I'm Telling You Stories, Trust Me - QUT

[Pages:1]`I'm Telling You Stories, Trust Me': Blending the Marvellous and Mimetic Modes of Discourse in Jeanette Winterson's Memoirs and Autobiographies.

Kate Cantrell, Queensland University of Technology

Abstract

This paper investigates the narrative structure of Jeanette Winterson's semiautobiographical novel, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit (1985) and her memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (2012). Specifically, the paper demonstrates how Winterson endows her works with a non-linear temporality that merges past, present, and future into a uniform whole. This collapse of temporal dimensions disrupts the laws of causality and chronology, and creates a non-linear narrative that binds Jeanette to her mother. This bind not only represents Jeanette's movement through the world, but the shape encapsulates the complexities of her relationship with Mrs. Winterson: a fundamentalist Christian who rejects Jeanette when she falls in love with another woman. When Jeanette refuses to `repent', she undermines the discursive power of her mother's faith and consequently breaks the alliance on which their relationship is based. In both Oranges and Why Be Happy, this collapse of the mother-daughter relationship evokes the multiplicity of selfhood by alternating between the mimetic and marvellous modes of discourse. In this way, Winterson employs a narrative structure that allows Jeanette to oscillate between the story of her adoption and coming out with the story of her mother's conversion to the Pentecostal Church.

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