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Haunted and seduced, I decided to write about the two novels, about their use of desire, fantasy and imagination in relation to the construction of subjectivity. The result is the present study, the aim of which is to offer a critical discourse in which desire and subjectivity in narrative are interrogated. My reading of the two texts by Carter and Winterson explores how desire allows the subject to imagine an alternative, utopian location where a narrative of the self, in all its multiplicity, might be effected. The term ‘narrative’ here is akin to the one described by Roland Barthes in “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative” (1994):
This book is organised around three blocks. The first, “Preliminaries,” contains a chapter entitled “‘Which is to be Master’: The History of our own Obscurity; Or, Subjectivity, Desire, and Narrative in Con-Text,”1 a theoretical introduction. Although the main theory informing the present project is poststructuralism, I refer to Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis to discuss issues of desire and subjectivity. Starting from the premise that language constructs reality, this Preliminary chapter explores the ways in which subjectivity, desire and narrative may be inter-connected. The first section, “Subjectivity as Paradox,” traces the development of the concept of human identity, from the Cartesian cogito to Sigmund Freud’s articulation of the unconscious, and Jacques Lacan’s theorisation of the subject as an organism-in-culture. Reference to the Lacanian ‘Mirror Stage,’ which performs splitting of the subject, is also made. The result is a theorisation of subjectivity in poststructuralist terms, “neither unified, nor an origin” (Belsey, Poststructuralim 65), but discursively produced, as the work of Michel Foucault consistently demonstrates.