Questioning Gender Through the Test of History: the Fiction of Jeanette Winterson and Ali Smith

• Thesis title in Czech: 'Gender na pozadí historie, historie ve světle genderu: fikce Jeanette Winterson a Ali Smith'
• Thesis title in English: Questioning Gender Through the Test of History: the Fiction of Jeanette Winterson and Ali Smith
• Key words: Jeanette Winterson, Ali Smith, britská literatura, skotská literatura, gender, feminismus, historie, historiografie, poststrukturalismus, postmodernismus
• English key words: Jeanette Winterson, Ali Smith, British literature, Scottish literature, gender, feminism, history, historiography, post-structuralism, postmodernism
• Academic year of topic announcement: 2014/2015
• Thesis type: diploma thesis
• Thesis language: angličtina
• Department: Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures (21-UALK)
• Supervisor: PhDr. Soňa Nováková, CSc.
• Author: hidden - assigned and confirmed by the Study Dept.
• Date of registration: 08.06.2015
• Date of assignment: 08.06.2015
• Administrator's approval: not processed yet
• Confirmed by Study dept. on: 11.06.2015
• Date and time of defence: 24.05.2016 09:00
• Date of electronic submission: 03.05.2016
• Date of proceeded defence: 24.05.2016
• Submitted/finalized: committed by student and finalized
• Opponents: PhDr. Zdeněk Beran, Ph.D.

Guidelines

This thesis will focus on the work of two contemporary writers, Jeanette Winterson and Ali Smith. These two British female authors both concern themselves with the issues of gender and of history. They are not the first authors to engage with these topics, writers such as Angela Carter and Virginia Woolf are crucial and indispensable predecessors, and their influence will therefore be analysed in some detail in the thesis. However, the issues of gender, sex and sexual orientation are being discussed and questioned nowadays more than ever before. The fact that same-sex marriages are being legalised, prominent figures identify themselves as transgender and that such matters have become the object of mass media, mean that society can no longer turn a blind eye to the fact that the traditional notion of gender needs to be redefined. Yet it is obvious that a search for new definitions would only create a different form of confinement. The authors I chose seem to have found a different way out: instead of seeing gender as something static and linked to the biological sex, they focus on the possible fluidity of the concept.
The works I have chosen are The Passion (1987) and Sexing the Cherry (1989) by Jeanette Winterson, and Girl Meets Boy (2007) and How to Be Both (2014) by Ali Smith. The reason for this choice is that these four works deal specifically with both history and gender in a way where one changes the way the other is perceived. Historiographic metafiction allows the readers to hear the voices which have been lost in history and realise that these voices indeed did belong to people as real as those from the ‘official’ historical accounts. By highlighting the fact that history is subjective these authors show us that not only do we create history but that history creates us – it influences the way we think and creates standards which must be followed. Moreover, they show us that gender norms are firmly set within history and by juxtaposing those with the present (mainly in Sexing the Cherry and How to be Both) expose what – if anything, has changed. At the same time, it is clear that history is gendered, depending on what stance the narrator chooses. In Winterson’s works female and male narrators take turns, and yet this switching between sexes does not always mean switching between genders as well: her characters are demonstratively of either biological female or male sex but the way they perceive themselves as well as the way they are perceived by others does not always correspond with the respective traditional perception of feminine or masculine gender. Both authors use various means to demonstrate gender: from cross-dressing, the characters’ own notions about themselves to other characters’ views of them, to language. They keep playfully shifting between what is traditionally considered masculine and what feminine and thus subvert the norms which are so ingrained in us. In doing so, they make us consider why, for example, we automatically think of a certain narrative voice as being feminine or masculine without the sex of the narrator being given. This is where I would turn to Judith Butler and her notion of gender performativity, which, in simplified terms, sees gender not as something biologically given or tied to our sex but as a performance we adopted because of the restrictions of our society. By making their characters biologically female but not necessarily identifying them with the feminine gender, Winterson and Smith point out that there are more options than we may traditionally think. However, the choice – which is not conscious, is not between a ‘natural’ and a ‘socially-constructed’ gender; as Butler explains, there is no such thing as a natural gender because the concept itself was created by us. Smith utilises Butler’s concept in Girl Meets Boy, where we read, “nobody grows up mythless, Robin said. ‘It’s what we do with the myths we grow up with that matters.” There is no pre-history to gender as gender cannot exist before society.
Gender is inseparable from history because of the historical roots of the current state of affairs. There are heated arguments whether the current norms pertaining to gender are arbitrarily chosen to suit the patriarchy, whether they are somehow based in reality, whether gender as we define it even exists and if we gave it up, whether it would be possible for our society to exist without these binaries. These traditionally accepted gender roles are a part of the grand narratives which Winterson and Smith try to dismantle by focusing on individual experience. They demonstrate how restrictive these binaries are, but traditional historians have been clinging to their idea of ‘the standard’ rather than to allow chaos into their preconceived ideas. According to Hayden White, since the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century, historiography has been influenced by various ideologies, in a way that suited their proponents. They may not have necessarily changed the historical accounts, but they cherry-picked the events useful to them. History is formed by the opinion of those who write it and its subjectivity means that there is no such thing as a singular “truthful account;” instead, there are multiple truths such as there are multiple identities. Like several characters in Winterson’s The Passion remark: “I’m telling you stories. Trust me.” The stories are always true because they imply individual experience. By choosing various historical periods as a setting for their novels, the authors make us reconsider the past and the role of women in it and at the same time contrast it with the present. These works question both normative historiography, because time in them is not perceived as a straight line, and our heteronormative culture. If we break the chains of history, can we then break the chains of heteronormativity?
This thesis will be divided into two major parts. In the theoretical part, for which I decided to rely primarily on Hayden White and postmodernist philosophy of history after the publication of his Metahistory (1973), and on Judith Butler and her post-structuralist predecessors (Wittig, Irigaray, Cixous, Kristeva), I wil strive to explain how the two groundbreaking notions: that history is subjective and gender performative, can work together. I will also consult Linda Hutcheon’s theory of historiographic metafiction as all of the texts can be defined as being partially or entirely of that genre. Michel Foucault and his views on the problematic of both history and gender will also be taken into consideration. The second part of the thesis will consist of an analysis of the four chosen texts based on the theoretical background, their position within contemporary postmodern literature, and the way the authors use language and its impact on the readers will be discussed. I will attempt to show how a different approach to history can liberate or possibly even destruct the notion of gender in the present.

References

Armitt, Lucie. Contemporary Women Fiction and the Fantastic
Bentley, Nick. Contemporary British Fiction
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender
Carter, Angela. Nights at The Circus
Foucault, Michel and Paul Rabinow. The Foucault Reader
Heyes, Cressida. Self-Transformations: Foucault, Ethics, and Normalized Bodies
Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism
Iggers, Georg. Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge
Jagger, Gill. Judith Butler: Sexual Politics, Social Change and the Power of the Performative
Kutzbach Konstanze and Monika Mueller. The Abject of Desire: The Aestheticization of the Unaesthetic in Contemporary Literature and Culture
Makinen, Merja. The Novels of Jeanette Winterson
Smith, Ali. Girl Meets Boy
Smith, Ali. How to Be Both
Watkins, Susan. Twentieth-century Women Novelists: Feminist Theory into Practice
White, Hayden. Metahistory
White, Hayden. Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism
Winterson, Jeanette. Sexing the Cherry
Winterson, Jeanette. Passion
Woolf, Virginia. Orlando