Q1.

What are the postmodern narrative techniques in the novel ‘The

French Lieutenant’s Woman’? Answer the question by giving references
from the novel.
ANS- Postmodernism is a recent intellectual movement that has had a
significant impact on contemporary literary texts, as well as other kinds of
representation. World War II divided the world as before and after it.
Individuality, identity, and gender relationships were all questioned, and a new
discourse was born to describe the modern disjunction. The modern approach to
literary works was also affected by the postmodern effect. To describe the
current situation, postmodern writers appear to have developed new discursive
methods. John Robert Fowles is an English novelist. Between modernism and
postmodernism, he occupies a critical position. The French Lieutenant's Woman
is a postmodern historical fiction novel that was published in 1969. Fowles
explores the new concepts that shaped Victorian British culture. In a
contemporary approach, he re-works classic narrative limits. There are several
endings to the novel. It examines and contrasts the ethics of Victorian characters
from the second half of the nineteenth century.

Fowles also tries to express to the reader his actual belief on how a novel should
be written from the perspective of a modern author, while criticising both the
'form-obsessed' school of authors and the flaws of Victorian writing techniques.

Postmodernism is noted for its rebellious nature and eagerness to test the
boundaries. Irony, dark humour, intertextuality, pastiche, metafiction,
historiographic metafiction, magic realism, paranoia, and fragmentation are all
characteristics of postmodern writing.

The dominant mode of literature between 1960 and 1990 was postmodernist
writing. Some of the major postmodern narrative techniques used in John
Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman are: pastiche, fragmentation,
multiple points of view, intertextuality, metafiction, and historiographic
metafiction.

John Robert Fowles' novel The French Lieutenant's Woman was written in the
postmodern era. It's about a troubled love affair between Sarah Woodruff and
Charles Smithson, the two major protagonists. It came out in the second half of
the twentieth century. The novel takes place during the Victorian era. It depicts
the time's contradictions and attempts to overcome them.

The French Lieutenant’s Woman is a postmodern novel. In this novel, John

Fowles exposes the themes by using a number of epigraphs, particularly of Karl
Marx and Charles Darwin, which become a reminder of the political situations
and theories of the time.

This novel's narrative techniques are a mix of Victorian and modern

narrative components employed by John Fowles, resulting in a
contemporary novel. Sarah Woodruff's relationship with Charles Smithson
reflects a conflict between twentieth-century consciousness and Victorian
mindset. Both characters are looking for their independence, and their fiction
relationship is based on a meta-fictional concept. The narrative techniques used
to portray Sarah's character provide a new perspective of her.
Throughout the work, Fowles skilfully employs a variety of voices. There are
several narrative presences, and the storyteller's identity is never clear. He takes
on the roles of narrator, observer, and god figure. Using the "I" pronoun, he is
sometimes the author, dropping into a familiar style and encouraging the
audience to enjoy his creative delusional process.

John Fowles is the bearded man who enters the novel several times as an
observer and sometimes as a sort of theatrical director. He comments on the
actions of his characters and discusses the relationship between the art of the
novel and life.

Pastiche is a combination of elements of previous genres and styles of literature

to create a new narrative voice, or to comment on the writing of their
contemporaries. The French Lieutenant’s Woman is partly a pastiche of the great
Victorian novelists. Fowles uses the conventions of the nineteenth century
romantic fiction to write a study of Victorian manners, morals which includes
two major themes: channelling erotic desire into the institution of marriage, and
working out the financing of marriage and the family, and also to portray the
emergence of modern consciousness in “the age of steam and can’t”.

Postmodernist writers disturbed the wholeness and completion associated with

traditional stories, and preferred to deal with other ways of structuring narrative.
One alternative is the multiple ending, which resists closure by offering
numerous possible outcomes for a plot. The French Lieutenant’s Woman is a
classic instance of this. Fowles refuses to choose between two competing
denouements: one in which Charles and Sarah are reunited after a stormy affair,
and the other in which they are kept irrevocably apart. He therefore introduces
an uncertainty principle into the book. He even dallies with a third possibility of
leaving Charles on the train, searching for Sarah in the capital.

