SEXUALITY AND GENDER

IN JEANETTE WINTERSONS TWO NOVELS:

ORANGES ARE NOT THE ONLY FRUIT
AND WRITTEN ON THE BODY





A THESIS SUBMITTED TO
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES
OF
MIDDLE EAST TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY


BY


ZGE YAKUT






IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS
FOR
THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS
IN
THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LITERATURE






FEBRUARY 2011













Approval of the Graduate School of Social Sciences.


________________________
Prof. Dr. Meliha Altunk
Director


I certify that this thesis satisfies all the requirements as a thesis for the degree of
Master of Arts.


_________________________
Prof. Dr. Wolf Knig
Head of Department


This is to certify that we have read this thesis and that in our opinion it is fully
adequate, in scope and quality, as a thesis and for the degree of Master of Arts.


_________________________
Assist. Prof. Dr. Nurten Birlik
Supervisor




Examining Committee Members


Assoc. Prof. Dr. nal Norman (METU, FLE) _________________


Assist. Prof. Dr. Nurten Birlik (METU, FLE) _________________


Dr. Sema Takn (BILKENT U., ELIT) _________________


iii































I hereby declare that all information in this document has been obtained and
presented in accordance with academic rules and ethical conduct. I also declare
that, as required by these rules and conduct, I have fully cited and referenced all
material and results that are not original to this work.


Name, Last name : zge YAKUT

Signature :








iv

ABSTRACT

SEXUALITY AND GENDER
IN JEANETTE WINTERSONS TWO NOVELS:
ORANGES ARE NOT THE ONLY FRUIT
AND WRITTEN ON THE BODY



Yakut, zge
M.A., Program in English Literature
Supervisor: Assist. Prof. Dr. Nurten Birlik

February 2011, 135 pages


This thesis aims to explore the categories of sexuality and gender through an analysis
of Jeanette Wintersons well-known novels, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and
Written on the body, against the background of Butlers concept of performativity
and Cixouss criture feminine. By underlining the constructedness of these
categories and questioning the boundaries of patriarchal concepts and transgressing
them, Winterson deconstructs the binary oppositions created by phallocentric
discourse and problematizes the verdict that sexuality is inborn. Instead of this
ingrained notion, she asserts that gender and sexual identities are culturally and
discursively constructed by the dominant discourse. Although the dominant discourse
favors heterosexuality over homosexuality and degrades sexuality into a binary frame
of oppositions such as masculinity/ feminity and male/female, Winterson, in her
novels, seeks an alternative to escape this ideological binarism and achieves to
subvert the binary oppositions by highlighting the fluidity of sexuality and gender,
and by creating amorphous characters like the ungendered narrator in Written on the
v
body or by bestowing on them bisexuality or homosexuality as in Oranges Are Not
the Only Fruit. Hence, the main argument of this thesis will be to display
Wintersons deconstruction and dissolution of the patriarchal categories in her novels
and to emphasize her escape from the binary charade, in a fictional universe, with
references to Butlerian performativity and Cixousian criture feminine.

Key Words: Sex, Sexuality, Gender, Performativity, criture feminine


































vi

Z

JEANETTE WINTERSONIN
ORANGES ARE NOT THE ONLY FRUIT
VE WRITTEN ON THE BODY
ADLI K ROMANINDAK
TOPLUMSAL CNSYET VE CNSEL KMLK


Yakut, zge
Yksek Lisans, ngiliz Edebiyat Program
Tez Yneticisi: Yrd. Do. Dr. Nurten Birlik

ubat 2011, 135 sayfa





Bu alma Jeanette Wintersonn tannm romanlar Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
ve Written on the bodydaki cinsellik ve toplumsal cinsiyet kategorilerinin Butlern
edimsellik (performativite) ve Cixousun criture feminine kuramna dayandrlarak
incelemesini amalamaktadr. Winterson bu kategorilerin kurgusallklarn
vurgulayarak ve ataerkil kavramlarn snrlarn sorgulayp bunlar aarak, fallik
sylem tarafndan yaratlan ikili ztlklara yapbozum yntemiyle bakar ve cinsel
kimliin doutan geldii hkmn sorunsallatrr. Bu yerlemi fikrin yerine,
Winterson toplumsal cinsiyetin ve cinsel kimliin baskn sylem tarafndan kltrel
ve tarihsel olarak ina edildiini ne srer. Baskn sylemin heterosekseli
ecinselden stn tutmasna ve cinsellii erillik/diillik ve eril/diil gibi ikili sisteme
indirgemesine karn, Winterson, romanlarnda, bu ideolojik ikililikten kamak iin
bir alternatif arar. Cinsel kimliin ve toplumsal cinsiyetin akkanln ne kararak
ve Written on the bodydeki toplumsal cinsiyetsiz anlatc gibi biimlenmemi
vii
kahramanlar kurgulayarak ya da Oranges Are Not the Only Fruittaki kahramanlar
biseksel ve ecinsel olarak kurgulayarak ikili kartlklar altst etmeyi baarr. Bu
nedenle, bu almann amac Wintersonn romanlarnda ataerkil kategorilerin
yapbozumunu ve zlmesini gstermek ve Butlern edimsellik (performativite) ve
Cixousun criture feminine kuramlar arka plannda Wintersonn ikili tuzaktan
kamak iin kulland yaznsal yntemleri irdelemektir.


Anahtar Kelimeler: Cinsiyet, Cinsel Kimlik, Toplumsal Cinsiyet, Edimsellik
(Performativite), criture feminine




















viii









To Tolga
















ix

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to express my deepest gratitude to my supervisor, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Nurten
Birlik for her guidance, encouragement and support throughout this study. It has been
a pleasure to write this thesis under her supervision.

I am grateful to Assoc. Prof. Dr. nal Norman and Dr. Sema Takn for their
invaluable comments and suggestions.

I also feel indebted to my father Mehmet Yakut, my mother Fidan Yakut, my sister
Kadriye Yakut and my brother zgr Yakut for their patience and endless support
throughout this process. I would like to express my gratitude to Tolga Ttncolu,
too; without his ongoing support and everlasting faith in me, I would not have
completed this tedious process. Finally, I would like to thank my beloved friends, for
smoothing this arduous path for me.














x

TABLE OF CONTENTS


PLAGIARISM ....iii
ABSTRACT ....iv
Z ....vi
DEDICATION ...........vii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ....ix
TABLE OF CONTENTS .....x
LIST OF FIGURES ....xii
CHAPTER
1. INTRODUCTION.1

1.1. Review of literature ...2
1.2. Genealogy of queer theory.......24
1.3. Aim of the study ..35

2. BUTLERIAN PERFORMATIVITY IN ORANGES ARE NOT THE ONLY FRUIT
2.1. Devouring Mother/ Absent Father ..42
2.2. Judith Beheading Holophernes ................56
2.2.1. Freud and Gender Identifications....56
2.2.2. Lacan and Gender Identifications ...60
2.3. Jeanettes eating the Forbidden Fruit and falling from grace...63
2.4. The Fairytales/ The Bible: Dissolution of binaries and subversion of
patriarchal discourse.........75

3. CIXOUSIAN CRITURE FEMININE IN WRITTEN ON THE BODY
3.1. Undisclosed Narrator ....88
3.1.1. Undisclosed Name ....88
xi
3.1.2. Undisclosed Gender .....91
3.2. The re-appropriation of the body as a written text ......101
3.2.1. What is written on the body? ..105
3.3. Poetic language: Subversion of Realistic scope.............116
3.4. Blissful Text ..120

4. CONCLUSION.........124
WORKS CITED ...............130




















xii
LIST OF FIGURES


FIGURES

Figure 1 .. 24-5
Figure 2 ..... 26
1



CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION


There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender.

~Judith Butler


Sexual difference is probably the issue in our time which
could be our salvation if we thought it through.

~Luce Irigaray


Censor the body, and you censor breath and speech at the
same time. Write yourself. Your body must be heard.

~Hlne Cixous





What are little boys made of?
Frogs and snails and puppy dog tails.
Thats what little boys are made of.

What are little girls made of?
Sugar and spice and all thats nice.
Thats what little girls are made of. (Letherby 4)



The disposition of gender and sexuality has disquieted and distracted the minds of
human beings from the very beginning of antiquity as dominant discourses have
been struggling endlessly to stabilize this slippery territory and to freeze the fluid
nature of these constructed categories by means of power relations, preponderant
ideologies, religious dogmas, familial and cultural obligations. The above given
rhyme is an illustration of mans desire to produce merely a dichotomous notion
2
of gender and sexuality in every walk of daily life. In the quest for construing
human gender and sexuality, some questions have been raised to clarify the
haziness and indefiniteness of those terms, such as: Does gender rank after sex? Is
gender a construction evolving throughout centuries? Is sexuality congenital or
constructed? Those questions paved the way for contrasting views on gender and
sexuality like the essentialist view and the constructivist view.

1.1. Review of Literature
The essentialist view argues that sexuality is congenital and natural, and appeals
to unchanging universal characteristic, an essence. This essence is thought to be
outside of or prior to social and historical factors (McLaren 21). For the
essentialists, the body is an absolute and abiding space devoid of historical and
social effects. Diana Fuss points out that for those who advocate the essentialist
point of view, the body occupies a pure, pre-social, pre-discursive space. The
body is real, accessible and transparent; its always there and directly
interpretable through the senses (qtd. in McLaren 22). However, the
constructivist view moves beyond the essentialist perspective as it underlines the
constructedness of all hierarchies and categories since it emphasizes that all
labels and categories in society and the meaning attached to them are socially
defined (Dillon 363). Therefore, the supporters of this view assert that
homosexuality as well as heterosexuality and all the other categorical terms are
human constructs, and because of the fact that they are created by human beings,
there is no absolute and natural sexuality, but there are sexualities that vary from
one culture to another.
3

By adopting a word, with a previously offensive connotation, queer as its title,
queer theory subverts the ideology of heteronormativity, and the adoption of the
inclusive moniker queer reflects the rejection of taxonomic sexual categories
that initially had been established through sexological discourse in the late 1800s
and early 1900s (Voss 184). Queer theory, thus, renounces to define and
demarcate the spaces of gender, sex and sexuality as it is a field that refuses to be
disciplined (Sullivan v). Although the field of queer theory remains slippery as it
cannot be easily characterized, there has been an ongoing effort to pin down the
inner dynamics of this movement and the logic behind it. Davidoff attempts to
conceive the term and the queer writing by proffering that queer theory refers to
the writing that has taken sexuality as its subject and has specifically addressed to
the ways in which lesbians, gays, and transsexuals raise questions about
conventional understandings of sex and the sexes, and perforce gender (qtd. in
Turner 3).

Along with the dominant voices, marginalized voices that have been cast off and
have not been given voice are, too, heard and welcomed in the unformed,
inchoate, provisional character of the field (Turner 9). It is a territory in which all
categories, boundaries, hierarchies and binaries are dissolved, and sexual
polarities and diversities are cherished and celebrated beyond the dichotomous,
bi-polar and definitive arrangement of sexuality. Rather than considering
ingrained categories and identities immutable and the basis of truth, queer theory
dwells on the process in which Western binary couplings are produced; because
4
the binaries are revealed to be cultural constructions or ideological fictions, the
reality of sexed bodies and gender and sexual identities are fraught with
incoherence and instability (Valocchi 753). Thereby, queer theory defies the
supposition that sexual attitudes and practices or gender roles [are] natural and
unchanging (Wiesner-Hanks 7).

Regarding queer theorys repudiation of any kind of categorizations and
demarcations, it might be claimed that the field is indebted to Poststructuralism,
rooted in the philosophy of French thinkers like Michel Foucault and Jacques
Derrida. Both Foucault and Derrida problematize the essentialist and foundational
Cartesian cogito descending from Descartess assertion that the National
independent subject is the ground of both ontology (being) and epistemology
(theories of knowledge) (Namaste 195). Western epistemology rests upon the
Cartesian duality taking individuals as the basis of truth and reality. However,
Poststructuralism challenges the postulate of taking subjects as a reference point
for external reality and attaining a stable and unified self. Poststructuralism
evinces that there is no such thing as an immutable self/subject since subjects are
not autonomous beings insulated from the social network surrounding them and
capable of arranging their lives or shaping themselves. In contrast, they are caught
up in a social network in which social institutions, traditional pistemes, grand
narratives, dominant discourse and powerful political mechanisms such as
language, gender and identity constitute them. Therefore, the subject is not
something prior to politics or social structures but is precisely constituted in and
through specific social, political arrangements (Namaste 195).
5

In The History of Sexuality, Foucault traces the configuration of sexuality in
different centuries and dissolves the conjecture that Western society has always
repressed sexuality and restrained the mention of it. He argues that since the
seventeenth century, there has been dissemination and accumulation of discourses
on sex, ultimately engendering discrepant sexual minorities and categories. In his
retrospective inquiry, Foucault deciphers the common belief that prude Victorian
society abstained from talking about sex and struggled to silence it by means of
creating a taboo out of it. Yet, Foucault elicits the truth behind the working
mechanisms of that time, shatters this misconception and eventually alleges that
modern societies do not restrict and repress sexuality. Contrary to the widely held
belief, they mention sexuality bluntly. By this way, in the discourse that they have
generated, they both reflect and treat sexuality as a secret and decipher its
construction process. What one comes across upon analyzing previous centuries is
the proliferation of discourses and devices around sex. Rather than censoring the
content and demanding secrecy concerning sex, there has been an instigation to
make people talk about sex more and more, to redouble the mention of it in
everyday life and in social institutions like medicine, psychiatry, justice,
pedagogy and education, and to enhance the strength and effectiveness of
discourses.

Foucault also differentiates between two means of producing truth about sex: in
societies such as China, Japan and India, Ars erotica, erotic art, in which sex is
highly favored whilst pleasure is experienced freely, appeared. Thus, truth was
6
experienced within pleasure itself. However, Western societies abandoned Ars
erotica, and instead, generated and acknowledged Scientia sexualis, the science of
sexuality, based on the ancient tradition of confession which has been integrated
into a scientific discourse. Foucault questions the formation of sexuality and
emphasizes the prominence of confession in this process:
How has sexuality come to be considered the privileged place where
our deepest "truth" is read and expressed? For that is the essential fact:
Since Christianity, the Western world has never ceased saying: "To
know who you are, know what your sexuality is". Sex has always been
the forum where both the future of our species and our "truth" as
human subjects is decided. Confession, the examination of the
conscience, all the insistence on the important secrets of the flesh, has
not been simply a means of prohibiting sex or of repressing it as far as
possible from consciousness, but was a means of placing sexuality at
the heart of existence and of connecting salvation with the mastery of
these obscure movements. In Christian societies, sex has been the
central object of examination, surveillance, avowal and transformation
into discourse. (Foucault 111)

To construct truth out of an individual, the hidden knowledge of sex should be
revealed. From the Christian ritual of confession to the modern psychiatrists
room, sex has always been an indispensable part of confession. Sexual discourses
intend to annihilate any form of sexuality which lies outside the scope of
heteronormativity and which is labeled as unproductive. Foucault affirms, the
transformation of sex into discourse and the dissemination and reinforcement of
heterogeneous sexualities are perhaps two elements of the same deployment: they
are linked together with the help of the central element of confession that compels
individuals to articulate their sexual peculiarities- no matter how extreme
(Gergen 48). Then, various sexual discourses in the nineteenth century
proliferated the fruitless and perverse sexualities. Foucault suggests that a
reverse discourse has emerged, bringing about unnatural, abnormal,
7
unproductive and fruitless sexualities. Having been created by the dominant
discourse, these categories demand for the right to speak and to be spoken about.
Also, they ask for acknowledgement with the same vocabulary with which the
dominant discourse has been written and definitely in the same discourse in which
it has been revived. In a way, Western civilization built a code of sex for its own
self-assertion. It erected the heterosexual monogamous couple into the standard of
morality and pillar of society as a result of which every other form of sex came
to be regarded as contrary to nature and dangerous to society (Merquior 123).
Thus, The History of Sexuality lays bare the underlying mechanisms of sex by
purporting that Western culture has configured a definite form of sexuality and
contributed to its growth and categorization. In such a context, sexuality appear as
an artifact rather than as an innate trait.

The other significant Poststructuralist figure who contributed to the development
of queer theory is Jacques Derrida. He defies any ingrained and irrefutable
thought system and challenges Western dichotomous way of thinking, which is
based on Cartesian duality, and uncovers the underpinnings of it. Derrida achieves
this with the help of an analysis that he calls deconstruction which aims to
understand the mechanisms and grounds of binary oppositions. Specifically, with
the concept of supplementarity, Derrida puts forth that meaning is constituted in
a way that a transcendental or metaphysical being/thing cannot figure out its
formation. Derrida illustrates, [s]upplementarity, which is nothing, neither a
presence nor an absence, is neither a substance nor an essence of man [sic]. It is
precisely the play or presence and absence, the opening of this play that no
8
metaphysical or ontological concept can comprehend (244). In this way, meaning
cannot be demarcated and categorized since the thing that has stayed outside
cannot be regarded as being fully outside; it is inside, too: The play between
presence and absence is the condition of interpretation, insofar as each term
depends on the other for its meaning (Namaste 198). An example might clarify
this point even more: despite the fact that men reject women, consider them as a
no/non man, a culpable entity and an inchoate being, they need this antithesis so
as to define themselves and to exert their existence. Eagleton, too, elaborates on
this intricate relation and interprets the situation as follows:
Perhaps she [woman] stands as a sign of something in man himself
which he needs to repress, expel beyond his own being, relegate to a
securely alien region behind his own definitive limits. Perhaps what is
outside is also somehow inside, what is alien is also intimate- so that
man needs to police the absolute frontier between the two realms as
vigilantly as he does just because it may always be transgressed, has
always been transgressed already and is much less absolute than it
appears. (133)

Another example is in the binary opposition of homosexuality/ heterosexuality.
As in the opposition between men and women, heterosexuals lean upon
homosexuals in order to be defined and categorized as straight though they
condemn their retrogrades.

Queer theory desires to demystify the frontiers of not sexuality, but sexual
identities, categories and hierarchies. It traces the answers to the following
questions; how can one draw the boundaries of identity as s/he cannot talk about
an irrevocable and stable kind of identity? What is the relation between sexuality
and power? Should other alternatives be suggested instead of the binary
9
oppositions or should the fluidity and multiplicity of sexuality be felicitated or
denigrated? Dwelling on the ideas of Foucault and Derrida and borrowing from
them, queer theory displays that human beings cannot define themselves by
drawing the boundaries of their sexualities. One cannot stand entirely outside of
heterosexuality, neither can s/he stand entirely inside of it as sexuality is not
natural and innate, but historically, discursively and culturally constructed.

Apart from philosophers who shaped the main features of queer theory, a
genealogical account of sexual identity should be presented by focusing on same-
sex desire in various cultures at various times in order to have a better insight into
the constructedness of the notions of sexuality and gender. However, sexualitys
history is still finding its way, oscillating between embarrassed silence and
tempestuous logorrhea (Tamagne 3). Therefore, the exact denunciation, origin
and process of sexuality cannot be consigned easily as there can be no true and
correct account of heterosexuality, of homosexuality, of bisexuality and so on.
Indeed, these categories for defining particular kinds of relationships and practices
are culturally and historically specific and have not operated in all cultures at all
times (Sullivan 1). Throughout history, each culture has a different
understanding and perception of same-sex desire; while in some cultures it has
been regarded as a sin against nature or as an illness that needs to be cured, in
others it has been highly acclaimed and favored.

In The Order of Things, Foucault looks at the previous pistemes and displays the
constitution of heteronormativity in the Western world. Turner asserts that
10
inquiry since 1800 has not only revolved around men as the central organizing
concept; it has also reflected the assumptions and perspectives of men- typically
heterosexual and white (11). By this way, the binary stage has been set to
perform the discriminatory scenario in which dichotomous and bi-polar side of
things (such as heterosexuality/ homosexuality, men/women and male/female)
comes into being, favoring the former over the latter. Indeed, binary
categorization contains a hierarchy based on the differences as a result of which
one leg of the binary coupling has always been attached more importance than the
other. Despite the Western societys bi-polar, incommutable and hierarchical
structure, a survey of ethnographic and anthropological data demonstrates that
some cultures have transcended the heteronormative gender paradigm, and instead
they have generated their own. The existing ethnographic literature provides four
different forms of gender variations:

1) Some societies construct gender so as to contain distinct categories that
are neither masculine nor feminine.
2) Some societies construct gender in ways that are bipolar, but in which
the boundaries are markedly different from those common in Western
Europe and North America.
3) Some societies construct gender so that, while the basic pattern is
bipolar, people with one set of biological characteristics are able under
specific circumstances, to step outside of the societys ordinary construct
and enter the other construct.
4) A residual category- instances that do not quite fit our neatly created
typology. This category is necessary to highlight the purely heuristic
nature of the other three and to avoid sterile typological debates and
argument. (Ember 4)

Different from the ingrained imperatives and dictations of heteronormativity,
same-sex desire in different cultures at different times evinces the fact that the
conception and understanding of sexuality and gender is discursively, historically
11
and culturally constructed. Moreover, the plenitude of sexuality suggests that it is
not restricted to one distinct and unchangeable definition but is open to various
attributions and configurations. So the existence of heterosexual desire in the
dominant Western discourse does not necessarily mean that it is the only stable
and right kind of sexuality, and that in this binary organization, homosexuality
should be despised, devalued and deprecated. The understanding of sexuality
bears ambiguity, fluidity and instability in itself outside the fixed strata of
grounded and normative conventions.

Among the anthropological inquiries of fluid sexuality, Margaret Meads
investigation sheds light on the proliferation of sexuality in different cultural
contexts and refutes the notion of universal gender and sexual norms. Mead is
aware of the danger of assessing history of sexuality by analyzing merely the
existing societies and goes for a new endeavor to ascertain each society on its own
attributes. Her efforts contribute to a more sympathetic understanding of the
diversity of sexual pattern and cultures (Weeks 15). With the help of her work,
the inconsistency and immoderation of sexual and gender categories, and their
discursively constructed nature are verified. In her Sex and Temparement, Mead
examines three primitive societies of New Guinea; the Arapesh, the Mundugumor
and the Tchambuli. On the basis of gender roles and the congenital aspects of
sexuality, she attempts to explore whether those non-Western societies differ from
Western ones, and whether the disposition of male and female attributes varies
from one culture to another and/or is shaped by cultural configuration. Her book is
an account of how those primitive societies have grouped their social attitudes
12
towards temperament about the very obvious factor of sex difference (Frayser
673). In the Arapesh, both men and women are characterized by female
peculiarity; hence, the Arapesh are gentle, feminine and fragile. In the
Mundugumor, both men and women are raised with the ideals of men, as a result
of which they are fierce, martial and brutal. In the last studied tribe, the
Tchambuli, Mead has observed that gender roles are subverted as women are
raised like men in Western parameters. Therefore, in this tribe, women shave their
heads, wander around unadorned and look after the household. In contrast, men
are adorned, emotional and dependent on women.

