search of some new evidence to his theories. Winterson juxtaposes here two visions of the world: Darwin's scientific rejection of the linearity of time, "not past, present and future as we recognise them, but an evolutionary process of change — energy never trapped for too long — life always becoming"56 with Babel Dark's Christian outlook, a stable system created by God. This world offers to Babel reliability and solidity he, like Silver, craves for, whereas the discontinuity and fragmentariness of the modern world make him uneasy: the fight in him was all about keeping control, when his Bands were bloodless with gripping so tight. If the movement in him was like the movement in the world, then how would he ever steady himself? There had to be a stable point somewhere. He had always clung to the unchanging nature of God, and the solid reliability of God's

51 Winterson, Lighthousekeeping, p. 229. 52 Winterson, Lighthousekeeping, p. 150. 53 Winterson, Lighthousekeeping, p. 15. 54 Winterson, Lighthousekeeping, p. 48. 55 Winterson, Lighthousekeeping, p. 118. 56 Winterson, Lighthousekeeping, p. 150.

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creation. Now he was faced with a maverick God who had made a world for the firn of seeing how it might develop. Had he made Man in the same way?57

Keeping a seahorse curved out of the fossil, "his emblem of lost time,"58 Babel attempts to forget his past with his beloved. The fossil represents not only the register of history of the world but also of Dark's personal history for touching the surface of the cave, he feels "Molly' s curve caught up in the living rock. When I put my hand in the gap, it's her I feel; her salty smoothness, her sharp edges, her turnings and openings, her memory."59 Winterson returns to the theme of memory and the past, advocating that the cosmos is an extensive multi-layered memory structure where everything is preserved; every organism is a part of the universe and its story is inscribed on it: "The fossil record is always there, whether or not you discover it. ... Memory is layered. What you were was another life, but the evidence is somewhere in the rock — your trilobites and ammonites, your struggling life-forms, just when you thought you could stand upright."6° Hearing the conviction from Darwin helps Babel to reconcile with his inability to forget his past. Also Handel's faith in God is an attempt at safety, nevertheless, it does not emerge as "a life-belt," therefore Handel abandons it to "go into unknown currents, a voyager through strange sees alone."61 The store of history in the form of strata of fossils reappears in Weight. Winterson compares the layers to the book pages with an imprint of contemporary life, the oldest strata at the bottom. Reading history is often hindered by some period's disobedience to regular sedimentation, thereby the record is partial. Moreover, time is lodged here in the apples of knowledge. When Atlas, temporarily relieved from the burden of the earth, goes to Hera' s garden to fetch some golden apples, she informs him the fruits represent his past, present and future. Although the tree is full of apples, it seems to Atlas there are only three, which demonstrates his unshaken belief in fate and its determinism. Hera attempts to make him aware of his blindness to the fluidity of the world and his refusal to notice alternatives. This is the beginning of Atlas's ponderings on how to use the curvature of space and bending the future to his needs and out of his fate of carrying the world on his shoulders. Ultimately, Atlas discards the passive position and by his conscious decision takes the earth off his back to walk away free with his dog.

57 Winterson, Lighthousekeeping, p. 120. 58 Winterson, Lighthousekeeping, p. 187. 59 Winterson, Lighthousekeeping, p. 167. 60 Winterson, Lighthousekeeping, p. 150. 61 Winterson, Art&Lies, pp. 32, 33.

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3. The past as an invented entity In her writings Winterson consistently deploys the past as an invented space. Starting with The Passion, after Oranges' deployment of elements of the authoress's personal history, she picks up some historical moments and rediscovers them. She mixes historical facts with her own imaginings about them and about historical personae, their actions and idiosyncrasies, enriching the bland cartoon-like historical statements with depth and vividness, and filling in their gaps. The real historical figures meeting fictional ones operate as validations of the fictional report, like in John Banville's Doctor Copernicus and Kepler, William Kennedy's Legs, E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime or Chris Scott's Antichthon. The apocryphal aspects bear so much authority and persuasiveness that the reader accepts them as facts, which enacts historiographic metafiction's assumption that its world is both fictive and historical. The collapse of frontiers between history and fiction highlights textuality as their common feature. In The Passion Winterson constructs Venice as a transgressive and transformative place in a mode that does not stray from previous cultural and literary encodings of the city. What she deconstructs is the stable concepts of sexuality, gender and identity, supplanting them with androgyny and plurality of selves. Her book differs from previous texts about Venice also in presenting the indeterminacy and fluency as constructive features.62 Undermining the notions of history and historiography, the book critiques Hegel's nineteenth century dialectical concept of history since it does not let the unpredictable or passion in, a factor so significant in Winterson's view of history.63 The Hegelian stance is replaced by a multiplicity of "little narratives" where Henri gives an exaggerated account of his childhood and war experiences and portrays Josephine along with Napoleon Bonaparte as a cruel overambitious leader. Sexing the Cherry introduces John Tradescant the Younger, a seventeenth century botanical voyager and his practice of grafting, conducted in the book by Jordan, as an essential metaphor. Furthermore, Winterson constructs her own version of the Puritan Revolution as a combat between King Charles I and Puritans. She portrays Puritans as allying each kind of pleasure with sin and cultivating repression. This is exemplified by Preacher Scroggs who has sex with his wife through a hole in the sheet, an allusion to Rushdie's Midnight Children, and never kisses her in dread of lust. However, he and other hypocritical Puritans relieve their sexual tension during perverse practices in the brothel. Meeting the pastor in the Spitalfields brothel where she helps to dispose of dead Puritans' bodies, the Dog-Woman decides to give him a lesson. During his homosexual date

62 Manfred Pfister after Makinen, The Novels ofJeanette Winterson, p. 68. 63 Scott Wilson, "Passion At the End of History," in: `I 'm tellingyou stories', ed. Grice and Woods, p. 61.

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she dresses up as an executioner and kills both men in a parody of the King's execution. After this, other men enter the room to engage in grotesque necrophiliac sexual acts. Yet, they attempt to escape and later beg her for mercy, a stark contrast to the King's death, "nothing of him shivering" and "his back straight."64 The Dog-Woman rages against other Puritans as well to pursue the Bible interpretation of a preacher dressed like Jesus. To reconciliate the prohibition against killing with the order of the Law of Moses to take "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,"65 the speaker commands them to extract their enemies' eyes and teeth in silence. After a short time the heroine can boast with 119 eyeballs and 2,000 teeth. Winterson's alternative model of history allies the war with an unfolding of the tyrannical ideals of independent individual and scientific neutrality, rather than a step towards a more democratic government dissociated from divine authority of a monarch.66 In this interpretation Winterson advocates Michel Foucault's opinion that "observational, affirmative science" developed in England at the turn of the sixteenth and seventieth centuries.67 Furthermore, depicting repressed desire as an uncontainable and destructive power, the novel normalizes lesbian passion and gives it priority over heterosexuality or male homosexuality.68 The Plague and Great Fire of London are also dealt with in the novel. The DogWoman, who cannot get rid of the smell of diseased bodies, encourages the fire pouring some oil onto the flames in the hope that it will eventually eradicate debauchery. In Art&Lies the civilization of ancient Greece serves to accentuate a sharp contrast between its esteem for Beauty, language and art and the lack of it in the contemporary world. One of the examples of the powerful impact of art is Sappho's poems, mostly destroyed and forbidden by the church an the ground of authoress's sexual orientation. Sappho's timeless poetry is read by Doll Sneerpiece, a protagonist of Winterson's parody of nineteenth century pornography read by Handel. The closure of Artcei ies gathers Sappho, Picasso and Handel in the act of reading which, looking back in time, unites them in the present as concontemporary London-dwellers. The book, "a talisman against time ... spinning a thread through time,"69 saved from the Alexandrian Library, constitutes a collection of Greek writings, parts of the Bible, history, romance and erotic literature along with different readers' contributions in the shape of drawings, notes, quotes and a map. Winterson renders reading the book as the unfolding of light, 64 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, pp. 71, 70. 65 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 84. 66 Jeffrey Roessner, "Writing a History of Difference: Jeanette Winterson's Sexing the Cherry and Angela Carter's Wise Children," College Literature, 29.1 (winter 2002), p. 107. 67 Roessner, "Writing a History of Difference," p. 107. 68 Roessner, "Writing a History of Difference," p. 105. 69 Winterson, Art&Lies, p. 202.

