THE U1'IIVERSITY OF HULL Representations of Love in the Novels of Jeanette Winterson From 1985 to 2000 being a Thesis submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the University of Hull by Julie Lisa Ellam B.A.(Hons), M.A. April 2003 1 Acknowledgements The support and guidance of my supervisor, Dr Jane Thomas, has enabled me to complete this work. I am also indebted to her for advising me to apply for the Graduate Teaching Assistant position at Hull University and for all of the technical advice she has offered consistently whilst I was working on both my thesis and M.A. dissertation. I would also like to acknowledge and thank Professor Angela Leighton for her detailed analysis of a draft of this work. Thanks must go to my family, friends and colleagues who have had to endure a constant barrage of complaints and tears over the last few years. Without their kindness and love it is unlikely that I would have even embarked on such a project, let alone complete it. Finally, this is for all the absent loved ones who are always in my thoughts. 11 Contents Acknowledgements 1 Contents 11 Abbreviations 111 Introduction 1 Chapter 1 The Ties That Bind 16 (Oranges are not the Only Fruit (1985)) Chapter 2 Love, Testing the Limits of Freedom 57 (The Passion (1987)) Chapter 3 Writing Strategies: Love, Politics and Art 96 (Sexing the Cherry (1989)) Chapter 4 Undying Love 127 (Written on the Body (1992)) Chapter 5 The Language of Love 159 (Written on the Body (1992) and Art and Lies (1994)) Chapter 6 Cheating Hearts 19l (Gut Symmetries (1997)) Chapter 7 Love Stories: New arid Old 221 (The.Powerbook (2000)) Conclusion 256 Bibliography 262 ill Abbreviations 0 Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985) P The Passion (1987) S Sexing the Cherry (1989) W Written on the Body (1992) AL Art and Lies (1994) GS Gut Symmetries (1997) TP The.Powerbook (2000) A 0 Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery (1995) 1 Introduction What a strange world it is where you can have as much sex as you like but love is taboo. I'm talking about the real thing, the grand passion, which may not allow affection or convenience or happiness. The truth is that love smashes into your life like an ice floe, and even if your heart is built like the Titanic you go down. (TP 51)' This reference from Jeanette Winterson's The.Powerbook typifies the value that love is given in her seven main novels. Love is idealised. It is also depicted as unavoidable, as unavoidable as the ice floe and as potentially destructive. Idealised, inevitable love is the thread that connects Winterson's writing together. Winterson's representations of love and the paradox at the heart of these representations are the primary concerns of this thesis. On the one hand love provides the opportunity for searching for freedom and for crossing barriers of sexuality in her work. This freedom is sought through the questioning of the dominance of heterosexuality in Western discourses of love. Winterson's writing takes pleasure in the concept of the forbidden fruit and challenges the discourses that have legitimised heterosexuality and unhappy marriages. It is understood in her work that normative practices have traditionally been a weapon to marginalise. On the other hand, she posits that love and the effect of loving are transcendent. Love surpasses the everyday. It is special. By suggesting the possibility of transcendence Winterson is enabling the maintenance of hierarchical thinking. Winterson's paradoxical position surfaces when love is heightened as a transcendent emotion. This is a political, The referencing for Jeanette Winterson's texts is abbreviated according to page iii of this thesis. 2 material paradox because by allowing for hierarchical thinking her work ultimately maintains rather than deconstructs binary oppositions, whilst simultaneously urging that love should be available to all regardless of sex or sexuality. Whilst arguing that Winterson's version of love is idealised, as I believe the earlier reference to 'the real thing, the grand passion' in The.Powerbook exemplifies, it is vital that the background for this type of love is specified in order to proceed. Irving Singer's The Nature of Love explores the historicity of the idealisation of love, and is useful for demarcating the tradition that Winterson is writing within. Singer points out that: "Plato initiates the great idealistic tradition which continued not only in the Christian attitude toward love but also in courtly and ultimately Romantic ideas about spiritual unity that provides a goodness sex alone could not equal" (Nature 27). For the sake of clarity the original difference between Platonic and Christian love needs to be explained. Augustine influentially