On The Ethical And Aesthetic Sensibility In Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit And The Passion

Since the publication of her debut novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson has established herself as a significant figure in the field of contemporary British literature and as a popular writer for study in schools and universities. So far most of the studies put Winterson either in a feminist literary tradition or in a postmodernist movement. Winterson, however, holds a negative attitude towards defining her in terms of "movement" or "groups". Refusing such academic games, her concern has always been to stretch the possibility of fiction toward liberating knowledge from its fixity and security. She tells stories so as to doubt and tilt and shift matter-the clean boxes of gender stereotypes, historical constructions and so on.This thesis, therefore, instead of being confined to one theoretical frame, seeks to investigate the way that Winterson challenges and shifts the solid ground of such constructed institutions as hierarchical structures, historical facts and human exploitation of nature. Winterson’s novels abound in number and stretch long in time, and this research confines itself to the early period of her writing career, focusing on the following two novels:Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and The Passion, both of which reveal her concern in interrogating the slips of solid constructions to tell different voices. These two novels depict stories of what might be considered as "the differend". The differend, according to the definition of Lyotard, is the unstable state and instant of language wherein something which must be able to put into phrases cannot yet be. In such a scenario, those who suffer a damage lose the ability to voice their suffering. And to recover such a loss of voice, Winterson extends her ethical and aesthetic concerns to such victims as the expelled women, the vanished soldiers and prostitutes, the cities and villages devastated in the war time, and the silenced nature. By integrating reality with fantasy, writing into the crevices of official history various "mini histories", and combining grotesque and lyrical presentations of the value of nature, Winterson restores to the victims the voices that they have once been deprived of.The thesis consists of five parts. The Introduction presents a brief introduction to Jeanette Winterson, a literature review of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and The Passion, and the ethical and aesthetic concern of Winterson. The first chapter studies how Winterson weaves into her storytelling the fantastic elements in order to reveal the violence of sex. The second concerns the dark area of official history that Winterson constructs in order to depict the victims of war. The third revolves around the voice of nature that is before silenced in the grand narrative of history. The Conclusion is a restatement of the argument and results of the research.