Multiplying Narratives, Disclosing Bodies: Story-Telling and Embodiment in Jeanette Winterson’s “Sexing the Cherry” and “The PowerBook”

Abstract

Instead of analysing Winterson’s texts from a postmodern and/or lesbian angle, which constitutes the main focus of many investigations of her texts, the thesis explores whether the intersecting themes of embodiment and story-telling propose innovative ways to represent bodies and narrate stories in “Sexing the Cherry” and “The PowerBook”. The deployed theoretical framework consists of psychoanalytic theories, women’s studies, philosophy and science studies, which are put into practice through the methodology of close-reading and textual analysis. The thesis argues that the two novels echo and interweave each other’s themes. Consequently, “The PowerBook”, published eleven years after “Sexing the Cherry”, discloses the methods used in the latter to re/write history. Similarly, the subject matter of virtual communication in “The PowerBook” serves as a foil for the use of multiple narratives in “Sexing the Cherry”. Thus, even though “Sexing the Cherry” and “The PowerBook” are separated by eleven years of time, many instances of cross-fertilisation occur