The Representation of Reality in the Works of Jeanette Winterson. A Mercury of Fact

Table of Contents

Abstract

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Beyond Barthes?

Chapter 1.0

‘A damn good story’: Postmodernism

Chapter 1.5
‘let’s call her Jeanette’: Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Chapter 2.0
‘To make an end of it Dark had decided to marry’: Gender and Feminism

Chapter 2.5
‘Anyone who fries spinach should be shot’:Fit for the Future

Chapter 3.0
‘We were not lovers, we were love’: Love

Conclusion

‘I have no idea what happens next’

Bibliography

Primary Texts

Secondary Texts

Abstract

This study investigates the way in which Jeanette Winterson’s works represent the self and the nature of existence by systematically challenging the authenticity of the construct of reality itself. It lays particular emphasis on the philosophical manner in which Winterson encourages her readers to live their own lives anew, and to learn to manipulate reality to their own ends, through the formation of a self-image which has a predominantly fictional basis.

The study is divided into seven distinct sections; five central chapters bookended by an introduction and conclusion. Of the five chapters, two are shorter linking chapters. The brevity of these chapters emulates the manner in which Winterson controls the reader’s experience of her texts by employing abnormal narrative devices.

The introduction to the study establishes the eight primary Wintersonian texts upon which the subsequent analysis centres, before proceeding to consider Winterson’s works in the light of Roland Barthes’ ‘The Death of the Author’. Chapter 1.0 considers the impact of Winterson’s postmodern aesthetic upon her work and her reader, and investigates the specifically linguistic manner in which it forms the foundation of her wider philosophy of the self. Chapter 1.5 analyses Winterson’s memoir, particularly in its subversions of the memoir form, arguing that it is just as fictive as her novels. Chapter 2.0 analyses Winterson’s works in terms of gender, and investigates the multiple ways in which her works embody a feminist agenda. Chapter 2.5 provides a short analysis focused solely on Winterson’s fitness bookFit for the Future, and considers how it relates to her feminist agenda more widely. Chapter 3.0 analyses Winterson’s works through philosophical theories of love, arguing that her works privilege love as the ultimate means to attaining self-actualisation. The conclusion draws the analysis from the previous sections together, and hints at the prospects for future research on the topic.

Acknowledgements

My most sincere thanks is due to Dr. Eileen Pollard of the Department of English at the University of Chester, for her unwavering support and stunning academic knowledge of everything Jeanette Winterson over the course of her supervision of this project. I am also indebted to Dr. Pollard for her help and encouragement with my paper on Winterson at the recent Talking Bodies 2017 conference, at which I was able to fine-tune the ideas within this study.

Introduction

Beyond Barthes?

Jeanette Winterson’s imperative to ‘read yourself as a fiction as well as a fact’¹is not a superficial metaphor, but rather a philosophy of the self, by which she proposes to her readers that it is possible to mediate their own self-identity in a manner that is both empowering and enduring. This proposition is common among Winterson’s works, where her narratives frequently suggest that by learning to understand yourself as a multifarious and fluid entity, you can bypass otherwise reductive categories and circumstances. Quintessentially, the premise of Winterson’s philosophy of the self is that defining yourself vehemently, rather than passively allowing yourself to be defined by the thought processes of others, engenders a vibrancy of character.

The texts focused upon in this study will be as follows.Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit²is Winterson’s semi-autobiographical debut novel, which depicts its protagonist Jeanette’s upbringing in a Pentecostal working class family. It was widely read by early critics as a verbatim account of its author’s own upbringing, a reading Winterson strenuously denies.³Boating for Beginners⁴is a Postmodern satire upon religion which rewrites and contemporises the biblical story of the flood from Genesis. It was forced out of print and disowned for many years by its author.⁵Fit for the Future⁶is a non-fiction fitness guide, which encourages women to achieve physical and sexual freedom via intensive exercise regimens and lifestyle modifications.⁷The Passion⁸is a historical fantasy novel, set at the time of the Napoleonic Wars. It centres upon the tempestuous relationship between Henri, a young soldier in the French army, and Villanelle, a Venetian born with webbed feet.Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit⁹is the BBC adaptation of Winterson’s debut novel, for which she wrote the script. It exhibits a high level of narrative fidelity to its source text, and included the first lesbian sex scene to be broadcast on British television.The PowerBook¹⁰is a novel concerned with the nature of love and identity in the digital age. It follows an androgynous author, who writes stories on demand, in which his customers’ fantasies become reality.Lighthousekeepingis the first novel in a new thematic cycle according to Winterson,¹¹in which its protagonist Silver must learn to tell her own stories, following her mother’s death, and her apprenticeship to the blind lighthouse keeper, Pew.Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?¹²is Winterson’s heavily fictionalised memoir, which recapitulates - and posits a questionably true history to - the events withinOranges.

