Литература народов стран зарубежья | Филологический аспект №4 (36) Апрель, 2018

Постмодернистская игра с историей и гендером в романе Дженетт Уинтерсон "Как определить пол вишни"

Пиняева Елена Вячеславна
старший преподаватель Департамента языковой подготовки Финансового университета при Правительстве Российской Федерации (Москва), el.pinyaeva@yandex.ru

Pinyaeva Elena Vyacheslavna
Senior lecturer at the Department of foreign languages of Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation, Moscow, el.pinyaeva@yandex.ru

Abstract: This paper examines J. Winterson’s “Sexing the Cherry” (1989) as a type of postmodern historiographic parodic narrative that establishes an oppositional dialogic relationship with the real interpreted in the carnivalesque Bakhtinian way. In mingling male and female voices in an intricate blend of the historical and the magical, J. Winterson transforms history into the playfield for the mysterious and the burlesque, cross-dressing and gender ambiguities and offers a multiplicity of responses to a commonly acknowledged situation of marginality and ex-centricity. Her parodies of Gothic forms and horrors associated primarily with changing gender roles challenge the heterosexual system building and dominant cultural tradition. The conclusion leads to the assertion that J. Winterson’s historiographic metafiction promotes an alternative gender identity through “otherness” and “difference”, while the employment of the Gothic/magical in historical discourse interrogates the idea of the “real”, and, thus, disrupts attempts at constructing the “objective” chronicle of historical events.
Keywords: historiographic metafiction, history rewriting, parody, feminism, gender as performance, gender identities, Gothic motifs

This paper analyzes Jeanette Winterson’s “Sexing the Cherry” (1989) in the light of postmodern historiography’s problematic issues, with emphasis being laid on the relations between late 20^th century fluid gender identities and the fantastic elements that reveal their new functions in the self-conscious metafiction. “Sexing the Cherry” boasts a complex narrative structure for it incorporates different narrative modes: the historical, the gender/sexual, and the Gothic/magical, combining them in the hybrid mixture of oppositional genre elements, and, thus, can be aligned with a postmodern form that L. Hutcheon has termed as “historiographic metafiction” [7, p. 5], a type of experimental novel which explores the paradoxical confrontation of history with fiction, and questions what might be likely identified with each. It emphasizes the role of subjective storytelling in historical narrative and challenges the notion of history as a linear sequence of interconnected historical events. The existence of the past itself in Winterson’s fiction is not rejected, but the process of making events out of historical “facts” is put under serious consideration; since the conventions of the two heterogeneous genres – fiction and history – are played off against each other, there is no simple mixing leading to their fusion. In other words, history is more often seen as a “human construct” [7, p. 16], which has always been rewritten, while its unity with the self-conscious fiction gives the grounds for its rethinking and reworking. “Sexing the Cherry” reveals its incredulity towards grand totalizing “metanarratives” [8, p. 26] and thus displays Winterson’s assumption that “history is a ball of strings full of knots” [12, p. 91]; it is an exemplary postmodern text which is made up of contradictory and partial individual stories which prevent the possibility of their unitary interpretation. According to P. Brooker, this narrative mode “neither repudiates nor simply ironizes the past; nor does it merely reproduce the past as nostalgia”; moreover, its use of paradox signals a “critical distance within this world of representations, prompting questions not about “the” truth, but “whose” truth “prevails” [4, p. 229].