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referring to Quantum Theory's notion of matter as energy fields, and enabling the characters to move in time. She invents a short history of Alexandrian library and the book to elucidate the fact of its extraordinary survival. The PowerBook deploys the European tulipmania of the seventeenth century to present a comic story of a girl dressed up as a boy so as to deliver some precious and very expensive tulip bulbs from Turkey to Holland. On the ship she is presented with the Captain's history of the aqueduct at Antioch. He depicts the Turks as barbarians who destroyed the aqueduct to establish their own civilization. He points to the repetitiveness of the process in history: to establish a splendid civilization each community must act as barbarians first. Tiberius, Oscar Wilde and Jack the Ripper appear briefly, and George Mallory alike climbing Everest, an endless shifting mountain, and him shifting with it, outside time. Lighthousekeeping appropriates the historical fact of building lighthouses in Scotland. Winterson makes Robert Louis Stevenson, an engineer involved in building, meet her fictional character Babel Dark whose life story inspires Stevenson to write The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The figure of Charles Darwin appears too coming to Salts to inspect the fossil. The mention of Darwin's publication of On the Origin of Species and Richard Wagner's completion of the opera Tristan and Isolde in the same year becomes an excuse for Winterson to propose a meditation on the two works. Drawing them together on the ground of common topic, which is the elucidation of the beginning of the world, she ponders on love, untraceable in the fossils, and rewrites the story of Tristan and Isolde to comment on Dark's relationship with Molly. Weight implements the historical actuality of the dog Laika going to space in 1957 to fantasize about her further lot. The dog, travelling in the sputnik, meets mythical Atlas carrying the earth on his shoulders. He sets her free a moment before an automatic hypodermic poisons her. In reality, Laika was to die from poisoned food after ten days from the sputnik's launch, but she died from high temperature and fear a few hours after the sputnik took off. In Winterson, she and Atlas become friends. Thanks to the dog, Atlas finds out about life on earth, however, Laika describes the outdated world of 1957, therefore "Atlas thought that everyone now ate beetroot and turnip and shivered in zero temperatures in concrete apartments."7° When they observe the moon landing in 1969, Atlas supposes the reason for the astronaut's odd clothes to be very low temperatures on earth. In Winterson's historiographic metafiction history is characterized by twofold identity. On the one hand, the extratextual view of history argues that since it refers to the empirical world, it is ontologically distinct from fictional texts, but on the other hand, textualized history emerges as a narrative available only in this form. As a result, history as employed in historiographic metafiction 70 Winterson, Weight, p. 133.

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can refer only to another text, never to the real world. In postmodern fiction the intertextual and extratextual views of history coexist and struggle with each other simultaneously, Linda Hutcheon explains, therefore history appears fictive and figurative, always already textualized and interpreted.71 4. Herstory Jeanette Winterson, along feminist lines, makes clear distinction between male and female history: "Women's history is not an easily traceable straight line. ... Following us is to watch for the hidden signs, to look in the gaps and be prepared for strange zig-zags."72 Feminist theory sets female dimension of time apart from the male one, which Kristeva designates in the phrase "father' s time, mother's species," borrowed from James Joyce. "Father's time" denotes the linear time with its sense of progress, destiny and history, whereas "mother's time" refers to the space similar to the chora with cyclical time and the sense of the eternity of the generated human species.73 In her oeuvre, Winterson participates in inserting herstory onto the patriarchal map, fulfilling thus Antoinette Fouque's plea to designate the female imaginary spaces which the patriarchal discourse will not define, and to produce the entrance to journeying "beyond the reality principle," that is beyond representation and history.74 Building upon the travel narratives an women travellers, which characterize female journeys as indifferent to conquest and exploitation, Stowers recognizes the same trajectory in The Passion. Henri rejects the linear paradigm of military expedition and history-making represented by Napoleon, and proffers an alternative pattern which opposes the concept of history as consisting in outstanding individuals and mainly male actions in the public sphere.75 His account of history in the diary emphasizes the "interior cities"; that is subjectivity and emotions rather than facts. He starts the diary in the army so as not to forget or distort the truth. He explains, "I knew how old men blurred and lied making the past always the best because it was gone. I don't care about the facts ... I care about how I feel. How I feel will change, I want to remember that."76 Deeming the masculine record of the past as falsified, blurred and governed by "memory tricks," Henri suggests it is a narrative itself and not a factual account. Throughout the book he scatters memories of the feminine with which he associates happiness.

71 Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, p. 143. 72 Jeanette Winterson, "Foreword," in: Erotica, ed. Reynolds, p. xxi. 73 McAfee, Julia Kristeva, p. 94. 74 After Stowers, "Journeying with Jeanette," p. 144. 75 Stowers, "Journeying with Jeanette," pp. 143-144. 76 Winterson, The Passion, pp. 28-29.

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It is only when Henri abandons his hometown to pursue his "need for a little father" that he realizes he was happy there: "I was happy but happy is an adult word. You don't have to ask a child about happy, you see it. They are or they are not. Talking about it is the same as trying to catch the wind."77 Now he appreciates all the everyday things he disliked, and misses home unendingly: the sun, dandelions, food, Fields, river, but most of all, his mother. His memories of childhood are always accompanied by the smell of porridge his mother used to make. In Venice he rediscovers the meaning of maternal with Villanelle; he I heard confesses, "I had never lain like this with anyone but my mother. nothing but her heart and felt nothing but her softness."78 In San Servolo his saturation in the senses, emotions, spontaneity, creation and the ability to enjoy trivial everyday things indicates his opting for the female universe once again. He is further feminized also because he assumes the position of a waiting subject, "sedentary, motionless, at hand, in expectation, nailed to the Spot, in suspense," unlike Villanelle, the absent one, who is "in a condition of perpetual departure, of journeying; migrant, fugitive,"79 as defined by Barthes. Henri takes pleasure in the acts of creation he undertakes: writing the diary and letters to Josephine, working in the garden and planning to plant the seeds, looking after the bird and playing its mother. He decides, "I won't give it a name. I'm not Adam,"8° deprecating the masculine paradigms of naming and pinning down. In a similar fashion, in Sexing the Cherry, the wish for colonizing, categorizing and trophy hunting are defeated by Jordan's yearning for the female mode of travelling; for the unmapped routes, "the path not taken and the forgotten angle."81 His journeys are never linear or simple: [T]here is no end to even the simplest journey of the mind. I begin, and straight away a hundred alternative routes present themselves. I choose one, no sooner begin, than a hundred more appear. Every time I try to narrow down my intent I expand it, and yet those straights and canals still lead me to the open sea, and then I realize how vast it all is, this matter of the mind.82

He draws his own maps of the places they visit with Tradescant, and keeps a highly personal and subjective account of the explorations that lead him back to the maternal. Furthermore, Jordan is feminized by female voyeurism resulting

77 Winterson, The Passion, pp. 81, 25-26. 78 Winterson, The Passion, p. 140. 79 Barthes, A Lover 's Discourse, p. 13. 80 Winterson, The Passion, p. 156. 81 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 9. 82 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 102.

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from the majority of the people met an journeys being women,83 as well as by the discovery of wilderness within himself. A twentieth century character, Nicholas Jordan, coagulates into one of Jordan's selves. Hiding a pineapple under his bed, he also dreams of pursuing the precepts of masculinity; breaking records, making discoveries and becoming a hero, therefore he joins the navy. However, it is the woman ecologist campaigning for polluted rivers who represents a heroic position. Nicholas Jordan reckons her a hero since "Heroes give up what's comfortable in order to protect what they believe in or to live dangerously for the common good."84 He also strives to renegotiate his masculinity, longing for the feminine complementariness; for the freedom that he imagines dancers and acrobats must feel, and thus commencing the feminine "journey inside, down our time tunnels and deep into the realms of inner space."85 He too must surpass the constraints of his sex to reconceptualize his gendered identity. As a representative of a new variety of masculinity, acquiescing in women's repositioning towards the male storyline, Jordan allows himself to be absorbed by his mother's narrative trajectory, which stands testimony to the superficiality of his incipient support for traditional values. Similarly, Henri in The Passion opts for female fluidity and subjectivity, represented by Venice, whereas Handel in Art&Lies decides to undergo an operation changing him into an androgyne. The fluid multiple Venice as well as a floating town and a City with shifting buildings visited by Jordan in Sexing the Cherry, explode the linear differentiations between past, present and future, and figure alternative modes of representation. Their figuration is congruent with Mary Louise Pratt's argument that in women's travel reports rooms and towns appear allegories of the female explorer's "subjective and relational states."86 Jordan undergoes the female upsetting of male-identified selfhood, which allows him to assume the feminine perspective and commence a female fluxing voyage.87 Feminizing history and travel discourse, The Passion, Sexing the Cherry and Art&Ties subvert the construction of gender, reinscribing both femininity and masculinity and proposing `a new man'. Winterson's narrative strategy constitutes another weapon against the symbolic. She deploys fragmented and plural pastiche narratives which use a range of narrative modes, such as autobiography, fairy tales, fables, romance, myth, the Bible to shape a multifaceted postmodern text. This stratagem offers a challenge to patriarchal discourse as it proposes a juxtaposition of voices 83 Stowers, "Journeying with Jeanette," p. 146. 84 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 120. 85 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 120. 86 Stowers, "Journeying with Jeanette," p. 155. 87 Stowers, "Journeying with Jeanette," p. 147.

