Rewriting the body: A critique of current readings of gender and identity in Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body

Abstract

Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body ([1992] 2001. London:Vintage) attempts to liberate identity and sexuality from binary imposition and essentialist categorizations through its use of a narrator who is not gender-bound. However, there is a tendency in some of the critical responses to the novel to interpret the narrator as a masculine force dominating and objectifying his/her submissive and powerless lover, Louise. This imposes essentialist distinctions on a text that seeks precisely to reject such classification. Against such reductive readings, I will argue for a reconsideration of the power dynamics at play in the relationship between Louise and the narrator, one which will seek to undermine critically the too easy imposition of a dominance/ submission binary. The article will consider how the way in which the narrator’s identity is constructed renders him/her inherently dependent on external sources for definition – it is arguably the dependency and uncertainty characterizing this identity that makes him/her vulnerable to the kind of reductive essentialist classification that the article opposes. I will also reinterpret the narrator’s depiction of Louise’s body in an attempt to counter the discourse that presents this depiction in terms of objectification and domination. Rather than the more common interpretive images of colonization and invasion, my alternative interpretation of the construction of Louise’s body will be conducted according to two sustained motifs: the lover as nourishment, and Louise’s body as a yonic vessel or shelter.