Subverting the Traditional Language ofLoveandSex:Body Politicsin Winterson’s The Passion

Abstract

ThePassionis romantic love story mediation on pleasure and disturbing faith in transforming power of romantic love between Henri and Villanelle. The novel however will be familiar of lesbian fiction in which “all for love” is a recurrent theme. Winterson’s story plays on our emotion and explores the root of human passion. It also poses a problemof lesbian, and recasting of modernity. Winterson allows to reimagining modern categories as sexual bodies, sexualboundaries, sexual object and sexual identities and offers instated a postmodern history construct new possibilities and realities of the virtual lesbian. The representations of heterosexual activity are most effective when theyare juxtaposewith the lesbianrelationshipsof Villanelle and her lover. So, Winterson re- evolutesfemale desire, something distinctfrom male desire, a part of a ‘separate sexual economy.’