Fowles juggles with three distinct narrative voices in the novel: a seemingly
omniscient narrator and an intrusive twentieth century storyteller conversing
with the readers using both first person and second person narrative voices.
Majority of the story is narrated from a third person point of view. Some parts
of the text are directly addressed to the readers by the author. For instance, in
chapter thirteen, the author conveys his unspoken thoughts, “But I live in the
age of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Roland Barthes;” (95) in the first person.
Sometimes the author makes the reader feel as if he or she is a character in the
story, “Perhaps you suppose that a novelist has only to pull the right strings and
his puppets will behave in a lifelike manner;” (95) using the second person.

An important element of postmodernism is its acknowledgement of previous

literary works. Postmodernism recognizes the value of tradition. It understands
present culture as the product of previous representation. The intertextuality of
postmodern fiction, the dependence on literature that has been created earlier,
attempts to comment on the situation in which both literature and society found
themselves in the second half of the twentieth century. Intertextuality most
commonly appears in The French Lieutenant’s Woman in the form of an
epigraph in the beginning of each chapter. In these small passages, Fowles
quotes famous
literary works and authors, thus setting the theme and tone of each chapter. For
example, chapter one begins,

“Stretching eyes west

Over the sea,

Wind foul or fair,
Always stood she
 Prospect-impressed;
Solely out there
Did her gaze rest,

Never elsewhere
Seemed charm to be.
HARDY, ‘The Riddle’” (3)
This epigraph and the title of the poem itself emphasize the enigmatic figure of
Sarah Woodruff who is presented as a riddle not only to Charles but to the
narrator as well. Sarah is described in similar terms and remains mysterious
throughout the novel.

The narrator in The French Lieutenant’s Woman intervenes in the story

continuously. Many postmodern authors feature metafiction in their writing,
which is essentially writing about writing. Patricia Waugh defines metafiction
as “fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention
to its status as an artifact in order to pose questions about the relationship
between fiction and reality”. Fowles uses the technique to make the reader aware
of the fictionality and the presence of the author. Chapter thirteen begins with
the lines, “I do not know. This story I am telling is all imagination. These
characters I create never existed outside my own mind” (95). This authorial
intimacy blurs the line between fiction and reality. Fowles is engaged with the
problem of whether telling a story is telling lies, and this engagement draws him
to examine the relation of the fictional world to the real world. Fowles refers to
fiction as “world as real as, but other than the world that is. Or was.” This
means that metafiction is not an imitation of reality, and instead of hiding the
disparity between fiction and reality, it exposes it.

Historiographic metafiction is a term coined by literary theorist Linda

Hutcheon. According to Hutcheon, in “A Poetics of Postmodernism'', works of
historiographic metafiction are “those well-known and popular novels which are
both intensely self-reflective and yet paradoxically lay claim to historical events
and parsonages” (105). It is the process of rewriting history through a work of
fiction. The French Lieutenant’s Woman is regarded as a compelling
historiographic metafiction in contemporary British literature. The interweaving
of historical and literary sources of the Victorian era are characteristic of the
novel. As metafiction, it is conscious of its own fictional status; on the level of
historicity, it is conscious of the fact that much of what is passed on as history
represents not only the state of affairs of a former era, but also reflects the
preferences and prejudices of those who wrote those accounts. Historiographic
metafiction is conscious of the fact that it is not objective but also that such
texts are the only means to learn something about the past. In Fowles’ novel, the
readers shuffle between realistic narratives set in the mid-nineteenth century and
a contemporary narrative voice which is able to pull into that Victorian world a
host of intertextual references which disrupt the novel’s historical realism.
References to modern theoretical ideas such as Darwinism, along with notes
explaining aspects of Victorian society, means, as Hutcheon puts it, that the
reader is constantly referred to the arena of the ‘extra-textual…a world outside
the novel’ and to ‘other texts, other representations’ of the world being
represented in the text itself. Such paradoxes of fictionality/reality and the
present/the past in the novel demonstrate Fowles’ breakthrough in the
traditional literary narrative.

