Sexing the Cherry

Sexing the Cherry is a 1989 novel by the award-winning English author Jeanette Winterson. Nominally set in London in a version of the 17th century, the novel fuses the genres of magical realism, postmodernism, interpolated narratives, and intertextual pastiche to create a work that ponders the meaning of time and love. Centered on the relationship between a woman and the foundling boy she raises, and following the ways in which this boy is able to travel both in his actual world and in the world of his imagination, the novel asks which experiences are more real, and which are truer. Building on these themes are images of discovery and rebirth, which are referenced in the novel’s title – a term for the botanical process of creating hybrids.

The novel’s narration switches between the points of the view of its two main characters, Dog-Woman and Jordan. We first meet the Dog-Woman, a sometimes gentle and other times gleefully murderous giantess who lives by the river Thames. She has forgotten her given name, and now is known by her profession: raising dogs that fight for street entertainment. The Dog-Woman’s appearance is grotesque. Not only is she enormous, but she is also flat-nosed, nearly toothless, and has huge smallpox scars that house fleas.

Her son Jordan is a foundling that she fished out of the Thames and named for a less ridiculous-sounding river. She adores him and takes him for walks on a leash. He is inordinately proud of the fact that she can fit six oranges in her mouth. The Dog-Woman is strong and has a zest for life, but she is ignorant and somewhat naïve. The novel mines comedy from her confusion about human body parts and sexuality, and from the way she comments on what she sees around her. Still, despite the fact that she is an outsized literal giant – a mythical figure – her part of the narrative is the most grounded in reality.

The Dog-Woman’s story takes places during the chaos of the Puritan Revolution of 1641, and the following civil war. After King Charles I is beheaded in 1649 by anti-monarchists who install Oliver Cromwell as Lord Protector, the Dog-Woman feels empowered to also use beheading as a suitable punishment for her own enemies – the Puritans who attack her livelihood by trying to outlaw dog fighting, gambling, and other amusements for poor people. She suffers through Cromwell’s rule, but as soon as the Restoration of 1661 puts King Charles II on the throne, the Dog-Woman takes her revenge on the Puritans by organizing a brothel to help her behead her awful neighbors Preacher Scroggs and Neighbor Firebrace.

Jordan’s part of the narration involves travel of the worldly and otherworldly type. When he is still a boy, he falls in love with the sea and spends his time building model ships. The King’s gardener, John Tradescant, whose ambitions involve searching the world for novel plants to bring back to England for Charles I, takes Jordan under his wing and teaches him botany. One of the first exotic fruits the two bring back from an ocean voyage is the pineapple, which strikes the English audience as overly sexual, and recalls Jordan’s own experience going to see an exhibit of the first banana ever brought to England – a fruit whose similarity to male genitalia thrilled Londoners.

After Tradescant’s death, Jordan continues traveling; and, even though she assumes that by sailing far into the distance, her son has fallen off the face of the earth, the Dog-Woman always remains Jordan’s home and resting place in between trips.

Soon, however, Jordan’s voyages start to take place entirely in his mind, which generates fantastic people and places for him to interact with. One adventure involves Jordan disguising himself as a woman to learn what women really think about men. Another finds Jordan in a city where people have literally died of love, which spreads like a plague and is now kept at bay by an old jaded prostitute and a wizened monk, who ban love altogether. Unwittingly, Jordan plays a guitar which again unleashes love and kills all of the town’s inhabitants except the monk and the prostitute. The novel leaves ambiguous whether Jordan is actually bending time and space to get to these places, or whether they are wholly imaginary. As he mind-travels, Jordan speculates about the nature of time, space, and reality – and also love.

On one imaginary trip, Jordan glimpses a dancer named Fortunata at a party. Deeply smitten, he starts voyaging specifically to find this woman. On the way, he encounters Zillah and her sisters, who live in a castle and who are the Twelve Dancing Princesses from the fairytale collected by the Brothers Grimm. Just like in the story, these women would spend each night secretly dancing in a magical palace – but when a prince discovers their secret, they are given away in marriage to his twelve brothers. Eleven of the women tell Jordan their stories, all of which have to revolve around the idea that love and passion have very little to do with marriage. In each case, the arranged marriage of the princess has failed: some because the princesses are actually in love with other women, one because her husband was actually gay, one because her husband was constantly unfaithful. After getting rid of their spouses, the women are now “happy ever after” living together and pursuing their own desires.

At last, Jordan finds Fortunata on the island of Barbados, but after they spend a month together, she sends him away – she prefers to be unpartnered. Once again Jordan comes back to his ever-loving Dog-Woman mother.

The novel now introduces two new characters, who seem to be Dog-Woman and Jordan, but reconfigured for the 1990s. Nicholas Jordan dreams of sailing and seeing the world, and he decides that the best way to do this is to join the army, despite the disappointment and concern of his parents. As he gets ready to leave, he reads a newspaper article about an unnamed woman who has made it her life’s work to call attention to environmental degradation by sitting next to a polluted river. Nicholas decides to find this woman, despite the seeming impossibility.

At the end of the book, these two timelines merge, as Nicholas and the woman burn down a factory, which causes the London of Jordan and the Dog-Woman to go up in flames. As Jordan and the Dog-Woman flee, he has hope for the future.

The novel was widely praised on publication, and remains critically acclaimed. As the New York Times put it in its review, “The marvelous and the horrific, the mythic and the mundane overlap and intermingle in this wonderfully inventive novel.” For her literary contributions, Winterson was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2018, a very high honor in England.