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coalescing to form a story which rejects tradition and heterosexual connubial denouement in favour of extended multiple ones, allocating space for the female voice within the symbolic. In The PowerBook she offers tips for rewriting narratives: "Break the narrative. Refuse all the stories that have been told so far and try to tell the story differently — in a different style, with different weights and allow some air to those elements choked with centuries of use, and give some substance to the floating world."88 Winterson loves cover versions of myths since she believes those timeless and universal stories to be the carriers of perpetual truth about human nature and to reflect "the life of the mind and the soul's journey."89 Various narrative styles underline the concept of multiple identity and fluctuating gender positions through the agency of the protagonists' identifications with the characters of fantasy episodes. The fantasy parts also articulate the role of imagination and narrative in shaping one's identity and in explaining the world and oneself to oneself, although no narrative can be the conclusive or final one. Telling stories in order to explore the protagonist's multilayered subjectivity allows her to see herself as a fiction. Given that, one is also granted the opportunity of transformation. The distinction between the narrative and identity collapses then, yet, the stories function as a vehicle for making "connections out of scraps," to use Alice's words, who continues, "The fragmentariness of life makes coherence suspect but to babble is a different kind of treachery."9° Although Winterson's characters realize their subjectivity to be a series of shifting fluid selves and perceive "coherence suspect" as it excludes any alternatives, they also conclude that some level of integrity is indispensable for the subject to operate effectively in the world. Furthermore, in the hesitations and uncertainty of the unreliable narrator who should be trusted though, as Winterson judges, the protagonist and the reader come closer to truth than in any type of apparent factual objectivity.91 The narrative technique reflects mental processes as well as Winterson's conviction that there is no point in •

reading in straight lines. We don't think like that and we don't live like that. Our mental processes are closer to a maze than a motorway, every turning yields another turning, not symmetrical, not obvious. Not chaos either. A sophisticated mathematical equation made harder to unravel because X and Y have different values an different days.92

88 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 53. 89 Winterson, "Introduction," in: Weight, p. xvi. 90 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 24. 91 See e.g. the interview in: Jonathan Noakes and Margaret Reynolds, Jeanette Winterson. The Essential Guide to Contempormy Literature (London: Vintage, 2003), p. 21. 92 Winterson, "Introduction," in: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, p. xiii.

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Winterson's rewriting of fairy tales, which subvert the images of femininity produced by the patriarchal culture and discard their limitation of the female potential, are part of the same trajectory as pursued by Angela Carter. Both writers do not refuse their characters agency or intelligence and do not allow them to reproduce the role of self-sacrificing housewives or princesses "dreaming of princes on well-muscled steeds."93 Winterson's reformulations of fairy tales along with gender fluidity and alternative images of the female self expose story-telling as a political act. 5. Time Jeanette Winterson deploys T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets, especially in Sexing the Cherry, as a starting point to explore the notion of time and to problematize the supposition of absolute and linear time. Her concept of time, advocating the simultaneity of past, present and future is congruent with Eliot' s idea of eternal time: "Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future, / And time future contained in time past." This notion is embedded in Einstein's spacetime continuum, very similar to St Augustine's concept of etemity as a territory in which "the whole is simultaneously present."94 In the meantime, neither Eliot nor Winterson reject the Newtonian sense of time corroborating human everyday experience of time as linear sequence. While the Greeks perceived the flow of time as circular, classical physics considers it as linear. Time, a separate dimension running at a constant rate throughout the universe, and space are absolute in Newton's terms. In his opinion, the world is three-dimensional, possible to be described by height, width and depth. Einstein discovered that all time and space measurements are relative, that is they rely on the location and movement of the observer. Subsequently, the shape of objects and the speed of the clock depend on their velocity. The changing speed of the clock proves that the universe does not have absolute time. It can be defined only in relation to the observer and relies on his state of motion relative to other observer's. Two events occurring concurrently to one observer might take place at different times for other observers. Consequently, past, present and future are relative notions as well, and `now' for the whole universe is unfeasible to be delineated, which entails the dismissal of the notion of the absolute space. The Newtonian comprehension of the world is supplanted with Einsteinian fourdimensional one where the notion of time (chronos) and space/place (topos) coalesce into a single construct, termed space-time. The Special Theory of Relativity puts forward space-time as a static entity where events do not unravel in time but exist complete; in other words, the past, present and future co-exist in 93 Winterson, Boating for Beginners, p. 41. 94 After Bay-Petersen, "T. S. Eliot and Einstein," p. 154.

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a continuum given all together. The phenomena are tangible only when velocity approaching the Speed of light comes into question.95 Winterson, however, expands her characters' experience outside the ordinary experience of the physical world. They obtain insights into time from God's perspective and thus they undergo an experience of timelessness. Winterson goes further and implements multiple space-time frameworks, thereby Mikhail Bakhtin' s concept of the chronotope is a useful lens through which to anatomize her experimentation. Whilst Einstein viewed the world in terms of a single four-dimensional continuum, Bakhtin demonstrates how multiple space-time chronotopes in literary works can be presented in tension with each other. The Passion offers an image of the barrenness of history in which pain and death pose a person's inescapable fate: "The only wisdom we can hope to acquire / Is the wisdom of humility," to use Eliot's words. The view of history presented here is pessimistic, repudiating Newton's notion of time as dynamic. The soldiers, subordinated to Bonaparte's whimsical dominion, and fighting for years on end, perceive time as cyclical rather than progressive. The chronotope of Russia is confronted with the one of carnivalesque Venice which withstands mapping and fixing, and where life is open to chance and seductive obscurity.96 The past and future fluctuate and await to be reformulated: The future is foretold from the past and the future is only possible because of the past. Without past and future, the present is partial. All time is etemally present and so all time is ours. There is no sense in forgetting and every sense in dreaming. Thus the present is made rieh. Thus the present is made whole. On the lagoon this morning, with the past at my elbow, rowing beside me, I see the future glittering on the water. I catch sight of myself in the water and see in the distortions of my face what I might become.97

In this place one can be captured by their past and memories as well as participate in a masquerade which erases the distinctions between genders and sexualities. Villanelle mentions the old chronotope of Venice as well, where the Venetians had their "own calendar and stayed aloof from the world" and "began the days at night."98 Their secrets and trade relied on the disguise of darkness, which was no obstacle to them thanks to their "eyes like cats"99 that could see through it. She maintains she cannot situate those days in time as time is connected with daylight. Sexing the Cherry utilizes different chronotopic frameworks as well. A discrepant chronotope of the Hopi Indians whose language does not differentiate 95 The elucidation of the theories after Bay-Petersen. 96 Morrison, Contemporary Fiction, p. 101. 97 Winterson, The Passion, p. 62. 98 Winterson, The Passion, p. 56. 99 Winterson, The Passion, p. 56.

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between present, past and future, is announced in the epigraph: "The Hopi, an Indian tribe, have a language as sophisticated as ours, but no tenses for past, present and future. The division does not exist."1°0 Jordan encounters the Hopi during one of his voyages and speaks to an old European man who has been captured by the tribe and has lived as one of them. It appears that learning the Hopi's language entails learning their world. Jordan, like the characters in Swift's Gulliver's Travels or Orwell's 1984, experiences the effects of Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, stating that language frames one's comprehension of the world, when his notion of time clashes with the Hopi's, which hinders communication. Time seems to be argued here as a Western construct. Tracing the history of modern time in The Spatialization of Metric Time, Dan Thu Nguyen draws attention to Greenwich time as a mathematical fiction "which Signals the collapse of human experience of space and time into a mathematical formula," and calls such communities as the Hopi "the form of historical and anthropological curiosities."101 The ecologist in Sexing the Cherry experiences the artificiality of chronometric time when she campaigns alone by the river for many days. Although she has a watch and a calendar to state rationally the point in the year nevertheless, the time is now measured by her internal clock. She often stays awake at night and sleeps during the day and feels as if time has slowed down, "as though I have been here for years already."IO2 She poses time has gone wild and she has become internal to it. To ascertain that time moves through one is to maintain that movement takes place rather than "a forward progression" as it would be in case of moving forward and back in time, which linear time demands.'°3 Moreover, along the framework of concurrence of various presents, Jordan and the Dog-Woman exist in the seventeenth and twentieth centuries concomitantly, inhabiting different time and different bodies. Only the consciousness stays the same: "If I have a spirit, a soul, any name will do, then it won't be single, it will be multiple. Its dimension will not be one of confinement but one of space. It may inhabit numerous changing decaying bodies in the future and in the past."I°4 In the same mode, the Dog-Woman states, "I had a name but I have forgotten it."I05 All incarnations share traits of character and attitudes. Jordan and Nicholas Jordan are linked with their need to travel and the initial desire to pursue the traditional paradigms of masculinity, later transposed into the wish to renegotiate it. The Dog-Woman, Artemis and the ecologist are clamped

100 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 8. 101 After Morrison, Contemporary Fiction, p. 28. 102 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 126. 103 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 90. 104 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 126. 105 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 11.