The French Lieutenant’s Woman is a retrospective twentieth century examination

of the Victorian novel of the nineteenth century. The writer presents us with a
realistic picture of the nineteenth century compared with the twentieth century.
In the novel, Fowles uses postmodern techniques and strategies to produce the
parody of historical fiction.

******
Q2. Write the character sketch of Sarah Woodruff from the novel ‘The
French Lieutenant’s Woman’.

ANS- John Fowles, in full John Robert Fowles, (born March 31, 1926,
Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, England—died November 5, 2005, Lyme Regis, Dorset),
English novelist, whose allusive and descriptive works combine psychological
probing—chiefly of sex and love—with an interest in social and philosophical
issues.
Fowles graduated from the University of Oxford in 1950 and taught in Greece,
France, and Britain. His first novel, The Collector (1963; filmed 1965), about a
shy man who kidnaps a girl in a hapless search for love, was an immediate
success. This was followed by The Aristos: A Self-Portrait in Ideas (1964), a
collection of essays reflecting Fowles’s views on such subjects as evolution, art,
and politics. He returned to fiction with The Magus (1965, rev. ed. 1977; filmed
1968). Set on a Greek island, the book centres on an English schoolteacher who
struggles to discern between fantasy and reality after befriending a mysterious
local man. The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969; filmed 1981), arguably
Fowles’s best-known work, is a love story set in 19th- century England that
richly documents the social mores of that time. An example of Fowles’s original
style, the book combined elements of the Victorian novel with postmodern
works and featured alternate endings.

Fowles’s later fictional works include The Ebony Tower (1974), a volume of
collected novellas, Daniel Martin (1977), and Mantissa (1982). His last novel, A
Maggot (1985), centred on a group of travellers in the 1700s and the mysterious
events that occur during their journey. Fowles also wrote verse, adaptations of
plays, and the text for several photographic studies. Wormholes, a collection of
essays and writings, were published in 1998.

John Fowles' novel The French Lieutenant's Woman was published in 1969. It's a
pastiche of a historical romance that juxtaposes the Victorian characters'
mentality of 1867 with the author's ironic commentary of 1967. The plot centres
on Charles Smithson, an amateur Victorian palaeontologist. He is engaged to
Ernestina Freeman, a traditional, affluent woman, but he breaks it off after a
series of secret love affair with Sarah Woodruff, a gorgeous, mysterious social
outcast known locally as the forsaken lover of a French lieutenant. The author,
who interjects throughout the story, offers three different endings, allowing his
readers to choose their own conclusions.

In the first ending, Charles skips visiting Sarah in Exeter, and instead goes
straight to Lyme to reconfirm his love for Ernestina. They have a not entirely
happy marriage, and Charles enters into business with Ernestina’s father.
Charles admits encountering Sarah to Ernestina, but speaks poorly of Sarah and
hides the evolution of his feelings for her. The narrator dismisses this possible
ending as a daydream of Charles’.

In the second possible ending, Charles and Sarah have a sexual encounter
during which he realizes Sarah was a virgin. The emotional response he has to
this encounter moves him to end his engagement with Ernestina. He sends
Sarah a letter and proposes marriage. The letter, however, never reaches Sarah,
and Ernestina’s father shames Charles over the botched engagement. To make
matters worse, Charles’s rich uncle’s new wife has a successful pregnancy,
giving his uncle an heir, and ruining any chance Charles had to inherit. Charles
is broken, and to avoid social ruin, he travels to Europe and then America.
Sarah moves to London without sending word to Charles. During Charles’s
travels, his lawyer searches for Sarah, and two years later she is found living an
artistic, happy life with the painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti. She had a child as a
result of her encounter with Charles, and when Charles meets his baby, he is
hopeful that the relationship can be rekindled.

In the third possible ending, the reunion between Sarah and Charles does not
go as well. This ending obscures the identity of Sarah’s child’s father, and
Charles leaves wondering if Sarah was just using him.

