Summary
The novel begins with a section narrated by Jordan. Throughout the novel, sections narrated by Jordan are indicated with an image of a pineapple, while sections narrated by Dog Woman are indicated with an image of a banana. Jordan introduces himself and describes his first memory: he is alone and lost on a foggy and cold night. He explains that he is going to describe not just things that happened to him, but also things that he imagined or wished had happened. He believes that life is more complex than the factual record of events, and that most of what is important to him has happened within his internal world. Jordan explains that when he was young, his adopted mother (Dog Woman) found him abandoned on a riverbank and took him home, where she raised him in isolation.
The narrative switches to Dog Woman. She explains that she named Jordan after a famous river, because she found him on the riverbank in London. Dog Woman always wanted her own biological child, so she was happy to have a chance to adopt a child. When Jordan is 3 years old, Dog Woman takes him to see Thomas Johnson displaying a new fruit, which he has brought back to England. Johnson is an herbalist. While Johnson tries to dramatically stage the reveal of the fruit, Dog Woman becomes impatient and rips off the covering, after threatening Johnson. Dog Woman is confused by the long yellow fruit that she sees; Johnson explains that it is a banana, and he has brought it back from Bermuda. The crowd is largely confused and disgusted by the sight of the banana. Dog Woman panics when she cannot find Jordan, but then sees him standing close to Johnson. Dog Woman realizes that Jordan is having a vision of an exotic island; this event marks the beginning of Jordan's internal life being as real to him as what he is experiencing around him.
Dog Woman goes on to describe what life was like for her and Jordan as he grew up. Dog Woman makes money by entering the dogs she raises into races, but she and Jordan live in relative poverty. Their neighbor, a very old woman, predicts that Jordan will break Dog Woman's heart, but she loves him fiercely anyways. Dog Woman shares another memory, of a later time when she and Jordan (now an adult) sailed down the Thames River and out into the open ocean. By this point, Jordan has gone on many voyages abroad, and seen many exotic lands. Dog Woman looks back on this memory with a sense of calmness and joy.
The narrative switches to Jordan's point of view (indicated by the pineapple). Jordan describes the experience of leaving his body and traveling to far off and magical places through the power of his mind. He repeatedly returns to a fantastical city where the words spoken by individuals take on physical form and hover in the air. People travel upwards in balloon in order to clean these words. Jordan sometimes accompanies these individuals, and uses imagery to describe the experience of approaching the personified language.
The narrative returns to Dog Woman's perspective. She recollects how when Jordan was a young boy, he was often fascinated with building small paper boats, but was also continuously disappointed when these boats were invariably wrecked after he tried to sail them in the river.
The narrative switches to Jordan's point of view; within the fantastical city of words, there was also a specific house that Jordan visited. In this house, no one allowed their feet to touch the floor. Furniture was suspended from the ceiling, and individuals walk on tightropes. While visiting this house, Jordan encounters a striking young woman. He is very intrigued by her.
Dog Woman describes how, around the year 1640, Jordan met a man named John Tradescant. Jordan was around 10 years old at this time. One hot summer day, Jordan was playing with his boats in the river, and when Dog Woman went to fetch him, she found him speaking with a man. John Tradescant is the gardener to King Charles; his father also previously held this post. Up until 1637, Tradescant had mainly spent his time voyaging around the world (including to the colony of Virginia) to collect specimens of exotic plants. However, when his father died, he had to return to England to take up the post of royal gardener. Tradescant sometimes still pines for his life of travel, so he was touched by Jordan's obvious fascination with boats.
Dog Woman pauses in her memories to describe her appearance: she is a giant, superhumanly large, and also somewhat grotesque in appearance. Dog Woman's huge size and ugliness have often frightened people, or made her the target of mockery.
Dog Woman recollects how, soon after the start of the Civil War (thus around 1642), Tradescant comes to Dog Woman's home. Dog Woman is in the midst of a heated argument with a neighbor, who was a Puritan. Dog Woman supports the Royalist cause, siding with King Charles and his supporters. She disagrees with the Parliamentarian side, largely allied with the Puritan religious movement, which is putting pressure on the King to support religious reforms by refusing to grant him money. Dog Woman dislikes her local preacher, Preacher Scroggs, who is a Puritan in his religious leanings. Tradescant intervenes in the argument between Dog Woman and her neighbor, and explains that he wants Jordan to come and work as his assistant at Wimbledon Palace. Even though Queen Henrietta has gone abroad with the royal children for greater safety during the civil war, Tradescant is focused on his project of designing a beautiful garden for her.
Dog Woman cannot bear to be without Jordan, and says that she will go to Wimbledon with him. Tradescant is surprised and reluctant, but is eventually compelled to agree. Dog Woman makes the journey on foot, carrying Jordan, and arrives at Wimbeldon with him and 30 of her dogs.
The narrative returns to Jordan's point of view. He resumes his story of encountering the beautiful woman in the house where no one steps on the floor; when he wakes in the morning, Jordan goes to look for her. He has seen the woman, whom he identifies as a dancer, climbing out of a window in the early hours of the morning. Jordan begins to ask everyone about her, but no one seems to know who the dancer is. Jordan seeks out a group of prostitutes to ask if they know the dancer, and they tell him to dress in women's clothes and then come back to them.