After the exploration of those societies and the differences between them in terms
of gender roles and sexuality, she highlights the fact that each society differs from
one another by the division of male and female patterns which are not innate and
biological. Other than temperament, male and female are shaped from the
beginning of their lives by the behavior of both sexes (Frayser 673). At the end
of her groundbreaking investigation, Mead comes to the conclusion that there are
no universal, biological and congenital discrepancies between males and females,
but there are disparities originating from cultural and social configurations and
encodings of gender and sexuality. This anthropological account of gender and
sexuality in diverse cultural contexts indicates the instability and fluidity of
sexuality.

Along with Meads research which points out the constructedness and amorphous
nature of sexuality through anthropological evidence, it would also be
13
enlightening to track down the fluidity of sexuality in classical Athens and other
communities. First and foremost, since Western discernment of sexual and
romantic love springs from Platos philosophy, it might be interesting to look at
Platos The Symposium (4 BC), a compilation of dialogues between Socrates and
others, and the earliest treatise on compassionate male same-sex relationships
(Merin 13). For Plato, the ideal and true love cannot be attained by women or by
means of women. Likewise, Athenians considered perfection merely in men, not
in women. In one of the dialogues in The Symposium, Aristophanes assorts human
beings into different categories considering their desire towards males or females,
and he asserts each person has been made to desert his half:
Each of us, when separated having one side only, like a flat fish, is, but
the indenture of a man, and he is looking for his other half, men who
are a section of that double nature which was once called Androgynous
are lovers of women; adulterers are generally of this breed, and also
adulterous women who lust after men: the women who are a section of
the woman do not care for men, but have female attachments; the
female companions are this sort. But they who are a section of the
male follow the male, and while they are young, being slices of
original man, they hang about men and embrace them. (Plato 24-5)

Moreover, he glorifies same-sex desire and depicts it as a yearning for the missing
half from whom one has been parted, [w]hen one [of those boys who have
reached manhood] finds his other half, whether he be a lover of youth or a lover
of another sort, the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and
intimacy, and one will not be out of the others sight even for a moment (Plato
25). Similarly, Pausanias, a Spartan general, affirms the strength of same-sex
relations; I am convinced that a man who falls in love with a younger man of his
age is generally prepared to share everything with the one he loves- he is eager, in
fact, to spend the rest of his own life with him (qtd. in Cohen 290). Hence, Plato,
14
in a way, institutionalized and legalized pederasty, and it is this Platonic
idealization of pederasty that most influenced later Greek culture and eventually
the Christian west where it came to be known simply as Platonic Love
(Provencal 8).

In Rome, as in Athens, there was not a categorized and stable distinction between
heterosexuality and homosexuality; indeed, at that time, sexual identity was not
defined by the norms that govern modern understanding of sexuality today. The
Romans were cherishing fluid and free sexuality until Emperor Augustus, who at
the end of the first century passed a law called Lex Julia de adulteries which
forbade intercourse between homosexuals (Dode 24).

In the Middle Ages, sodomy, sexual practices not having the aim of procreation
was considered to be a sin against nature (Sullivan 1). The word sodomy
originates from the ecclesiastical Latin term pecatum sodomiticum, meaning sin
of Sodom (Sex and Society 824). By adopting the biblical story of the cities,
Sodom and Gomorrah, and referring to Gods destruction of the inhabitants of
those cities for committing pederasty, the Church and other religious institutions
employed it to condemn same-sex desire. As this kind of sexuality did not
conform to the normal categorization, it was labeled as abnormal and tried to be
repressed.

Byzantine society constructed a separate gender category called eunuchs who
were castrated and acculturated kind of men, and who were considered neither
15
male nor female but who belonged to a third category. By transgressing bi-polar
organization of gender, Byzantine society transcended the boundaries of binary
trap; thus, the eunuchs in that society offer an important example of an
alternative gender category and of the need to understand how such categories
function in society (Ringrose 3). This third category evinces how slippery the
area of sexuality and gender is, and how these notions can be configured
differently by different societies.

The United States, too, has experienced the elasticity of gender and sexual
identities and witnessed the cultural approval of their fluidity in various
indigenous communities throughout history. In addition to the heteronormative
gender pattern, different societies have had a third gender category. Like the
eunuchs of the Byzantine society, another well-known example of the
indefiniteness of gender roles can be seen in Native America, with berdaches, a
term derived from a French word with Persian and Arabic origin used for male
prostitutes. When the Europeans settlers came across them for the first time, they
took them as homosexuals since berdaches were men in womens clothes and
adorned. However, today they are called a third sex or two-spirited persons
and [a]mong many groups, two-spirit people are actually thought of as a third
gender rather than effeminate males (Wiesner-Hanks 218).

From ancient periods to modern times, the third gender has been continuously
defined by the somatic terms such as androgyny, hermaphrodite, or Freudian
true hermaphrodites. Against the background of researches on the inception and
16
origin of sexuality by sexologists like Havelock Ellis and Krafft-Ebbing, Freud
explored the complexity of sexual desire and pondered on sexual orientation in
both males and females. Freuds account of psychosexual development and his
ideas on the nature of sexuality support the view that human sexuality is
composed of not only biological but also social aspects: Although [Freud]
believed that the libido was an essentially biological drive, he acknowledged the
important role that culture has in channeling this libido to different objects
(Fuller 106). In this way, Freud, too, maintains the constructedness and later
acquisition of sexuality, and proffers that human beings are not innately confined
merely to heteronormative patterns. Thus, Freud goes beyond the binary trap of
heterosexuality versus homosexuality by displaying that all human beings are bi-
sexual in nature but they are made to direct their sexual drive into solely one form
of sexuality in the course of their infancy:
Psychoanalytic research is most decidedly opposed to any attempt at
separating off homosexuals from the rest of mankind as a group of a
special character. By studying sexual excitations other than those that
are manifestly displayed, it has found that all human beings are
capable of making a homosexual object choice and have in fact made
one in their unconscious. (Neu 176)


As can be seen in the above paragraphs, regarding the origin of sexuality, two
contrasting views have come into being in history; those advocating the
congenital facet of sexuality and those opposing the innateness of it and
supporting instead the constructedness and discursiveness of it.

In his informative book, A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory, Sullivan traces
the development of queer theory and various theorists ongoing attempts to
17
theorize same-sex tendency. A German social commentator and activist, Karl
Heinrich Ulrichs (1825-1895) claims that homosexuality is innate, and it is the
result of interior androgyny, a hermaphroditism of the soul (qtd. in Sullivan 4).
He says that some men are equipped with feminine drives and attributes, and
some women carry masculine psyche within themselves. For Ulrichs, those men
born with feminine motives tend to love men, and those women equipped with
masculine traits tend to love women. Ulrichs coined the terms Urning for males
and Dailing for females, thus, generating a third sex category which is neither
male nor female but a synthesis of both categories.

Yet, Ulrichs categorization of men and women regarding their sexual desire
based on masculinity and femininity engenders another dichotomous and
stereotypical deadfall since his theory does not reserve any space for feminine
lesbians or masculine homosexuals; so, Ulrichss thesis is firmly founded on
dichotomies such as male/female, active/passive, subject/object, mind/body and
so on, which construct the world in terms of one valued term and its opposite
(Sullivan 6). Despite being a great challenge to the heteronormative understanding
of sexuality, Ulrichss theory cannot escape Western bi-polar organization, and it
verifies normative gender standpoint.

Regarding sexual inversion, Richard Von Kraft-Ebing, too, stands out with his
historic book Pyschopathia Sexualis, which looks at approximately two hundred
sexual histories and explores various kinds of sexualities. Krafft-Ebing, like
Ulrichs, believes that homosexuality is congenital. He believes that reproduction
18
is the ultimate aim of sexual desire; therefore, any other form of desire which does
not result in procreation is labeled as perversion and vilified. For Kraff-Ebing,
homosexuality is an indication of degeneration developing at the time of gestation
and causing the sexual reversion of the brain.


Along with sexologists advocating the innateness of sexuality from an essentialist
standpoint, there have been scientists whose views on sexuality have not been as
deterministic as those of Ulrichs and Kraff-Ebings. One of those sexologists,
Havelock Ellis transcends essentialists views and suggests that any kind of
sexuality including homosexuality is constituted by joint working of nature and
nurture. Ellis differs from Kraff-Ebing in that he does not see homosexuality as a
disease but more like an anomaly or an abnormality: In this sense, inversion,
Ellis claimed, is analogous to color-blindness or color-hearing insofar as all three
conditions are abnormal, but are not necessarily morbid or harmful(Sullivan
8). Dissociating homosexuality from its so-called derogation and morbidity, Ellis
suggests that since homosexuality is congenital, there is no point in struggling to
treat or punish it. Moreover, as he does not disregard sexualitys constructedness
historically and discursively, he believes in the possibility of eliminating
homosexuality from very early on.

The last significant contributor to the sexual theory is Magnus Hirschfield, whose
sexual theory is based on the notion of the third sex. Following his predecessor
Ulrichss edifice of the third sex, Hirschfield, too, used the concept of the third
sex to describe a whole range of sexual intermediate types, like hermaphrodites,
19
androgynies and transvestites (Erzen 135). Despite pursuing Ulrichss inborn and
deterministic paradigm of same-sex desire and the notion of intermediate sex in
his earlier publication, Hirschfield relinquished this idea in his later works and
outlined instead a notion of what we might now call sexual pluralism which
regularly contravened the rigid nineteenth century paradigm of sexual polarity
(Sullivan 12). Hirschfields contribution to the field of sexuality is immense as he
went beyond the binary organization of sexuality, and favored and cherished
sexual diversity. Moreover, he challenged ingrained contention of sexual
discomposure. Hirschfield is also well- known for founding the first homosexual
rights organization, the Scientific- Humanitarian Committee. In a way, Hirschfield
paved the way for other organizations challenging the heteronormative taxonomy
of sexuality and seeking equality and tolerance.

Indeed, the acknowledgement of homosexuality and the positioning of
homosexuals in the society owed substantially to homophile organizations which
appeared at the end of the nineteenth century and to gay liberation movement
which appeared in the late 1960s and 1970s. Intending to detach from their
peripheral and marginalized positioning, homophile organizations have aspired to
be integrated into the society, and to break away from their decentered locus.
They have sought a center. As a matter of fact, in their endless efforts to be
acknowledged, to obtain tolerance/ equality and to eliminate all the social, legal
and religious denunciations, they have aspired to go beyond their exiled and
marginalized position and to occupy a heterosexual niche rather than a
homosexual one. To achieve their aim, they set up educational programs and
20
worked towards political reform designed to increase tolerance of homosexuality
and, in some cases, to decriminalize it (Jagose 22).

Unlike gay liberation movement, homophile organizations did not struggle
harshly and bluntly or apply sanctions towards those condemning homosexuals as
they wanted to achieve an adjustment strategy and an assimilation orientation to
be integrated to the mainstream culture. One of the significant homophile
organizations is undoubtedly the Mattachine Society, which is considered a
forerunner/ a pioneer for other subsequent groups. In their earlier discussions,
they saw homosexuals as a population unaware of its status as a social minority
imprisoned within a dominant culture (Jagose 3). The Mattachine Societys
earlier policy was to engender and invigorate a collective identity among
homosexuals so that they would become aware of the hegemonic, restrictive and
repressive ramifications of the dominant/ centered discourse and eventually get up
and fight against oppression. Yet, their struggle is entrapped in the assimilation
aspect of their fight: they believed in a common ground which can unite both
homosexuals and heterosexuals on the basis of sameness. Sullivan posits that
one of the primary tenets of assimilationist discourses and discursive practices is
the belief in a common humanity both homosexuals and heterosexuals belong
(23). In the course of time, the organization started to expand and moved from its
Los Angeles base to New York and Chicago. Also, in 1953, the members of this
organization published the first issue of a homosexual magazine, One, in which
they glorified being gay, and felt a combative pride in being gay (Jagose 25).
Later on, in its blossom, two opposite groups came into existence. The first party
21
continued to represent homosexuals as a minority group oppressed by the
dominant culture, and their adversary advocated an assimilationist line, insisting
that homosexuals were people like everyone else (Jagose 26). The second group
aimed at dissolving their peculiarities in the normalizing process and in the
heterosexual society.

The Mattachine Society was criticized for basing its attempts merely on men,
emphasizing the problems of men and disregarding the issues of women.
However, in the course of ongoing discussions, another homophile organization
called the Daughters of Bilitis, which was solely for women, emerged in 1955 in
San Francisco in order to foreground the representation of women and their sexual
identities in the mainstream society. In its statement of purpose published in its
formation year, the society declared its aim and defined itself as a womens
organization for the purpose of promoting the integration of the homosexuals into
society (Blasius and Shane 328). The organization intended to educate both
the women belonging to its own circle and the society in general. With the help of
education, those women would discover themselves and their sexual peculiarities,
thus, they would adapt to the normalizing process more easily and exist in the
heteronormative society without being condemned. Through education and public
discussions and emphasizing sameness of homosexuals and heterosexuals, the
Daughters of Bilitis also aimed to make the society accept homosexuality and to
shake themselves free from all bias towards homosexuals. By following a scheme
of quietude and submission, neither the Mattachine Society nor the Daughters of
Bilitis ignited militarist feelings towards normative community or mutated into a
22
mass movement. That is, they could not evoke rebellious excitement among
homosexuals because of their assimilationist notions, and they failed.

The late 1960s, however, witnessed a historic event with the Stonewall riots,
marking the start of a radical shift from the assimilationist policy to a more
militarist one. A vehement activist, Martha Shelley announces the arrival of gay
liberation movement in 1972 as follows: Look out straights, Here comes the Gay
liberation front springing up like warts all over the bland face of Amerika [sic].
We are the extrusions of your unconscious mind- your worst fears made flesh
(qtd. in Angelides 107). Stigmatized and marginalized by the dominant discourse,
gay liberation movement challenged the status quo by questioning the normalizing
process and by challenging the traditional views on issues such as gender, legal
terms and marriage.

Jennis Altman argues that gay liberation was much more the child of the counter-
culture than it [was] of the older homophile organization; it [was] as much the
effect of changing mores as their cause (qtd. in Angelides 108). Regarding its
attitude towards the understanding of sameness, gay liberation movement
differed from homophile organizations in that it dwelled on differences rather than
similarities between homosexuals and heterosexuals. Actually, gay liberation was
based on the notion of gay identity that they took pride in.

Their motto Out of the closets, into the streets reflects coming-out narrative, the
public avowal of ones homosexuality, as they come to discover it. Only by
23
disclosing their sexual identity can they realize their selves since homosexuality is
not a personality trait to be shrouded in mystery and locked in a closet. On the
contrary, it is a transformative identity that should be exclaimed publicly to
constitute a site of existence in which they can live their sexuality to the bitter end
(Jagose 38). In gay liberalist circle, there was an endeavor to reach a society in
which people are valued merely for being people, and not marginalized for their
sex roles. They foreground that the prescriptive society generates its own sexual
categories and gender paradigms which privilege heterosexual notions, and which
disregard and stigmatize homosexuality. As Jagose puts, [l]iberation theory
presupposed a notion of an innate polymorphous, androgynous human nature.
Liberation politics aimed at freeing individuals from the constraints of a
sex/gender system that locked them into mutually exclusive homo/hetero and
feminine/masculine roles (59). Therefore, gay liberalists have struggled to
eliminate the delimitation of gender and sexuality.

Other than gay liberalists, lesbian feminism, too, has emphasized a shift from
ingrained sexual gender paradigm to the arbitrariness of those categories. In their
ongoing effort to barricade the oppressive impetus of formative society and
eradicate sex/gender binary organization, these groups have had a constructionist
view of sexuality. They take homosexuality as an epistemological precedence,
discrepancy and rupture in which the bipolar nature of sexuality and binary
oppositions are entrapped. This binarism should be deconstructed in order to
disclose the constructedness, flexibility and alterability of those frames.

24
1.2. Genealogy of queer theory
Despite the fact that a dimorphic gender system might bear within itself both same
and opposite sexual couplings, the underlying assumption is that heterosexuality
is the innate and natural one. Katz posits that homosexuality is allowed as the
binary opposite of heterosexuality only to serve as a foil of otherness as a way to
support the naturalness of heterosexual pairing. The world is believed to have
been engineered as a bipolar jigsaw puzzle with sexually matching parts which
Butler referred as the heterosexualization of desire (qtd. in Lev 92-3). As it can
be seen in Figure I below suggested by Lev, male is matched with its binary
female, and this coupling is considered to be natural. So any other myriad
matching excluding this frame is regarded as unnatural and strained.






SEX





GENDER
IDENTITY












MALE

FEMALE

MAN

WOMAN
25

GENDER
ROLE







SEXUAL
ORIENTATION



FIGURE I: It is assumed that each of these components lines up and ensures the
next.
If a person is a male, he is a man.
If a person is a man, he is masculine.
If a person is a masculine male man, he will be attracted to
a feminine female woman.
If a person is female, she is a woman.
If a person is a woman, she is feminine.

If a person is a feminine female woman, she will be attracted to a masculine male
man (94).

However, Figure II evinces that all kinds of sexuality have an elastic nature
subsisting on a continuum which makes the existence of various sexualities and
gender types such as transgender/ transsexuals, bisexuals and intersexes possible.
In these categories, one can talk about stabilization of identity since people can
shape their gender and sexual identities by playing with their behavior and
performances. This understanding accommodates a place for both/and
alternative rather than being entrapped in enforced either/or paradigm.

MASCULINE

FEMININE

HETEROSEXUAL

HETEROSEXUAL
26





































FIGURE II:

All components of identity are actually on a continuum. Sex, gender identity,
gender role-expression and sexual orientation are not mutually exclusive (i.e.,
moving in one direction does not necessarily mean that one cannot also move in
the other direction) (Lev 97).

Male SEX Female
Man GENDER Woman
Masculine SEX ROLE Feminine

Heterosexual SEXUAL Homosexual
ORIENTATION
27
Homophile organizations and gay liberation movement emerged in an effort to
erase the masculine prejudice towards homosexuals, yet they have not succeeded
in transcending the binary formation since they have strived for generating a gay
identity which is, in any case, a category in itself. However, these organizations
have paved the way for the term queer to come into being, which marks both a
continuity of previous organizations and a separation from them. Queer has
appeared like a rupture in the historical development of sexual categories and
gender paradigms. Many literary critics and theorists have attempted to define the
term queer and delineate its frontiers. Nonetheless, they have not been able to give
a definite description of its origin. While to specify the exact date for the first use
of queer is not possible, it is supposed to have dated back to 1990s. Susan
Hayes traces perception of queer throughout history in a derisive manner and
presents it as the combination of pertinent events:
First there was Sappho (the good old days). Then, there was the
acceptable homoeroticism of classical Greece, the excesses of Rome.
Then, causally to skip two millennia, there was Oscar Wilde, sodomy,
blackmail an imprisonment, Forster, Sackville-West, Radclyffe Hall,
inversion, censorship; then pansies, butch and femme, poofs, queens,
fag hags, more censorship and blackmail, and Orton. Then, there was
Stonewall (1969), and we became gay. There was feminism, too, and
some of us became lesbian feminists and even lesbian separatists.
There was drag and clones and dykes and politics and Gay Sweatshop.
Then, there was Aids, which, through the intense discussion of sexual
practices (as opposed to sexual identities), spawned the Queer
movement in America. Then, that supreme manifestation of
Thatcherite paranoia, Clause 24, which provoked the shotgun marriage
of lesbian and gay politics in the UK. The child is queer, and a
problem child it surely is. (qtd. in Jagose 76)

Queer theory challenges the dominant Western epistemology, and it intends to
decenter the supposed Cartesian subject. It refuses all kinds of identities,
categorizations and hierarchies including the ones related to sexuality and gender,
28
and it rejects the heteronormative understanding of sex, gender and sexuality.
Judith Butler, an immensely significant figure in the field of queer theory,
embraces the constructionist view and deconstructs the underlying parameters by
evacuating those terms and exposing them as constructed, not congenital. Butler
traces the constitution of the subject and the configuration of sex and gender in
her work Gender Trouble. She revives her well-known and groundbreaking
theories like performativity, drag performance and parody in the same book. She
seeks answers for her questions about sex and gender. She asks, [w]hat will and
will not constitute an intelligible life, and how do presumptions about normative
gender and sexuality determine in advance what will qualify as the human and
liveable? In other words, how do normative gender presumptions work to
delimit the very field of descriptions that we have for human? (Gender xxiii)

She draws on phenomenological theory of acts adopted by Edmund Husserl,
Maurice Merleau-Ponty and George Herbert Mead and the speech act theory of J.
L. Austin, all of which are based on the claim that subjects themselves constitute
social reality through language, social signs and gestures. However, Butler
diverges from her predecessors with her more radical contention suggesting that
subjects are merely objects being constituted by social acts rather than
constituting them. Thereby, Butler engenders her own theory of performativity
which is based on the constitutive acts of phenomenology. She also questions the
essence of gender, and takes gender not as an immutable reality but an alternating
one: What we take to be real, what we invoke as the naturalized knowledge of
gender is, in fact, a changeable and revisable reality (Gender xxiv). To this end,
29
Butler proffers that gender is constructed by being repeatedly performed: Gender
is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid
regulatory frame that congeals over time to produce the appearance of substance,
of a natural sort of being (Gender 45).

As her point of departure, Butler takes Simon de Beauvoirs claim, [o]ne is not
born, but, rather becomes a woman, and emphasizes genders constructed nature.
That is, she adopts the Beauvoirian viewpoint that gender is not something one is
born with, rather it is something one performs/ does and eventually becomes. She
interprets this catchphrase by stating that gender is in no way a stable identity or
locus of agency from which various acts proceed; rather it is an identity tenuously
constituted in time- an identity, instituted through a stylized repetition of acts
(Performative 1). As gender is a construct rather than an inborn attribute, a
predetermined sex does not necessarily mean following and conforming to a
predetermined gender edifice. So Butler contends that gender can be performed
and reenacted in myriad ways, even in ways that are against heterosexual
framework of gender embodiment. Also, drag performance and parody are
referred to by Butler as subversive bodily acts as they reveal ontological inner
depths and gender cores as regulatory fictions (Butler and Salih 93): The notion
of an original or primary gender identity is often parodied within the cultural
practices of drag, cross-dressing and the sexual stylization of butch/ femme
identities (Gender 187). For Butler, drag subverts gender categories, reverses the
inner/ outer and unfolds the illusionary nature of gender.