Fowles’ book is an example of a postmodern novel in that it breaks from several

conventions of traditional style. The most obvious of these deviations is the
approach the book takes toward its ending. In presenting the three potential
endings, Fowles comments on the role the author plays in the outcome of a
story, and the power that the author has in the lives of his or her characters.

Other elements of the book point to postmodernism, as well. The narrator is

omniscient, and in addition to merely telling the facts of the plot, offers several
other insights and asides through the use of extensive footnotes. These footnotes
are an unexpected addition to a novel, as fictional texts don’t typically use them.

Additionally, the narrator later becomes a character himself. While first-person

narration by a character within a story was not innovative, the insertion of the
narrator into the story so late in the book’s plot was.

Critics have continued to marvel at and discuss the book’s other stylistic
flourishes, including its intertextuality and self-referential nature. The book
reads as if it’s aware that it’s a book, something modern audiences might refer
to as a version of “breaking the fourth wall.”

The novel was also adapted into a film in 1981.

Sarah Woodruff is an educated but impoverished young woman. She is called

"the French Lieutenant's Woman" or "Tragedy" or the "French lieutenant's
whore" because it is believed that she had an affair with a shipwrecked French
sailor. It is also believed that she is half-mad with grief and that she stares out to
sea, vainly hoping for the day he will return to her. Because of her reputation
she can no longer gain any employment until Mrs. Poulteney hires her as a paid
companion. Sarah is a mysterious figure. No one knows much about her, and
later we find that much of what people believe about her is untrue.

INTRINSIC IMAGES OF SARAH

The novel starts with Hardy’s poem “The Riddle”, and also the author puts in
two questions: “Who Sarah is?” and “out of what shadow she come?” in chapter
12 of the novel, which seems puzzle the readers, and also establishes Sarah’s
mysterious, lonely and free intrinsic images. At first, Sarah is a cryptic figure.
In the novel, Sarah’s mysterious characterization is expressed from the very
beginning to the end. With the development of the port, Sarah’s behaviours
become more confusing and complicated. Sarah is called “poor tragedy”, “a
bitch” or “the French lieutenant’s woman”, and she never denies, and even
considered herself as the follows:

No insult, no blame, can touch me. Because I have set myself beyond the pale.
I am nothing; I am hardly human any more. I am the French Lieutenant’s
Whore. (Fowles, 1992: 246)

Sarah’s mysterious character builds up step by step. Her behaviours, never

restricted by people’s view or social ethics, never took into account surrounding
people’s eyes, sought her own freedom and as one, vividly indicated her pursuit
of autonomous consciousness.

Then, in the novel, Sarah’s another obvious distinct character is loneliness. She
is a lonely figure. Obviously, Sarah’s loneliness is a product of Victorian social
conceptions. Sarah’s father is the so-called “blue born”, and his father’s action,
sending her to boarding school, is also one of the main reasons which make her
lonely. As a daughter of a blue class, she had to learn on the day and earn
money to pay for her education in the evening; she couldn’t get on well with
other pupils. They look down on her; she becomes the victim of the class
society. Sarah seems like “a redundant person” who was abandoned by the
surrounding people and the society. She
separates all her life with the surrounding world; she becomes a lonely “outlier”.
But on contrary, she looks like very “enjoy” such kind of lonely life, she always
comes and goes freely, as if it has been become accustomed in other people’s
eyes, she should never build a friendship with an equal, never inhabit her own
home, never see the world except as the generality to which she must be the
exception. Actually, she lives in a world where loneliness is easiest to avoid,
later; she seems to wish to be what she is. Generally speaking, what she suffers
from her situation and social standard lead to her unique character---loneliness.

Last, Sarah is a libertarian and free individual in the novel. In the preface of the
novel, John Fowls proclaims: “Actually, the theme of my novel is how a humble
woman obtains her freedom in a completely no free society.” Therefore, the
constitution of the theme of this novel is embodied from the heroine Sarah's
behaviours for pursuing of libertarian and freedom. With her autonomous
ideology, Sarah chooses to be a fallen woman; she makes up a love with a
French lieutenant as casual, which makes herself as “the French Lieutenant’s
whore” or “an outcast”. The people surrounding her are considered her as a
shameful and deserted woman, but Sarah seems never to care for it, on contrary,
just because of her such shamed behaviours; she can enjoy liberation and
freedom beyond the pale under such evils and notorious guilt. As well, Sarah’s
liberty will also embody the relationship between Charles and her. In the novel,
Sarah can choose her lifestyle freely which is different from that “poor” woman
who lives in Victorian society, she can do everything that she wants to freely.