Jordan returns dressed in women's clothing, and begins to talk with the prostitutes about their lives. They explain that they don't know the dancer he is seeking, but they do share a secret with him. While the prostitutes appear to live their lives in a tightly locked and sealed building, they have devised a system for sneaking out at night. A stream flows from the beneath the home of the prostitutes and passes through a nearby convent before merging with the river and flowing out to the sea. The prostitutes are carried along by the stream, until they reach the convent, where the nuns fish them out. The prostitutes can then move freely about the city, as long as they swim back upstream by the morning. Moreover, the prostitutes are actually a rotating group of women; any woman who wants to earn money can sneak in, rob the clients, and then leave when she has the money she wanted.
Jordan finds this experience so interesting that he continues to dress as a woman, and gets a job working at a fish market. Jordan is surprised to observe that the women around him seem largely disdainful of men, and in solidarity with one another. Believing Jordan to be a sheltered young woman, several older women give him pragmatic and cynical advice about how to manage and interact with men. Jordan begins to be upset about what he is learning about how women honestly perceive men; some birds become interested in the fish he is holding in his hands, and when they seize the fish, they pick Jordan up as well and carry him through the air. The birds set Jordan down on the windowsill of a house in a new town; a young girl opens the window, and brings Jordan inside.
Analysis
The novel is narrated in alternating first-person perspectives, with some sections narrated by Dog Woman, and some by Jordan. Winterson subtly signals the movement between narrators by including small icons of different fruits: the pineapple signals that a section is being narrated by Jordan, and the banana signals that a section is being narrated by Dog Woman. The use of fruit icons connects to the overall motif of fruits in the novel, which is further affirmed by the episode in which Dog Woman and Jordan see the first banana that has ever been brought to England. Fruits hint at the theme of sexuality within the novel, since fruits function as a way for plants to reproduce (they are plant ovaries). The presence of the fruit iconography also allows Winterson to begin to unsettle traditional categories of gender: given its shape, a banana is often read as a phallic symbol, but this icon is assigned to a female character. The phallic associations of the banana are affirmed when the crowd who gathers to see the banana displayed are disgusted by the notion of eating it.
Importantly, the fruits used as icons and incorporated into the plot are not usually fruits indigenous to England; rather, they are fruits that are forcibly transplanted back to England as a result of exploration and early imperialism. In the first half of the 1600s, England was beginning to claim control of overseas regions, establishing what would eventually grow to be a gigantic empire. This overseas expansion allowed for new and exotic items to be imported into England for the first time. As will be the case throughout the novel, Winterson interweaves historical fact with imaginative fiction: Thomas Johnson (died 1644) was an English botanist and merchant who was very interested in observing and chronicling different species of plants. On April 10, 1633, Johnson displayed the first bunch of bananas known to have been seen in England in his London shop; they had been imported from Bermuda, which had been settled by the English (Bermuda remains a British overseas territory to this day).
Jordan is thus inspired to his lifelong fascination with sailing and exploring new lands by the sight of something that could only be displayed because individuals chose to leave their home. In the 17th century, sea voyages were dangerous and could mean being gone for years. Nonetheless, Jordan's early fascination with sailing paper boats and the spark that is triggered by the sight of the banana imply that he is compelled to look for new challenges in his life. Perhaps because he is being raised by a single woman, Jordan is drawn to role models like Johnson and Tradescant (also a historical figure) who seem to embody more traditionally masculine attributes of risk, novelty, exploration, and discovery.
The novel's depiction of these sea voyages, and of British naval exploration in general, focuses on the cataloguing of plant species, which is a relatively benign activity (especially because the fruit was often cultivated in England after being imported). There is little to no discussion of the darker reality that England, like many other European powers, was often causing massive death tolls among the indigenous populations of lands they "discovered." By the time period in which the historical portion of Winterson's novel is set (roughly 1630 to 1666), there was an active slave trade occurring, and England, along with other European powers, was relying on slave labor in many of its overseas territories. The rhetoric of "discovery" that was often applied to places and species of animals and plants belied the reality that something like a banana had been known by non-European people long before European contact.
While Jordan is shown as almost immediately pulled towards a masculine world of travel, discovery, and novelty, he grows up with a strong and loving bond with his adoptive mother. By depicting a family that is formed by choice rather than biology, Winterson disrupts assumptions about heteronormative relationships and family dynamics. Dog Woman is highly unconventional, and her inability to participate in traditional forms of sexuality and romantic relationships is a reoccurring topic in the novel. Nonetheless, she is able to take on the role of a mother because she constructs her own family, and forms a strong emotional bond with a child. The scene in which Dog Woman finds the infant near the waters of the river functions as an analogy for a biological childbirth (which would involve water breaking as part of labor), and also alludes to a literary and mythological tradition of discovering orphan children who turn out to be important and significant (for example, Moses being found in the Nile river).
The opening chapters highlight how the novel will shift between different genres, notably historical fiction and magical realism. For the plot involving Dog Woman, there is a distinctive historical setting (London in the 1630s and 40s), the incorporation of verifiable historical figures (King Charles, Tradescant, Queen Henrietta Maria), and references to specific historical events (the outbreak of the English Civil War). However, these events are often presented in non-linear ways and alternate with sections described by Jordan. Parts of Jordan's narrative are often quite difficult to place in time, and it is also challenging to discern to what extent these events are "really" occurring. By incorporating aspects of magical realism, which later expand into extended philosophical meditations on time, memory, and existence, Winterson departs from a traditional work of historical fiction, and in fact actually unsettles the categories of past and present. She creates a world in which multiple events are occurring simultaneously, and time is non-linear.
