Draft: Written

[jhameia]

In Wirten on the Body, Jeannette Winterson attempts to avoid the idea and use of cliches, even defy them, by examiniming them through the perspective of her gender-less narrator and the relationship between narrator and a string of affairs, with the greatest focus on the affair with 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. As Rubinson observes in his article, “we know very little abuot Louise: that she has red hair,that she’s Australian … everything else is the narrator’s subjective construction of her as an erotic object” (226). Despite the lack of information on her, 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, making her own decisions with her own personality. There is something written beyond Louise's body, and there are many ways to view this.

Louise as a catalyst for lyrical language on the narrator’s part is easy enough to discern through the reading of the text. The narrator’s voice becomes less coherent, seemingly more incomprehensible or abstract when in interaction with or in description of her. While narration becomes a bit more mundane in describing things that happen with her, for example, Louise’s helping out ni cleaning the apartment after Jacqueline has left for the last time, the language does become more poetic in describing Louise than when describing other lovers. The narrator describes past lovers ni a more straightforward manner, not really dwelling too long on what they look like, just what they did, and an anecdote or two on what the narrator did or said around them. For example, in describing Jacqueline, the narrator says ni a series of statements:

“She told me all about the problems facing the lemurs in the Zoo. She brought her own mop. She worked nine to five Monday to Friday, drove a Mini and got her reading from book clubs. She exhibited no fetishes, foibles, freak-outs of fuck-ups. Above all she was single and she had always been single. No children and no husband” (WotB 26).

The first description of Louise is comparably more physical and metaphorical, with a lack of punctuation to denote a kind of poetic tone:

“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 breads. You are creamy but for your hair your red hair that flanks you on either side” (WotB 11).

Susann Cokal observes that Louise represents language more than she does a living, breathing person (Cokal 24), giving the narrator a mouthpiece through which to communicate his/her adoration. Through her role as a catalyst for poetic language, she presents to the narrator a cause to fight for, “a grand excuse of passion” (WotB 39).