by Kevin Patrick Mahoney
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Winterson page, for Jeanette Winterson biography, Jeanette Winterson
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The overwhelming aspect
of criminality discussed in Sexing the Cherry, the Elegy:For Male Lovers, and
Painting with a Knife, is that of sexual murder. I write ‘sexual murder’
purposefully, for I would like to argue that the Dog Woman is a problematical
creation, disturbingly akin to real life serial killers, such as the Yorkshire
Ripper. Discussion of Peter Sutcliffe and the events surroundings his murders
is unavoidable. I shall be making a critique of both Ian Sinclair and Jeanette
Winterson, and in the process, I shall use their devices. This will involve the
use of inter-textuality, and a certain lessening of essay conventions, which
could only hamper the argument on this occasion. There will be no attempt at
impartiality: hidden prejudices will come out into the open.
I begin with Wendy Mulford’s Elegy. This seems to be quite an accurate
representation of the feelings of women during the hunt for the Yorkshire
Ripper. Judith Walkowitz gives some of the background in City of Dreadful
Delight: ‘“Slap a curfew on men” demanded hundreds of women during a march
through Leeds city center’ (Walkowitz p.234). Mulford refers to this demand,
and employs the tactics used by the women on that march. With ‘light breasts
firm nipples/ smooth flat belly’, the female narrator reifies her male
companion. The protesting women also pinched men’s bottoms in an attempt to
make men recognise what it is like to be treated as a female sex object. Thus
Mulford’s poem tends to confuse on the first reading, for the male sleeper is
given characteristics usually associated with women.
There is an intentional paradox in the poem. The woman narrator is
‘cuddled’ by the ‘instruments’ of ‘violence’. This reflects the conflicting
messages that women were given
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during the six years of
terror: ’women were harassed on the streets by would-be Rippers, at the same
time that they were told to look to other men for protection’ (Walkowitz p.230).
Police told women to be wary of every man, but yet to never go out without a
male companion. The terror was aided and abetted by the media: ’the press
consistently invoked the example of the legendary Ripper to enhance the
contemporary power and prestige of this contemporary killer’ (Walkowitz p.230).
This terror forced many women to remain indoors. Walkowitz gives a quotation
from a woman who felt restricted from even going to her corner shop at night.
Yorkshire, from 1975 to 1980, was one place where Susan Brownmiller’s
contentious assertion came true: ‘From prehistoric times... rape has played a
critical function. It is nothing more or less than a conscious process of
intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear’ (Brownmiller p.15).
At first, ‘“let them die”’ seems as equally harsh a judgment on the whole of
mankind, but on reflection, it would seem to be that Mulford’s narrator is
saying something different. The desire for men to die is in inverted commas
because it actually reflects what some feminists were postulating at the time -
why should it have to be women who lose their freedom as soon as a sex killer
is on the loose? Mulford’s narrator mourns the death of male lovers, and thus
proposes that men also suffered during the terror. This is a view rarely given,
but that does not mean to say that it is not true. Men were not being murdered,
but they all had to share the burden of responsibility for the actions of one
man. Since the identity of the Yorkshire Ripper was unknown for many years, all
men were treated as suspect whilst being powerless to stop the killings. At the
same time though, the narrator does reiterate the belief that it is only men
who commit such crimes: ’sexual murder... is invariably committed
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by men and not women’
(Cameron & Frazer p.23).
This may be so, but the point has to be made that sexual murders are
only committed by a minuscule proportion of men. However, Ian Sinclair is one
man who can be accused for creating yet ‘another Whitechapel impasto’.
Painting with a Knife is a poem that reflects Sinclair’s obsession with
Jack the Ripper. It is an ‘obsession’. As he himself writes in Downriver,
‘Anyone who has ever written anything about Whitechapel, or the Whitechapel
Murders, will soon discover they have issued an open invitation to every
conspiracy-freak who is not actually under lock and key’ (Sinclair p. 190).
This is rather like a train spotter criticising fellow buffs for wearing the
wrong sort of anorak. I cannot help feeling contempt for those who would
propagate the myth of Jack the Ripper under the cover of trendy high art.
Alasdair Palmer recently wrote an article in The Spectator, criticizing this
very love affair between literary London and serial murders (Palmer p.10). All
the usual suspects in the Yorkshire Ripper case, such as Gordon Burn, are being
rounded up and offered thousands to write about a certain individual called
Frederick West. Even Martin Amis has been approached, so that ‘punters could
feel they were being cultured when they read about sex and murder’ (Palmer
p.10), which takes us nicely to Jeanette Winterson (although one of Martin
Amis's relatives was a victim of Frederick West).
