Written on the Body

(Literary Masterpieces, Critical Compilation)

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Any resemblance Written on the Body might have to the usual
love story is eclipsed by Jeanette Winterson’s deft juggling of
the English language. In Winterson’s hands, love—that most
tired and well-worn of literary subjects—is pummeled,
dissected, and flipped upside-down until the word itself rings
new and unfamiliar. Love, make no mistake, is equal to such
rough treatment. For Winterson’s characters, love is more likely
to be gut-wrenching than gentle, life-shattering than
uncomplicated. When it is profound and reaffirming, her
characters often brace themselves for disappointment. Still, one
cannot honestly describe love without giving its cliched aspects
their due, observes the narrator of Written on the Body: “Why is
it that the most unoriginal thing we can say to each other is still
the thing we long to hear? ’I love you’ is always a quotation.”
The first-person narrator of Written on the Body (whose name
and gender are left unstated) is no stranger to love and its
frequent attendants of sex, fatigue, late-night flights, mental
distraction, and moral confusion. In fact, the narrator has just
about bid good-bye to the more exhausting characteristics of
love when love slams freight-train-hard again. Is it time to cling
fast to comfortable, if predictable, companionship? Although the
narrator solves that dilemma in about the length of time it takes
to return another’s gaze, other questions quickly present
themselves. How can love be measured? What sacrifices for
one’s lover are worthy? These are the metaphysical partners with
which this sexy, savvy novel dances. Written on the Body is a
meditation—with a plot—if what one does and fails to do in the
name of love.
In its structure, Written on the Body most closely resembles
monologue. It is an examination of the past, told as the narrator
languishes alone in a rented room, at the end of a long, dry
summer when the lack of rain has left the grapes withering on
the vine. It has not always been so for the narrator; she or he
recalls other summers, lush and fertile, filled with mutual desire.
The path between then and now, a trail strewn with single-
minded romantics, male and female lovers alike, is what the
narrator must traverse again to determine what went wrong.
The use of monologue is but one of several unusual narrative
strategies used here. In the first short pages before the plot
emerges and the book accommodates a more traditional
structure, Winterson allows the narrator to address directly her
or his great lost love, Louise. Yet the judicious use of “you”
seems at times to be addressed to a larger audience, as if the
narrator recognizes that others have lain where she or he has
lain, that others have wielded soft phrases as “bullets and barter”
too.
A chronology of love found and lost slowly begins to emerge
from these memories of heavily armed forays into the deadly
jungles of love. For the narrator, the story of Louise actually
begins with Jacqueline, the woman with whom the narrator is
sharing a too-calm life when Louise interrupts. The narrator
recognizes the advantages of life with Jacqueline: “I had
survived shipwreck and I liked my new island with hot and cold
running water and regular visits from the milkman.” Still,
Louise’s blood-red hair and Australian accent lure the narrator
into setting sail again.
The tension between long-term faithfulness and feverish short
affairs is very familiar to the narrator, given the number of
married women who have been her or his lovers. “I’ve been
through a lot of marriages,” she or he declares. “Not down the
aisle but always up the stairs.” This time, though, the narrator
recognizes the possibility of wholehearted commitment to
Louise. In the past, the narrator might have begun the romance
with Louise behind Jacqueline’s back; this time the narrator
notifies Jacqueline of the new relationship. For her part, Louise
chooses to leave cancer specialist Elgin Rosenthal, her husband
of ten years, rather than conduct the affair with his tacit
approval. Despite this mutual declaration of devotion, Louise
still remains only too aware of the narrator’s Lothario past and
instructs her sweetheart to refrain from saying “I love you” until
the day when the narrator can prove that love.
Louise moves into the narrator’s apartment, and although they
have very little money, they are “insultingly happy” for five
months. Then, on Christmas Eve while Louise is off visiting her
mother, Elgin unexpectedly drops by. Louise has cancer, he tells
the narrator, and he wants her back as a wife and patient. The
narrator is doubly devastated, first and foremost at the
description of Louise’s asymptomatic leukemia but also at what
Elgin is proposing. With Elgin, Louise could have access to the
finest, most cutting-edge cancer treatments. As his wife, she
could accompany him to the clinic in Switzerland where he
conducts his research. Such early intervention might save her
painful months of conventional chemotherapy. In return for this
special treatment, however, the narrator must terminate the affair
with Louise.
When the narrator confronts Louise with the news delivered by
Elgin, Louise reacts by playing down her disease. She feels fine,
she protests. She does not trust Elgin, as her husband or as her
doctor. Yet the narrator sees only one way to save Louise’s life,
only one way to act that is worthy of the love shared with her.
The narrator must disappear from Louise’s life. With only a few
belongings and some translation work, she or he catches a train
to Yorkshire. There, dedicated to not being found, the narrator
rents a run-down cottage and takes a job in a wine bar. In this
self-imposed exile, the narrator has ample time to dwell upon
Louise as lover, Louise as leukemia patient, Louise’s body as
both beloved and dangerous. The narrator’s double-edged
obsession is abetted by the acquisition of a medical text. “Within
the clinical language, through the dispassionate view of the
sucking, sweating, greedy, defecating self, I found a love-poem
to Louise.”
The novel breaks again from its conventional structure to offer a
series of narrative poems on various parts of the body, including
the skeleton, the skin, the cranial cavity, and the eye. 13y
isolating and examining the parts of the body, the narrator
burnishes her or his love for Louise in its particulars. Yet
Winterson’s language for the first time seems less clever, less
daring than before, as if by accepting the medical book’s
categories and definitions her own adventurous language is
stilted. These are familiar body parts, with familiar assumptions
of what the body is and does. The one exception is the section
on the nose, which is really a section on the scent of Louise’s
vagina. In this loving, earthy detail, Winterson can shine,
perhaps because she is claiming this untraveled literary territory
as her own. “I shall visit her gamey low-roofed den and feed
from her,” the narrator declares. The writing is provocative, and,
more than in any of the other descriptions of the body parts, the
narrator’s obsessive desire shines through.
In this section, with its poetic rendering of the corporeal self, the
title of the novel should really resonate. Oddly, this fails to
occur, perhaps because of the way the book itself interprets the
phrase. Earlier, the narrator had noted that written on the body is
a “secret code” containing the story of one’s life. This is a truly
idiosyncratic view of the body. Only with a great stretch of the
imagination can the body be viewed as hosting a secret code.
The body is each person’s first introduction to another, a fact
Winterson knows when she describes Louise 5 initial attraction
to the narrator after glimpsing her or him in the park. By
describing the body as secret code, Winterson has abandoned a
wealth of other interpretations of the phrase “written on the
body,” the most obvious being the postmodern interpretation
that one’s body “writes” one’s identity. Consider how what a
person looks like affects who the person is. Consider the ways
one modifies oneself—the hair, the face, the body with
clothing—to control the way others “read” one.
How interesting it might have been if Winterson had pursued her
examination of the dramatic way the narrator’s boyfriend Frank
marked his body by running a gold chain through nipple rings.
This would have been an opportunity to delve deeply into the
ways persons “write” their bodies and their bodies “write” them.
Instead, the narrator simply says, “The effect should have been
deeply butch but in fact it looked rather like the handle of a
Chanel shopping bag”: quite amusing, yes, and also studiously
dismissive of any other way the chain and nipple rings might be
“read” by gay or straight culture.
Gender is the great determiner, a fact that Winterson amplifies
by creating a narrator Without one. What effect is achieved by
keeping in question whether Louise and the narrator’s affair is a
lesbian one? It is never quite clear how readers are meant to
respond to the lack. Sexual preference is supplied to the reader,
aftet all—the narrator sleeps with women and men both—so it is
only the body parts themselves that go missing. This has its
downside. By the narrator’s forswearing of any claim on his or
her own arms, legs, and genitalia, the luscious descriptions of
sex with Louise are somewhat diminished. Furthermore, the
omission imbues small details with an importance completely
out of proportion as readers play the game of guess-the-sex.
Ultimately, it is very difficult not to read the narrator as a
woman. Would “an archafeminist” Inge, one of the narrator’s
girlfriends, date a man? Do men seek out bushes to pee behind?
Could the “Mickey Mouse one-piece” worn during a tryst in a
greenhouse be anything but a woman’s swimsuit? Perhaps
Winterson intended to demonstrate how gender, between true
lovers, matters lirtle, but this seems rather a reactionary way to
do it. How much more interesting a book Winterson might have
written if she had allowed her narrator to have a body. Its
absence, in a novel otherwise acutely aware of the body, is
distracting at best, negligent at worst.
After the section on the parts of the body, the novel returns to its
plot. Day by day, the narrator is growing more and more uneasy.
The plan to save Louise’s life by exiting Louise’s life seems to
be failing: No news of Louise has been delivered by Elgin, as he
had promised. The narrator confides these fears to Gail Right,
the manager of the wine bar where the narrator works. The
silence from Elgin continues, until finally Gail and the narrator’s
worst fears prompt a search for Louise. After returning to
London, the narrator confronts Elgin; he finally confesses that
Louise never returned to his protection as either husband or
doctor and that he has no idea where she has gone. Convinced
that Louise has slunk off to die alone, the narrator returns to the
cottage in Yorkshire, only to discover Louise waiting there.
The strength of Written on the Body is in its discourse on love,
especially love as encountered by this sarcastic, startling
narrator. For readers looking for an exploration of lesbian or
bisexual themes, this is a book closer in tone to The Passion,
with its understated treatment of bisexuality, than Oranges Are
Not the Only Fruit, an account of a young lesbian’s coming of
age. When read for its plot alone, the novel betrays an irksome,
tedious quality. The writing becomes too earnest, overly sincere,
intense. Still, there is plenty else here to appreciate, especially
the quirky narrator and the seductive narrative voice. It is almost
as if Winterson were demonstrating that the familiar love story
of boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl can be made new
again through sheer virtuoso writing and clever gender-bending.
Bibliography
Anna, Gabriele. Review of Written on the Body. The New York
Review of Books 40, no. 5 (March 4, 1993): 22. A long and
extremely thorough review which gives as much attention to
previous works, particularly Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, as
it does to the subject text. Also contains references to and
comparisons with other authors and/or literary works and
interesting biographical details about Winterson.
Gerrard, Nicci. Into the Mainstream: How Feminism Has
Changed Women’s Writing. London: Pandora Press, 1989. A
good survey of the social and political climate of the 1970’s and
1980’s and its effect on women writers and their work. Brings in
the opinions of several writers, literary agents, and editors.
Although only brief reference is made to Winterson, and then
only to her earlier work, Gerrard’s work places Written on the
Body in an insightful and comprehensible context.
Hunt, Sally, ed. New Lesbian Criticism: Literary and Cultural
Readings. London: Simon & Schuster, 1992. The essay on
Winterson discusses Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit as a
“crossover” text into the dominant culture, which is seen to have
lost its radical lesbian content in its adaptation to a television
film.
Petro, Pamela. Review of Written on the Body. The Atlantic 271,
no. 2 (February, 1993): 112. A thorough and intelligent
discussion of Written on the Body presented within the
framework of Winterson’s previous novels. The review clearly
identifies and comments on recurring themes and formal
techniques in Winterson’s work.

