To indulge in such passions

As previously mentioned, this work by Winterson, alongside with The Passion, are examples of historiographic metafiction, which destabilise strict categories of gender and sexuality. Sexing the Cherry includes two narrators that alternate:

Winterson proposes another kind of aesthetics of love

Life can be paralleled with a casino, with games that suppose risk loss, and this can be seen literally as she gambles her future to escape her husband.

Highlights the arbitrariness of love – she gambles her heart and she loses

Passion also means obsession

Soul mates

By ‘passion’ Winterson signifies the subject’s obsessive involvement with the Other, the object of desire. Obsessions of this intense kind, she illustrates, override barriers of class, gender and sexual orientation, and assume a variety of different manifestations. They can be romantic, as in Villanelle’s love for the Queen of Spades and Henri’s for Villanelle, or they can reflect hero worship and be oedipal in nature, as is Henri’s attachment to Napoleon, whom he describes as ‘a little father’. They can be motivated by a desire for power, as is the case of Napoleon’s ambitions of territorial domination, or be a matter of appetite, as is his passion, on a culinary plane, for chicken and, on a sexual one, for Josephine. They can be religious, as are the feelings of devotion which Henri’s mother experiences for the Virgin Mary.

Passions of this obsessive nature, Winterson emphasizes, are involuntary, irrational and, more often than not, self-destructive.

There is always the thought that you might have played your hand better, but there’s no way of cheating luck, chance

Like a game of cards

She picked up the queen of spades

What are the odds

wanted to create an imaginative reality sufficiently at odds with our daily reality in order to startle us out of it

I have always been a gambler. It’s a skill that comes naturally to me like thieving and loving. What I didn’t know by instinct I picked up from working the Casino, from watching others play and learning what it is that people value and therefore what it is they will risk. I learned how to put a challenge in such a way as to make it irresistible. We gamble with the hope of winning, but it’s the thought of what we might lose that excites us.

It was a game of chance I entered into and my heart was the wager. Such games can only be played once.Such games are better not played at all.It was a woman I loved and you will admit that is not the usual thing. I knew her for only five months. We had nine nights together and I never saw her again. You will admit that is not the usual thing.I have always preferred the cards to the dice so it should have come as no surprise to me to have drawn a wild card.The Queen of spades.

Love is just like a game of cards in Villanelle’s opinion, as it is based mostly on chance and

In portraying Villanelle in this transgressive manner, Winterson shows herself less interested in normalizing the image of the lesbian and highlighting the features which she shares with women in general than in foregrounding lesbian difference and inventing strategies of representation to express it.

Onega pag 55

I am in love with her; not a fantasy or a myth or a creature of my own making.Her. A person who is not me. I invented Bonaparte as much as he invented himself.My passion for her, even though she could never return it, showed me the difference between inventing a lover and falling in love.The one is about you, the other about someone else.”

These two manifestations of passion are supposed to differentiate between the “Lacanian je-idéal1”, as Susana Onega identifies Henri’s perception of Napoleon, and true love, which he feels for Villanelle. However, his love is unrequited and he loses in the game of love, just like she did. Henri gives up his love for the same reason as Villanelle decided to end her relationship with the Queen of Spades: “There’s no sense in loving someone you can only wake up to by chance.2” This phrase first uttered by Villanelle and afterwards recalled by Henri, shows that in order to achieve fulfillment the lover needs total devotion from his/her beloved, and neither Villanelle, nor Henri get that; the Queen of Spades also loved her husband, which is why Villanelle felt “the pain of never having enough3” and in addition to this, the biggest impediment to her love was the fact that they were forced to meet in strange places in order to avoid detection, as they could never share their love openly in a society that condemned everything out of the ordinary

1 S. Onega, Contemporary British Novelists JEANETTE WINTERSON, Manchester University Press, 2006, p. 61.2 J. Winterson, The Passion, London: Penguin Books Ltd, 1988, p. 122.3 J. Winterson, The Passion, London: Penguin Books Ltd, 1988, p. 96.

The fact that the Queen of Spades is married increases the illicit nature of the two women’s relationship, causing it to take place under conditions of secrecy, masquerade and lack of social recognition – all the features, in fact, which today we encompass in the term ‘the closet’.

to demonstrate both the intensity of lesbian love and the closeted existence to which hetero-patriarchal society conventionally relegates it.

The definite article in the title, then, gives the life stories of the protagonists a representative, archetypal character, just as the noun justifies its stylistic repetitiveness, since, as Bényei, following Roland Barthes, acutely notes, any discourse on passion is inevitably surrounded by silence and it is only through repetition that the writer can aspire to express ‘the difficulty of talking and telling stories about passion.’ Bényei’s interesting contention is that the text incessantly veers towards its own discursive limit, managing, through repetition and excess, to express ‘a beyond of passion, of madness that can never be spoken of, but which always already speaks in the very language that is unable to speak about it.’

Words like passion and extasy, we learn them but they stay flat on the page. Sometimes we try and turn them over, find out what’s on the other side, and everyone has a story to tell of a woman or a brothel or an opium night or a war. We fear it. We fear passion and laugh at too much love and those who love too much.And still we long to feel.

155