synthesised the two terms, but the history of idealised love has not always been founded on this blending of concepts. Philip S. Watson writes the Translator's Preface to Anders Nygren's Agape and Eros and differentiates Agape (Christian love), from Eros (Platonic love) thus: "This love is not, like Eros, a longing and striving after something man lacks and needs, but a response of gratitude for something freely and bountifully given, namely God's own Agape;..." (ix). It is necessary to distinguish the historical difference between Agape and Eros at this early stage because Winterson intermittently places significance on the search for love. Eros, as defmed by Socrates in Plato's Symposium, is inimical to ascending the ladder to Absolute Good, Absolute Beauty. Eros is concerned with the search for, and with the movement upwards towards, a greater good and this is a theme that persistently recurs in Winterson's representations of love. 3 Winterson's brand of love readily embraces the origins of both traditions. She also develops the connection between sexual, romantic and courtly love. Love is not separated from sex in her writing and as my quotation from The.Powerbook suggests, sexual love is a component of her transcendent love. The concept of Agape infiltrates her work, in that there is an expectation that love should cross boundaries and be limitless. The freedom to love is ever present and is re-stylised by Winterson in her refusal of the constructed boundaries between heterosexuality and homosexuality. The idealisation of love in Winterson's writing does not, however, allow for closure for her lovers. In an interview for The Paris Review in 1997 (entitled 'The Art of Fiction') Winterson discusses with Audrey Bilger how concerned her work is with disappointed lovers. Bilger draws her on this lack of closure: "All of your works involve a love plot. And yet things don't usually work out for your characters; you seldom allow them to have a kind of perfect bliss in love" (99)2 Winterson's reply, "well, I don't do happy endings, do I?" (99), underlines how for her the crucial aspect of writing is not to look for simplistic answers. Her characters often search for love in the desire for unity, but are rarely unified with the beloved. The idealisation comes in the act of searching and the desire for unity, rather than a conclusively 'happy ending'. Winterson refuses a superficial neutralisation of paradox, and this is made clear in the following reference: We live in a society that peddles solutions, whether it's solutions to those extra pounds you're carrying, or to your thinning hair, or to your loss of appetite, loss of love. We are always looking for solutions, but actually what we are engaged in is a process throughout life during which you never get it right. ('The Art' 99) 2 Interviews with Winterson are referenced in this bibliography under Winterson's name. 4 In so far as Winterson refuses her characters closure in their relationships, she does not simplify her writing or the effects of romantic love. Despite this wish to refuse simplification and easy solutions there are, nevertheless, themes in her work that become predictable as one reads each of her novels. This predictable quality is most evident in the way that love is so frequently depicted as a solution, in that her characters desire unification with their lovers, even though their love is often represented as enslaving and as the cause of disappointments. When the narrator of Written on the Body looks back at his/her relationship with Louise, for example, and compares the gains to the losses, s/he argues how their love outweighs the pain: "And if anyone had said this was the price I would have agreed to pay it. That surprises me; that with the hurt and the mess comes a shaft of recognition. It was worth it. Love is worth it" (W 156). This decision in favour of love is the one that arises in Winterson's novels time and again. This thesis highlights how Winterson always fmally accepts love, in all its different forms, as a means for living one's life, and this is why I argue that transcendent love is not only described but prescribed by her. Her affiliation to love is always influenced by Christian ideals, where there is a synthesis between Agape and Eros. This affiliation becomes predictable, which is both a strength and weakness in her work. On the whole I consider this to be a strength. Each one of her novels stands distinctly apart from the others but they are simultaneously connected as the theme of idealised love threads them together. Winterson relies on this thread to create her own particularised oeuvre, where love disturbs boundaries yet theoretically allows for them when condoning the notion of transcendence.