Prof. Dr. Fernando de Toro Jeanette Winterson 1987 The Passion English.

Prof. Dr. Fernando de ToroProf. Dr. Fernando de Toro

Jeanette Winterson1987

The Passion

English

Subversion of Sexual Identity in Jeanette Winterson The Passion.

The passion is the plight of a specific woman, Villanelle, who uses masquerade, the blurring of appearance and reality, as a stratagem both to subvert categorization according to sex and to denounce the social and political consequences of such a categorization.

Jeannete Winterson: The Passion

Although lesbianism had already been a keynote of Winterson’s earlier novels, Oranges and not fruits, in The Passion the author takes the issue a step further in order to question and problematize the very notion of sexual identity as a means of overthrowing the constructed fixity of heterosexuality and the established presumptions of a binary gender system.

The category woman is too restrictive in the sense that it only comprises the notion of gender but says nothing of the context in which the category woman has to be defined.


On the other hand, the narrow categorization of woman leaves out many other modalities which are inevitably connected with the notions of gender, such as class, race, ethnicity, or sexuality.

Hence, it is only through problematizing the category woman that feminism as a politics of representation may be empowered to formulate a deconstruction of the notion of identity as engendered and naturalized by contemporary structures of power.


In The Passion, Winterson disrupts the categories of gender, the body and sexuality and brings about their deconstructive resignification and proliferation beyond the limits of the above mentioned binary frame.

The means she selects for such a denaturalisation are a set of parodic practices based on a performative theory of gender acts, which include impersonation and masquerade, and which are mainly, but not exclusively, carried out by the female character in the novel, Villanelle, an indefatigable gambler who is never smashed or crushed by the experiences she goes through.


In contrast to a strategy that consolidates woman’s identity through an exclusionary process of differentiation, Winterson offers a strategy of reappropriation and subversive redeployment of those values which traditionally have been regarded as either masculine or feminine.

Consequently, therefore, The Passion could be said to take part in those “gender practices within gay and lesbian cultures” which, as Judith Butler states, “often thematize the natural in parodic context that bring into relief the performative construction of an original and true sex” (1990, viii)


Winterson incorporates sexual binarism into the very structure of her novel only to deconstruct it.

From the beginning and all through the novel, both at the level of form and the contents, a very strong, overtly highlighted tendency to sexual binarism can be perceived.

Indeed the novel is narrated by two opposed but complementary figures, significantly a man, Henri, and woman, Villanelle, who are simultaneously, and on an equal level, the main characters in the story.


These two characters and the binary opposition ‘real/unreal’ that exists between the worlds they inhabit provide the basic dual structure of the novel.

This duality prepares the ground for the development of the idea that underlies the novel, namely that ‘the category of sex and the naturalize institution of heterosexuality are constructs, socially instituted and socially regulated fantasies or fetishes, not natural categories but political ones (Butler, 126).


The Passion questions the apparent stability of binary sex from within, that is, she explicitly uses those social clichés, those sets of binary oppositions that constitute men’s sexual identity as opposed to women’s sexual identity, in order to deconstruct them and to expose their constructedness and arbitrariness.

Hence in the novel men disclose certain features which have been traditionally associated with women.

Inevitably in The Passion it is the men who are weak and passive.


When Henri talks about his parents, he always refers to his father as an extremely quiet, sensitive man; for instance, when Henri leaves his house in order to become a soldier, says “Mother did not cry” (p.12)

Likewise, Villanelle also reverses the binary oppositions strong/weak, a active/passive in the persons of her father and mother: in a fairy-tale mood she says, “There was once a weak and ….. their children” (51)


Even Napoleon with all his power and authority proves to be a dependent man when he is deprived of his loving trustful soldiers and is left on his own, a man who needs Henri to restore to him his lost confidence: “When the wind….. small boat home”. 134

Yet the most androgynous male character in the novel is significantly Henri, who tells the reader that his mother compared him to herself: ‘You’re like I was, she said.’ No patience with a weak heart’ (p. 32) who is unable to kill moles except ‘by looking the other way’. 31


Henri describes himself as a very sentimental emotional man who misses his mother and ‘I was homesick … the hill where the sun slants across the valley’ (6) from the very first days in the army, his is compared as a duckling, who in his frailty, needs to stick for survival to a strong figure, first his mother and then the ideal image of Napoleon he constructs in his mind.


