As I was reading Jeanette Winterson’s Written On the Body I was immediately struck by a passage on page 72 reading, “We don’t take drugs, we’re drugged out on danger, where to meet, when to speak, what happens when we see each other publicly. We think no-one has noticed but there are always faces at the curtain, eyes on the road. There’s nothing to whisper about so they whisper about us.”(Winterson, 72). I’ll admit, at first I was struck by this passage because it reminded me of the Taylor Swift song illicit affairs. Similar to that song, this passage really speaks to why people have affairs. This line draws a direct parallel between the thrill of drugs and the thrill of cheating. There is a certain excitement that comes from something forbidden, regardless of that it is. The narrator also addresses the high of communicating with an affair partner in public, which adds a whole other layer to the thrill.
This passage continues on to discuss who even though the narrator is seeking a thrill of getting away with something, they’re really not. The affair may be a secret from Jacqueline’s partner, but something about the way they are together makes in clear there is something wrong about their relationship. It also speaks to the slight narcissism of the narrator, as they believe they are getting away with this affair, but might not actually be.
This passage speaks to the overall theme of infidelity in the novel. When I read books I use sticky tabs to mark passages I want to remember. I use the same colors to mean the same things in every book, but sometimes I add another color for something specific to that book. In Written On The Body I’ve been using a tab for infidelity. At this point in the story it’s been established that the narrator has a thing for married women. But this is one of the first moments where we start to understand why. The narrator not only falls for these women, but also enjoys the thrill of an affair. The narrator is an addict in their own right, but they get high off forbidden loves and encounters instead of drugs.
I loved your connection from this passage to “illicit affairs” by Taylor Swift (I too am a big fan of that song). I like how you made connections between the narrator and their addiction to infidelity. It reminded me when Swift sings, “A dwindling, mercurial high / A drug that only worked / The first few hundred times.” And this is so interesting to me, because as we see with the narrator and Bathsheba, after a long time of this infidelity behind closed doors, the narrator wanted her to tell her husband. Converse to that situation, Louise took it upon herself to tell Elgin fairly quickly about the affair, leaving the narrator in a position she had never been in before. So, I think this also shows how the narrator is so addicted to this drug of forbidden love and it does lose its affect after a while. Yet, since Louise took that drug away from the narrator early on, it may have the cause for the narrator to become addicted to Louise.
Swift, Taylor. “illicit affairs.” Folklore, Republic Records, 2020.