Category: 2025 Class Post

“Why is it that the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still the thing we long to hear? ‘I love you’ is always a quotation,” (Winterson 9). It is in these two lines on the first page of Written on the Body that Jeanette Winterson places what I believe to be her thesis for the work as a whole. Winterson, in an opinion I can certainly sympathize with, adores allusions. She uses them tar from sparingly in this work, and each can be tied back to this central position: that perhaps the words we need are not always our own. Just after this paragraph, the narrator includes a quote from William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. In this passage, the maligned character of Caliban speaks against the play’s protagonists who have settled on his native island: “You taught me language and my profit on’t is I know how to curse. The red plague rid you for learning me your language.” What does it mean for the narrator that Caliban’s language is not his own, and yet the primary tool of expression he is given? On the very next page, Winterson enters an extended metaphor to the tune of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. “Love demands expression,” and this is what the entirety of the work strives to accomplish. As a translator, the narrator is intimately familiar with the words of others—perhaps maddeningly so. The words of others, not unlike the primary language spoken in The Tempest, become the avenue through which the speaker explores themself and those around them. Caliban’s outrage, Alice’s confusion, Jane Eyre’s devotion, Eve’s original sin, and Mercutio’s fatal hubris all become winters on in the great tapestry of language.

title taken from act 1 scene 2 of the tempest!

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.

“Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights; the accumulations of a lifetime gather there. In places the palimpsest is so heavily worked that the letters feel like braille. I like to keep my body rolled up away from prying eyes. Never unfold too much, tell the whole story. I didn’t know that Louise would have reading hands. She has translated me Into her own book” (89).

Throughout the novel, the narrator struggles with commitment in their relationships. They say, “My circadian clock, which puts me to sleep at night and wakes me up in the morning in a regular twenty-four-hour fashion, has a larger arc that seems set at twenty-four weeks. I can override it, I’ve managed that, but I can’t stop it going off” (79). They seem to not last very long in relationships and, consciously or unconsciously, seek out emotionally unavailable, typically married, partners.​ They also make themselves emotionally unavailable. In this passage they say they “keep their body rolled away from prying eyes” and “never unfold too much, tell the whole story” (89). They don’t let anyone get too close, until Louise. Though the narrator struggles with this, they still ultimately desire a deep connection and a mundane, normal life with someone. They frequently write very philosophically and are extremely emotionally charged, wishful, and reflective. Their struggle doesn’t stop their need for love. They finally find this with Louise. From this passage, you can see that the narrator feels very deeply for Louise, more than any of their previous partnerships. 

When the narrator says, “Written on the body,” they are referencing a deep connection with their own past and the people they have been romantically involved with. Like scars, the narrator’s stories live with them on their skin. Though they have struggled with connection and commitment and have previously kept themselves somewhat withdrawn, they still are important aspects of the narrator’s past. The narrator’s connection with Louise runs deeper than with their previous partners. The narrator says “you have scored your name into my shoulders, … you play upon me, dumming me taut” (89). The most important line to me is, “I didn’t know that Louise would have reading hands. She translated me into her own book” (89). Louise breaks the narrator out of their mold. She makes the narrator finally settle and open up. The narrator’s life with Louise is written the deepest on their body. 

Despite the narrator finally settling down with Louise, the narrator only gets this dream for a short time. I find it interesting that once she finally commits to someone and is with them outside of infidelity, they are still taken away from her. If the narrator doesn’t leave, outside forces will still end the relationship. This connects back to the very first line of the novel, “Why is the measure of love loss?” (9). Maybe the narrator isn’t destined to be with anybody forever and can only understand and apprectiate their connection once they are physically gone, from their life or from life itself. I wonder if the narrator will be able to find any relationship again after how deep the narrator’s connection was with Louise. 

“Cheating is easy.  There’s no swank to infidelity.  To borrow against the trust someone has placed in you costs nothing at first.  You get away with it, you take a little more and a little more until there is no more to draw on.  Oddly, your hands should be full with all that taking but when you open them there’s nothing there.” (p. 77)

“The most reliable Securicor, church sanctioned and state approved, is marriage.  Swear you’ll cleave only unto him or her and magically that’s what will happen.  Adultery is as much about disillusionment as it is about sex.  The charm didn’t work.  You paid all that money, ate the cake and it didn’t work.  It’s not your fault is it?  Marriage is the flimsiest weapon against desire.” (one paragraph later, p. 78)

