| Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), The Passion (1987), and Written on the Body (1992) are representatives among the oeuvre of contemporary British writer Jeanette Winterson who in them not only problematizes respectively the texts of religion, history, and science, but also reconstructs the traumatized body under the grand narratives outlined above. It is significant, therefore, to explore the relationship between written texts and textualized bodies in Winterson’s fiction.Although body and narrative are the main perspectives of reading Winterson’s fiction, most of the literary criticism sidelong occludes into queer theory or postmodernism, each of which invokes the writer to be gendered as a lesbian or labeled as a postmodernist. However, Winterson herself dismisses these arguments as she diametrically opposes the reduction of her works to a lesbian paradigm and aligns herself with the modernists such as Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and T. S. Eliot. For that very reason in Winterson’s fiction, the relationship between text and body cannot be concluded within finality but a dynamic network. On one hand, the body is discursive and there is no body represented in a transcending text; on the other hand according to postmodernism the grand narrative is a self-legitimating process whereby the discourse should be composed of "little narratives", in other words the original text is a mythologized narrative and the text itself is inexhaustible. Therefore there are both a threat and a potentiality in the text/body relationship; as the body could be traumatized by the grand narrative and be revitalized through the self-made tales. Winterson interrogates the imperatives imposed on the representations of the body such as Pentecostal evangelicalism, historicized valour, patriotism, and scientific knowledge. Meanwhile because of her underpinning of the tradition of modernism particularly the autonomy of art, Winterson reconstructs the traumatized body in her own tales in which the traumatized body is not only healed through the power of art but also rendered positively as an inexhaustible narrative by virtue of the corresponding characteristic inherent of the text.The main body of the thesis consists of three parts as the following:The first chapter deals with the sexually repressed body in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. With an outset of Winterson’s self-reflexive illustration of Deuteronomy, the chapter reveals the possibility of religious tenets as a grand narrative prescribed by Jeanette’s Pentecostal evangelical church whereby the female sexuality is undermined, as Jeanette’s mother Louie precludes her sexual intercourse with her husband because of her upholding of the evil of sensual desire. Together with other lesbians in the community, Jeanette’s lesbianism is abjected as a demon-ridden disgrace both for the family and the church. Nevertheless, through her self-made tales underpinned as the last resort to solve the problem of sexually repressed body, Winterson reconstructs the positivity of female sexuality with her biblical parodies and fantatisized tales.In the second chapter, the focus is made on the historicized body in The Passion. With the help of the theories of Linda Hutcheon and the perspectives of New Historicism, Chapter Two firstly explores the invention of history that is more likely a collection of subjective observation influenced by the ideology instead of an objective record of the past. Furthermore, this chapter demonstrates that upon the summoning of valour and patriotism the soldiers are made through the disciplinary manoeuvre and the Vivandieres are forced to provide sexual services for the officers. Eventually through magical realism, Winterson recuperates the bodily freedom after a rediscovery of the "heart".Chapter Three explores the mechanized body embedded in the scientific knowledge in Written on the Body with the beginning of the falsehood of science, which is, according to Lyotard, not a conflict with the non-narratives but another one included in the word game. Then the textualized body rendered by science is under inspection, as Winterson foregrounds the cruelty of computerization to deprive the senses and her incredulity of the medical treatment to the diseased body. Accordingly, this chapter argues Winterson revives the mechanically traumatized body in her sensual aesthetics through culinary erotic, medical geography and poetic memory of senses.By and large, the traumatized body in Winterson’s fiction is revitalized and rendered inexhaustibly through the texts. Hence with the rejection of the principles of postmodernism, while upholding the word game which stresses on the heterogeneity at the expense of the depth of the work, Winterson renders her fiction vertically, which combines the heterogeneity with the "fleshy word", that is, she not only problematizes the grand narrative invested on the body but also follows the tradition of modernism to reconstruct the body through the art of texts. Therefore it is evident that Winterson sublimates her novels into an ontological level-she rediscovers the body as the narrated through her fluctuation in modernism and postmodernism, which combines her efforts in the signifying system with the inexhaustible meaning of the signified. |
