An overview of Jeanette Winterson’s short stories

Jeanette Winterson deals with several themes in her short stories. Biblical allusions, as
well as ancient and mythological references appear in her writings. For instance, in “Roman
short story”, she deals with the famous city from a subjective point of view, since she uses
the first-person narrator, and expresses her philosophical opinion upon history and the
meaning of life. Rome stands for a biblical place, the “Eternal city” where old and new values
coexist. She redefines the so-called sacred places and shows them from another perspective,
which is more secular, therefore next to the historical descriptions of the landmarks she uses
some subjective and rather funny presentations: “fat baldacchino- a St Peter’s bed canopy,
swollen as sex”. The narrator is a follower of the carpe diem attitude “one life, one day” and
Rome seems to be the constant capital of amusement.
Love is another pattern in Winterson’s short stories, which is fulfilled, and it is full of
beautiful experiences, intimate moments in one hand and depressive, painful and unfulfilled
in the other hand. “Message in a Bottle” is one example of portraying love and destination.
The protagonist wants to get home and Winterson uses several allusions to other works of
arts and figures such as Poseidon to describe the dark waters, James Bond’s wit, Ophelia’s
victim-like figure to give the impression of a desperate woman. This work is also in first-
person, and the main atmosphere is driven by water, the rain that expresses the pain, and the
flood that destroys everything. The main idea though is the circularity of time that finds its
way back and wins a new beginning as the water bottle did. The message in the bottle can
also be interpreted as Jeanette’s ars poetica since literature and the act of writing is the place
for rebirth of values after destruction. Time is the archetype of circularity, destiny and
irreversibility and it is also an important source of philosophical writings.
Winterson also deals with the idea of time in her stories, “Gnomon” is one example
for this in which the narrator uses the third person point of view to give an objective
description of time. Several uses of it are presented but the most important is that time is
timeless and both “dark time and the light time is the same time” good and evil experiences
are the same, but it is still a gift from God that moves everything. Love can defeat time as it
can be ignored. Time cannot be measured mechanically and anyone who tries to do it should
be chained and killed. It is challenging to understand the stories as several times the plot is
interrupted and suddenly another description appears. In this story Stephen the creator of the
clock is executed in one moment and describes his daily routine in another time that is in
another century. The meaning of this is to show how has time evolved and our present is
driven by the management of time and rush. Everyone is so obsessed with planning and
dealing with time that they get exhausted and fail. Several philosophical ideas are interpreted
and views of for example Einstein or Heidegger or even students’ visions to give an extensive
image of time. I think Winterson reminds us that originally everything should have a time “a
time to be born and a time to die, a time to reap and a time to sow, a time for laughter and a
time to refrain from laughter. A time of war and a time of peace.”, in other words the infinite
gallop and the repeated division of our time is breaking the peaceful cycle that balances the
scale of order and harmony between life and time. All three stories urge for an interiorized
time, that can be experienced through feelings of joy and love.
Many of Jeanette’s stories deal with the Theme of Christmas. All the symbols
and themes of the celebration are put in another angle. For instance, in “Dark Christmas” the
image of the holy family is placed in a post war context. The protagonist is trying to put the
pieces together and solve the mysteries around the Highfallen House. Here the main character
appears to be a man and instead of hoping for love to offer shelter, isolation and horror-like
experiences drive the first-person narrator mad. The nativity scene is the central symbol of
this work, the happiness of Christmas has disappeared since the tree is roped and the nativity
scene looks like a doll’s house with a battered star on its front, and with rubbed and faded
like effect. This allows us to think of a child’s broken toy, a destroyed dream worn down by
hard times. Joseph wears a uniform, and he has a wound on his back, he becomes a soldier
figure. In the end the mystery isn’t completely solved which emphasizes the idea that not the
crime is important, but the whole psychological process relived by the narrator put in Joseph
Locke’s role.
