Sexing the Cherry and Alternate Reality “Every journey conceals another journey within its lines : the path not taken and the forgotten angle. These are journeys I wish to record . Not the ones I made , but the ones I might have made , or perhaps did make in some other place or time.” – Jordan (2) “It’s one life or countless lives depending on what you want.” – The Dog-Woman (in the 20th century) These lines, spoken by Jordan and the Dog-Woman, the two protagonists of Sexing the Cherry, by Jeanette Winterson, encapsulate the motif of alternate realities that spans the whole book.Sexing the Cherry challenges the “solid world of objects” (Winterson x), questioning instead the reality of the world. The ideas of reality, time, and alternate reality are contemplated throughout the book. The criterion that makes anything real is: anything is considered real, when most of us believe in it and when the thing is made of matter which can be seen and touched. But, solid objects and matter become empty space in the book: “Empty space and points of light” (Jordan 169) he also keeps reiterating this point throughout the book). The two protagonists of the book and the action we go through with them make us question the concept of reality, and bring to the forefront the idea of alternate realities, as it is often not possible to tell whether these things really happened or whether they are only imaginings, however real, of lives that might have been. The questioning of the conventional distinction between reality and the imaginary enables readers to inhabit multiple possibilities, be these of Puritan England, ecological warfare, or travel and exploration. The last section of the book – “Some Years Later” – features Nicolas Jordan and an unnamed female environmentalist (who is the Dog-Woman contemporized) in the current, ostensibly real world, for greater immediacy. In this section, Nicolas Jordan is fascinated with the idea of making journeys, as a member of the Navy, “of bringing something home for the first time” and becoming a hero. At the beginning of the section, he sees a painting in which Mr Rose, the Royal Gardener, after coming back from his journey to Barbados , presents a pineapple to king Charles II (which is itself a curious edit of Jordan’s own history of having pioneered the arrival of the pineapple in England). In his boyhood world, he cannot make journeys and go on voyages . He can only make boats and sell them on weekends. His parents cannot afford a telescope, Winterson tells us, the better to emphasize how looking at new worlds and other realities is also a function of money and class. To pursue his desires of sailing and seeing this world, all he can do is join the very regimented world of the British Navy. The nameless female environmentalist, who can clearly be recognized as the Dog-Woman in the contemporary world, is described as “pretty” and a girl whom men adore, quite contrary to how she is physically presented in the seventeenth century. But she is upset due to the increasing pollution and consequent dangerous levels of mercury in the rivers, lakes and streams of the world, and the government’s indifference frustrates her. So, she starts a one-woman campaign, camping at a riverbank to make the rulers take some steps for the betterment of London. But she feels helpless as an ordinary “small” person who cannot do much to bring a change – a great contrast to her gargantuan seventeenth-century avatar who slays scores with impunity. She thinks she is hallucinating when she imagines herself becoming a giant who grabs and puts all the world leaders and important persons from various places in her bag and goes to “butter mountains , wine lakes and deserts” . There, she trains men in feminism and ecology, and also redistributes food surpluses to the needy; hence, she is able to change the world. Only a small part of the narrative describes this “real”, puny condition of the protagonists. In this socalled real world , both Jordan and the Dog-Woman are not able to do what they want to, but these Vol 1.1
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