[In the following essay, Fahy examines Winterson's use of fragmented bodies in The Passion to represent the restorative powers of postmodern art.]

Many lesbian writers, such as Monique Wittig and Jeanette Winterson, have used images of fragmented female bodies to subvert heterosexist norms and question the politics of gender roles. For these and other authors, shattered or incomplete bodies call into question culturally constructed assumptions about women's bodies as knowable sites—sites which can be possessed and controlled. This fragmentation also destabilizes some of the boundaries placed on bodies to promote possibilities for social and sexual difference. As Judith Butler has argued in Bodies That Matter, objects have a discrete set of boundaries, but bodies do not; instead, it is the act of labeling bodies and sexuality according to heterosexual standards (“woman” or “she is a lesbian”) that creates or defines bodily limitations. Fragmented bodies in postmodern fiction can therefore disrupt traditional images of women's bodies and undermine dominant ideologies; or as Linda Hutcheon has suggested more broadly, postmodern texts can “denaturalize some of the dominant features of our ways of life” (2). But once the body has been dismembered as an act of resistance, what kind of narratives get constructed that offer new understandings about women's bodies?

For Jeanette Winterson, fragmented bodies become a way of exploring the various coercive forces (heterosexism, imperialism, violence, spirituality, sexuality) that tear people apart and fracture their relationships with others. In novels such as The Passion (1987), Sexing the Cherry (1989), Written on the Body (1992), and Gut Symmetries (1997), love often fails to bring people together (or reassemble the broken pieces), but it is valued precisely because it remains incomplete, ongoing. Though many critics have labeled Winterson a lesbian feminist postmodernist, these readings of her as postmodernist have not adequately examined her writing of bodies. In “Jeanette Winterson's Sexing the Postmodern,” for example, Laura Doan's discussion of The Passion focuses on Villanelle's lesbian relationship and the novel's use of cross-dressing to blur gender distinctions. And Marilyn R. Farwell's Heterosexual Plots and Lesbian Narratives discusses the ways Winterson's lesbianism distinguishes her postmodern techniques from male and gay writers. I want to complicate these readings of Winterson by considering her use of fragmented bodies. Through her images of the body, she offers a solution (or resolution) to postmodernist narratives of fragmentation, enabling her characters to find meaning in art that validates the incomplete.

In The Passion, fragmented bodies are spaces where love doesn't work, and they act as metaphors for the severed emotional, spiritual, and physical states of her characters. These body-parts reflect contemporary anxieties about creating fragments that do not cohere into a unified whole. Yet Winterson's novel suggests that postmodern art offers a means of achieving spiritual and emotional comfort. This may sound like a modernist agenda. But in modernism, fragmentation is a source of anxiety—leaving the individual with a desperate need, as Virginia Woolf says, “to seek among phrases and fragments something unbroken” (266). Postmodernism, instead, embraces the fragmented. In this essay, I first consider the forces that fragment Winterson's characters, specifically empire-building (the ways Napoleon's empire sectionalizes people), religion (the loss of spiritual passion for God), and sex without love. After tracing the intersection of these forces and their impact on bodies in the novel, I show that Winterson uses postmodern art as a means of allowing for fragmentation while still affirming individual strength.

Although Napoleon's empire-building differs significantly from European colonial exploitation of non-Western countries, Winterson addresses the issue of global imperialism by fashioning Napoleon as a colonizer-king. In the first section of The Passion, “The Emperor,” Henri describes Napoleon as “sitting alone with a globe in front of him. He doesn't notice me, he goes on turning the globe round and round, holding it tenderly with both hands as if it were a breast” (4). Through this image of the woman's breast, Winterson presents Napoleon as feminizing unconquered territories on the globe, conflating uncolonized territories and the woman's body—both objects to be violated. Images of penetration and expansion also equate Napoleon's imperial conquest with the sexual exploitation of women. When Napoleon's cook ejaculates into the prostitute's mouth, for example, her cheeks “[fill] out like a rat's when she took him” (15). Such images reveal the limitations of empire-building. Like the prostitute who spits out semen and exclaims “what else would I do with it,” regurgitation becomes an act of resistance, suggesting that imperialism cannot successfully procreate and generate lasting desire. Imperialism's failure is illustrated by Napoleon's inability both to create a dynasty and to maintain his soldiers' devotion; ultimately Napoleon's empire can only expect resistance and rejection from those it conquers and subjugates. In other words, unfulfilled desire and non-reproductive sexual acts become metaphors for the inevitable erosion and failure of imperialism. In one example, Winterson uses the prostitutes Napoleon provides for his troops to liken imperialism to infertility, suggesting that an empire's own destruction is inherent in its failure to create the conditions where healthy generativity might be possible.

