[In the following essay, Harris draws upon the feminist theory of Luce Irigaray to examine transpersonal aspects of sexual difference and Winterson's subversion of gendered language and narrative subjectivity in Written on the Body.]

I will explore you and mine you and you will redraw me according to your will. We shall cross one another's boundaries and make ourselves one nation.

—Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

How can I say “you,” when you are always other? How can I speak to you? You remain in flux, never congealing or solidifying. What will make that current flow into words? … These streams are without fixed banks, this body without fixed boundaries.

—Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One

Like The Waves, Written on the Body is a self-reflexive text preoccupied with language; like Nightwood, it confounds simple gender categorization; and like The Talking Room, it is a meditation on love and loss. As the narrator struggles with the loss of her beloved to cancer, she attempts to literally recreate her through and as a written text.¹ Writing becomes a manifestation of passionate sexual love that enables the lover to cross the boundary between self and other and thereby fully inhabit the other's being. The central trope of the novel—writing as bodily act, the body as written text—is another trope of the liminal, similar to Woolf's “little language,” [Djuna] Barnes's third sex, and [Marianne] Hauser's ambiguously gendered characters. For Winterson, to touch the flesh and to love the body is also to write upon it and to read it. Through these metaphors, the flesh, typically considered the marker of the boundary between self and other, becomes the gateway to immersion in the other's being. Due to the central character's nearly insatiable desire for this immersion, the possibility of violating this boundary looms large in the novel. Just as Winterson explores the space between self and other, word and object, so she explores the space between masculine and feminine. While Barnes and Hauser depict characters who may be described as both masculine and feminine in terms of their behavior and desire, Winterson goes about creating gender ambiguity very differently. She depicts a nearly featureless narrator (we are only told of its romantic history) and gives us no clear signals as to its gender such as gendered pronouns or a name. Despite this refusal to mark gender, at the same time the novel offers many hints that “it” is in fact a she. By leaving her narrator's gender a question, yet loading the text with suggestions that “it” is in fact a woman, Winterson boldly claims universality for a feminine and lesbian subject position, an idea advanced in Monique Wittig's theoretical writing.

Written on the Body explores the intersubjective, ethical ramifications of the meeting of opposed terms that are the focus of this study. By dwelling on the contact between one and another in a loving, passionate relationship, the novel traces a complex tension between respect for the other and the violation of the other. In this focus on the ethics of love, the novel details a poetics of fleshly, mundane, earthly love; it dwells on the caress, the embrace, and the touch. Yet it also suggests that such love has a spiritual dimension, one that transcends the everyday and earthly. This meeting of mundane and spiritual, like the meeting of masculine and feminine within the subject in Barnes, Woolf, and Hauser, echoes Luce Irigaray's theory of the sensible transcendental. All are a means of restoring the repudiated feminine, in all its various associations, to its central place in Western thought.

“I WANT TO DO THE RIGHT THING”: THE ETHICS OF LOVE

More than the other novels studied [in this book], Written on the Body raises the question of the ethical ramifications of these meetings and crossings of opposed terms, because the meeting in this text is an intersubjective one. What does it mean to attempt to become one with the other? Although the narrator wishes to consume her lover, Louise, early in their relationship, by the end of the novel the narrator begins to see love in different terms, terms that allow her to be joined with Louise, yet not be consumed by nor consume her. The narrator discovers that “true love” requires an ethical relationship to the other. My reading of Written on the Body's ethics of love is based on Irigaray's concept of the sensible transcendental, as discussed in chapter 1. The two manifestations of this concept that bear directly on the novel are the immediate and the passion called wonder.

A central aspect of Irigaray's theory of the ethics of sexual difference is her inquiry into that which has been excluded from metaphysics—the immediate or the sensible—because it has been relegated to the feminine. Although the exclusion of the immediate is a critical problem, it is frequently overlooked: “Few people worry about finding new ways to experience passion, or passions, about working out a new pathos, or rather a more ethical spirit, rooted in the world of the senses. … the problem of the relation to the immediate has not been resolved” (Sexes and Genealogies 115). In order for “our relation to the immediate” to be “resolved,” we must first of all begin to admit that there is such a thing as the immediate, and we must acknowledge that the immediate has been problematized due to its connection with the feminine, the body, and the material. The issue of the immediate is directly related to the simultaneous insistence upon difference and lack of genuine sexual difference. In a pivotal passage, Irigaray asks why a genuine sexual difference “has not had its chance to develop, either empirically or transcendentally” (An Ethics 15). One aspect of the lack of genuine sexual difference is the split between the sensible and transcendental, which would be resolved by the meeting of these realms in the sensible transcendental. In answer to her own question, she alludes to her key notion of the sensible transcendental without naming it as such:²