EXTRINSIC IMAGES OF SARAH

Under the influence of patriarchy, women lose their existent meaning in

Victorian age, women are accessories of men, women are “other”, they should
not have their own ideology and ideas, and they have no right to choose their
own life and marriage. The definition of patriarchy given by some scholars likes
this:

Patriarchy is a social system in which the man acts as the primary authority
figure central to social organization, and in which the father also holds authority
over mother, children, and property. It implies that the system of male rule and
privilege entails female subordination. Historically, patriarchy embodies itself
in the social, legal, political, and economic organization of a range of different
cultures.

Sarah, a woman who lived in the Victorian age, suffers a lot from Patriarchy
ideology and class system, but she pursues economic independence and selfhood
bravely, seeks for freedom constantly, all her behaviours embody her desire for
her own autonomy. Sarah is regarded as a seeker of selfhood and as a rebel
against the traditional Victorian social system. Sarah is full of new ideologies in
her mind, which is regarded as a representative of feminism theory. Sarah thinks
firmly that gender identity could be and should be challenged and transformed.
Therefore, Sarah, as a rebel against the Victorian social system, mainly
embodied the following three aspects: her struggling against her master who is
the symbol of Victorian social supremacy, her distinctive appearance and her
attitude towards marriage. And as a seeker of independence
and freedom, Sarah used her own behaviours to revolt the prejudice against
women in western culture. In the novel, the author builds up Sarah’s own minds
step by step, in Sarah’s mind; females should firmly change the deep-rooted
ideology of such patriarchal culture. Woman must break up the bonds of
patriarchal society if she hopes to become an independent female with an equal
right. Therefore, Sarah is one of successful representations who is
struggling to search for her selfhood, no matter what kind of society she is living
in and do whatever she can do to gain her independence and freedom.

CONCLUSION

John Fowls’ famous novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman is considered as the
classic feminist mate fictional work. In this novel, Fowls successfully narrates
the images of the heroine--- Sarah, who in order to seek her freedom and
independence, constantly struggles against the traditional ethics of the Victorian
social system, even regardless of the cost of her reputation. The thesis analyzes
Sarah’s autonomous images with the feminist perspectives through exploring
Sarah’s autonomous characteristics and actions. Sarah displays her
determination to seek independence and freedom and lives in her own way that
she likes. She is regarded as a cryptic and lonely individual, a rebel in the
Victorian age, a seeker of selfhood, independence and freedom by the way of
her constantly battling with the Victorian society system. She managed to
realize her dream. Generally speaking, all her unique images and independent
ideology make Sarah become a unique woman in the Victorian age. Sarah’s all
kinds of inopportune ideas and behaviours bring an in-depth influence and
reflection to those women who are still oppressed by the patriarchal social
system.

******
Q3. What is the significance of the title of the novel ‘Sexing the Cherry’?
ANS- Novelist Jeanette Winterson was born in Manchester, England in 1959.
She was adopted and brought up in Accrington, Lancashire, in the north of
England. Her strict Pentecostal Evangelist upbringing provides the background
to her acclaimed first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, published in 1985.
She graduated from St Catherine's College, Oxford, and moved to London
where she worked as an assistant editor at Pandora Press.