While serving in Napoleon's army, men fashion a virgin/whore dichotomy that prevents them from finding love and spiritual meaning in heterosexual relationships. Henri and the other soldiers separate a woman's physical body from her spiritual or ethereal one: “Here, without women, with only our imaginations and a handful of whores, we can't remember what it is about women that can turn a man through passion into something holy. […] We never think of them here. We think of their bodies” (27). Women, and presumably heterosexual relationships, had the power to sanctify men before the war. Under the imperial hand, however, women—the unconquered land—become prostitutes, physical objects to be taken, mere “breasts.” Their bodies become objects through which men hope to find spiritual as well as physical fulfillment. Unable to possess the bodies which they have despiritualized, however, the men eventually abandon them for their love of Napoleon, the one who can tangibly make France (and by extension themselves) powerful. Henri's parable of the inventor—a man who leaves his wife to make his fortune, yet loses everything—illustrates this abandonment of women: “She had made him possible. In that sense she was his god. Like God, she was neglected” (28). Here Winterson suggests that women possess a spiritual power that men cannot access through the virgin/whore, spirit/matter dichotomy, and because of this boundary, the colonizers eventually neglect women (and religion) in order to find passion in their service for Napoleon.

Through the character of Patrick, Winterson provides a direct link between imperial and religious forms of power that sever love from sexuality and desire. Before Napoleon appropriates his telescopic eye for the empire, Patrick uses his “gift” to watch women: “he had been forced out of the church for squinting at young girls from the bell tower. What priest doesn't? But in Patrick's case, thanks to the miraculous properties of his eye, no bosom was safe” (21). Like Napoleon fondling his globe-breast, the leader of the church touches/watches women as a way of “possessing” them. Looking, in other words, gives men the power to subjugate—“the women looked at the earth and said they knew when they were being watched” (21). Ironically, Patrick loses his status as a priest primarily because his gaze suggests heterosexual desire. The Bishop who dismisses him “[preferred] the smooth shapes of his choirboys [and thought] a priest should have better things to do than look at women” (21). In Patrick's experiences with Catholicism, homoerotic, not heteroerotic, bonds are privileged: “[Women] always sense our lying ways. The Blessed Virgin's a woman too, for all that she's Holy, and there's no man I know can get his own way with her. You can pray all day and all night and she won't hear you. If you're a man, you'd much better stick with Jesus himself” (40). Homoerotic bonds fail in the novel when they, too, are based on possession, not on reciprocal love.

After abandoning their relationships with women, men also abandon institutional, here Christian, religion. Beginning with the title's allusion to the passion of Christ, the novel compares religious suffering, which is an integral part of Christian lore, to romantic passion. Winterson implicitly refers to the body of Christ, which is marked and scarred by his passion and love for humanity, to invoke his physical body as an image of the supreme sufferer and martyr. Yet no single martyr appears in The Passion; instead, many characters experience Christ-like suffering, such as the prostitute who like Christ “lost consciousness at thirty-nine (lashes)” (38) and Henri who, while looking at the chalice's silver imprint on his palms, wonders “were these my stigmata then?” (42). Given the absence of a single martyr-figure, the text does not invoke Christ as a totality, so much as it disperses fragmented images of his tortured body throughout the novel. The synecdoche that Christianity offers—the sacred heart, the blood and flesh of communion—may elicit passion, but the fragmentation leaves its followers continually looking for wholeness. Henri, for example, feels an unjust imbalance in his relationship to God: “My mother loved God, she said that God and the Virgin were all she needed […]. I can't be a priest because although my heart is as loud as hers I can pretend no answering riot. I have shouted to God and the Virgin, but they have not shouted back […]. Surely a god can meet passion with passion? She says he can. Then he should” (9–10). Since religion fails to incite any “spiritual fervor” in Henri and most of the people in France (“we're a lukewarm people” [7]), he begins to devote himself to Napoleon's cause. “He was my passion and when we go to war we feel we are not a lukewarm people anymore” (108).