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with heteronormative oppression and the motif of fire symbolizing their protest.1°6 Artemis makes a fire to ponder about her past, present and future: The fiery circle surrounding her held all the clues she needed to recognise that life is for a moment contained in one shape then released into another. Monuments and cities would fade away like the people who built them. No resting place or palace could survive the light years that lay ahead. There was no history that would not be rewritten and the earliest days were already too far away to see.1°7

The activist reflects the Dog-Woman's belligerence towards infidels when she hallucinates about coercing men into training in ecology and feminism. Its aim is replacement of power for collaboration with women to recast the world into a harmonious place. First she campaigns by the river and fire against the mercury plant, then she operates with Nicholas Jordan to burn the factory contaminating the environment. This parallels the Dog-Woman's assistance in buming London in the Great Fire to cleanse the city of vice. Furthermore, the book drifts many a time into the territory of the insights of the Relativity and Quantum theories. According to the Relativity Theory, the construct of space-time has the capacity for deformation and curvature, unlike the fixity of its Newtonian counterpart. Within Quantum Theory, the mies of `uncertainty' and `complementarity' inform the claim that an object can never be observed in its totality as it manifests different traits in different circumstances. Relating also to the Quantum Theory's conceptualization of matter as energy fields rather than as solid objects with stable boundaries and places, Winterson interrogates the normativity and stability of the body:I°8 "Matter, that thing the most solid and the well-known, which you are holding in your hands and which makes up your body, is now known to be mostly empty space. Empty space and points of light."1°9 Fritjof Capra in The Tao of Physics encapsulates the viewpoint of modern physics: The whole structure of space-time is inextricably linked to the distribution of matter. Space is curved to different degrees, and time flows at different rates in different parts of the universe. We have thus come to apprehend that our notions of a threedimensional Euclidean space and of linear flowing time are limited to our ordinary experience of the physical world and have to be completely abandoned when we extend this experience.11°

106 Morrison, Contemporaty Fiction, p. 105. 107 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 133. 108 Morrison, Contemporary Fiction, p. 109. 109 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 8. 110 After Bay-Petersen, "T. S. Eliot and Einstein," p. 151.

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Jordan believes that the earth is round and flat concurrently. He explains this as obviousness: "That it is round appears indisputable; that it is flat is our common experience, also indisputable. The globe does not supersede the map; the map does not distort the globe."1 1 Jordan experiences the Newtonian sense of time then but ponders on it in Einsteinian terms of simultaneity of space and time. He compares the experience of Newtonian time to looking at a map and seeing flatness that denies the existence of hills, curvatures and other forms. On the other hand, thinking about time is for him "like turning the globe round and round, recognizing that all journeys exist simultaneously, that to be in one place is not to deny the existence of another, even though that other place cannot be felt or seen, our usual criteria for belief."112 He thereby understands that human sensory restrictions hinder perceiving the four-dimensional universe, and instead one experiences events in a temporal succession, i.e. as a chain of limited space-time segments. Accordingly, for him the two conceptions of time do not negate each other; he just assumes that one's outward life is chronometric while the inward one is subjected to an irregular "imaginative impulse cutting through the dictates of daily time, and leaving us free to ignore the boundaries of here and now and pass like lightning along the coil of pure time, that is, the circle of the universe and whatever it does or does not contain."113 The ecologist does not realize the difference between the experiential time of common sense and objectivity of time, therefore, when her identity assumes a different body, she does not understand what is happening to her, feels frightened and presumes she is going mad. She hallucinates about her other incarnation as the giantess, the Dog-Woman, concluding that she has an alter ego, a guardian, who she believes to lurk inside her. When she sits by the river, she experiences an inward feeling of not being always there. Particularly one of the days returns to her many a time. In the `memory' when she is walking from school, admiring the view from Waterloo Bridge, suddenly she finds herself "alone on a different afternoon," St Paul's and the wall in front of her disappear, and her forearms become "massive, like thighs."114 The moment of passing from the ecologist's incarnation to the Dog-Woman's is depicted as dizziness and losing balance followed by "coming to herself' and being "home as always."115 This event is also described in the section narrated by the seventeenth century Jordan, under the heading, "Hallucinations and Diseases of the Mind." Other hallucinations include very brief stories of a woman who suddenly ceases to recognize her family; of a man who, visiting a country house with a tour, recognizes it to be his own and of a

111 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 81. 112 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 89. 113 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 90. 114 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 128. 115 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 82.

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young man, Nicholas Jordan, as the reader can conclude from another part of the book, whose friend drifts into John Tradescant. Winterson thus thoroughly opens the domain of temporal experience: Lies 1: There is only the present and nothing to remember. Lies 2: Time is a straight line. Lies 3: The difference between the past and the future is that one has happened while the other has not. Lies 4: We can only be in one place at a time. Lies 5: Any proposition that contains the word 'finite' (the world, the universe, experience, ourselves... )116

The assumptions let the consciousness shift between the bodies of its incarnations. The oscillations take place when one changes perspective, which mirrors Bakhtin's argument that considerable shifts in perception can be comprehended in terms of conversion between diverse chronotopes.117 Placing the ability to experience the continuum of present in a comparison with looking at pictures, Jordan explicates it is essential that one masters making "the foreground into the background" concentrating an the background details and figures: "My own life is like this, or, I should say, my own lives. For the most part I can see only the most obvious detail, the present, my present. But sometimes, by a trick of the light, I can see more than that. I can see countless lives existing together and receding slowly."118 The "trick of the light," referring to the energy fields in the Quantum Theory, is also mentioned when the activist experiences being at two places simultaneously — the turn takes place when she concentrates an the sunshine. The quality of matter as envisaged by the Quantum Theory is also demonstrated by the dance practised at a dancing school. Fortunata, the teacher, teaches her students to become points of light, that is to fluctuate between bodies, "to step out of one present into another":119 Bodies that could have bent double and grown numb she maintains as metal in a fiery furnace, tempering, stretching, forcing sinews into impossible shapes and calling her art nature. She believes that we are fallen creatures who once knew how to fly. She says that light burns in 0117' bodies and threatens to dissolve us at any moment. How else can we account for so many of us who disappear? lt is her job to channel the light Iving in the solar plexus, along the arms, along the legs, forcing it into fingertips and feet, forcing it out so that her dancers sweat tongues of flame. To her dancers she says, 'Through the body, the body is conquered. ' She spins them, impaled with light ... until all features are blurred, until the human being most

116 Winterson, Sexing the Cheriy, p. 83. 117 After Morrison, Contemporary Fiction, p. 37. 118 Winterson, Sexing the Cheny, pp. 91, 92. 119 Winterson, Sexing the Chen' y, p. 90.

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resembles a freed spirit from a darkened jar. One after the other she spins them, like a juggler keeping plates on sticks. 12°

When Jordan visits the school he sees points of light whirling along the room which later materialize as women. The seif is drawn out of oneself and experiences the sense of timelessness also when, like in T. S. Eliot, it comes in touch with genuine art, when, mocking the rules of gravity, one is "no Tonger bound by the matter, matter has become what it is: empty space and light."121 Withdrawing from the world, meditation, delirium, passion or creating art are propitious to experience time as allcircumscribing dimension. Through storytelling Ali in The PowerBook and Rembrandt, who he is compared to, make psychic journeys out and shove their own boundaries "inching into other selves."122 What they invent is "one continuous story, where even birth and death are only markers, pauses, changes of tempo. Birth and death become new languages, that is all."123 After their deaths their tales will relocate to other mouths and other narratives. They both make themselves the objects of their work: Ali "knots himself into stories" to such an extent that he does not know "where he begins and the stories end,"124 whereas Rembrandt paints a great deal of self-portraits dressing up and putting on makeup, like in the theatre. They become the indissoluble part of their art: Rembrandt' s portraits are "surfacing through the painter and into paint,"125 while Ali, putting himself into a story is similar to a Turk who "knots a fine carpet and finds himself in the pattern."126 A similar process occurs in the short story "Turn of the World" on the moving island of Aeros whose inhabitants are famous for storytelling. The listeners very often become part of the story and convert themselves into it, impersonating its protagonists and forgetting about their lives completely. Yet, they will not be imprisoned in the story forever as another story, more authoritative than the previous one, is bound to liberate them into other selves or back into the former ones. Storytelling constitutes thus a record of the storytellers' numerous incarnations. The memory of other personifications is stored in the brain and revealed, for instance, when one has the sensation of having been somewhere before when one is there for the first time. Winterson interprets this as being there at the moment "but in another life, another time, doing something else."127 The same 120 Winterson, Sexing the Cherty, p. 72. ltalics in the original. 121 Winterson, Sexing the Cherty, p. 91. 122 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 214. 123 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 217. 124 Winterson, The PowerBook, pp. 215-216. 125 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 214. 126 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 215. 127 Winterson, Sexing the Cherty, p. 90.