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 Written on the Body Form and
Content (Masterpieces of
Women's Literature)
Jeanette Winterson
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Form and Content

(Masterpieces of Women's Literature)
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Written on the Body is a meditation on the nature of sexual love
and passion as experienced by the first-person narrator, whose
name and gender are never revealed. The narrative’s primary
focus is on the absent Louise, the most recent and apparently
most passionately adored of a series of lovers, both men and
women. Details of these earlier affairs are interspersed
throughout the novel as points of comparison to the all-
consuming passion expressed for Louise. Alternately anguished
and exhilarated, cynical and romantic, the monologue
immediately establishes the circumstances of lost love, although
why and how this loss came about is not revealed until later. The
narrator addresses his/her thoughts and ruminations at times to
the absent Louise, at others to the reader.
Witty and cynical accounts of former loves punctuate this
mournful, elegiac remembrance. Readers are told about Inge, the
“anarcha-feminist” who is also a committed romantic and a
lover of beauty. She suffers at the thought of the damage that
she may do to beautiful objects or innocent lovers when, as part
of her crusade against patriarchal, phallocentric monuments, she
blows up buildings. Because of her qualms, she eventually limits
her terrorist activities to men’s toilets, abetted by the narrator.
There is Bathsheba, the married dentist who insists on keeping
the affair clandestine and finally ends it in favor of her husband,
causing her lover some temporary pangs of deprivation and
longing. Other briefly mentioned lovers include Bruno, a mover
who finds Jesus while trapped for hours under a fallen wardrobe,
and Crazy Frank, the six-foot, “bull-like” son of midget parents.
These are caricatures, described in broad, often humorous
strokes, which provide contrast to the tragic and implicitly more
real and enduring passion for Louise, who is described in minute
detail.
The narrator is living with Jacqueline when he/she meets Louise.
Jacqueline is described as comfortable but ordinary. The
narrator draws an analogy between him/herself and the
traumatized animals Jacqueline works with at the zoo.
Jacqueline was chosen primarily as a calm harbor in which the
narrator comes to rest after a series of emotionally and
physically draining affairs. When confronted with the affair with
Louise, Jacqueline is devastated. In her rage at being betrayed,
she destroys the shared apartment before she leaves, an action
which runs contrary to her earlier characterization. Louise
meanwhile has left her husband, Elgin, and moved in with the
narrator.
Shortly after this, about halfway through the novel, the narrator
recalls the day that Elgin came to the house and revealed that
Louise is dying of lymphocytic leukemia. In anguish, the
narrator decides to leave London for Yorkshire without telling
Louise in order to force her to return to Elgin, who can provide
the best treatment for her illness. Reluctantly, Louise does return
to Elgin, and they travel to Switzerland for her treatment.
The narrative format shifts at this point to a series of short
analyses, clinical descriptions of various parts of the body and
the diseases that can afflict them, which reads almost like an
anatomy textbook. Within each section, the general becomes
specific in references to Louise’s body and the cancer that is
destroying it. This section acts as a break in the time sequence of
the novel. The first half is a reminiscence, a recollection of the
past. The narrative following the anatomical section has more
immediacy and tension, and it brings events up to the present
with hints of a future that the earlier part lacked. Miserable
without Louise, and prompted by the lecherous but
compassionate Gail, who manages the Yorkshire wine bar in
which the narrator has a temporary job, the narrator returns to
London to find Louise. Elgin is contacted, and it is revealed that
Louise has left her treatment, and him, and disappeared. In
despair, the narrator returns to Yorkshire, only to find Louise—
thin and pale, but alive—waiting. The novel ends here, in the
present tense, in the form of a beginning: “This is where the
story starts.”