She is a regular contributor of reviews and articles to many newspapers and

journals and has a regular column published in The Guardian. Her novels
include Boating for Beginners (1985), published shortly after Oranges Are Not
the Only Fruit and described by the author as 'a comic book with pictures'; The
Passion (1987), twin narratives following the adventures of the web footed
daughter of a Venetian gondolier and Napoleon's chicken chef; Sexing the
Cherry (1989), an invented world set during the English Civil War featuring the
fabulous 'Dog Woman' and the orphan she raises; and three books exploring
triangular relationships, gender and formal experimentation: Written on the
Body (1992), Art and Lies (1994) and Gut Symmetries (1997). She adapted her
novel, The PowerBook (2000), for the National Theatre in 2002.
Lighthousekeeping (2004), centres on the orphaned heroine Silver, taken in by
the keeper of the Cape Wrath lighthouse, Mr Pew, whose stories of love and
loss, passion and longing, are interwoven in the narrative.

One of the most original voices in British fiction to emerge during the 1980s,
Jeanette Winterson was named as one of the 20 'Best of Young British Writers'
in a promotion run jointly between the literary magazine Granta and the Book
Marketing Council.

Sexing the Cherry, set in the 17th century, is about the relationship between a
woman without a name (she calls herself "dog-woman" because she breeds
hounds for dog-fighting) and her protégé, Jordan, who is named after a river
because the dog-woman found him on a riverbank. Their intertwined stories are
full of fantastic elements and sexual encounters, which are frequently so absurd
that they create a sense of humour. For example, the dog-woman has no sense
for figurative language or symbolism, and takes things literally. For example, in
the beginning, when she sees a banana for the first time she is offended by its
looks, as it resembles a penis. Jordan, on the other hand, dresses up as a woman
and soon discovers that women seem to have a secret language, as he is given a
book that outlines the nature of men. He is appalled when he reads the first page
but admits that whatever is written in it is true. According to the book, men are
rather simple creatures that must be exploited by women.

Indeed, Sexing the Cherry includes a range of stories where men in particular
blindly follow their sexual desires, including a teenager "sleeping with" a
pineapple.

A central story is the one about the twelve princesses. After being abused by
their husbands, all except one leave them behind and decide to live together on
their own. The youngest, Fortunata, did not join them, however. Having heard
her story, Jordan decides to dedicate his life to finding her, even though she is
actually real.

Later in the book, the chapters become more philosophical, as the story takes the
reader on a journey through the narrator's thoughts. Passages about the flat earth
theory and hallucinations and diseases of the mind are embedded in narratives
of the dog-woman killing Puritans when they ban dog fighting, while Jordan
goes on long voyages with Tradescant, bringing back rarities such as fruit,
spices, and new plants for the royal gardens.

Eventually, when London is haunted by the plague and almost completely

destroyed by the Great Fire, Jordan and the dog-woman leave the city behind
and embark on a new journey.

The title does not refer to some sort of sexual slang or innuendo. It actually
refers to determining the sex of a cherry tree. The fine art of grafting–a
method of asexual plant propagation in which two plants are joined together–is
at the root (excuse the pun) of what the book is about.

The title Sexing the Cherry refers to determining the gender of a grafted cherry
tree. New to the 17th century, the art of grafting fruit trees is practiced by the
protagonist Jordan during his apprenticeship to the Renaissance figures John
Tradescant. Metaphorically minded, Jordan seeks to fuse himself with the
spirit of self-possessed women to form a hardier, more complete self. The form
of the novel is itself a graft of perspective, with its alternating narrations of a
mother and her adopted son, which in turn contain the fabulous tales of others,
especially women, who overcome obstacles by living fearlessly in new ways.

The book takes place in two time periods, London during the reign of Charles II,
and the current day. And the characters, both Jordan and the Dog-Woman are
alive in both. The book plays with time too, but that would require an entire
other post to talk about. Sticking to the idea of grafting, the character of Jordan
in old London and the character of Nicholas Jordan in modern London can be
seen as a graft. Which is the root and which is the plant is arguable because
Jordan might be all in the imagination of Nicholas and Nicholas might be the
part of himself that Jordan goes in search of.

It doesn’t really matter which Jordan is what part of the resulting grafted plant. It
only matters that together; the two halves make a whole. One can make
speculations on the necessity of imagination for survival as well as the need to
integrate soul and body, or the shadow self, or the practical self with the
dancing part of the self.