It is surely a question of the dissociation of body and soul, of sexuality and spirituality, of the lack of a passage for the spirit, for the god, between the inside and the outside, the outside and the inside, and of their distribution between the sexes in the sexual act. Everything is constructed in such a way that these realities remain separate, even opposed to one another. So that they neither mix, marry, nor form an alliance. Their wedding is always being put off to a beyond, a future life, or else devalued, felt and thought to be less worthy in comparison to the marriage between the mind and God in a transcendental realm where all ties to the world of sensation have been severed.

(An Ethics 15)

Irigaray envisions a restoration of and to the senses—a healing of the breach between the sensible and the transcendental. Irigaray's language is sweeping in this passage because the nature of this breach is immense. Margaret Whitford writes that through the concept of the sensible transcendental, “Irigaray is positing that the oppositions might come into relation—the mother and father, the Sensible and the Intelligible, the immediate and the transcendent, the material and the ideal—in imaginary and symbolic processes, that is, that each sex might be able to assume its own divisions” (Luce Irigaray 122). For Irigaray, the oppositions come into relation in the meeting of man and woman. However, to take her point to its conclusion, if “each sex” is to truly “assume its own divisions,” then each sex would bear the fruit of this encounter and would be the meeting place of masculine and feminine, or the realization of genuine sexual difference. The sexed subject conceived in this way should be understood as “other-sexed,” and only possible in the context of a genuine sexual difference.

The ethical encounter that Irigaray alludes to involves not the merging of self and other but the meeting of self and other. The male-female couple is her focus because of their inherent difference: “[T]hey are irreducible one to the other” (An Ethics 12). When such an encounter truly takes place (and her language makes clear that she believes it has not), the boundaries between the lovers remain fully intact despite the intense “joining” that takes place between them. Irigaray writes: “Who or what the other is, I never know. But the other who is forever unknowable to me is the one who differs from me sexually. This feeling of surprise, astonishment and wonder in the face of the unknowable ought to be returned to its locus: that of sexual difference” (An Ethics 13). Many negative emotions factor into the relation between man and woman, “but not that wonder which beholds what it sees always as if for the first time, never taking hold of the other as its object. It does not try to seize, possess, or reduce this object, but leaves it subjective, still free” (An Ethics 13).³ The relationship between Winterson's narrator and Louise reaches this point in their last encounter in the novel. Wonder possesses a healing power, because it takes place at the junction of the sensible and the transcendental. Irigaray writes that wonder is a

birth into a transcendence, that of the other, still in the world of the senses (“sensible”), still physical and carnal, and already spiritual. Is it the place of incidence and junction of body and spirit, which has been covered over again and again, hardened through repetitions that hamper growth and flourishing? … Wonder would be the passion of the encounter between the most material and the most metaphysical, of their possible conception and fecundation one by the other. A third dimension. An intermediary. Neither the one nor the other. Which is not to say neutral or neuter. The forgotten ground of our condition …

(An Ethics 82)

Irigaray bases the possibility of a genuine sexual difference in an irreducible otherness that man and woman find in each other.⁴ This wonder is not the exclusive property of the sexually differentiated, however. To argue that, as Irigaray does, is to reduce the complexity of sexual or gender difference within the subject as well as between subjects who are presumably identical as men or women. If we think of Irigaray's writings on ethics in dialogue with her 1970s writings on women such as “When Our Lips Speak Together” (This Sex), it is possible to bridge this seeming gap. The encounter between man and woman, as Irigaray herself acknowledges, is fraught with negativity because of the history of the relation between the sexes. That is, the very division that the sensible transcendental seeks to overcome is liable to threaten this encounter. As Irigaray writes, “[B]etween man and woman … [come] attraction, greed, possession …” (13). The encounter between subjects of the “same sex” is less likely to be fraught with such issues because a history of domination between them does not exist, while it certainly does between men and women. This history of the male subordination of women is present in every encounter between the sexes. For Irigaray to insist on wonder in the heterosexual encounter and to largely dismiss the possibility of these passions occurring in the homosexual encounter is to risk simplifying homosexuality by equating it with narcissism. That is, she is blind to the difference within women as well as between women (and between men), despite her constant insistence upon the recognition of difference.

