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- Title
"The Wound and the Gift": Rewriting the Wounded Self Through the Gift of Language. A Study of Jeanette Winterson's Autobiography Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
- Authors
Antonietta, Struzziero Maria
- Abstract
Jeanette Winterson's Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (2011) is the autobiography of the writer whose life is marked by traumas connected with her abandonment at birth, her subsequent adoption, and a further rejection by her adoptive family when they discover that she is having a lesbian relationship. In the memoir, the paper will argue that the author tackles the hermeneutics of self-representation. She wishes to make sense of the personal past and to trace its trajectory as a means to discover the origin of the self and re-write it along different existential and psychological lines. During her memory journey back into her past, Winterson relentlessly returns, and revisits, the traumatic events of her early life, still stored in her buried memories, allowing them to surface to her conscious mind. She gradually deconstructs her old self through a slow and painful interpretive process that, in the end, leads to psychic healing and artistic creation. Winterson's autobiography will be read in the light of memory and trauma studies; psychoanalysis, as well as Winterson's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985).
- Subjects
WINTERSON, Jeanette, 1959-; AUTOBIOGRAPHY; MENTAL healing; ARTISTIC creation; SELF; LESBIAN relationships; LESBIAN couples
- Publication
Graduate Journal of Social Science, 2019, Vol 15, Issue 2, p12
- ISSN
1572-3763
- Publication type
Article