Crago 1 Ezekiel Crago ENGL 410 Dr.

Rachel Crawford 4/30/09 No Sex Jeanette Winterson wrote the novel Written on the Body as a test; the text explores the limits of language to express desire. Her postmodern prose, steeped in metaphor and multiple layers of symbolic mimesis, teases out the deeper meanings of clichs and stereotypes, altering them and commenting upon their possible truth value. For example, using erotic language in one scene, she metaphorically transforms food into a symbolic system that represents the body of a lover (Winterson 36-37). The act of eating becomes a sex act. She compares the fiery passion of desire to the lulling domesticity of a long-term relationship. The novels narrator relates, Over the months that followed my mind healed and I no longer moped and groaned over lost love and impossible choices. I had survived shipwreck and I liked my new island with hot and cold running water and regular visits from the milkman. I became an apostle of ordinariness. I lectured my friends on the virtues of the humdrum, praised the gentle bands of my existence and felt that for the first time I had come to know what everyone told me I would know; that passion is for holidays, not homecoming. (Winterson 27) The oblique reference to Odysseus bewitched by Circe on her island serves as covert foreshadowing to the rambling journey that follows. Every passage in the book, like this one, drips with irony and cynicism. Winterson describes the slop bucket of romance (21).

Crago 2 Gender is a text written on our bodies in invisible ink. Winterson critiques this text by limiting her use of language; her narrator speaks with an un-gendered voice. Her technique of gender obfuscation in this novel questions categorical assumptions regarding gender, desire, and sexuality. She demonstrates the subjective nature of gender by using a confessional voice. The narrator relates the story of a love affair without ever revealing their own identity, thereby declaring that desire has no gender. Winterson shows us that gender as a symbolic system exists within language. This way of writing the novel tricks the reader into questioning the assumptions they may have regarding their own gender. Not only does language fail in adequately defining gender; it can never fully express notions of love and longing. The novel represents Wintersons allegorical struggle with language. She strives to express sexuality as textuality and in so doing reveals the erotic nature of language itself. Gender identity relies on subjective judgment rooted in the use of categories and stereotypes. Human beings perform many roles in life; gender performance remains unique because we do not commonly recognize it as performative. We assume gender to be in a person. Gender identity consists in the ways that we are recognized by others. This recognition subverts the notion of an objective gender identity, as the subjective judgment of recognition relies heavily on arbitrary stereotypical categories. Charles Scott, in his article The Birth of an Identity: A Response to Del McWhorters Bodies and Pleasures, reasons that stereotypes and recognitions are real and powerful they arise from real things, and they create other real things (Scott 107). Thus, we base these categories other upon experiences that must be treated as actualities in their effect on people: they can occasion suffering, success, and multiple affections (Scott 107). We perform gender, yes, but the performance relies on the assumptions, preconceptions, and interpretations of our audience.

Crago 3 A writer can overcome reliance on stereotype by using a confessional voice. Writing in the first person assumes subjectivity. Scott argues that McWhorter defies objectivity, subjectivity, and stereotypes by writing her book in this confessional voice. By doing so, she makes a declaration, owning, and avowal not only by her regarding her self, but by the acknowledgement and recognition of her and us by many powerful forces in our society and its histories (Scott 108). She writes about being a lesbian in the modern world and what this means to her. Her personal confession becomes a confession for our society and a recognition of fear and prejudice. She accomplishes this by confess[ing] such things without shame and with the intention of owning [her]self publicly (Scott 109). Scotts response attempts to match her declaration. Her confessional voice seiz[es] these stories [about identities]so as to overcome the storytellers through their own stories (Scott 109). Wintersons narrator relates his/her story with the same kind of seemingly stark unrelenting honesty. The narrator describes such sentiments as, I felt reprieved and virtuous. Now I could sit in my own flat by myself and be pragmatic. Sometimes the best company is your own (Winterson 31). The narrator speaks from a position of solitude. We learn that the intended audience for this confession is the love object herself, Louise. The novel is a love letter to a lost lover. Winterson also challenges the storytellers. Perhaps she even challenges the act of storytelling. She wrote Written on the Body in such a way that the reader never learns the narrators full identity. Her ingenious use of non-gendered language prevents the reader from forming any kind of gender identity in the voice of this first-person narrative. Without this cue, sexual identification remains elusive. We are never given a name for the main character, who serves as both storyteller and protagonist. On more than one occasion, the narrator tells the reader that s/he is lying (Winterson 39). His/her words are unreliable, not to be trusted. S/he