Henri’s androgynous features are so obvious that when he envisions his married life with Villanelle, he sees himself as impersonating the traditionally passive, resigned, impotent fate of wives rather than the authoritarian destiny of husbands: “She’d vanish for days…. She’d grow to hate me..” 123

The questioning of sexual identity as traditionally understood is taken to an extreme in the person of Villanelle, a bisexual woman who cross-dresses as a man for money and for fun and who, in the story, shares with Venetian boatmen one of their exclusive male features, their webbed feet.


At the beginning of her narrative in chapter two, Villanelle says: ‘Rumour has….. heredity’ (49) And immediately afterwards, in a tone which again reminds the reader of a fairy tale, she describes the whole ritual that boatmen’s wives had to perform when they were pregnant: “This is a legend… secrets and their trade…. (49-50)

A clean heart for girls; webbed feet for boys. That is the tradition.


However, the performance of the ritual carried out by Villanelle’s mother causes Villanelle to subvert tradition by the fact that she is born with webbed feet like men: “It was an easy…. Boatmen….” 51

Boatmen constitute a hermetic guild. There trade is patriarchally organized for it is inherited by the son from the father. (50)


Furthermore, their secret ways, inaccessible to any other social or sexual group, guarantee their power and their privileged position which is biologically marked by their webbed feet.


Apart from the patriarchal connotations already mentioned, Villanelle’s society is also phallocentric, the phallus being precisely represented in those webbed feet that only boatmen have: “There never was a girl whose feet were webbed in the entire history of the boatmen’(51) until Villanelle is born.

The reaction of society, represented by the midwife and Villanelle’s own mother, is explicit enough: “The midwife….. for a life time…” 51-52


But any effort to do away with the ‘offending parts’ is pointless. Villanelle is biologically marked by the phallus precisely to deconstruct patriarchy and phallocentrism.

This is why she grows to be a rather androgynous creature, equally attracted to men, women and gambling.

She would have liked to be a ‘boatmen’ herself, but again society reacts negatively against any such intrusion in the establish order of patriarchy: ‘what I would have most liked to have done, worked the boats, was closed to me on account of my sex’ (53)


Winterson: 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. Perhaps don’t get a chance to find out about themselves. They are told who they are, that they fit in a certain patterns. How many people can honestly say that they have made their own choices, their own decisions? But that’s largely because of the picture book world we are offered, the story that we are told about ourselves, rather than being encouraged to tell our own stories. (Barr, Face to face with JW, 1991) 271


Masquerade

Butler refers to the complex and successful technique used by Winterson to subvert gender roles; that is, the technique of masquerade.

In other words, The Passion is, among many other things, a novel about masquerading.

In fact, masquerade occurs at least at three levels in the text:


(a) and b) The first two levels are related to Villanelle and Venice, the peculiar fantasy-world she inhabits.

c) the third level has much more to do with the author herself and with her choice of the historical period in which the events occur, that of Napoleon’s imperial campaigns.

a) Venice, city of carnival and masks, an enchanted city where ‘all things seem possible’ (76), is itself a mercurial city which could have been taken out of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities: (1974):


The city I come from….tin pot Prince (97)

Venice is also a city which hides within itself all those groups marginalized by society: p. 53; 54 disguise; uncertainty; 58 in this….. Satan. (104) and not Bonaparte could not rationalize Venize (112); where every body is in disguise; 118

b) A daughter of Venice, Villanelle is the masquerade par excellence in the novel. Hers is a world of pretence, of game,- significantly one of her favourite motifs is “you play, you lose, you play (66).


A world where it is difficult, not to say impossible, to distinguish reality from unreality, where the boundaries between fact and fiction have been blurred.

Even her name is an unusual name for a Venetian, apart from the literary connotations that it may have. (a verse form in which words are repeated in a mesmerizing pattern).


c) Napoleon, history

What historiogaphic metafiction overtly foregrounds is, among many other things, the discursive nature of all referents, the fact that there is no unique reality outside language, that both fiction and history are linguistic, and therefore human, constructs.

The Passion is a rewriting of Napoleon’s rise and fall from the contextualized perspective of two ex-centrics, as representatives of distinct but equally ‘muted’ groups (Vilanelle and Henri).


It retells Napoleon’s historical epic and his politics and wars in terms of the untold stories of the everyday lives of a soldier-cook and a woman who gambles away her freedom and ends up as a military prostitute: ‘Soldiers and women. That’s how the world is. Any other role is temporary. Any other role is a gesture.’ 45


Jeanette Winterson presents the patriarchal world of Henri, with Napoleon as his father figure, as the male side of the world of her novel, and consequently, as the object of her criticism.

