'Self' and 'Other' in Jeanette Winterson's The Passion

Abstract

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.