******
Q4. Write a character sketch of Dog Woman from the novel ‘Sexing the
Cherry’.
ANS- Novelist Jeanette Winterson was born in Manchester, England in 1959.
She was adopted and brought up in Accrington, Lancashire, in the north of
England. Her strict Pentecostal Evangelist upbringing provides the background
to her acclaimed first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, published in 1985.
She graduated from St Catherine's College, Oxford, and moved to London
where she worked as an assistant editor at Pandora Press.

She is a regular contributor of reviews and articles to many newspapers and

journals and has a regular column published in The Guardian. Her novels
include Boating for Beginners (1985), published shortly after Oranges Are Not
the Only Fruit and described by the author as 'a comic book with pictures'; The
Passion (1987), twin narratives following the adventures of the web footed
daughter of a Venetian gondolier and Napoleon's chicken chef; Sexing the
Cherry (1989), an invented world set during the English Civil War featuring the
fabulous 'Dog Woman' and the orphan she raises; and three books exploring
triangular relationships, gender and formal experimentation: Written on the
Body (1992), Art and Lies (1994) and Gut Symmetries (1997). She adapted her
novel, The PowerBook (2000), for the National Theatre in 2002.
Lighthousekeeping (2004) centres on the orphaned heroine Silver, taken in by
the keeper of the Cape Wrath lighthouse, Mr Pew, whose stories of love and
loss, passion and longing, are interwoven in the narrative.
One of the most original voices in British fiction to emerge during the 1980s,
Jeanette Winterson was named as one of the 20 'Best of Young British Writers'
in a promotion run jointly between the literary magazine Granta and the Book
Marketing Council.

Sexing the Cherry, written in 1989, is a novel by Jeanette Winterson which

traces the journey of a mother, the Dog Woman and her adopted son Jordan
across time. As a postmodernist text, it experiments with the literary form,
linear narrative structure, featuring the elements of Magic Realism to destabilize
and subvert the conventional notions of gender, sexuality and providing us with
the narrative of the ‘other’ by foregrounding and normalizing lesbian desire.

Dog-Woman is one of the two main characters in Sexing the Cherry, and she is
unlike any other woman in Winterson's novel. She is Jordan's adopted mother.
The character is gigantic, cares little for her outward appearance, and is
described as heavier than an elephant, with very few teeth, a flat nose, heavy
eyebrows and smallpox scars. Dog-Woman makes a living by breeding fighting
dogs, lives as a strict royalist, and narrates part of the story, which is illustrated
by the banana. Over her appearance, her son is extremely proud of her and loves
and protects her as his mother despite all odds.

In Sexing the Cherry, Jeanette Winterson's Dog Woman is a gigantesque weapon

yielding force to be reckoned with. As the title teases with the notion of
gendering within language, both her physical appearance and actions beg for a
re-evaluation of what has been defined as both maternal and instinctual. She is
at once a stable and loving, yet in order to protect her son from harm, she
revolts against the powers that be and oscillates between time and place in both
a self-made utopia as well as a force-fed dystopia. To her son, she is shelter, to
her enemies, menacing and elusive.

The Dog Woman is a grotesque, hideous, giant-like woman, whom Winterson

herself describes as “the only woman in English fiction confident enough to use
filth as a fashion accessory.” Through the character of the dog Woman,
Winterson questions and destabilizes the notions of femininity and also engages
in a rewriting of the past historical accounts from her point of view. Winterson
sees the past as an “energetic space”, not as a document but as a “lumber room,
full of old trunks and mementos’ and argues that in the writing of the past, there
are “as many narratives as there are guesses.”