Context
(Masterpieces of Women's Literature)
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Winterson published her first novel to immediate acclaim in the
mid-1980’s. Although she is both a lesbian and a feminist, the
themes that Winterson explores are not limited to specifically
lesbian or feminist issues, nor do they display any overt political
posturing. It is through form rather than content that Winterson
might arguably be seen to contribute a new voice and
perspective to literature by women. The richness and value of
her work comes through her freely employing and mingling
many different styles and literary forms in her exploration of a
variety of large themes—notably sexuality, gender, time, and
freedom. All of her novels experiment with narrative form,
creating disorienting shifts in time and character, the latter often
presented as sexually ambiguous.
Her fourth novel, Written on the Body is considered by some
critics to be a sequel to her first novel, Oranges Are Not the
Only Fruit (1985), whose central character, Jeanette, bears a
strong resemblance to Winterson herself and her own early life
and experience as a lesbian. Winterson denies that either novel
is autobiographical, although both, particularly the earlier novel,
contain many possible correlations to her own experience. As if
in direct response to this speculation, however, Written on the
Body seems to both set up and then undermine it in the use of a
possibly similar, but clearly fickle and unreliable, first-person
narrator. Winterson seems to be teasing those who presume to
associate the fictional character with the author.
Winterson’s work defies any pigeonholing of genre or theme. It
is her diversity that is viewed by many critics as her most
important contribution to literature by women. In Into the
Mainstream: How Feminism Has Changed Women’s Writing
(1989), Nicci Gerrard sees Winterson as walking in the footsteps
of Angela Carter, sharing with her a boldness and breadth of
imagination which allows them to leave the “woman’s world”
and “treat the whole world as their own.” Context
(Masterpieces of Women's Literature)
print Print document PDF list Cite link Link
Winterson published her first novel to immediate acclaim in the
mid-1980’s. Although she is both a lesbian and a feminist, the
themes that Winterson explores are not limited to specifically
lesbian or feminist issues, nor do they display any overt political
posturing. It is through form rather than content that Winterson
might arguably be seen to contribute a new voice and
perspective to literature by women. The richness and value of
her work comes through her freely employing and mingling
many different styles and literary forms in her exploration of a
variety of large themes—notably sexuality, gender, time, and
freedom. All of her novels experiment with narrative form,
creating disorienting shifts in time and character, the latter often
presented as sexually ambiguous.
Her fourth novel, Written on the Body is considered by some
critics to be a sequel to her first novel, Oranges Are Not the
Only Fruit (1985), whose central character, Jeanette, bears a
strong resemblance to Winterson herself and her own early life
and experience as a lesbian. Winterson denies that either novel
is autobiographical, although both, particularly the earlier novel,
contain many possible correlations to her own experience. As if
in direct response to this speculation, however, Written on the
Body seems to both set up and then undermine it in the use of a
possibly similar, but clearly fickle and unreliable, first-person
narrator. Winterson seems to be teasing those who presume to
associate the fictional character with the author.
Winterson’s work defies any pigeonholing of genre or theme. It
is her diversity that is viewed by many critics as her most
important contribution to literature by women. In Into the
Mainstream: How Feminism Has Changed Women’s Writing
(1989), Nicci Gerrard sees Winterson as walking in the footsteps
of Angela Carter, sharing with her a boldness and breadth of
imagination which allows them to leave the “woman’s world”
and “treat the whole world as their own.”

his essay will concentrate, then, on ways in which Winterson confronts

the linguistic problems of narrating a romance, starting with her
admission that the entire subject of love has been verbalized so
extensively and repeatedly that it is almost impossible to write anything
new about the experience. Her subject is less love than the problems
associated with describing it in narrative or textual form. I will show
how Winterson, facing the unavoidable necessity of falling back on the
clichéd language of love, uses such language against itself. Her narrator
alternates between moments of utter verbal banality and moments of
critical detachment from and examination of such language. Just as the
narrator defines love by its loss, so does the language of love derive
much of its power from the breakdown of its expressive function. I will
show how Winterson pursues this parallel between sexuality and
textuality to imbue language with its own life, a life that can revivify the
love the loss of which it is brooding on. Winterson will also be seen to
employ a variety of specialist languages drawn from such discourses as
those of the Bible, travelogues and anatomy, as well as employing such
divergent narrative modes as dramatic dialogue and epistolary fiction, to
overcome the over-worn status of romance fiction. This novel is less
about desire than it is about the language of desire, and less about the
phenomenon of love than about the problem of its fictional
representation.

To get at Jeanette Winterson's writing it is necessary to clear away more

than the usual amount of critical debris and readers' misprisions. The
first task is to dispose of the mountains of biographical criticism that
have accumulated especially in the British press and that serve as
substitutes for serious evaluation of her work. The British literary
establishment never got over her choosing one of her own novels when
asked in 1993 to pick her Book of the Year for The Daily Telegraph. She
also had the effrontery to make public her affair with her literary agent,
Pat Kavannah, who happens to be Julian Barnes's wife. There were other
provocations, including her claim to be the direct literary heir to Virginia
Woolf.

