The Anatomist of Love and Disease in Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body

Abstract

Abstract Historically, both the male and the medical gaze have sexualized and pathologized the female anatomy. Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body simultaneously perpetuates and problematizes the alliance between patriarchy and science that objectifies and disempowers women and their own stories. Her novel’s genderless narrator first eroticizes her/his beloved Louise and later abandons her because she suffers with leukemia, leaving her in the hands of her husband-doctor, a man whom she no longer loves or trusts. Under the umbrella of medical humanities, this essay explores how Winterson’s narrator dehumanizes and silences Louise by becoming the anatomist of her cancer to possess her entirely from afar and to mourn the loss of access to her sexual body; vicariously experiencing leukemia through storytelling, and thus depriving Louise of her right to make choices in her life, the comforting presence of the person she loves by her side, and the therapy of narrating her own account about terminal illness on the look of death.