Written on the body - Jeanette Winterson
Posted on Aug 05, 2008 under contemporary literature |
Jeanette Winterson is one of the most important young voices of the contemporary British literature. Having a dazzling success with her first novel (Oranges are not the only fruit), with Written on the Body Winterson adds to postmodern literature some surprising and innovative procedures and gives us one of the most intense and thrilling love stories.
Narrator- no name, no age, no sex!
If during the first pages of the novel, I thought (probably as a victim of some prejudices) that the narrator is a man, later on I discovered that there no actual references to his age or sex. The person that tells her love life and the relationship with the beautiful Louise doesn’t leave a clue concerning his sexuality.
The procedure Winterson uses takes us into an androgyny world, where war between sexes becomes obsolete and lacks in importance. Unaltered is only the power of love and the sensuality of discovering the loved one physically.
The ambiguity of the narrator’s sex brings to the table the problem concerning a woman’s capacity of writing from the perspective of a man (and vice-versa) and also the reader’s ability of visualizing all love scenes without clearly having in mind the nature of the character.
The intense descriptive episodes, with abundant anatomical details, of intense color, become really important when the narrator’s sensorial experiences are not limited by the perspective of its own sexuality.
By this procedure, Winterson has gone into an unexplored and dangerous field. Although she managed to free her love story of the dull determination of a homosexual relationship, she confronted harsh critics from the lesbian community who accused her of failing to write a sincere novel about a love affair between two women.
Cliché free love
Love as a cliché appears obsessively on the whole novel.
Marriage as a cliché “of settling down” , having a satisfied (if not happy) family and leading a quiet and comfortable existence.
“I love you” are words with no originality, empty by repetition.
Beyond all these sentimental and social traps, Written on the Body is the novel of a freed love, of love as an exploration, as a discovery, as knowledge.
Lovers are not bound to do what they are expected to do, but they live their own feelings independently and intensely. A letter of farewell consisting of all the clichés of a traditional love comes as a painful reminder of the uniqueness of this novel.
A joy of the senses
Probably one of the most powerful love stories, Written on the Body is, as the author herself confessed, a discovery of the self through metaphors of lust and disease. It is an adultery seen from the perspective of one lover. It is love seen as Braille written on a body that could be seen only in a certain light, our own secret code; the burden of all lost and consumed loves. It is a novel that wishes to find out why love is measured only by its loss.
Written by Ama