30
As stated above, Butler does not support the essentialist view which is based on
the assumption that gender and sex are congenital. In contrast, she asserts that
both gender and sex are constructed in and through time. Further, she attests that
through bodily movements and acts, there occurs the illusion of an abiding
gender self (Performative 1). So if the ground on which gender identity is built
is comprised of the stylized repetition of acts, but not of an immutable and pre-
discursive self/ identity, then, Butler posits, the possibilities of gender
transformation are to be found in the arbitrary relation between such acts, in the
possibility of a different sort of repeating, in the breaking or subversive repetition
of that style (Performative 1).

Then, for Butler, gender is performative; it should be performed to come into
being. She also raises such questions as: How is that identity shaped, and is it a
political shaping that takes the very morphology and boundary of the sexed body
as the ground, surface or site of cultural inscription? (Gender 175) She refuses
the prescriptive view that femininity and masculinity are the markers of a
biological sex. Rather, she accredits that there is nothing given about gender, nor
is there any pre-cultural or pre-discursive sex that provides the basis for its
cultural construction (Jagger 2) since the sexed body is regarded as the site
and/or surface on which cultural values are inscribed. For her, [t]he body often
appears to be a passive medium that is signified by an inscription from a cultural
source figured as external to that body (Gender 175).

31
During the constitution of gender, human beings are exposed to a range of gender
characteristics, and they are forced to act on those gender features. Through the
regulatory practices, the body is culturally and historically inscribed and sexed.
As a matter of fact, the sexed subject is constituted in the Symbolic which
consists in a series of demands, taboos, sanctions, injunctions,
prohibitions, impossible idealizations and threats- performative speech
acts, as it were, that wield the power to produce the field of culturally
viable sexual subjects: performative acts, in other words, with the
power to produce or materialize subjectivating effects.
(Bodies 106)

Upon the subjects entering into language/ the Symbolic, the regulating discourses
transform them into gendered and sexed subjects to make them perform and
maintain certain stylized actions. The normative, prescriptive and regulatory
dominant discourse appropriates and freezes the slippery and fluid nature of sex,
sexuality and gender by locating these notions in univocal and restrictive
identitarien categories and conditioning human beings to perform and to
perpetuate those acts: This productive reiteration can be read as hegemonic
norms. Discursive performativity appears to produce that which it names, to enact
its own referent, to name and to do, to name and to make (Bodies 107).

After displaying the constructed and changeable nature of gender, Butler also
asserts that there is no sex that is not always already gender; or as she puts it,
sex by definition will be shown to have been gender all along (Butler and Salih
91). Salih states, this means that, as before, there is no natural body which
preexists culture and discourse, since all bodies are gendered from the beginning
32
of their social existence (Butler and Salih 91). Butler seeks to apprehend the
underlying contrivance of sex. She asks;
And what is sex anyway? Is it natural, anatomical, chromosomal or
hormonal, and how is a feminist critic to assess the scientific
discourses which purport to establish such facts for us? Does sex
have a history? Does each sex have a different history or histories? Is
there a history of how the duality of sex was established, a genealogy
that might expose the binary options as a variable construction? Are
the ostensibly natural facts of sex discursively produced by various
scientific discourses in the service of other political and social
interests? (Gender 9)

Butler comes to the conclusion that sex, too, is culturally and discursively
constructed like gender. Therefore, the difference between gender and sex is
eradicated since both of them are human constructs having evolved culturally and
discursively throughout history.

Besides Butlers theory of performativity, Hlne Cixouss notion of criture
fminine or feminine writing will also be referred to in this study in order to
display Wintersons efforts to dissolve the binary organization engendered by
patriarchy. In her 1975 essay called Sorties, Cixous takes her departure by
questioning the position of women in phallogocentric community:
Activity/ passivity,
Sun/ Moon,
Culture/ Nature,
Day/ Night,

Father/ Mother,
Head/ heart,
Intelligible/ sensitive,
Logos/ Pathos,

Man
Woman. (Sorties 63)

33

By listing oppositions and calling the constructed stage as a universal
battlefield, in which the victory is always hierarchized and granted to men,
Cixous seeks another alternative to break away from logocentricism in which the
woman is passive; or she doesnt exist (Sorties 64). In her attempt to detach
from logocentricism degrading women, Cixous asks, [w]hat would become of
logocentricism, of the great philosophical systems, of world order in general if the
rock upon which they founded their church were to crumble? and answers,
[t]hen, all the stories would have to be told differently, the future would be
incalculable, the historial forces would, will, change hands, bodies; another
thinking as not thinkable will transform the functioning of all societies (Sorties
65).

Cixous heralds a different economy called criture feminine against the
patriarchal and masculine one in which she attempts to break away from cultural
stereotypes, essentializing concepts and their attributes such as man/ woman,
masculine/ feminine, active/ passive (Conley 7). Since Cixous is against
categorization and hierarchies in dualistic understanding, she cannot form the
boundaries of this innovative writing, theorize and mould it in terms of principles
and rules. Cixous does not want to be captured in the very trap she has been
fleeing, and highlights the importance of the incapability of theorizing criture
feminine. Cixous posits that [a]t the present time, defining a feminine practice of
writing is impossible with an impossibility that will continue; for this practice will
never be able to be theorized, enclosed, coded, which does not mean it does not
exist (Sorties 97).
34

Cixous accredits that a writing that belongs merely to women, free from the
regulations of the dominant discourse, and fraught with pre-verbal spaces of the
unconscious and the instinctual drives might subvert patriarchal language
othering women: A return to rediscovery of the body is the path to liberation
since throughout history women have been dispossessed of their bodies and selves
through being possessed (Blyth and Sellers 94). In order to regain their femininity
usurped by men and to challenge the dominant discourse regulated by the phallus,
women must write, and they must do so by means of their bodies. She must write
her self, because this is the invention of a new insurgent writing which, when the
moment of her liberation has come, will allow her to carry out the indispensable
transformations in her history (Laugh 350). Cixous alleges that womens
writing can serve at two levels:
a. Individually. By writing her self, women will return to the body
which has been more than confiscated from her, which has been turned
into the uncanny stranger on display- the ailing or dead figure, which
so often turns out to be the nasty companion, the cause and location of
inhibitions. Censor the body and you censor the breath and speech at
the same time.
b. An act that will also be marked by womans seizing the occasion to
speak hence her shattering entry into history, which has always been
based on her suppression. (Laugh 350)


Thus, through the medium of writing, women can break away from the boundaries
of the phallogocentric thinking, transcend Platonic binarism and be positioned in
history.



35
1.3. Aim of the Study
In this dissertation, the discursively, culturally and historically configured
categories of gender, sex and sexuality will be analyzed against the background of
Butlers theory of performativity and Cixouss criture feminine. The fluidity of
the above mentioned categories and how this is fictionalized by Winterson in two
novels Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and Written on the body will be put under
scrutiny. The dissertation will concern itself also with the binary nature of these
categories and how Wintersons novels decenter them.

By questioning the boundaries of patriarchal concepts and transgressing them in
her writing, Winterson deconstructs the binary oppositions created by the Western
metaphysics and problematizes the assumption that sexuality is inborn. Instead of
this ingrained notion, she asserts that gender and sexual identities are culturally
and discursively constructed. Although the dominant discourse favors
heterosexuality over homosexuality and degrades sexuality into a binary frame of
oppositions such as masculinity/ femininity and male/female, Winterson, in her
novels, seeks an alternative to escape this ideological binarism and achieves to
subvert the binary oppositions by highlighting the fluidity of sexuality and by
creating her characters amorphous like the ungendered narrator in Written on the
body or by bestowing on them bisexuality or homosexuality like the protagonists
in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.

With Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Winterson subverts heterosexual
understanding of sex and gender and dissolves binary oppositions by assigning a
36
coming out quest to her protagonist. She shatters ingrained and normalizing
notions about sex and gender by displaying that sexuality and gender are human
constructs. By this way, Winterson attacks, questions and challenges the dominant
discourse privileging heterosexuality as the predetermined sexuality and
disregarding same-sex desire. By creating her narrator as nameless and
ungendered in Written on the body, Winterson defies the binary framework of
sexuality and emphasizes that detached from all categorizations and
representations of gender, the body just desires. It does not desire necessarily a
female or a male body, but it merely desires. In such a context, the sexual
ambiguity of the narrator deals a heavy blow to the conventional understanding of
sex, sexuality and gender.

In the second chapter of the study, the discursively, culturally and historically
configured categories of gender, sex and sexuality in Oranges Are Not the Only
Fruit are to be analyzed in light of Judith Butlers theory of performativity.
Through a detailed analysis of performativity, the embodiment of human subject
and the illusory and fluid nature of aforesaid categories will be displayed. In the
third chapter, Written on the body will be studied by deconstructing the binary
nature of categories and by attempting to decenter the text in light of Cixouss
criture feminine.


37


CHAPTER II

BUTLERIAN PERFORMATIVITY IN ORANGES ARE NOT THE ONLY
FRUIT


What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but
the human heart, oh, no, its curved like a road through
mountains.
~Tennessee Williams

Somewhere, sometime, something was lost, but no
story can be told about it; no memory can retrieve it; a
fractured horizon looms in which to make one's way as
a spectral agency, one for whom a full 'recovery' is
impossible, one for whom the irrecoverable becomes,
paradoxically, the condition of a new political agency.

~Judith Butler


Tell me, do you really think you go to hell for having
love?

~Rufus Wainwright



In this chapter, the main characters in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit will be
analyzed in the light of Butlerian theory of performativity which claims that the
body becomes its gender through a series of acts which are renewed, revised and
consolidated through time (Performative 4). Rather than perceiving the body
as a predetermined and pre-discursive essence and fact, Butler supports that the
body is constituted as a result of discursive practice and sedimented acts. Theory
of performativity will be employed in this study to disclose the fact that gender
roles are not the markers of innate, congenital and natural identities, but they are
38
the results of specific gender acts. As Butler points out, the substantive effect of
gender is performatively produced and compelled by the regulatory practices of
gender coherence (Gender 34).

Those gender acts are dictated by the network of power generating the dominant
discourse and surrounding it; thus, they are learned and repeated in and through
time. Performative and stylized acts in the fabricated and unnatural identitarien
categories lay bare misleading and fallacious impressions of a self/ subject prior to
its construction. Butler proffers that gender is always a doing, though not a doing
by a subject who might be said to preexist the deed (Gender 34). Nietzsche
suggests that there is no being behind doing, effecting, becoming; the doer is
merely a fiction added to the deed- the deed is everything (qtd in Gender 34) but
Butler reinterprets Nietzschean allegation: there is no gender identity behind the
expressions of gender: that identity is performatively constituted by the very
expressions that are said to be its results (Gender 34). In other words, the
subjects do not constitute reality; on the contrary, they are being constructed by
the deed. In such a conjecture, subjects transform into objects/ effects, and deeds/
acts mutate into agents/ subjects.

Winterson, in her novels, attempts to destabilize and to transcend the binary frame
which precludes the multiplicity and fluidity of sexuality and gender. In her
works, the conventional understanding of gender and sex and the perception of the
derogative binaries male/female, man/woman and masculinity/femininity are
dissolved. To lay bare the constructedness of these categories, Winterson
39
establishes her own language which defies the conventional, preexisting
discourse, transcending language as a manifestation of social convention, thus
allowing for an exploration of individual description and experience of the
different perspectives which can be put on reality (Jorgensen 13). Like Butler,
Winterson supports the view that the body is a site on which the cultural
inscriptions and patriarchal prescriptive restrictions are affixed. Winterson
proclaims:
I think that sexuality or the versions of sexuality that we are served up
from the earliest moments are prescriptive and in many ways debilitating,
people dont get a chance to find about themselves. They are told who they
are, that they fit in to certain patterns. How many people can honestly say
that they have made their own choices? But thats largely because of the
picture book world that were offered the story that we are told about
ourselves rather than being encouraged to tell our own stories.
(qtd. in Asensio 270-1)

The body on which cultural inscriptions are engraved is a recurrent theme for
Wintersons novels, and plays a dyadic role as the subject/ object of desire and
pleasure and as a means of breaking down the binary conception of gender
(Jorgensen 18). In an attempt to evade the binary organization of gender,
Winterson conceives the body as empty space waiting to be inscribed and
bedecked. In her epigraph to Sexing the Cherry, Winterson delineates that
[m]atter, that thing the most solid and the well-known, which you are holding in
your hands and which makes up your body, is now known to be mostly empty
space and points of light (8). So, instead of maintaining a binary opposition
between the solid, physical body and the abstract, fluid self, Winterson aims at un-
sexing the body and through this reveal the self as well as the body as discourse or
empty space and points of light (Jorgensen 20).
40

Oranges has given rise to different feelings among literary critics and ardent
readers, ranging from anger and scorn to acknowledgment and admiration.
Accordingly, those having read the novel have called it with diverse attributes:
some have called it an autobiography, some a Bildungsroman and some a lesbian
coming-out story. However, Winterson renounces all these labelings, and she
herself characterizes her novel as such:
Oranges is a threatening novel. It exposed the sanctity of family life as
something of a sham. It illustrates by example that what the church called
love is actually psychosis and it dares to suggest that what makes life
difficult for homosexuals is not their perversity but other peoples. Worse,
it does these things with such humor and lightness that those disposed not
to agree to find that they do. (qtd. in Grice and Woods 5)


Oranges is primarily the story of young Jeanette and how she learns to discover
and welcome her desire, which in turn allows her to construct her subjectivity
beyond the impositions from external agents, another critic, Lopz remarks
(157). An adopted seven-year-old girl starts her life under the influence of her
Christian fundamentalist mother, Louise, who dominates Jeanette and her
metaphorically absent father, made passive by her mothers assertiveness and
dominance throughout the novel. Jeanettes mother refuses to send Jeanette to
school until the age of seven and instead educates her with her biblical doctrines
and dogmas. Her mothers real purpose in adopting Jeanette is to raise a
missionary and to create a servant to God. In the absence of social friends other
than church members and necessary education other than the Bible teaching,
Jeanette is isolated from the outer world and entrapped in the world of her
exorbitant religious mother. Yet, her exclusion from the external world is
41
disrupted when she is commanded to attend the school. Stuck between realities
created by her mother and realities of the real world, Jeanette is marginalized at
school. She cannot discard her religious background. Her assignments, talks,
essays and art projects are colored with religious elements and quotations from the
Bible, and this in-betweenness makes her an outcast.

As time goes by, Jeanette discovers distinctions between her own opinions and
those imposed by the Church, and questions the credibility of other womens
assumption that men are beasts. One day, Jeanette encounters a girl named
Melanie with whom she becomes friends soon. Jeanette starts to visit Melanie at
her home to study the Bible. Shortly after words, they indulge in a love affair. As
Jeanette feels extremely happy in her relation with Melanie, and does not consider
it a sin, she shares her happiness with her mother. Then, the following Saturday,
both Jeanette and Melanie are ordered to come to the church where the priest
makes them confess their sins and repent. Though Melanie repels immediately,
Jeanette resists and flees to Miss Jewsburys house, who, too, is a lesbian.

The following days, the members of the church attempt to exorcise the demons
out of Jeanette. As she is resistant, she is locked into a closet for thirty-six hours
without being given any food at all. After this traumatic event, Jeanette gives up
her resistance and pretends to ask for forgiveness, yet deep inside she knows that
she has done nothing to offend God, and loving someone is not a sinful act. After
Melanies departure, Jeanette participates actively in the church affairs again.
However, her involvement is interrupted when she is caught with a newly convert,
42
Katy. Her mother is convinced that Jeanettes tendency would cause their
downfall, and she forces Jeanette to leave home as she thinks that the evil would
contaminate her family if Jeanette continues to stay with them. Deprived of her
family and friends, Jeanette attempts to reestablish her life from scratch.
Sometime later, Jeanette returns home only to find out that her mother is still
stuck with her religious dogmas. Yet she has softened a little since she has taken
up listening to a radio channel broadcasting religious programs.

An inner journey of Junginian individuation, Jorgensen suggests, is at the core
of the novel, in which the main character, Jeanette, attempts to deconstruct her
fictionality and to discard gender roles imposed on her before all else by her
castrating and comminatory mother and then by the matriarchal and threateningly
religious community she inhabits (18). In the novel, Jeanette plays a significant
role as a consequential character hovering between masculinity and femininity
since she struggles to trespass the boundaries of heteronormative understanding of
sexuality and gender. Despite having been raised in a religious family endorsing
the Law of the Father, Jeanette transcends her configuration and rewrites her self
defying and evading all grand narratives such as patriarchy and the myth of origin.

2.1. Devouring Mother/ Absent father
Jeanette is exposed to her mothers incessant religious indoctrinations and
dictations which disregard what Jeanette really wants, and which, instead, serve
for Louises one and only aim in life: to raise her daughter as a missionary for the
Lord. That is, rather than regarding Jeanette as a human being who has her own
43
desires, the mother conceives her as a perfect instrument for her Lord. Thus,
Louise thrusts on Jeanette some gender roles she is supposed to perform by taking
religion as her exclusive guide. However, religion has a precise and immutable
theology of sexual ethics which dictates that there should be merely one kind of
sexuality, that is heterosexuality, and which renounces the fluidity and
multiplicity of sexual domain. Its prescriptive and restrictive sexual paradigm
asserts that gender follows from sex, and desire follows from gender. That is, in
this theology, gender roles are derived from biological sex, which paves the way
for gender/sexuality fundamentalism.

Therefore, masculinity is thought to be a retrograde of femininity or male is
assumed to be a retrograde of female. In this compulsory heterosexual trajectory,
then, there is an imposed and irrevocable correlation between sex, gender and
desire. This heterosexual configuration of sexuality discards the possibility of
other sexualities and discontinuities or as Butler notes, [t]he cultural matrix
through which gender identity has become intelligible requires that certain kinds
of identities cannot exist and those in which practices of desire do not follow
from either sex or gender (Gender 24). When this regulatory binary frame is
digressed, and certain kinds of gender identities fail to conform to those norms
of cultural intelligibility, in other words, when a man loves a man or when a
woman loves a woman instead of practicing the prescriptive doctrine, they
appear only as developmental failures or logical impossibilities from within that
domain (Gender 24).

44
Louise is the incarnated form of the Church as she manages her life as well as
others lives within the regulatory heteronormative religious framework. In the
beginning of the novel, Jeanette becomes a passive medium on which specific
cultural acts are inscribed by her mother. The mother does not curb Jeanettes
performativity, because, in Butlers words constraint is not necessarily that
which sets a limit to performativity; constraint is, rather, that which impels and
sustains performativity (Bodies 95). Thus, she tries to freeze or stabilize
Jeanettes sexuality.

Jeanette gradually becomes aware of her mothers binary logic, and in the course
of time, she apprehends Louises ongoing endeavor to locate her sexuality into a
heterosexual frame based on her religious doctrines. Louise can readily accept
dualistic conceptions and overlook alternate possibilities. Because, for her, there
are solely two sexualities: one can either be a man or woman, and there is no
place for other sexual and gender varieties such as lesbians, transsexuals and
transgenders. A case in point is, when hearing about the family life of snails on
the radio, Louise feels as if she were insulted. She remarks, the family of snails,
its an Abomination, its like saying we come from monkeys (Oranges 21). In
her refusal to imagine animals copulating, Louise implies that she cannot endure
the idea of having alternate views and possibilities. In other words, Louise is
captured in the heterosexual logic which necessitates identification and desire to
be opposed; however, Jeanette can see through the illusory essence of this view. It
might be helpful to refer to Butler at this point: The heterosexual logic that
requires that identification and desire be mutually exclusive is one of the most
45
reductive of heterosexisms psychological instrument: if one identifies as a given
gender, one must desire a different gender (Bodies 239). Yet, the austere
postulate cannot always be achieved since in real life people can desire those of
the same gender, and this paradoxical nature of identification undermines the
heterosexual matrix.

Louise imposes on Jeanette the idea that in the world there are only binaries, and
she has to make a choice between the binaries. Jeanette recalls some memories
from her formation years in which her mother cannot transcend the binary
understanding she is trapped in. In her minds eye with references to these
memories, Jeanette observes that her mother has specific and definite boundaries
from which she does not digress: her mother had never heard of mixed feelings.
There were friends, and there were enemies, and she specifies her mothers
extreme dichotomous apprehension in a list:

Enemies were: The Devil (in his many forms)
Next Door
Sex (in its many forms)
Slugs

Friends were: God
Our dog
Auntie Madge
The novels of Charlotte Bronte
Slug Pellets. (Oranges 3)


Thus, Jeanette states, I discovered that everything in the natural world was a
symbol of the Great struggle between good and evil (Oranges 16). Louise can
perceive the world as either friends or enemies, male or female, good or evil, and
46
she preaches Jeanette to shape her life by depending on the binaries she herself
has followed throughout her life. By taking Jeanette as a substitute for Christ,
Louise attributes special powers to Jeanette and regards her a missionary child, a
servant of God, a blessing since she believes that Jeanette can change the world
(Oranges 10). Jeanette emphasizes her mothers disappointment for not being the
Virgin Mary and insinuates her envy to compensate for this failure:
And so it was that on a particular day, some time later, she followed a
star until she came to settle above an orphanage, and in that place was a
crib, and in that crib, a child. A child with much hair.
She said, This child is mine from the Lord.
She took the child away and for seven days and seven nights the child
cried out, for fear and not knowing. The mother sang to the child, and
stabbed the demons. She understood how jealous the Spirit is of flesh.
(Oranges 10)


In Louises project to attain the position of the Virgin Mary, Jeanette cannot/
must not go out of the plan made for her whole life, and cannot question the
Churchs understanding of sexuality. Ironically, imposing herself so much on
Jeanette, Louise serves for the opposite result. She does not let her submit herself
to the patriarchal metaphor, thus stabilize her sexuality. In fact, this was foretold
to Jeanette herself by an old woman long ago but Jeanette could not figure out
what she said. Once, when Jeanette was out for collecting black peas, she ran into
an old woman prophesying about her sexuality and foreshadowing her future
sexual orientation. The old woman looked at Jeanettes palm, youll never
marry, she said, not you, and youll never be still (Oranges 7). In the course of
the narration, Jeanette refuses the place reserved for her, and the prophesy of the
old woman turns out to be true as Jeanette refuses to be shaped by restrictive
indoctrinations of the heterosexual paradigm.
47

After her encounter with the fortuneteller, Jeanette runs home, trying to
understand what the old woman meant as Jeanette never thinks of getting married
anyway. Along with the prophesy which blurs her mind, Jeanette mentions the
two old women running the paper shop and living together. She narrates, one
day, they asked me if Id like to go to the seaside with them. I ran home, gabbled
it out, and was busy emptying my money box to buy a new spade, when my
mother said firmly and forever, no. I couldnt understand why not, and she
wouldnt explain. Afterwards, it turns out that Louise forbids Jeanette to have
any kind of contact with them as they dealt in unnatural passions (Oranges 7).
These two women generate a world of women as they do not have any contact
with men. In other words, they defy the societys heteronormative sexual
paradigm, and choose to come to terms with their desire by excluding compulsory
sexuality imposed by the patriarchal discourse. Louises binary understanding is
again exposed in her attack on lesbianism. Louise disclaims the so-called
unnatural/ unhallowed one, homosexuality, and welcomes supposedly natural/
acceptable one, heterosexuality.