Crago 4 shares his/her thoughts with us, taking us into his/her confidence, but we never receive a description of the narrators physicality. S/he exists within the descriptions of his/her sensual experience. The narrators body becomes a vehicle for experience; it is the medium for this text. S/he has boyfriends. S/he has girlfriends. The narrator seems to lack sexual preference. S/he loves deeply but finds commitment difficult as s/he has a wandering amorous eye. Not only through the language of the narration, but also through the actions of the narrator-character, his/her gender, sex, and sexual orientation are obscured. Bodies, and the sex type attached to them, are treated as the vehicles of desire, but not their object. When Winterson describes a characters body, the description contains the text of the characters life. Relating Elgins childhood, she writes, He was small, narrow-chested, short-sighted, and ferociously clever (Winterson 33). Significantly, Elgin falls in love with Louise because she bests him in a verbal match of wit. He desires her use of language more than her body (Winterson 33-34). Winterson, like McWhorter, utilizes a confessional voice to reach past stereotypes and to demonstrate that desire is not contained by the amorphous boundaries of gender. Her narrator owns his/her self without shame, but not without remorse. In addition, her technique questions the role of gender in the author. In one sense, her novel responds to the question of womens role in literature. In Written on the body: meaning, gender, Natasha Distiller explores the concept of a gendered voice by examining text by early modern female writers. She notes that the category of womens literary history, with its imperative to hear the essentialist womans voice, is a creation of a twentieth century historical moment (Distiller n. pag.). Thus, the idea of a womans voice is a modern concept. Wintersons postmodern literary style openly questions this notion of an essential womans voice. Although this novel was written by a

Crago 5 woman, one would find it difficult to uncover in it a womans voice. Her novel speaks with the voice of desire and love. We define gender through the use of language. Gender is a symbolic entity. There was nothing aberrant about Oedipus marriage until he learned that his wife was also his mother. Thus, linguistic categorical knowledge brought about his guilt. The crime was a crime of categorical dissonance. His wife could not also be his mother; they existed in two distinct categories. The Christian doctrine of original sin describes the same process. Adam and Eve ate from the source of knowledge of good and evil. The adverse reaction to deviance from gender norms is due to the blurring of these boundaries, a questioning of the stability that linguistic categories are supposed to supply. Brian Finny argues, in Bonded Language: Jeanette Wintersons Written on the Body, that this novel is a deliberate attempt to dispense with distinctions of gender and to meditate on the nature of love stripped of its specifically hetero- and homosexual features (23). Desire does not exist within the object, but in the mind of the one desiring. Wintersons novel forces the reader to question the meaning of their own gender identity. Scott observes that social identities are recognized within a lineage of values, policies, procedures, institutions, and methods that [compose] at once the structure of their own recognitions (109). Wintersons narrative, by refusing an easy recognition, breaks with this lineage and, by doing so, allows a distance which calls for a new perspective of gender. The problematic nature of a genderless narrator induces a cognitive dissonance that focuses this problematic on the readers own identity. As you read the novel, you are forced to picture the events narrated in your mind, but the mind recoils from the ambiguity revolving around the central character. Jennifer L. Hansen, in Written on the Body, Written by the Senses, writes