“WE SHALL CROSS ONE ANOTHER'S BOUNDARIES”: DRAWING THE LINE BETWEEN SELF AND OTHER

The mutual exchange and reciprocity discussed in the passage from Written on the Body used as an epigraph to this chapter represent the ideal that is only occasionally grasped by the narrator in her desire to be one with Louise. The fact that the narrator desires such a close connection to her lover is important in and of itself. The early parts of the novel involve two simultaneous narratives: the ongoing narrative about the relationship with Louise and the episodic narrative of her many affairs prior to Louise. Most of these affairs are with married women and most last under six months, due to the narrator's circadian clock, as she puts it.⁵ The stories of these affairs provide a necessary counterpoint to the story of Louise, for the narrator undergoes a profound reeducation about love by means of this relationship. She realizes that while she has had many affairs due to her disdain for serious relationships, especially marriage, and her belief that they are passionless, a kind of love is possible in which she may have both passion and commitment (79). She finds just this with Louise. Her jaded view of love, as represented by her previous, more lighthearted affairs, nearly compromises her relationship with Louise, despite its basis in love. When they first become lovers, the narrator is quick to declare her love, but Louise cautions her to be careful to mean what she says (53). Louise is extremely wary of the narrator due to her past exploits.

Throughout this narrative, the narrator traces her development from heartless Lothario to committed, responsible, and deeply passionate lover. The narrator is rather self-conscious about the issue of ethics in love. At one point, she questions her own ethical failings as well as those of most people (43). Louise stands in the position of “saviour”: through loving her fully, the narrator will be able to escape her past (77). But the narrator must first fail Louise before she learns to love her as she is meant to be loved. In fact, the impetus for the novel is the narrator's desire to understand “where I went wrong” (17). Throughout the novel, the narrator's understanding of love expands and matures: she comes to learn that intimacy is “the recognition of another person that is deeper than consciousness, lodged in the body more than held in the mind” (82). Yet despite this realization early in her relationship with Louise, it takes her some time to act on this knowledge. She also revises this definition somewhat, eventually “recognizing” Louise on levels other than the physical. When she leaves Louise upon learning that she has cancer, she does so because Louise's husband Elgin, an oncologist, will continue to care for her only on this condition. Despite the concern for Louise's health upon which this decision is based, the narrator makes the mistake of not recognizing Louise's wish to stay with her. Instead, the narrator only recognizes her own sense of what is right, and by completely overlooking Louise's sense of what is right, she betrays her. After their separation, the narrator begins to think of Louise differently, and this indicates the distance she has come in her awareness of what love can be in the fullest sense. While praying for Louise, the narrator begins “[t]o think of Louise in her own right, not as my lover, not as my grief. It helped me to forget myself and that was a great blessing” (153). At the same time, because she is thinking of Louise in her own right, the narrator begins to doubt her decision to leave Louise to Elgin: “‘You made a mistake,’ said the voice” (153). Part of this process of understanding love anew involves the narrator's gradual realization of the way in which she has failed Louise by leaving her. In the act of writing this narrative, she recognizes that to leave Louise was to fail her. After several moments when she doubts her actions (148, 153), the narrator finally admits that “I had failed Louise and it was too late. What right had I to decide how she should live? What right had I to decide how she should die?” (156–57). After her employer and one-time lover Gail Right confirms the narrator's own opinion (and Gail Right's name tells us how to regard her views), the narrator decides to return to London to look for Louise (158–59). Although she does not find her, she leaves a letter with her address, which leads to their eventual reunion on the last page of the novel.

The narrator's love for Louise is so profound that she wants to immerse herself fully in Louise's being, primarily her physical being. As Winterson writes, “I didn't only want Louise's flesh, I wanted her bones, her blood, her tissues, the sinews that bound her together. I would have held her to me though time had stripped away the tones and textures of her skin” (51). This passage is notable for its hyperbole. The narrator has always guarded herself against full attachment and commitment, yet now she wants these as well as complete absorption in every aspect of her lover's being. Because her desire for Louise is so extensive that it is boundless, she speaks constantly of crossing all boundaries between them. Yet there is a kind of violence implicit here in her desire to have Louise as a collection of body parts (“her bones, her blood, her tissues”). This violence comes full circle in the central section of the text, entitled “THE CELLS, TISSUES, SYSTEMS AND CAVITIES OF THE BODY,” in which the narrator literally seeks to become one with each part of Louise's body, using the language of medical textbooks to get under Louise's skin. In what follows, I refer to this section as the body parts section.

