James Butler on Jeanette Winterson

I’ve been thinking a lot about the body lately, about consciousness and embodiment and the ways we relate to them. The mind and body are often distinguished from each other, drawn as two parts of a whole: the mind an essence and the body a vessel. I’ve been questioning why we maintain such a distinction, what the repercussions of that distinction are, and what writing and actively thinking about the body can do.

These questions are how I came to read Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body. I’d never read Winterson before: I’d seen her books, certainly, but they always seemed too erotic, too carnal, and me too prudish. I was writing a paper on gender and embodiment though, and this book was pressed into my hands. And, to be honest, Written on the Body is erotic, and it is carnal. It’s a romance novel: part Petrarchan lover and part Mills & Boon. It carries all of the genre’s tropes: the desirer and desired, a lyrical concern for sensuality, bodies objectified and likened to nature, and a conflation of love and fate. But it’s subversive too, it hovers a large question mark over the ways bodies exist in language, and the ways in which we use language to coerce them.

Much critical writing on Written on the Body has concerned itself primarily with the intentional withholding of the narrator’s gender. The narrator, who speaks using the first person, never uses personal pronouns, and is never referred to by any character in gendered terms. The narrator’s lover, Louise, claims that the narrator is ‘the most beautiful creature male or female [she] had ever seen.’ It’s a knowing wink, almost, and with it a game begins: Winterson egging us on to guess the narrator’s gender, to materialise their body from the page.

Like this, we’re continuously offered and denied the narrator’s gender. It’s often reiterated that the narrator has a conceivable gender, but just exactly what that is is obscured. Arriving at the front door of their girlfriend’s house, the narrator finds a rat-trap hidden within the mouth of a papier-maché snake poking out of her letterbox. The narrator experiences literal castration anxiety, hesitating to near the door ‘because to reach the door meant pushing my private parts right into the head of the snake’. With this line Winterson suggests a phallus and then, maybe, masculinity. But when the narrator’s girlfriend answers the door and is questioned about the snake, she says, ‘It’s for the postman … You’ve got nothing to be frightened of.’ In this response, any suggestion of the narrator’s phallus is retracted.

The narrator’s body, then, is not only ambiguous but shape-shifting: a site of narrative and cultural tension, an open end. Winterson’s narrator recalls past love affairs with both men and women, and their sexuality, like their body, is fluid. The narrator is a translator of old Russian texts, and like these texts, so too is our understanding of their body changeable – an act of continuous rewriting.

In Bodies That Matter, Judith Butler writes that ‘the subject, the speaking “I”, is formed by virtue of having gone through the process of assuming a sex’. Our bodies are readable and speak a language – through movement, stance and dress – and, like written text, the language of some bodies is more privileged than others. While language has, historically, been used to sustain the status of white men, so too does our body language exist in a system that supposes a preferred way of being. Butler writes that, in this way, our bodies are formed through a matrix of prescribed gender and sexuality – we find our bodies and our selves through an understanding of the ways in which our bodies are supposed to behave. What does this mean, then, for a narrator whose gender is withheld?

This isn’t just a matter of me bringing these questions to the text but, rather, they are implied within it. As a romance novel, a genre that, traditionally, is primarily concerned with relations between men and women, Written on the Body unsettles the ways in which we believe male and female bodies should behave. Winterson’s lyrical prose seems to allude to romantic poetry but, unlike the sonnets of writers such as Shakespeare or Yeats, the notionally male gaze is occupied by an ambiguously gendered speaker. Written on the Body, then, both engages with and avoids Butler’s matrix of gender and sexuality – here is the hovering question mark and the knowing wink.

Very often when reading literature we’re asked to question who speaks, but also who is silenced by particular narratives. But speaking is an embodied act, and Winterson brings this consideration of the body to Written on the Body by not bringing a body at all. With this, she partially answers the question I’ve been mulling over recently: that what it means to be a body is dependent on the kind of body you are, influenced by social forces that determine whether the way you’re embodied is conceivably right. However, as it often happens, a response such as this elicits more questions than it satisfies.

Written on the Body’s last line is one of the most satisfying I’ve read in recent memory. With the fate of the two lovers left unknown, the narrator looks to the sky and directly addresses the reader: ‘I don’t know if this is a happy ending but here we are let loose in open fields.’ Those open fields are an apt metaphor for the way the novel treats its narrator’s body: unbound by notions of gender and sexuality, lucid and free.


James Butler is a Brisbane-based writer and the fiction editor of Scum.

Cover image for Written on the Body

Written on the Body

Jeanette Winterson

This item is unavailableUnavailable