Deconstruction And Reconstruction

As a new-generation woman novelist,Jeanette Winterson is regarded as the most prominent writer in the contemporary literary arena,who is well-known both at home and abroad.Her works are highly praised by critics for their rich connotations and her postmodernist narrative style.The Passion takes the Napoleonic War as the grand narrative background,selecting Henri and Villanelle who are the victims and survivors of the Napoleonic War as the protagonists,telling a story about war and love in the Napoleonic era.As the novel sets its background in real historical event,The Passion perfectly matches the history writing with metafiction and embodies the main features of historiographic metafiction by means of parody and intertextuality.The famous Canadian literature theorist Linda Hutcheon puts forward the definition of historiographic metafiction in A Poetics of Postmodernism: History,Theory,Fiction as the novels both intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically to historical events and personages.It mainly explores the following two issues: First of all,the unreliability of history as an artificial construction is demonstrated by its self-consciousness and textuality;secondly,through the narrative method of fragmentation and multi-perspectives narration,the author reconstructs the existing historical discourse to let readers think about the relationship between fiction and reality.This thesis takes Linda Hutcheon’s theory of historiographic metafiction as a theoretical framework,interpreting The Passion from the perspective of deconstruction and reconstruction.Hutcheon believes that historiographic metafiction mainly deconstructs and reconstructs in three aspects: history,center,and gender.In terms of deconstruction,The Passion uses the narrative of small characters to deconstruct the grand history as a fictional production;secondly,it satirizes the traditional religious and patriarchal center by describing the devout adherents and the people in the patriarchal society;finally,it deconstructs the traditional concept of gender by combining magical elements with gender transition.In the aspect of reconstruction,Winterson reconstructs the historical events of Napoleon’s period using the methods of parody and intertextuality.In this process,she highlights the discourse power of the marginal groups and calls for people to reconstruct the suppressed discourse power and pursue the value of life independently.This thesis tries to build an ideal world that can accommodate differences and diversities by breaking through gender differences and male-dominated political discourse with the help of theory of historiographic metafiction.It also enlightens readers to rethink the existing standards and recognize the relationship between discourse and rights against the pluralistic history.