The narrator's desire for full connection is not always so excessive, however. It is tempered, for example, in a passage where she discusses the “tie” between them. Although she and Louise are “held by a single loop of love,” it is a straight loop with “no sharp twists or sinister turns” (88). She compares this “loop of love” to the actual rope that was used to tie two fighters in Renaissance Italy. This is not her wish; instead, she wants a clean, straight line between them: “I want the hoop around our hearts to be a guide not a terror” (88). At this point in the text, Winterson uses writing and reading as metaphors for the connection between the narrator and her lover, and these best convey the nature of this tie.

Articulacy of the fingers … signing on the body body longing. Who taught you to write in blood on my back? Who taught you to use your hands as branding irons? You have scored your name into my shoulders, referenced me with your mark …

Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights; the accumulations of a lifetime gather there … I like to keep my body rolled up away from prying eyes. Never unfold too much, tell the whole story. I didn't know that Louise would have reading hands. She has translated me into her own book.

(89)

In this passage the narrator and Louise switch roles: it is usually the narrator who is the lover and Louise who is the beloved. The lover here does a certain violence to the beloved's body, branding and scoring marks upon her flesh. But these are marks upon the surface of the body and they merely add to “the accumulations of a lifetime”—the scars and marks of daily living and aging. The act of reading that is described in the rest of the passage is a loving act: having sheltered herself and her story, the narrator now opens herself like a book under Louise's hands. These hands have a double function, which is both to write upon her body and to read her body. The “translation” described in the last line of the passage is a transfer into another medium, which does not irrevocably alter the narrator or her story.⁶ It is not a violent appropriation or violation like the narrator's forced entry into Louise's body in the body parts section. Writing and reading metaphors serve to balance the narrator's desire for immersion with ethical respect for the other. Such metaphors imply that there is always a remainder: she cannot fully have Louise, but only a version or interpretation of her, just as Louise cannot fully have her.

At these moments when the narrator balances desire for immersion in the other and recognition of the other in her otherness, there are striking parallels between Winterson's novel and Irigaray's classic text on the union between women lovers, “When Our Lips Speak Together,” the source of the second epigraph to this chapter. What unites the speaker and her lover in Irigaray's text is first their similarity, from which everything else springs. She writes: “We live by twos … Our resemblance does without semblances: for in our bodies we are already the same. Touch yourself, touch me, you'll ‘see’” (This Sex 216). Their giving is reciprocal, since to love the other is to love the self: “When you say I love you … you're saying I love myself … That ‘I love you’ is neither gift nor debt” (206). As in Written on the Body, the issue of language is central to the issue of connection and boundary crossing: Irigaray writes of “find[ing] our body's language” (214). Such a bodily language will facilitate the fluidity of the boundaries between the two women: “Let's hurry and invent our own phrases. So that everywhere and always we can continue to embrace … We shall pass imperceptibly through every barrier, unharmed, to find each other” (215).

Irigaray writes of a kind of alternative space or relation that is possible between women, in comparison to the place in which women find themselves in Western culture—a subordinate place in the patriarchal, heterosexual economy that divides women from each other. Similarly, in Written on the Body, it is the narrator's investment in a limited notion of love drawn from the heterosexual economy that divides her from Louise. Irigaray writes: “We put ourselves into watertight compartments, break ourselves up into parts, cut ourselves in two, and more. Whereas we are always one and the other, at the same time. If we separate ourselves that way, we ‘all’ stop being born” (217). Women are deprived of life itself in this economy because of the insistence on clear boundaries between all beings. Women must escape in order to survive. Irigaray describes the deadening effect of being immersed in the patriarchal economy in this way:

How can we speak so as to escape from their compartments, their schemas, their distinctions and oppositions … How can we shake off the chain of these terms, free ourselves from their categories … You know that we are never completed, but that we only embrace ourselves whole. That one after another, parts—of the body, of space, of time—interrupt the flow of our blood. Paralyze, petrify, immobilize us. Make us paler. Almost frigid.