The main events depicted in the fiction set in one of the most dramatic periods in English history – the Civil War and Interregnum – are presented from the two marginal heroes’ minoritarian perspectives which reveal their “otherness” and “difference” as well as their total deviation from the traditionally accepted social and cultural norms. “Sexing the Cherry” can be said to intertwine two “petite histories”, if to borrow J.-F. Lyotard’s term, or two parallel mini-stories of the deliberately ex-centric witnesses to the turbulent moments in English history who promote the idea that there is falseness per se, just others’ truth(s). These considerably local in their influence and effect apocryphal histories challenge an ideologically laden discourse and are engaged in the ironic rethinking of history. One belongs to a huge giantess nicknamed the Dog Woman who lives by the bank of “the stinking Thames” [13, p. 11] and earns an eccentric living by arranging fights and races for the boar-hounds she breeds, while the other is attributed to her foundling son Jordan who undertakes endless quests in restless search of romantic love; the latter’s journeys are “not linear, [but are] always back and forth, denying the calendar, the wrinkles and lines of the body” [13, p. 80]. Each protagonist’s narrative is introduced by the drawing of a fruity symbol: a banana for the phallic Dog Woman, who due to her enormous size, plays the function of the “castrating mother of primitive male fears” [5, p. 73], and a pine-apple for the botanical explorer Jordan, who like Swift’s Gulliver, was once carried up into the air by the gigantic birds and “flown over the city and out to sea” [13, p. 33]. Rather than present a dramatic story set at a time of upheaval in the 17^th century English history and depict its traumatic events – the Puritan Commonwealth and Charles I’s trial and execution – from the “objective” point of view, Winterson’s metafiction contains the two little protagonists’ alternative narrations, which embrace either their notorious love affairs or imaginary journeys to the unknown magical lands that cannot be detected on any detailed geographical maps. The Dog Woman’s narrative, which keeps some realistic details of the fall of the Charles I’s reign and the glorious restoration of the monarchy, forms the fiction’s historical mode, while Jordan’s story, which narrates his picaresque travels across time zones, provides the magical recount of his strikingly unrealistic adventures in imagined lands, though it recombines the historical discourse as well due to his collaboration with the real historical figure – John Tradescant the Younger, a famous gardener to the king. These minor histories of the two little people who develop two central topoi in the text – the unrequited love and the archetypal quest – emphasize M. Foucault’s notion of history as “counter-memory”, which is defined by Brenda K. Marshall “as the process of reading past against the grain” [9, p. 150] when an active rather than a passive, or “viewing role” [9, p. 150] in its interpretation takes place.  

History, being interpreted as a construct, is accessible by means of parody, as L. Hutcheon authoritatively claims. In Winterson’s fiction, parody uses textual indeterminacy, and, in so doing, breaks genre frames that have become both fixed and inauthentic, and provides the starting point for all sorts of narrative creation; by enacting both instability and continuity, it promotes a renewal of the previously adopted versions of historical events so that the fragmented remains of the reflected past tend to embrace only tiny details from Christopher Columbus’s, Lord Nelson’s and Francis Drake’s apocryphal lives which are given the different, unrecognizable and unexpected shape and meaning. The real historical events seen only from the fabulous Gothic figure’s minoritarian perspective are valued as “fabricated”, and, as a consequence, lose their connections with their original referents, while the real historical figures portrayed in Jordan’s narration are exposed as “invented”; being given a comic depiction they escape from their established identities and turn into provocative “pop-images”.  The foregrounding of the role of details mainly in historical figures’ private lives as well as refocusing of World History from the perspective of the minor and de-centered individuals reminds us of the New Historicists’ assertion that history has always been (re)-written by the dominant culture on top of the half-forgotten versions of unwritten histories of peripheral cultures it defeated.

Winterson’s fiction boasts an exquisite blend of the Gothic farce discourse with fragments of magical incursion. The employment of magic in her fiction is restricted to two main forms: magical objects and magical attributes. The former includes the magical house that is all ceilings and no floors, but bottomless pits from whence a fearful crunching of crocodiles can be constantly heard; “words of passion” seen flying literally across the sky in the shape of doves, and the magical mops brushing away swear-words, which rising up, from a thick cloud over the uncanny city of words, belong to the same group of magical elements. Some characters like Fortunata possess magical attributes; being unaffected by the laws of gravity, she flies like a bird and climbs down her window on a thin rope, which she skillfully cuts and re-knots while descending a number of times. However, most significant magical attributes belong to the numerous magical figures who constitute the fiction’s magical topography, and, though they do not produce the traditional subliminal effect, they evince colorful examples of the carnivalesque and the burlesque in Winterson’s fiction. Mermaids do not act as dangerous seductresses, but are depicted as harmless creatures who are fond of eating herrings instead, while spotted toads, which tend to sing funny madrigals, seem to lack their stereotypical associations with making witchcraft. Not only do their pluralized points of view and intertwining narrative voices reproduce the fragmentation of the self and its transformation through the magical discourse, but also they are intended to blur the distinction between the historical fact and fiction. In other words, Winterson introduces the magical mode of the narrative as a subversive space of unconscious drive to dislocate the historical discourse seen through kaleidoscopically changing magical lenses in her fiction. The use of the giantess, the Dog Woman, who plays the key role in the Gothic farce discourse, although her literary functions are not only truly Rabelaisian, works to destroy rationalistic conceptions of reality as well while challenging unitary ways of seeing and interpreting the historical reality. Moreover, by adopting Gothic and magical figures who create an oppositional imaginary area outside the rational discourse of historical reality, Winterson’s fiction incorporates alternative interpretations of fluid gender identities and different perceptions of sexuality, for the main magical figures in her fiction – the mermaids and the toads – are freaks, or amphibious creatures whose sexually ambiguous bodies do not support the rigid oppositions of masculine and feminine because they belong both to water and land. The Dog Woman’s body is of a freakish nature as well, though its “otherness” is of a different kind; her unnatural birth is linked to the technique of grafting the cherry, which the Church condemns as unnatural practice attributed to botanists who produce exotic hybrids, and, thus are seen as usurpers of the power of God.