Still only in her early 40s, Winterson invited some of this vituperation
by her naiveté and inexperience with the media. But reviewers and
critics have allowed this extraneous and sometimes misreported material
to affect their assessment of her innovatory and distinctive work.
Representative is James Wood, the Guardian's principal book reviewer,
who attributed to her sixth novel, Art and Lies (1994), the failings that
he found in Winterson's public personality: the book is "a walking self-
advertisement" which "preache[s] the importance of itself" (T 11). In
other words, Wood claims, the novel suffers from the egotism of it's
author. Reviewing her next novel, Gut Symmetries (1997) for the Daily
Telegraph, Anthony Quinn is even more blatant in his obfuscation of the
difference between writer and writing: "Great writers understand that
profound rumination is the more powerful for being handled with a little
humility. Winterson is more interested in advancing the idea of herself
as a stylist" (4).

Again and again critics and reviewers have asserted that since the
publication of her fifth novel, Written on the Body, if not before,
Winterson's work has shown a catastrophic decline from its earlier
promise (note 2). This escalating chorus of criticism may reflect the fact
that each of her books has become more meditative and less narrative, a
trend of which she is fully conscious. In her only collection of essays to
date, Art Objects (1995), she asserts, "I realised that [. . .] plot was
meaningless to me. [. . .] I had to accept that my love-affair was with
language, and only incidentally with narrative" (155).

Winterson's repeated portrayal of love between women is a major cause

of distortion and prejudice among the reviewers of her books. On the
one hand the British critics have tended to accuse her of male-bashing,
and once again the source for the accusation proves to be pseudo-
biographical rather than based on her fiction. Tellingly, it is mainly the
male critics who focus on Winterson's supposed anti-male stance and
read it back into her fiction. Peter Kemp, chief book reviewer for the
Sunday Times, is representative. Reviewing Art and Lies he deplored
Winterson's "propensity for scrawling the graffiti of gender-spite across
her pages," her "sexist goings-on," and her "high-pitched rhapsodies [. .
.] given voice in the novel's extensive interludes of lesbian lyricism" (2).
Kemp and others seem to have forgotten Winterson's creation of such
sympathetic male characters as Henri in The Passion and Jordan in
Sexing the Cherry, Jordan who (like Winterson herself) records the
journeys he "might have made, or perhaps did make in some other place
or time" (2). Such critics equally forget Winterson's hilarious caricature
of the successful female writer of romances, Bunny Mix, in Boating for
Beginners, or of the preposterous, fundamentalist Mother in Oranges
Are Not The Only Fruit. Responding to a question concerning gender in
The Paris Review, Winterson replied: "I see it as less important as I get
older. I no longer care whether somebody's male or female. I just don't
care" (Bilger 102).

It is ironic that Winterson's writing has also been badly misrepresented

by some of her fellow lesbians, mainly female academics. In their case
the origin of their misrepresentation is not founded on a judgment of her
character, but is based on the success or failure of her work to conform
to what they consider to be a correct representation of contemporary
lesbian-feminist politics (note 3). They pursue this line despite
Winterson's public insistence that she doesn't "want to be a political
writer, or a writer whose concern is sexual politics" (Bilger 105). Even
Winterson's first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, which has been
proclaimed one of "the few canonical texts which are central to the
fledgling lesbian literary tradition" (Munt xx), is nevertheless criticized
by another critic of lesbian literature for failing to live up to "the
political agenda" of the lesbian writer (Doan 147). But it is Written on
the Body with its narrator whose gender is withheld that seems to have
aroused the most criticism from lesbian critics. Patricia Duncker is most
explicit in giving her reasons for finding this novel a failure: "Written on
the Body is a text full of lost opportunities. Winterson refuses to write an
'out' lesbian novel." In doing so, "she is losing more than she gains" (85).
In the same collection of essays in which Duncker writes, Cath Stowers
defends Winterson from this charge on the grounds that she conforms to
Monique Wittig's definition of lesbianism as not just "a refusal of the
role 'woman'," but "the refusal of the economic, ideological, and
political power of a man" (13). Thus the lesbian school of criticism can
only salvage Winterson's work by demonstrating how, despite
appearances to the contrary, she actually conforms to lesbian politics and
aesthetics. Ultimately, as Louise Horskjaer Humphries has suggested, in
the case of most lesbian critics "the work is being judged by the writer
(in particular her sexuality) [. . .] rather than the writer being judged by
the work" (15). By a twist of irony British male reviewers and lesbian
academic critics coming from opposite directions end up alike reading
into the work what they think they discern in the author.

Winterson herself is very clear about where she stands on this issue.
"When I read Adrienne Rich or Oscar Wilde [. . .] I am not reading their
work to get at their private lives, I am reading their work because I need
the depth-charge it carries" (Art Objects 109). As for herself, "I am a
writer who happens to love women," she insists. "I am not a lesbian who
happens to write" (104). What appears to be autobiographical in a good
writer's work, she argues, is actually a rhetorical strategy: "It presents
itself as a kind of diary when really it is an oration" (105). This is just as
true of Written on the Body as it is of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.
Even if one disregards the critics' tendency to read Written on the Body
as a roman à clef in which her past affair with Pat Kavannah and her
concurrent one with Peggy Reynolds are waiting to be revealed by the
critic skilled in literary gossip, this novel is still largely discussed in
terms of Winterson's known sexual orientation. Katie Owen is
representative of such a response when she asserts in her review of the
novel for the Sunday Telegraph that "this is clearly a gay novel, with
little sympathy for heterosexual relationships or men in general" (111).
Joan Smith reviewing the novel for The Independent, Daniel Johnson
reviewing it for The Times, and Anthony Curtis reviewing it for The
Financial Times all make the same assumption. Winterson is in effect
being charged with writing a gay novel that is being coy about its
gayness. Yet, as Judith Butler observes, "being 'out' always depends to
some extent on being 'in'" ("Imitation . . ." 16). Besides, do all gay
novels have to offer an affirmation of gay love? Winterson herself insists
that her use of an ungendered narrator is intended to burrow beneath the
divisions of gender in order to excavate the essence of love:
I mean, for me a love story is a love story. I don't care what the genders
are if it's powerful enough. And I don't think that love should be a
gender-bound operation. It's probably one of the few things in life that
rises above all those kinds of oppositions-black and white, male and
female, homosexual and heterosexual. When people fall in love they
experience the same kind of tremors, fears, a rush of blood to the head. [.
. .] And fiction recognizes this. (Marvel 165)