Napoleon, on the other hand, can tangibly return the love and devotion of his soldiers through the acquisition of new territories. Emotional allegiance therefore takes on capital value for them because it is reciprocated and validated by France's literal expansion. Eva Illouz's Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism argues, in part, that romantic love often occurs within the context of capital and cultural consumption. The link she suggests between consumerism/acquisition and the romantic interchange parallels the soldiers' relationship to Napoleon in The Passion. After Romantic love and religious passion fail the men of France, Napoleon's cause—a cause motivated by an insatiable desire for power and control through territorial expansion—gives them something concrete to believe in. Imperial power, in other words, offers wholeness because it imposes unity on fragmentation. It is also a project whose successes and failures can be measured and mapped. However, the intersection between consumption and love has the power, according to Illouz, at “one and the same time [to] bind and divide, unite and separate” (6), and, in the context of Winterson's novel, it unites France at the cost of separating the soldiers from their families and literally from themselves through the loss of body parts.

The men of France also transfer a religious significance to Napoleon; and through the influence of the village priest, Henri specifically fashions Napoleon into a savior figure who revivifies France:

For years, my mentor, the priest […] told me that Bonaparte was perhaps the Son of God come again. […] I have lain with the priest on an old and impossibly folded map of the world looking at the places he had gone and watching the frontiers of France push slowly out. The priest carried a drawing of Bonaparte next to his drawing of the Blessed Virgin.

(15–16)

In place of Christ, the priest carries a picture of Bonaparte, warrior-savior, next to the Mother of God, and he positions himself and these photographs above a map of the world to suggest that Napoleon's mission to “push out” the frontiers of France is God's mission. Henri and his fellow soldiers will later echo this notion to justify their actions in war. When they prepare to attack England, for example, Henri explains: “We knew about the English; how they ate their children and ignored the Blessed Virgin. […] The English have the highest suicide rate in Europe. I got that straight from a priest” (8). Not only is religious devotion transferred to the figure of Napoleon, but morality is also used to validate imperial expansion and the subjugation of France's enemies. David Spurr, for example, explains in The Rhetoric of Empire that moral justification recurs throughout colonial discourse to “[justify] the authority of those in control of the discourse through demonstrations of moral superiority” (110). For Henri and most of France, Napoleon maintains his superiority by filling a need for passion that the Church cannot satisfy. When, “at the last second he took the crown [from the Pope] in his own hands and placed it on his own head” (13), he becomes the physical embodiment of spiritual passion for the people of France.

In her essays Art Objects, Winterson discusses the differences between the roles of the priest and the king in order to explain the deification of political leaders like Napoleon. “King was more accessible to his people than were the priests. Although King and priest worked together, priesthood is still allied to magic. […] The priest did not fight in battle, take concubines, hoard treasure, feast and riot” (140). Kings share in the tangible or physical aspects of everyday life—thus making them more “real” for the common people. At the same time, because kings are already endowed by God, their subjects can see them and their actions as invested with religious and moral significance: “At its simplest and at its best, royalty is an imaginative function; it must embody in its own person, subtle and difficult concepts of Otherness. The priest does not embody these concepts, the priest serves them. The priest is a functionary, the King is a function” (141). Like the “lukewarm” priest who visits Henri's village and Patrick who serves Napoleon, the functionary and passive roles of priests offer the people no alternative or model to escape their own emotional stagnation: “Not much touches us, but we long to be touched. […] Our children frighten us in their intimacy, but we make sure they grow up like us. Lukewarm like us” (7). At one point, Henri suggests that the only appealing aspect of the Catholic religion is the Jesuit order: “I would have preferred a burning Jesuit, perhaps then I might have found the extasy [sic] I need to believe” (12). Henri has simply not seen this type of passionate, religious fervor in France. Napoleon's grandeur and imperial drive, however, have been able to ignite, even if temporarily, the passions of the people, and, like religious missionaries, he seeks ideological control over those he conquers: “Bonaparte always claimed he knew what was good for a people, knew how to improve, how to educate. He did; he improved wherever he went, but he always forgot that even simple people want the freedom to make their own mistakes” (103). Yet when the Russian peasants effectively reject Napoleon's attempts to “improve” things, they expose the ultimate ineffectiveness of imperial attempts at ideological control.