In her theory of performativity, Butler maintains that performative acts are forms
of authoritative speech: most performatives, for instance, are statements that, in
the uttering, also perform a certain action and a binding power (Bodies 225).
Echoing what Butler says, in her attempt to make Jeanette perform accepted
gender roles by exerting her authority, Louise dwells upon the power of words.
Her language which is full of biblical allusions and intermingled with religious
48
dogmas impersonates the tenets of the Church. It can be regarded as an instance of
performative acts since, as in Butlers words, implicated in a network of
authorization and punishment, performatives tend to include legal sentences,
baptisms, inaugurations, declarations of ownership, statements which not only
perform an action, but confer a binding power on the action performed (Bodies
225).

By blurring the line between fact and fiction and by drawing on biblical lexicon,
Louise employs religious stories to cast some normative sexual/ gender roles on
Jeanette. After forbidding Jeanettes visits to the paper shop, Louise tells her a
story about a brave person who despised the fruits of the flesh and worked for
the Lord itself (Oranges 7). Louise tries to set an example for Jeanette by
exalting that brave person who disclaims the fruits of the flesh, in other words,
all sexual desire hidden within the body. By using fruit as an objective correlative,
Louise refers to gender and sexual categories, and tries to influence Jeanette so
that she would follow the compulsory framework presented to her. Louise expects
Jeanette to relinquish any kind of sexual orientation and to focus solely on the
Lord. Here, Louise is like a teacher giving assignment to her students; yet, in this
case, Louise is giving a gender assignment which is, in Butlers words, never
quite carried out according to expectation, whose addressee never quite inhabits
the ideal s/he is compelled to approximate (Bodies 231). Jeanette is not aware of
the gender role assigned to her, and she is like a passive medium/ a blank sheet on
which formalistic inscriptions are written.

49
Absorbed in the Churchs maxims and her mothers perpetual impositions,
Jeanette spends her earlier years studying the Bible and reading the Book of
Deuteronomy so that she would become a missionary. Yet, Louise interprets the
Bible according to her restrictive perception and offers Jeanette a mechanical
reading of it. Louise is vacillating between her religious fanaticism and her
endeavor to shape all the things/ people around her with her prescriptive doctrines
like restrictive heterosexuality and religious life style. With her ironic and
humorous tone, Jeanette remarks that my mother is very like William Blake; she
has visions and dreams and she cannot always distinguish a fleas head from a
king. Luckily she cant paint (Oranges 9). This remark implies that Louise
creates a world of her own delusions and lives there, and indicates her inability to
differentiate between reality and illusions.

Interestingly enough, when Louise cannot make sense of the things in the Bible or
when the things are not as she wants, sometimes she changes the reality according
to her needs. Jeanette states sometimes my mother invented theology (Oranges
5). Though there can be more than one interpretation of the Bible, her
understanding forestalls other exegeses and possibilities. While playing Bible
quizzes, Jeanette hints that their perception of the Bible is mechanical:
She was very regular. I put the milk in, in she came, and taking a great gulp
of tea said one of three things:

The Lord is good (steely-eyed into the back yard).
What sort of tea is this? (steely-eyed at me).
Who was the oldest man in the Bible? (Oranges 4).


50
Although Louise and her community are genuine believers, they only perceive the
literal in the Bible, thus, they cannot embrace alternate possibilities, and they are
entrapped in a binaristic view of the world.

One of the most noteworthy memories in Jeanettes formation years is when she
gets deaf. Nobody can diagnose it, a result which leads Jeanette to question the
competence of all the people living around her. As both Louise and her
evangelistic community are blinded by the doctrines of the Church and by the
single-mindedness caused by their dualistic perception of the world, they cannot
see the fact that Jeanette cannot hear due to her deafness. On the contrary, they
relate her silence to the spiritual transformation (Oranges 24). Since Jeanette
cannot hear, she does not react to the pastors speech, which strengthens the
church members allegation that Jeanette is full of the spirit. Jeanette says, I
didnt hear a word; just sat there reading my Bible and thinking what a long book
it was. Of course this seeming modesty made them all the more convinced
(Oranges 24).

Were it not for Miss Jewsbury, who takes her to the hospital, Jeanette would
remain deaf for the rest of her life. Jeanettes deafness can be regarded
metaphorically as her refusal to hear the patriarchal metaphor that forces her to
kill her authentic self and mutate into a stereotypical young girl. In other words,
she becomes deaf to the Bible and to its clichs. Louise cannot see the literal truth
in Jeanettes case because of her religious delusions. She does not act like a
conventional mother figure with a sense of responsibility towards her child, and
51
she does not feel guilty for her negligence. In her practice, then, despite parroting
the teachings of the Church, she creates a space in which she can exert her
authority. From another perspective, then, Louise is a subversive woman/ mother
figure as she evacuates the notions of feminity and maternity. That is, Louise
reconfigures her own understanding of womanhood and motherhood within the
dominant discourse.

After her recovery, which becomes a turning point in her quest, Jeanette realizes
that all the dictations, impositions and prescriptions that have been forced on her
by her mother and her religious community can be questioned. Jeanette expresses
the ambiguity she feels towards the Church as follows, since I was born, I had
assumed that the world ran on very simple lines, like a larger version of our
church. Now I was finding that the church was sometimes confused (Oranges
26-7). Even though Jeanette is just a child, she can perceive that something is
wrong with the Church. Her confidence in her mother, at the Church and in its
repressive teaching is shaken even more during her stay in the hospital when the
only visitor is Elsie Norris, a substitute mother figure for Jeanette. As Louise is
occupied with the churchs events, she does not come to the hospital and visit her
daughter. Unlike Louise, Elsie approaches Jeanette as a nurturing and mother-like
figure, and liberates her from the dualistic understanding of the Church by
displaying that there is not merely one truth, one perception and one world.
Jeanette can appreciate Elsies potential to welcome and cherish plurality. At the
hospital, Elsie reveals her open minded world view and wants Jeanette to shun
singularity, as what looks like one thing may well be another (Oranges 30).
52
Elsie negates the conception of oneness: There is this world, she banged the
wall graphically, and theres this world, she thumped her chest. If you want to
make sense of either, you have to take notice of both (Oranges 32). Thus, Elsie
defies the one and only perception of reality, and advocates the multiplicity of the
reality. As Elsie broadens Jeanettes vision, she becomes an important figure in
Jeanettes quest for subjectivity and for her struggle to disown gender roles cast
upon her.

Louises single-mindedness, bigotry and entrapment in the binary frame is also
reflected in her insistence on the fruit orange which she considers the only
fruit (Oranges 29). Instead of the biblical forbidden fruit apple which led
Adam and Eve to be expelled from the Garden of Eden and to their fall,
Winterson makes use of another fruit, orange. As apple descends from the Tree of
Knowledge, its connotations are multi-layered. Here, orange can be conceived as
a metaphor for heteronormativity and oneness. By taking orange as the only fruit,
Louise defies all the disjunctive possibilities for sexuality and restricts the notions
of gender and sex, and puts them into the compulsory heterosexual matrix
generated by the dominant discourse. By offering her oranges, Louise attempts to
repress Jeanettes feelings falling out of the heterosexual trajectory and to stop her
daughters ongoing efforts to discover her true self. However, orange can be
interpreted in another light and might imply subversive elements, too. When
Adam and Eve were tempted to taste the apple from the forbidden tree, they fell
from grace. By eating the fruit, they transgressed the boundaries, and challenged
the patriarchal metaphor signified by the apple. In their trangressive attempt, they
53
faced an end and a beginning, which is a kind of rebirth beyond the restrictive
boundaries of heaven. Ironically, by foregrounding her own fruit, Louise offers an
alternative to the patriarchal metaphor, and consolidates the maternal metaphor in
her effort to compete with the Virgin Mary. Like apple, which is a challenge from
Adam and Eve to the patriarchal metaphor, orange develops into a subversive
element too, but this time, it comes from the mother. Accordingly, Louise focuses
exclusively on oranges and her motto is, oranges are the only fruit (Oranges
29).

In stark contrast to the powerful mother figure, Jack, Jeanettes father, is almost
an invisible figure in their life. As a matter of fact, men in general are ghostly
figures in Oranges. By bestowing extreme power and freedom to create their own
space on women in Oranges, Winterson problematizes and subverts gender roles
assigned to women and men. In the dominant heteronormative binary frame,
women are associated with weak attributes, and men with strong ones. However,
in Wintersons story, women have created their own kingdom/ queendom in
which men are stripped off their conventional roles. In contrast to traditional and
archetypal framework, men are weak albeit harmless, and women are the ones
who are strong. In Oranges, women have eliminated men in both public and
private arenas, and have direct contact with the embodied/ incarnated agents of
the Law, which is the Church.

At the very beginning of the novel, Jeanette refers to her parents, like most
people I lived for a long time with my mother and father. My father liked to watch
54
the wrestling, my mother liked to wrestle; it didnt matter what. She was in the
white corner and that was that (Oranges 3). Instead of her father who is supposed
to wrestle, a sign of strength associated with manliness, Louise does Jacks part
and wrestles. Thus, Jack is placed in a subordinate position identified with women
in heteronormative gender frame. As in this example, gender roles are reversed
since strength/ activity /assertiveness pass to the woman from the man, and
weakness/ passivity/ submissiveness are now associated with the man. Andermahr
asserts that much of the novels humor involves the depiction of a family life in
which conventional gender expectations and roles are reversed (52). Jeanettes
mother subverts conventional gender paradigm as she is dominant/ active/ strong,
and her husband is submissive/ passive/ weak. His existence is nominal for both
his wife and daughter. Accordingly, while referring to her father, Jeanette calls
him her husband, not my father, hinting that her mother, not her father, is the
authority figure (Oranges 5).

Having a passive and an invisible role throughout the novel, this effeminized and
psychicly forsaken father figure is continuously negated by the phallic, castrating
and strict mother figure. This strong and unruly woman does not sacrifice
anything from her identity and her religion for the sake of others, or she does not
abdicate her supreme role as a religious guru for her daughter, her husband and
her matriarchal and evangelist community. Her ultimate aim is to construct the
others, especially her daughter, in her own image. Therefore, it comes as no
surprise when, with the help of Jeanettes memories, it becomes evident that
Jeanettes adoption is not because of her parents impotence of begetting a child,
55
but it is because of Louises abstention from copulating. In the very first page of
the novel, Jeanette observes that she had a mysterious attitude towards the
begetting of children; it wasnt she couldnt do it, more she didnt want to do it.
She was bitter about the Virgin Mary getting there first. So she did the next best
thing and arranged for a foundling. That was me (Oranges 3).

Louise competes with the Virgin Mary and mimics her. Like her, Louise desires
to identify with the Father. Like her, she does not want to have a husband and
does not want to bear a child but she goes for a foundling and gets Jeanette and
takes her as a substitute for Christ. Rather than a son like Christ, Louise adopts a
daughter which is again a challenge to the patriarchal metaphor. It might be that
Louise feels identified with a daughter as neither of them is castrated. Louise
seems to have chosen such a weak man as Jack because he is incapable of
castrating them. On one occasion, when Jeanette and Melanie are talking about
their fathers, Jeanette exclaims that she has no father like Melanie, which is a sign
of Jeanettes low esteem of her father: she [Melanie] talked about the weather
and her mother, that she had no father. I havent either, I said, to make her feel
better. Well, not much. Then, I had to explain about our church and my mother
and me and me being dedicated to the Lord (Oranges 83). Jeanette is devoid of a
powerful father figure, and she is fatherless in metaphorical terms, as a result of
which she cannot submit herself to the Law of the Father and cannot be castrated
or symbolically positioned. However, she identifies with the mother, who is not a
conventional mother. Louise is in the place of a man; in a way, she is a manly
woman. She is devouring and strong, which causes Jeanette to identify with her
56
mother and to desire the same sex according to Butlers conjecture of gender
identifications. Butlerian readings of Lacan and Freud help us comprehend
Jeanettes gender identifications, and decipher the heterosexual compulsory
gender ideology generating the binary matrix better.

2.2. Judith Beheading Holophernes
In gender configuration, the notion of the Oedipus complex and identification
with the same sex parent or the opposite sex parent is important in the institutional
psychoanalysis as it is thought to determine whether the infant would be
homosexual or heterosexual. Butler offers a rereading of Freud and Lacan, which
renders the Oedipal scenarios heterosexual understanding culpable, and which
makes Jeanettes quest more comprehensible for readers.

2.2.1. Freud and Gender Identifications
Freud presumes that all infants go through a period of incestuous desire for their
parents. The resolution of this desire determines the sexual orientation of the
infant, and the development of the ego and the superego. Between the ages of
three and five, the male infant desires his mother, and he has hostile feelings for
his father whom he regards as a rival. Under the fathers possible threat, the child
discontinues his incestuous desire for his mother and identifies with one of the
parents. Freud posits that there are two probabilities of this identification. Either
the child experiences a negative complex leading into identification with the same
sex parent and desiring the opposite sex or the child undergoes a positive complex
leading into identification with the opposite sex parent and desiring the same sex.
57
Thus, in this conventional Freudian surmise, a negative complex engenders
heterosexuality in which the object of desire is the opposite sex, and a positive
complex brings about homosexuality in which the object of desire is the same sex.

Butler, however, approaches the Oedipal scenario from a different perspective:
She concentrates on unpicking Freuds assumptions in order to demonstrate that
what he conceives of as a natural and universal phenomenon is, in fact, the
construct of a heteronormative discourse (Lloyd 82). Freud assumes that all
infants are bisexuals possessing both masculine and feminine dispositions. When
the child has masculine dispositions, the desire is oriented to the mother, and
when the child has feminine dispositions, the desire is channelized to the father.
However, Butler infers that the conceptualization of bisexuality in terms of
dispositions, feminine and masculine, which have heterosexual aims as their
intentional correlates, suggests that for Freud, bisexuality is the coincidence of two
heterosexual desires within a single psyche (Gender 82). In other words, Freuds
estimation of psycho-sexual development is grounded in a prior prohibition on
homosexuality (Lloyd 83). Thus, according to Butler, within Freuds thesis of
primary bisexuality, there is no homosexuality, and only opposites attract
(Gender 82). Butler attempts to demonstrate that masculinity and femininity are
ramifications of identification, a process in which an individual acquires its
identity, or aspects thereof, from someone (or something) else (Lloyd 83).

In an attempt to support her argument that masculinity and femininity are not
natural dispositions but effects of identifications, Butler draws on Freuds texts
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Mourning and Melancholia (1915) and The Ego and the Id (1923). Here,
Freud proffers that when an object is lost, mourning occurs whereby the libido of
the lost object is oriented towards another object. With mourning, the subject
reconciles with the loss and his/her ego breaks loose from this restraining burden.
However, when the subject cannot overcome the loss, s/he might experience
melancholia in which the lost object is conjugated to the ego with all
characteristics of the loss. Thus, it can be asserted that the egos formation is
based on mourning and melancholia; it is the effect of identification.

Butler takes Freudian understanding of identification and re-employs it for gender
identifications suggesting that the subjects sexual orientation is also formed
melancholically. Butler, too, believes that gender identification is a kind of
melancholia in which the sex of the prohibited object is internalized as a
punishment (Gender 85-6). At the resolution of the Oedipal complex, the boy
indeed identifies with the father as he has lost his mother as object of desire, and
he cannot overcome this loss. Thus, he has internalized the father and
incorporated him into his ego. When it comes to the girl, the same process occurs
as she has lost her mother as her object of desire as a result of which the girl
identifies with the mother because she cannot surmount the mothers loss. Here,
one might give a hearing to Lloyd, who says that [h]eterosexual desire is bought,
therefore, at the price of denying- or, in psychoanalytic language, disavowing or
foreclosing prior homosexual desire (85).

59
Jeanette, stuck in the heterosexual matrix with imposed identifications, hovers
between masculinity and femininity. Divided between her own desire and
compulsory identifications, she cannot have a unified sexual identity. As Jeanette
does not have a real father figure, she identifies with her mother and internalizes
all characteristics of the lost object- the mother in this case- into her ego. Yet,
instead of a castrated mother figure, Jeanette has a manly mother who endorses
the Law of the Father and who is entrapped in the binary organization. As her
mother is not a traditional woman, but a devouring and a castrating figure
replacing the father figure, she orients her desire not to the opposite but to the
same sex.

Despite the seemingly enforcement of the heterosexual desire by her mother and
her evangelist community, Jeanette does not buy heterosexuality with the price of
losing/ disavowing/ foreclosing her prior homosexuality. In contrast, she fights for
her authentic self and comes to terms with her desire. In other words, instead of
submitting to the heteronormative sexuality, though it has been imposed on her so
hard, she embraces her lesbianism and deciphers the constructed nature of sex and
gender. As a practicing Christian, she does not accept the established assumption
that God would punish and condemn those who do not follow the path of
heterosexuality. Jeanette comes to think that her mother and her community create
their own truths and attempt to impose them on her. Jeanette does not yield to the
patriarchal metaphor for the sake of living within the boundaries of
heterosexuality. In the end, by refusing to foreclose her homosexuality despite the
punishment given by her mother and the church members, Jeanette challenges the
60
dominant discourse and achieves to lay bare the underpinnings of the dominant
discourse.

2.2.2. Lacan and Gender Identifications
Lacans psychoanalytic discourse reveals how social constraints affect the process
in which sexed subjects come into being. By borrowing from Freudian sexuality
and the Oedipal complex, Lacan expands the trajectory of sexuality by rescuing it
from the haunting effects of pure anatomy, and incorporates language into his
agenda. Lacan proffers that both subjectivity and subject are formed in the
signification process which follows the infants entering into language/ the
Symbolic order. By submitting to the Law of the Father, not to face the threat of
punishment, the subject becomes sexed. Butler asserts that for Lacan: one
assumes [sex] under the threat of punishment, that is, a position one is constrained
to assume where those constraints are operative in the very structure of language
and, hence, in the constitutive relations of cultural life (Bodies 96).

Like Freud, Lacan believes that the Oedipal stage is central to the development of
sex. Yet, Lacan proffers that the phase is substantial for the development of
language, too. For Lacan, in the Oedipal scenario, the symbolic demand that
institutes sex is accompanied by the threat of punishment. Castration is the
figure of punishment, the fear of castration motivating the assumption of the
feminine (Bodies 96). The probable punishment for the figure of castration is the
existence of two inarticulate figures of abject homosexuality; the feminized fag
and the phallicized dyke (96). So, frightened by the possibility of occupying such
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abject positions, the infants submission to the Law of the Father terminates
incestuous desires and prepares the ground for normal sexuality.

Lacan, too, employs the term phallus which is the privileged Symbolic signifier,
and he differentiates between being the phallus and having the phallus while
explaining the formation of sexed positions. Both of these positions require
the other to identify with. In order to be the phallus, women depend on the
desire of men, and in order to have the phallus, men depend on the desire of
women. So, in Lacans scheme, there is no place for abject/ marginalized/
homosexual forms of sexuality, which is the target of Butlers criticism since she
asserts that heterosexuality occurs as a result of a phantasmatic identification.
Lloyd infers that:
if the assumption of sexed position requires an identification with a
position already marked out within the symbolic domain, and if, given
lack, this identification is phantasmatic (a position the subject aspires
to fill but never can), then the way that heterosexuality is established in
the symbolic is by regulating the terms of identification. (91)

Thus, Butler assumes that sex is a kind of identification, and identification is a
site at which prohibition and deflection are insistently negotiated (Bodies 100).
In the process of acquiring a sex through identifying with the other, the subject is
exposed to an imaginary threat, imaginary and forceful, forceful precisely
because it is imaginary (100). Then, Butler questions what happens to the one
defying the Law, and what is the appropriate punishment for the one refusing to
submit to the Law of the Father and encountering the imaginary punishment. In
case of failure to submit to the Symbolic positioning of the feminine, the subject,
then, renounces yielding to castration, as a result of which the necessary
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identification with the castrated mother would not take place and the relegated
father figure to desire would come into being. Butler purports that:
The failure to submit to castration appears capable of producing only its
opposite, the spectral figure of the castrator with Holopherness head in
hand. This figure of excessive phallicism, typified by the phallic mother, is
devouring and destructive, the negative fate of the phallus when attached
to the feminine position. (Bodies 102)


In Oranges, despite the threat of punishment and exclusion, Jeanette refuses to
submit to the Law of the Father. In the novel, rather than the literal father figure,
the Church is the representative of the Symbolic order. As the literal father cannot
exert his power and authority, he cannot represent the Law. In the absence of the
necessary features to have a binding power on his family, Jack cannot castrate
Jeanette and Louise, as a result, he cannot make them submit to the patriarchal
metaphor. Instead of a castrated mother figure being the phallus for the man,
Jeanette has a castrating mother, having the phallus. As Louise is identified with
the phallus, she exhibits exorbitant and destructive phallicism, and attempts to
approximate Jeanette into the Symbolic order. This phallic mother, ironically,
wants Jeanette to identify with the Law and struggles to castrate her and to make
her perform heteronormativity which is considered to be the sole sexuality.
Jeanette refuses to submit to the Law of the Father, thus, takes her place in the
margins of the dominant discourse.

By refusing the Law and deciphering culturally appropriated gender identities cast
upon her, Jeanette disrupts restrictive gender binaries and reveals that gender is a
continuum, not a dualistic and closed system. In the rupture caused by gender
performativity, Jeanette cherishes the fluidity and multiplicity of gender, and
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abnegates the singularity of phallicism. While referring to the female characters in
Wintersons works, Stowers emphasizes their refusal to be categorized and
located into singularity and fixity by following pleasures which are suggested to
be more female, pleasures of palimpsestic representation instead of official
exclusionary paradigms; of fluid multiplicity instead of phallic singularity (99).
Jeanette, like other Winterson characters, chooses to depart from her phallic
mothers restraints by embracing viscosity of gender and sexuality.

2.3. Jeanettes eating the Forbidden Fruit and falling from grace
As Jeanette moves from childhood to adulthood, she reconfigures her own world
view with the help of both the secular view of the school and the effects of other
people around her. This is her awakening from her mothers religious bigotry and
single-mindedness. Her dissociation from the Church takes place when the pastor
delivers his sermon on perfection and asserts perfection is flawlessness
(Oranges 60). Interestingly, Jeanette comes to realize that she does not agree with
the pastor, and eventually, she says, it was at this moment that I began to develop
my first theological disagreement (60). Now, having doubts about the reliability
of the Church, Jeanette moves into another domain in which she questions the
nature of men and women, and the relations between them.