Since Written on the Body is commonly held to mark the point in

Winterson's writing when she supposedly lost her bearings, I want to
focus on this novel which I believe is an exceptional achievement,
arguably her best work to date. Considerable critical attention has been
paid to this novel due to its use of an ungendered narrator. Clearly this
highly original device allows Winterson to escape from the binary
determinations of a heterosexual representation of human behavior, to
examine sexuality in an ungendered fictional universe. Most critics (as
opposed to reviewers) of the book cite Monique Wittig's The Lesbian
Body (1973) and Judith Butler's Bodies That Matter (1993) in order to
explore the ways in which the narrator evades what Butler has termed
"the globalizing heterosexist episteme" (Gender Trouble 120) (note 4).
Yet many critics, like the reviewers, choose to assume that the narrator
is a thinly disguised lesbian lover. They promptly foreclose a text that
Winterson has deliberately left open. What is undeniable is that her
narrator is bisexual (not androgynous), having conducted affairs with
both men and women. Winterson has said that she does not "think
people's sexuality is really that fixed" (Bilger 107). Some critics have
gone to enormous lengths to cite textual evidence for their assumption
about the gender of the narrator. But their ingenious detective work is
rendered pointless by Winterson's observation that it doesn't matter
which sex the narrator is, because "the gender of the character is both,
throughout the book, and changes; sometimes it's female, sometimes it's
male" (Stewart 74). All such critics have done is to select those passages
in the book where the narrator is (temporarily) female.

Although the use of an ungendered narrator is an innovative move that

has significant implications for one's reading of the novel in its entirety,
I want to turn to the wider concerns that Winterson uses this device to
explore. The ungendered narrator is only one strategy she employs
among many to see whether she cannot revivify the jaded language of
love. First occurring on the second page of the novel, the phrase "It's the
clichés that cause the trouble" is reiterated like a refrain five more times
in the course of the book (10, 21, 26, 71, 155, 180). What the narrator is
forced to face is that the clichés employed in the discourse of love,
sexual desire and romance are unavoidable. Early in the book the
narrator repeatedly ridicules the clichés attached to married love: "Settle
down, feet under the table. She's a nice girl, he's a nice boy. It's the
clichés that cause the trouble" (71). The narrator contemptuously
dismisses the safe confines of marriage: "Marriage is the flimsiest
weapon against desire. You may as well take a pop-gun to a python"
(78). Yet this Lothario or Don Juan type of libertine simultaneously
catches him/herself falling victim to the clichés associated with the
sexually promiscuous lifestyle:

I suppose I couldn't admit that I was trapped in a cliché every bit as

redundant as my parents' roses round the door. I was looking for the
perfect coupling; the never-sleep non-stop mighty orgasm. Ecstasy
without end. I was deep in the slop-bucket of romance. (21)

Winterson, then, embeds the inevitability of ending up in cliché in the

fabric of the narrative even
before confronting this problematic inevitability in recounting the
central love story.

The story of the narrator's and Louise's love for one another opens on the
first page of the novel, although the reader is unaware that the unnamed
"you" is Louise at this point. No sooner has the narrator recalled Louise
saying "I love you," than s/he is forced to confront its lack of originality
- "'I love you' is always a quotation" (9). We can hear the phrase used
every day of the year on television. Hardly a single romantic novel
published by Harlequin is without it. The focus on "quotation" alerts the
reader to the fact that the problem for the narrator of this love story is
how to narrate such a powerful emotion without falling back on
language already made over-familiar by past use. And what the narrator
has to learn over the course of the book is that it is impossible to avoid
the use of clichéd quotation altogether. To describe the experience of
love necessarily plunges any narrator into a world of intertextuality, of
language already long inhabited and become automatized. Winterson's
answer to this quandary is to embrace the use of intertextuality and
exploit it for all it is worth. In employing those three unavoidable words
the narrator compares him/herself to some savage worshipping them
only to later curse his/her acquisition of the language of love. There
follows a famous quotation from The Tempest where Caliban curses
Prospero for teaching him to speak. So even on the first page the
narrator is citing another celebrated romance to foreground the Janus-
faced nature of language in general and the language of love in
particular. This book abounds in references to other books, especially
ones concerned with love - Madame Bovary, Jane Eyre, House of Fame,
Anna Karenina, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Midsummer Night's Dream,
Song of Solomon, not to mention writers like D. H. Lawrence and Mark
Twain, paintings such as Burne-Jones' "Love and the Pilgrim," songs
such as "Lady Sings the Blues," and movies such as Jules et Jim and
King Kong. Even Louise's ploy for forcing herself on the narrator's
attention is borrowed from the narrative of history: she turns up at the
narrator's door soaking wet, just as Lady Hamilton had done so
successfully at Nelson's door. Neither words nor actions can avoid being
derivative in the field of love.

Many reviewers criticized the novel for its clichéd use of the traditional
romance plot - boy(?) meets girl; boy(?) loses girl; boy(?) reunites with
girl. On the one hand Winterson deliberately appropriates this time worn
plot for her own purposes, another instance of her flaunting the
intertextual nature of her text. On the other hand the uncertain gender of
the lover and the uncertain nature of the reunion breathes new life into
this much repeated plot sequence. Carolyn Allen has pointed out a
further break with tradition in that the "heroine" (Louise) is the initiator
of the love affair (74). Winterson's strategy, then, is to deliberately
evoke textual precedents only to establish a distance from them. Critics
of lesbian literature (such as Allen) have remarked on how closely the
plot and situation of this book resembles Wittig's The Lesbian Body and
Djuna Barnes' Nightwood (1936), but also note significant differences in
tone (less cruel than Wittig) and outcome (in Nightwood Nora drives
Robin from her). That seems to be the effect Winterson is seeking - the
charge of the old, combined with the shock of various departures from it.

Clichés abound at every level in this novel, and almost without

exception Winterson seizes on the cliché and turns it to her own
purpose. Instance the adultery involved in the affair with Louise.
Previously the narrator had made use of the conventional excuses of
adulterers - "You had no choice, you were swept away" (39). But this
new love for Louise is differentiated from the others by an honesty that
forces the narrator to face up to the pain that his/her actions are bound to
cause to the third party (Jacqueline): "I know exactly what's happening
and I know too that I am jumping out of this plane of my own free will.
No, I don't have a parachute, but worse, neither does Jacqueline" (39).
Winterson makes particularly heavy use of clichéd situation when
describing the narrator's illicit sexual liaisons, such as that with an
anonymous married woman:

These are the confines of our life together, this room, this bed. This is
the voluptuous exile freely chosen. We daren't eat out, who knows
whom we may meet? We must buy food in advance with the canniness
of a Russian peasant. We must store it unto the day, chilled in the fridge,
baked in the oven. Temperatures of hot and cold, fire and ice, the
extremes under which we live. (72)

Yet the language and images she employs serve to undercut the clichéd
situation, to place it within a wider moral frame that depends
intertextually on references to, for instance, the extremities of ice and
fire that afflict the damned in Dante's Inferno, and to Christ's sermon on
the mount in which he counseled, "Sufficient unto the day is the evil
thereof" (Matt. 6.34). In this way the banality and sordidness of the
typical adulterous tryst is reunited with spiritual profundities.

