A Study of Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion as Historiographic Metafiction

Abstract

Based on the poststructuralist intellectual thought system, the postmodern philosophy of history has started looking at history as discourse/text. This led to the reformulation of the relationship between history and literature. In consequence, the presence of historical reality in fiction and metaficitonal self-reflexivity in history, the intervention of historian in the process of transformation of past events into history and the realization that history is ideologically constructed have been discussed by most of the postmodern philosophers. In fact, the attempt of postmodern philosophers to study the close affinity between history and literature has shaped the notion of history and the writing of historical novels in the 1960s. This new kind of historical novels, which consciously blur the distinction between history and fiction and create a space for the oppressed people, is what Linda Hutcheon calls historiographic metaficiton. Using the ideas put forward by the postmodern philosophers of history as the theoretical frame, the proposed paper will take up Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion and discuss how Winterson has used the two narratives of Henri and Villanelle in order to subvert the established notion of history, which is one of the narratives of patriarchy and invent a space for female consciousness. However, it will also be highlighted that Winterson’s attempt to create a new space is not to be considered as an escape from the actual world, but a quite essential effort to give multifaceted representation of the actual world.