Becoming In Space: The Echoes Of Deleuze In Jeanette Winterson’s Novels

In the late twentieth century,Jeanette Winterson’s novels reinvigorated the British literary world with unique narrative techniques and profound thought.Winterson is a master at mixing various genres,such as romance,fairy tale and myth.Her novels make readers shuffle between the remarkable textual space and the real world,inspiring,enlightening,and moving thousands of people.Moreover,Winterson’s novels show astute concern toward gender issues and are interspersed with philosophical reflections on human existence,love,time,and space.The challenging and subverting of conventions run through Winterson’s narrative approaches and characterisation,which is also one of the most outstanding features of her novels.Starting with the orphan protagonists in three of Winterson’s significant works,Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit,Sexing the Cherry and Lighthousekeeping,this thesis analyses the orphans’ interactions with space during their migration by Gilles Deleuze’s theory of Becoming and the critical concepts of deterritorialization and nomadism.The first chapter focuses on the interaction between religious space and individuals in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.The hierarchical space constructed by the religious system shapes and oppresses individuals from top to bottom.Individuals boldly reconstruct biblical stories,break through spatial boundaries,and generate new selves nomadically,revealing the entangled interaction between space and individual generation under religious authority.The second chapter explains the relationship between gendered space and individuals in Sexing the Cherry.Under the hierarchical patriarchal system,space continuously produces and shapes male heroes,oppressing and restraining women with double moral standards.The author emphasizes women’s escape and subversion of gendered space and men’s resistance to it.Individuals dissolve gender by deterritorializing space and generating new women.The third chapter describes the exclusion and integration between modern individuals and social space in Lighthousekeeping.In a rootless state,modern individuals are constantly excluded by social space,wandering as anomalies.Finally,through writing and talking about individual lives,they achieve mutual generation with social space,connecting and interacting with social space through abstract space,filling the void of individual lives.After a detailed analysis of the novels in question,the thesis draws a conclusion in the study of Winterson’s works.Oranges are Not the Only Fruit and Sexing the Cherry convey the theme of “undoing gender,” and Lighthousekeeping focuses on the existential anxieties of all humanity.The theme extends to a broader level,advancing and deepening Winterson’s philosophical thinking.Spatial anxiety and the pursuit of a reliable and stable space(home)are dismissed during the becoming in space.The questions “Where am I from” and “Where am I going” are no longer critical,and what matters is to struggle against rigidly striated space and to utilize abstract space.Orphans’ constant interaction with space resonates with Gilles Deleuze’s becoming and deterritorialization during nomadism,which shed light on human existence in space: becoming in nomadism,deterritorializing with space and writing individual lives through storytelling.