In an interview, Winterson states that:

the principle of my work is to suggest that [...] the boundaries between history and story telling, between reality and dreaming, are always being blurred and muddled¹³

Were she to be considered the absolute authority on her own texts by virtue of being their author, this study would simply conclude immediately by deferring to her own opinion of her texts’ meaning, as stated above, yet this would clearly constitute an incredibly reductive method of analysis. According to Barthes, ‘The author is a modern figure, produced [...] by our society’,¹⁴the superficial nature of imposing such a totalising authority on the text having lead to the fallacy of believing that ‘once the Author is discovered, the text is’¹⁵fully explicated. He contends that rather than ‘the critic ha[ving] conquered’¹⁶through attempts to derive a definitive meaning mediated by the presumed intentions of the author, it should be supposed that any authorial authority over interpretation of the text ceased at the moment of its publication. This leads to the surmise that ‘the reader is the very space in which are inscribed, without any being lost, all the citations a writing consists of’,¹⁷that multiple interpretations of any one text are valid, and entirely divorced from the context and convictions of its author.

Nevertheless, although Winterson herself admits that her fiction should be open to interpretation as ‘It’s redundant for a writer to say, ‘that’s not what I meant’ or, ‘I meant something else.’’,¹⁸there remains in her works an integral relationship between herself as author, the text, and the reader. Metafictionally, she frequently tries to posit an absolute meaning upon her fiction within the pages of its narrative, self-reflexively provoking a commanding authorial presence. This extensive authorial command Winterson sustains over her texts is demonstrated by her addition of a number of miniature illustrations to subsequent editions ofOranges, used to precede each chapter. These icons represent events within the narrative, being a type of leitmotif which parallels the analogous symbolic icons inPowerBook. This unusual revision not only encourages a thematic linkage between the two texts,¹⁹but additionally asserts Winterson’s continuing power as author of the text, by her alteration of the reader’s experience of her novel years after its original publication.²⁰

As this example is symptomatic of Winterson’s wider tendency to attempt to control the reader’s experience of her texts more widely, through self-reflexivity, her relationship to her texts surpasses the rigid boundaries Barthes draws between the text, author and reader.²¹Therefore, a consideration of Winterson’s metafictional style is crucial to any analysis of her works, as although she does not have any final textual authority over them, their self-awareness of her own self as textual author plays an important role in their narrative function.

In a recent video produced as part of the BBC’s 100 Women project, Winterson guides a small group of primary school children in the creation of a feminist reimagining of the Cinderella fairytale. The Cindy of the completed project ‘makes money by doing chores’²²in order to free herself from the clutches of her overbearing family, then uses the money not to buy a dress, but ‘a smart suit and trainers’. In an emancipating manner, it is Cindy who asks the prince to dance at the ball, rather than vice-versa, and when he finds her and returns her lost trainer, she also ‘decides they won’t get married’ and ‘they become friends and world-famous explorers’ instead. Although the viewer is led to believe the story was produced by the children themselves, it is patently obvious that Winterson had a major influence in the shaping of the final product, with it reflecting her own agenda and politics exceedingly closely. Besides the fact that this once more demonstrates her strong desire to retain a strong authorial presence within her own texts, the final project produced by the group also encapsulates the three crucial facets which stimulate self-constitution in Winterson’s writings. Firstly, the story produced embodies a progressive attitude to gender relations, its female protagonist gaining agency by breaking social norms. Secondly, its most remarkable rewriting of its source material comes by Cindy’s rejection of the Prince’s proposal of marriage. She refuses to commit herself to a partner she has barely met, presumably, so she can seek true love elsewhere. Finally, the fact that the project is a rewriting of another text, and therefore Postmodern²³is important in itself. I shall begin by expanding upon the importance of this third facet of Winterson’s wider philosophy of the self.