Butler underlines that [b]ecoming a gender is an impulsive yet mindful process
of interpreting a cultural reality laden with sanctions, taboos and prescriptions
(Sex 40). In accordance with Butlers words, until her inquiry, Jeanette has
continuously been instructed about the gender roles. Though initially Jeanettes
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gender choice seems to be her preference, it is actually formed and dictated by the
corporeal styles which are pre-discursive because as Butler evinces the choice to
assume a certain kind of body, to live or wear ones body a certain way, implies a
world of already established corporeal styles (Sex 40). Jeanette is born into the
settled world of established gender and sexual norms, and she merely interprets
and approximates them with the influence of her powerful and prescriptive
mother.

Upon Jeanettes entering puberty, Louise consolidates her impositions and
dictations on Jeanette as she is frightened of losing the control of her daughters
life and of failing to locate her into compulsory patriarchal trajectory. On one
occasion, they go shopping together, and despite Jeanettes objection and
unwillingness to buy a new coat, Louise gets her a bright pink mac. Entrapped
within this coat, Jeanette recalls a film she has seen titled The Man in the Iron
Mask. Though Jeanette refuses to wear it, her mother insists so. Jeanette seeks for
a way of escape; so, she makes up some excuses:
It is a bit big,
You can grow into it.
But Mum.
Well have it.
But Mum.

It was bright pink. (Oranges 79)

In the traditional binary organization, certain gender stereotypes have been
produced and coded within the society. From the very beginning of their lives
onwards, human beings are exposed to a definite social dualistic framework
65
dictating what each sex is permitted to do and not to do, or what gender roles each
sex should internalize. That is, in the conformist matrix, women and men are
made to perform certain gender roles in the society, which produces the practical
extension of those restrictive gender expressions. One of the most common
stereotypes is associating girls with pink and boys with blue. Jeanette wants to
evade this stereotypical binary frame when she refuses to wear pink and prefers
trousers to skirts but she fails. So, she is made to give specific stylized
performances of femininity that are coded in the societys dichotomous thinking.
By performing what her mother has dictated on her, Jeanette creates the illusion of
an abiding self or as in Butlers words, acts, gestures, and desire produce the
effect of an internal core or substance, but produce this on the surface of the
body (Gender 185). To sustain the illusion of the unified self, the subject should
perpetuate pursuing gender coercion. Before figuring out the negative
ramifications and restrictions on her, Jeanette has accorded with those enactments
and performed what has been cast upon her. Because, those stylized performances
and signs are presented as natural by the system of normative sexuality through
her mother.

Louise attempts to suppress and control Jeanettes desire by regulating her body
according to the heterosexual paradigm. She would like to shape Jeanettes body
by the social codes and inscriptions, but initially, Jeanettes body as a medium is
to be destroyed and reconfigured for the culture to come into existence. Here, the
pink coat is like a rubber straight jacket aiming to congeal the body by preventing
its flow. Nevertheless, squeezing her daughter into a pre-pubescent little girl
66
package indicates how delusional Mother really is, as though a rubber
straightjacket will prevent Jeanettes body from developing sexually but Jeanette
resists the destruction of her body and sacrificing her desire and authenticity
(Bailey 11).

Before encountering Melanie, which is the turning point in her life, Jeanette lives
through a process in which she questions the nature of men, and tries to figure out
what sex means without the restraining and clich-ridden definitions of the
society. The chapter titled Numbers narrates Jeanettes dream in which she is
about to marry. The interesting thing about her dream is that instead of a
bridegroom, Jeanette has various possibilities, which is indicative of Jeanettes
ambiguity, ignorance and confusion about men and of her attempt to avoid
singularity and to cherish plurality. Jeanette narrates her dream as follows:
It was spring, the ground still had traces of snow, and I was about to be
married. My dress was pure white and I had a golden crown. As I
walked up the aisle, the crown got heavier and heavier, and the dress
more and more difficult to walk in. I thought everyone would point me,
but no one noticed.

Somehow I made it to the altar. The priest was very fat and kept getting
fatter, like bubble gum you blow. Finally, we came to the moment, You
may kiss the bride. My new husband turned to me, and here were a
number of possibilities. Sometimes he was blind, sometimes a pig,
sometimes my mother, sometimes the man from the post office, and
once, just a suit of clothes with nothing inside. (Oranges 71)

Although it looks like a happy traditional wedding dream, it turns out to subvert
normalcy with its end offering a range of possibilities rather than one single
expected end. The dream starts like a usual wedding scene; Jeanette wearing a
crown and a white dress as they are indispensable parts of conventional weddings.
67
Yet, as Jeanette moves towards the altar, her dress and crown get heavier and
heavier. She cannot carry those ready-made covers of the society but no one can
notice her discomfort. The peculiarity of her dream emerges when the priest
remarks you may kiss the bride. Instead of a bridegroom, Jeanette has a number
of possibilities, which reveals her floating gender and sexual identity open to
other sexes and embracing the diversity of sex and gender markers.

Puzzled by her dream and disturbing talks of women about their husbands,
Jeanette goes to the library in order to seek answers to the questions blurring her
mind. She says: in the library I felt better, words you could trust and look at till
you understood them, they couldnt change half way through a sentence like
people, so it was easier to spot a lie (Oranges 72). Even the library cannot dispel
her apprehension about the nature of men. In contrast, her discomfort and
confusion increase with the story she has read titled Beauty and the Beast. She
is mystified by the worlds wonders as theory and practice do not overlap in real
life. If a beast can be turned into a prince with a kiss, then what about her horrid
uncle Bill or other men around her? With the seeds of doubts in her mind, Jeanette
draws a terrible conspiracy:
There are women in the world.
There are men in the world.
And there are beasts.
What do you do if you marry a beast?
Kissing them didnt always help. (Oranges 72)

In her efforts to attain the answers to the issues regarding men, Jeanette infers that
marriage is not a sensible act but a dangerous one, and implies in the above given
quotation the danger of marriage; if one marries a beast, there is no escape from it.
68
On this point Mendez aptly says that for someone like Jeanette, so firmly rooted
in her relationship with her mother and a larger close-knit female community, the
disfunctionality of the heterosexual relationships around her serve only to reassure
her in rejecting the phallocentric ethos (24). Inhabiting the world of women
devoid of powerful men figures and being coded by her mother with the
assumption that sex and fornicating are unholy, Jeanette develops negative
feelings towards men and heterosexual marriages. When her auntie states, theres
time enough for you to get a boy, Jeanette resists and says, I dont think I want
one (Oranges 73). Her answer reveals her negative attitude towards marriage as
a bond between two people. With the collapse of heterosexual marriages and
relations in front of her eyes, Jeanette questions the specific cultural framework
engendering truths about gender and sex.

As she can see through the phallogocentric discourse generating categories and
presenting them as natural, Jeanette refuses to be included in those grand
narratives and to inhabit a place in this binary frame. She becomes the familial
heroine of Wintersons repertoire attempting to lay bare the constructedness of
patriarchal categories, and through her:
Wintersons fiction focuses particularly on refusing lies related to sex
and gender roles, she attacks various artificial sources of sexism which
disseminate and perpetuate lies about what is natural behavior for
men and women, religion and scripture, androcentric political,
economic, familial hegemony, romance novels; and scientific
discourses about bodies. (Rubinson 115)


Despite the lies imposed by the dominant discourse, Jeanette sees that there are
many truths to be discovered and to be narrated, not merely one truth that belongs
69
to the heterosexual matrix. So, in her confrontation with identitarien categories
and gender/ sex fabrications, Jeanette becomes determined to follow her desire.

Following her query of women/men relations, the narrative moves to the time
when Jeanette falls in love with Melanie for the first time, an incident which alters
her life radically. As Jeanette has not experienced anything so intensely before,
she cannot name and define her feelings. For the first time in her life, she feels
happy and has a great time with Melanie. Jeanette defines this unfamiliar but
enchanting feeling as follows: She [Melanie] stroked my head for a long time,
and then we hugged and it felt like drowning. Then I was frightened but couldnt
stop. There was something crawling in my belly. I had an octopus inside me
(Oranges 89). Jeanette stays away from home very often to be with Melanie, and
Louise suspects that Jeanette might spend her time with a boy:
Theres a boy at church I think youre keen on.
What? I said, completely mystified. (Oranges 86)

In Louises binary understanding of sexuality and gender, there is place only for
heterosexual positioning. If Jeanette does not come home as she used to do, then it
must be a boy issue. Entrapped in her restrictive world view, Louise cannot
perceive alternate possibilities, and disregards the probability of other sexual
practices. Hence, she expects Jeanette to assume normative sexual and gender
expressions, and to like the opposite sex.

Because, the reiteration of authority must be corresponded by a repetition or
citation on the part of those interpellated, a performativity on their side: she and
70
he must linguistically confirm it again and again (Bech 189). By calling
Jeanette a girl/ a missionary/ a special child, Louise determines her place, locates
Jeanette into a heterosexual trajectory and injects the idea of femininity to her.
Louise inscribes Jeanettes body with gender markers and makes Jeanette affirm
and strengthen her femininity by reiterating/ performing/ confirming linguistically
those prescriptive gender expressions. On the linguistic encoding, Butler
delineates that performative speeches entrap one in a closed system and designate
her/his positioning before s/he can assert and discover her/his self by propounding
that:
Gender norms operate by requiring the embodiment of certain ideals of
femininity and masculinity, ones that are almost always related to the
idealization of the heterosexual bond. In this sense, the initiatory
performatives, Its a girl anticipates the eventual arrival of the
sanction, I pronounce you man and wife. (Bodies 231-2)

As the time Jeanette and Melanie spend together increases, their love becomes
more intense. From time to time, after drowning in each others body, Jeanette
and Melanie remember Pastor Finchs sermon on Unnatural Passions (Oranges
85), and they are scared of committing a sin. Jeanette questions the possibility of
committing a sin, and asks Melanie, Do you think this is Unnatural Passion?
and Melanie replies: Doesnt feel like it. According to Pastor Finch, thats awful
(89). Yet, they do not comprehend such a wonderful feeling can be the abhorrence
Pastor Finch has mentioned. They continue their intimacy till Jeanette makes the
mistake of telling her feelings to her mother. Since Jeanette takes their relation as
innocent, she sees no harm in sharing this with Louise: I explained how much I
wanted to be with Melanie, that I could talk to her, that I needed that kind of
friend. And. And. But I never managed to talk about and. My mother had
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been very quiet, nodding her head from time to time, so that I thought she
understood some of it (102). However, Louise cannot tolerate same-sex relations,
which leads to Jeanettes marginalization and excommunication. In front of other
people who come to the church for their regular service, Jeanette and Melanies
relation is denounced by the Pastor. By pointing them, he says:
These children of God have fallen under Satans spell.
These children of God have fallen foul of their lusts.
These children are full of demons. (104)


Attempting to resist all these condemnations of being impious, Jeanette remarks,
[t]o the pure all things are pure (105). Jeanette cannot detach herself from the
Lord. She is still a believer, but she interprets the Bible differently from both her
mother and her evangelist community. Those fanatically religious believers refuse
to perceive alternate truths and accept solely one literal meaning of the Bible.

When the Pastor demands Jeanette and Melanie to ask for forgiveness, Melanie
repents immediately and yields to the Law. However, Jeanette withstands:
I love her.
Then, you do not love the Lord.
Yes, I love both of them.
You cannot.
I do, I do, let me go. But he [Pastor Finch] caught my arm and held
me fast.
The church will not see you suffer, go home and wait for us to help
you. (105)

According to the Church, one cannot love someone from the same sex; if they do,
they defy the Lord and should give up His love. Yet, Jeanette loves both the Lord
and Melanie.

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As part of the so-called treatment of Jeanettes profligate sexual orientation,
pursuing the imperatives of the Church, her mother locks Jeanette in a room
where she spends thirty-six hours without food and light. In a way, Louise tries to
castrate Jeanette and to position her in the Symbolic order. Jeanette renounces to
follow the heterosexual paradigm cast upon her. She abandons performing
femininity, in consequence of which she is castigated with excommunication, a
relegation to the spheres of the unliveable, unviable, uninhabitable (Bech 189).
She is punished because she does not fix the influx of gender and sexual identity
markers. This performative act as an assertive lesbian figure arouses horror.

Despite all these, Jeanette does not yield to the prohibitive performatives, and
does not form libidinous attachments. She does not give up following her desire
but she gives up performing gender reality. Her resistance exasperates her mother
and the church members.

In the beginning, Jeanette is a good daughter by her mothers criteria as she is
heavily involved in biblical study. When Jeanette abandons performing gender/
sexual/ heteronormative acts, she is banished and marginalized since she is
gradually digressing from the patriarchal circuit. Contrary to Pastor Finchs
assertion that Jeanettes soul is at stake because of her lesbianism causing her fall
under Satans spell, the truth indeed is that the authority and integrity of the
Church is in danger as Jeanettes lesbianism is a threat to them. Thus, [f]orcing
her to repent is more about preserving the androcentric, heterosexual, social
73
structure that is advocated and relied upon by the church than saving Jeanette
(Rubinson 113).

In the room where Jeanette is locked, an orange demon appears as demons
entered wherever there was a weak point (Oranges 108). Jeanette states, [i]f I
had a demon, my weak point was Melanie, but she was beautiful and good and
had loved me (108). Here, Jeanette is being subversive as her demon is Melanie,
and she is not ugly, evil or scary, but beautiful and good. After hearing the voice
of the orange demon, Jeanette wonders why it is here talking to her. The thing
says, [w]ere here to keep you in one piece, if you ignore us, youre quite likely
to end up in two pieces, or lots of pieces, its all part of the paradox (109). The
demon offers oneness and unity within a heteronormative frame so that the person
would not fall into pieces. Yet, Jeanette does not desire oneness; she wants
plurality and fluidity. Andermahr says that, [i]t is possible to interpret Jeanettes
demon as a daemon, an aspect of herself, which in an internal dialogue, allows her
both to express qualms about her lesbianism and to receive reassurance of its
positive value (55). Moreover, it is also possible to interpret the orange demon as
the ego created by the patriarchal discourse. As the demon cannot assert its aim
openly, its intentions and appearance cannot be apprehended fully: Jeanettes
demon is neither good nor evil and can therefore not be confined within the
system of binary oppositions which permeates the church (Jorgensen 34).

When Jeanette asks what sex are you? the demon answers doesnt matter, does
it? After all, thats your problem (Oranges 109). By refusing to reveal its sex,
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that is, to be located in the dualistic organization, the demon underlines the
constructed nature of categories. It asserts that having a sex or becoming a sex is
ones own problem. So, whether the orange demon is male or female, and whether
it has good intentions or not is not specified, and left in ambiguity. About this
ambiguity Doan says that, Wintersons aim of challenging and deconstructing a
range of grand narratives including oppressive gender binaries is revealed once
more with the depiction of the orange demon being neither good nor bad and
neither male nor female (qtd. in Andermahr 50). Avoiding categorization and
restrictive utterings in the depiction of the demon, Winterson attempts to
deconstruct the binary coupling, and to transcend to a fluid terrain in which all the
binaries are dissolved.

Subsequent to the exorcism performed on Jeanette by the church members who
lock her in a room for long hours, she falls ill, which is interpreted by the
missionary community as an indication of Gods cleansing her of all her
demons (Oranges 112). Stuck in her conformist values, Louise cannot forgive
Jeanette. When the Pastor tells Jeanette that the Lord forgives and forgets,
Jeanette thinks perhaps the Lord does, but my mother didnt (112). Louise burns
all the evidence of Jeanettes relation with Melanie such as letters and cards as if
this could erase what Jeanette has felt/ feels and transform her desire into a
heterosexual matrix (112). Louises irreversible act accelerates Jeanettes
detachment from her mother because Jeanette regards her act a betrayal, in her
head she [Louise] was still queen, but not my queen any more, not the White
Queen any more. Walls protect and walls limit. It is the nature of walls that they
75
should fall. That walls should fall is the consequence of blowing your own
trumpet (112).

With the collapse of her faith in the Church and her mother, Jeanette can see
beyond the walls that her mother has built around her. These walls are there
merely to restrict her self rather than protect her, and Jeanette discards them.
Additionally, she celebrates her lesbian identity, and gradually, her intellect and
desire combine to precipitate a fall into reprobation from which Jeanette realizes
she can recover only if she re-writes the narratives forming her identity (Bailey
61). Hitherto, Jeanette has accepted solely oranges that Louise has given her
whenever Jeanette feels weak and sad. Now, as she is alienated from the Church
and her mother, Jeanette repudiates her mothers motto, oranges are the only
fruit, and questions what about grapes or bananas? (Oranges 113). She looks
for other alternatives, because Jeanette cannot internalize categories constraining
her, as a result of which she comes up with her own reading of religion/ the Bible/
categories by inserting fairy tales and biblical allusions into her narration. As a
matter of fact, the novel can be regarded as a subversive reading of the Bible and
the fairy tales to problematize the myth of origin, and eventually the patriarchal
discourse engendering and sustaining normative categories, and presenting them
as congenital/ natural.


2.4. The Fairytales/ The Bible: Dissolution of binaries and subversion of
patriarchal discourse

Jeanette as a subject in a constant flux raises objections to grand narratives
generated by patriarchy. To lay bare the underpinnings of the dominant discourse,
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to disclose its working mechanisms and to uncover the artificiality of its
categories such as gender and sex, Jeanette challenges the myth of origin by
disrupting the linear time trajectory and by problematizing time as a continuum.
For this purpose, she juxtaposes fairy tales and biblical allusions within the
narrative. This disruption can be related to the novels suspicion towards the
grand narratives of religion, the family and the heterosexual aim, which are
fabricated by patriarchy veiling their constructedness behind the story of the
origin (Bentley 115). Regarding the origin, Butler maintains that the story of
origins is a strategic tactic within a narrative that, by telling a single,
authoritative account about an irrecoverable past makes the constitution of the law
appear as a historical evitability (Gender 46). Butler underlines the urge of the
Law to construct a truth out of the origins as natural and prior to the subject in
order to conceal its constructed nature:
The self-justification of a repressive or subordinating law almost always
grounds itself in a story about what it was like before the advent of the law
and how it came about that the law emerged in its present and necessary
form. The fabrication of those origins tends to describe a state of affairs
before the law that follows a necessary and unilinear narrative that
culminates in and thereby justifies the constitution of the law. (Gender 46)

By refuting the myth of origin, and thus, problematizing categories,
performativity theory attracts the attention to performative nature of subjects/
hierarchies. It suggests that there is no prior subject/ self before its constitution but
it comes into being by performing specific corporeal acts and by assuming the
illusion of an identity. Thus, patriarchy institutes univocal and discrete meanings
in its place, so that sex and gender come to be seen one (Heathcoten 139). This
process works through binary oppositions such as masculine and feminine which
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are generated by reducing desire, sex and gender into a single, cohesive chain
that mirrors- and secures- the logic of the heterosexual imperative (Heathcoten
139). Through naturalizing gender in a binary organization and regulating desire
by means of patriarchal paradigms, heterosexual desire is practiced and cherished,
yet homosexual desire is cast aside and degraded.

Sharing Butlerian ideas about the unnaturalness of the patriarchal categories and
the potency of the dominant discourse in the subjectification process, Winterson
digresses from the linear narrative and intertwines fairy tales and biblical stories
together. Integrating sub-stories into the main narrative subverts the linearity of
the text, and paves the way for the dissolution of the grand narratives grounded
within the dominant discourse- in this case, fairy tales and the Bible- and for the
revelation of the imposed gender/ sex predicament. So, by echoing biblical
themes while subverting their restrictive interpretations, and interpolating tales
illuminating the primary narrative, Winterson deconstructs Jeanettes received
ideology and demonstrates the ways in which self and reality are narrative
constructions (Bailey 61).

The incorporation of fairy tales and biblical stories into the narrative not only
disrupts the linearity of the novel but also points out Jeanettes efforts to escape
her mothers essentialism and to rewrite her own narrative. This is foreshadowed
by Elsie Norris wise statement on the multiplicity of reality, and by Jeanettes
discovery of alteration in Jane Eyres ending by Louise. When Jeanette asks
Louise about how she has decided to marry her father, Louise refers to the story of
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Jane Eyre; yet she changes the end of it. Louise rewrites the story by making Jane
marry St John Rivers in the end. However, it does not take long for Jeanette to
discover the real ending: I found out, that dreadful day in a back corner of the
library, that Jane doesnt marry St. John at all, that she goes back to Mr.
Rochester. It was like the day I discovered my adoption papers while searching
for a pack of playing cards (74-75).

On discovering her mothers insincerity, Jeanette questions her life and identity,
and she comes to realize that she has been living in a world founded on delusions
and lies. Jeanette reconsiders the categories of reality/ history/ story. Eight
chapters named after eight books of the Old Testament recast the wanderings of
the Chosen People and the construction of the Law as the wanderings of Jeanette
seeking her Promised Land and the writing of her own history (Bailey 61).
Jeanette concludes that there is no one reality/ history/ story, but a multiplicity of
realities/ histories/ stories. Furthermore, Jeanette maintains that each person is the
historian of his/her own world as s/he engenders her/his own fiction. Thereby, one
cannot talk about the singularity of the truth:

Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that
everybody sees it differently. Some people say there are true things to be
found, some people say all kinds of things can be proved. I dont believe
them. The only thing for certain is how complicated it all is, like string full
of knots. Its all there but hard to find the beginning and impossible to
fathom the end. (Oranges 93)

Apart from offering an alternative world view to Louises deterministic and
constraining frame of reference by presenting the slippery nature of all the
narratives, fairy tales and biblical allusions, the narrative also displays the crucial
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moments in Jeanettes life in which she has to choose between her matriarchal/
evangelist community and her own desire. With the juxtaposition of those
narrative elements, Jeanette creates a space for her innermost desire that the Law
expects her to repress, and correlates her experiences in real life with her dreams
in fairyland.

In the chapter titled Leviticus, Jeanette experiences her first theological
disagreement with the Church on the concept of moral perfection, which heralds
her prospective dissociation from the teachings of the Church. When the Pastor
gives a sermon on the necessity of attaining moral perfection, Jeanette repudiates
such a rigid attitude, and the interpolated story of a prince seeking for the perfect
woman is inserted into the narrative to problematize the potency of the Law. In
this tale, there is a prince obsessed with finding the perfect woman. One day he
meets her and asks her to marry him. However, a radical problem emerges when
the princess does not want to marry him as her understanding of perfection differs
from that of the princes: The search for perfection, she had told him, was in fact
the search for balance, for harmony (Oranges 64). By declining the princes
proposal and, thus, uncovering the defects in his narrative, the princess challenges
the order of patriarchy. That is why she should be killed. Bailey comments on this
as follows:
The perfect woman has to die because she will not perform the script
written for her and because she can (and does) point out the flaws in its
assumptions. Anyone who might have witnessed her challenge the
princes narrative must die as well, their deaths acceptable losses in the
struggle to keep the text pristine and its meanings stable. (63)

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After the death of the princess, the prince carries on with his quest. Then, he
comes across a vendor who only does oranges, which reminds of Louises
insistence on oranges as the only fruit (Oranges 67). The tale of the prince
looking for perfection correlates with her mothers quest for a perfect daughter
abiding by the tenets of patriarchy. Both the prince and Louise are entrapped in
their single-mindedness, and their bigotry and dualistic perception of the truth
cause the destruction of other people. The prince causes the death of the princess
for not following the path of patriarchy, and Louise wants to cause the psychic/
authentic death of Jeanette by imposing the Churchs doctrines on her.

