Reference and repetition in Jeanette Winterson's novels

Abstract

Jeanette Winterson’s infamous use of intertextuality and self-quotation, often dismissed as arrogance, compels her readers to locate her works within an interconnected cycle. This thesis argues that Winterson’s reference and repetition are evidence of a poststructuralist project: she reconceives the unities of autobiography, history, and identity as networks of relations. Foucauldian archaeology, the study of discourse as a system of references rather than a thematic unity, provides an appropriate toolkit in studying Winterson’s discursive method. Her memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? returns to many of the same events of her semi-autobiographical novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, suggesting that any attempt at writing the authoritative version of one’s life story is always partial or fractured. Much the same, the fantastic elements and self-deprecating narrators within her historical novels The Passion and Sexing the Cherry imply authoritative or historical facts are as fictions, open to the surreal or contradictory and accessed through the personal. Last, in Written on the Body, Winterson encourages her reader to interpret the narrator’s gender from textual clues, just as the reader of Weight confronts biographical parallels between author and character; in both cases, identity is a narrative, open to play and revision.