Sexing The Cherry

Sexing the Cherry (1989) by Jeanette Winterson is a story about a mother, Dog-Woman, and her adopted son, Jordan, who travel through time and space. There are historical events, finding exotic fruit, and the intertextuality of the fairy-tale ‘Twelve Dancing Princesses’. Ultimately, it is about The Self, and the journey to finding it. Sexing the Cherry is narrated by Dog-Woman; she is the agent of her own story, like the young girl’s narration in The Bloody Chamber (1979) by Angela Carter.

Dog-Woman describes herself as having a flat nose, “heavy eyebrows” (2001:24), a few rotten teeth and that her face has “caves” from where she had smallpox as a child, she calls them a home for fleas (24). She also has “fine blue eyes that see in the dark” (24) and she “stand[s] taller than any[one]” (25), she is also so heavy that she managed to send an elephant into the air and when she was young she broke both her father’s legs when she sat on them. Dog-Woman has the definition of a grotesque body; she is exaggerated and has the female body of excess, making her a big monstrous woman. 

Irving Penn, Large Nude Woman Seated ("Epic Proportions")

According to Sonia Front, Dog-Woman’s “grotesque body recalls those of the Rabelaisian giants. Her extraordinary size and ugliness […] engender fear, terror and aggression” (2009:27). Rabelais’s ‘Gargantua’ was used as a “vehicle for cartoon violence and toilet humor” (Best, 2009), which Winterson took up and used as a “way to poke fun at a few shreds of taboos that cling to the female body” (Best, 2009); the cross between the chaos and humor is a good example of the carnivalesque. Winterson’s Dog-Woman also allows “the grotesque body [to] overlap the world, […][and] its borders become blended with the animal and the inanimate” (2011:98), in Sexing the Cherry, Dog-Woman is told by a religious man to gouge out her enemies eyes and teeth, which is a horrific and somewhat animalistic notion. She ends up telling us, the readers, the amount she has gained, 119 eyeballs and 2000 teeth (2001:85). The quote also draws upon the sheer size of Dog-Woman, having a body that would ‘overlap’, “I was wearing my best dress, the one with a wide skirt that would serve as a sail” (2001:64).

Gargantua and Pantagruel

There is also the matter of her father, he attempts to steal his daughter and sell her to a circus, much like the carnival freak shows. She is so grotesque that her father believes he is able to profit from it, I am not sure whether he did it for just the money or that he just could not stand having a child like her. Dog-Woman kills her father and forgets it,

I have forgotten my childhood, not just because of my father but because it was a bleak and unnecessary time

                                                                        (2001:107)

It seems that Dog-Woman knows that she has had a hard time due to her appearance, especially when she is older; she takes it in her stride and makes the most of it. She becomes a strong feminine character; she addresses a number of gender and sexuality problems, although they may not have been looked at closely at the time. For example Sexing the Cherry, Sonia Front says that Winterson’s text is about “regaining the female body for female desire” (2009:128) and she continues on to say that the text is addressing lesbianism:

Dog-Woman’s excessive grotesque body […] stipulates postmodernism’s metaphoric figuration of the lesbian body.

                                                       (2009:115)

Sexing the Cherry may not seem like a lesbian text straight away; however there are some moments that Dog-Woman could be said to be tackling sexuality/gender roles, as well as a woman’s role in a man/woman relationship. Dog-Woman gives her opinion on men,

I don’t hate men. Just wished they’d try harder. They all want to be heroes and all we want is for them to stay at home and help out with the housework and the kids.

                                                                                                               (2001:127)

Winterson, through Dog-Woman, brings forward the ideas of equality in a relationship between man and woman; she does not make any direct statements towards a sexual relationship to women, even though critics make links to that effect today. Critics should focus on Dog-Woman as a good example of the female grotesque; men will be fearful of her, her own husband left her because he could not deal with her grotesque body. Men feared the woman’s sexuality, Dog-Woman believes in equality in the relationship, making her a powerful, confidence woman.