Embodied Grief: The Elegiac Tradition and Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body

Abstract

Jeanette Winterson’s 1992 novel Written on the Body opens with the question, ‘Why is the measure of love loss?’ The scene is set with the narrator’s description of the autumnal landscape as scorched and barren, which immediately prompts a comparison to a year earlier: ‘It was not always so. I am thinking of a certain September: Wood pigeon Red Admiral Yellow Harvest Orange Night. You said, “I love you”’ (Winterson 1992: 9). This sudden leap from sketching the scene to addressing an absent lover aligns the novel right from its first lines with the literary tradition of elegy. According to David Shaw, ‘The classical elegist is always trying to break through the barrier of mere descriptive naming in quest of the vocative of direct address. To speak to the dead is already to have made a breach in the wall, to have battered down a boundary or divide’ (1994: 15). The narrator’s brief apostrophe to a lover who remains unnamed until ten pages later makes it clear that loss and grieving both motivate the telling of the story and will be its primary thematic preoccupations.