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Reveling in elements of fantasy and grotesquerie and foregrounding a complex intertextual lineage, the fiction of Jeanette Winterson and Angela Carter reveals a host of common stylistic traits and thematic preoccupations. However, an even more compelling reason to read them together emerges when we consider their distinct feminist perspectives, particularly regarding historiographic issues. I want to focus here on Winterson s Sexing the Cherry (1989) and Carters Wise Children (1992), two paradigmatic fictional attempts to challenge the gender stereotypes often upheld in traditional histories. Winterson sets much of her story against the backdrop of the English Revolution while Carter offers a contemporary woman s account of her life and several generations in her family s history. In telling their stories, they historicize the larger patriarchal forces that shaped the lives of their characters, and expose the contingency of supposedly universal values, including the naturalness of heterosexuality and the father's authority in a patrilineal culture. In so doing,Winterson and Carter ultimately develop distinct feminist approaches to history. While Winterson premises her celebration of lesbian desire on the complete rejection of patriarchal history and its linear temporality, Carter suggests her characters can never utterly escape the sway of patrilineal history, though they come to challenge it in practical ways. Sexing the Cherry and Wise Children, then, reflect the range of narrative tactics used to destabilize gender categories such as man and woman, hetero and homosexual, and reading the novels together helps us map an important and ongoing debate in feminist historiography.
The focus of feminist historiographers has steadily shifted from recovering the neglected past experience of women to historicizing the patriarchal values that helped produce such experience. In an early essay on this trend, Linda Gordon suggests that initially, "Women historians sought to proclaim a truth heretofore denied, disguised, distorted, defamed, and thereby to expose the meretricious lies of earlier mandarins" (1986, 22). Gordon here stresses women's desire to celebrate their presence at, and participation in, past events. In this way, earlier feminist historians promised the recognition denied women in the record of public events and wars traditionally called "history." This emphasis on the recovery of suppressed facts, however, has more recently come under scrutiny by feminists such as Linda Anderson who suspect not only the content,...