To indulge in such passions

As previously mentioned, this work by Winterson, alongside with The Passion, are
examples of historiographic metafiction, which destabilise strict categories of
gender and sexuality.
Sexing the Cherry includes two narrators that alternate:
Winterson proposes another kind of aesthetics of love
Life can be paralleled with a casino, with games that suppose risk loss, and this
can be seen literally as she gambles her future to escape her husband.
Highlights the arbitrariness of love she gambles her heart and she loses
Passion also means obsession
Soul mates
By passion Winterson signifies the subjects obsessive involvement with the Other, the object of desire. Obsessions
of this intense kind, she illustrates, override barriers of class, gender and sexual orientation, and assume a variety of
different manifestations. They can be romantic, as in Villanelles love for the Queen of Spades and Henris for
Villanelle, or they can reflect hero worship and be oedipal in nature, as is Henris attachment to Napoleon, whom he
describes as a little father. They can be motivated by a desire for power, as is the case of Napoleons ambitions of
territorial domination, or be a matter of appetite, as is his passion, on a culinary plane, for chicken and, on a sexual
one, for Josephine. They can be religious, as are the feelings of devotion which Henris mother experiences for the
Virgin Mary.

Passions of this obsessive nature, Winterson emphasizes, are involuntary, irrational and, more
often than not, self-destructive.
There is always the thought that you might have played your hand better, but theres no way of
cheating luck, chance
Like a game of cards
She picked up the queen of spades
What are the odds

wanted to create an imaginative reality sufficiently at odds with our daily reality in order to
startle us out of it

I have always been a gambler. Its a skill that comes naturally to me like thieving and loving. What I didnt
know by instinct I picked up from working the Casino, from watching others play and learning what it is that people
value and therefore what it is they will risk. I learned how to put a challenge in such a way as to make it irresistible.
We gamble with the hope of winning, but its the thought of what we might lose that excites us.

It was a game of chance I entered into and my heart was the wager. Such games can only be played once.
Such games are better not played at all.
It was a woman I loved and you will admit that is not the usual thing. I knew her for only five months. We
had nine nights together and I never saw her again. You will admit that is not the usual thing.
I have always preferred the cards to the dice so it should have come as no surprise to me to have drawn a
wild card.
The Queen of spades.

Love is just like a game of cards in Villanelles opinion, as it is based mostly on chance
and

In portraying Villanelle in this transgressive manner, Winterson shows herself less interested in
normalizing the image of the lesbian and highlighting the features which she shares with women
in general than in foregrounding lesbian difference and inventing strategies of representation to
express it.
Onega pag 55
I am in love with her; not a fantasy or a myth or a creature of my own making.
Her. A person who is not me. I invented Bonaparte as much as he invented himself.
My passion for her, even though she could never return it, showed me the difference between inventing a lover and
falling in love.
The one is about you, the other about someone else.

These two manifestations of passion are supposed to differentiate between the Lacanian
je-idal1, as Susana Onega identifies Henris perception of Napoleon, and true love, which he
feels for Villanelle. However, his love is unrequited and he loses in the game of love, just like
she did. Henri gives up his love for the same reason as Villanelle decided to end her relationship
with the Queen of Spades: Theres no sense in loving someone you can only wake up to by
chance.2 This phrase first uttered by Villanelle and afterwards recalled by Henri, shows that in
order to achieve fulfillment the lover needs total devotion from his/her beloved, and neither
Villanelle, nor Henri get that; the Queen of Spades also loved her husband, which is why
Villanelle felt the pain of never having enough 3 and in addition to this, the biggest impediment
to her love was the fact that they were forced to meet in strange places in order to avoid
detection, as they could never share their love openly in a society that condemned everything out
of the ordinary

1 S. Onega, Contemporary British Novelists JEANETTE WINTERSON, Manchester University Press,

2006, p. 61.
2 J. Winterson, The Passion, London: Penguin Books Ltd, 1988, p. 122.
3 J. Winterson, The Passion, London: Penguin Books Ltd, 1988, p. 96.

The fact that the Queen of Spades is married increases the illicit nature of the two womens
relationship, causing it to take place under conditions of secrecy, masquerade and lack of social
recognition all the features, in fact, which today we encompass in the term the closet.

to demonstrate both the intensity of lesbian love and the closeted existence to which heteropatriarchal society conventionally relegates it.
The definite article in the title, then, gives the life stories of the protagonists a representative, archetypal character,
just as the noun justifies its stylistic repetitiveness, since, as Bnyei, following Roland Barthes, acutely notes, any
discourse on passion is inevitably surrounded by silence and it is only through repetition that the writer can aspire to
express the difficulty of talking and telling stories about passion. Bnyeis interesting contention is that the text
incessantly veers towards its own discursive limit, managing, through repetition and excess, to express a beyond of
passion, of madness that can never be spoken of, but which always already speaks in the very language that is
unable to speak about it.

Words like passion and extasy, we learn them but they stay flat on the page. Sometimes we try and turn them over,
find out whats on the other side, and everyone has a story to tell of a woman or a brothel or an opium night or a war.
We fear it. We fear passion and laugh at too much love and those who love too much.
And still we long to feel.

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