Reading Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion as a postmodern text

Jeannette Winterson’s novels can always be studied from a postmodern perspective. Postmodernism, though a loosely-defined term, makes reference to a cultural, intellectual, or artistic condition which does not have a direct predominant hierarchy, and epitomizes extreme entanglement, discrepancy, uncertainty, diversity, and heterogeneity. In this sense, The Passion (1987) is written to deconstruct the various domineering cultural, social and moral conventions or constructed realities and norms of Western civilisation. Techniques of postmodernism – temporal and spatial distortions, gender roles, parody, pastiche, historiographic metafiction, irony – are often used by postmodernist writers in their works. This article aims to pinpoint that Winterson is resisting dominant ideologies and discourses in The Passion, and trying to reconstruct a free and alternative discourse in the same society through postmodernist techniques in the narrative of the novel.