The Dog Woman, who like the awe-inspiring ogres in fairy-tales, has murdered thousands of men, including her own father, is given a parodic portrayal in Winterson’s fiction; it presents her as an alien monster who refers to her own huge body proudly as “the mountain of flesh” [13, p. 14]. Her repellent face with a flat nose, a few broken black teeth and skin covered with pockmarks as big as caves where fleas live, parodies Milton’s Sin with Hell Hounds, and conforms to Bakhtin’s description of the grotesque body that is typical of the carnivalesque imagery. As the monstrous figures of pregnant hags suggest, she is strongly associated with the female animals or objects which “combine senile, decaying, degradation and deformed flesh with the flesh of new life” [3, p. 26]. According to Bakhtin, the discourse of the carnivalesque is primarily connected with the multivalent spectacle in which all conventional rules are inverted or neglected, the macabre, sacrilegious and ghoulish; it emphasizes on the life of the belly and reproductive organs, bawdy language, the fusing of the high courteous culture with the profane, eccentric behavior, all types of excessiveness, and the grotesque. Moreover, the Dog Woman, who combines both masculine and feminine attributes, represents a “grotesque hybrid challenging the accepted parameters of “normal” womanhood while, in this case, simultaneously plying with the pejorative sexual connotations of her name” [2, p. 18], as L. Armitt says. The grotesque body of the fabulous Gothic giantess, whose very name suggests a “mongrelized identity” [2, p. 18], incorporates the misogynist features of mythical female hybrids such as sirens, harpies and sphinxes; the latter’s hybridized monstrosity being located in the lower half of their hideous bodies is physically dangerous to men as Freud’s vagina dentata. The Dog Woman’s lower half thus symbolizes due to its excessive femaleness and ability to swallow men with her vagina the latter’s primitive fears of female dangerous sexuality and power. This aspect of the female grotesque is portrayed in a parodic mode, especially when the Dog Woman is asked to perform fellatio on a stranger in the street and interprets the man’s request literally: “Put it in your mouth”, he said. “Yes, as you would a delicious thing to eat”. – “I like to broaden my mind when I can and I did as he suggested, swallowing it up entirely and biting it off with a snap” [13, p. 41]. This example, as many others, show that Winterson does not merely revive the female grotesque as the exemplar of Bakhtinian abjection, but rather transforms it into the image of female power by exaggerating Gothic clichés to the limit of grotesqueness. Winterson parodies the Dog Woman’s colossal inability to understand the metaphors of patriarchy, and, in so doing, she challenges the heterosexual male system building and phallocentric social and cultural tradition. In addition, since the Dog Woman is an alarming giantess, her male partners’ influence on her is too insignificant to have any disruptive effect, and thus is seen as a ridiculing of phallic power in relation to the feminine.