Crago 6 that Wintersons protagonist is too unknown to foreclose the possibility in advance that we may not wholly be able to identify with the protagonist (370). Wintersons careful use of language prevents a reader from fully imagining who narrates this story. Indeed we are impelled to identify with the protagonist; this polymorphous entity that confesses to us. S/he bares his/her tortured soul. In the novel, the narrator chases the ever-receding form of Louise. As readers, we are forced to do the same with the form of the narrator/protagonist. Hansen explains that we cannot make this protagonist into an object of consciousness because we cannot generate a concept that distinguishes us from this character as an object of possible experience [] we are invited to occupy this space ourselves (367). The ambiguous narrator creates a negative space within the novel which envelops the reader. This ambiguously sexed narrator drew large amounts of criticism from the lesbian community. The critics argued that Wintersons novel somehow betrayed her own status as a lesbian. In Finnys article, he explains that critics read into the work what they know about the author (24). It seems that readers cannot help assuming a gender for the narrator and applying the identity politics implied by this assumption to the text. Finny notes that many critics, like reviewers, choose to assume that the narrator is a thinly disguised lesbian lover. They promptly foreclose a text that Winterson has deliberately left open (25). The reader reads what they want to read and the text allows such activity. Winterson herself has said that it doesnt matter which sex the narrator is, because the gender of the character is both, throughout the book, and changes (Finny 25). She no doubt refers to scenes like the one where the narrator hits Jacqueline, since violence is usually a masculine-gendered action, but this assumption can also be challenged (Winterson 86).

Crago 7 Written on the Body explores the limits of language to describe love, desire, and sexuality. At the beginning of the book, Winterson writes that love demands expression and then proceeds to demonstrate how language lacks the ability to express love (9). She follows this observation with the declaration that a precise emotion seeks a precise expression, but then she demonstrates the difficulty of precision when expressing something that you cannot fully articulate (Winterson 10). The emotions involved in love may not be so precise. Hansen explains it this way: Written on the Body begins with a protagonist showing us the limits of language to accurately convey the truth of the experience of love (368). By using this deliberately ambiguous narrator, Hansen believes that a dialogue takes place between the text and the reader over the nature of love (368). Indeed, at one point, the narrator enters into a dialogue with his/herself and the conversation speaks allegorically over the nature of love. Walking up the steps to a girlfriends house, the narrator notices a papier-mch snake sticking out of the letter box. The debate consists of Me and I discussing the reality of apparent danger: ME: I: ME: I: ME: I: Dont be silly, its a joke. What do you mean its a joke? Its lethal. Those teeth arent real. They dont have to be real to be painful. What will she think if you stand here all night? What does she think of me anyway? What kind of a girl aims a snake at your genitals? ME: I: A fun-loving girl. Ha Ha. (Winterson 41-42)

Loves teeth dont have to be real to be painful.

Crago 8 The narrator spends most of the book describing the effect of Louise on his/her senses. Hansen argues that love is a knowledge of oneself, grasped not by intellect, but through loving (376). The narrative depicts a process of self learning through love and loss. As the narrator says, Context is all (Winterson 36). Louise has become the context of the narrators existence. Winterson describes love in this novel as a kind of disease. Having a thistle removed at a clinic after an outdoor tryst, a doctor tells the narrator, You know, love is a very beautiful thing but there are clinics for people like you (Winterson 20). In "Winterson's Written on the Body," Molly Hoff treats Louise as a carrier of this disease, which she equates linguistically through a pun on Louises name to the French word for syphilis. She observes that the pronouncements Louise utters consist in communicating the disease she personifies (Hoff n. pag.). After falling in love with Louise, but deciding that s/he needs to stay with Jacqueline, the narrator awakes sweating and chilled (Winterson 42). S/he suffers from lovesickness, but lovesickness can also be word sickness; words can poison you (Finny 28). The narrator becomes infected with Louise. Louise exists exclusively within the narrators imagination. The text of Written on the Body consists of a series of remembrances. Before the narrative has begun, Louise has already left. As the narrator remembers Louise, she becomes more indistinct, until we are reading a description of Louise in the strange language of biology; but Louise ultimately cannot be defined, even with the precise tools of science. In trying to recreate Louise with his/her imagination, the narrator reduces her to essential anatomical details and distinct sensations. Louise becomes more an abstract idea than a person. Toward the end, Louise has completely disappeared. When she reappears at the conclusion of the novel, the event seems suspect, ghostlike and insubstantial. Louise is only a textual artifact (Finny 27).