(212; emphasis added)

This is precisely what we see in the body parts section of the novel, in reverse. Having lived fully in, through, and with Louise, the narrator is stunned by loss when she leaves Louise to Elgin. She then attempts to recreate Louise but uses the language of Western medicine to do so. The more she thinks of Louise in this light, the less alive she becomes. Over the course of this section, this same categorization and negation that Irigaray details take place. Rather than bring Louise to life, as is the narrator's wish, she renders her lifeless, piece by piece.⁷

The narrator violates Louise, from a metaphorical standpoint, when she takes the notion of crossing boundaries too far during their separation by using a Western medical approach to the body. That she rewrites Louise's body in this context at the same time that she literally abandons Louise to Western medical care makes this violent rewriting all the more violent. When Louise asked the narrator early in their relationship if she would stay with her unconditionally, clearly she was referring to the narrator's inevitable discovery of her illness. Just as she fails Louise by leaving her, so she fails her by attempting to invade her body much as the cancer itself has done. The particular way in which she approaches Louise's body—as a collection of discrete parts—also constitutes a failure. Ironically, such an approach overlooks the specific way that cancer attacks the body. The narrator makes several references to the anomaly that cancer is when considered from the standpoint of Western medicine, yet she herself does not follow this lead. Cancer is holistic in its invasion of the body, while Western medicine isolates the body into discrete parts (105, 175). She explains metastasis in this way: “Cancer has a unique property; it can travel from the site of origin to distant tissues … In doctor-think the body is a series of bits to be isolated and treated as necessary, that the body in its very disease may act as a whole is an upsetting concept. Holistic medicine is for faith healers and crackpots, isn't it?” (175). The narrator fails to understand that she herself uses “doctor-think” to recreate and know Louise more fully when she leaves her. She seeks to be one with her, paradoxically, by dividing her up and knowing each part of her, an approach that is anything but holistic. Louise's style of loving should also have given her a hint: “It was necessary to engage her whole person. Her mind, her heart, her soul and her body could only be present as two sets of twins. She would not be divided from herself” (68). The narrator has previously approached relationships in just the opposite way: relationships engaged her body and her passion, but never any other part of her. To some extent, this is also true of her relationship with Louise. The narrator is attentive to the body in and of itself and to the bodily nature of their love, at the expense of other aspects of their connection. Only after leaving Louise and trying to find her again is she able to see that she has made an error and must bring back into their love those other parts of herself, primarily her faith and her trust.

Although the body parts section begins with an attempt to become more intimate with Louise, in the narrator's sense of “recognition,” it takes several turns away from this initial aim.

If I could not put Louise out of my mind I would drown myself in her. Within the clinical language … I found a love-poem to Louise. I would go on knowing her, more intimately than the skin, hair and voice that I craved. I would have her plasma, her spleen, her synovial fluid. I would recognise her even when her body had long since fallen away.

(111)

The effect of this method of knowing her is to depersonalize her utterly. By studying an anatomy textbook, she does not learn about Louise's skin and organs; instead, she learns about generic skin and organs. The body represented in the anatomy textbook is not Louise's body, but any body (and at the same time, no body).⁸ Simply reading about biology and anatomy is not going to bring Louise to her on this level. It is even arguable whether this is the level at which the spirit of a human being exists. It seems that the narrator has taken her former style of loving, which stopped at the physical and passionate, and has pushed that to an extreme, hoping that this will be the equivalent of “true love.” This may be due to her new definition of intimacy as “the recognition of another person that is deeper than consciousness, lodged in the body more than held in the mind” (82; emphasis added). Privileging the body over the mind is as great a mistake as privileging the mind over the body. A true recognition of the other would be an ethical encounter, which would involve a meeting of mind and body, just as it is a meeting of self and other. Although the narrator believes that she can avoid death and mortality through this approach to Louise, she in a sense kills the real Louise and replaces her with Louise as dissected corpse, the material basis of the anatomy lessons she teaches herself. The language of death even creeps in to these sections more and more.⁹

In the section on the cavities of the body, the narrator very explicitly uses such a language: “Let me penetrate you. I am the archaeologist of tombs. I would devote my life to marking your passageways, the entrances and exits of that impressive mausoleum, your body” (119). Of course, since the narrator is contemplating her beloved's eventual death, she is bound to see Louise's body as her grave. Yet it seems that she metaphorically assists in the process by so relishing her role as mortician, as in her reference to “embalm[ing] you in my memory” (119). Because losing Louise has made her feel dead, the narrator wants to kill her in turn: “You must be rid of life as I am rid of life” (119). Such remarks make it clear that the narrator is conscious of and deliberate about the language that she is using. The reason for this attempt to metaphorically invade Louise's body is at last made clear. The narrator writes of “knowing” Louise externally by appreciating her physical beauty, but she sees a vast gap between knowing the surface and knowing the depth: “I have held your head in my hands but I have never held you. Not you in your spaces, spirit, electrons of life” (120). The narrator's desire to penetrate Louise actually preceded their separation. “Mining” is a common metaphor in the text for the narrator's lovemaking, whether or not it is with Louise. She speaks of “explor[ing] you and min[ing] you” (20), as well as of her queasiness about “plumbing” the depths of her lovers (17). She often uses the term “pushing into” as well (110, 137). Related to this series of metaphors are analogies between a woman's sex and a shell (15, 73), and the narrator occasionally brags about her violent penetration of these shells. She notes, “I've … blown into the hollows of many [shells]. Where I've left cracking too severe to mend the owners have simply turned the bad part to the shade” (15). Coupled with the violent metaphors of the body parts section, the overall picture is one of the violation of the other.