At the same time, the Dog Woman breaks traditional norms of female sexuality by demonstrating “the all devouring and deadly facet of her Mother-earth personality” [10, p. 82] in the episode when she appears to be a real monster, having killed two men with an axe; the scene itself “parodies the orgies of the Marquis de Sade’s libertines” [10, p. 82], as S. Onega remarks. Her representation reconfigures female hideousness as subversive power, while her unnatural birth (she was released by a woman from a bottle like a genie) links her to the subversive potential of the cyborgs who, being grafted creatures, bear the burdens of sexual mutability as well. The Dog Woman is unquestinably female by sex, but is not feminine by gender, since her elephantine size confounds men who cannot impregnate her, and thus her carnivalesque performance of traditional feminine traits serves to destabilize them as “natural” to women. If to judge from her physical appearance and manlike habits, the Dog Woman can be more properly regarded as lesbian then, since she combines both masculine and feminine attributes that refuse any conventional categorization, which brings to mind M. Wittig’s claim that “lesbian is the only concept […] which is beyond the categories of sex […], because the designated subject (lesbian) is not a woman, either economically, or politically, or ideologically” [14, p. 20]. Having torn 2, 000 teeth from the skulls of the Puritan men she has killed, the Dog Woman performs a symbolic act, and, in so doing, she destroys the paternal substitutes of evil in the villainous figures of the Father, the usurper of supreme social position, power and orders of religion, and thus asserts the supremacy of the lesbian in herself.  

Her foundling son Jordan acknowledges his bodily limitations, and imagines the possibility of applying the new technique of grafting for himself to “become someone else in time”, to be “grafted on to something better and stronger” [13, p. 80]. Gender for him is also a kind of drag, an act of performance, a carnivalesque imitation of the ideal through “the gesture, the move and the gait” [5, p. 134]. He finds relief from the oppressive binaries in perennial cross-dressing – “I have met a number of people who anxious to be free of the burdens of gender, have dressed themselves as women and women as men” [13, p. 31], and like his mother he represents a conscious transgression of normative gender roles as well, though in his case, a deliberate deviation from the traditionally accepted norms becomes a strategy to attain more freedom both in movement and thought. Only when he assumes a female disguise to pass unrecognized, the women in the brothel allow him to stay with them and continue his search for the dancer; his disguise allows him to learn that women can communicate in their own language, which is not dependent on the gendered language constructions created by men. Not only does his transgender experience got in the brothel lead him to the discovery of the gendered language that consists mostly of code-word expressions and signs, but also his collaboration with the famous botanist makes him acknowledge the “queer” theory of species reproduction based on the horticultural concept of “grafting” which is applied to the growing plants of female sex. As far as Jordan not only succeeds in grafting, but he also seeks to reproduce it in himself, his endless quest for Fortunata might be read as a search for the feminine self in himself.

The magic fairy-tale that Winterson incorporates in her fiction “report(s) from imaginary territory – a magical elsewhere of possibility” [11, p. xxii], and “evoke(s) every kind of violence, injustice, and mischance” [11, p. xxiii] to challenge patriarchy and to reveal the performative nature of gender. She rewrites the Grimm brothers’ fairy-tale about twelve dancing princesses by providing her own strikingly feminist “and they lived happily ever after” ending to emphasize the difference with the canonical version which presents women as victims of despotic excess. Unlike the authentic patriarchal convention dictates, the princesses’ married lives are depicted as utterly frustrating, with the sole exception of the ones whose husbands turned out to be either a mermaid or a woman, though the latter rendering of the story proves that the one’s conjugal preference might be a matter of a slim chance. Winterson’s deeply ironical revision of the fairy-tale shows that the twelve dancing princesses can liberate themselves from their husbands’ control only by setting up home together in a female community instead of living happily ever after in traditional marital bliss. By offering a dramatic twist to the original – the ninth princess, being kept chained like a falcon tears her husband’s liver from his body in the act of revenge – she “highlights the violence that often underlies traditional fairy-tales” [1, p. 69], and de-familiarizes their conventional ideology by drawing attention to oppressive messages to young women who are demanded obedience in accordance with the patriarchal dictates which are included in their endings. On the contrary, Fortunata’s fabulous bird-like flight on her wedding day represents freedom from the patriarchal constraints of society, and the physical laws of gravity are not the obstacles that can prevent her miraculous escape.

If in this view, Winterson offers a variety of oppositional narrative modes to destroy the distinction between the officially accepted and the “other”; by textualizing partial individual stories and minor perspectives that undermine unitary ways of seeing and interpreting, she challenges phallic monosexuality and reveals the performative nature of gender, while by using the extravagant collage of the stock magical images, she parodies both Gothic forms and the horrors associated primarily with the tabooed sexual experience and fluid gender identities.

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