It can be observed that the novel expresses the feminist voices and subversive ideas toward traditional society by the grotesque image of Dog Woman, feminine image of Jordan, the extreme hallucination of revenge and feminist campaigns set by the female chemist。 Also, the post-modern narrative features applied in the novel is one of the key factors for analyzing。 It can be seen that the novel has used parody and historiography when stating the Plague, and many paragraphs of streams of consciousness of different protagonists are also phenomenal in the novel。 It also adopts myths and magical realism to enrich the reading experience for readers。From+优|尔-论_文W网wWw.YouErw.com 加QQ752018.766

1。 3 Literature review

Kundera believed that writers should be free from the limited space and time and introduce multiple historical periods when creating and cultivating characters, when he was criticizing the European novels。 ( Kundera, 2004 ) 。 Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry shows the features put forwarded by Kundera。 Sexing the Cherry contains mainly two British historical periods, the 16th century and the 20th century, centering on the protagonists Jordan, the Dog Woman, Nicolas Jordan and a female chemist。 The novel mixed legends, fairy tales, religions and history, bringing variable layers of reading experiences for readers。 Generally speaking, the studying focuses of scholars home and abroad are on the gender identification and the narrative structure of Sexing the Cherry。

From the publishing of Sexing the Cherry till today, the critical attention abroad to the novel has been split even between the challenges towards traditional gender identification by feminism and the feminism embodied by Jeanette Winterson’ s narrative structure。 As for the study on the gender identification, Kintzele argued that the queer theory gives a insight to the novel in terms of the ambiguity of the gender and the harsh reality of the gender by analyzing the protagonists Jordan and Dog Woman in the novel ( Kintzele, 2010 ) 。 According to Andrievskikh , she studies the motif of consumption in its functions to represent the female struggle for pleasure, power and expression through language( Andrievskikh, 2015)。 In terms of the narrative structure of the novel, Elizabeth Langland explore the narrative poetic feature of the novel, parodist rewriting of “The Mower, Against Gardens” in particular and heroic tradition in general ( Langland, 1997) 。 She points out the the challenges to the sequential narrative posed by feminist text。Smith discussed the feminist view of history by analyzing the narrative of the Dog Woman about the historical period from 1649 to 1665 ( Smith, 2005) 。 Roessner believed that refusing the linear narrative time and applying post-modern narrative strategy could imply the subversion to the traditional patriarchal structure of power ( Roessner, 2002) 。 Jenzen (Luo, Yang, 2014) analyzing the non-linear narrative strategy of the novel in detail and emphasized that the subversion to the traditional view toward time and space is intensified by the challenge to traditional gender identification。论文网

To date, published domestic studies on Sexing the Cherry are generally limited to the exploration of gender identification and the time - space narrative strategies featured in the novel。 As for the studies on gender identification, Chen regarded the “hybrid cherry” in the novel, from the perspective of queer theory and the concept of androgyny, as a metaphor to the combination of the feminine and the masculine, which forms a challenge to the conventional absolute binary gender identification ( Chen, 2014 ) 。 It is also pointed out that the Dog Woman in the novel owns not only the masculine power physically and psychologically in face of every impediment or critical moment, but also the inborn feminine personality and maternal love when taking care for Jordan ( Li, Liu & Zhang, 2012)。 According to Yang, the stories of the four protagonists and the allegories of twelve princess in the novel embody the concept of androgyny and the theory of performativity (Butler, 1990), developed by Judith Butler, by which the gender identification is cultivated by patriarchal society ( Yang, 2015 ) 。 In terms of time-space narrative strategies, Zhang argued that Sexing the Cherry is free from the limitation of time and space making contribution to the challenge toward phallocentric by applying stream of consciousness and parody ( Zhang, 2014 ) 。 Jeanette Winterson establishes a discourse of time-space narrative with the light of the contradict time-space theory of 20th century, which functioned as guideline and principle for the two thematic narratives, namely, the historiographic narrative and the identification narrative( Luo & Yang,2014)。 They also pointed out that the reversible and irreversible time of historiographic narrative, openness of historical space , and the role playing of opposite genders jointly feature the ideas of Winterson’s idea that the contradiction and paradox can be harmonized in the postmodern context。 Though the studies mentioned the narrative time of the novel reflects the author’s idea on gender identification, the theory of Genette is not applied in the research specifically and systematically。