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

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.

Keywords: Jeanette Winterson, psychoanalysis, materiality, gender, English literature.

Click HERE to access the thesis (via the Arts Library at Utrecht University).

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Stitch and Split: Feminist Alternatives to Frankensteinian Myths in Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl

The thesis explores how Shelley Jackson’s hypertext work Patchwork Girl (1995) provides a feminist alternative to dominant Frankensteinian mythologies of unethical creation, arguing that it succeeds in doing so by offering alternative approaches to linear and positivist knowledge production. The hypertext work mobilises representational elements of horror, abjection and “unnaturalness” whilst operating on the symbolic, cultural, and imaginary level. The role the technologically mediating apparatus of the Storyspace software plays in this figuration is central. The interplay of texts stemming from various sources and dictions combined with striking images creates a quilt of multiple truths; in this manner, Patchwork Girl expresses a non-hierarchical stance between truth and untruth, as well as fact and fiction. Additionally, the thesis suggests that the hypertext provides an accessible, albeit complex, journey into the land of feminist theory, stopping at various key terms and concepts, such as human and non-human agency, text/author, body/text, and memory/subjectivity. The deployed theoretical framework draws on visual culture, women’s studies, literary studies, and philosophy; nevertheless, the dominant analytical toolbox is that of a literary close-reading.

Keywords: materiality, gender, feminism, hypertext, Frankenstein, Patchwork Girl, monster, Shelley Jackson.

Click HERE to access the thesis (via the Arts Library at Utrecht University).