Jeanette Winterson’s discourse of love : an investigation of alterity in love in written on the body, the passion and sexing the cherry

• Main Author: Yeo, Tiffany Cher Ying
• Other Authors: School of Humanities and Social Sciences
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2014
• Subjects: DRNTU::Humanities
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/59299
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

This paper seeks to evaluate the alterity in love within the postmodern fiction of Jeanette Winterson—Written on the Body, The Passion and Sexing the Cherry. The various sections of this paper will first surface the ways in which the notion of love functions as a discourse in Winterson’s fiction with her employment of postmodern fiction writing techniques. I will also discuss how desire is precisely “both silent and garrulous” (Belsey 685) within the texts. One prominent feature of Winterson’s writing is the insertion of the element of fantasy. Christy Burns concedes that her fantastic writing “throw[s] itself into the place of possibility” which is never before found in “a literature of realism” (Burns 302). This “place of possibility” (302) henceforth enables more radical adoptions of writing techniques including the reappropriation of traditional metanarratives such as fantasy and science. In reappropriating them for her novels, Winterson investigates ways in which the loving subjects attempt valiantly but eventually still fail to love selflessly in the representation of love. Ultimately, if desire necessitates expression, this paper thus seeks to underscore the impossibility of maintaining alterity in love especially through the expression of desire by the use of theories from Luce Irigaray and Jean-Luc Marion. Through the evaluation of language use, Winterson’s (loving) protagonists prove that notwithstanding the best endeavour (and struggle) to love without objectifying their beloveds, human love is always selfish and possessive. Consequently, she hints that the only person that humans can love ideally is the invisible God whom we cannot see or fully know to project our desires upon.