As Winterson's characters become aware of the ways their bodies have been fractured and dismembered by imperialism, both Napoleon's empire and his position of moral superiority begin to break down. Specifically, Henri sees how war has damaged his body and those around him: “I lost an eye at Austerlitz. Domino was wounded [losing one side of his face] and Patrick […] never sees much past the next bottle” (79). Throughout the drive to capture Moscow, Henri's awareness of body parts enables him to see how his individuality and that of his friends has been subsumed by Napoleon's possessive desire for conquest and power. Napoleon's quest for expansion tears apart the people of France and those it wishes to control, pulling them away from their families and homes. Thus, images of fragmented bodies in The Passion work as metaphors for the (self-) destructiveness of imperialism which fragments both the self and the other. On one occasion, Henri describes a man whose “horse froze around him; in the morning when he tried to take his feet out they were stuck, entombed in the brittle entrails. We couldn't free him, we had to leave him. He wouldn't stop screaming” (80). Like this man's feet, the soldiers have become limbs or expendable parts of Napoleon's body, and their damaged bodies force them to acknowledge the physical and spiritual losses of Napoleon's attempts at empire-building. “Even Bonaparte was beginning to learn that numbers count. In this vast country there are miles and men and snowflakes beyond our resources” (100). Napoleon's insatiable desire for expansion and control ultimately forces his empire to meet its own limitations and borders. As the army reaches its furthest point from the heart of France during the march to Moscow, the novel shows his empire literally disappearing as more soldiers lose parts of their bodies and/or lives.

Lost and/or removed hearts become another central image that links spirituality and love. After Henri's disillusionment with Napoleon, he explains how he and the other soldiers had to relinquish their hearts to survive: “You can only give up your passion. Only then can you begin to survive. […] When I say I lived with heartless men, I use the word correctly” (82–3). We also learn through Villanelle's experiences that the empire wants heartless bodies because it needs them as objects. After the cook sells Villanelle as a prostitute to the French army, she explains that she “was to join the army, to join the Generals for their pleasure. […] They didn't give me enough time to collect my heart, only my luggage, but I'm grateful to them for that; this is no place for a heart” (99). Napoleon's empire and its demonic representative, the cook, have objectified her and Henri, de-individualizing both the self (Henri) and the other (Villanelle). Only when these characters become concerned with their individual identity—their needs and losses—can they resist the destructive desires of Napoleon's growing empire: “We wanted glory and conquest and slaves and praise. [Napoleon's] desire burned for longer than ours because it was never likely that he would pay for it with his life” (104).

As Napoleon's empire crumbles, the cook, who has made his fortune by selling the army low-quality supplies, becomes a symbol for its excesses:

He was much heavier than when I had known him, with jowls that hung like dead moles, and a plump case of skin that held his head to his shoulders. His eyes had receded and his eyebrows, always thick, now loomed at me like sentries. He folded his hands on the edge of the boat, hands with rings forced over the knuckles. Red hands.

(127)

Imperialism has encoded itself on the cook's face, making his eyes barely visible under his sentry-like eyebrows. Nameless, eyeless, and, as Villanelle assumes, heartless, his debased identity makes him a perfect tool for empire-building. The ways in which he financially profits seem to make him physically heavier, and, like Henri's description of Napoleon's stuffing an entire chicken into his mouth, the cook's body becomes a symbol for the gluttony of empire: a consuming machine. Finally, when the cook confronts and threatens Henri and Villanelle, Henri literally cuts out his heart: “I cut a triangle in about the right place and scooped out the shape with my hand” (128). Henri does to the empire what the empire has done to him.

