Thoughts: Written on the Body II
Mar. 22nd, 2006 09:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jhameiaIn Written on the Body, Jeannette Winterson attempts to avoid the cliches of romance in terms of text by resorting to lyricism. - through use of a genderless narrator. The character who expresses the demand to avoid cliches, however, is Louise, where she demands the narrator to strip away everything that's been learnt from the past relationships: "I want you to come to me without a past. Those lines you've learnt, forget them. Forget you've been here before in other bedrooms in other places. Come to me new. Never say you love me until the day you have proved it" (54).
Personate note: I don't suppose I need to tell anybody here how really stupid that sounds?
Louise is the catalyst for lyrical language. Everytime the narrator sees her, there's a flurry of poetic language that doesn't really come out anywhere else in the novel. Other girlfriends are discussed in shorter, more prosaic terms. When Louise is not around, the narrator turns to medical texts and tries to poeticise them. The times when the narrator is in direct contact with Louise, in an intimate encounter, are the times when the language is most vague and defying of general conventions such as grammar and punctuation. Louise gives the narrator a cause to fight for, a cliche to fall back on - a motif from a bad Russian novel (in Gail Right's terms,"this isn't War and Peace, honey, this is Yorkshire" (160) and she's painfully right).
Louise is the narrator's physical obsession. From when they first meet to when the narrator abandons her, and after that, the narrator continues to be obsessed with her cancer and her body. Most of the emotions described in the text have something to do with physicality - the love they share is physical; the cancer that afflicts their relationship is physical; the . Part of the reason why it's so hard to relate to the narrator as a character and to Louise is that Louise is described only in physical terms, leading to the next point:
EDIT 22:45 - Louise is therefore objectified and worshipped.
Louise is an agent outside of the narrator. This is the most problematic part, seeing as the narrator limits her agency so much because the narrator is so self-focused on its own preception of Louise. Therefore, Louise is a limited agent outside of the narrator, and we get to know her only through the narrator's interactions with her family, or in relation to her interactions with others. I could list down what the reader could find out about Louise: she's strong-minded and independent (she needs to control Elgin). She's intelligent (Elgin met her at a Debate conference). She needs to be engaged intellectually (that's why she doesn't have sex with Elgin). And finally, she's elusive to the narrator as she is to the reader: she disappears at the end and the narrator is left with just memories of her body.
...
Okay. Time to put together some quotes.
Personate note: I don't suppose I need to tell anybody here how really stupid that sounds?
Louise is the catalyst for lyrical language. Everytime the narrator sees her, there's a flurry of poetic language that doesn't really come out anywhere else in the novel. Other girlfriends are discussed in shorter, more prosaic terms. When Louise is not around, the narrator turns to medical texts and tries to poeticise them. The times when the narrator is in direct contact with Louise, in an intimate encounter, are the times when the language is most vague and defying of general conventions such as grammar and punctuation. Louise gives the narrator a cause to fight for, a cliche to fall back on - a motif from a bad Russian novel (in Gail Right's terms,"this isn't War and Peace, honey, this is Yorkshire" (160) and she's painfully right).
Louise is the narrator's physical obsession. From when they first meet to when the narrator abandons her, and after that, the narrator continues to be obsessed with her cancer and her body. Most of the emotions described in the text have something to do with physicality - the love they share is physical; the cancer that afflicts their relationship is physical; the . Part of the reason why it's so hard to relate to the narrator as a character and to Louise is that Louise is described only in physical terms, leading to the next point:
EDIT 22:45 - Louise is therefore objectified and worshipped.
Louise is an agent outside of the narrator. This is the most problematic part, seeing as the narrator limits her agency so much because the narrator is so self-focused on its own preception of Louise. Therefore, Louise is a limited agent outside of the narrator, and we get to know her only through the narrator's interactions with her family, or in relation to her interactions with others. I could list down what the reader could find out about Louise: she's strong-minded and independent (she needs to control Elgin). She's intelligent (Elgin met her at a Debate conference). She needs to be engaged intellectually (that's why she doesn't have sex with Elgin). And finally, she's elusive to the narrator as she is to the reader: she disappears at the end and the narrator is left with just memories of her body.
...
Okay. Time to put together some quotes.