Chapter 1.0

‘A damn good story’: Postmodernism

The Postmodern aesthetic that Winterson’s writing employs not only problematizes conventional notions of reality, but through this process, works to specifically advocate the pursuit of a linguistically fashioned interior existence; as a vivacious rejoinder to humanity’s ‘Part fact part fiction’²⁴external social environment. The Postmodern itself is a product of ‘the transformations which, since the end of the nineteenth century, have altered the game rules for science, literature, and the arts’,²⁵leading to a contemporary age where the simulacrum threatens ‘the difference between “true” and “false”, between “real” and “imaginary”‘.²⁶As these categories are no longer readily distinguishable from a human perspective, Postmodernism supposes that the world has become hyperreal. Although according to Baudrillard this altered consciousness means that subjects now exist in a world of simulation where ‘truth, reference and objective causes have ceased to exist’²⁷altogether, Winterson’s work embodies a more magnanimous realisation of the Postmodern condition,²⁸in a manner that perceives ‘The postmodern [...] not so much [as] a concept as a problematic’.²⁹Winterson’s oeuvre tends towards optimism rather than despondence in regard to the possibilities hyperreality affords, typically depicting characters who successfully achieve personal fulfilment within the subjective realities they inhabit. Her use of the Postmodern aesthetic thereby lies in line with Lyotard’s statement that an individual sense of ‘Legitimation can only spring from [a subject’s] own linguistic practice and communicational interaction’³⁰within a predominantly hyperreal reality.

By replicating a number of passages fromOrangesinBoatingverbatim, including ‘She had never heard of mixed feelings. There were friends and there were enemies’,³¹Winterson conflates her first two novels, endorsing the reading of them in conversation with each other. Correspondingly, the thematic linkages between the two situations become obvious. Both palimpsestic passages enclose lesbian undercurrents, conceptions of morality, and form a moment in their text which foreshadows a young female protagonist breaking free of religion and her overbearing mother. In both situations, the protagonist’s mother figure interprets the world in the terms of simple binary oppositions, and despises hegemony-breaking formations like lesbian desire. In both situations, the daughter is soon to begin finding her own truth outside of the interpretive authority of her mother figure. Through this one reiterated line therefore, Winterson successfully evokes a constellation of textual meaning, the ‘infinite possibilities of palimpsestuous textuality’³²implicit within the relational function of the line allowing it to signify more resolutely than its discrete form would be capable of doing alone. As it does here, Winterson’s Postmodern aesthetic consistently foregrounds the importance of language in constructing meaning, by its use of unconventional narrative techniques, which explode and reveal the latent potency of words.

Although Silver steals books, it is only when she steals a bird instead that she is labelled ‘a thief’.³³Clearly, Winterson perceives there to be no crime in stealing words; as ‘Postmodern texts consistently use and abuse actual historical documents and documentation in such a way as to stress [...] the narrativised form in which we read them’,³⁴textual derivativeness is not theft, but rather a method of enhancement. When Noah looks at Bunny the expanded consciousness of the text is made explicit:

She had a strange bright look about her, rather like the picture of St Bernadette meeting the Holy Virgin for the first time. Noah couldn’t make this comparison, but it did occur to him that she seemed very odd.³⁵

As the passage itself comments upon, the text/reader dynamic effectuates a complex relationship between the two in which the text relies on its reader’s intertextual knowledge to produce its intended meaning, the impious humour the passage contains only being accessible via shared knowledge. This shows reading to be a concomitant process, in which texts do not inform their reader statically, but ‘read us back to ourselves’³⁶through our own limitations. Although Barthes maintains that ‘the citations which go to make up a text are anonymous, untraceable, and yetalready read: they are quotations without inverted commas’,³⁷Winterson’s intertextuality deliberately exposes its own heredity in order to interrogate the entire institution of narrative.

