Petrifying Attachments: Fear and Safety in Jeanette Winterson's Tanglewreck and The Battle of the Sun

This article focuses on Jeanette Winterson's two most extended works of fiction for children, Tanglewreck and The Battle of the Sun, identifying them as narratives of longing and adventure engaging directly with questions of childhood fear and safety. In 2007 I wrote an article on Winterson's adult fiction which focused on her use of vertical imagery. Using such vertiginous drops, I argued, Winterson explores the perilous opportunities afforded by disengaging from a woman-centred storytelling tradition, thus enabling her to ‘go it alone’. In Tanglewreck and The Battle of the Sun, these vertical images return and are again connected with questions of attachment and disengagement, yet now with an increasingly overt agenda of negotiating maternal separation anxiety. In Winterson's 2011 memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, the journey of the first-person narrator, as she travels from child to adulthood, is shrouded in fears linked to lost origins and a safe sense of belonging. As this article shows, these are also the issues facing Silver and Jack, the child protagonists of Tanglewreck and The Battle of the Sun.

What Happens When Verbal Threat Information and Vicarious Learning Combine?

Recent research has shown that the verbal information and vicarious learning pathways to fear create long term fear cognitions and can create cognitive biases and avoidance in children. However, it is unlikely that these pathways operate in isolation in the aetiology of childhood fear and the interaction between these pathways is untested. Three preliminary experiments are reported that explore the combined effect of verbal threat information and vicarious learning on self-reported fear beliefs in 7–9-year-old children. Results showed that prior negative information significantly facilitated the effect of negative vicarious learning on children's fear beliefs (Experiment 1); however, there was not a significant combined effect of verbal threat information and vicarious learning when they the information was presented during (Experiment 2) or after (Experiment 3) vicarious learning. These results support the idea that verbal information can affect CS-US associations formed in subsequent vicarious learning events, but contradict the proposal that it can change fear beliefs already acquired through vicarious learning by changing how a person evaluates the vicarious learning episode.