These musings from Written on the Body’s narrator follow their train of thought after Jacqueline has just learned of their infidelity.  The narrator has been swept up into a self-admittedly familiar haze – the first few months spent teetering on the edge of an illicit tryst, then finally falling into a full-on affair.  From what has been established so far, the narrator is very used to being an affair partner, but not so much being the one actively cheating.  Still, it’s possible to surmise that rationalizations their partners have given in the past have informed the narrator’s justifications.  My first quote emphasizes how effortless it was for the narrator to become entangled with Louise.  They express that it’s “easy” to get into a rhythm of taking increasingly more from the trust built up in an established relationship.  I would assume that since the narrator elected to get into a relationship with a woman they found entirely bland, they had even fewer qualms this time than they would have otherwise.  There are no considerations of how Jacqueline might feel when she discovers that what she thought was a mutually-loving relationship was actually abandoned long ago by her partner.  The only hint of hesitance in this first quote appears in the last sentence, when the narrator extends their metaphor to imply that they should have gathered something meaningful from “all that taking”, but instead they end up bereft of any substantive relationship.  Interestingly, though, this does still frame things in a way that makes the narrator the main victim – they’re the one that’s been left high and dry.  Pay no attention to the partner whose trust has been violated.

The second quote holds a much more by-the-book justification for cheating.  The narrator voices the argument of placing all responsibility for maintaining an infidelity-free marriage onto the state-sponsored institution, not on the people involved.  There is no discussion here of incremental choices made on the part of the would-be cheater, so no accountability can be requested of them.  Elsewhere in the story, the narrator considers how fantasizing about cheating does end up damaging a relationship even though it seems like a too-strict boundary to uphold.  They conceptualize it as having given a portion of their heart away, even as they still lie in bed beside the person they’ve pledged themself to.  If they decide to continue going down that path instead of addressing the issue, communicating with their partner, and either deciding to recommit themself or break off the relationship, then emotional cheating can steal the passion and trust from a relationship just as much as physical cheating can.  In this selected quote, though, the narrator places the blame for cheating onto the cultural conceptualization of marriage as a “magical charm.”  Once someone discovers that it’s not that, and that people within monogamous relationships – even legally-married ones, gasp – are still capable of experiencing desire for people outside their relationship, they can’t be faulted for becoming disillusioned with the whole thing and drifting toward the next person/people they desire instead.

The last sentence especially makes this viewpoint clear: “Marriage is the flimsiest weapon against desire.”  Sure, if you’re viewing it as a spell that prevents you from ever experiencing attraction ever again, then yes, marriage as a construct will not prevent that from happening.  Conscious choices to continue nourishing your relationship, and still experiencing attraction but making the decision to stay with the person(s) you love and have decided to be loyal to, are important.  If you are so tempted to be in a relationship with someone else that you’re already halfway out the door either emotionally or physically, then ending your current relationship first would seem to be the more moral thing to do instead of hurting the person(s) you’re with.   Mutual decisions to keep choosing your partner(s) instead of other people are what sustains the trust of a relationship, not a legal document.  The narrator undercuts this specific argument about marriage in the next paragraph, but – importantly – allows this same argument about disillusionment to justify their cheating on Jacqueline.  People don’t just fall magically into cheating; lots of tiny decisions are made along the way to get to that point.  However, people invested in preconceived romantic ideas of following their hearts outside a relationship they made the choice to commit to, or people who would rather just wash their hands of any responsibility to not damage the trust of their partner(s), would follow the same line of reasoning that the narrator’s currently allowing themself to follow.

“She stroked my hair. ‘I want you to come to me without a past. Those lines you’ve learned, forget them. Forget that you’ve been here before in other bedrooms in other places. Come to me new. Never say you love me until that day when you have proved it.’

‘How shall I prove it?’

‘I can’t tell you what to do.’

The maze. Find your own way through and you shall win your heart’s desire. Fail and you will wander for ever in these unforgiving walls. Is that the test? (54).”

Louise wants the narrator to be something that they are not––a non-self, a blank journal, a space for a narrative that she and the narrator can write together. She wants to grow a new relationship on a bed of dust from her marriage, which is written and read and dead. She asks the narrator to be a part of her new story, but the narrator is unsure if they should begin again––if they should abandon their lone journey through the maze and let Louise guide them through it instead, adding to the palimpsest of their body instead of erasing it. The narrator has done this many times before, abandoning themself again and again for another love. Louise knows this, and wants the narrator to “come to her new,” despite knowing that she can’t tell the narrator “what to do”––the narrator can’t even tell themself what to do. 