Crago 9 Winterson expresses sexuality as textuality. Finny relates that she not only describes humans as textual artifacts, but also thinks of works of literature as if they were living beings (27). He argues that Winterson, in godlike fashion, seeks to turn flesh back into word (Finny 29). Written on the Body contains many references to other texts; Winterson uses several varying discourses, such as: meteorology, biology, anatomy, chronobiology, physics, astrophysics, zoology, [and] the Bible to comment on each other in an inter-textual dialogue(Finny 26). Since the only knowledge that readers can have about the narrator comes via the text, the narrator is constituted by language (Finny 27). The narrator, like Louise, is also a textual object; he/she is part of the discourse. Finny explains that Wintersons strategy [] is to deliberately evoke textual precedents only to establish a distance from them (26). She invites the reader to examine how much they themselves are constituted by language. She hints that we all may be textual artifacts. Wintersons writing takes a different form from the typical narrative structure of a novel. The narrator relates their story as a kind of self examination, a psychoanalysis. S/he relates such insights as I still remember that night with shame and rage, after one of his/her relationships dissolves (Winterson 45). Every remembrance carries emotional baggage. Finny argues that Winterson build[s] a structure that is bonded by language (quoting Winterson 23). Narrative and plot do not hold this book together. But she runs the risk of being trapped in the prison house of language (Finny 28). Indeed we all risk such confinement. Winterson does not offer the reader a way out. When the narrators affair with Bathsheba ends, s/he wants Bathsheba to return the letters that s/he wrote. The narrator confesses, Perhaps it was wrong to climb into her lumber-room and take back the last of myself. [] I took them into the garden and burned them one by one

Crago 10 and thought how easy it is to destroy the past and how difficult to forget it (Winterson 17). The narrator destroys the textual evidence of the affair that was written on paper in a vain attempt to nullify the affair itself, but the text of memory remains. The affair is written on the body, etched into the cerebral cortex. The narrator cannot destroy the text of his/her life; the text of desire burns slowly. The narrator struggles with language as if it contains malice. S/he fears to be trapped by the endless repetition that words represent. Language represents domestication: a cage. Winterson herself wrestles with the limitations of language by the strict choice allowed when trying to use un-gendered words. In Fantastic language: Jeanette Winterson's recovery of the postmodern word, Christy Burns analyzes Wintersons linguistic choices, elucidating this struggle. Quoting David Lodge, she says that Wintersons use of language transports the reader into new imaginative territory (Burns n. pag.). Burns addresses one effective technique utilized by Winterson: repetition. She observes that repeated phrases work like musical motifs associatively accruing different levels of meaning across the text. In Brian Finnys analysis of Wintersons language, he notes that the phrase Its the clichs that cause the trouble is repeated six times in the book (Winterson 10, 21, 26, 71, 155, 180) (Finny 25). This particular use of repetition accumulates irony until the phrase becomes truth. Louise repeats the phrase I will never let you go five times and then she ultimately does (Winterson 69, 76, 96, 100, 163) (Hoff n. pag.). The narrator fights against clichs during the narrative but the clichs ultimately win out. Wintersons writing reveals that clichs are unavoidable. Finny says, To describe the language of love necessarily plunges any narrator into a world of intertextuality, of language already long inhabited and become automatized (25). The region of love is a well-traveled space. Finny writes, neither words nor actions can avoid being derivative in the field of love