The other stories are built around love. “New Xmas story” deals with the
reinterpretation of traditional images of fairy, Jesus, and Santa. The heroine Mrs Snow has a
broken heart kept in a bucket and it is the fairy who consolidates her and encourages her to
risk everything as there is no other way to shelter her heart from loss. According to her
beliefs: “Christmas is a birth story, a love story, a loss story, an impossible story. None of it is
possible-star, shepherd, wise men, virgin birth, angels. We celebrated because we still believe
that only the impossible is worth the effort”. All in all, the only way of being happy is
through sacrifices and actions: “hope must be visible”. The motif of loneliness is frequent in
Winterson’s work and not surprisingly “O’Brien’s first Christmas” deals with the story of an
unmarried woman and the awkward Christmas moments. “Marriage, children, a career,
travel, a home, enough money, lots of money”- are goals that should be fulfilled and
celebrated at Christmas. O’Brien is the counterexample for all these expectations. However, a
fairy appears and even though the wish is only a small change, it changes the heroine’s self-
image, and the possibility of love, offered by a man in the role of Santa, saves her heart.
Despite of this it is her merit that things have changed, when she is asked if the reason of
transformation was a man, she says it is because of a woman. Gender representation and
feminism are fundamental themes in Winterson’s oeuvre. In “The Mistletoe Bride” the agony
of a young woman is told in a Christmas themed haunted story. All the marriage is presented
as a pagan ritual, in which man hunt for women. The victim turns out to be strong, even
though her double aged husband tries to claim her and she undergoes a series of visions in a
coffin, she realizes that the only way out is running away. She is placed in the biblical story
of following the star, which stands for hope.
Sometimes it’s rather challenging to understand the stories, as there it seems to be no plot or
if there is, then descriptive parts take over, which are not obvious and in Christmas stories
characters resemble to some roleplays and lots of events are only suggestive instead of
concrete. Furthermore, allusions and intermediary events make the structure complex,
language is used as means of setting the atmosphere rather than telling the story itself.
Next to the biblical allusions mythological connotation are also frequent. In “The
agony of intimacy” the theme of sexuality is presented through a modern setting, using
mythological figures to contemplate the dangers and pleasures of intimacy. Another short
story retells the myth of Orion from a feminist point of view using the pattern of murder and
revenge. The battle of Artemis and Orion is between the heart the quest and even more of
that, the redefinition of female social roles. Artemis rejects marriage, childbirth, and
homemaking in order to remain a great hunter. She embodies the figure of a modern
independent woman. The main journey is to the self, as she awakens to a knew self-
knowledge. The story gives us three contexts, not only the one of history but also the context
of medieval alchemy and the context of astronomy.
The motif of isolation is presented not only in the Christmas stories but also in other ones
such as in “Newton”, Tom and his differences to his neighbours lead to an alienation. He is
the person who cannot fit in. The third person narration is used, and it starts like a nursery
rhyme by using the repetitive lines. One of the sources of the differences is that Tom’s
neighbours are overly interested in science and not in art. The idea of artificial world is also
expressed: “lamination”, “plastic garden”.
Marriage is another aspect of the short stories. “Holy Matrimony” and “Heathcliff”
deal with this topic. Marriage was often associated with class and wealth in the Victorian
period, and Winterson uses the characters from this era to create a new story from the point of
view of the women, who are the victims of sadistic and manipulative men. While the first one
tells the preparation for the wedding and the loss of values of church rituals from a subjective
point of view, the second one reinterprets the classical story through a teenage girl who
expresses her opinion on the story and meanwhile the story is interrupted by trivial events. A
feature that is commonly used in Jeanette’s writings.
Symbolism can be considered as an important characteristic of her works. In “The
turn of the world” the description of four islands is symbolical, that stand for the four
elements. As many other stories this also has got an intertextual relationship, it reminds us of
“Gulliver’s travels” Understanding might seem difficult in many of her works, because as in
this story the narrator offers a description but doesn’t tell the meaning, so the reader is left
with allusions, descriptions, and impressions, rather than action and plot.
In conclusion, Jeanette Winterson’s short stories deal with philosophical aspects,
dealing with the theme of love, loneliness, time, murder, existence. On the other hand, they
present aspects of male-female conflicts, and especially the status of women. As any
postmodern art she uses intertextuality and reinterpretation of classical literature.