Remaining in the Thraldoms: Re-Reading Transvestism and the Abject Body in Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes1 The critics’ biologist orientation contradicts Butler’s theory of gender performativity, where the emphasis is placed upon doing. With reference to Nietzsche’s profession in On the Genealogy of Morals that “‘the doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed” (qtd. in Butler, Gender Trouble 33), Butler argues that “gender is always a doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to preexist the deed” (33; my emphasis).2 Apart from their antipathetic attitude in the birth scene, Villanelle’s parents’ perception of her androgyny changes twice: evasive (before she is sold to Napoleon’s army) and accepting (after her return to Venice). Before she becomes a vivandière in Napoleon’s camp, Villanelle recalls that “[m]y mother wouldn’t even tell me if the rumors [of boatmen’s webbed feet] were real” (Winterson, The Passion 69). After she and Henri escape the war in Russia and return to Venice, her mother relays and affirms the urban myth without hesitation in their presence (118). Her mother’s eventual open-mindedness, however, fails to find a counterpart in Villanelle’s psychological progression.3 A focus on Villanelle’s intent makes apparent that Winterson fashions the heroine’s transvestism in adherence to Laura Mulvey’s idea of the male/female dichotomy in the act of gazing. In the chapter “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Mulvey describes a conventional dynamic in patriarchal culture where “pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female:” “The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness. Woman displayed as sexual object is the leitmotif of erotic spectacle: from pin-ups to strip-tease, from Ziegfeld to Busby Berkeley, she holds the look, and plays to and signifies male desire” (10; original emphases).4 Although Irigaray defines masquerade as Freudian femininity, her theory remains valid in my line of argument. The chief tenet of her theory is centered on what a woman is compelled to do in order to be considered normal in a patriarchal culture: “What do I mean by masquerade? In particular, what Freud calls femininity. The belief, for example, that … a woman has to become a normal woman, that is, has to enter into the masquerade of femininity” (134; original emphases).