Crago 11 (26). Winterson composes something original because she seizes on the clich and turns it to her own purpose (Finny 26). She twists the clich, squeezing out concentrated drops of irony. In her adept hands, the clich becomes a trope. While leaving the Clap Clinic, the narrator relates, On the way out I bought myself a large bunch of flowers. Visiting someone? said the girl, her voice going up at the corners like a hospital sandwich. She was bored to death, having to be nice, jammed behind the ferns, her right hand dripping with green water. Yes, myself. I want to find out how I am. She raised her eyebrows and squeaked, You all right? I shall be, I said, throwing her a carnation. At home, I put the flowers in a vase, changed the sheets and got into bed. What did Bathsheba ever give me but a perfect set of teeth? All the better to eat you with, said the Wolf. I got a can of spry paint and wrote SELF-RESPECT over the door. Let Cupid try and get past that one. (Winterson 48) This paragraph subverts several well-worn clichs, putting them to novel and cynical usage. The novel repeats this process up to the last sentence: I dont know if this is a happy ending but here we are let loose in open fields (Winterson 190). Language is erotic. Winterson writes about sexuality and sexual acts, but since the language that she uses can never refer to the gender of the narrator, it restricts the kind of references that she can make. She must describe erotic scenes without gender bias. Her description lends itself to voyeurism, such as the first erotic encounter in the novel. In this scene we are kept from realizing the sex of the other as well by her specific genderless language:

Crago 12 You laughed and waved, your body bright beneath the clear green water, its shape fitting your shape, holding you, faithful to you. You turned on your back and your nipples grazed the surface of the river and the river decorated your hair with beads. You are creamy but for your hair your red hair that flanks you on either side. [.] You stood up and the water fell from you in silver streams. I didnt think, I waded in and kissed you. You put your arms around my burning back. You said, Theres nobody here but us. (Winterson 11) Winterson has made this person desirable without really describing them. We know only that the person has pale skin and red hair. The description contains more details about the water than the person. She transforms water into an erotic metaphor and uses it to make this person desirable. The personified water holds and caresses this person as if the water itself desires to touch them. Burns argues that Wintersons sensate and erotic words are both pleasurably self-directed but always and only at the moment of being spoken (or read) (n. pag.). According to Burns, passages like this one become erotic because speaking anothers words is sex (n. pag.). Winterson directs eroticism at language itself and it is through this eroticism (language that appears to want to please itself) that Winterson works to revitalize postmodern language (Burns n. pag.). Finny observes that this novel is less about desire than it is about the language of desire (23). Winterson energizes language with erotic potential. As Finny relates, The indirectness of these allusions to the lovers bodies only adds to the erotic charge and demand on the readers imagination (28). Describing Louise, the narrator says, She was wearing a red and green guardsman stripe dressing gown gloriously too large. Her hair was down, warming her neck and shoulders, falling forward onto the table-cloth in wires of light. There was a dangerously electrical quality about

Crago 13 Louise. I worried that the steady flame she offered might be fed by a current far more volatile. Superficially she seemed serene, but beneath her control was a crackling power of a kind that makes me nervous when I pass pylons. She was more of a Victorian heroine than a modern woman. A heroine from a Gothic novel, mistress of her house, yet capable of setting fire to it and fleeing in the night with one bag. I always expected to see her wearing her keys at her waist. She was compressed, stoked down, a volcano dormant but not dead. It did occur to me that if Louise were a volcano then I might be Pompeii. (Winterson 49) The form of Wintersons writing often says more than the content. When the narrator describes infidelity at the beginning of the novel, s/he uses the form of a stage play. By using this form, the scene carries the implication of endless repetition. Plays are performed over and over again in front of an audience; s/he thereby includes the reader as an understood voyeur. The scene consists of a silent unidentified lover and a woman lying in bed. The reader can assume the lover to be the narrator by the sheer lack of description. The woman relates her conflicting emotions over the affair. Her description becomes metaphoric and textual: Ive been trying to get you out of my head but I cant seem to get you out of my flesh. I think about your body day and night. When I try to read, its you Im reading. When I sit down to eat, its you Im eating (Winterson 15). The scene ends with the ambiguous lover alone in the bathroom, crying. This same process of visceral invasion infects the narrator after losing Louise. Significantly, the narrator works as a translator but finds it impossible to function in that capacity after the affair. When [s/he tries] to read, its [Louise shes] reading. In many ways, Louise is the text of this novel. A reader of a novel becomes infected by the text in similar fashion. Louise infects the reader as well.

