An Ecocentric Reconsideration of Bakhtin’s Grotesque Realism in Sexing the Cherry

Abstract

Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry (1989), which is regarded as one of the best examples in the postmodern fiction, offers a new space for re-considering genders, identities and environmental problems by effacing the boundaries of story/history, self/other, male/female, reality/fantasy, material/immaterial, nature/culture, natural/unnatural, and human/nonhuman. Questioning the monologic discourses of anthropocentrism and androcentrism, the novel deals with social restrictions, political upheavals, religious conflicts, authoritative inequalities, gender issues, and environmental destruction in multiple contexts. Winterson’s novel presents the voice, subjectivity and agency of the monstrous, the most feared, the ignored, the muted and the oppressed, including all human beings regardless of their gender and nonhuman life forms. To achieve this aim, the author retells some events in English history in a detailed way through the voices and perspectives of larger-than-life characters. In doing so, Winterson seeks to deconstruct the officialdom, authoritarian power relations, political hierarchies and social inequalities. She also attempts to eliminate the patriarchal and anthropocentric biases and norms for ecological justice. In this sense, the novel suggests a carnivalesque space with a multiplicity of self and voice and offers a dialogic world with infinite possible ways of existence, fluidity and interdependence of beings. Within this framework, this article seeks to explore Sexing the Cherry in the light of Bakhtinian grotesque realism within the ecocentric view to discuss the effects of the authoritarian, hierarchical and patriarchal attitudes of the human on human and nonhuman communities. In her novel, the author tries to revive the agency of the nonhuman to oppose Cartesian binary oppositions that keep humans away from their physical environment and lead to an anthropocentric tendency that reduces both nature and all its nonhuman inhabitants to objects. Therefore, the article aims to show grotesque responses and challenges demonstrated by the main characters to the environmental problems depicted in the novel. Consequently, Winterson, in accordance with Bakhtin’s grotesque realism, imagines a world of optimism and equality and focuses on the union and harmony of the human with the nonhuman.