This book gets 4 out of 5 cherries
One day, I decided I needed to start a book blog. This combines a love of reading and writing with the practical need to create some sort of portfolio to prove that I can indeed strings words together not only into sentences, but thoughtful ones at that. The whole “we won’t give you a job without experience and you can’t get experience without a job” Catch-22. So, finally, here I am, typing out some musings on Jeannette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry.
It must be noted that although it is easy to read while on vacation somewhere with no internet, it is much harder to blog about it. I’m already 3 blog posts behind and hoping that my pace will improve. Ugh.
[ A hand holds a copy of Sexing the Cherry: it appears to be a collage of reddish/greens that forms a textured and gritty image of a woman. Behind the book is a fantastical treehouse on a cliff: my childhood home! ]
Sexing the Cherry has been sitting on my shelf for at least seven years — ever since I devoured her debut novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. I have somehow managed to also read and reread her novel Written on the Body, while never cracking the pages of Sexing the Cherry.
Now, if I had, I would have seen that the book seems to be divided by small drawings; pineapples, bananas, and dancing women. This is similar to what is done in Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, and as someone who read Oranges I would have been super intrigued. In Oranges, fruit, and the literal meaning of the title, are meant to represent non-normative sexualities, particularly that of the author/protagonist. As soon as I opened Sexing the Cherry to see a pineapple etched at the top of the page I was curious and promptly discovered the other drawings dividing the sections in the book. What did these symbols mean in this book? There are many potential answers, some of which I will explore later on, post-spoiler warning. Technically the symbols are not a spoiler because if you look at almost any page of the book, you will see one. So that’s my rationale for ‘spoiling’ that. Plus, anything to reel you into some Jeanette Winterson!
- Why did I pick this book up?
I picked this book up after it had sat on my shelf for many many years. Jeanette Winterson’s books Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit and Written on the Body are some of my favourite books, and I decided this was as good a time as any to delve back into some lesbian lit! I knew based on the reviews included at the front of my copy that although set in the 17th century “to suggest that the novel is set in any one period or place would give a false impression, for Winterson wants to question customary thinking about what time is” (London Review of Books).
Based on Oranges I knew that Winterson liked to play with the genre of historical fiction and I knew that it would be highly referential: of politics, history, religion, and odds are – knowing Winterson – fairy tales.
- Would I recommend: why/why not ?
I would recommend this book if you like weird lesbian magical realist historical fiction, or even just one of those adjectives. Odds are you have not read much like it! If you like post-modern stuff, this is the book for you! If you like books that will philosophize on time, reality, love, and identity politics, then this book will do all those things for you! As is standard with Winterson, there is a lot of beautifully written prose that is worth the read, and many other things This is definitely not the book for you if you only want linear, realistic narratives. If you don’t like any of the things I’ve mentioned before, then this book may not be for you, but it is also not very long so I would say “why not give it a shot?”
- Quick synopsis:
Cherry is a story that alternates between two primary narrators: Jordan (represented by a pineapple) and his adoptive mother, Dog-Woman (represented by a banana). From the outset, we are told by Dog-Woman that Jordan will abandon her. Through Jordan and Dog-Woman we are taken through a fantastical retelling of the events leading up to and following the execution of Charles I, as well as Jordan’s adventures sailing the world, looking for a dancing princess. What follows is a disjointed narrative that touches on colonialism and the European drive to perpetuate empire, Cromwell and Puritanism, the imprisonment – metaphorical and literal – of women, and the idea of love as destruction and essential.
- Overall brain gushings:
From the moment you open Cherry you are confronted with an epigraph that unsettles any perception of reality:
“The Hopi, an Indian tribe, have a language as sophisticated as ours, but no tenses for past, present, and future. The division does not exist. What does this say about time?
Matter, that thing the most solid and the well-known, which you are holding in your hands and which makes up your body, is now known to be mostly empty space. Empty space and points of light. What does this say about the reality of the world?