As their search for wholeness through physical relationships (heterosexual and homosexual love), religious practices, and imperialism fails, Winterson's characters turn to art: Joséphine's gardens, the Queen of Spades's tapestry, and Henri's notebook. Through this shift Winterson suggests that in a fragmented world, passion can be sustained only through artistic expression which privileges the incomplete. Even though her characters suffer from spiritual and physical fragmentation, she presents art, postmodern art—a space where fragments do not form a unified whole—as enabling them to find ongoing meaning. Unlike empire, which wants to consume the parts in order to create a masculinist-imperialist homogeneity, the “whole” in postmodern art does not swallow the parts into its self. Thus, Winterson can use Henri's incomplete notebook to locate value in an individual's fragmented experiences.

In order to present postmodern art as a salve for the contemporary condition, she first contrasts the art of imperialism, which requires the imposition of artificial order (“Where Bonaparte goes, straight roads follow, buildings are rationalised” [112]), with the never-ending mutability of Venice. After Napoleon tears down many of the churches in Venice, Joséphine seeks to impose order over nature through the art of her gardens. She specifically uses these spaces to make public gardens. “Why did we want a public garden? And if we had chosen it ourselves we would never have filled it with hundreds of pines laid out in regimental rows. They say Joséphine's a botanist” (53). Venice, however, the city of mazes and disguises, resists imposed order: “Not even Bonaparte could rationalise Venice” (112). The city rejects the way imperialism measures order through maps. When Henri asks for a map, Villanelle responds: “It won't help. This is a living city. Things change” (113). Villanelle sets up an explicit contrast between the constructed and the organic, and the city of Venice can thus be read as a symbol for postmodern art with the continual (natural) changes it gives to meaning and life.

Just as Venice rejects Joséphine's artificial garden—“four sepulchral churches rise up and swamp the regimental pines” (112)—Winterson uses Henri's appropriation of her art to place it into a meaningful context. While in San Servelo, he plants a garden with seeds from Joséphine, but his artistic vision is of “a wide field where flowers grow of their own accord” (155). After receiving the seeds, he learns that while she had been in prison “she and the other ladies of strong character cultivated the weeds and lichens that spread in the stone and managed to make for themselves, while not a garden, a green place that comforted them” (158). This comforting “green place,” which is made from plant detritus and wild materials (weeds, fungus), becomes something that Henri perceives as offering ongoing comfort. Subsequently, he decides to plant “a cypress tree and it will outlive [him]. That's what I miss about fields, the sense of the future as well as the present. That one day what you plant will spring up unexpectedly” (156). As distinct from the squared-in boundaries of Joséphine's earlier gardens and her attempts to organize weeds, these open fields are natural because they don't stop changing and growing.

Like the dissolution of Bonapartes's arts (empire-building and formal gardens), Winterson uses the Queen of Spades's tapestry and home to critique highly structured art and imperialism. After her affair with Villanelle, the Queen of Spades weaves “a tapestry some three-quarters done lay in its frame. The picture was of a young woman cross-legged in front of a pack of cards. It was Villanelle” (119). Like Joséphine's gardens, the art of the Queen of Spades represents an attempt to create something that can capture her passionate past with Villanelle. Her art, in effect, keeps Villanelle fragmented—a very postmodern gesture, as it were. Her entire home, a mausoleum of stagnant arts, illustrates the lifelessness of structured crafts: a stuffed “full-sized scaly beast” (119), a room with nothing but a harpsichord, stained-glass windows, illegible journals, two coffins, and a map of the world. As the two coffins suggest, even death becomes something that can be artificially ordered.

The Queen's husband, who is a book and antique dealer, has a map which explicitly links the arts of her home with imperialism and offers another image of how empires turn on and destroy themselves:

In the fifth room a light burned and covering the whole of one wall was a map of the world. A map with whales in the seas and terrible monsters chewing the land. There were roads marked that seemed to disappear into the earth and at other times to stop abruptly at the sea's edge. In each corner sat a cormorant, a fish struggling in its beak.

