Rethinking the Boundary Between Human and Nonhuman: Jeanette Winterson’s <i>The stone gods</i> as a Transgression Experiment

Abstract

As a world-famous writer, Jeanette Winterson, as well as her novels, have been well-known for her lesbian theme and love theme. Little attention has been paid to the theme of transgression. However, studies have shown that transgression experiment is also the key theme through all of the novels by Jeanette Winterson. In the Stone Gods, she still keeps this narrative style and gives an attempt to stir the people to re-evaluate the boundary between human and nonhuman, attracting much more attention to the issues of transgression experiment and the result after transgression. In this paper, based on the Jenks' theory of transgression, we found out that there are two ways that (1) broadening the definition of body;(2) breaking the boundary between human and environment, which could be accepted to attempt to explore the issues of boundary between human and nonhuman to examine whether the boundary could be crossed in The Stone Gods. In these ways, it is found out that the real aim when Winterson regards the novel as a transgression experiment is to not merely break a rule, rebel against normative social and cultural constraints, but rather lead a dynamic trend in cultural production and diverse discourse, in order to stimulate readers to have dynamic thought about everything.