After the exorcism ritual and her excommunication by the church due to her
relation with Melanie, Jeanette continues to narrate her life and what she has gone
through: her expulsion from her home, her attempts to start a new life and lastly
her urge to come back home. In the chapter titled Judges and Ruth, pivotal
narratives of two tales are interpolated: the quest for the Holy Grail by Sir
Perceval and the story of a sorcerers apprentice called Winnet Stonejar. With the
Arthurian knight of Round Table, Sir Perceval, Winterson establishes a
parallelism between Jeanettes quest for individuation and Sir Percevals mythical
quest, thus adding a mythical overtone to Jeanettes individual life-story and so
turning it into the archetypal representative history of lesbian women at large
(Onega 147).

Like Sir Perceval, Jeanette is in exile to discover the Holy Grail, a search which
can be taken as Jeanettes true search for her self devoid of patriarchal societys
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indoctrinations and her mothers impositions. The Holy Grail stands for the absent
signifier/ jouissance/ the metaphysical zone. It is impossible to reach the Holy
Grail as it is a site of existence created to perpetuate living. Having departed from
their given homes and favoring to seek their innermost desire far away from this
given home, Jeanette and Sir Perceval reveal that they long for a home to which
they can belong. In the tale of Sir Perceval, Winterson attacks the gender/ sex
fundamentalism, instead of which she offers the fluidity of these categories by
displacing Jeanette (in real life) with Sir Perceval (in the alternate fairyland).
Jeanettes association with Sir Perceval, not with a woman, becomes a challenge
to the patriarchal organization which is based on prescriptive couplings and
gender/sex fundamentalism.

In addition to the tale of Sir Perceval, the story of Winnet, an apprentice of a
sorcerer, reveals Jeanettes uncertainty about whether to stay or to pursue her
desire. In the story of Winnet, the sorcerer becomes the owner of Winnet when he
guesses her name correctly as naming meant power (Oranges 142). Winnet is
taken to the sorcerers castle. On arriving at the castle, Winnet forgets everything
about her previous life. From then on, Winnet becomes the sorcerers adopted
daughter. His truth becomes Winnets truth, and his world becomes Winnets
world: She believes she had always been in the castle, and that she was the
sorcerers daughter. He told her she was. That she had no mother, but had been
specially entrusted to his care by a powerful spirit (145). The sorcerer teaches her
everything he knows, and they get along well until the time Winnet falls in love.
The sorcerer asks her to leave: Daughter, you have disgraced me said the
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sorcerer, and I have no more use for you. You must leave (147). Thus, her
journey towards a beautiful city which no one has gone before starts. She is
determined to go to that city where truth mattered and no one would betray her
(158). However, before leaving the castle, the sorcerer disguises himself as a
mouse tying an invisible thread around one of her buttons (148). With the
thread, the sorcerer wants Winnet to come back home, yet, Winnet does not.

There are strong parallelisms between Winnet and Jeanette as both of them are
adopted, and when they defy the authority of their parents by falling in love with
the wrong person and desiring to follow their own paths, both are banished and
forced to abandon their homes. Despite the fact that Winnet does not return to the
sorcerers castle, Jeanette comes back to her mother for a final confrontation as
Jeanette thinks that the invisible threads are attached to her. She states there are
threads that help you find your way back, and there are threads that intend to bring
you back (160). So, the threads cast upon her bring her back to her mother who
has become a little bit more tolerant as she tears apart her motto by saying, After
all, oranges are not the only fruit (Oranges 172). In Winnets story, Winterson
inserts, again, gender displacement into the narrative as Louise is represented by
the male sorcerer holding power. By reversing genders in the fairy tales, and by
assigning the characters opposite gender roles, Winterson subverts the
phallogocentric nature of those tales and underlines the slippery nature of the
heteronormative categories.


83
Hence, in view of Butlerian theory of performativity, Oranges can be taken as a
challenge to the heterosexual matrix as it lays bare its constructedness and
unnaturalness. Though raised by her mother within binary understanding of
gender and sex, Jeanette realizes her own constructedness in the course of time.
At this juncture, the dualistic perception of these categories is disrupted and
shattered. The conventional association of women with men and female with male
is demolished when Jeanette rejects performing gender roles created by the
dominant discourse and cherishes her lesbianism, instead. By the traditional
patriarchal society, Jeanette is regarded as feminine and coded as such; yet, she
craves to assume the opposite role by pursuing her desire in her quest to discover
her self. The dominant discourse tries to suppress marginalized and polymorphous
figures in an attempt to squeeze them into compulsory heterosexuality. By
refusing to be frozen into a sexed body and to be located in heterosexual desire,
Jeanette is positioned in a decentered/ denaturalized space. Butler states:
The presuppositions that we make about sexed bodies, about them being one
or the other, about the meanings that are said to inhere in them or to follow
from being sexed in such a way are suddenly and significantly upset by
those examples that fail to comply with the categories that naturalize and
stabilize that field of bodies for us within the terms of cultural conventions.
Hence, the strange, the incoherent, that which falls outside, gives us a way
of understanding the taken-for-granted world of sexual categorization as a
constructed one, indeed, as one that might well be constructed differently.
(Gender Trouble 149)

Jeanette refuses what Butler calls as a totalization of [the] I (Butler and Salih
122). Butler attests that to claim that this is what I am is to suggest a provisional
totalization of this I. But if the I can so determine itself, then that which it
excludes in order to make that determination remains constitutive of the
determination itself (qtd. in Salih 122). However, Jeanette repudiates the
84
totalization of the I/ her self, and refrains from restricting her I to a totalizing
mould. Instead of terminating the plurality of her I, Jeanette chooses to explore all
her alternate selves, favors indefiniteness, which precipitates the process of her
subjectification. Lopz comments that in the operation, she becomes decentered,
but the point is that the decentered self is still an agent subject, one that not only
allows but celebrates the rift caused by the multiplicity of positions that she
allows her self to occupy in the textualisation of her subjectivity (251).

By way of conclusion, Jeanette metamorphoses into a rupture in the dominant
discourse as she does not conform to the constraints of the heterosexual matrix.
She becomes a symptom of the breakdown of the assumed link between the
signifier female and the signified woman by problematizing the arbitrary
nature of those concepts and by the mismatch between her biological sex and her
desire. She becomes a threat to the heteronormative dominant discourse by
revealing the possibility of alternate sexes/ genders.



85


CHAPTER III

CIXOUSIAN CRITURE FEMININE IN WRITTEN ON
THE BODY

Let a body venture at last out of its shelter, take a
chance with meaning under a veil of words, WORD
FLESH. From one to the other, eternally, broken up
visions, metaphors of the invisible.

~Julia Kristeva


The fact that we are all human beings is infinitely more
important than all the peculiarities that distinguish
humans from one another.

~Simone de Beauvoir


I know, I remember but hold me, remind me of how
her womans body was made taboo to us.

~Adrienne Rich


It is the clichs that cause trouble, says the undisclosed narrator of Written on
the body, hinting at her/his attempt to go beyond the totalizing implications and
regulations of the phallocentric society (Written 71). Winterson, with the help of
her controversial and provocative narrator, explores the limits and nature of sex,
sexuality and gender merely by reemploying those notions against the background
of the social foundation on which they are created. Written on the body is a
sensual and sentimental elegy for the lost one. It offers a map of the body and
desire, the path of which is drawn on the anatomical structure of the body. In the
very beginning of the novel, Winterson asks a question which recurs throughout
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the novel; Why is the measure of love loss? and attempts to draw the taxonomy
of desire on the body. Winterson challenges the conventional phallocentric
narrative and succeeds in transcending it by not bestowing an identity, a gender
and a name on her narrator. The ungendered narrator reveals her/his indefinite
liaisons with both males and females, and experiments with the boundaries of love
by passing from one lover to another. The vivid flashbacks to her/his previous
relationships like I had a girlfriend once and I had a boyfriend once recur
constantly in the novel.

However, one day, s/he falls for a red-haired, married woman called Louise, and
s/he is trapped in this passionate affair. Though Louise is married to an annoying
oncologist named Elgin, she betrays her husband, and they have a relationship
lasting approximately for a year. Nevertheless, halfway through the book, s/he
learns that Louise has cancer. Not to create psychological turmoil in Louises life,
the narrator abandons her/his new lover, too. At this point, the attempt to revive
the lost one by writing her body and writing on her body starts to occupy the mind
of the narrator. S/he begs Louise to let her/him protect her and write her body as
she is defenseless against the enemies inside. The narrator appeals, Will you let
me crawl inside you, stand guard over you, trap them [the enemies] as they come
to you? (Written 115). The ungendered and nameless narrator gets obsessed with
human anatomy, and to have access to Louises body intimately, s/he breaks down
her body into smaller pieces, and rewrites them through lyrical melodies. In
parallel with the narrators attempt to break Louises body into pieces, Morrison,
87
by drawing on Butlers theory performativity, suggests that Wintersons texts
perform and should perform on two levels:
Firstly, they must carry out a genealogical investigation of flesh and
its pleasures, tracing the processes by which sexed bodies are
materialized over time. Secondly, they must find new and imaginative
ways to disrupt the sedimentary processes of hetero-normativity,
bearing narrative witness to the sexually ab-normal, the perverse and
the intolerable. (174)


Through creating an ungendered narrator refusing to declare her/his name/gender
and desiring to rewrite her/his lovers body using an evocative language rather
than the phallocentric language which enslaves bodies, Winterson attacks the so-
called bodily integrity, evacuates the notion of female body appropriated by
patriarchy, thus, parodies the phallocentrism on which binary charade is set. In
parallel with Cixouss theory based upon a vacillation between the body as a
concrete object and the body as a signifier in the discourse of the unconscious,
Winterson also considers writing a salvation of womens bodies and their
unconscious (qtd. in Binhammer 73).

Therefore, Winterson draws an ungendered narrator and her/his venture
consciously employing criture feminine to reappropriate her/his beloveds
lost/absent/silenced body through an innovative language. With the help of
strategically and poetically exerted voice of an androgynous narrator and a
palimpsest of the female body, the narrators experiment in criture feminine has
succeeded in translating the patriarchal into a new feminine self/text/world
(Onega 130).

88
3.1. Undisclosed Narrator
3.1.1. Undisclosed Name
Names, naming and being named are problematized in the text since the biggest
absence and challenge to being positioned or trapped into epistemological
categories is the undeclared name of the narrator. Butler, too, mentions the power
of names and states that all referring ends up phantasmatically producing (and
missing) the referent to which it aspires because the name fixes, embodies and
entraps free-floating signifiers into the mould called identity, and positions the
self in the dominant discourse (Bodies 208). By accepting the performatives,
authoritative speeches, which have a binding power, the subject is situated in a
network of ideology/punishment/authorization, and becomes surrounded with the
dominant discourse from which s/he cannot escape. Without being named and
interpellated, the I cannot be positioned in the discourse. Only by being named
does the I come into existence since there is no I who stands behind
discourse and executes its volition or will through discourse, which means the
subject does not pre-exist the discourse but s/he is mobilized in the process of
being positioned (Bodies 225).

Lacan explores in Seminar II the extent to which names can maintain the integrity
of the subjects identity as naming constitutes a pact by which two subjects
simultaneously come to an agreement to recognize the same object (qtd. in
Butler Bodies 152). However, it is a social pact that depends on the Law of the
Father demanding the total control and compliance of the subject under
patronymic names in return for a lasting identity. Enduring and viable identity is
89
thus purchased through subjection to and subjectivication by the patronmy
(Bodies 153). Yet, what if one rejected being positioned in the dominant
discourse? What if s/he disclaimed the name as a site of existence but generated
her/his own space? Then, s/he will venture to subvert the performativity cast upon
her/him by not disclosing her/his name; thereby, disclaim the position granted by
the dominant discourse as in the case of Wintersons ungendered and nameless
narrator who challenges the patriarchal metaphor.

In her first novel, Oranges, Winterson deals with the issue of naming, and through
her protagonist, she highlights its significance in romantic love and relation.
Jeanette suggests:
[t]here are many forms of love and affection, some people can spend
their whole lives together without knowing each others names. Naming
is a difficult and time-consuming process; it concerns essence, and it
means power. But on the wild nights who can call you home? Only the
one who knows your name. (Oranges 170)


Also, on another occasion, when the sorcerer sees Winnet, he says, I know your
name, and Winnet gets intimidated as naming meant power. Adam had named
the animals and the animals came at his call (Oranges 142). In Oranges,
Winterson stresses the power that can be conceded from names and naming
process, and questions names potential to situate one into the patriarchal order.
However, in Written on the body, her approach to naming process assumes
harsher implications as it becomes the critique of grand narratives and as proper
names are associated with the Law of the Father and being positioned under the
patrimony.

90
Rather than bestowing a name on her narrator, Winterson chooses a not-naming
strategy, which raises questions about identity and identification. Devoid of a
name and consequently a position in the patriarchal discourse, the narrator is like
a floating signifier defying the role allotted to it, refusing to be altogether
relegated to the task of signification (Critchley and Marchart 193). The narrator
cannot assume a signified on this slippery and unfixed ground since s/he has
discarded the labels and identities imposed by the patriarchal discourse. As can be
seen in Gilmores words, what is missing is the signifying chain of identity that
presumably corresponds to a material reality in which identity coheres through the
progressive, motivated and linked signification of sex, gender and sexuality
(130).

Besides creating a narrator disowning a name, which can be read as the narrators
attempt to blur the relation between herself/himself and the patriarchal metaphor,
Winterson also attacks the myth of origin in the Western metaphysics. Derrida
asserts that metaphysics endeavors to obtain complexity from simplicity and from
an origin which has presence within itself. For Derrida, any such presence is
not really originary at all, but at best a secondary effect that must emerge from an
earlier state that he famously calls difference. Namely, present origins are
always in fact projected (or, rather, retro-jected) on the basis of a situation in
which they are already lost (Bennington 20). The reason why they are retrojected
as origins is to deny the fact that they have never come first, yet they are alleged
to have come first. In order to create a totalizing history and a grand narrative
which has an underlying ideology working for its good, metaphysics tries to
91
reappropriate presence through notions of adequacy of presentation, of
totalization, of history (Niranjana 40). It means the origin is a myth, and also an
originary translation. Therefore, the nameless narrator lays bare the
constructedness of history/origins of the dominant discourse, and deciphers the
process of reappropriation by refusing to enter the ideological network and
patriarchal categories with her/his undeclared name, background and history.


3.1.2. Undisclosed Gender
Another conspicuous feature of Written on the body is that although the narrator
does not reveal any gender references about herself/himself, s/he mentions her/his
sexual relations with other women and men. As suggested by Moore, the
narrators undeclared gender makes the space of narration a virtual space, (108)
and further in this virtual space, the anxiety caused by not reaching any
information about the narrator in terms of her/his name, age, occupation and
background upsets the readers and frustrates their expectations. Winterson, by
disrupting the traditional narrative line and incorporating the gender ambiguity of
her narrator; and through the shift of her narrative, the integration of different
points of view, the dissection of bodily integrity and flashbacks into her narrative,
invites the readers to a fictional game. She seems to test whether the readers can
endure when the story falls apart and joins together again.

92
In her challenge to the traditional understanding of sexual identities, Winterson
aggravates most of the readers as she does not follow the determinate
heteronormative sexual paradigm which
prescribes human beings with biological male sex to understand
themselves as men, follow the bodily and aesthetically approved
appearance outlined for men and direct desire at women.
Correspondingly, human beings with biological female sex should
understand themselves as social women, follow the bodily and
aesthetically approved appearance outlined for women and direct their
desire at men. (Sndergaard qtd. in Jrgensen 119)

The readers are muddled regarding the gender of the narrator as in one page they
witness her/his affair with a woman and in another page with a man. Winterson
seems to problematize the gender/sexual boundaries by assigning different
gender/sexual roles to her narrator. Eventually, it becomes clear that s/he is not a
seamless character but constructed by the stories s/he tells, with different
identities evoked by various memory flashbacks typically beginning with I had a
girlfriend once or I had a boyfriend once (Lindenmeyer 50).

The narrators fluid and uncategorized sexual identity acts in one place under the
cover of a heterosexual man or in another place under the cover of a lesbian
having countless affairs with women such as Inge, Catherine, Bathsheba, Judith,
Estelle (Written 72). Likewise, s/he wears the mask of a heterosexual woman or
a gay being with different men such as Crazy Frank whose chest jewelry rattled
when he walked (Written 94) or Bruno who found Jesus under a wardrobe
(Written 150). Yet, the narrator does not want to be embodied and classified
according to heteronormative gender and sexual criteria because it [this strategy]
forces the reader into the text to coordinate the different masks and perspectives
93
the narrator offers (Kauer 42). Being aware of her/his constructedness and
fictionality, the narrator engenders a labyrinthian network entrapping the reader in
confusion and obscurity.

In contrast to the conventional understanding which advocates increasing the
reliability of the narrator so that the reader can be convinced and drawn into the
narration more easily, Winterson consciously dictates to her narrator the idea that
s/he is not reliable. The narrator questions her/his credibility: I can tell by now
that you are wondering whether I can be trusted as a narrator (Written 24) or
trying to remember what s/he has said earlier, Did I say this has happened to me
again and again? (Written 17). The narrator struggles to transfer her/his past into
present. By stating something indecisively and then restating it, the narrator
consolidates the distrust felt by the restless readers. While recalling the scene in
which s/he and Louise lay on their bed, the narrator cannot indicate the time
precisely. S/he points out:
That year the branches were torn beneath the weight, this year they sing
in the wind. There are no ripe plums in August. Have I got it wrong, this
hesitant chronology? Perhaps I should call it Emma Bovarys eyes or
Jane Eyres dress. I dont know Nevertheless, I will push on. There
were plums and I broke them over you. (Written 17-8)


Through these indeterminate statements, Kauer asserts, the reader is made to see
that what he or she will get is fiction, not facts or rather uncertainties instead of
straightforward categories (44). By repudiating the categories that engender an
abiding self such as name and gender, the narrator wants the readers to become
aware of the restrictions around them and to cherish multiplicity rather than
sticking to singularity. Rubinson, too, supports the idea that the narrators
94
strategically undisclosed sexual identity paves the way for multiplicity and
ambiguity: the narrators sexual ambiguity teaches us to become aware of how
we view the world in polar and essentialized terms; the ambiguity implicitly
challenges the naturalized status of positivist- influenced biological
essentialism which casts ingrained, stereotypical and readily-made gender roles
upon human beings (220).

In order to make the readers realize the inconsistency and versatility of sexuality,
the narrator deliberately dwells on false assumptions and hints regarding her/his
gender and sex. Sometimes s/he becomes Alice in Wonderland, stating that I
shall call myself Alice and play croquet with the flamingoes (Written 10), and
sometimes after recalling memories with one of her/his earlier boyfriends, s/he
enounces, I still blush and asks herself/himself Why do I feel like a convent
virgin? (Written 94). After tracing the hints, the readers falsely assume that they
have successfully discovered the narrators gender and freeze the body as a
woman. As the readers are stuck in their heteronormative gender biased
understanding, they associate blushing with womanly features, and delude
themselves regarding the narrators gender and sex. Yet, as the narration
progresses, and as the readers have more access into the narrators memories, they
encounter statements that can be taken as the opposite of the previous assumption.
Besides calling herself/himself Alice, the narrator also refers to herself/himself
as an unhappy Socrates (Written 13) and the Lothario reading Playboy
(Written 20).

95
The unsteadiness and ambivalence in the narrators gender continues when the
narrator and her/his anarchist, feminist and obsessive girlfriend, Inge, go to
destroy some chosen urinals which were all concrete Nissan huts, absolutely ugly
and clearly functionary of the penis (Written 22). This is Inges aesthetic crisis
because she cannot help destroying phallic symbols. Moore posits that the
movement of the characters in and out of this male-gendered space provides the
opportunity for numerous identifications and counter-identifications (on the part
of both characters and readers) with those who have entered through the door
marked Men (qtd. in Grosz 109). The narrator comments on the scene when
entering mens toilet: a typical occasion would be to find five of them, cocks in
hand, staring at the brown-streaked porcelain as though it were the Holy Grail.
Why do men like doing everything together? (Written 22) By attributing a
double-coded meaning to her narrators question, Winterson again plays a trick on
her reader as the inference of the narrators gender depends on the perception of
the readers. On one level, the narrator can be perceived as a man who complains
about his fellow men and who dissociates himself from them. He looks at them
from a masculine distance. However, on another, by complaining about mens
habits in her/his grumbling question as if s/he is a woman, the narrator detaches
herself/himself from the other men and observes them from a feminine distance,
as a result of which those men mutate into the other, and the narrator assumes the
shape of a woman.

Nonetheless, the narrators identification with the female point of view does not
last long since it turns out that the narrator actually makes fun of her/his feminine
96
attachment. In order to distance herself/himself from the position appropriated for
her/him, s/he teasingly quotes from Inge, who insistently attacks on patriarchy:
[t]his urinal is a symbol of patriarchy and must be destroyed (Written 22).
Winterson, then, reverts to the narrators own voice and continues tampering with
her readers and frustrating their restrictive and multiplicity-lacking expectations.
The fluid and mercurial narrator states:
Then (in my own voice), My girlfriend has just wired up the Semtex,
would you mind finishing off? What would you do under the
circumstances? Wouldnt impending castration followed by certain death
be enough to cause a normal man to wipe his dick and run for it? They
didnt. Over and over again they didnt, just flicked the drops
contemptuously and swapped tips about the racing. Im not a mild-
mannered sort but I dont like rudeness. On the job I found it helped to
carry a gun. (Written 22-3)

The narrators authentic voice hints that s/he may be a man; a normal man
carrying a gun on the job and having a girlfriend. Vacillating between being male
and female, the narrator blurs the lines between two definite gender paradigms,
imposed by patriarchal discourse. By attaining different bodies and masks, s/he
refuses to act on merely one gender. As Butler avers, the substantive effect of
gender is performatively produced and compelled by the regulatory practices of
gender coherence (Gender 34). Yet, the narrators voluntary choice, which is not
to be moulded into any gender identity, forestalls regulatory acts, the aim of
which is to congeal fluidity and multiplicity of sexuality. Accordingly, gender
signifier cannot be frozen on the narrators body. Thus, the narration subverts
Butlerian performativity, shuns performing only one gender and consequently,
destroys patriarchal agenda. For Moore, the undisclosed narrator
is a figure (or perhaps a narrative space or category) that appropriates the
experiences and investments of variously gendered and sexualized
97
beings in a structural enactment of Wintersons particular Virtual
Reality. This is a figure constructed of disparate body parts, desires,
identities and histories, put together in a postmodern pastiche.
(qtd. in Grotz 110)


In the space allocated to her/him, the narrator sways from one gender identity to
another, and cannot be attached to a fixed sexuality as s/he is like a drop of
quicksilver refusing any form of viscosity. The reader of the novel, however,
finds him/herself continuously led astray by allusions to the narrators sex: signs
which it is impossible to ignore and not try and pick up and put together to form a
clear, sexed picture of the narrator (Jrgensen 121).

