Summary
Once Dog Woman, Jordan, and their dogs have settled into their new home at Wimbledon, Dog Woman begins to have time to reflect. One morning, she thinks about love, and resigns herself to the fact that no one will ever love her. Dog Woman is puzzled by religious teachings that regard sexuality as a sin, since it is clear to her that human beings often experience sexual desire. Dog Woman herself was once in love with a handsome boy; she attempted to make herself desirable by washing and dressing in finer clothes. The boy expressed a willingness to kiss her, but when the giant Dog Woman picked him up and raised him to her mouth, he fainted in fear.
The narrative returns to Jordan. The young girl who lets him in through the window is named Zillah, and she explains that she is kept trapped in the tower. Jordan becomes confused and frightened, as the room and Zillah herself seem to be enchanted in some way; he leaps out of the window. Landing in a market square below, the local people tell him about a legend. Years ago, a young girl was caught having an incestuous relationship with her sister. She was sentenced to build a tower out of stones and then be sealed up in it. After building an extremely tall tower, the girl was sealed up and died in agony. The tower was eventually torn down, but the house built in its place is said to be haunted by her and the sound of her cries.
The villagers befriend Jordan, and he tells them about his desire to find the beautiful dancer. Together, they talk about the nature of love. Jordan makes an impassioned argument for the importance of pursuing love, no matter the obstacles.
The narrative turns back to Dog Woman. After her failed attempt at love with the boy who fainted, she resigned herself to avoiding love and sexuality. Dog Woman thinks about an encounter she had while journeying from London to Wimbledon: a man approached her on the road, exposed himself, and asked her to touch him and then put his penis in her mouth. Dog Woman did so, but misunderstood, and bit it off. She was confused as to why the man fainted, and thinks quizzically that this is an odd way for men to achieve pleasure. Dog Woman also worries about Jordan and his romantic future, as she can tell that he is growing into a sensitive and idealistic young man. Dog Woman describes how a French gardener named Andre Mollet is helping Tradescant to design the elaborate and beautiful palace gardens.
The narrative switches back to Jordan; he recounts a memory of a town he visited, where inhabitants constantly tear down and rebuild their houses, shifting them to new sites in the town. In this town, Jordan learns that the twelve dancing princesses from the famous story live nearby. Still in pursuit of his dancer, Jordan goes to see the princesses. He is greeted by a woman who introduces herself as the eldest of the princesses. She begins to narrate the next section of the text.
The twelve princesses slept in a narrow room, and each night, they would fly through the window to escape and go dancing. Their father became frustrated with his inability to control his twelve daughters, and eventually a prince was able to figure out how they were escaping. As a reward, the princesses were given to the prince and his eleven brothers as their brides. After her marriage, the eldest princess fell in love with a mermaid; eventually, she left her husband and has been living happily with her mermaid lover ever since. Although she had lost touch with her eleven sisters, she eventually learned that all of them had wound up single again, and the other sisters gradually came to join the eldest one. Now, they all live together in different parts of the house.
Jordan begins to encounter the other princesses, who each tell him a story about their marriages and lives. The second princess lives in a glass room filled with a collection of obscure religious artifacts. Her husband had objected to this hobby, so she murdered him. The third princess explained that she was infatuated with her handsome husband; however, he was in love with another man. She killed her husband and his lover by piercing them with a single arrow. The fourth princess was married to a man who was aroused by humiliating her by having many affairs. Although she initially tried to cooperate in his fantasies, she was horrified when she learned that he was having sex with women from a local lunatic asylum. She abandoned her husband, who ended up going mad and dying of venereal disease.
The fifth princess's husband transformed into a frog when she first kissed him. As an older woman, she fell in love with a beautiful maiden named Rapunzel. Rapunzel's family disapproved of the relationship, so the princess and Rapunzel met in a very high and isolated tower that they accessed by climbing up Rapunzel's hair. However, a prince violently broke into the tower, kidnapped Rapunzel, and blinded the princess as punishment. The princess has never regained her sight. The sixth princess recounted feeling unhappy and trapped by her marriage and domestic duties. One winter day, inspired by the sight of wild deer running free, she walked away from her husband's home.
The seventh princess was married to a prince who secretly turned out to be a woman. They lived in great happiness for many years, but the secret eventually got out. Knowing that the local people were coming to arrest and burn her wife at the stake, the princess killed her, and then fled. She still longs for the wife she loved. The eighth princess was unhappy with her fat and greedy husband; she bought a poison and fed it to him. After his death, she went back to live with her sisters. The ninth princess was married to a man who treated her like falcon, and a source of danger; he kept her chained up, and rigidly controlled. She gradually adopted the traits and identity that he ascribed to her, and one day she broke free and tore his liver out of his body.
The tenth princess had a husband who fell in love with someone else, but he was unwilling to leave behind their beautiful home and the life they had built together. Growing increasingly frustrated, she asked him to leave so that she could at least move on with her life, but he refused. Although it was a hard choice, she left him and her home behind. The eleventh princess was married to a man who largely wanted to be left alone to pursue scholarly work. One day he told her that he felt his spirit and mind were imprisoned by his body, and asked her to kill him. She did so, and his spirit escaped into the air.