Winterson also evokes the different languages of a wide range of

discourses - meteorology, biology, anatomy, chronobiology, physics,
astrophysics, zoology, not to mention the Bible - and employs them to
rejuvenate the jaded language of love. Here is just one example among
many from marine biology: "She opens and shuts like a sea anemone.
She's refilled each day with fresh tides of longing" (73). The sheer
functionality of the female lover's sexual opening and closing here
acquires the beauty of a delicate marine flower responding to
overwhelming tidal flows of desire. She also reaches out to a number of
literary genres to add to her armory. In a two-page scene from an
imaginary melodramatic playscript, the married woman attempts to
reconcile her divided loyalties with a series of clichéd excuses which are
neatly undercut by the silence of the lover who ends up in the bathroom
silently crying (14-15). In this case a Beckettian silence is employed to
expose the emptiness of the married woman's language and emotional
life. Later in the novel Winterson turns to the epistolary mode when the
narrator writes Louise a letter explaining that s/he feels compelled to
leave her to help save her life. The letter starts with an unacknowledged
quotation from Twelfth Night (5. 1. 132-3): "I love you more than life
itself," continues with even more commonplace expressions such as "I
did not know this much happiness was possible," and draws to an end
with a tautology: "The message is a simple one; my love for you" (105-
6). In between come some highly original expressions of love. Is this
mixture of the genuine and the secondhand meant to reflect the fact that
the narrator genuinely believes that s/he is acting in Louise's best
interests, but later discovers his/her action and sentiment to be derivative
and presumptuous? Winterson's self-conscious use of different
discourses throughout this book encourages the reader to expect such
sophisticated, complex effects.

Winterson's negotiation between the unavoidable use of cliché and the

breakthrough into a new language of love reflects an ambiguity lying at
the center of the phenomenon of love itself. Michel Foucault has
diagnosed a similar duality underlying the discourse of love in his three
volumes of The History of Sexuality. For Foucault sexuality itself is a
function of ideology:

It is the name that can be given to a historical construct: not a furtive

reality that is difficult to grasp, but a great surface network in which the
stimulation of bodies, the intensification of pleasures, the incitement to
discourse, the formation of special knowledges, the strengthening of
controls and resistances, are linked to one another, in accordance with a
few major strategies of knowledge and power. (105-6)
It is interesting that Foucault throws together "stimulation of bodies" and
"the incitement to discourse," that is, sexuality and textuality (about
sexuality). Whichever of the two is invoked, there appears to be an
internal contradiction that resists any attempt to achieve stability of
meaning or effect. Addressing what she terms "postmodern love,"
Catherine Belsey defines it from a poststructuralist perspective as
similarly conflicted: "Love is [. . .] at once endlessly pursued and
ceaselessly suspected. [. . .] It cannot speak, and yet it seems that it never
ceases to speak in late twentieth-century Western culture" (685).
According to Belsey, desire's citationality roots it not in nature but in
fiction and the entertainment industry. The language of love
consequently "is at the same time dispersed among banalities, poetry, the
sacred, tragedy" (693).

Turning her attention to Written on the Body for half a page, Belsey
claims without further elaboration that "[l]ove is very explicitly shown
to be subject to the dialectic of Law and desire" (693). How? Where?
The opening sentence of the novel (reiterated later) offers the key: "Why
is the measure of love loss" (9)? Winterson's unusual word order ensures
that love and loss are directly juxtaposed. Love, the novel implies,
necessitates and is constituted by loss, just as desire, viewed from the
poststructuralist psychoanalytic perspective of Jacques Lacan, is defined
paradigmatically by a sense of lack. Talking of the subject, Lacan claims
that "it is in so far as his desire is unknown, it is in this point of lack, that
the desire of the subject is constituted" (218-9). Lacan proceeds to point
out that the lack is located in both the subject and the object of the
subject's desire. That dual lack is what produces desire. Similarly in
Winterson's novel desire is consistently associated with a dual sense of
lack, absence or unobtainability. No sooner does the narrator succeed in
luring Louise away from her husband than s/he chooses to absent
him/herself from the relationship. This has the immediate effect of
raising the register of desire in both the narrator and Louise and
sustaining it at a high level for the rest of the book. Winterson is careful
to build this interdependency of love and lack into the texture of her
narrative. For instance at one point the narrator is describing a moment
of tenderness between Louise and him/herself:

I put my arms around her, not sure whether I was a lover or a child. I
wanted her to hide me beneath her skirts against all menace. Sharp
points of desire were still there but there was too a sleepy safe rest like
being in a boat I had as a child. She rocked me against her, sea-calm, sea
under a clear sky, a glass-bottomed boat and nothing to fear.
"The wind's getting up," she said. (80)

The paragraph associates "child" with "safety" with "boat" with

"Louise." No sooner has s/he achieved this childish sense of safety, of
being protected from the storms of nature rocked in Louise's maritime
arms, than Louise warns him/her of impending danger. No sooner has it
manifested itself than love paradoxically generates the condition for its
survival - the immediate threat of loss.

Winterson continuously exploits the parallels between sexuality and

textuality. She acknowledges the fact that the language of love is as
beyond the writer's control as is love beyond the lover's control. Talking
about language in general, she has said, "to release the power of words is
to release a power which is sometimes in your gift but never in your
control" (Barr 32). In Art Objects Winterson parallels art (literature) to
love. Each "challenges the reality to which we lay claim." Part of the
pleasure and terror of each is "the world turned upside down" (15).
Sappho gives poetic expression to the same belief in Art and Lies: "Is
language sex? Say my name and you say sex" (66). If "[a]rt is excess"
(Art Objects 94), so is love: beneath Louise's control is "a crackling
power of the kind that makes me nervous when I pass pylons" (49).

