Texte remanié de: Thèse de doctorat--Littérature anglaise--Metz, 2003. / Bibliogr. p. 317-331. Index.

Texte remanié de: Proefschrift : Letteren--Leiden, Pays-Bas--Universiteit Leiden, 2004. / Bibliogr. p. 219-233.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Florida State University, 2006. / Advisor: William J. Cloonan, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Interdisciplinary Program in the Humanities. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed June 7, 2006). Document formatted into pages; contains vi, 136 pages. Includes bibliographical references.

Jeanette Winterson’s novel Written on the Body asks what it means to express love not through language but through the body, where it is felt, challenging the boundaries placed between body and language. Using Winterson’s novel and Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse as points of inquiry, this thesis examines conceptions of love based on heteronormative and romanticized visions of present and healthy bodies. This thesis asks how a body that is diseased and dying can express an emotion that is predicated on these very notions of presence, absence, and health. The narrator of the novel sees love as a scripted story that, once adhered to, determines the (successful) experience of love. Louise’s cancer threatens these scripts of love, as it destroys the narrator’s conception of both love and Louise. Despite the fact that Louise is absent and dying, the narrator begins to write a new story that will allow him/her to have a perfect relationship with Louise, so that s/he can reconcile the contradictions of the scripts that the relationship exposed. Using Slavoj Zizek’s “Melancholy and the Act” and Richard Stamelman’s Lost Beyond Telling as frameworks of mourning and melancholy, the narrator’s melancholy over a lost presence thus emerges as a way that allows him/her to create a perfect love story. To make Louise appear perfect in this perfect love story, the narrator manipulates the language of disease that reconstructs Louise's physical absence as a textual presence. The discourse surrounding Louise thus begins to operate out of the desire to compensate and supplement what is missing; in Louise's case, the narrator is supplementing her with a "normal," healthy body. Looking in the shadows of the narrator’s memories, Written on the Body emerges as not only an account of the narrator’s love story, but also an account of Louise’s story, a story of a body that refuses to be written on and demands to be heard. Winterson demonstrates how the body is always in the process of creating knowledge and meaning that can only be obtained by questioning what is normal, both for the body and for the scripts we all adhere to.

As many theorists have pointed out, queer history is often erased within traditional, heteronormative historiography. Consequently, historians cannot recount the gay and lesbian past by conventional techniques of evidence and documentation. Instead they recuperate and reinvent queer history using strategies normally associated with the writing of fiction. This thesis examines three works of late twentieth century lesbian historical fiction that rewrite the past in order to render visible queer intimacy, sexuality, and desire. Jeanette Winterson's The Passion (1987), Sarah Waters' Tipping the Velvet (1998), and Helen Humphreys' Leaving Earth (1997) employ spectacularly visible lesbian heroines who symbolically reverse lesbian invisibility in mainstream historical narratives by displaying themselves as public figures or stage performers. There are ongoing debates in contemporary queer theory and historiography about the extent to which it is politically useful to privilege highly visible individuals when recovering the marginalized gay and lesbian past. Winterson's, Waters', and Humphreys' novels enact this debate, and exemplify a trend in contemporary lesbian historical fiction in which lesbian heroines are empowered by their ability to control their own visibility and to ensure the perpetuation of their history.

This thesis investigates acts of ‘re-telling’ in four selected novels by Jeanette Winterson and Alan Warner.Re-telling, as I have defined it, refers to the re-imagining and re-writing of existing narratives from mythology, fairy tale, and folktale, as well as the re-visioning of scientific discourses and historiography. I argue that this re-telling is representative of a contemporary cultural phenomenon, and is evidence of a postmodern genre that some literary theorists have termed re-visionary fiction. Despite the prevalent re-telling of canonical stories throughout literary history, there is much evidence for the emergence of a specifically contemporary trend of re-visionary literature. Part One of this thesis comprises two chapters which deal with Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry (1989) and Weight (2005) respectively. In these chapters, I argue that, although the feminist and historiographic elements of her work are significant, there exist further motivations for Winterson’s acts of re-telling in both Sexing the Cherry and Weight. In Chapter One, I analyse Winterson’s subversion and re-imagining of historiography, as well as her re-telling of fairy tale, in Sexing the Cherry. Chapter Two provides a discussion of Winterson’s re-telling of the myth of Atlas from Greek mythology, in which she draws on the discourses of science, technology, and autobiography, in Weight. Part Two focuses on Warner’s first two novels, Morvern Callar (1995) and These Demented Lands (1997). In both novels, Warner re-imagines aspects of Christian, Celtic and pagan mythology in order to debunk the validity of biblical archetypes and narratives in a contemporary working-class setting, as well as to endow his protagonist with goddess-like or mythical sensibilities. Chapter Three deals predominantly with Warner’s use of language, which I argue is central to his blending of mythological and contemporary content, while Chapter Four analyses his use of myth in these two novels. This thesis argues that while both Winterson and Warner share many of the aims associated with contemporary re-visionary fiction, their novels also exceed the boundaries of the genre in various ways. Winterson and Warner may, therefore, represent a new class of re-visionary writers, whose aim is not solely to subvert the pre-text but to draw on its generic discourses and thematic conventions in order to demonstrate the generic and discursive possibilities inherent in the act of re-telling.

