‘It was years ago but I still blush. Sex can feel like love or maybe it’s guilt that makes me call sex love. I’ve been through so much I should know just what it is I’m doing with Louise. I should be a grown-up by now. Why do I feel like a convent virgin?’ (p.94)
Quite often pleasure of sex comes with guilt. The guilt that you should have sex only with someone you truly love will make you ‘blush’, and feel like a ‘convent virgin’. It is so burdensome that you sometimes deceive yourself to evade from the guilt. An abrupt sex may be turned into genuine love. As what Warner insists, the guilt itself is illegitimate, restricting people’s identity and behavior without any ethical base. If we refuse the guilt, and if sex no longer necessarily means love, however, how would we know what love is?
Marriage used to be the evidence of love. It strongly bound love and sex. But ‘grown-ups who have been through so much’ now should realize the norm do not assure you of true love. Love affairs between numerous married women and the narrator showed relationships composed of only obligations and duties cannot mean love.
The narrator keeps trying to find how sex can be connected to real love instead of guilt and duty. The narrator says the measure of love is loss, and the loss the narrator feels is represented as her body. The narrator get obsessed with sex and touch they used to have, and then with Louise’s body and the narrator’s sensation, and then with her biological body of organs and other parts, even cells.
Would the narrator still love Louise, who became much paler and thinner and whose all the body parts got serious cellular damage after leukemia treatment? If so, why? Wasn’t it her body that the narrator had sex with, and that convinced the narrator to fall in love? If not, why?
‘Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights; the accumulations of a lifetime gather there.’ (p.89). It is the narrator’s memory with Louise that sustains his/her love. The memory is about flesh and carved in flesh. In other words, it is not Louise’s present physical body but the narrator’s memory of her body why the narrator long for her. Memory of body is the narrator’s unit of love.
I really enjoyed reading your thoughts about what it is that makes up true love. Society’s expectations of marriage and childrearing consistently confuses sex with love. Physical acts of lust are automatically correlated with expected emotional burdens. I found your questions concerning the narrator’s love for Louise’s deteriorating body to be extremely interesting. It reminded me of when the narrator confessed, “There is nothing distasteful about you to me…not disease and its dull markings” (124). This quote helps show that the narrator’s love for Louise does exist outside of the physical realm.
Your post was a great connection to Warner’s piece about sex being shameful. The narrator clearly does have some issues with sex, and even worse issues with love. It makes a lot of sense that if the narrator does not think that sex equals love then the narrator has not truly experienced love. The narrator’s view of marriage is surely corrupt because of the various married women they have slept with. I think it’s really important that you made this connection because it helped me to understand the narrator on a deeper level, and in a way I hadn’t really thought of. Additionally, you’re question about whether to not the narrator would still love Louise because her body had deteriorated is something I have to strongly consider. I might suggest reading the blog post “Beyond the Body” by EMarie as I think it answers this question in a very eloquent way. Overall, a great post!
I really, really like this post! I think the concept of guilt in relation to sex is such a prominent difficulty in today’s culture. I feel that this section of the text highlights that issue. I appreciate that you pointed out that the text in its entirety does this as well, as a novel that focuses on the body. I believe this is Winter’s way of make a critique of certain social constructs.