Critics and readers alike will take in their own views and apply it, along with who the author is, to an authors work. In actuality, dissecting a writers work as a parallel to their own life has only recently been on the rise. T. S. Eliot would all at once violently refuse and enforce that he is in no way involved in his work if he could see the comparison made today. Yet, evidences of his disconnect with his own wife in The Wasteland are being conjured. Can see Joyce’s views on the church, society and often on gender throughout Ulysses. Rebecca West, an acclaimed feminist and journalist, dots her work with role reversal, yet involved Evadne with a male, her husband, in Indissoluble Matrimony as she herself had a fiery, long lasting affair with H. G. Wells around the time of it’s publication. At least Virginia Wolff had the gall to admit to her presence in her writing.
This scorning is a bit ironic in that a writer is a writer, an idea is an idea. In the end, neither have anything to do with sex.
It is amusing at best though, the way in which critics have plucked apart Written on the Body to be a lesbian novel. That the central focus of the narrators passion happens to be a woman is irrelevant to the feelings themselves. As are any of the obvious neglects of gender for the narrator. If there are hints to gender, they are ambiguous at best or shifting to frequently one couldn’t possibly grab a-hold of any one thread and claim it to be evidence of a man or a woman.
These roles in fact -clues if you will- are only one’s conjured up by the readers themselves. All “references” or “implications” to gender not only do not exist, but are completely fabricated by whomever is choosing to see them. Any claims to the narrator being bashed with images or literal wording of “penetration,” or the instance in which a past lovers snake startles the narrator because of its blatant crotch-length-in-height stature. Likely, the idea of a male, for some obscure reason, also gets doubted throughout the reading of the novel.
Regardless of whether or not the narrator is male or female, one also gets the sense of Louise being the submissive woman, as both figures [her husband and the narrator] make large decisions in her life. Jenifer asked us at one point during our discussions if Louise had been Luis, would it have changed the believability. The resounding “yes” only proved that as readers all markers of “gender” have all come from that exactly. The reader is the one to pre-suppose gender.
This is something Winterson seemed to be focusing a critical lens upon. Readers would not get the sensation of Luis being as reasonable because obviously Louise is exhibiting obvious “female” traits, is she not? What, with allowing the “dominant” figures in her life “rule” her. Quick to jump the gun, are we not? Quick to assume that no man could ever exhibit such levels of submissiveness, especially when it comes to the control of their relationships and bodies. Quick to forget that is was Louise who took on the male role of “perusing” to allow herself to become close to the narrator, was the one to ask if they were to have an affair, the one to call. The one to lead.
Self examination of how “open” one really is to the uselessness of gender and love should be conducted before and after reading Written on the Body. It will change how one sees gender and it’s irrelevance to blistering passion.
When I read Written on the Body I did not think of this as a lesbian novel. I did a bit of research on the narrator and discovered the she herself is indeed a lesbian. That her previous novels were indeed lesbian in its nature, most likely influenced by the fact the Janette Winterson is a lesbian. During my reading of Written on the Body I searched for clues that may or may not have genuinely been there. I used the line of the narrator being in a women’s shelter to form the image of a female protagonist. I used the line that the narrator went into Louise to decipher if the narrator was a male. It was at the point that I discover that the narrator was neither gay nor straight but in fact bi-sexual that I truly stopped caring about the gender of the narrator. It was relatively along that time line that I saw the novel as a novel exploring love between two individuals, not a lesbian romance or a straight couple’s intimacy but as two bodies exploring each other. As love in a way that is expressed by the narrator in his or her radical and somewhat unreliable form, and that was the point of making the novel genderless. We were not to assign a gender to the narrator, although we did it anyway, or take it that because Louise was not Luis she could only have been submissive to a man as society dictates, thus impressing our personal gender roles and beliefs onto these characters. We are love, the oldest human emotion and desire in the world.
ReplyDeleteAn author, who they are, I think can defiantly have an impact on their writing. Knowing who the author is and about their life and personal opinions and actions I think has a great impact on the reader, or the critic. Because I think this, I am very happy that I had no prior knowledge of the author of “Written on he body”. When I read the book I was able to take the book, and the narrator for what was written on the page, I was able to read it in a way where I had no preconceived ideas or opinions. I am very glad that I was able to read it and take it all in with just my own ideas and experiences coloring the book and not my knowledge of the author. For me, when I read the narrator I read he/she as both. Whether the narrator was a male or female changed with every chapter, sometimes with every page. By the end of the book I was not looking for “clues” or trying to differentiate between what gender the narrator was, but rather the narrator did become genderless in my mind, it became unimportant for the character to be male or female, the character was human with emotions that were universal. It is only in class when discussing who the author was, her gender (coincidentally, I didn’t ever look at the author’s name on the cover until after I read through most of it) her sexual orientation, and what was known about her life that it started to matter who she was and her motivations that might have been present in writing the book. I think I was at an advantage in my ignorance when I read it. When I read the article about how this book was critiqued, it seems to me that most of the critics lost their objectivity and instead were judging the novel for what it should have been, or could have been, or what was lacking, instead of taking it at face value for what it was. They seemed to let their knowledge of Jeanette Winterson cloud their ability to do their jobs.
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