\u201cHer hair was shining with bright drops of rain, the rain ran down her breasts, their outline clear through her wet muslin dress.\u201d (85)<\/p>\n
Winterson introduces Louise to the narrator as rain after a drought. Each subsequent encounter is further marked with the appearance of rain (54, 72), and the honeymoon period that follows the fulfilment of their affair is depicted as \u201cThe wettest June on record. We made love every day.\u201d (20)<\/p>\n
To the narrator, Louise is a tactile wetness that writes along the skin: the platonic lunch charged with sexual tension right before the start of their affair culminates in their first touch, incited by \u201cviscous juices\u201d dribbling down her chin, and the narrator rushing to steal the napkin for the opportunity to dab it away (37). Her \u201coutline\u201d is first revealed to them as the rain runs down her figure.<\/p>\n
\u201cOdd to think that the piece of you I know best is already dead. (123)<\/p>\n
The dichotomy of \u201cdermis\u201d and \u201cepidermis\u201d\u2014the living body and the dead cells of the surface of the skin is one that\u2019s complicated by Louise\u2019s cancer\u2014because her body has turned on itself, the epidermis, while already dead, is the only part of her\u2014because they lack \u201cblood vessels or nerve endings,\u201d untouched by her illness (123). The narrator, as a \u201ccreature who feeds at your hand,\u201d who \u201crub(s) away\u201d at the \u201cdead you,\u201d is at a constant struggle to dig skin-deep, yearning to feel life at their fingertips (124). Yet the core of Louise\u2019s being hides death, while the dead epidermis appears more lively than her condition truly implies. This is mirrored in the plot and Louise and the narrator\u2019s character development: Louise, who is asymptomatic, fails to show any sign of illness on the outside, while intimacy and authenticity reveals to the narrator that she no longer has very long to live.<\/p>\n
The only part of Louise that is neither dead nor dying, then, is the thin layer of skin cells at the apex of the dermis which meets the epidermis, a layer that can\u2019t feel the narrator, nor be felt by them, but which becomes visible to them in the glow of wet skin, because as water is absorbed by the pores of the skin it makes it reflective, and its reflectiveness the light bounces in and out of the surface of the skin. The water is what enables Louise to appear in the fullness of her life, and Louise, in turn, refers to the narrator themselves as this water: \u201cYou are a pool of clear water where the light plays.\u201d (85)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cHer hair was shining with bright drops of rain, the rain ran down her breasts, their outline clear through her wet muslin dress.\u201d (85) Winterson introduces Louise to the narrator as rain after a drought. Each subsequent encounter is further marked with the appearance of rain (54, 72), and the honeymoon period that follows the … Continue reading Blood, Water, and the Body in Between<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3611,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[169398],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1571","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2021-blog-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1571","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3611"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1571"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1571\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1571"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1571"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1571"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}