The dog woman is the most unconventional female character, described in terms
of her huge breasts, grotesque body and enormous strength. She is anatomically
and biologically a female, a fact which is overemphasized in her sheer
physicality. But she doesn’t fit into the conventional idea of a female as she is
not ‘feminine’ enough. To be adequately feminine is to be weak, fragile, and
submissive. Judith Butler argues how gender identity is a matter of
‘performativity’ and we see how the novel destabilizes the notions of gender
identity femininity- by exposing how these are mere cultural constructs and not
something which is natural and inherent. The Dog Woman is very much a
woman and a mother but doesn’t conform to behavioural norms, notions of
motherhood, femininity as laid down by patriarchy.
As Elizabeth Langland argues that though she is a woman, the Dog Woman
performs her gender in a destabilizing way. She asserts that “women’s bodies are
at once a site for inscription of conventional meaning and also a locus for their
disruption. The very materiality of the body is vividly depicted in the huge bulk
of Dog Woman … her representation reinvents the female body as a site for
cultural transformation.” (p. 99)

DOG-WOMAN: THE ANTI-HEROIC HEROINE

Jeanette Winterson’s novel Sexing the Cherry is a primary example for a modern
retelling of a fairy tale. Her incorporation of the traditional tale of “The Twelve
Dancing Princesses” by the Grimm Brothers within her story about the unlikely
mother and son duo of Jordan and Dog Woman offers a new perspective on the
traditional role of women within our society. Winterson’s retelling of “The
Twelve Dancing Princesses” as well as her portrayal of the anti heroic heroine
Dog-Woman turn around the image of the passive female and represent active
women taking charge of their own lives and destinies.

Focusing on the marginalized of society, the figure of Dog-Woman becomes the

ultimate yet highly unlikely heroine of Sexing the Cherry. She is anything but
the typical feminine hero of not only fairy tales but novels in general. In a fairy
tale she would have been the villain rather than the heroine, yet this is exactly
what makes her so appealing to the reader. She combines many opposites within
herself: she is a woman according to the name she gives herself, yet stronger
than any man, and features many other masculine attributes; she is hideous and
grotesque but also good, gentle, and an avenger of the suppressed.

Her opposing features start off early by a description she gives of herself.
My nose is flat, my eyebrows are heavy. I have only a few teeth and those are
a poor show, being black and broken. I had smallpox when I was a girl and
the caves in my face are home enough for fleas. But I have fine blue eyes
that see in the dark. (Winterson 24)

This self-description has the strong allusion to those descriptions of beauty often
found in the fairy tale, giving a detailed account of the female’s beauty thus
establishing that she is good and gentle and worthy of a reward simply because
she is beautiful. Dog-Woman is not beautiful but especially her relationship
with her adopted son Jordan shows a loving and caring woman.

She is neither beautiful nor obedient and passive, and being the opposite of those
characteristics frees her immensely and empowers her more importantly. By
illustrating through the character of the scientist/activist how this role model of
Dog-Woman can be used as an empowerment and an alter ego to gain
self-respect and self-esteem Winterson shows that the traditional female of the
fairy tale is not a role model any woman should take for herself.
Dog-Woman might not be the monster Martin wants her to be yet she forces the
reader to reflect about power constructs within society which becomes
especially clear through her alter ego function. The scientist says about herself:

“I was fat because I wanted to be bigger than all the things that were bigger
than me; All the things that had power over me. It was a battle I intended to
win” (Winterson 124)

And later on, she says:

“I had an alter ego who was huge and powerful, a woman whose only
morality was her own and whose loyalties were fierce and few. She was my
patron saint, the one I called on when I felt myself dwindling away through
cracks in the floor or slowly fading in the street.” (Winterson 125)

As mentioned before, Dog-Woman has masculine characteristics which make

her appear more like a man than a woman, yet her complete femininity is proven
by her state of being a mother, and a caring mother moreover to whom her child
means everything. This love for her son makes her more acceptable, more part
of the norm and she describes her relationship with Jordan as a blissful one.

“He was always happy. We were happy together, and if he noticed that I am
bigger than most he never mentioned it. He was proud of me because no other
child had a mother who could hold a dozen oranges in her mouth at once. How
hideous am I?” (Winterson 26)

To conclude, we can say that the Dog-Woman is an impressive character and her
male characteristics are the attributes which allow her to challenge the
patriarchal system. She is proud of her strength and not ashamed to use and
show it despite it making her appear less womanly. Exaggerating features that
would make her appear more like a monster would lead to her being turned into
a stale and unrounded character and take away the depth of the figure.

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