Subversion in sexing the cherry
Subversion in sexing the cherry.
We all know the typical love story that parents narrated us as kids before we went to sleep; the story where the prince and the princess get married and live happily ever after, or the one with the strong superhero as the main character of the story. In “Sexing the Cherry”, Winterson decided to subvert the typical tale related by people. In this essay we will show two examples of how is Winterson using the “subversion” in her book.
To begin with, the main characters of the story are not as usual characters in books. Most of the authors try to make their characters look as heroes or at least as handsome people but in this book, the dog woman, one of the main characters, is represented as an enormous, religious, strong, violent woman who has very close minded ideas and thinks nobody is correct, but her: “‘You know nothing of the Scriptures,’ said I. ‘For nowhere in that Holy Book is there anything to be said about the weight of an angel.’” (p. 20) The same happens with Jordan, which people may think will be fighting for the world but the reality is that he is described as a weak, tiny boy that lives alone with fifty dogs and a strange woman.
Another example is the story that is told of the twelve dancing princesses. As readers, when we look at the word “princess” we could be thinking of one of the Disney fairy tales that we are used to listen. Winterson decides to totally subvert that idea and makes the princesses marry princes but without the happily ever after, as an example: “After that she had wrapped her own husband in cloth and gone on wrapping the stale bandages round and round until she reached his nose. She had a moment’s regret, and continued.” (p.49) The way the princesses treat and finish their marriages are not common, and not imaginable for readers.
As a conclusion, we can say that Winterson was not a writer who liked to write or express her ideas as the other authors, including in her stories the same concept or
We all know the typical love story that parents narrated us as kids before we went to sleep; the story where the prince and the princess get married and live happily ever after, or the one with the strong superhero as the main character of the story. In “Sexing the Cherry”, Winterson decided to subvert the typical tale related by people. In this essay we will show two examples of how is Winterson using the “subversion” in her book.
To begin with, the main characters of the story are not as usual characters in books. Most of the authors try to make their characters look as heroes or at least as handsome people but in this book, the dog woman, one of the main characters, is represented as an enormous, religious, strong, violent woman who has very close minded ideas and thinks nobody is correct, but her: “‘You know nothing of the Scriptures,’ said I. ‘For nowhere in that Holy Book is there anything to be said about the weight of an angel.’” (p. 20) The same happens with Jordan, which people may think will be fighting for the world but the reality is that he is described as a weak, tiny boy that lives alone with fifty dogs and a strange woman.
Another example is the story that is told of the twelve dancing princesses. As readers, when we look at the word “princess” we could be thinking of one of the Disney fairy tales that we are used to listen. Winterson decides to totally subvert that idea and makes the princesses marry princes but without the happily ever after, as an example: “After that she had wrapped her own husband in cloth and gone on wrapping the stale bandages round and round until she reached his nose. She had a moment’s regret, and continued.” (p.49) The way the princesses treat and finish their marriages are not common, and not imaginable for readers.
As a conclusion, we can say that Winterson was not a writer who liked to write or express her ideas as the other authors, including in her stories the same concept or