Literary Analysis Of Sexing The Cherry
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Sexing The Cherry, written in 1989, is a novel by Jeanette Winterson that traces the journey of a mother, the Dog Woman and her adopted son, Jordan. Set in 17th century London, Sexing The Cherry is a postmodernist text that challenges the conventional historiography, heteronormativity and realist narratives. The boundaries between reality and fiction are blurred by the narration. Time and history are challenged as fragmented, subjective and artificially constructed. In the novel,gender transgresses from the social binaries and challenges the constructed reality of gender. Sexing the Cherry has a dual narrative pattern. Jordan, a pensive boy who likes to travel, and who often reflects on the nature of time, the structure of reality and on the new scientific theories that emerge in his seventeenth-century world. He is presented not only in a seventeenth-century setting, but is also placed in late twentieth-century capitalist society. Another main narration is of the Dog Woman and her ecologist alter ego of 20th century.The Twelve Dancing Princesses functions as a unifying bridge to Jordan’s and the Dog-Woman’s modes of narration. During postmodernist feminist writing, feminist writers such as Helen Cixuos, Luce Iragaray and Julia Kristeva urged for a new style of writing, which opposed the male language and represented plurality of sexuality of a female. Thus, Winterson models her novel in a writing style that can acknowledge women’s difference, parodic rewriting,