“Christ was wrong, impossibly hard, when he said that to imagine committing adultery was just as bad as doing it.” (Winters 38)
The narrator develops a deep uncertainty on the idea of religion. Through the quote, we can imagine that the narrator’s affair will Louise has hit them hard in the way they perceive their relationship with Jacqueline. For the narrator, committing adultery is more “bad’ then actually just imagining it. Nonetheless, this quote not only characterizes the idea of family upbringings through religious institution, but also how the surrounding world has changed over time. This idea of time developed a sense of uncertainty in the narrators perspective of his life and decisions.
According to Halbustan, “Queer uses of time and space develop, at least in part, in the opposition to the institutions of family, heterosexuality, and reproduction.” Winterson’s use of dialect through her characters uses queer time as a sense to portray the narrators genderless view. The use of religion is given to the reader as a cyclical event. From my earlier quote, religion is spread out through the novel in order to understand how the narrator has somewhat changed or developed a different sense of what religion might mean in their own imaginatively place. It might even be crazy to imagine that queer time in Written on the Body might just be a place where all our impossibilities become possible by the simple fact that everything is weird into our own understanding.
The way you phrased this is super interesting. I really like your last line where you note that “everything is weird into our own understand.” I think that is a super valid statement. It might be neat too, though, to assume that rather everything is “normal” based on our own understanding. Why must are perceptions be weird? Why can’t are standards be “normal.” I think that’s an interesting comment on society.