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elucidation concerns the act of recognition interwoven in Winterson's oeuvre: the sensation that one has always known the person just met. Villanelle defines the phenomenon as one of the manifestations of multiplicity of selves: "Perhaps our lives spread out around us like a fan and we can only know one life, but by mistake sense others."I28 For her the moment of disintegration of identity occurs when she decides to marry against her heart: my selves broke away and one married a fat man and the other stayed here, in this elegant house to eat dinner night after night from an oval table. Sometimes, drinking coffee with friends or walking alone by the too salt sea, I have caught myself in that other life, touched it, seen it to be as real as my own. And if she had lived alone in that elegant house when I first met her? Perhaps I would never have sensed other lives of mine, having no need of them.I29

In Winterson reciprocal love conditions the unity of self, yet, as the characters still seek love, they are split into a plethora of selves, "stacked together like plates on a waiter's hand,"13° taking kaleidoscopic "journeys folded in on themselves like a concertina" which echoes Woolfs Orlando's proposition that "selves of which we are built up" are "one on top of another" like "plates are piled on a waiter's hand."13I Being a part of multi-faceted existence, the self is "not contained in any moment or any place, but it is only in the intersection of moment and place that the self might, for a moment, be seen vanishing through the door, which disappears at once."I32 The fluidity comes to a climax when Jordan meets himself, which can be conjectured as a successful conclusion of Jordan's quest for completeness, the closure the pilot in "The World and Other Places" endeavours to achieve: "I do what I need to do, which is to look for myself. I know that if I fly for long enough, for wide enough, for far enough, I'll catch a signal on the radar that teils me there's another aircraft on my wing. It will be me. Me in the cockpit of that other plane."133 The alternative journeys of the consciousness are also termed here as journeys unmade, "the path not taken," alluding to Robert Frost's poem, or "the passage which we did not take," to employ T. S. Eliot's phrase once more, and Winterson treats them as seriously as the actual journeys so as to highlight the connection of consciousness with its other incarnations. By means of this strategy, Winterson argues that consciousness, time and space are interpermeable and vacillitate.

128 Winterson, The Passion, p. 144. 129 Winterson, The Passion, p. 144. 130 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 90. 131 After Stowers, "Journeying with Jeanette," p. 146. 132 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 80. 133 Winterson, "The World and Other Places," pp. 98-99.

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Another narrative operating at the intersection between the real and the imaginary is The PowerBook, deploying the notion of virtual reality which opens up the field of many possibilities: The one life we think we know is only a window that is open on the screen. The big window full of detail, where the meaning is often lost among the facts. If we can dose that window, on purpose or by chance, what we find behind is another view. This window is emptier. The cross-references are cryptic. As we scroll down it, looking for something familiar, we seem to be scrolling into another seif — one we recognise but cannot place. The co-ordinates are missing, or the co-ordinates pinpoint us outside the limits of our existence. If we move further back, through a smaller window that is really a gateway, there is less and less to measure ourselves by. We are coming into a dark region. A single word might appear. An icon. This icon is a private Madonna, a guide, an understanding. Very often we remember it from our dreams. `Yes,' we say. 'Yes, this is a world. I have been here.' lt comes back to us like a scent from childhood. These lives of ours that press in on us must be heard.I34

Here the narrator oscillates between a tulip purveyor, Lancelot or Francesca da Rimini, between man and woman, between Paris, Capri and London, and between various historical times. Writing interactive stories, Ali discovers that the imagined narrative alters her actual life. Attempting to set a clear boundary between the potential events and the 'real' ones, Ali learns it is blurred and the two worlds overlap. The stories, a palimpsest of possibilities, constitute thus a bridge between the two worlds. Places, people and time shift, nonetheless, the protagonist and her lover reappear, as if to try out various possibilities. She clarifies the phenomenon with Einstein's proposition that the space-time continuum is curved: The more I write, the more I discover that the partition between real and invented is as thin as a wall in a cheap hotel room. I can hear voices on the other side, running water, the clink of bottles, the sound of a door opening and closing. When I get up and go out into the corridor, everything is silent, no one is there. Then, as soon as I reckon I know the geography of what isn't and what is, a chair scrapes in the room beyond the wall ... When 1 sit at my computer, 1 accept that the virtual worlds I found there parallel my own. lt used to be that the real and the invented were parallel lines that never met. Then we discovered that space is curved, and in curved space parallel lines always meet.I3'

As the borderline between alternative journeys and memory become obscured at times, both may affect the present and the future. Once again Winterson points to the possibility of redrawing the future which the idea of the powerbook

134 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 103. 135 Winterson, The PowerBook, pp. 93-94.

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presupposes: "I can change the story. I am the story."136 The non-linearity of time, space and mind is reflected in Winterson's narrative method which can be designated to consist in "fragments, hints, clues, letters."137 She interweaves fairy stories, flashbacks, movements in time which create interruptions and draw attention to language itself In The PowerBook the strategy, accompanied by icons with some of the names of the chapters including computer terminology (e.g. open, hard drive, new document, search), reflects the arrangement of the Internet: non-linear, with many links. Linearity is thereby replaced by spaceless and timeless entity since computer time, Paul Virilio points out, "helps construct a permanent present, an unbounded, timeless intensity."138 Winterson's fluid subjectivity moving in space-time continuum corresponds to Rosi Braidotti's notion of nomadic subjectivity. Thanks to nomadism, the protagonist obtains "the facets of multiple homogeneous identities without being cornered by the bounded limits of a solitary one."139 Winterson's extended metaphor of ships and voyaging conceptualizes the notion of nomadic subjectivity, which is upheld by the new physics' theory of space-time continuum. The appropriated theories of subjectivity, memory and new physics work together to underline the impossibility to form a theory of permanence in human comprehension of the universe and of the seif. Like Einstein, Winterson discards objectivity and supports self-referentiality of the terminology one utilizes to designate one's self. Notions and idioms gain significance only when they are explained on the basis of logical connections with one another. Both time, symbolized by the river, and the constituents of identity fluctuate continually, while stability and solidity appear merely illusions. Alice in Gut Symmetries states, "Those well-built trig points, those physical determinants of parents, background, school, family, birth, marriage, death, love, work, are themselves as much in motion as I am. What should be stable, shifts. What I am told is solid, slips," and later on, The separateness of our lives is a sham. Physics, mathematics, music, painting, my politics, my love for you, my work, the star-dust of my body, the Spirit that impels it, clocks diurnal, time perpetual, the roll, rough, tender, swamping, liberating, breathing, moving, thinking nature, human nature and the cosmos are pattemed together.I4°

136 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 5. 137 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 188. 138 After Roger Luckurst and Peter Marks, "Hurry up please it's time: introducing the contemporary," in: Literature and the Contemporary: Fictions and Theories of the Present, ed. Roger Luckhurst and Peter Marks (New York: Longman, 1999), p. 2. 139 Kim Middleton Meyer after Makinen, The Novels of Jeanette Winterson, p. 106. 140 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, pp. 9-10, 98.

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Alice supports a relativistic theory of the cosmos and identity which assumes a congruent and unified universe, linked with human experiences, bodies and identities.141 This coincides with Stella' s stance that draws attention to the Hebrew word 'know' that denominates connections instead of facts. Subjectivity, interconnected with the ancestors' ones, constitutes the outcome of various factors, like time, space and history clashing and influencing each other to structure a unique identity. The palimpsest of history is visible in every human being: My time, my father's time, my grandfather's time. Now separate, now flowing together, and joined with the floods and cries of men and women I have never met, places and years that snag their movement in mine and choose me, for a moment, as a conscious depot of history. What is it that you contain? The dead, time, light patterns of millennia opening in (our gut. What is salted up in the memory of you? Memory past and memory future. 2

Identity is envisaged here according to Plato's notion of invenire that means to come upon, connected with the assertion that "we are all in a continual state of remembering, that the human life span is to remember, to remember the things that we are, that we can be, that we've left behind — to remember the glories of the soul, as Plato would have seen it," Winterson elucidates.143 "Gut feelings" depict intuitive and emotional attitude which is incessantly paralleled throughout the novel with the material theoretical GUT, a single notion elucidating the world, commenced by Einstein and pursued in the Superstring Theory. The theory poses an attempt to explicate all of the particles and fundamental forces of nature in a single theory by patterning them as vibrations of supersymmetric strings. Stating, "When gravity and GUTs unite? Listen: one plays the lute and another the harp. The strings are vibrating and from the music of the spheres a perfect universe is formed,"144 Alice proposes a metaphysical elucidation of the world, drawing an the ancient philosophical concept of "music of the spheres." Connected with "gut feeling" is Alice's conceptualization of time as a vortex. Time moves through the Body to expose "the expanding universe opening in your gut."I45 In physics chaos theory, pursued by Feigenbaum, Lorenz and Mandelbrot argues for this anti-linearity of time, manifest in everyday life. Alice's notion of time is similar to Bruno Latour' s helical model of time where the contemporary constituents are reorganized

141 McClellan, "Science Fictions," pp. 1070, 1076. 142 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 218. 143 After McClellan, "Science Fictions," p. 1076. 144 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 100-101. 145 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 2.

