BOOK REVIEW : A Feminist and Fantasist Gives a Transformed View of Utopia : SEXING THE CHERRY <i> by Jeannette Winterson</i> Atlantic Monthly Press $19.95, 180 pages

Inside the modern woman--as thin and attractive as she can manage, and otherwise diligent at rearranging her nature to get by in a still-masculine world--is a fat, lusty and dangerous giantess raising hell to get out. So, at least, for Jeannette Winterson.

Winterson, a British writer--author of “Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit” and “The Passion”--is feminist and fantasist both. In her novels, women are the rambunctious and part-mythical heroes. Polymorphous, undergoing strange transformations, they love themselves and sometimes each other. They cut down the omniscient male who has filled the world with blood, oppression and chemical waste; or refine him into a quicksilver sprite: Prospero into Ariel.

“Sexing the Cherry” is a phantasmagoria, weird and witty, though excessively burdened by a lyrical symbolism that aims to fly higher than it does. It is a kind of Utopia; provocative, as such things can be, and pat, as they can also be.

As “Finnegans Wake” was the jumbled world, past, present and to come, dreamed by the sleeping H.C. Earwicker, “Cherry” is also a dream-world cosmography. The dream-spinner is a chemist whose specialty is industrial pollution, and who is in the news for conducting a one-woman protest by camping out beside a factory that is pouring mercury into the Thames.

She is thin and rather pretty. Her principles allow her to take no pleasure in these things, and she takes none in men, with whom she has had sex but no satisfaction. She is doing something meaningful, she is liberated, yet so much less than she longs to be.

Her fantasy goes back to the time when she was adolescent, fat, and ashamed of it. Sitting by the polluted river, she conjures an alternative history. She becomes the sublimely fat Dog Woman, a seven-foot brawler living in the time of the Stuarts and Oliver Cromwell. Most of the book is the magical adventures of Dog Woman and of Jordan, the foundling baby boy she discovered beside the river; it is narrated alternately by each.

“How hideous am I,” Dog Woman proclaims triumphantly. She tells us how she overpowers men who trouble her by crushing them to her monstrous bosom, the more lethally since she has not changed her dress for five years. As a child, this Paula Bunyan tells us, she broke both her father’s legs by sitting on his lap. An elephant was placed on a seesaw; she lowered herself upon the other end and hurled it into the air. She would have liked to find a man for sex, but none were big enough.

But she has Jordan. A stepmother who cannot love men can love a man-child because just possibly she can raise him to be different from all other men. And Jordan, the gallant, elusive wanderer, is her quicksilver sprite. He loves her looks; he is proud that she could hold 12 oranges in her mouth at once.

“When Jordan was a baby he sat on top of me much as a fly rests on a hill of dung,” she relates, her language as prodigious as she is. “And I nourished him as a hill of dung nourishes a fly, and when he had eaten his fill he left me . . . I should have named him after a stagnant pond and then I could have kept him, but I named him after a river, and in the flood-tide he slipped away.”

Jordan slips away, though he always slips back. He falls in love with Fortunata, a princess who floats in the air. He meets her 11 floating sisters, each of whom has gotten rid of her husband, usually by killing him or, in one case, by kissing him and turning him into a toad named Anton. He dresses as a woman to escape briefly “the burden of my gender,” and a fishwife teaches him women’s rules for dealing with men. (“Never give a man money. If you ask him for money and he refuses, sell his richest possession and leave at once.”)

Dog Woman, meanwhile, is fighting for the Stuarts against the Roundheads; I suppose it is on the view that Puritanism has hurt women worse than libertinage. She chops up two vinegar parsons and gouges out the eyes of 60 of their followers.

There is a lot more; some sharp, some blurry. Dog Woman is fine and clearly seen; Jordan is vague. Winterson’s attempt to imagine the man of the future, cleaned up like the future Thames, is prettified and sentimental.

Revolutionary rhetoric, as a rule, tears the world apart more convincingly than it puts it together again. The anarchist’s bomb may clear the air; the anarchist’s smile clouds it.

Next: Elaine Kendall reviews “Family Pictures” by Sue Miller.