Look into My I. Narrating Subjects, Identity and Gender in Jeanette Winterson's Fiction

Almost all of Jeanette Winterson’s novels are written in first person, in most cases a person narrating his or her own life. Nonetheless Winterson does not consider any of her novels as autobiographies, not even Oranges Are not the Only Fruit, which tells about the writer’s early life. On the contrary, she points out how the fact she narrates events that are exact descriptions of her life is not enough to call this work an “autobiography”. In her collection of essays Art Objects she states that, like Gertrude Stein in her Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, she prefers herself as a character in her own fiction and, like Stein, what concerns her is language. It is in and through language, in fact, that a human being becomes a subject, because it is only through language that one can create a concept of “I” inside reality. The paper will try to analyse how Jeanette Winterson uses language to investigate the disappearance of gender and to create new identities in such novels as Written on the Body and Art and Lies, and it will also try to show how her characters gain conscience of this identities by narrating themselves.