draft: Written on the Body
Mar. 26th, 2006 11:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jhameiaThe spelling is fucking awful because I am sick. Or rather, I have a fever which is bugging me and I don't feel like checking my spelling. All I really want is to get started on this thing.
In Wirten on the Body, Jeannette Winterson attempts to avoid the idea and use of cliches, even defy them, by examiniming them through the eyes of her gender-less narrator and the relationship between narrator and the lover, Louise. While Winterson quite neatly avoids pigeonholing her narrator into a set of characteristics designated for male or female, the relationship, devoid of certain cliches, falls into the trap of self-sabotage, and Louise is abandoned. The reader cannot help but feel that Louise, as a character in her own right, is sorely under-written as a result of the avoidance of cliches and the over-metaphorising of the relaiotnship into physical terms. Although Louise seems to perform the function of a plot device, a fixation for the narrator, there is something about Louise that is worth reading deeply into the text for. She is the narrator's catalyst into lyrical language in the attempt to avoid the trap of cliche, of the shallow "I love you". She becomes the narrator's physical obsession through her role as plot device, moving into a deep bodily description. Undeniably, Louise is an agent beyond the narrator, with her own personality. There is something written beyond Louise's body.
In Wirten on the Body, Jeannette Winterson attempts to avoid the idea and use of cliches, even defy them, by examiniming them through the eyes of her gender-less narrator and the relationship between narrator and the lover, Louise. While Winterson quite neatly avoids pigeonholing her narrator into a set of characteristics designated for male or female, the relationship, devoid of certain cliches, falls into the trap of self-sabotage, and Louise is abandoned. The reader cannot help but feel that Louise, as a character in her own right, is sorely under-written as a result of the avoidance of cliches and the over-metaphorising of the relaiotnship into physical terms. Although Louise seems to perform the function of a plot device, a fixation for the narrator, there is something about Louise that is worth reading deeply into the text for. She is the narrator's catalyst into lyrical language in the attempt to avoid the trap of cliche, of the shallow "I love you". She becomes the narrator's physical obsession through her role as plot device, moving into a deep bodily description. Undeniably, Louise is an agent beyond the narrator, with her own personality. There is something written beyond Louise's body.