Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

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Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

• By Jeannette Winterson

STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS
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• Author Jeanette Winterson
• Genre Memoire

• It is different from autobiography.
• The chronological sequence is not so important
  and it is flexible
• Facts and language is linked to authors emotions
  and personality? emotional truth is more
  important than the real truth.
• In addition writing a memoir the author should
  heal his/her hurts.

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THE COVER

• The picture represents a child on the beach. I
  think that the child is Jeanette Winterson. So
  the reader experts that in the book is about the
  writers life.

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THE TITLE

• question what is its function? ?To take the
  reader attention and to create connections
  between the reader and the writer.
• Repletion of the verb to Be ? I think that the
  writer introduces the content of the book the
  life of a person who wants to be, to live.
• Happy are linked to life ? a way to live life and
  every human being try to reach it.
• Normal are linked to life? normality coincides
  with masss life.

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DEDICATION

• To my three mothers
• -Constance Winterson? adoptive mother
• - Ruth Rendell? literary mother
• Ann S.? birth/biological mother
• J. Winterson uses the word mother to underline
  the importance of the three women. The mother is
  a woman who grows up and helps her child.

TRIBUTES
She thanks all the people who helped her or
believed in her.
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CONTENTS

• There are fifteen chapters and every chapter has
  an own title.
• Intermission (between chapters 11 and 12)

• The importance of wherefore. Time is not
  important.
• We are interested in art because it is not
  time-bound
• Everyones life has a cover near the narrative
  part (reality)

Coda the narrator ends her novel speaking about
her feelings during the writing of the novel and
about the meeting with her birth-mother.
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SETTING

• Accrington
• the place in which she lived after the adoption.
  She lived in a poor house with strange
  step-parents. She couldnt be herself becuase her
  step-mother thought what makes you happy is a
  sin she only could read the Bible and pray.

Manchester the place in which she was born. The
narrator says it is a good place to be born. In
the second chapter she describe it underlining
its double-faced spirit. It is the archetype of
the industrialized cities.
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CHARACTERS
The protagonist J.Winterson

• The book is a memoir so the protagonist is the
  writer, Jeanette Winterson.
• For this reason in the book you cannot find her
  physical description but you can know her way of
  thinking, her behaviors, her thoughts and
  relationship with the other characters thanks to
  different situations.

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CHARACTERS
Wrs. Winterson

• The characterization of Mrs. Winterson is
  grottesque indeed the narrator pay attention on
  the negative aspects and she overstate and deform
  her phisical appereance.
• Mrs. Winterson is fat, she doesnt want to sleep
  with her husband (maybe she was victim of a
  refusal),she is a fanatical religious woman and
  she has two sets of false teeth and a revolver in
  the duster drawer, waiting for Armageddon.

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Ballarin ClaudiaV Aas.2012-2013