In a similarly metafictional way, Silver’s unnamed lover inLighthousekeepingis a prototypical blank slate of a character. Referred to as simply ‘you’³⁸, and ascribed only indistinct characteristics that comprise her being ‘a woman’³⁹and - especially vaguely - having ‘long fingers’,⁴⁰her character clearly has more of an emblematic than a narrative function in the text. As she remains a semi-anonymous ‘you’, whenever Silver addresses her, she is also addressing the reader. Indeed, Silver’s anxiety regarding her unnamed lover - particularly in her utterance of ‘I hoped you meant it’,⁴¹and in attempting to reassure herself that ‘This is not a lie’⁴²- can be seen not as naiveté, but desperation. She is scared that this ‘you’ is going to abandon her, and metafictionally at least she is correct. As Silver is a fictional character in the novel, she will be abandoned by ‘you’ when her reader finishes reading the book, and subsequently forgets it. As this symbolically suggests, the reader retains the ultimate power in the dynamic, the text being bereft of meaning without the continuation of the reading process.

InPowerBook⁴³however, Winterson playfully attempts to control the reading experience itself to a greater extent. As withLighthousekeeping, the novel employs a number of short chapters, ‘night screen’ consisting of only forty-three words. Although it would be too deterministic to attempt to proscribe precisely why ‘this section is so short’,⁴⁴its brevity both conditions the reading experience, and - in conjunction with the novel’s other short chapters - ensures its narrative is fragmentary. Additionally, the novel is named after the Macintosh PowerBook laptop, and the design of the first edition of the novel allows the text to further emulate its namesake. Not only does the author’s name appear as ‘Jeanette.Winterson’, but the cover incorporates a number of Macintosh icons within its design, and its square shape is redolent of the PowerBook’s screen. Although through this imitation the novel reflects its own thematic conviction that ‘When I sit at my computer, I accept that the virtual worlds I find there parallel my own’,⁴⁵its inability to become a complete facsimile of a PowerBook ultimately reflects an inability to entirely condition the reading experience. As the command buttons that provide names for its chapters suggest semantically, the novel remains more conditioned than conditioner.

As the contemporary relevance of Noah telling his followers that they will ‘see their country become great again’⁴⁶aptly proves, Winterson’s contemporising of the story of the flood makes an ancient narrative relevant to current times. When the Orange demon tells Doris ‘[She] can’t be at the last supper because we’re nowhere near there chronologically’,⁴⁷her self-reflexive reproach of ‘it was a good line and no one would have noticed it’⁴⁸exposes ‘the crisis of narratives’,⁴⁹and thereby the text’s fictional nature. Thus, the anachronistic transplantation of a fictional modern society into a biblical context functions in a manner which shows that ‘The grand narrative has lost its credibility’,⁵⁰while mischievously epitomising the hypothesis that ‘The future is foretold from the past and the future is only possible because of the past’.⁵¹Additionally, Winterson’s bastardisation of Noah, who employs ‘blackmail’,⁵²and intends to ‘get roaring drunk’⁵³when he reaches the dry land following the flood, humorously delegitimizes his Biblical namesake’s heroic narrative function. At one point, Noah’s and God’s speech temporarily becomes amalgamated by virtue of ambiguously assigned quotation marks:

‘You know how you move around. ... ‘I will not’⁵⁴

Rather than this being a textual error, the ellipsis between the two characters’ speech unequivocally confirms it to be a Postmodern rejection of established typographical conventions. By imposing an unconventional designation of speech between the two characters, the text is able to imply that their ideologies are interchangeable enough to be mistaken for each other, thereby amalgamating God with a right-wing imbecile.

As is signified by its peritextual contemporary journalistic quotation, attributed to‘The Guardian: 28.8.84’,⁵⁵that is also simultaneously a parody of a biblical citation, the novel locates a fluid convergence of the past and present in which neither is entirely valid, and each disproves the other’s veracity over the course of the narrative. Clearly, humanity has only a tenuous grasp upon reality. Soames ‘face purple with rage’⁵⁶shows a contemporary civilisation content with science when it works, but intellectually impotent when it seemingly fails, the purpleness of his face evoking an autochthonous phallus, emblematic of the ultimately primitive nature of his species. Though human belief systems such as science constantly attempt to categorise reality neatly, their inevitable failures in providing absolute explanatory authority prove each of them to be a transient entity. Likewise, when Babel Dark walks into the lighthouse and approaches Molly, the reader is initially told that ‘she turned around’⁵⁷and then, paradoxically, that ‘She did not turn round’⁵⁸when the same story is retold, the aporia created by the two contradictory narratives emphasising that there is not only no ultimate truth within fiction, but perhaps within human experience more widely.