I feel - quite entitled to bunch her with Sinclair, as Sinclair even
mentions her in Downriver, right next to Martin Amis (Sinclair p.351).
Winterson does us the honour of presenting us with a female sex killer: Dog
Woman (kapow!). Perhaps I am guilty of having the same reaction as eighteenth
century broadsheet writers: ’There is something ridiculous about a woman
cutting off a male’s genitals: it is merely aberrant and not really
threatening’ (Cameron & Frazer P.25). I will treat Dog Woman seriously, for
I do find her to be a threat. But then, being a man, I would say
4
that, wouldn’t I? (Men,
huh?).
It is my contention that Dog Woman is a sexual murderer, although it is
also my contention that nobody actually knows what defines a sex murderer.
Cameron and Frazer argue that the motive is ‘sexual gratification’ (p.24), yet
Susan Brownmiller sees hatred of women as being the prime motivation of rape.
Dog Woman does not understand male sexuality and so hates it. The overwhelming
representation of male sexual acts are nauseating in the extreme:’I looked back
and saw that one already had Scroggs on the remains of the bed. He was mounting
him from behind, all the while furiously kissing the severed head’ (Winterson
p.E39). At times, Dog Woman is conveyed as being very naive about male
genitalia: her first castration is caused by a misunderstanding (p.4l). Yet,
earlier in the novel, Winterson cannot resist a rather obvious joke about the
shape of bananas, and has Dog Woman knowingly comment on it (p. 13). Far more
alarming than the consumption of bananas though, is Winterson’s justification
of Dog Woman’s violence.
‘Although she murders hundreds of people in the course of the novel, she
never hits out at anybody who hasn’t hurt her. She murders people whom she sees
are hypocritical and are effectively damaging her life’ (Kay p.27). If we were
all given such licence to murder, we wouldn’t have any politicians left. Dog
Woman is a heroine of the modern Gothic; therefore, she takes on even more
significance. Cameron and Frazer write that ‘Not only does this discourse
affect our reading of sexual murder today, it was also... an important factor
in the original emergence of this kind of crime’ (p.54). Robert Louis
Stevenson’s famous tale of Jekyll and Hyde contributed greatly to the Jack the
Ripper myth: God forbid that Dog Woman should actually do the same. America
recently celebrated its first woman serial killer. However, it is unlikely that
Dog Woman would ever be taken as the model of such a killer. One of Winterson’s
5
intentions was ‘to create
a woman that was not in any way a female stereotype, who wasn’t clean,
particularly loveable or desirable or any of these things’ (Kay p.27).
Ironically though, Dog Woman does quite resemble the model of the female killer
proposed by Lombroso (Smart pp.31-36). One can only assume that all Dog Woman’s
victims are men, representing the ‘generic objects’ of Cameron and Frazer
(p.24).
The Dog Woman is also a serial killer because she acts like Peter
Sutcliffe, claiming that she is on a moral mission (Winterson p. 129). Thus
‘Stamping out sin is God’s prerogative, and a man who usurps it reveals himself
as mad’ (Cameron & Frazer p.131). Yet Winterson’s exuberant prose would
have us celebrate Dog Woman. The temptation is there to say that it is only
right that men should be bumped off for a change, if only to even the balance.
However, I can only be reminded of the climax of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver.
The shock of that film is that Travis Bickle becomes a celebrity because he has
bloodily murdered the pimps and clients of a young prostitute. For that reason,
I cannot celebrate Dog Woman as a heroine - murder can never be justified, no
matter what the morality of the victims.
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Bibliography
Articles
Kay, Jackie, ’Unnatural
Passions’, Spare Rib, 209, 1990.
Palmer, Alasdair,’A Dead
Clever Way to Make Money’, The Spectator, 28 May 1990.
Books
Brownmiller, Susan,
Against Our Will, Reading, 1986.
Cameron, Deborah and
Frazer, Elizabeth, The Lust to Kill, Oxford, 1987.
Sinclair, Ian, Downriver,
London, 1992.
Smart, Carol, Women,
Crime and Criminology, London, 1976.
Walkowitz, Judith R.,
City of Dreadful Delight, London, 1994.
|
Visit our Jeanette
Winterson page, for Jeanette Winterson biography, Jeanette Winterson bibliography,
Jeanette Winterson short stories, Jeanette Winterson articles, Jeanette
Winterson interviews, and free Jeanette Winterson essays |
