Authority and molestation in Jeanette Winterson's "Sexing the Cherry"

Jeanette Winterson's novel Sexing the Cherry addresses literary genres in which women's voices have been silenced or marginalized, demonstrating John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill's claim that only when women have "lived in a different country from men and [have] never read any of their writings [will] they have a literature of their own" (207). This philosophy may be viewed in light of Edward Said's theory of colonization in which he argues that a people who colonize by violence maintain authority, while those people who are colonized are subject to "the paternalistic arrogance of imperialism" (Culture xviii). Winterson's desire to reclaim the authority of women illustrates her need for permission to narrate and to be "taken out of the Prism of [her] own experience" (Winterson, Into 17). As a result, she rewrites history, myth, fairy tale, and pornography, reversing the traditional gender roles and inverting the gender hierarchy. Women, in Sexing the Cherry maintain the authority and the Power to molest the now weaker sex, man.