Another significant scene in which the readers believe momentarily that they have
derived a clue about the narrators sex and gender is the lurid dream scene. In this
vivid scene, the narrator visits one of her/his ex-girlfriends, Amy, and encounters
a vagina dentata on the letter-box:
Poking out of the letter-box just at crotch level was the head of a yellow
and green serpent. Not a real one but livid enough with a red tongue and
silver foil teeth. I hesitated to ring the bell. Hesitated because to reach
the bell meant pushing my private parts right into the head of the snake.
(Written 42)


While fighting with herself/himself over ringing the bell, the door opens, and
Amy utters; You've nothing to be frightened of. It's got a rat-trap in the jaw.
Afterwards, Amy returned with a leek and shoved it into the snake's mouth.
There was a terrible clatter and the bottom half of the leek fell limply onto the
mat (Written 42). Lindenmeyer contends that [t]his passage plays with popular
assumptions about castration and penis envy: the snake as implement of the
phallic woman, the snake's jaw as vagina dentata (51) since the toothed vagina
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is the classic symbol of mens fear of castration, expressing the unconscious belief
that a woman may eat or castrate her partner during intercourse (Linstead 169).

Nonetheless, Amy consoles the narrator by stating [y]ouve nothing to be
frightened of (Written 42), which is double-coded depending on the expected
gender of the narrator. If one considers the narrator a woman, then she cannot feel
castration anxiety as she has already been castrated. Since women are devoid of
outer genitals, in psychoanalytic terms, they are already been castrated. Thereby,
the narrator has nothing to lose, and it is pointless for her to feel intimidated by
the rat-trap. In another scenario, if the narrator is a man, he may feel anxious
about getting castrated and about being left imperfect. However, Amy says that it
is for the postman (Written 43). Thus, the narrators fear is pointless as the rat-
trap is not set up for him. Winterson never affirms the importance of the
penis/phallus as marker of sexual difference, but plays around it, offering only
shifting positions of phallic woman/castrated woman/man ridden with castration
anxiety that can never be immovably allocated (Lindenmeyer 51).

Here again, the readers are invited to the disentangling process of discovering the
narrators sex and gender colored with ambiguity and haziness, and to employ
their cultural background what Sndergaard calls the cultural quilt to decipher
the gender of the narrator and the different clues are read in the light of culture
(Jrgensen 121). Coded by the phallocentric society, the readers have learnt
following certain signs and stereotypes in the dualistic gender paradigm, thus,
they can be on the safe side and rest under the shadow of the heteronormative
99
dominant discourse. Sndergaard also mentions the readers attempts to freeze the
terrain of sexuality: individuals are read as signs of gender. No matter how
confusingly the individual forms its appearance, its co-actors will never give up.
They can be apprehensive, but will struggle endlessly to become able to reach a
conclusive reading (qtd. in Jrgensen 121).

In parallel with the readers urge to be sure about the gender and sex of the
narrator, Written on the body is full of signs, hints and false assumptions that
might specify the narrators sexuality and pierce the mystery; yet, the gender
markers in the text serve dual purposes, and eventually, they turn out to designate
both the male and female sex.

Along with the narrators previous sexual affairs before her/his beloved Louise,
the novel also gives an account of the aftermath of their affair, the sorrow and
mourning process the narrator experiences after s/he leaves Louise. Starting as a
monologue of the undisclosed narrator who tries to come to terms with the loss of
her/his lover, the narration is intermingled with incessant references to Louise and
the narrators deep feelings and sufferings. Fluctuating between memories of the
ex-girlfriends and boyfriends, the readers are tempted to trace down sexual clues
in the story of Louise, too. When Louise remembers the first time she saw the
narrator, she says; you were the most beautiful creature male or female I had
ever seen (Written 84). However, Louise and her implicit statements disappoint
the readers expectations as the previous lovers have done.

100
Anna Fhranaeus raises some questions about Wintersons ungendered and
nameless narrator, and regards it as a challenge to the imprisonment and
congealment of the body. She asks:
Is it possible that Wintersons use of a character with a materially
featureless and thus unspecified sex in mundane situations that are
readily associated with gender is an attempt to liberate not only the body,
but thought, attachments, likes and dislikes from gender? To, in a sense,
capture the psychological reality of personality without skewing of
material sex.

Is the featureless narrator an attempt to separate what is normally taken
as written on the gendered body and to say: Look, the associations are
there without the body and thus the writing is superimposed, imprisoning
the body. (188)


The narrators oscillating between femininity and masculinity, and refusing to be
frozen positions her/him into the status of Kristevian subject-in-process which is
always in a state of contesting the law either with the force of violence, of
aggressivity of the death drive or with the other side of this force: pleasure and
jouissance (McAfee 69). The traditional Western discourse necessitates a single
monolithic unified self having clear-cut boundaries and definite
gender/sex/identity paradigms. Yet, the subject-in-process defies the definiteness
and oneness of this postulate, and instead, favors being in a constant flux. The
term of the subject-in-process is a reminder that a process of differentiation
continuously constitutes subjectivity; there is no core, fixed, unified self
(McAfee 69).

Not only does the narrator challenge the established notions by abstaining from
disclosing her/his name, gender and background, but also s/he subverts the
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appropriation of the body by patriarchy, and ventures rewriting the body; this time
by experimenting with language and turning the patriarchal and centered language
into a feminine and decentred one. Only by this way can the narrator liberate the
body from patriarchal imprisonments, decipher the constructedness of the body,
attain a fluid and an unsubstantial body image and eventually create a rupture in
the traditional discourse.

3.2. The re-appropriation of the body as a written text
You said I love you. Why is it that the most unoriginal thing we can
say to one another is still the thing we long to hear?... When you say it
and when I say it, we speak like savages who have found three words
and worship them. I did worship them and now I am alone on a rock
hewn out of my own body. (Written 9)

The above given monologue of the narrator starts the narration, and displays the
narrators intense feelings and love for Louise. Despite the elusiveness of her/his
gender, the narrators words refute the essentialist maxim that desire should be
directed to the opposite sex. As the gender and sex of the narrator is not
mentioned explicitly, the narrator cannot be positioned in the paternal Law. Yet,
her/his fluidity, indefiniteness and peripheral positioning do not stop the narrator
from loving her/his lover so much and grieving after her departure.

Subsequent to many insincere liaisons with both males and females, the narrator
eventually plunges into a love bearing and defying clichs concurrently. All s/he
wants is Louise as under her fierce gaze [her/his] past is burned away (Written
77). Casting her/his previous affairs aside, the narrator comes to realize the
strength of love and this red-haired womans influence on her/him. Absorbed in
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new feelings, the narrator cannot understand whether what they experience is real
or not. As in her/his previous relations, the narrator supposes that Louise will
abandon her/him: You said, Why do I frighten you? Frighten me? Yes you do
frighten me. You act as though we will be together for ever. You act as though
there is infinite pleasure and time without end. How can I know? My experience
has been that time always end (Written 18).

Yet, Louise, the Pre-Raphaelite Heroine (Written 99), who does not belong to
the era in which she lives, acts according to the wrong script (Written 18)
against the narrators pessimistic expectation that she would desert her/him.
However, Louise does not act according to the expected script and does not desert
the narrator but deserts her husband, Elgin. Since Louise is not a conventional
woman figure, she sacrifices her marriage, which stuns the narrator. S/he cannot
believe Louises unexpected attachment, and comments:
You said, I love you and my love for you makes any other life a lie.
Can this be true, this simple obvious message, or am I like those
shipwrecked mariners who seize an empty bottle and eagerly read out
what isnt there? And yet you are there, here, sprung like a genie to ten
times your natural size, towering over me, holding me in your arms like
mountain sides. (Written 119)

In the vastness of infinite pleasure, Louise and the narrator engender a space
which is uncluttered by association and which redeems [them] from the
accumulations of a life time in which they cherish the void belonging to them and
the desire they have for each other (Written 81). The narrator, in a way,
experiences jouissance which is the attainment of an absolute satisfaction, a
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pleasure with no limits. Jouissance is the acme of unchecked pleasure where
the subject loses itself in ecstasy... (Green 45).

Lost in the gratification and satisfaction provided by these novel feelings, the
narrator attempts to depict the depth of Louises love: Louise took my face
between her hands. I felt her long fingers tapering the sides of my head, her
thumbs under my jawbone. I put my arms around her, not sure whether I was a
lover or a child. I wanted her to hide me beneath her skirts against all menace
(Written 80). Devoid of a place in the patriarchal community and occupying the
niche of an individual on the periphery, the narrator desires to fill in her/his Lack
with Louise, and thereby transforms her into the position of the source of
jouissance. Further, their intimacy and bond remind Kristevas concept of the
semiotic which is an evocation of feeling, desire or unconscious drive, a flow of
words that is more emotive than logical (Hlbling 285). Rather than confirming
the rational and the realistic, the narrator sustains an overflow of desire and
senses. Despite their special bond and jouissance they experience, the narrator and
Louises affair is disrupted by the intrusion of Louises husband, Elgin who says
that Louise has Chronic lymphocytic leukemia (Written 101).

After discovering Louises leukemia, the narrator feels as if s/he were
disintegrating:
Two hundred miles from the surface of the earth there is no gravity. The
laws of motion are suspended. You could turn somersaults slowly
slowly, weight into weightlessness, nowhere to fall. You are
stretching slowly slowly, getting longer, your joints are slipping away
from their usual places. There is no connection between your shoulder
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and your arm. You will break up bone by bone, fractured from who you
are, you are drifting away now, the centre cannot hold. (Written 100-1)

In this way, the mourning phase starts for the narrator and s/he attempts to
reinvent her/his lost lover by employing the power of language and by splitting of
Louises leukemic body into minimal but miscellaneous pieces to rewrite and
discover it in the light of a feminine language devoid of any coercive and
imprisoning heteronormative performatives. The narrator abandons Louise so that
she can get her husbands professional help. In the emptiness created by Louises
absence, the narrator feels the strong urge to revive Louise. Her/his desire to
know Louise intimately shows that s/he is attempting to recover jouissance
they had previously enjoyed (Onega 125). The narrator defines her/his
experiment as follows:
If I could not put Louise out of my mind I would drown myself in her.
Within the clinical language, through the dispassionate view of the
sucking, sweating, greedy, defecating self, I found a love-poem to
Louise. I would go on knowing her, more intimately than the skin, hair
and voice that I craved. (Written 111)

In her/his voyage to discover Louises body, the narrator resembles
herself/himself to Columbus, and endeavors to guess what he might have felt
while discovering America. S/he asks, How could I cover this land? Did
Columbus feel like this on sighting the Americas? (Written 52). At first sight, the
narrators question recalls manly colonialization of womens bodies as penetrable
territories and a dark continent, which generates another binary organization by
positioning men as colonizers and women as colonized. The narrators query also
reminds one of Cixouss allusion to mens imprisonment of womens bodies.
Cixous proposes that men have alienated women from their own bodies by
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making them their own enemies, restricting their site of existence and creating an
area of absence:
As soon as they [women] begin to speak, at the same time as theyre
taught their name, they can be taught that their territory is black: because
you are Africa, you are black. Your continent is dark. Dark is dangerous.
You cant see in the dark, youre afraid. Dont move, you might fall.
Most of all, dont go into the forest. And so we have internalized this
horror of dark. (Laugh 349)

However, the narrator gets intimidated by the profundity of exploring the body,
and thereby chooses writing to delineate the dissolution of her/his body and
Louises body into one another and transgressing the boundaries of each and
every bodily limitation. Thus, writing becomes a manifestation of passionate
sexual love that enables the lover to cross the boundary between self and other
and thereby fully inhibit the others being (Harris 129).

3.2.1 What is written on the body?
In her/his expedition to the undiscovered and hidden segments of her/his lovers
body, the narrator also encounters Foucauldian bodies that have been moulded by
history. For Foucault, the body is the surface on which events inscribe
themselves (whereas language marks events and ideas dissolve them) (Dosse
248). Foucaults notion of the body bears in itself the allegation that the body is
the ramification and outcome of power relations, and his concept of discursively
shaped body comes into being through regulatory regimes and normalizing
practices. Accordingly, Foucault believes that the body is the precondition for
subjectivity, and highlights the power mechanisms that shape subjectivity, mind
and psyche.
106

In order to reveal the effect of power relations on the body, Foucault gives the
example of a nineteenth-century French hermaphrodite, Herculine Barbin, who
was compelled to change her/his sex to male after an affair though at birth she
was assigned a sexual identity, female. With the help of legal documents and
medical reports, Foucault discusses how Barbins so-called true sex is determined
by the dominant discourse. Before suffering from severe pains and confessing to a
doctor, Barbin was enjoying pleasures granted to both sexes. Nevertheless, after
her confession to the representatives of the medical institution and then to the
religious institution- to a doctor and to a priest- Herculine was forced to change
her name and act like a man by juridicial power. Authorities confer and affect
[her/his] legal transformation into a man whereupon s/he is legally obligated to
dress in mens clothing and to exercise the various rights of men in society
(Gender 133). Hindered by the repressive discourse which necessitates accepting
merely one sex and gender rather than embracing multiplicity, Barbins body was
congealed so that it might offer univocity. Butler avers that we might read this
body here fully textualized, as a sign of an irresolvable ambivalence produced by
the juridicial discourse on univocal sex (Gender 135). Submitting to the
regulatory practice of power on her body and being unable to transfer from female
to male, Barbin could not handle the anxiety, and eventually committed suicide.
In his trace of human sexuality, Foucault comes to the Nietzschean conclusion
that the body is totally imprinted by history and the process of historys
destruction of the body (Nietzsche 83).

107
In the novel, immersed in her/his lovers body, the narrator encounters the traces
of Foucauldian bodies, and realizes that Louises body is inscribed by history as it
turns out that her body carries the scars of previous histories: I have had you
beneath me for examination, seen the scars between your thighs where you fell on
barbed wire. You look as if an animal has clawed you, run its steel nails through
your skin, leaving harsh marks of owners (Written 117). On Louises body, there
are the signs of history implying that her body does not purely belong to her; yet,
it is inscribed by some owners. The narrator, too, is aware of the marks left on
Louises body. S/he observes:
The glossy smoothness of the inside of your upper lip is interrupted by a
rough swirl where you were hurt once. The tissues of the mouth and
anus heal faster than any others but they leave signs for those who care
to look. I care to look. Theres a story trapped inside your mouth. A
crashed car and a smashed windscreen. The only witness is the scar,
jagged like a dueling scar where the skin shows the stitches.
(Written 117-8)

The narrators mentioning of Louises scars brings to mind female castration in
which female genital is referred to as castrated, and is likened to an inchoate penis
and/or a scar. In spite of the marks left by history, the ambiguous narrator believes
that s/he can save Louise from the impingement occurring over her body by
rewriting it as Louise has done to her/his body previously. The narrator engenders
a virtual space for her/him and Louise in which they can evade the patriarchal
footprints, and melt in each others bodies. By referring to Louises writing on
her/his body, the narrator evinces:
Articulacy of fingers, the language of the deaf and dumb, signing on the
body body longing. Who taught you to write in blood on my back? Who
taught you to use your hands as branding irons? You have scored your
name into my shoulders, referenced me with your mark. The pads of
your fingers have become printing blocks, you tap a message on to my
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skin, tap meaning into my body. Your morse code interferes with my
heart beat. (Written 89)


Louise rescues the narrator from the binding effects of the society, deciphers
her/him, and displays her/his constructedness since, at the time they met, the
narrator was unaware of her/his fictionality. Louise sees right through the
narrator, and attempts to show her/him what s/he cannot see. Louise notes, you
cannot see what I can see. You are a pool of clear water where the light plays
(Written 85). Through re-appropriating her/his lovers body, and making her/him
realize her/his constructedness, Louise has translated [her/him] into her own
book (Written 89). Hence, the autodiegetic narrator breaks free from the marks of
history by being written on the body, which is a secret code only visible in
certain lights; the accumulations of a lifetime gather there. In places the
palimpsest is so heavily worked that the letters felt like braille (Written 89).
Though the narrator abstains from disclosing her/his whole story, s/he cannot
resist unraveling under Louises deciphering, and submits to her/his lovers
writing process, which causes her/him to become a text, too. S/he suggests, I like
to keep my body rolled up away from prying eyes. Never unfold too much, tell the
whole story. I didnt know that Louise would have reading hands. She has
translated me into her own book (Written 89). Lindermeyer, too, believes that in
the novel, the distinction between 'body' and 'text' becomes blurred, lovemaking
turns into a hermeneutic act of reading and translating the beloved's body (55).
She also points out, if the text inscribed on the body can be changed and
translated, the body is no longer a mere passive object of inscription by an all-
powerful history (55).
109

Lindenmeyers allegation echoes Cixousian criture feminine which is a strategic
writing practice designed to facilitate the expression of womens subjectivity and
desire (Eileraas 84). With the help of experimenting with language, criture
feminine opens up the possibility of representing the female body which is
regarded as inferior compared to male body, and thereby impersonates the weaker
leg of the binary organization: women< men. By generating a site of existence
recovered from the effects of male territory, and employing a blend of both
masculine and feminine points of view and multiplicity, criture feminine grants
women the possibility of discovering their selves. By breaking free from the
influence of men, they embrace plurality. Thereby, it heralds the emergence of an
innovative style of writing which is fluid, open and decentered in opposition to the
phallocentric language which is irrevocable, close and centered.

Cixous believes in the power of writing as writing is about possibilities as much
as it is about the impossible. It is the body of possibilities in the act of writing that
permits the impossible to come through. (qtd. in Ang) Through translating the
body to the paper, the rational to the irrational, the reason to the feeling and the
signifier to the signifier, and through writing the other, the paternal law is
dissolved. Since various implications and meanings come into being, this process
displays the fact that there is no one stable reality but multiplicity of realities.
Thus, translation challenges the origin of meaning, and secures the eruption of the
body into the text. Cixous states:
I dont begin by writing: I dont write. Life becomes text starting out
from my body. I am already text. History, love, violence, time, work,
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desire inscribe it in my body, I go where the fundamental language is
spoken, the body language into which all the tongues of things, acts and
beings translate themselves, in my own breast, the whole of reality
worked upon my flesh... recomposed into a book. (Coming to write 52)

Here, Cixous also alludes to the Foucauldian postulate that the body is inscribed
by history. In addition, Cixous affirms that writing coexists with the body as she
takes the body as a text on which the Symbolic Order acts. In this way, Ang
proposes that Cixous blurs the boundaries between writing and life, treating life
as writing and writing as life. By treating the body as a text, and the text as a
body, and thereby translating the Symbolic Order into the feminine terrain,
Cixous destroys the patriarchal agenda and shatters the binary organization.
Consequently, Cixous transforms the impossible into the possible.

In the novel, in spite of the narrators ambiguous statements about her/his life,
s/he allows the readers to have an insight into her/his job. S/he is a translator, and
translates from Russian to English (Written 94). Translation has a significant place
in delineating the feminine desire. Ang suggests that the feminine:
is the necessary in articulation, but in itself cannot be articulated because
the Symbolic Order functions on grounds of the propre (signifier to
signified), and this excess belongs to the realm of the non- propre
(signifier to signifier in an endless chain). Thus, feminine desire can
only be demonstrated through unveiling of the propre through play and
translation.


Thus, the narrators occupation as a translator takes a new, albeit a symbolic
meaning, and it makes the narrator capable of undertaking the practice of
criture feminine and, by so doing, of giving expression to and making real their
111
[her/his and Louises] unrealisable desires and dreams (Onega 124). Susana
Onega contends that Louise and the narrators;
activity of writing/translating each others body has revolutionary intent,
since as Nicole Brossard has pointed out, the skin of a woman which
slides on to the skin of another woman provokes a sliding meaning
creating the possibility of a new version of reality and fiction, which [she]
would call a tridimensional vision. It is this sliding of meaning brought
about by the mutual writing/translating of the narrators and Louises
bodies that creates le corps/texte or cortex, the new feminine space in
the Symbolic Order within which they can give expression to their perfect
love as desiring subjects/subjects of desire. (124)


In the rupture constituted by their repudiation of the paternal law and in the
feminine space characterized by their excessive and obsessive desire, the narrator
and Louise translate and transform one another. They revive the jouissance they
lost beforehand and since then sought incessantly to recover. The narrators
chivalric act to separate from Louise to save her life implies the presence of a
protective male figure and again gives a false hint about the hazy sex of the
narrator. This also contributes to the fragmentation in the narrators self. The
reason for the narrators dissolution and dissection stems from the fact that Louise
gives meaning to her/his existence. When the narrator gives credit for the equation
body=text engendering the symbolic feminine space for their desire, s/he feels as
if the ground were slipping away from her/him: I grapple but my body slithers
away. I want to brace myself against something solid but there is nothing solid
here (Written 101). Previously the narrator refers to their profound affection as
held by a single loop of love or as King Solomons knot associated with truth
and perfection (Written 88). After Louises prolonged absence, the narrator
experiences a deep anguish, as a result of which the cord conjoining their bodies
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weakens and detaches, and s/he cannot hold on to something solid. The narrator
dissolves, and her/his body is no longer solid, but fluid.

In her/his farewell to Louise, the narrator yearns for her body, and feels in her/his
bones the marks left on her/his body by Louise. Rescued from the haunting
influences of the paternal law, the narrators body is re-appropriated with desire,
and inscribed with love and passion. S/he is aware of Louises tremendous traces
on her/him: your hand prints are all over my body. Your flesh is my flesh. You
deciphered me and now I am plain to read. The message is a simple one: my love
for you (Written 106). With the assistance of Louise, the narrator is purified from
the totalizing imprints of history which inscribe bodies as a passive medium.
Now the narrator is nothing but Louise. Incapable of carrying the burden of loss,
s/he leaves her/his job as a translator, and dedicates the rest of her/his life to fill
the Lack caused by her/his lovers grievous disappearance.

