\u201cThe body that has lain beside you in sickness and in health. The body your arms still long for dead or not. You were intimate with every muscle, privy to the eyelids moving in sleep. This is the body where you name is written, passing in to the hands of strangers\u201d (178).<\/p>\n
As of right now the narrator has found themself in a cemetery. This is apt for such a depressing time in the narrator\u2019s journey as they grieve their relationship with Louise. This passage I found extremely interesting because it highlights on the idea of defining love by loss, and can almost directly be tied to common clich\u00e9 of you don\u2019t know what you got \u2018til it\u2019s gone.<\/em> This passage also addresses the one we close read in class on Wednesday, although now the meaning has somewhat shifted now that Louise is no longer with the narrator.<\/p>\n This passages addresses what happens to a beloved\u2019s body once they have deceased, and in a way Louise is dead to the narrator not only because she\u2019s absent, but because she\u2019s terminally ill. The words you\/your repeat a lot in this passage, but instead the you\/your doesn\u2019t reference Louise, the narrator is speaking directly to us. We are the you. Now the narrator is spelling out your loss, your grief, your depression. The direction has shifted from Louise to the actual audience, highlighting on the fact that we are all capable of love and almost indefinitely loss, more specifically the loss of the physical body. The arms, muscle, eyelids, and hands of your lover\u2019s body, that really are your heart\u2019s property. For once the body is gone, what is left to love?<\/p>\n Winterson, I believe, wary of clich\u00e9s and the language of love, chooses to share the message that love cannot be expressed through language, but through bodily actions and marking each other\u2019s bodies as our own. The language of love has been around forever, but maybe instead we should look at the ways we imprint on, write on, and seize other bodies rather than reading about the hopeless romantics in novels. Winterson is highlighting on the inexpressible, bodily idea of love. That by focusing on the connection between your body and your lovers body (\u201ceyelids moving in sleep\u201d, \u201cintimate with every muscle\u201d, \u201cbody that has lain beside you\u201d) you can find love. The narrator, and Winterson has decided that true nature of love cannot be written down, for only our bodies can carry the weight of our words.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cThe body that has lain beside you in sickness and in health. The body your arms still long for dead or not. You were intimate with every muscle, privy to the eyelids moving in sleep. This is the body where you name is written, passing in to the hands of strangers\u201d (178). As of right … Continue reading Bodies and the Weight of Words<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2057,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[123782],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-820","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2016-blog-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/820","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\/2057"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=820"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/820\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=820"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=820"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=820"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}