As Postmodern, Winterson’s works presuppose the ‘obsolescence of the metanarrative’⁵⁹interpreting religion as simply a ‘Punch and Judy show’⁶⁰that irksomely distracts consciousness toward the erroneous and the banal. When Noah preaches an aphorism regarding diet on the spot, though he ‘meant [it] as a metaphor only’,⁶¹it is taken literally, becoming ‘a huge success’⁶²due to his followers misconstruing its figurative nature. Clearly, language can become self-defeating in the hands of large theological bodies. Interestingly then, Winterson’s works promote the establishment of ‘a counter-myth’⁶³in the self, a use of language itself as a potent way of dealing with the contemporary Postmodern world.

The fact that Winterson wrotePassion‘before [she] had been to Venice’⁶⁴exposes an important aspect of her engagement with the Postmodernist concept of hyperreality. As her descriptions of the city are hence not influenced by any personal experience, but merely imbibed vicariously, they are seemingly distanced from any real essence. Yet, as Pearce states, ‘Winterson’s world is not simply one of facts, but one of stories and narratives [...] hence, the realms of the aesthetic and the imagination assume a new importance’⁶⁵for the protagonists of her novels that is authentic in itself. Her ability to make ‘us sit up [...] and glory in the power of words to conjure a world into existence, and to create an alternative reality’⁶⁶directly resists Baudrillard’s hypothesis that the image ‘bears no relation to any reality whatsoever’.⁶⁷In Winterson’s works, ‘The postmodern [...] is not a degeneration into ‘hyperreality’ but a questioning of what reality can mean and how we can come to know it’,⁶⁸that emphasises the diverse possibilities of applying a fantastic approach to daily life.

Respectively, Gloria’s mother’s exclamation that ‘I didn’t recognise you without my arm’,⁶⁹shows that her misperception of her daughter is of an entirely subjective origin, and accordingly works in a ludic manner to illustrate that perception is an entirely individual phenomenon. Given the human incapability to comprehend an objective external reality, ‘The social subject itself seems to dissolve’,⁷⁰given that parallax necessarily destabilises the interpretation of all individual character. Crucially though, Winterson construes this ostensibly daunting premise as an opportunity. The important, yet seemingly impossible, detail that Silver⁷¹‘[has] no father’⁷²intertextually relates her character with the gods of Greek mythology. Whilst Athena is born to the world from the head of her father Zeus, rather than from the body of any mother, and is therefore essentially motherless, Silver is in contrast, essentially fatherless. This association foregrounds the fact that modern narratives use the same techniques as ancient ones, and that they share a common fascination with ‘thepossibilitiesoffered by such ‘primary’ lack’,⁷³to the extent that fiction becomes a valid method of expanding the boundaries of human experience beyond what is conventionally considered to be possible.

The Orange Demon states that:

The vital thing is to have an alternative so that people will realise that there’s no such thing as a true story. [...] Are you willing to let that baldie and his mad family rewrite the world without any interruptions?⁷⁴

Its address highlights the necessity of combating ideologies, such as the shambolic religion Winterson portrays inBoating, through the creation of oppositional subjective fictional representations of reality. Although Henri’s observation that ‘Words like devastation, rape, slaughter, carnage, starvation are lock and key words to keep the pain at bay’⁷⁵shows language to be fallible as a tool for describing emotional interiority, it also highlights that carefully constructed language can provide a psychological sanctuary for the individual. While ‘ideology is constantly up against forces of resistance’,⁷⁶it remains ‘engaged in a constant struggle not just to extend its power but to hold on to the territory it has already colonised’.⁷⁷As such Winterson advocates that, given the unavoidability of the mental worlds we live in being conditioned by the instability of language, we should attempt to revolutionise that language to the extent that it comes to promote our own interests, and accordingly, generates our own subjective reality.

[...]