Written on the body, palimpsest-like, is everything we have ever been, everything we have ever been told we are, and underneath all of that––maybe––is what we will be. If you erase all of the writing on the skin, maybe there is blank space for a new narrative. But is erasure possible? This is what I imagine is going through the narrator’s mind. This is why they keep letting love guide them––out of fear that erasure isn’t possible. 

The maze. It promises everything to the traveler who makes it through on their own. But if you make it through the maze by yourself, what else could you possibly want? Making it through the maze, erasing the palimpsest of their lovers, would be detrimental to our narrator, who knows nothing else than other people, and their relationship to other people. I think if the narrator made it through the maze, they would realize it is not Louise that their heart desires, it is not Louise or Crazy Frank or Bathsheba, but themself. And who is that? I don’t know, neither do you, and neither do they. 

The maze. It promises nothing to the traveler who wanders its walls forever. And how does the traveler find themselves in such a situation? Maybe because they aren’t traveling alone. They are too busy wondering about their partner’s mindscape to notice their own walls closing in. I think the narrator finds Louise where Louise finds herself. Free, past the walls of the maze. Independent, irrevocable, and icy, like a statue. 

But Louise cannot say, “Leave me now and meet me on the other side of these walls.” She says “I can’t tell you want to do,” because the narrator must find their own way through—they cannot follow Louise, like they followed all of their past lovers, getting lost in the maze while keeping their eyes fixed on the statue, the lover, at the exit. Walking in circles, thinking they are getting closer, maybe the narrator must close their eyes and trust their intuition instead. It’s not like they’ll find themselves more lost. 

“Elgin and Louise no longer made love. She took the spunk out of him now and again but she refused to have him inside her. Elgin accepted this was part of their deal and Louise knew he used prostitutes. His proclivities would have made that inevitable even in a more traditional marriage. His present hobby was to fly up to Scotland and be sunk in a bath of porridge while a couple of Celtic geishas rubber-gloved his prick” (68).

Winterson uses the terms “made love” and “took the spunk out of him” here instead of sex. The two phrases speak to the state of their marriage at this point in the book and have two very different connotations. Instead of “making love,” something that is viewed as very tender, something a husband and wife do or, at least, what two people who love each other do. However, she takes “the spunk out of him.” This seems transactional and like Louise is sucking the soul out of Elgin. He can no longer be entirely himself, she brings him down. The phrasing makes it seem like Louise is taming Elgin, just giving in to complete a task because she has to because they are still technically married. Marriage, culturally, is understood to include sex and especially in the past, it is the wife’s job to please her husband. 

Like we talked about in class though, this sets up the idea that they already have a set “deal.” The wording implies that they already have discussed sex outside of marriage so the same deal for Elgin would theoretically apply to Louise in the fact that she can also have sex outside of marriage. However, later on, we find out that Elgin is not as okay with this as he originally let on. The difference, however, between Elgin’s use of prostitutes and Louise with our narrator seems to be the emotional aspect of the affair. Elgin won’t even let the sex workers see him naked, but Louise is implying that Elgin is into “untraditional” sex practices that she wouldn’t want to perform so therefore it is necessary for him to be with a prostitute. I think it is this passage that sets up the irony of him being upset at Louise for having an affair, though the circumstances are slightly different, it applies nonetheless. 

I think the important part of this excerpt though, is the fact that she “refused to have him inside her.” Sex is defined culturally as penetrative sex, everything else is considered an ‘other’ form of sex, but true sex itself is penetrative (according to society and cultural expectations). I don’t think this is the exact thing Winterson is trying to get at. I think she is still considering them having sex, however I think she is making a sexual hierarchy. Some acts are considered more intense/personal than others, they are worth more in the long run. By not letting Elgin enter Louise, she is keeping their marriage at surface level and almost disassociating from the act and, maybe in her mind, they aren’t actually having sex. Although it is a sexual act, society stereotypically only defines sex as the traditional way. Louise has set the boundary that once Elgin is “inside her” that is the ultimate form of sex, and right now, she is just getting by by performing sexual acts to complete her ‘duties’ as a wife. However, she is only fulfilling her ‘duties’ as a wife in the sense that she is giving her husband pleasure, not (in the very traditional sense) by making it possible to have a baby. 

The reader does not know what type of sex the narrator and Louise are having but it is set up to appear to be a much more intimate experience. Maybe Winterson might be trying to portray is that sex is ‘worth’ more when there is an emotional connection which was absent with Elgin. She is only performing sexual acts, not what society seems true sex, so that it isn’t ‘worth’ as much, it doesn’t matter as much.

