Winterson writes, “Louise, your nakedness was too complete for me, who had not learned the extent of your fingers. How could I cover this land? Did Columbus feel like this on sighting the Americas? I had no dreams to possess you, but I wanted you to possess me” (52).
I found it interesting how often Louise’s body and the protagonist’s romance were framed through possession and exploration. This isn’t surprising, given that in our culture, claiming a partner, or being claimed, is often equated with love. It also made me think about love as an act of reclamation, or at least what it’s supposed to be. In Mexican culture, love is deeply tied to the idea of belonging to one another, which in turn reminds me of the not so distant echoes of colonization. The Spanish imposed their God on Indigenous peoples, declaring conversion or death; they imposed marriage, declaring anything outside of it sinful. Love then becomes a cycle of possession.
Love it isn’t about control, certainty, or ownership. It has no place for angst or insecure attachment; those are illusions that only distort our perception of what love truly is. Love also isn’t about making decisions for your partner as if they were a child, assuming you know what’s best for them without giving them the chance to express their own desires. That isn’t love, it’s fear disguised as protection. As Gail says, “She wasn’t a child, you didn’t give her the chance to say what she wanted. You left” (Winterson 159).
I recently took a course on critical utopias and the human instinct to search beyond borders for a better land, a better reality. In many ways, love can feel utopian, an escape from one’s own limitations. But for Louise’s lover, no matter where they went, despair followed. There was no “elsewhere” where they could be different or where they could be free from their own cycles of longing and suffering. Did they truly want happiness, or were they more comfortable in longing? At times, it seems as if the protagonist convinces themself that their despair is okay, that the pain of love is its proof. If love is possession, then maybe loss is the ultimate confirmation of love’s existence. Which leads up back to how Winterson begins this novel, “Why is the measure of love loss” (Winterson 9).
I’d like to connect the passage you brought up to another text. It’s not part of this class (and I’m not a fan of this poem), but upon reading that section again, I immediately thought of John Donne’s Elegy 8 “To His Mistress Going to Bed.” Donne’s poem also makes this exact connection between love and colonization when he writes, “O my America, my new found land, / My kingdom, safeliest when with one man mann’d” (lines 27-28). I found this interesting, because I doubt Winterson was referencing Donne, but the two are very similar. Even though they are written differently, both have an air of “you will be mine and only mine” about them, if that makes sense? (I don’t know how else to word it.)
Hello, and great job on this post! The connection you made between the concept of colonization and how the narrator talks about Louise is very apt. Also, your specific mention of how a common understanding of love within Mexican culture has to do with “belonging to one another” (and how the harmfulness of that idea began with colonization) is again very insightful. Because the narrator – either consciously or subconsciously – believes that Louise belongs to them, they then act as though Louise’s wants/needs for their relationship don’t matter, which lets them more easily hurt Louise by making the decision to leave all by themself.
Your point in the last paragraph about how the end of the book spirals into reaffirming the statement that the ‘measure of love is loss’ is also quite astute. The narrator’s in an awful headspace for the last portion of the novel, but that torment allows them to keep convincing themself that they really, really love Louise, because if they didn’t, then they wouldn’t have made the decision to cut themself off, or later, the decision to try to exhaust every option to find her. Your idea that they consider their relationship with Louise utopian ties in well with how blind the narrator seems to become to any flaws Louise may have, and how their connection with reality (because real, sustainable human relationships can never be quite utopian) becomes more and more tenuous as the book ends. Great work!