Male postmodernist fiction often shows an obsessive desire to undermine
the concept of the bourgeois individual subject characteristic
of classic realism. However, women writers on the whole do not feel
comfortable with an aesthetics of impersonality because it would be
deeply at odds with women’s own experience of subordination and
objectification. The paper analyses the way in which, in The Passion,
Jeanette Winterson attempts to reconcile her rejection of the conventions
of classic realism with her need for definition of selfhood within
the framework of Freudian and Lacanian theory.