The ethical dimension of love that the narrator eventually discovers has a spiritual dimension as well, which is suggested through the narrator's many references to the pilgrim. The first reference is to a print in Louise's house, of Edward Burne-Jones's Love and the Pilgrim. This comes into play early in their affair when the narrator is quick to say “I love you,” and Louise cautions her to “Never say you love me until that day when you have proved it” (54). The narrator then reflects on Love and the Pilgrim, which hangs in the room where they have just made love: “An angel in clean garments leads by the hand a traveller footsore and weary. The traveller is in black and her cloak is still caught by the dense thicket of thorns from which they have both emerged. Would Louise lead me so? Did I want to be led?” (54). The narrator is correct in her judgment that “As a lover I was lethal” (53). Not fully present, because she is still wrapping up her relationship with Jacqueline, the narrator is far from ready to be led by Louise. First, she must wander through that “dense thicket” alone—her self-exile from Louise.¹⁰

The narrator muses again on the image of the pilgrim, after comparing being held by Louise to being rocked in a boat. She imagines medieval pilgrims setting sail, secure in their faith and belief in God. In this image, Louise is the boat, the narrator the pilgrim: “Louise let me sail in you over these spirited waves. I have the hope of a saint in a coracle … Love it was that drove them forth. Love that brought them home again” (81). The narrator feels herself capable of trusting Louise and following her faithfully, but this is prior to learning that Louise has cancer. She thinks she is ready to give up her past and become someone new with Louise: “Louise, I would gladly fire the past for you, go and not look back … I know what it will mean to redeem myself from the accumulations of a lifetime” (81). As the story plays out, however, she discovers that she is far from ready. The narrator tellingly transforms the pilgrim's voyage into a bodily voyage as they begin making love again: “Eyes closed I began a voyage down her spine, the cobbled road of hers that brought me to a cleft and a damp valley” (82). Compared to the open-ended, dangerous voyage of emotional intimacy, the voyage of physical intimacy is easy and pleasant. She seems to realize this herself towards the end of the novel, after she has returned to London to seek out Louise. She questions every move that she has made, particularly her failure to accept Louise's refusal to go back to Elgin. In this context, she refers to Louise again as her guide and potential saviour. “Louise, stars in your eyes, my own constellation. I was following you faithfully but I looked down. You took me out beyond the house, over the roofs, way past commonsense and good behaviour. No compromise. I should have trusted you but I lost my nerve” (187). By initiating their reconciliation, the narrator finally puts her faith in Louise, becoming pilgrim to her angel/saviour as in Love and the Pilgrim.¹¹

The love between the narrator and Louise, particularly when they are reunited at the end of the novel, involves wonder in the Irigarayan sense because it involves the unification of body and soul, the sexual and the spiritual. While several critics see this union as “fantastic,” I would argue that it is important that we see it as real and realizable.¹² The narrator's shock and surprise when she opens her door and sees Louise indicate wonder, not the fantastic, imaginary nature of Louise's return. Upon seeing Louise, the narrator needs to touch her to be convinced that she's real: “I put out my hand and felt her fingers, she took my fingers and put them to her mouth … Am I stark mad? She's warm” (190). The expansiveness of her vision as she describes the scene of their reunion is now the measure (to use the narrator's own metaphor) of love, rather than loss being the measure of love, as was the case at the beginning of the novel (9). “The windows have turned into telescopes. Moon and stars are magnified in this room. The sun hangs over the mantelpiece. I stretch out my hand and reach the corners of the world. The world is bundled up in this room” (190).¹³ Here Winterson uses the same language to describe the reunion that she used to describe the room in which Louise and the narrator first made love: “The walls … were breathing. I could feel them moving under my touch … The light, channeled by the thin air, heated the panes of glass too hot to open. We were magnified in this high wild room. You and I could reach the ceiling and the floor and every side of our loving cell” (51). This earlier scene is just as fantastic as the final reunion scene, but there is not doubt that it takes place: their love is so profound and so transformative that it alters material objects. Such a meeting on all levels, such a crossing of strict boundaries, is possible. Winterson achieves the crossing of boundaries in another context through the genderless narrative voice.

