Demythologizing history: Jeanette Wintersone’s fictions and his/tories

Abstract

The paper will examine how Jeanette Winterson makes efficient use of historical material in her fiction. Winterson’s use of history as the subject material of her fiction is interesting in that through the narratorial comments upon the nature of history and history writing, and through a blend of history and story, she brings forth a fresh outlook on the past. The fact that she inserts passages on the nature of history and story and that she juxtaposes the past and the theorising of the past makes the reader also take on the same task: the task of revisioning the history. In this sense, Winterson’s texts have a function of inviting the reader to an act of rethinking, revising and revisiting the past. The juxtaposition method she successfully follows also enables the reader to grasp a vision that emerges out of this way of processing the past as a raw material. Then, it can also be suggested that Winterson takes the past as a raw material waiting to be cooked, processed and digested, and communicates this vision to the reader as well. Thus, in her fiction, monolithic, stable and monumental history gains an aspect of plasticity enabling the reader to see the past from a fresh perspective. As the reader is able to find an individual voice in the historical material, s/he perceives the feeling of presence in the past. In other words by historisizing the individual experiences, she gives power and narratibility to individual lives to make them audible, narratable and authorial. In this way, she eliminates the voice of patriarchal and logocentric authority in narratives.

Keywords

• metaficción historiográfica
• jeanette winterson
• escritura feminista de la historia