Knotting up the cat's cradle: Exploring time and space in Jeanette Winterson's novels

“Knotting up the Cat’s Cradle: Exploring Time and Space in Winterson’s Novels”, puts an emphasis on the journey motif in the cycle of Winterson’s first seven novels. Cox argues that, as Winterson confirms in her introduction to Great Moments in Aviation, her writing is repeatedly configured around the journey, whereby characters construct fantastic travels through narrative, time and space. Recurrent themes in her work, Cox suggests, evidence the journey as a perpetual state that is not completed by the return home, or even by the end of the novel. With this general outlook on time and space as core concerns of Winterson’s works, Cox’s essay investigates certain space metaphors in the texts that represent a tension between constraint and possibility, like cyberspace, the cat’s cradle and the maze. In the thematic network of these novels that manifest a tension between desire and boundaries, the allusions to knots and metaphors of thread function as symbols of restraint, Cox holds. Focusing mostly on Oranges, The Passion and The.PowerBook, the essay places an emphasis upon the investigations of time and space across the cycle of Winterson’s first seven novels. This essay illustrates the fact that Winterson’s cycle of novels explores time through conflation and manipulation of history, myth, literature and personal narrative and reads the metaphors of space against the nature of time presented in her novels, which once again shows that elements of time, space and narrative in Winterson’s novels work integrally.