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¹Jeanette Winterson, ‘Introduction’ toOranges Are Not the Only Fruit(London: Vintage, 2014), p. xii.

²Henceforth referred to asOranges.

³I will however note thatOrangesplays only a marginal role in this study. Although it is undeniably a remarkable novel in its own right, I generally consider it less sophisticated, and therefore inferior to, its incredibly faithful adaptation.

⁴Henceforth referred to asBoating.

⁵In the peritextual bibliography of Winterson’s latest novelThe Gap of Time(2015),Boatingis listed within the ‘Fiction’ section for the first time, rather than separately - as a ‘Comic Novel’.

⁶Henceforth referred to asFuture.

⁷Futuresuffers a greater indignity thanBoating, in that it is not only remains out of print, but additionally remains unlisted in Winterson’s bibliography; both in her recent novels, and on her official site at http://www.jeanettewinterson.com.

⁸Henceforth referred to asPassion.

⁹Henceforth referred to asFruit.

¹⁰Henceforth referred to asPowerBook.

¹¹Margaret Reynolds, ‘Interview with Jeanette Winterson’, in Margaret Reynolds and Jonathan Noakes,Jeanette Winterson: The Essential Guide(London: Vintage, 2003), p. 25.

¹²Henceforth referred to asNormal?.

¹³Colette Douglas-Home, ‘Compromise is not the only way’,The Scotsman, 24 September 1990, Lifestyle section, p. 11.

¹⁴Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, trans., Richard Howard, http://www.tbook.constantvzw.org/wp-content/death_authorbarthes.pdf [accessed 14 March 2017], p. 2.

¹⁵Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, p. 5.

¹⁶Ibid.

¹⁷Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, p. 6.

¹⁸Louise Tucker, ‘From Innocence to Experience: Louise Tucker talks to Jeanette Winterson’, inLighthousekeeping(London: HarperCollins, 2004), appendix, p. 11.

¹⁹The specific nature of the thematic linkage betweenOrangesandPowerBookwould perhaps be worth pursuing in an essay subsequent to this admittedly brief study of Winterson’s writings.

²⁰My edition, which has the addition of the symbols, is the 2014 edition. Further research is needed to determine the first edition - if there is another - in which the symbols appear.

²¹As I shall demonstrate further in Chapter 1.5, by fiercely asserting control within her texts, Winterson is able to inscribe in their pages - to varying extents, and in the greatest case, inNormal?andOranges- a fictionalised essence of herself that is created from her own language.

²²‘Cinderella: For a New Generation - 100 Women: Jeanette Winterson helps children rewrite Cinderella’,

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-38014161 [accessed 14 March 2017].

²³Although the earlier cultural movement of Modernism also often involves the rewriting of earlier texts, as I shall demonstrate in the following chapter, Winterson’s writing is specifically Postmodern.

²⁴Winterson, ‘Introduction’ toOranges are Not the Only Fruit, p. xiv.

²⁵Jean-François Lyotard,The Postmodern Condition, inLiterary Theory: An Anthology, (eds.) Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), p. 355.

²⁶Jean Baudrillard,Simulacra and Simulation, inLiterary Theory: An Anthology, (eds.) Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), p. 366 - 367.

²⁷Baudrillard,Simulacra and Simulation, p. 367.

²⁸Such a complex philosophical revolution as Postmodernism is certainly no clear-cut cultural movement though, given their quintessentially challenging natures, Postmodern forms elude such simple overarching classifications.

²⁹Linda Hutcheon,The Politics of Postmodernism(London: Routledge, 2002), p. 15.

³⁰Lyotard,The Postmodern Condition, pp. 360 - 361.

³¹Jeanette Winterson,Boating for Beginners(London: Methuen, 1992), p. 54; Jeanette Winterson,Oranges are Not the Only Fruit(London: Vintage, 2014), p. 5. The unconventionality of such palimpsestuousity is demonstrated further, of course, by the necessarily unconventional nature of this reference, the palimpsest being a postmodern device which challenges conventional forms.

³²Sarah Dillon,The Palimpsest: Literature, Criticism, Theory(New York: Continuum, 2007), p. 95.

³³Jeanette Winterson,Lighthousekeeping(London: HarperCollins, 2004), p. 157.