(119)

By depicting finite territories, roads leading nowhere and lands consumed by unknown monsters, this map-painting captures the futility of empire-building. Maps both enable imperialism to mark conquered territories and expose the limitations of conquests. Through this map and these lifeless artistic objects, Winterson criticizes the “unnaturalness” of these arts—at least what they have become in the Queen's house. And through Henri and Villanelle, she suggests that art should not be “finished.”

Finally, through Henri's notebook, Winterson presents an example of fragmented art which offers ongoing emotional and spiritual comfort. Because of his experiences, which have fragmented his passion, Henri becomes a type of ascetic figure, withdrawing from his relationships and the empire in order to survive: “I have to send her away because she hurts me too much” (151). He ultimately realizes Villanelle will neither marry him nor return his passion, so he tries to find meaning in the notebook where he records his experiences. After Patrick dies, for example, he explains that “[Patrick] was always seeing things and it didn't matter how or what, it mattered that he saw and that he told us stories. Stories were all we had” (107). As a result, Henri becomes a storyteller by the end of the novel, and, through this ongoing creative process, he becomes a postmodern-artist figure who finds the strength to survive in his own fragmented narrative.

I re-read my notebook today and I found:

I say I'm in love with her, what does that mean?

It means I review my future and my past in the light of this feeling. It is as though I wrote in a foreign language that I am suddenly able to read. Wordlessly she explains me to myself; like a genius she is ignorant of what she does.

I go on writing so that I will always have something to read.

(159)

For Henri, art needs to reproduce itself, and he goes on telling and rereading stories because this gives him something to believe. Just as hearing the story of Josephine's “green place” consoles him (“Hearing about it comforts me” [158]), his fragmented collection of stories fills an aesthetic and spiritual need that relationships, religion, and empire could not. And through Henri, Winterson suggests that postmodern art can revivify the individual.

Winterson's use of reiterated images, particularly fragmented bodies, offers an invaluable way for interpreting the intersection of empire-building, spirituality, and love in this and many of her works. Bodies are often sites for resistance in postmodern fiction, and the act of breaking apart these bodies suggests, paradoxically, a rejection of totalizing ideologies and narratives. These images also speak to a fracturing of self that cannot be remedied by the conventional passions of love, religion, or empire. This condition leaves her characters continually yearning for more, for wholeness through these forces. But even as her novels reject these attempts at wholeness, they challenge her readers to find meaning in images and stories that are incomplete. In The Passion, empire, religion, and love fragment people physically, emotionally, and spiritually by destroying their passions. Religious leaders have lost their fervor and commitment. Husbands, wives, and lovers have lost their passion for one another. And France eventually loses its passion and love for Napoleon. Yet postmodern art, which recognizes and represents these fragments, becomes a source of strength for individuals. Henri does not attempt to impose an artificial structure on his art; therefore, its vitality and meaning come from its ability to continue without a prescribed shape or form. It is also important to recognize that this art comes from him; it exists for himself. His journal and isolation at the end of the novel suggest that strength and meaning for postmodern individuals comes from the ongoing art within.¹

Note

1. I want to thank Linda Wagner-Martin and Pamela Cooper for both their invaluable help with this essay and their friendship.

Works Cited

Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge, 1993.

Doan, Laura. “Jeanette Winterson's Sexing the Postmodern.” The Lesbian Postmodern. Ed. Laura Doan. New York: Columbia UP, 1994. 137–55.

Farwell, Marilyn R. Heterosexual Plots and Lesbian Narratives. New York: New York UP, 1996.

Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, 1989.

Illouz, Eva. Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. Berkeley: U of California P, 1997.

Spurr, David. The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration. Durham: Duke UP, 1993.

Suleiman, Susan Rubin. Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1990.

Winterson, Jeanette. The Passion. New York: Vintage, 1987.

———. Sexing the Cherry. New York: Vintage, 1989.

———. Written on the Body. New York: Vintage, 1992.

———. Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery. London: Cape, 1995.

———. Gut Symmetries. New York: Knopf, 1997.

Woolf, Virginia. The Waves. 1931. New York: Harvest, 1978.