117 seen to have enacted and the modernity it installed.

The novel also rejects chronological modes of storytelling. Traditional notions of the English Revolution and its retelling in linear, progressive narratives are bound up in Enlightenment ideals of progress, reason, and rationality. Kristeva notes that

Bakhtin situates the text within history and society, which are then seen as texts read by the writer, into which he inserts himself by rewriting them. Diachrony is transformed into synchrony, and in light of this transformation, linear history appears as abstraction. The only way a writer can participate in history is by transgressing this abstraction through a process of reading-writing. (1980c, 65) This novel challenges history as a linear progression, not only by implicitly calling into doubt Enlightenment notions of progress, but also by highlighting its textual status. History here is a text, which is re-read and placed in a new context, just as the novel’s intertexts are redistributed, opened up to new meanings and reinvigorated.

The text also invites readers to challenge Western conceptions of history as linear by challenging traditional views of the nature of time. Jordan’s meeting with the Hopi Indian Tribe shows that cultures construct particular types of subjects, and that language affects how we see the world and time: ‘their language has no grammar in the way we recognize it. Most bizarre of all, they have no tenses for past, present and

117 None of Winterson’s critics have asked how this postmodern approach tallies with feminism, which many feminists argue has grounds in the Enlightenment. Some feminists, as outlined in my introduction, argue for a continuation of the Enlightenment’s autonomous subject, asking why they should let go of the ideal of autonomous identity when only men were granted it in the past. Rather than uncritically

appropriating Enlightenment ideals, which would involve granting women illusory autonomy as meaning- makers just because men supposedly had it at one time, Sexing the Cherry examines and problematizes autonomous subjectivity and offers alternatives to it in the form of multiple subjectivities.

future. They do not sense time in that way. For them, time is one’ (Winterson 1990, 134-35). The Hopi tribe has no concept of time as an objective entity because their language has no words or grammatical forms that refer directly to time; it cannot be perceived in linear terms in a language which lacks a time-space metaphor. This not only points to the constructed nature of subjectivity, but also offers the idea that it is not

‘natural’ to think about time as linear and opens up the possibility of imagining it in different terms. Although this may be impossible, as the English language is full of so many references to time, the text itself nevertheless places readers in positions where they often have no idea of time or place, most notably in Jordan’s travels of the mind. The Dog-Woman provides the only point of reference to time and place in the text, mentioning dates, places, and historical figures, and relating this to Jordan’s age and activities at those times; she situates the story within a chronological, linear calendar. Jordan, on the other hand, charts imaginative territories, meeting fairytale princesses and mythological characters, and visiting cities with no floors. Jordan sets out to record his journeys, but ‘not the ones I made, but the ones I might have made, or perhaps did make in some other place or time’ (Winterson 1990,10).118

Sexing the Cherry opens itself up to space and infinity and rejects a linear concept of time in its introduction of two twentieth-century characters - the modem incarnations or alter-egos of the seventeenth-century protagonists. Their insertion invites readers to question traditional Western understandings of time as chronological and linear, just as the text as a whole disputes the notion of linear storytelling. The notion of parallel lives is established and the invasion of past into present and vice versa is acknowledged. Nicholas Jordan and an unnamed environmentalist woman share the attitudes and language of their seventeenth-century counterparts; Jordan and Nicholas

118 Onega (1999,444) and Clingham (1998, 71) note that Jordan’s notion of time and his internal journeys of the mind echo T.S. Eliot’s fourth category of time in “Burnt Norton” in the Four Quartets.

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share an interest in heroic ideals, and the Dog-Woman and environmentalist woman are both concerned with fighting corruption.

A factory which is polluting the river Thames with mercury, symbolising patriarchal capitalism, is burned down by the environmentalist woman. The Dog- Woman, likewise, starts the Great Fire of London, symbolically ending ‘the patriarchal order associated with the Puritan Commonwealth’ (Onega 1996, 309). The merging of these two events ‘disrupts the linear chronology of history in favour of the cyclical temporality of myth’ (Onega 1996, 309). It not only disrupts linear chronology, but also shows that the faults inherent in the Enlightenment project of emancipation have come to light. The Thames has been polluted due to scientific development, world poverty is overshadowed by defense budgets, and ‘men in suits’ sit in boardrooms discussing these issues (Winterson 1990, 122). The optimistic quest for human emancipation and the goal to scientifically dominate nature have led to oppression and cruelty; history, reason, and logic have failed as organising principles. The juxtaposition of the

seventeenth- and twentieth-century characters invites the reader to note the difference between the two cultures and the possibility that things need not be as they are. The text’s setting in two different centuries, two different cultures, opens up the idea that culture is not natural or given, but is made in meanings. Different cultural contexts highlight the constructed nature of other cultures.

As in The Dancers Dancing, Sexing the Cherry offers an account of the past that has implications for the present. The figures of Nicholas Jordan and the

environmentalist women suggest that an acknowledgement and reconsideration of the past allows for the future to be rethought. Sexing the Cherry transgresses the idea of linear history not only by reading and rewriting history, but by interweaving the seventeenth- and twentieth-century moments, rather than presenting them

consecutively.119 The entwining of past and present and the text’s challenge to traditional histories, realist fiction and monocular perspective allow traditionally dominant perspectives to be challenged.

The environmentalist woman suggests that inhabiting numerous bodies in the past and in the future may lead to different perspectives on the past, present and future, and allow multiple subjectivities to be embraced:

Outwardly nothing is changing for me, but inwardly I am not always here, sitting by a rotting river. I can still escape. Escape from what? The present? Yes, from this foreground that blinds me to whatever may be happening in the

distance. If I have a spirit, a soul, any name will do, then it won’t be single, it will be multiple. Its dimension will not be one of confinement but one of space. It may inhabit numerous changing decaying bodies in the future and in the past. (Winterson 1990, 126)

The novel’s portrayal of the historical setting of the founding of modem, sovereign subjectivity throws into relief the culturally constructed status of the autonomous subject. It denaturalises it, showing it to be just one way of approaching human experience, and invites the reader to consider that ‘the regime of the subject and the colonial technologies that produced it can be seen to be historically specific ways of addressing the felt sense—in history and in representation—of the incoherence and fragmentation of human life’ (Moore 1995, 106). The environmentalist woman’s subjectivity is in process; it dances between the past, present and future and cannot be pinned down.

119 Roessner argues that the novel stages a ‘complete rejection of patriarchal history and its linear temporality’ and ‘endorses an apocalyptic urge to escape history’ (2002, 102, 104). Far from displaying an urge to escape history, I would argue that the text pleads for an acknowledgement of history in its various alternatives and indeed, its various intertextual references and parodies rely on traditional texts and histories as much as they reject them.

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Similarly, the reader is not offered any single accessible way of reading the text and instead is offered countless points of view. The novel asks readers to use the past to comment on the present; not the past as it is conventionally accepted, but a re-imagined past, which prompts a re-imagining of the present and future. Instead of presenting a solution to women’s everyday political problems in the form of a principle to adhere to, the text offers multiple subjectivities and view-points for the reader to accept or reject. Rather than march along with the rules of a certain kind of feminist politics, the text dances in a way which is much more beneficial to a true politics, which is ever-

changing and will not become stagnant; a view appropriately summarised in the words of the Dog-Woman: ‘With everyone in accord, what merriment is there?’ (Winterson