Jeanette Winterson, pg. 8.
From the get go, Winterson shows you she means business: don’t expect a book that won’t make you think, a fun summer read, or a fun story with a tight plot. No, this book is going to make you take your time with it parsing out all the historical and literary – particularly religious – references that fill its pages. Winterson uses the English Civil War and the regicide of Charles I to explore a variety of themes. At times she reflects on the hypocrisy of Christianity only to then use this historical context to ponder questions of authenticity and identity. The character of Dog-Woman is full of idiosyncrasies, which seem to serve the purpose of revealing our own idiosyncrasies, particularly in regard to religion and spiritual beliefs.
- What does it mean?
So many papers could be written on all the things this book could mean, and to touch on any more than I have would be to spoil it. Of course, there is also the fact that as a post-modern text, it can be argued that to expect meaning and impose one’s view of the text would be to betray the narrative’s intent. So there. Read the book and try and figure out what it means to you.
- Favourite passages:
Winterson is one of those writers that manages to turn everything into poetry, and poetry into hardcore philosophy. This means that on nearly every page I could have found something that made my heart sigh and go “wow that must be my favourite passages”. But I’ll list a couple here, just to give you a taste and get you hooked on the Winterson drug.
“When Jordan was a boy he made paper boats and floated them on the river. From this he learned how the wind affects a sail, but he never learned how love affects the heart.”
Winterson, pg 19.
“When I was a child my father swung me up on to his knees to tell a story and I broke both his legs. He never touched me again… but my mother, who lived only a while and was so light that she dared not go out in a wind, could swing me on her back and carry me for miles. There was talk of witchcraft but what is stronger than love?”
Winterson, pg 25.
Here Winterson blends magical realism with an interesting comment on women and witchcraft, the power of love, and the gendered nature of sacrificial love.
“The Buddhists say there are 149 ways to God. I’m not looking for God, only for myself, and that is far more complicated. God has a great deal written about Him; nothing has been written about me… I have met a great many pilgrims on their way towards God and I wonder why they have chosen to look for him rather than themselves. Perhaps I’m missing the point – perhaps whilst looking for someone else you might come across yourself unexpectedly, in a garden somewhere or on a mountain watching the rain.”
Winterson, pg 102.
Winterson links exploration of the Earth and the nature of time to explore knowledge of self, and the ways in which our relationships and perceptions affect our identity.
- Things that made me go “ugh”:
There were actually only a few things I didn’t like about this book, which when you are actively taking notes on a text, must be a pretty good sign! In fact, most of my distaste centred around the graphic and obscene sex scenes between members of the clergy. Although I could understand the function of those scenes, the crudeness really stood out next to the rest of Winterson’s eloquent and delicate prose. Again, this juxtaposition could very well have been intentional, and was of course successful, but in a text where the pleasure of reading the words and pondering the implications of them, this interruption seemed to have been given too much attention.
There were also times where the ‘postmoderness’ of the text was a little overbearing and at the expense of unity and clarity in the text. This seems like an obvious complaint about a post-modern text, and yet when compared with Oranges, Cherry lacked a balance between genre exploration and narrative storytelling. I found it harder to parse out what I thought Winterson might want me to get out of the text.
Sometimes I would be reading and go “WTF?” is happening/what does this mean?! I would get taken out of experiencing the text by trying to analyse it only to get frustrated when my brain would start feeling mushy.
- Get on these books next:
If you liked Cherry, and made it this far, you should definitely consider reading any other Jeanette Winterson, in particular Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit! Some other texts that came to my mind when I was reading Sexing the Cherry were Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and the graphic novel Bitch Planet by Kelly Sue DeConnick and artist Valentine De Landro. Carter’s is a collection of feminist retellings of classic fairytales. It is very sensual, erotic, and dark. Bitch Planet is a satire of exploitation genres, and includes a wealth of diverse feminist and queer representations.
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