Language pursues a life of its own. Winterson not only describes

humans as textual artifacts but also thinks of works of literature as if
they were living beings: "A work of art is abundant, spills out, gets
drunk, sits up with you all night and forgets to close the curtains, dries
your eyes, is your friend, offers you a disguise, a difference, a pose" (Art
Objects 65). Similarly Louise's declaration that she was leaving Elgin
because her love for the narrator makes her married life seem like a
sham is transformed by the narrator from a verbal offering into a
precious object: "I've hidden those words in the lining of my coat. I take
them out like a jewel thief when no-one's watching" (99). Obversely the
first-person narrator/lover is constituted by language, the language of
others. As Lucy Hallet pointed out in reviewing this novel, "The
speaking subject is always grammatically androgynous: 'I' is an
ungendered pronoun" (116). Gail Right reinforces this impression that
character is a construction of language when she tells the narrator: "The
trouble with you [. . .] is that you want to live in a novel" (160). Seen
from the reader's vantage point, s/he does live in a novel which s/he also
narrates. Both love and art offer us "freedom, outside of the tyranny of
matter" (Art Objects 59). Like love, language, according to Winterson,
offers us a form of religious experience. She thinks of language as
"something sacred," (Art Objects 153), books as "talismans" or "sacred
objects" (Bilger 76), and the writer's pursuit of perfection as a search for
"a Holy Grail" which she knows she will never find (Art Objects 168-9).
Still, language is necessarily a substitution for a deeper need or desire
that inevitably eludes us in the attempt to give it linguistic life.

At her most intense Winterson will resort to the language of the Bible to
express the inexpressible experience of love. Her use of the Song of
Solomon in this novel (e. g. Written on the Body 20) has been much
commented on. At the same time Winterson recognizes the tendency of
lovers' language to topple unexpectedly into absurdity or self-deceit. She
rarely loses her critical faculty and will subject her narrator's use of
language even in his/her interchanges with Louise to scathing
examination:

"Hello Louise. I was passing so I thought I might pop in."

Pop in. What a ridiculous phrase. What am I, a cuckoo clock?
We went down the hall together. Elgin shot his head out of the study
door. "Hello there. Hello, hello, very nice." (30)
Not content with mocking the narrator's temporary aberration,
Winterson extends her comic image to ridicule Elgin who pops out
(rather than in) and sounds like the cuckoo in a cuckoo clock. Similarly
the narrator is quick to catch him/herself excusing his/her new-found
love for Louise to Jacqueline with the expression "things had changed,"
when it is s/he who had changed, asking, "Why do I collude in this mis-
use of language" (56-7)? One has to be very alert to Winterson's use of
language, because she makes it work for herself in complex ways.
Describing the narrator's decision to settle for a safe, comfortable,
loveless life with Jacqueline, she writes: "I became an apostle of
ordinariness. I lectured my friends on the virtues of the humdrum,
praised the gentle bands of my existence [. . .]" (27). The repeated use of
oxymoron here betrays to the reader the contradictory, pointedly foolish
(the Greek meaning of oxymoron) behavior of the narrator in trying to
settle for second best where love is involved.

Winterson also uses tropes of travel and anatomy to pursue her textual
exploration of the corporeality of love. She has said that she wrote The
Passion with its Venetian locale before she ever visited Venice. "I do
travel in my head" (Bilger 100). She goes on to point out that travel is a
simple trope for conveying "an inner journey and an outer journey at the
same time" (101). The lover's exploration of the total person constituting
the loved one (not just her body) is given substance by analogy to earlier
explorers of new-found lands:

Louise, in this single bed, between these garish 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 another's
boundaries and make ourselves one nation. (20)

Where the trope differs from the explorations of early travelers is in the
lack of exploitation. This form of love is not conquest but mutual
discovery. "I was lost in my own navigation," says the narrator (17).
Winterson seems to want to differentiate this love from the stereotypical
heterosexual version where penetration of the interior and possession of
the gold mined there is the norm. The indirectness of these allusions to
the lovers' bodies only adds to the erotic charge and demand on the
reader's imagination: "Eyes closed I began a voyage down her spine, the
cobbled road of hers that brought me to a cleft and a damp valley then a
deep pit to drown in." The next sentence makes us realize that Winterson
has used this trope to turn the little world of the lovers into an
everywhere: "What other places are there in the world than those
discovered on a lover's body" (82)? This is not the only occasion in the
book when Winterson draws on Donne's comparison of love to territorial
exploration, but with a difference. Where Donne turns the loved one into
a conquest ("O my America, my new found land, / My kingdom,
safeliest when with one man manned" "Elegy 19"), Winterson celebrates
reciprocity: "I had no dreams to possess you [. . .]" (52).

In the second section of the novel the narrator, nursing his/her pain,
enters into an extended series of prose poems meditating on various
parts of Louise's cancer-ridden body. Each section opens with a
quotation from an anatomical textbook. The narrator's explorations of
Louise's body at times combine anatomical definitions with tropes of
travel: "I dropped into the mass of you and I cannot find the way out"
(120). This entire section constitutes an extended conceit centering on
the paradox that love is so frequently thought of as a disease -
lovesickness. The narrator, for whom love previously has usually lasted
six months, cannot help seeing analogies between a vision of love by
definition dependent for its power on its potential undoing and a
terminal disease like cancer. Both love and cancer end in death (yes,
death too in the sense that the Elizabethans loved to play on so
exhaustively). Marianne Børch has succinctly summarized the extent of
the parallels between love and cancer established in the text:

no one knows why love or cancer strikes or how to cure it (pp. 67/96);
neither can be controlled, but only known from its effect (pp. 53/105);
normal rules of existence are suspended (pp. 115/10); the sick body
hurts easily, even as intense love-making leaves the heedlessly
passionate lover bruised (pp. 39/124); even as the sick body enters a
recession of deceptive health (p. 175), so seemingly healthy love may
mark a withdrawal into narcissism; cancer invades the body, an intrusion
similar to the lover's exploration (pp. 115/123); the cancerous body
dances with itself, self intimate with self in the way of dancing lovers
(pp. 175/73). (47)

Winterson uses these variations on an anatomical theme to give poetic

expression to the underlying duality of love and of the language of love
that is the obsessive theme of this narration. As the narrator
acknowledges, Louise "opened up the dark places as well as the light"
(174). Not just love but language, words, can "poison you" (Gut
Symmetries 119). In one interview Winterson agreed that disease is "one
of those useful metaphors that everyone understands." She continues:
"Even the dimmest people can see that this is not only to do with their
own bodies but a kind of metaphor for the state crumbling away" (Bilger
108). The narrator's failures in love can be seen as part of a wider failure
in the narrator's society as a whole. Elgin, Gail Right and her pretentious
wine bar, Louise's mother and her fear of what the neighbors think, even
the degeneration of the local railway station--all indicate a criticism of
contemporary Britain.