³⁴Hutcheon,The Politics of Postmodernism, p. 84.

³⁵Winterson,Boating for Beginners, p. 135.

³⁶Winterson, ‘Introduction’ toOranges are Not the Only Fruit, p. xii.

³⁷Roland Barthes, ‘From Work to Text’, inImage-Music-Text(London: Fontana, 1977), p. 160. Emphasis in original.

³⁸Winterson,Lighthousekeeping, p. 209.

³⁹Winterson,Lighthousekeeping, p. 200.

⁴⁰Winterson,Lighthousekeeping, p. 201.

⁴¹Winterson,Lighthousekeeping, p. 216.

⁴²Ibid.

⁴³Although Winterson does the same in all her novels, to some extent.

⁴⁴Margaret Reynolds and Jonathan Noakes,Jeanette Winterson: The Essential Guide(London: Vintage, 2003), p. 137.

⁴⁵Jeanette Winterson,The PowerBook(London: Vintage, 2001), p. 94.

⁴⁶Winterson,Boating for Beginners, p. 70.

⁴⁷Winterson,Boating for Beginners, p. 147.

⁴⁸Winterson,Boating for Beginners, p. 148.

⁴⁹Lyotard,The Postmodern Condition, p. 355.

⁵⁰Lyotard,The Postmodern Condition, p. 359.

⁵¹Jeanette Winterson,The Passion(London: Vintage, 2014), p. 62.

⁵²Winterson,Boating for Beginners, p. 136.

⁵³Winterson,Boating for Beginners, p. 127.

⁵⁴Winterson,Boating for Beginners, p. 90.

⁵⁵Winterson,Boating for Beginners, p. 7. Emphasis in original.

⁵⁶Winterson,Boating for Beginners, p. 159.

⁵⁷Winterson,Lighthousekeeping, p. 99.

⁵⁸Winterson,Lighthousekeeping, p. 102.

⁵⁹Lyotard,The Postmodern Condition, p. 356.

⁶⁰Winterson,Boating for Beginners, p. 66.

⁶¹Winterson,Boating for Beginners, p. 15.

⁶²Ibid.

⁶³Winterson,Boating for Beginners, p. 66.

⁶⁴Jeanette Winterson, ‘About the author’ inLighthousekeeping, appendix, p. 17.

⁶⁵Lynne Pearce, ‘The Emotional Politics of Reading Winterson’, (eds.) Helena Grice and Tim Woods, ‘I’m telling you stories’: Jeanette Winterson and the Politics of Reading(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003), p. 34.

⁶⁶Lyn Pykett, ‘A New Way With Words?’ in ‘I’m telling you stories’: Jeanette Winterson and the Politics of Reading, (eds.) Helena Grice and Tim Woods (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003), p. 60.

⁶⁷Baudrillard,Simulacra and Simulation, p. 368.

⁶⁸Hutcheon,The Politics of Postmodernism, p. 32.

⁶⁹Winterson,Boating for Beginners, p. 106.

⁷⁰Lyotard,The Postmodern Condition, p. 360.

⁷¹Interestingly, Silver appears to be a namesake for the Zoe Silver whom Winterson thanks onLighthousekeeping’sacknowledgements page, on a list which also includes a Henri Llewelyn Davies; presumably a namesake for the protagonist ofPassion. The fictional characters’ names therefore appear to have been evoked metafictionally, from a non-fictional foundation, in a manner that queries the veracity of our own reality as the ultimate reality; a conclusion further supported by the fact that Winterson again has a protagonist named Silver in her young adult novelTanglewreck.

⁷²Winterson,Lighthousekeeping, p. 3.

⁷³Eileen Pollard, ‘“Trust me, I’m telling you my life story”: Queer Return in the memoirs of Jeanette Winterson and Jackie Kay’,FORUM: University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture and the Arts, 15 (2012), p. 4. Emphasis in original.

⁷⁴Winterson,Boating for Beginners, p. 124.

⁷⁵Winterson,The Passion, p. 5.

⁷⁶John Fiske, Culture, Ideology, Interpellation, in Literary Theory: An Anthology, (eds.) Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), p. 1273.

⁷⁷Ibid.