Effusive Narrative Temporalities: Queer Class Poetics in Jeanette Winterson’s Early Novels, 1985-1992

Abstract

This thesis investigates intersections of class inequality and queerness in the early writing of Jeanette Winterson. In the pursuit of what I contend might be understood as a queer class poetics, I mine a selection of Winterson’s early novels (Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Written on the Body, and The Passion) for instances wherein queer and class struggles inflect the narrative style, as much as the content, of her prose. I highlight several pressure points where queer lives chafe against ‘straight’ narrative poetics, threatening, and at times breaching the confinement these traditional modes impose on non-hetero, non-bourgeois bodies. To identify the key components of an emergent queer class poetics in these texts, I derive a scaffolding from the work of Annamarie Jagose, Lee Edelman, Lauren Berlant, and Elizabeth Freeman on queer temporalities. I focus on these scholars’ analyses of what disruptions of causality, of sequence, and of linear narrative and temporality might bring to the work of reimagining and recalibrating queer and economically disenfranchised lives. In Chapter One I show how in Oranges Winterson’s queer class poetics reclaims as productive paradoxes those lateral temporalities and dalliances in which the novel’s protagonist Jeanette abides. This refusal to synthesize forms part of the discussion of Written in Chapter Two, where scientific and poetic renderings of the body neither compete nor complement one another but simply exist, juxtaposed, on the page. Written takes as its organizing conceit the obfuscation of the narrator’s gender, sex, age, ethnicity, and name. Yet this text’s push towards narrative queerness seems to have provoked a decrease in sensitivity to class. In the third chapter I turn to The Passion. This novel, the second ‘chronologically’ in Winterson’s oeuvre, offers a more concrete template, and a fuller blurring of the lines between authorized historical narrative and the marginalized narratives of queer working-class characters. I argue that, in concert, the novels perform a queer politics that remembers but also rearticulates survival, and that at once theorizes and shapes the grounds on which time is understood and inhabited in worlds before, alongside or beyond neoliberal regimes.