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along a spiral rather than a line. We do have a future and a past, but the future takes the form of a circle expanding in all directions, and the past is not surpassed, but revisited, repeated, surrounded, protected, recombined, reinterpreted and reshuffled. Elements that appear remote if we follow the spiral may turn out to be quite nearby if we compare loops. Conversely, elements that appear quite contemporary, if we judge by the line, become quite remote if we traverse the spoke. Such a temporality does not oblige us to use the labels `archaic' or 'advanced', since every cohort of contemporary elements may bring together elements from all times. In such a framework, our actions are recognised at last as polytempora1.146

One of Winterson's descriptions bears a striking resemblance to Latour' s: A river cannot flow against its current, but it can flow in circles: its eddies and whirlpools regularly break up its strong press forward. The riverrun is maverick, there is a high chance of cross-current, a snag of time that retums us without waming to a place we thought we had sailed through long since.I47

Both Winterson and Latour promote a model of time where progression and repetition are_looped then. Latour' s future "expanding in all directions" seems to be consonant with Winterson's multiple possibilities of plural identities and his "polytemporal actions" with her "cross-currents," that is transitions between chronotopes. The past in both understandings fluctuates, and all times, past, present, and future permeate one another. In addition, given the concept of matter as energy Felds along with the Relativity Theory's interrelatedness of time and space, and the notion of history as a function of movement and Position, Winterson suggests there is no point in speaking of the unalterable nature of the body.148 If the body, whose sex and gender are culturally constructed, as Judith Butler poses, is produced through time, manipulating with time and space along with body disguises produces significant consequences for the scrutiny of the concept of identity. The division of time and identity interrogates the expected "unity and 'in-dividability' of the `individual'," which upholds the idea of integrated and fixed sex and gender.I49 The postmodern palimpsest of possibilities and "repetition-withdifference" of history Winterson proposes points to the possibility of renarrativizing the future. The protagonists' oscillations between the real and imaginary aim at active trying out various options and declining all previous stories along with the most obvious closure that ensures safety. Winterson wams against "automatic writing" which can be also read as the peril of automatic living

146 After Steven Connor, "The impossibility of the present: or, from the contemporary to the contemporal," in: Literature and the Contemporary, ed. Luckhurst and Marks, p. 25. 147 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 104. 148 Morrison, Contemporary Fiction, p. 109. 149 Morrison, Contemporary Fiction, p. 106.

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with the most obvious closure that ensures safety. The writer persuades to take control of one's life and actively explore new variations. 6. Water motifs Winterson's imagery associated with water commences with her second novel, a comic book, Boating for Beginners. Apart from the obvious motifs of the ark and deluge, the book touches upon the subject of Gloria, who must oppose her dominating mother in the process of constructing her own identity. She claims to have managed with her mother's overwhelming presence by "disappearing to the bottom of her private pool with a collection of unsuitable literature and a vivid imagination."I50 Water stands for rebirth here, as opposed to the water of the Hood which brings death, a duality similar to The Passion's, where the rheumy space of Venice becomes the site of Villanelle's rebirth and reunion, and of Henri's shattering of psyche and madness. There is, however, one constructive story Gloria's mother imparts to her daughter; a story a of a man who attempts to track the secret of the world travelling for months on end to more and more exotic places. Ultimately, the mother-like figure elucidates: The secret of the world is this: the world is entirely circular and you will go round and round endlessly, never finding what you want, unless you find what you really want inside yourself. When you follow a star you know you will never reach that star; rather it will guide you to where you want to go. It's a reference point, not an end in itself, even though you seem to be following it. So it is with the world. It will only ever lead you back to yourself. The end of all exploring will be to cease from exploration and know the place for the first time.I51

In the course of their voyages, necessary to gain the knowledge about the world and a distance from their lives, Winterson's characters invariably realize the quest must involve an interior voyage as well. In other words, they voyage out to realize they have to voyage in. This premise is enacted in The Passion in the imagery of labyrinthine Venice standing for the interior selves, uncharted, multiple and fluid, like water in the canals. It is the canal water that mirrors Villanelle's other self to match Henri's future possible identities reflected in the pot after rejecting his father's shaving mirror offering a single image. For Handel in Art Ties Venice also becomes the place where he tries on another identity. The water imagery continues in Sexing the Cherry with Jordan found by the river and named after a river to encode flexibility and fluidity: "I wanted to give him a river name, a name not bound to anything, just as the waters aren't

150 Winterson, Boating for Beginners, p. 98. 151 Winterson, Boating for Beginners, p. 65.

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I should have named him after a stagnant pond and then I bound to anything. could have kept him, but I named him after a river and in the flood-tide he slipped away.55152 Fulfilling the power of names, Winterson inoculates in her protagonist the germ of travelling. The Dog-Woman takes the three-year-old boy to a show of a banana, a great rarity, and Jordan is mesmerized, setting sail in his mind's eye: "I put my head next to his head and looked where he looked and I saw deep blue waters against a pale shore and trees whose branches sang with green and birds in fairground colours."I53 The sea water symbolizes Jordan's dreams, desires and fears. Both he and Nicholas Jordan "voyage out" to negotiate their identity and the ships appear "a spatio-temporal rite of passage" the protagonists have to pass through.154 The narrative of The PowerBook floats around Paris and its Seine, Capri and London. The narrator compares the Seine and time to the film tape, unrolling and fluttering. The night in Paris Alix spends with the redhead is "shot and exposed and thrown away, carried by the river, by time,"I55 nonetheless its each frame and scene remains imprinted in memory. Winterson uses a downpour and the characters running through it to construct a spontaneous and romantic scene, however cliched. She presents rain as an unpredictable element which introduces risk, and she treats the sparkling river and the pleasant evening as a promise that time, encoded in the river, offers a new beginning along with a new opportunity against the baggage of the past. Ali notices many possibilities for the couple, which is symbolized by the rain on the street reflecting and multiplying the city and the heroines. Drops of rain are envisaged as separate worlds; plural possibilities and chances offered by the future. Winterson renders love in analogous terms: a lover possesses life-giving properties, becoming a Pool to drink from, love can be as fierce and unexpected as an ice floe smashing into one's life, its vehemence making one drown, even though one has "a heart built like the Titanic."156 Water motifs proliferate: Alix's mother lived on the river, her biological mother had a soft voice "like the river over the chalk pan of the riverbed,"157 Ali and the redhead rent a room in a hotel that was once a spa, the e-writer compares her computer to a shore. She writes new stories for the redhead and drops them "overboard, like a message in a bottle"158 in the hope that the lover will open them. Capri is portrayed as a place which successfully negotiates the tensions between land and sea, depth and height, myth and the real. Plundered for its 152 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 11. 153 Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, p. 13. 154 Pearce after Makinen, The Novels of Jeanette Winterson, p. 88. 155 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 36. 156 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 51. 157 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 157. 158 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 83.

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history and artifacts, the island eludes a stable and exhaustive definition, preserving its mystery. The notion of Winterson's "Niquid time"I" encoded in the river accords well with Heraclitus's doctrine that since everything is in a state of flux, "you cannot step twice into the same river; for fresh waters are ever flowing in upon you.,,160 The Thames running through The PowerBook and Sexing the Cherry as well as Eliot's Four Quartets and Woolf s Orlando introduces with itself the weight of previous cultural and historical encodings. Winterson employs the river metaphorically and literally as the space where time flows.I61 The London Spitalfields section commences with the depiction of the part of the city as consisting in mazes of streets with omnipresent river whose sound dominates, but whose water remains invisible. The river saturates the ground, streets and buildings: "It is as though the water is everywhere and nowhere, perhaps under the streets, perhaps inside the houses, with their watery windows where the old glass reflects the light."162 Water imagery points to the time collapse here: the insignia of the past adjoin those of the present and future. The city and the river emerge as the carriers of multi-layered memory then, the same function as is in Lighthousekeeping fulfilled by the fossil and in Weight by the apples. The marbles used as bottle stoppers Afi finds during the lowest tide of the twentieth century serve as counterparts of Lighthousekeeping's seahorse. In Art&Lies Winterson refers to the encodings of the sea as change and violence against the security of the stable land. Sappho, imagining to make love with her beloved, Sophia, in a somewhat clich6d scenery of the beach, craves to find spontaneity, fervour and variety in their erotic encounters. She asks her lover to be turbulent and fierce in her passion: "Be tidal to me in the constancy of change. Break over me where I feel most safe, be a shore to me, when I fear I am wave in the water, endlessly slipping away. Lift me up like a Shell from the beach, now empty, now full."163 She continues to weave water imagery into her invocations to depict the feeling of abundance and wholeness the relationship grants her, referring to water's life-giving qualities. She thus addresses Sophia, "I have satisfied myself with water from your well. My mouth knows the shape of you. My mouth overflows."164 Not only love-making but also Sophia's appearance are bestowed the qualities of the sea: "The skin is cast of pearl. She is

159 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 243. 160 Bertrand Russel, History of Western Philosophy (London and New York: Routledge Classics, 2004), p. 52. 161 See the interview in: Noakes and Reynolds, Jeanette Winterson. The Essential Guide, p. 23. 162 Winterson, The PowerBook, p. 165. 163 Winterson, Art&Lies, p. 57. 164 Winterson, Art&Lies, p. 59.