The narrator of Written on the Body consistently has these beautiful excerpts between normal observation or action that abstractly articulates this person’s thoughts. They are often profound, cosmic, or meta. When the narrator arrives at the cottage after leaving Louise, there is this section where they are describing their house, and it evolves into this commentary on “movement” and “life” accompanied by naturalistic imagery (107). The narrator states, “I want to rot here, slowly sinking into the faded pattern invisible against the dead roses,” then proceeds to personify death in themselves by saying “Death’s head in the chair, the rose chair in the stagnant garden” (107). There is this consistency with life and death or nature and rot that the narrator circles back to throughout this passage and the novel. These two sentences feel almost as if they are inverses. The narrator wants to rot, but is alive, while the roses are dead. In the second sentence, the narrator is dead (synonymous with rot), and the roses have become placed in a garden (associated with life). These sentences are tied to the current plot of the book: Louise’s cancer and the inevitability of death. Louise has cancer in her blood, and one could associate the sickness with the rot the narrator is speaking of. Louise has always been this character that is full of light and life as seen through the narrator’s eyes. There could be this conflict within the narrator of wanting themself to rot/to personify death, and thus free Louise of her sickness. I believe this because the narrator has run away from Louise, as if the narrator is a part of Louise’s sickness (as if they are the rot). By leaving, the narrator either believes Louise will get healthier with Elgin or that Louise will get healthier without the narrator.

Further, the narrator believes that by sitting in that chair, they have “neither life nor hope” because “movement indicates life and life indicates hope,” and they refuse to move (107-108). This could emphasize the narrator’s dependency on Louise. They feel stagnant without her and thus lifeless and hopeless. Additionally, the narrator mentions the idea of death and dust and that “daily we breathe the dead” (108). The narrator believes it is better for them to become dust (death) since they are immobile and thus void of life and hope. I believe the latter quotation goes beyond the actual aspect of breathing in dust. In class, we spoke of how our experiences are written on our body; and how that could be a possible meaning of Winterson’s writing. Since breathing is a function of the body, “daily we breathe the dead” could have a similar meaning (108). The dead are always with us; they are in our memories and written on our bodies. Breathing is essential to life (the antithesis of death), and as long as we are breathing, we will always have our pasts and remember those who have died.

“No silent films were shot in colour but the pictures through a window are that. Everything moves in curious clockwork animation. Why is that man throwing up his arms? The girl’s hands move soundlessly over the piano. Only half an inch of glass separates me from the silent world where I do not exist. They don’t know I’m here but I have begun to be as intimate with them as any member of the family. More so, since their lips move with goldfish bowl pouts, I am the scriptwriter and I can put words in their mouths.” (59)

This passage comments on numerous important aspects of the narrator’s story and identity. First, this passage poses the narrator as a voyeur, peering into other people’s lives without their knowledge. Much like the film Rear Window, the narrator imposes their own perspective and assumptions onto the subjects they have cast in their window movie, invading their privacy as they have imposed themself into a world where they “do not” –should not– “exist”. Furthermore, the narrator is “putting words in their mouths”, implying that they are unable to accurately depict the stories which they are observing, but still imposing judgment on them. In this instance, it would be impossible to articulate the lives of the window people as they are meant to be unheard, within the privacy of their homes; however, this offers a commentary on the unreliableness of the narrator that is blatantly displayed in the narration of their own story. It also displays a dynamic shift in the conventions of “normalcy”. 

The identity of a voyeur is one that falls within the “unsavory” area of the diagram of sexual/romantic preferences; although this voyeurism is not sexual in nature, its broader concept still applies, further alienating the narrator to the right side of the wall diagram. This bolsters the narrator’s separation from the “normal”. However, it is the subjects, not the narrator, who are “hidden” –limited to the confines of their box– even though they seemingly comply with all aspects of the “normal” (a man and woman inside a home, one can assume that they are in some form of relationship that either qualifies as, or is moving toward, marriage). This has, therefore, reversed the expected dynamic between the narrator and those inside the house: the “normal” has become the hidden, and the hidden has become the judger of the concealed “normal”. 

This shift also reveals the narrator’s desires. The use of a “window”, in addition to making the narrator a voyeur, displays their longing for what the figures on the other side of the window have. This is because we often desire that which we cannot –or should not– have (what is relegated to confined areas of society). This generally references “normal” people having suppressed desires to partake in “abnormal” behaviors; however, in this case, it demonstrates the “abnormal” narrator’s desire to have what the “normal” have. 

Notes:

Post title is adapted from “Rear Window’s Glasshole”, which views the voyeurism in Rear Window through a queer lens: “Suppose, however, one came at the question of vision from what a binary system construes as the “other” side.” (Lee Edelman)