“MALE OR FEMALE”: THE GENDERLESS NARRATIVE VOICE

I thought you were the most beautiful creature male or female I had ever seen.

(Winterson, Written on the Body 84)

While Winterson's narrator is technically ungendered, there are many wry hints that “it” is in fact a “she.” For example, we learn of the narrator's revolutionary acts with her radical feminist girlfriend Inge, and it is impossible to imagine Inge as anything but a lesbian (22–23). We also learn of the narrator's dream about a girlfriend who sets a mousetrap for her mailman's penis because she is annoyed with him. She tells the narrator that she has nothing to worry about; that is to say, her genitals could not be caught in such a trap (41–42).¹⁴ On a more serious note, many of the narrator's girlfriends refer to her lovemaking abilities and the implication seems to be that she knows and loves them in a way that their husbands and boyfriends cannot. The narrator's refusal to equate love with reproduction suggests that her brand of loving is nonreproductive, that is, lesbian (108). There are also extratextual reasons for reading the narrator's gender as female; Winterson discusses her lesbianism as well as the autobiographical nature of all of her texts (particularly Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and Written on the Body) in interviews.¹⁵

In addition to the many plot “hints” that the narrator is a woman, many passages establish the strong similarities between the lovers. Here, again, Winterson is rather direct. In the following passage, the narrator comments on the differences between heterosexual and lesbian love precisely in terms of the question of difference.

I thought difference was rated to be the largest part of sexual attraction but there are so many things about us that are the same.

Bone of my bone. Flesh of my flesh. To remember you it's my own body I touch. Thus she was, here and here.

(129–30)

One of the means by which the heterosexual economy operates is of course this idea that “opposites attract.” By contrast, the narrator discovers through Louise the intense allure of sameness. The narrator also states, while separated from Louise: “You are still the colour of my blood. You are my blood. When I look in the mirror it's not my own face I see. Your body is twice. Once you once me. Can I be sure which is which?” (99). These passages, in their freshness and beauty, resemble Irigaray's “When Our Lips Speak Together.” Despite this, the narrator occasionally slips into a dangerous kind of boundary crossing, as in the body parts section as well as in other passages such as this: “She was my twin and I lost her. Skin is waterproof but my skin was not waterproof against Louise. She flooded me and she has not drained away. I am still wading through her, she beats upon my doors and threatens my innermost safety” (163).¹⁶ There is a certain danger even in these positive evocations of connection through similarity; it is due to the all-consuming nature of their love, which threatens the loss of self.

Why does Winterson leave gender unmarked in the standard sense by eliminating gendered pronouns, yet load the text with other marks of gender, as discussed above?¹⁷ It is doubtful that Winterson finds concealment in and of itself subversive. Rather, what is subversive occurs on the level of language. The use of the pronoun “she” immediately locates women in a subordinate position in the social order. According to Monique Wittig, to refuse to gender women in this way grants them a different status, the status of the universal, a position historically available only to men.¹⁸

Wittig is concerned with gender not just as a social category but as a linguistic category, and she notes how these two categories inform each other.¹⁹ For Wittig, the foundation of oppression is difference—the male/female as well as the heterosexual/homosexual oppositions.²⁰ For that reason, she takes a position quite different from Irigaray's regarding difference. For Wittig, difference must be abolished, not rediscovered, for difference is synonymous with “domination.” On this point, she writes that “[t]he concept of difference has nothing ontological about it. It is only the way that the masters interpret a historical situation of domination. The function of difference is to mask at every level the conflicts of interest, including ideological ones” (29). Difference and gender mark women only, not men, for “the masculine is not the masculine but the general” (60). Wittig's position on gender is the opposite of Irigaray's. Instead of the masculine being the only sex, the feminine is the only sex in Wittig's account: “[T]he category of sex is the category that sticks to women, for only they cannot be conceived outside of it. Only they are sex” (8; emphasis in original). For this reason, in order to assume a universal position, a woman must be de-gendered as Winterson's narrator is. Language provides this possibility of freeing women of their entrapment in the particular: “Gender then must be destroyed. The possibility of its destruction is given through the very exercise of language. For each time I say ‘I,’ I reorganize the world from my point of view and through abstraction I lay claim to universality. This fact holds true for every locutor” (81). In Wittig's terms, the fact that Winterson's narrator is a lesbian makes her better able to assume such a universal, that is, non-gender-marked position.²¹ Although in some ways the fact that lesbians are women is inescapable (that is, after all, part of what makes them lesbians), lesbians are in many ways “not women,” as Wittig succinctly puts it (32). Lesbian “is beyond the categories of sex (woman and man), because the designated subject ‘lesbian’ is not a woman, either economically, politically, or ideologically. For what makes a woman is a specific social relation to a man” (20). This distance of lesbians from womanhood by virtue of their distance from men may explain the amount of attention paid to Louise's husband, Elgin, in the novel.²² It is only by understanding him that we can understand Louise's leaving him for the narrator.

