Love, Stripped

He loves her; he loves her not. She loves her; she loves her not. Love can survive; love cannot survive. Such are the issues defined and explored in Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body, a novel in which the heteronormative presumptions regarding love are dissolved by the author’s use of a narrator of indeterminate gender. Defining love primarily by its loss, Winterson focuses not on the effects of feminine, masculine, or queer gender on love, but rather, the gaps in gender construction therein, challenging the notion of fixed gender structures on the fixed category of love, while also (almost woefully) examining the literary issue of addressing love without cliché.

Interestingly, this examination of the superfluity of the expression of love is manifest early in Winterson’s novel with an allusive quote by the character Caliban from Shakespeare’s The Tempest: “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.” In this quote, Winterson refers not to the actual work of Shakespeare, but to the implicit notion that the erudite expression of love has been exhausted; there is only the replication of that which has been said already, only repetition. Also implied therein is a certain meaninglessness in the expression of love, and therefore, a shallowness. Ironically, by Winterson’s suggestion, then, the literary demonstration of love draws most of its imagery from the author’s definition of love and that upon which her work ruminates most frequently—that is, loss.

In order to emphasize the rule-breaking nature of her novel, Winterson balances the excitement and positivity of the affair which occurs between the nondescript narrator and the paramour Louise, a married woman who leaves her husband, with Louise’s cancer diagnosis. This contrast of events provides a merism of necessary human boundaries and the total breakdown of the horizon of expectations inevitably developed by the heterosexually-minded reader: health and disease, love and loss. Louise’s cancer serves as a metaphor for the unconventional nature of the narrator and the limits placed on love by the heteronormative assumption that only a male can love a female, and only a female can love a male, but also for the requirement of boundary testing in the realm of gender construction. Thusly, the novel becomes a representation of love, simply, love without presupposition of gender, anticipation of role, literary precursors, or social pressure.

It is the expression of gender (or lack thereof, perhaps) which ties Winterson’s theory of the inconsequential love-declaration to her own love related ideals. While Winterson’s narrator has no specific gender identity, bodily description, job, place of residence, or any other tangible definition of worldly character, by prose and philosophical musing, this nondescript protagonist takes on the air of a bisexual female (the narrator has erotic relations with both men and women), shaped not by her own revelations, but by the relationships she encounters. Couched upon this development of personality is the idea that human beings are changed, not as a result of necessity or self-improvement, but rather, for the approval of those with whom relationships are experienced or maintained. However, this feminine air is not always evident; in many cases where the narrator describes his lover, he says she “smells like a gun” or has “iron in her soul,” descriptions which evoke masculine connotations of violence and hardness. Regardless, Winterson writes, "Don't you think it's strange that life, described as so rich and full, a camel-trail of adventure, should shrink to this coin-sized world? A head on one side, a story on the other. Someone you loved and what happened. That's all there is when you dig in your pockets. The most significant thing is someone else's face. What else is embossed on your hands but her?" In this quote, the narrator is defined, without gender, by love itself. The narrator loves and is loved without gender, the epitome of Winterson’s representation of love, stripped.

“Putting on his white gloves so that fingerprints would not show he tapped at my heart and I thought he said his name was Love.” Perhaps his name wasn’t love after all. Perhaps he was just a set of predetermined expectations, something someone else had already said. The love expression, however, is irrelevant. What is relevant is Winterson’s development of love itself, exclusive of the realms of gender identity and the gaps therein. Erotic. Passionate. Philosophical. All-inclusive.