The figure of Napoleon is particularly suitable for this role, not only because he represents the law of the Father, in Lacanian terms, but also because of one of Napoleon’s well-known phrases, ‘Anatomy is destiny’, which Irigaray mentions when she criticizes Freud’s notion of women’s sexual development, which Jeanette Winterson defies in The Passion by laying bare the contingency of gender.


Winterson’s criticism of patriarchy through the symbolic figure of Napoleon can be said to have different phases.

The first one is represented by Georgette (Henri’s mother), who exerts an active opposition to the world she inhabits through her actions.

The second phase is represented by Villanelle, who, apart from acting against patriarchy, is also given the voice historically to women.


Jeanette Winterson always portrays immensely strong women (Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Sexing the Cherry) as means of destroying one of the most recurrent prescriptive stories that women have been told about themselves, namely that they are weak.

The strongest character in Henri’s male dominated world is paradoxically Georgette, Henri’s mother, who is continually defined by her acts as a rebel against the established system of patriarchy.


Georgette’s upbringing has undoubtedly been oppressive: she was almost forced to get married.

Through this figure, Jeanette Winterson strikes at the patriarchal notion of woman as a mere commodity, forever deprived of he independence, first having to comply with the authority of her father and then with that of her husband.

But Georgette defies the imposed system and flees from her home. She will remain a rebel all through the novel.


In short, she is a role model for women.

Villanelle’s attacks on patriarchy are much more overt and harsh because she does not miss an opportunity to censure Napoleon’s actions.


She puts into practice the idea forwarded by Monique Wittig that ‘the task for women is to assume the position of the authoritative, speaking subject – which is in some sense their ontologically grounded ‘right’ – and to overthrow both the category of sex, and the system of compulsory heterosexuality that is it origin’ (Buttler, 115).

This is why Jeanette Winterson places Villanelle in the uncanny world of the marvellous real .


She creates a new linguistic system in which Villanelle is able to express herself, a free space where her voice can be heard and become powerful.

The Passion is about gender deconstruction and subject construction.


History and Reality

Like a growing number of contemporary novelists, Jeanette Winterson writes from the postmodern premise that history is knowable only through the mediating lens of narrative – or, in the term preferred by the narrator of her first novel ‘storytelling’.


Winterson use of the marvellous real, which has figured prominently in six of her seven novels, intensifies the critique of referentiality not only because it breaches the mimetic contract associated with historiographic representation, but also because it violates the natural laws governing the historical world that is her referent.


History, Winterson observes, is a way of explaining the universe while leaving the universe unexplained, it is a way of keeping it all alive, not boxing it into time. Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently.

Ultimately, she argues, facts are (or should be ) subordinate to narrative.


Winterson: Some people say there are true things to be found, some people say all kinds of things can be proved. I do not believe them. The only thing for certain is how complicated it all is, like a string full of knots. It is all there but hard to find the beginning and impossible to fathom the end.. It is an all purpose rainy day pursuit, this reducing of stories called history. (OR 93)


The marvellous real is a mode of writing which enters into a dialogue with the ‘real’ and incorporates that dialogue as part of its essential structure. (21 (the priest’ telescopic eyes)*, 51, 52 (webbed feet)*, 84 (Henry’s tear-diamonds)* 87 (Domino’ icicle does not melt- from canvas)*, 102, 109 (Vilanelle’s repossession of her heart)*, 116, 121, 129 (Vilanelle walking on water)*, 134)

The issue of the narrative’s internal reality is always relevant to the marvellous real, with the result that the ‘real’ is a notion which is under constant interrogation.


Villanelle interrogates Henri’s version of the past by insisting on the indeterminacy of all stories. (remember what his friend tells him about writing a diary, 28-29).


I am Telling Stories

This sentence appears throughout the text: 5, 13, 40, 69, 89, 143, 146, 147, 152, 159, 160

The narrative is a product of Henri’s diary, and this is only a recording of his memory, his understanding of the events as he thinks took place. Written also in San Servolo.

The diary clearly is a form of historiography, a chronicle which want to bring the past into the present as objectively as Henri is able to.


However, everything in it, indicates the blurring between the real and the constructed, and by this means Winterson undermines the Historical discourse and its pretension of objectivity and truth.

In this manner, Winterson carries out a massive textual and historical deconstruction.

END


Prof. Dr. Fernando de Toro Jeanette Winterson 1987 The Passion English.

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