This thesis investigates the subversion of Biblical discourse in Jeanette Winterson’s first two novels, Oranges are Not the Only Fruit and Boating for Beginners. By rewriting Biblical stories Winterson challenges traditional Western religious discourses and their rules for heteronormative social and sexual behaviours and desires. Winterson’s texts respond to the patriarchal nature of socially pervasive texts, such as the Bible, by encouraging her readers to regard these texts with suspicion, thus highlighting what can be seen as a ‘postmodern concern’ with the notion of ‘truth’. Chapter One of this thesis comprises a discussion of Biblical boundaries. These boundaries, I argue, are a process of historical oppression which serves to subjugate and control women, a practice inherent in the Bible and modern society. The Biblical boundaries within which women are expected to live, are carefully portrayed in Oranges and then comically and blasphemously mocked in Boating. Chapter One also argues that Winterson’s sexuality plays an important role in the understanding of her texts, despite her desire for her sexuality to remain ‘outside’ her writing. Chapter Two of this thesis, examines the mix of fact and fiction in Oranges, in order to create a new genre: fictional memoir. The chapter introduces the concept of the ‘autobiographical pact’ and the textual agreement which Winterson creates with her readers. In this chapter, I examine Winterson’s powerful subversion of Biblical discourse, through her narration of Jeanette’s ‘coming out’ within a Biblical framework. Chapter Three of this thesis examines Winterson’s second book, Boating, and the serious elements of this comic book. This chapter studies the various postmodern narrative techniques used in Boating in order to subvert Biblical and historical discourse. Chapter Three highlights Winterson’s postmodern concern with the construction of history as ‘truth’. Finally, Chapter Four compares Oranges and Boating, showing the texts as differing, yet equally relevant textual counterparts. This chapter examines the anti-feminine characters in both texts and Winterson’s ability to align her reader with a feminist or lesbian viewpoint. This thesis argues that Winterson’s first two texts deliberately challenge Biblical discourse in favour of a postmodern feminist viewpoint.

The phrase “glimpsing the balance between earth and sky” in the thesis title is taken from Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. In this novel, the central character Jeanette believes she has glimpsed the possibility that human relationships can find their mirror in the relationship with God, as she understands the divine Other. This glimpse has set her wandering, trying to find such a balance. This examination of four selected novels by Jeanette Winterson and John Irving shows that for Irving, “glimpsing the balance” means in part, giving voice to a strongly “Christian” view of humankind and human nature but in an age where the prevailing intellectual worldview is strongly sceptical of any Grand Narrative. The “voice” expressed in Irving’s work has to be situated, like Winterson’s, as one among many possibilities. Irving’s voice is itself masked as different, other/Other, freakish, in the narrative worlds he creates. Through his use of grotesque comedy as a vehicle for deeper philosophical concerns, Irving asks us: What after all in the postmodern world is the main show? This thesis argues that if Winterson and Irving are testing or re-presenting a Christian worldview in a postmodern context, than they are asking whether Christianity is capable of assimilating and rising above the worst circumstances the world, writer, and life can throw at it. In Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Winterson tells a story of “forbidden love”, posed as a direct challenge to the prevailing way of knowing in her character’s community. In Gut Symmetries, she expands this challenge by employing the insights of quantum physics to make sense of the complexities raised by a triangular love relationship. Irving offers the story of Owen in A Prayer for Owen Meany as the kind of story which might possibly make a believer out of him; in short, that he would have to be a witness to some kind of miracle, something utterly inexplicable. In A Son of the Circus Irving narrates the quest for identity undertaken by an Indian doctor who is in every way a Displaced Person – the condition, he implies, of anyone who purports to find their piece of the truth. The theoretical concerns of the postmodern project are examined through Lawrence Cahoone’s argument that postmodern writing offers criticism of: presence, origin, unity and transcendence through an analytical strategy of constitutive otherness. In each of their texts, Irving and Winterson are seen to use these four critical elements and to offer a postmodern strategy of re-presenting meaning through “constitutive otherness”. Both writers also employ a strategy of historiographic metafiction (as defined by Linda Hutcheon) as a means of constructing and re-presenting their narrated stories. Postmodern paradox is compatible with what could be called a Christian plan for living, if the latter is in turn given an appropriate 1990s interpretation. The selected novels by Winterson and Irving are offered as contemporary evidence for this view. This thesis argues that the connection between postmodernism and other worldviews, particularly Christianity, is found in both projects’ process of making meanings through encounters with an other/Other.

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