Jeanette Winterson: Written on the Body (1992)

Abstract

“Everything I have written is a quest—a quest for self,” Winterson wrote in the program notes to her dramatization of The PowerBook in 2002 (“Experiment!” 7). Every novelist considered in this book can be said to be in quest of one form of identity or another—an identity already constructed in part by the past and its recreation in the present, an identity that attaches itself to notions of nationhood, ethnicity or culture, or—as in this section—an identity determined by gender, sexual orientation, or social class. Yet gender, sexual orientation, and class are themselves partly determined by national constructions of or modifications to them. All of Winterson’s nine novels to date equate the quest for self with self-narration. The self is constantly being reinvented by narrative means in her fiction. In her first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985) when the young narrator (a preacher) is forbidden to preach the Word by the church elders she makes up her own words in the form the novel takes. In her ninth novel, Lighthousekeeping (2004) one of the inter-chapters reveals the continuity of this identification of subjectivity with narrativity:

Tell me a story, Pew

What story, child?

One that begins again.

That’s the story of life.

But is it the story of my life?

Only if you tell it. (109)