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a matter of the sea. The sea deep about her, not only in her eyes that are green, but in the moving contours of her face."I65 Also in Lighthousekeeping Winterson uses water imagery to depict Dark' s and Molly's tidal relationship. They are lighthouses, that is stable points of reference, for each other. Winterson compares the one standing at Cape Wrath to a seahorse: "the lighthouse looked like a living creature, standing upright on its base, like a seahorse, fragile, impossible, but triumphant in the waves."166 Molly calls Babel a seahorse and thinks of him as her "navigation point" and "the coordinate of her position."167 He colludes their love-making to swimming "towards her in their bed like an ocean of drowning and longing."168 They have their love game about the seahorse and the sea cave which poses "[t]heir watery map of the world."169 He terms their break-up a 'flood'. It is when he refers to the flood in his sermon many years later that he notices Molly in church, spying on him. The flood in the sermon heralds another break-up. Torn with his double life and unable to reconciliate Jekyll with Hyde, Babel decides to commit suicide. He walks into the sea with the seahorse to travel in time to the space before the flood. At the moment of his death the man has a vision of a reunion with his beloved. Sappho's in Arknies fascination with the sea is provoked by its contradictory character — it can be either placid or raging, holding the promise of either freedom or enslavement, bringing either (re)birth or death. Therefore she announces that both "the marble beach" and "the glass sea" are lies and' deceptions since they are vulnerable to alteration: "[t]he white sand damp-veined is warm underfoot. The sea that softly reflects the Null will splinter it soon. What appears is not what is. I love the deception of sand and sea."17° In that they reflect the postmodern world, seemingly firm, but in fact shifting, like its shadow cast by the moon. Handel points to the changeability of the sea and confesses to his fear of it. He evokes the comparison of subjectivity to the sea. The superficial knowledge of any of them does not entail the knowledge of the innermost part; they are known and not known concurrently: "Those who know it [the sea] well will admit that they hardly know it at all."171 The existence of the bottom is assumed in both instances, yet, not confirmed empirically. As regards the self, Handel infers, "I may not have a very bottom, I may be much shallower than I like to think, or I may be a creature of infinity, for now confined ... in waters I can manage."172 He 165 Winterson, Art&Lies, p. 139. 166 Winterson, Lighthousekeeping, p. 80. 167 Winterson, Lighthousekeeping, p. 102. 168 Winterson, Lighthousekeeping, p. 80. 169 Winterson, Lighthousekeeping, p. 81. 170 Winterson, Art&Lies, p. 52. 171 Winterson, Art&Lies, p. 32. 172 Winterson, Art&Lies, p. 32.

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thus gestures back at the postmodernist argument that one `knows' the world through textuality, which constitutes an antithesis of `experience'. Also he seems to allude to the blurred differentiation between Richard Rorty's "texts," that is things made, belonging to the realm of interpretation, and "lumps," that is things found, situated in the realm of phenomenology, proposing that "lumps" — historical events and personae — existed but now they are accessible only in the shape of textuality.173 The sea functions here also as a signifier of history then. Its waters contain past, present and future: "the waters, dashing the past at her feet, the water dragging her future behind, the hiss and pull of the waves."174 The book postulates that art surpasses time in a continuum of past and present, in other words, the past literary tradition is brought into the present, and, subsequently, they interact with each other, the past is "altered by the present as the present is directed by the past,"m to use T. S. Eliot's words. The journey between the past and present is depicted in terms of a sea voyage, supported by the female moon: "Sappho hears the sea, hears the wind in the threadbare sails. She travels time in a new-moon boat."176 The sea around the Lesbos Island in Art&Lies turns into the Atlantic Ocean in Gut Symmetries. Alice and Jove travel by ship to America and it is where their love affair begins. Alice recollects: "It began on a boat, like The Tempest, like Moby Dick, a finite enclosure of floating space, a model of the world in little."177 She collates the boat to the Ship of Fools on which lunatics or saints sail after the Holy Grail, that is "that which cannot be found."178 The voyages encompass the sky and the whole universe which the Ship of Fools navigates. Alice herself is born in a tugboat and her father is a director in a shipping company, her mother a daughter of the company partner. In her childhood Alice often accompanies her father on his business cruises. The motif of the boat and the sea reappears when Stella and Jove go on a cruise together and get lost. A storm pushes their boat into the open sea and it seems to them as though they "floated off the world's edge into a science-fiction sea,"179 the imaginary one, not recorded on any map, where no movement can be spotted. Stella recalls the voyage to Hamburg with her mother after her father's death, and herself watching the sky for the albatross, her father's new incarnation following them. 173 After Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, p. 145. 174 Winterson, Art&Lies, p. 76. 175 T. S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," in: Selected Essays (New York, 1950), p. 5. 176 Winterson, Art&Lies, p. 72. 177 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 9. 178 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 6. 179 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 179.

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In "The Turn of the World" the island of Hydor, consisting of the regions of the Shore, the Lakes and the Deep, is plunged into water and to move around one needs to swim, dive and travel by boat. The waters of the island possess cooling and healing properties. They also promise oblivion "away from memory, his life washed off him, clean at last."18° Remembering the traumas gives rise to the desire to return to the chora then, a timeless pre-Oedipal womb, like in Martin Amis's The Arrow of Time. At one point the character of the water changes: it becomes more difficult to navigate the place and "[t]he agony of rise and fall, the strength to pull forward, the clang of the oars an the metal surface of the Lake, all become hypnotic."181 Then a steep drop follows, holding little chance of survival, however, if a rower manages, she comes to the core of the island, a well, which is She lies down and Looks into the well. She sees her face a mandala of pure water. since time began. She sees all the world in the enveloping waters and remembers everything. She sees the beginning and the end swirnming alter each other. There is no beginning. There is no end. The water is unbroken. I82

The well appears thus a repository of selves, history, memory and time. Looking into it involves gaining insight into time, identities and events from God's standpoint; to see them given all together, as advocated by the Special Theory of Relativity. The coexistence of beginning and end is advocated here similarly to T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets which asserts: "the end and the beginning were always there / Before the beginning and after the end. / And all is always now." Winterson's story can be read as another articulation of a voyage in search of oneself: very hard, abundant in obstacles, yet, unless one gets discouraged, the self-discovery journey will be gratifying; one will use the experience not to miss the meaning, to refer to Eliot once again. Apart from the river, ocean and sea, Lighthousekeeping takes recourse to the metaphor of the ship to delineate the concept of time. Pew evokes the comparison of McCloud, the ship, to the future. He believes one inescapably drags their past behind, always tangible under the surface of the skin, like McCloud, with a new crew and furnished with the latest technology but with the old destroyed McCloud, like a Russian doll, sailing inside. Life is for Silver a constant voyage, sailing from place to place, but never coming to shore. Sometimes the voyages are successful, and at other times they bring disillusionment; "a trail of shipwrecks and set-sails. There are no arrivals, no destinations; there are only sandbanks and shipwreck; then another boat, another tide."183 Silver describes her life in rheumy terms, "a span of water,"184 which 180 Jeanette Winterson, "The Turn of the World," in: The World and Other Places, p. 155. 181 Winterson, "The Turn of the World," p. 155. 182 Winterson, "The Turn of the World," p. 155. 183 Winterson, Lighthousekeeping, p. 127.

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oscillates between places bound to sea. She depicts her conception in marine terms as well: her father comes "out of the sea" and returns there, being "crew on a fishing boat that harboured with us one night when the waves were crashing like dark glass. His splintered hull shored him for Jong enough to drop anchor inside my mother. Shoals of babies vied for life. I won."I85 She lives in Scottish Salts, "[a] sea-flung, rock-bitten, sand-edged shell of a town."I86 The girl claims to be born "part precious metal part pirate,"187 her and Pew's names alluding to Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island. When ordered to abandon the lighthouse, Silver goes to Bristol, supposedly "a sea-faring town," where Pew's story of the place appears out-dated as the girl turns out the only person wearing an oilskin. "Ends Meet," a shore tavern, was supplanted with Holiday Inn where hammocks, seamen used to sleep in, are not available. After Bristol Silver sails off to Capri since, as she explains, "I feel better surrounded by water,"188 where she steals a bird knowing her name Then she visits one of the Greek islands where she falls in love. During the time she and her partner spend together in a forest hut, they make a trip to Ironbridge. Looking at its river, Silver meditates on the river which is "past and future,"189 and the place layered with lives, continuing the suppositions from Winterson's previous works. At the end of the book Silver visits her lighthouse with a tour and meets Pew and DogJim once again, who come, obviously, by boat. The plethora of motifs connected with the river, sea and ships is adjoined by other watery images. For instance, if Silver reads a book, it is Death in Venice; if there is a bottle of champagne in the bucket, it floats "like a relic from the Titanic";19° if Silver's lover tells her a story, it is about turtles on the Thai beach; if a librarian is busy, it is with alphabetizing Sea Stories, and so on. Babel Dark's story is no exception. The water motifs in Winterson invariably serve to envisage the alterable nature of time, and thus the shifting qualities of the postmodern world. The extended metaphor of ships and voyaging conceptualizes the notion of nomadic subjectivity, the self in a flux, which is upheld by the new physics' theory of space-time continuum. Furthermore, Winterson's insistence on recurring water imagery seems to be associated with the depiction of femininity in the Western culture as volatile, shapeless and fluctuating entity. The writer takes advantage of the amorphous similarity between women and water to articulate her characters' need to define 184 Winterson, Lighthousekeeping, p. 134. 185 Winterson, Lighthousekeeping, p. 3. 186 Winterson, Lighthousekeeping, p. 5. 187 Winterson, Lighthousekeeping, p. 3. 188 Winterson, Lighthousekeeping, p. 155. 189 Winterson, Lighthousekeeping, p. 215. 190 Winterson, Lighthousekeeping, p. 218.