Crago 14 The text describes the narrators odyssey of longing and loss. In a very real sense, the narrator becomes the narrative. The narrator relates, You were driving but I was lost in my own navigation (Winterson 17). The first time that the narrator addresses their object of desire by name, s/he says, Louise, in this single bed, between these sheets, I will find a map as likely as any treasure hunt. I will explore you and mine you and you will redraw me according to your will. We shall cross one anothers boundaries and make ourselves one nation. (Winterson 20) The audience becomes lost along with the protagonist. Later, the narrator asks, How could I cover this land? Did Columbus feel like this on sighting the Americas? (Winterson 52). At the beginning of the novel, the narrator asks, Why is the measure of love loss? (Winterson 9). The question lingers. As Winterson explains, Bigger questions, questions with more than one answer, questions without an answer are harder to cope with in silence (13). Scott argues that perhaps the modern knowledge of pleasure is far too centered in an essential state of being that is recognized as desire, and perhaps pleasures are far more dispersed throughout physical experiences than can be accounted for or appreciated by a discourse of desire (112). Winterson dissects the discourse of desire to find, the measure of love [is] loss (9). We desire that which we lack. Finny observes that the conclusion of Written on the Body celebrates the transformative effects of art itself [] Textual love necessarily sacrifices sexual love [but] we are left with the consolation of language (30). Winterson leaves us with the consolation of language, but provides such elegant language that the consolation seems a prize. The language that she chooses elucidates many of the bigger questions in life without answering them. Indeed, she

Crago 15 demonstrates how inadequate language can be when answering such questions. She shows us that desire and sexuality exist outside of the confining boundaries of gender. While exploring the text of sexuality, she struggles with language, subverting clichs and stereotypes into new meanings and wider classifications. She argues that love is known through the act of loving; love is a journey that you undertake from yourself in order to explore the depths of another. This means that a lover risks everything. Whether we learn about ourselves from this process remains open to debate.

Crago 16 Works Cited Burns, Christy L. "Fantastic language: Jeanette Winterson's recovery of the postmodern word." Contemporary Literature. Vol. 37 no. 2 (Summer, 1996): 278-306. Academic OneFile. Gale. University of San Francisco. 16 Feb. 2009. Distiller, Natasha. "Written on the body: meaning, gender." Shakespeare in Southern Africa. No. 17 (Annual, 2005): 35-43. Academic OneFile. Gale. University of San Francisco. 12 Feb. 2009. Finney, Brian. Bonded Language: Jeanette Wintersons Written on the Body. Women and Language. Vol. XV no. 2: 23-31. Academic OneFile. Gale. University of San Francisco. 14 Feb. 2009. Hansen, Jennifer L. Written on the Body, Written by the Senses. Philosophy and Literature. No. 29 (2005): 365-78. Academic OneFile. Gale. Project Muse. University of San Francisco. 14 Feb. 2009. Hoff, Molly. "Winterson's Written on the Body." The Explicator. Vol. 60 no.3 (Spring 2002): 179-81. Academic OneFile. Gale. University of San Francisco. 14 Feb. 2009. Scott, Charles E. The Birth of an Identity: A Response to Del McWhorters Bodies and Pleasures. Hypatia. Vol. 16 no.3 (Summer 2001): 106-14. Research Library. ProQuest. University of San Francisco. 14 Feb. 2009. Winterson, Jeanette. Written on the Body. New York: Vintage International, 1992. 9-11, 13, 15, 17, 20-21, 23, 26-27, 31, 33-34, 36, 39, 41-42, 45, 48-49, 52, 69, 71, 76, 96, 100, 155, 163, 180, 190.