Having heard all the stories, Jordan notices that there are only eleven princesses in the house, and asks where the final sister is. They explain that on the day they were all to be married to the 12 princes, the youngest princess (who was also the best dancer) leapt into the air and managed to escape. They have never seen her since; her name is Fortunata.
Analysis
Love and desire are significant to both the novel's themes and plot. Jordan's experiences are primarily driven by his desire to find Fortunata. Even though Dog Woman initially seems to be excluded from experiences of sexuality and romantic love, she continues to be curious about these experiences. Throughout the novel, Winterson implies that desire and love are inevitable human experiences; they can take many different forms, but they are going to arise in some form or another. Repeatedly, individuals who try to renounce, restrict, or repudiate these experiences are shown to be unable to do so, and often suffer unfortunate consequences as a result.
This insistence on desire as natural and inevitable forms a key part of Dog Woman's ongoing hostility towards Puritans. Puritans is an umbrella term referring to a movement within English Protestant Christianity that arose during the 1500s and 1600s. England broke away from Roman Catholicism in 1534, when King Henry VIII declared himself the head of the Church of England, but the precise identity and ideology of the Church of England would be debated for decades afterwards; many people did not want to abandon the familiar practices of the Roman Catholic tradition, while others saw everything associated with Catholicism as needing to be purged. There was also a real possibility of England reverting to a Catholic state, as it did during the reign of Queen Mary (1553-1558); Queen Henrietta Maria, the wife of King Charles I, was a devout Catholic who was often viewed as a threat lest she convert her husband.
While they were a religious movement, Puritans achieved significant political power in the lead-up to and during the English Civil War. During this time, many also emigrated to British colonies in New England; Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel The Scarlet Letter (1850) is set in the same time period depicted in Winterson's historical fiction, and depicts the impact of Puritan morality in a New England community. In addition to specific religious and political viewpoints, Puritans came to be more broadly associated with a desire to eliminate pleasure, especially when associated with sexuality, celebration, frivolity, and joy. In Shakespeare's play Twelfth Night (1602), Maria refers to the dour and humorless character Malvolio as "a kind of puritan" (Act 2, Scene 3); between 1642 and 1660, Puritans banned the staging of plays in England. For a similar time period, they also made significant efforts to suppress the celebration of Christmas.
Given this context of Puritans as hostile to sexuality, the arts, and most celebratory experiences, it is somewhat unsurprising that Winterson depicts an antagonistic relationship between them and Dog Woman. Even though (or perhaps because) Dog Woman is a relatively disinterested observer in matters of sexuality, she can see that attempts to suppress the pursuit of sexual expression are doomed to fail, and almost certainly hypocritical. Winterson has also spoken openly, and written extensively, about her difficult experiences growing up gay in a devoutly Christian family. It's possible that this insight into the tension between religion and individuals openly expressing their sexual identity animates her depiction of Puritans.
The one place in which Puritans tolerated sexuality was within the confines of heterosexual marriages, and Winterson critiques this structure as well. The section recounting the stories of the twelve dancing princesses functions as an embedded narrative, and creates an opportunity for Winterson to subvert and critique societal norms. "The Twelve Dancing Princesses" was included in Grimm's Fairy Tales in 1815, and many different cultures have similar versions of this story. In the most famous version, a king learns that his 12 daughters, whom he locks up securely every night, are found with worn-out dancing shoes every morning. Perplexed as to how they are finding a way to get out, the king challenges various princes to uncover their secret. In different versions of the story, either a prince or a soldier is able to determine how they are sneaking about by spying and following them; he is then rewarded with marriage to one of the princesses, and in some versions, the other sisters are married as well.
Fairy tales often serve to reinforce societal norms; the original tale of the dancing princesses emphasizes patriarchal control, since the king does not want his daughters to have the freedom to dance. He enlists other men in the project of regaining control and dominance over the young women, and then transfers authority to their future husbands. By continuing the story past the traditional, happily ever after resolution of heterosexual marriage, Winterson unsettles the assumption that marriage is inherently a good thing, especially for women. Instead, she depicts the princesses all winding up as single women, and also uses this section to explore domestic violence, same-sex desire, gender fluidity, and other experiences that challenge a more rigid view of romantic relationships. As Angela Marie Smith summarizes, "These tales' strategies of reversal and humor reconfigure power structures: the women violently reclaim their right to freedom and to self-narrative, and their narratives question mythical norms" (28).
Within the tales they recount, the twelve princesses (eleven since Fortunata is absent) adopt a kind of polyphony, with shifts in tone and diction to create the sense of distinctive voices. They also incorporate a pastiche of references to other literary works, including allusions to Robert Browning's poem "My Last Duchess," Lord Byron's poem "She Walks in Beauty," and works of mythology and scripture. The presence of these allusions in narratives within a narrative heightens their potential to be reimagined; as Natalia Andrievskikh notes, "What is important about Winterson’s treatment of these references is that the novel does not simply 'reuse' stories or images, but consumes and appropriates them to change their meaning and subvert the message of the original source" (7).