In her/his attempt to resurrect the beloved, the narrator buries herself/himself into
the library, and gets obsessed with anatomy, which is the sole instrument to reach
Louises body intimately. Initially, on discovering Louises illness, the narrator
thinks about the ugly and unwanted results of this long and afflicting process, and
envisages the physical transformation of Louises body under the assault of cancer
cells:
Cancer treatment is brutal and toxic. Louise would normally be treated
with steroids, massive doses to induce remission. When her spleen
started to enlarge she might have splenic irridation or even a
splenectomy. By then she would be badly anaemic, suffering from deep
bruising and bleeding, tired and in pain most of the time. She would be
constipated. She would be vomiting and nauseous. Eventually
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chemotheraphy would contribute to failure of her bone marrow. She
would be very thin, my beautiful girl, thin and weary and lost.
(Written 102)

S/he feels the risk that their romantic relation embellished with desire and passion
might fade away, and mutate into brutal physical change. Intimidated with the
possibility of losing her/his lover in the labyrinth of the medical discourse, the
narrator reads intensively medical textbooks and their metanarratives about the
wholeness of the body. Rubinson puts forwards that the textbooks anatomical
descriptions of the body dissect, name, classify, and so seek to contain the body
under a single rubric (134). By naming body parts and situating them into a
univocal and totalizing shape, the scientific and medical discourse appropriates
the body into disparate units, and colonizes it through discursive practices
rendering the bodys perception as natural. Nonetheless, through juxtaposing
scientific and literary texts, and engendering a poetic discourse out of scientific
texts, Winterson urges us to see scientific genres of writing not as natural but as
a set of stories as constructed and constructing as other genres of story (137).

Besides refraining from revealing her/his gender and performing on this haziness
as a strategy to challenge the constructedness of heteronormative categories, the
narrator also defies the bodys integrity consolidated by the dominant discourse.
Another critic Elizabeth A. Grosz touches on the issue of volatile bodies which
are intended to be congealed:
The body has far remained colonized through the discursive practices of
the natural sciences, particularly the discourses of biology and medicine.
It has generally remained mired in presumptions regarding its
naturalness, its fundamentally biological and precultural status, its
immunity to cultural, social and historical factors, its brute status as
114
given, unchangeable, inert and passive, manipulable under scientifically
regulated conditions. (x)


Considered as immutable, the body becomes a site for the projection of sexes, and
a site on which sexual and gender roles are performed by sticking to the
congenital and so-called natural biological roles. Noticing the restraints on the
body imposed by essentializing scientific discourses, in Written on the body,
self-consciously Winterson sets out to sculpt literature into new forms to respond
to the alienating, depersonalized threat of scientific postmodernism (Rubinson
134). To reclaim the lovers body, the narrator subverts the ultimate purpose of
wholeness by dissecting the body into smaller units. In other words, s/he mutilates
the understanding of wholeness strategically and reverts to the w/holeness by
holding on to the gravitational field in which bodies are fluid, open and
decentered, not to the solid grounds which petrify the floating bodies.

Lindenmeyer also supports the idea of bodily parts connection by saying that
Winterson, using romantic conventions of boundary-transcending love as well as
postmodern concepts of the body to deconstruct rigid identities and boundaries,
escapes total dissolution by envisaging a connected-ness that is not relying on
stable selves and surfaces: the gravitational field (55). Getting free of the sapient
anatomical and medical textbooks full of accumulative information, the narrator
untangles a love poem, and generates a language sprung from both the body and
the scientific discourse. For instance, the narrator describes the cavities in human
body in anatomical and scientific language: FOR DESCRIPTIVE PURPOSES
THE HUMAN BODY IS SEPERATED INTO CAVITIES. THE CRANIAL
115
CAVITY CONTAINS THE BRAIN. ITS BOUNDARIES ARE FORMED BY
THE BONES OF THE SKULL (Written 119). The assertive scientific language
disregards the existence of a subject, and embalms subjectivity with the shade of
objectivity and ultimate realities: Scientific discourse is supposed to link the
reader directly to universal truths about nature, but it offers a limited form of
knowledge that is particularly challenged when confronting the complexities of
human behavior and feeling (Rubinson 224).


As opposed to the scientific single truth, the narrator embraces a variety of
disparate truths as her/his narration employs poetic language blended with
scientific language:
Let me penetrate you. I am the archaeologist of tombs. I would devote
my life to marking your passageways, the entrances and exits of that
impressive mausoleum, your body. How tight and secret are the funnels
and wells of youth and health. A wriggling finger can hardly detect the
start of an ante-chamber, much less push through to the wide aqueous
halls that hide womb, gut and brain. (Written 119)


Versifying Louises body in poetic language, the narrator creates a counter
narrative to the scientific metanarrative. While depicting Louises body, the
narrator does not conform to clichs or established notions which suggest that the
human body is constituted by solid segments such as bones and/or flesh but s/he
compares Louise to a tomb with various secret passages and hidden places. Thus,
s/he sustains that Louises body is fluid and resistant to the normalizing
stabilization and totalization. Thus, Louises body which is ontologically
transitional or liminal (Morrison 173) mutates into a text, a love poem and a
mysterious work of art. It subverts the ingrained notions about the immutable
116
perception of truth, and sexuality, and reflects a self-conscious experiment in
criture feminine, carried out by an autodiegetic author-narrator whose aim, as
Uta Kauer has succinctly put it, is no longer self-discovery but rather self-
construction (Onega 124).

3.3. Poetic language: Subversion of Realistic scope
One of the concerns of the postmodern theory is to overcome the anxiety and
uncertainity stemming from the Enlightenment philosophies which presuppose the
totalization of the individual. Behind the closed and centered principles of the
Enlightenment philosophies, there is a concealed ideology which Althusser
defines as a system of representations that naturalize the situation in which
people live and therefore prevents them from fully understanding it (qtd. in
Herman 206). Apart from science and medicine, literature, too, projects
underlying mechanisms that constitute an ideology. Further, it has an adopting
and a naturalizing influence on the readers: The classic realist variety embodies
bourgeois ideology and oppressively engenders a subject position that accepts
the readily given truth (Herman 206).

In Written on the body, the ambiguous narrators attempt to discard univocity and
singularity is felt by the reader when s/he refuses the readily accepted propositions
concerning the bodys integrity. S/he challenges the doctors premises by
questioning their credibility. The narrator states, in doctor-think the body is a
series of bits to be isolated and treated as necessary, that the body in its very
disease may act as a whole is an upsetting concept (Writtten 175). S/he disagrees
117
with the presumptions of the doctors and their totalizing viewpoints. Instead of
taking the body as a whole, the narrator prefers dissecting the body into pieces;
and by this way displays the interaction between them. Rather than the product, in
this case, the body, the narrator plunges into the process of knowing the body, and
of familiarizing herself/himself with the interaction between bodily parts. S/he
wants to revive Louise in her/his peculiar manner. S/he posits, I would have her
plasma, her spleen, her synovial fluid. I would recognize her even when her body
has long since fallen away (Written 111).

By favoring poetic language over realist language, the narrator challenges the
closed nature of the text, and the clichs-ridden allegations of the dominant
discourse. The narrator does not accept handing Louise over to the medical
discourse, and bemoans:
What would you do? Pass the body into the hands of strangers? The
body that has lain beside you in sickness and in health. The body your
arms still long for dead or not. You were intimate with every muscle,
privy to the eyelids moving in sleep. This is the body where your name
is written, passing into the hands of strangers. (Written 178)

For the narrator, the doctors are merely strangers who do not care about Louise or
her body, and who attempt to appropriate her body to engender one type of body.
Thus, the narrator eagerly hopes to get help from poetic language, which becomes
a means of disrupting reified relationships within so-called referential or
utilitarian language (Delville 62).

Principally, conventional realistic language accepts the existence of an
unproblematic relation between signifier and signified, and eventually creates a
118
closed chain which contains the compliance of signifier with signified. Yet, the
poetic function of language introduces ambiguity into the referential chain and
thereby, problematizes the very creation of meaning (Delville 62). Rather than
accepting a signifying chain, the poetic language involves the dissemination of
signifiers, thus disturbs the naturalness of realistic prose.

As one signifier leads to another signifier, one cannot talk about a signified
reached in the end. The reflection of the split between signifier and signified
becomes explicit in the poetic language, thus it can be implemented to subvert the
underlying ideology supporting the dominant discourse in realist texts. By
abandoning the closed and forestalled flow of signifiers, the poetic language
favors the decentered subjectivication, and thereby engenders a transitional space
in which not only desire is mediated, worked through, transformed and
sublimated, but also a space where new forms of desire may be created (Schwab
36).

Using Louises body as a shield against the boundaries of the heteronormativity,
the narrator finds a new language by means of which s/he opens up a site of
existence that saves them from the malignity of the society. In this site, they can
act on their desire, passion and love. The narrator interfuses Louise into her/his
body, and does not consider their bodies as disparate beings:
Explore me, you said and I collected my ropes, flasks and maps,
expecting to be back home soon. I dropped into the mass of you and I
cannot find the way out. Sometimes I think Im free, coughed up like
Jonah from the whale, but then I turn a corner and recognize myself
again. Myself in your skin, myself lodged in your bones, myself floating
119
in the cavities that decorate every surgeons wall. That is how I know
you. You are what I know. (Written 120)

Different from the medical discourses definition of the body, the narrator refuses
ingrained and immutable labels, and yearns to define the body with her/his own
words and feelings. Particularly, her/his last remark, you are what I know
reveals the narrators dismissal of the realist and scientific language which
attempts to draw the boundaries of the body. Instead, the narrator trusts her/his
own poetic discourse which, s/he thinks, can bring up a purified and an alternate
version of reality.

Moreover, in her/his definition, Louise changes into a bodily space that is fluid,
mobile and open to interpretation. Therefore, in depicting Louise, the signifying
chain is disrupted as Louises body, a signifier, cannot convey the traditional
understanding of the body as a whole and fixed being, a signified in this case. The
narrator is aware of the impossibility of knowing Louise. S/he notes: If I come to
you with a torch and a notebook, a medical diagram and a cloth to mop up the
mess, Ill have you bagged neat and tidy. Ill store you in plastic like chicken
livers. Womb, gut, brain, neatly labeled and returned. Is that how to know another
human being? (Written 120) S/he refuses to know Louise in terms of
conventional understanding and labels. S/he wants to rewrite Louise and to plunge
into her deepest parts, which are not inscribed and acknowledged by the dominant
discourse. Consequently, the narrators refusal to accept the language of realism
and her/his eagerness to employ poetic language makes the novel a text of bliss.
As Barthes puts forwards, the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that
120
discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain boredom), unsettles the readers
historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes,
values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language (14).

3.5. Blissful Text
The narrator of Written on the body is an anachronic subject, creating a blissful
text by challenging the conventional understanding of the text. Unlike the readerly
text, which does not frustrate the readers and meet their expectations, the narrator
in her/his text discerns the writerly text, and violates the principles of realism. The
readerly text situates the readers into a passive position as they are supposed to
accept whatever they read without questioning or criticizing it. The readerly text
fails to transform the readers into a site of production. Thus, Barthes asserts that
the readerly texts are products other than productions (S/Z 5). On the contrary,
the writerly text:
is a perpetual present, upon which no consequent language (which would
inevitably make it past) can be superimposed; the writerly text is
ourselves writing, before the infinite play of the world (the world as
function) is traversed, intersected, stopped, plasticized by some singular
system (Ideology, Genus, Criticism) which reduces the plurality of
entrances, the opening of networks, the infinity of languages.
(Barthes qtd. in Lucy 75)


Then, the writerly text buttresses multiplicity and plurality, and the readers are
engaged in the text in front of them, questioning, interpreting and producing
something out of the text. They are not merely readers, but they are also the
producers of the meaning. Though the readers can achieve pleasure, which is a
state through the readerly texts, they can also attain bliss, which is jouissance,
121
an action through the writerly texts (Barthes Pleasure vi). Barthes calls bliss
writing aloud, the aim of which is not
the clarity of messages, the theater of emotions; what it searches for (in a
perspective of bliss) are the pulsional incidents, the language lined with
flesh, a text where we can hear the grain of the throat, the patina of
consonants, the voluptuousness of vowels, a whole carnal stereophony:
the articulation of the body, of the tongue, not that of meaning, of
language. (Pleasure 66-7)


In Written on the body, with the quicksilver-like narrators experiment in criture
feminine, the readers not only read the text and face the loss of the beloved one,
but they also touch the text. Interestingly enough, with the lively poetic language
of the narrator intermingled with bodily language, the readers can feel the text.
The novel, breaking free from the limitations of the repressive ideology of the
dominant discourse, succeeds in shifting the signified a great distance and it, so
to speak, granulates, it crackles, it caresses, it grates, it cuts and makes the
arrival of the bliss possible in the end (Barthes Pleasure 67).

Winterson, by constructing her narrator genderless and nameless, and
experimenting with criture feminine, achieves attaining a narrative that evades
all categorizations, labels and restrictions of the dominant discourse. Rather than
accepting the patriarchal language which entraps Louises body within a centered
point of view, the narrator employs a poetic language in her/his narrative, and
consequently desires to re-appropriate her/his beloveds body outside the paternal
definitions. By dwelling on the power of language, the narrator wants to attribute
a transcendental feature to Louise. With the help of her/his poetic definitions,
metaphors, and elevations, the narrator wishes to mutate Louise into a piece of art.
122
However, the narrator admits that s/he attempted to invent Louise, to make her
into the object of her/his fantasy, but, again, this attempt is thwarted: She wasnt
yours for the making (Lindenmeyer 36).

Complying with the fluid and mobile position of the narrator throughout the
novel, its open ending, too, suggests that the narrative is not finished yet. In
her/his recluse life created without Louise and for her sake, the narrator sees
Louises face from the kitchen door: Paler, thinner, but her hair still mane-wade
and the colour of blood. I put out my hand and felt her fingers, she took my
fingers and put them to her mouth. The scar under the lip burned me. Am I stark
mad? Shes warm (Written 190). Not only the reader but also the narrator
herself/himself cannot decide whether Louise is real or constructed by her/his
delirious mood sprung from her/his desire and longing. Thus, Lindenmeyer
proposes: Winterson develops a narrative that confirms the power of desire and
imagination and exposes, at the same time, the dark underside of the romantic
tradition: the way women's bodies are used up to create a perfect romance (58).

Yet, by tampering with the text and Louises body, the narrator deciphers the
underlying mechanisms of the masculine and phallic convention entrapping
women, and silencing their bodies. This ambiguous narrator underlines the
impossibility of moulding identity into a univocal shape, and of categorizing it
according to the paradigms of the dominant discourse. As suggested by Conley,
absolute knowledge represses the senses, effaces signifiers and the body in order
to accede to an idealized signified and the spirit (11). Nonetheless, desire
123
undoes absolute knowledge, reason, mastery, decapitates paternal authority;
divides the origin, the I (Conley 14). Out of their desire, the narrator and
Louise generate a virtual space which functions as a site of existence for them,
and protects them from the detrimental totalizing effects of the society.

As can be seen in the close reading of the text, the narrators struggle in
reclaiming her/his lovers body, freeing it from the boundaries of the paternal law
and rewriting it with feminine and poetic language echoes Cixouss term, criture
feminine which results in a variety of disruptive meanings being brought to bear
on seemingly stable texts (Blyth 32). In order to disrupt the so-called stable
texts:
Cixous contends that woman should write her body. What this
means, she explains, is that women must pay attention to all the
nonverbal, unconscious, instinctual drives and sensations of their
bodies. They must accent language with the patterns, reverberations
and echoes emerging from these states. (Blyth 94)

The narrator employs criture feminine while trying to regain her/his beloveds
body underneath the patriarchal tomb. With her/his experiment with language, the
narrator achieves to break free from the patriarchal language, and transcends to
the feminine sphere. S/he finishes the novel without a closed and specified ending,
and again leaves her/his readers in ambiguity:
This is where the story starts, in this threadbare room. The walls are
exploding. The windows have turned into telescopes. Moon and stars are
magnified in this room. The sun hangs over the mantelpiece. I stretch out
my hand and reach the corners of the world. The world is bundled up in
this room. Beyond the door, where the river is, where the roads are, we
shall be. We can take the world with us when we go and sling the sun
under your arm. Hurry now, its getting late. I dont know if this is a
happy ending but here we are let loose in open fields. (Written 190)


124

CHAPTER IV
CONCLUSION
Chapter I of this study has aimed to explore the categories of sexuality and gender
and to display their discursively and culturally configured nature. With references
to different views and researches conducted in different time spans of history and
in different parts of the world, it has asserted that gender and sexual identities are
not congenital and immutable but vary from one culture to another. However, in
the Western culture, in order to produce merely one type of sexuality and gender,
the dominant discourse which is characterized by phallocentrism, has created
ideologies, inscribing cultural and specific meanings on the territory of sexuality
and gender. The dominant discourse in the West has opposed the idea of
marginalized and diversified sexuality and gender, and has intended to destroy the
possibility of fluidity. To control the domain of sexuality and gender, it has tried
to demote these categories to the binary frame such as the masculine/the feminine,
the male/the female and the heterosexual/the homosexual in which the previous
leg of the binary is favored more than the other one. However, by borrowing from
post-structuralism, queer theory aims to transcend the dualistic heteronormative
organization of sexuality and gender by challenging the conventional paradigm
and cherishing sexual multiplicity.

One of the precursors of queer theory, with her notion of performativity, Judith
Butler defies the essentialist view which suggests that sexuality and gender are


125
inborn. Instead of this totalizing and restrictive view, Butler embraces the
constructivist view positing the idea that sexuality and gender are culturally and
discursively constructed; and instead of a single sexuality, she underlines a
diversity of sexualities. By going beyond the constructivist view, Butler expands
her notion of performativity and puts forward that gender and sexuality exist as
long as they are performed. The illusion of an abiding self with a unified sexuality
and gender is created through repetition and the dominant discourse necessitates
the individuals to perform the masculine and the feminine gender in a ritualized
performance. In case of a failure to perform a specific and appropriate gender, the
individual is threatened with the fear of castration under the Law of the Father. By
occupying the position of a sexed subject within language, the subject is
positioned in the heteronormative sexual paradigm. With her ideas, Butler shatters
this illusion of a uniform self with a frozen and heteronormatively appropriated
body. Besides Butler, another significant figure in disrupting phallocentrism
is Cixous, whose suggestion of a new feminine mode of writing, called criture
feminine, creates a feminine space in which the binary organization is dissolved,
and women are given a chance to express themselves. Cixous believes that, for
women, writing is the only salvation to evade the restrictions of patriarchal
hegemony. Both Butler and Cixous aim to transcend the dichotomous
understanding of sexuality and gender by reconceptualizing their language, and
their theories on these categories go parallel with Wintersons ideas concerning
the fluidity of gender and sexuality.



126
In Chapter II, in the analysis of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Butlers idea of
performativity is employed to demonstrate Wintersons attempt to go beyond
essentializing binary organization and to deconstruct the ideological
categorizations of sexuality and gender. The protagonist of the story, Jeanette,
repudiates the dictations of the heteronormative community concerning sexuality
and gender, and ventures to discover her true self free from both her mothers,
Louise, and her communitys restrictions. Jeanette was stuck in a bi-polar
understanding of the world at the beginning of the novel. However, as time goes
by, Jeanette starts to realize the facts concerning the dictations of the evangelist
community, and she wants to formulate her own understanding of religion and
sexuality. Jeanette falls in love with Melanie and refuses to be shaped by the
regulating discourse that requires her to perform the feminine gender and to be
attracted to the opposite sex. Jeanette does not want to act on the prescribed
regulations. Thus, she becomes a threat for the religious community regarding
dissident sexualities as the work of the devil and unholy. In Louises project,
Jeanette should be a heterosexual girl complying with the prescription of the
regulating heterosexist discourse. However, Jeanettes inaction disturbs the
coherence expected from the subject and dislocates the heterosexual discourse as
it suggests that identification and desire should be opposite to each other. In other
words, one should get identified with the same sex but desire the opposite sex.
Nevertheless, in her case, the binary relation between identification and desire
disintegrates as Jeanette casts off normative sexual identity tailored for her. By
choosing Melanie as her lover and by subverting religious dictations, Jeanette
herself becomes a rupture in the dominant discourse in which the plurality of


127
gender and sexual identities can be cherished, and, in her identity configuration,
the binary organization is dissolved, opening up the possibility of multiplicity.

Chapter III, which concerns itself with Written on the body, continues to
demonstrate Wintersons endeavor, in her fiction, to challenge the dominant
discourse, this time with references to Cixouss criture feminine. In her/his quest
to revive the lost lover, the narrator mutates the patriarchal and centered
understanding of womans body into a feminine and decentered text by dissecting
her/his lovers body into small units and by reappropriating it outside the ills of
the heterosexist matrix. In the end, the boundaries between the body and the sex
are blurred as the body turns into a text. While defying the dichotomous and
stereotypical perception of gender and sexuality, the narrator strategically abstains
from revealing her/his name, gender and background. As naming means being
positioned in the phallocentric discourse, the narrator deliberately shuns using
her/his name. The lack of gender markers and the narrators intentional usage of
misorientation technique, engendered by the hazy description of her/his sexual
relations with both men and women, echoes Butlers postulate that gender has an
illusory essence and it cannot be squashed into normative shapes. The narrator
subverts the ingrained paradigm and vacillates between moving from one lover to
another with different sexualities.



128
The narrator not only problematizes the taken-for-grantedness of sexuality and
gender but also questions the dualism established in Western thought by her/his
language. In opposition to the masculine scientific language, the narrator
integrates feminine poetic language into the narration. As the love between the
narrator and Louise intensifies, the narrators urge to penetrate into Louises body
increases. Yet, s/he is against the scientific notion that takes the body as a passive
medium on which cultural and historical signs can be inscribed. Rather than
considering the body as a totalized unit, the narrator stands for a fluid and
malleable perception of the body, as a result of which s/he draws upon Cixouss
criture feminine to revive Louise by saving her from the patriarchal and
restrictive imprints of history, science and medicine. Eventually, by splitting
Louises body and redefining it in poetic terms, the ungendered narrator succeeds
in disrupting the clich-ridden definitions of the body and generating her/his own
understanding with an emphasis on feminine perspective. At the end of the novel,
the narrator succeeds in changing the patriarchal body into a feminine text.

This study comes to the conclusion that Winterson fictionalizes the maxims of
queer theory in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, and Written on the body in
representing gender and sexuality as they refuse to depict these epistemic
categories monolithically. These novels represent sexuality and gender on a
slippery ground characterized by an open-ended mesh networking of possibilities,
gaps, overlaps, and lapses. Due to the excess of dissonances and resonances in
their nature, these notions spill over the moulds reserved for them by the


129
heteronormative discourse. Wintersons writing also dissolves the binary
opposition between heterosexuality and homosexuality, and defies the stability of
the self. By problematizing the fixed sexuality and gender frame of the self,
Winterson disturbs the heteronormative understanding of these categories, as a
result of which she creates ruptures in the master narratives. These ruptures
metamorphose in the course of the novels into alternative sites of existence and
new spaces in which the characters can cherish their individuality and plurality,
and this is Wintersons response to the monolithic dominant discourse.
130



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