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themselves through water, sailing off on the private quert, during which they discover they desire femininity for seif-definition, whether they are lesbians or `new men'. On their way to self-discovery, the protagonists, more often than not either physically or psychically freak, struggle with water. The freakishness of the body usually constitutes a trauma register on the body, to corroborate Freud's assertion that an unsuccessful repression of a trauma recurs to manifest itself as a symptom on the body, in the psyche attempt to bind/rework the ordeal. It is usually when Winterson depicts freakishness that her texts erupt into magic reali sm. In Sexing the Cherry the ecologist sustains obesity, a reflection of the Dog-Woman's freakish giantism since she deems the size as the only means to be noticed. She finds the meaning of life in campaigning against pollution of the river, but only Jordan is able to see her action as valuable, unlike others who accuse her of insanity. Villanelle bears on her body the consequences of a spoilt ritual, whose consequence is that she is the first girl with webbed feet in the whole history of boatmen. Villanelle's body is mutilated once again when she falls in love and loses her heart to have it interwoven into the tapestry. The mutilation is undone and wholeness regained when she swallows the heart Henri retrieves for her. After the ordeal Villanelle and Henri experience, she performs the `miracle' of walking on water. Henri's psyche fails to bind the events of the war and murder, thereby he sinks into madness, sharing a room with ghosts and shadows, in a madhouse surrounded by water. Unlike Villanelle, Handel seeks completeness through mutilation, namely through a grotesque operation. Stella's strangeness of the body comprises the diamond at the base of her spine. It gets there during her mother's pregnancy when she eats it as one of the caprices. But she gets disfigured also on a psychological level because after her husband's betrayal she feels dismembered: Pull yourself together. Yes. Just pass me my leg will you? It's on top of the wardrobe where he threw it, and I think my right arm is leaning over by the wall. My head is in the gas oven but it will be probably all right, 1'm told that green colour wears off. Unfortunately I threw my heart to the dogs. Never mind. No one will notice how much is missing from the inside, will they? You Look betten. Thank you. I dumped the broken bits and varnished the surface.191

Her ability to communicate has been injured, too, to prove the bankruptcy of language in the face of tremendous pain. In the same mode, in Written on the Body the narrator loses fluency of using the language when confronted with the trauma of her lover' s disease that multiplies her body uncontrollably. Stella needs

191 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 43.

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to "learn the language of beasts and water and night"192 to emerge from the hiding. It is when she gets lost on the boat when she comes to terms with her desires and makes serious decisions about her life. Pew, the Salt' s blind lighthouse keeper, is a guide for voyagers on the strange sea, who apprentices a girl to take over the masculine domain. In the parallel story, Babel Dark's abuse of his partner registers on the baby's body as blindness. When she grows up, the blind woman joins the blind lighthouse keeper to become his wife. Although mutilated in one way or another, Winterson's protagonists achieve equilibrium when they live in the immediate vicinity of water. Accordingly, on the one hand they come to terms with the multi-facetedness of the world and subjectivity, on the other hand, they discover the need to construct their selves around femininity, and so, by inference, emotions, the heart and reciprocity.

192 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, p. 43.

Conclusions

The secret of the world is this: the world is entirely circular and you will go round and round endlessly, never finding what you want, unless you find what you really want inside yourself. /Jeanette Winterson: Boating for Beginnerst

What are the consequences of Winterson's manipulations with gender, sexuality and time, and her disruption of the binary system then? They seem to result in the possibility of the third sex or many sexes, beyond the patriarchal and heterosexual matrixes, in a new reconfigured social and cultural field. The subversion of phallogocentric narrative and scenarios entails the reenvisaging of relations between the sexes/genders and reconceptualization of female desire. This is an order where the space for a religious lesbian, a giantess, a "boy-woman" or other unorthodox bodies has been negotiated and they have been normalized. In Winterson the Holy Grail appears to be lesbian love, a blend of passion and safety, devoid of the will to possess or destroy. After the self-discovery journey, when a person has discovered their own path in the darkness leading to love, they are able to engage in an amorous relationship. Winterson's characters, nonetheless, enter into ambivalent attachments. Similarly to Sara Maitland and Emma Donoghue, Winterson does not depict enduring lesbian bonds, which, as Rachel Wingfield has observed, mirrors a tradition of lesbian writers who render lesbian relationships analogously to the patriarchal portrayals of lesbians as sad, painful, tragic and doomed, though passionate and romantic alike. In Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit the sexual politics demands that Jeanette should separate with her girlftiend and leave home and the religious community. Villanelle in The Passion and Alix in The PowerBook end up single since their lovers are not courageous enough to leave a comfortable marriage behind. In Written an the Body the return of Louise might be actual but it might be phantasmagorical as well. Other lesbians are also single or lonely for the lesbian attachment in Winterson very often results in loss which becomes "the measure of love." Stella and Alice's relationship in Gut Symmetries seems much more positive. It is the only relation in Winterson that permanently supersedes male homosocial desire. All of the lesbian bonds, though fervent and fulfilling, are inevitably connected with pain and emotional ransacking. This is to confirm Jeanette's assertion that "Leere is no choice that doesn't mean a loss." The lesbian trajectory of love is open also to men. Winterson gives them a chance as well. Although she portrays some men stereotypically as "pigs and

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beasts," on the other hand, she attempts to evade generalizations, positing that "there are exceptions." Henri seems to be on a good way to the reformulation of his masculinity, yet, it is thwarted by the trauma of war and murder, along with his inability to renounce the desire to possess. Handel, as a hermaphrodite, is ultimately able to speak from the feminine position. The figures of Henri, Handel and Jordan serve to demystify the masculine practice of hunting and colonizing. Winterson demonstrates that also men can profit from the feminist revolution, being given the liberty from the burdens of gender. Having realized they need femininity to define themselves, in Winterson's new world they do not need to be ashamed of that as this world allows many possibilities. Jordan is the male character who has gone the furthest: he can afford love rid of the need to subjugate. Nevertheless, in his case this entails parting, which, to my mind, frustrates the relationship's claims to successfulness. For the time being, then, only Winterson's lesbians can enjoy fulfilling attachments. To mature to such a relationship seems difficult enough, yet, it is feasible and always worth while, but, what is more, Wintersonian Holy Grail encompasses lesbian love accompanied by the acceptance of the community one lives in. This is the crux: even if one can manage to transgress boundaries, which is necessary for self-fulfillment, there is still the outside world for which age, gender and sexual preference make a tremendous difference. And the opinion of the world is important to the various Winterson's redheads who do not want to risk the safety marriage can grant. Winterson maintains Lighthousekeeping to be the first novel of a new cycle, against the reviewers' claim that she returns to her best here, joining thus the book with the previous series. However, Lighthousekeeping does appear to be different: the lesbian relationship is a happy one for the first time in Winterson. It manifests itself as more positive than in Gut Symmetries since it does not have to parley space for itself, nor is it informed with tensions or suffering. Silver's journey, like every individual's, aims at discovering the path for herself and making sense of the world. The schematic attitude of the community to other issues problematizes the notion that Silver lives in the society where the third sex is already feasible and acceptable, but, still, the heroines have the courage to get involved in a lesbian bond which appears rewarding. This heralds some positive changes to have been initiated, which might be, hopefully, depicted in the following books of the cycle. Even if the claim that the Holy Grail cannot be found, which indicates a lack of faith in the change of social order, is a recurrent assertion in Winterson's fiction, she undermines it concomitantly by her multiple rewritings. Problematizing and deconstructing conventional formulas of gender, sexual politics, history and time, and charting their instabilities and slippages between them, she opens up the fields of history, sexuality and literature. Her writerly texts compel the reader to active reading and re-examination of the familiar as well as to permit space for pluralities and heterogeneities. Ft is Winterson's goal to attain a fresh insight into

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the familiar, dulled and trivialized by routine. Her renegotiations constitute a call for change, since, as Jeanette believes: "Walls protect and walls limit. It is in the nature of walls that they should fall."

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The World According to Bridget Jones Discourses of Identity in Chicklit Fictions Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Bern, Bruxelles, New York, Oxford, Wien, 2007. 195 pp. Literary and Cultural Theory. General Editor: Wojciech H. Kalaga. Vol. 27 ISBN 978-3-631-55572-9 · pb. € 41.10* The World According to Bridget Jones: Discourses of Identity in Chicklit Fictions examines the cultural functioning of a popular contemporary strand in mainstream Anglo-American literature, known as “chicklit“. Assuming that the interpretive potential of chicklit novels is connected with the process of identity formation, the book points out the possibility of the reader‘s identification with certain fictional discourses permeating the convention. The study focuses on complex links between Anglo-American cultural discourses and narrative constructions of identity and explores narrative representations of contemporary family, love, and sexuality. It also tackles the relation between chicklit and consumerism, reconstructing salient characteristics of contemporary consumer culture and the position of the fictional female consumer within discourses of body, beauty, and shopping. Contents: Chicklit fictions · Popular culture · Theories of identity · Family · Love · Sexuality · Consumerism

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