But if love has its death written into its genetic code, the process can be
reversed, at least in the language of love. When the narrator returns
home from the library with an anatomy book, s/he sets out to defy the
quotidian world of decay and disease: "Within the clinical language,
through the dispassionate view of the sucking, sweating, greedy,
defecating self, I found a love-poem to Louise. I would go on knowing
her, more intimately than the skin, hair and voice that I craved" (111). In
writing a love poem about Louise, the narrator is substituting a textual
for a sexual and physical evocation of her. So in the section dealing with
the clavicle or collar bone, the narrator opens his/her meditation with: "I
cannot think of the double curve lithe and flowing with movement as a
bony ridge, I think of it as the musical instrument that bears the same
root. Clavis. Key. Clavichord" (129). This inventive use of language
converts the negative clinical view of Louise into the musical and poetic
evocation of the lover the narrator remembers. These prose poems
resuscitate the dying Louise with the magic of language, the signifiers of
which indefinitely defer desire. Love is and has its own language. This
love story is one written on the body, not of the body. "Written on the
body is a secret code only visible in certain lights; the accumulations of
a lifetime gather there" (89). Only the lover and the artist can decipher
this linguistic karma. With her reading hands Louise has "translated me
[the narrator] into her own book" (89). Where once the Word was made
flesh (John 1. 14), Winterson in godlike fashion seeks to turn flesh back
into the word. "Let me leaf through you," Sappho says in "The Poetics of
Sex," "before I read you out loud" (The World 46).

The clichéd plot of romance is subsumed within a prolonged meditation

on the interdependence of love and language and on the essentially
conflicted nature of both language and love. What controls this narrative
is not plot but shape. Winterson says she is "a writer who does not use
plot as an engine or foundation" (Art Objects 189). Shape is important to
her as much as plot is irrelevant. What shape does this book take? There
appears to be a movement from the predominantly flippant tone used
early on in the narrative to a more impassioned and serious tone once the
narrator learns of Louise's cancer. Winterson employs humor
throughout. But the overall mood changes from near farce, when
describing the narrator's earlier love life, to the lyric tone used for the
central love affair, to a near tragic mode that takes over once the narrator
has renounced Louise. (Winterson has learnt from Shakespeare, who
"never bothered to think of a plot" [Art Objects 149], that tragedy is
more effective if interlaced with moments of comedy- hence the
episodes with Gail Right and Louise's mother.)

Then there is a shape to the narrator's experience of love. What passed

for love during the narrator's earlier six-month stands gives way to
numbness with Jacqueline: "With her I forgot about feeling and
wallowed in contentment" (76). Once the narrator discovers true love,
s/he is quickly embroiled in its creative and then its destructive forces.
These unavoidable destructive forces are what give love its special
charge. "Why is the measure of love loss?" the narrator keeps asking (9,
39). The narrative offers a textual solution. Just as love destroys the
libertine in the narrator, so the narration aims at destroying the clichés in
the language of love. That process occurs most intensely during the long
period in which the narrator mourns the loss of love.

There is also the suggestion of a mythic shape to this book. It opens at a

time of drought. "It hasn't rained for three months. The trees are
prospecting underground, sending reserves of roots into the dry ground"
(9). How can one avoid recalling the opening lines of T. S. Eliot's The
Waste Land with its "dead land" and "dull roots"? In Art Objects
Winterson has not only defended Eliot and his theory of the
impersonality of the artist, but has also declared her indebtedness to
modernists like Eliot and Virginia Woolf in general, calling them "the
mainstream" (177). One might call Winterson a neomodernist rather
than a postmodernist. The chronology of this novel seems to have been
disrupted in order to suggest a mythic movement from aridity to fertility
that parallels that of The Waste Land. The opening in fact anticipates the
summer six months after the narrator has left Louise for Yorkshire. Late
on in the book we return to this period of drought: "June. The driest June
on record. [. . .] The sun that should have brought life was carrying death
in every relentless morning" (150). The narrator is left with her own
"broken images, where the sun beats" found in The Waste Land (l. 22).
And like The Waste Land, the final section of the book offers "a damp
gust / Bringing rain" (ll. 393-4). Trudging back to the cottage in the
Yorkshire countryside, the narrator finds that the "rain on the dry land
from a dry summer hadn't penetrated through the soil to the aquifers,
only as far as the springs that fed them" (185). As in the poem, the end
of the book appears to promise the possibility of renewal after dearth /
loss.

Yet the ending resists any such redemptive interpretation. Just how are
we to take the finale in which Louise reappears, whether in person or in
the narrator's fantasy the critics cannot decide? There is another way of
understanding it. The entire narrative is a confessional told in retrospect
until we catch up with the dry September described on the opening page,
which occurs approximately on page 161 out of 190 pages. Further the
narrative is put in the hands of a narrator who is seen to be factually
unreliable. "Have I got it wrong, this hesitant chronology?" asks the
narrator early on (17). Twice someone alleges, "'You're making it up.'"
"Am I?" the narrator asks the reader as much as the character (22, 60).
On another occasion the narrator addresses the reader directly: "I can tell
by now you are wondering whether I can be trusted as a narrator" (24).
For Winterson art is in the business of "persuading us of the
doubtfulness of the seeming-solid world" (Art Objects 135). She resists
realist art, and considers that film and television are now satisfying
people's need for "the narrative of fact." That "should free up words into
something far more poetic, something about the inner life, the
imaginative life" (Bilger 91).

Discernible in the ending is a structure that defies such progressive

patterning as I have traced in Winterson's use of narrative shaping. The
end is reminiscent of the Piranesi nightmare that the narrator is caught
up in: "The logical paths the proper steps led nowhere" (92). In narrative
terms this romance likewise leads nowhere. Consoled by a friend who
says, "'At least your relationship with Louise didn't fail. It was the
perfect romance,'" the narrator comments, "Was it? [. . .] The happy
endings are compromises" (187). Next the narrator wonders, "Did I
invent her?" (189). Finally in the penultimate paragraph Louise appears
at the kitchen door, paler, thinner but warm. The effect on the narrator of
this appearance is to turn her little room into an everywhere (pace
Donne): "The world is bundled up in this room" (190). In the final
sentence the narrator admits, "I don't know if this is a happy ending"
(190). The clichéd conclusion of romance has been problematized. This
is because the reader is not meant to see this ending in realist terms at
all. As Jordan reflects in Sexing the Cherry, "very rarely is the beloved
more than a shaping spirit for the lover's dreams. [. . .] To be a muse
may be enough" (79-80). The conclusion of Written on the Body
celebrates the transformative effects of art itself. It removes us from
what Winterson calls "the nightmare of narrative" (Gut Symmetries 24).
It is neither factual nor explainable simply as a character's fantasy. It
celebrates the triumph of a purely textual and artistic recreation of a
lover already dead ("I knew she would die," 154) but a love renewed by
a renewed use of language. The structure that Winterson has bonded by
language is one of love brought into focus through loss. It is also one of
words whose symbolic meaning is reached only at the cost of lack of
being - hence the enigmatic status of the ending. Textual love
necessarily sacrifices sexual love. We are left with the consolation of
language.