It is important that we read Winterson's “concealment” of her narrator's gender and not just read through it by attempting to read the gender that is presumably concealed.²³ Winterson's refusal to mark the narrator's gender must be read as a strategy: what she attains through de-gendering the narrative voice is a universal subject position. As a “universal” voice, however, doesn't this narrator speak as a man, a possible result of the universalization of women and lesbians that Wittig doesn't consider?²⁴ As is well known, much of the work of feminism over the past twenty-five years has been aimed at particularizing one's position as subject and speaker. Concurrent with this is the critique of the masculine hidden under the guise of the universal. While I argue that the narrator of Written on the Body is feminine, I also argue that she is feminine under the guise of the universal/masculine. Such an impersonation is both disturbing, because it seems retrogressive, and exciting, because it seems subversive and productive. Again, my dual perspective here is informed by both Irigaray and Wittig. For Irigaray, if a woman were to adopt a masculine position, this would be disturbing because it further eradicates the feminine, the other sex, and bolsters the masculine, the one sex. For Wittig, however, a woman's adoption of a masculine position would be liberating because it would relieve woman of the burden of sex, by which she is always marked. If we consider not just the genderless voice of the novel but what that voice is saying at various times, we might be able to escape this critical impasse. Early in the narrative, when the narrator has just entered her relationship with Louise, she seems to speak from a masculine position: she is a Lothario, a rake who brags about the many women she has “had.” After she leaves Louise and begins to doubt herself and admit her failure, her vulnerability positions her as a woman in the traditional sense. The flexible ego boundaries that the narrator discovers while with Louise also indicate a classically feminine subject position. If the narrator can be and is both these things, isn't her gender more nuanced than the simple designation “masculine” or “feminine” would allow? I am tempted to say that, like Bernard, the narrator moves from the masculine to the feminine end of the gender spectrum. Yet, when the other characters analyzed [in this book]—Robin, Matthew, V, and J—are also considered, the very fluidity of their sex/gender identifications throws into question the metaphor of a “gender spectrum.” A linear metaphor does not begin to suggest the complexity of “other sexes.”

Notes

1. The gender of Winterson's first-person narrator is never specified in the text, a fact that has been widely discussed in reviews of the novel. In the few critical essays on Winterson, this issue has not been adequately resolved, I would argue. I refer to the narrator as “she” throughout this chapter because there is much support, both textual and extratextual, for reading “it” as a “her.” I will discuss this in detail later in the chapter.

2. In a note to Irigaray's essay “The Limits of the Transference,” Margaret Whitford provides a gloss on the sensible transcendental: “The sensible transcendental is a term which refers to the overcoming of the split between material and ideal, body and spirit, immanence and transcendence, and their assignment to women and men respectively. Each sex should be able to represent both possibilities” (117).

3. My discussion of Irigaray here is based largely on “Sexual Difference,” the introductory essay in An Ethics of Sexual Difference (5–19). The key terms I have used from Irigaray—angel, mucus, lips—all emerge from this essay and are key components of Irigaray's vision of sexual difference. The mucous membranes are the site of a “communion” between lovers (19); angels are “messengers of ethics” that represent “a sexuality that has never been incarnated” (16); the paired lips of the woman's body provide a model of the ethical relationship, for they “do not assimilate, reduce, or swallow up” (18). See chapter 1, note 21, for further references to these figures.

4. Irigaray's ethics of sexual difference is in many ways a response to the philosophical tradition, particularly Emmanuel Levinas's work on ethics. She writes that Levinas's view of love fails to reach “the transcendence of the other which becomes immediate ecstasy in me and with him—or her. For Levinas, the distance is always maintained with the other in the experience of love … This autistic, egological, solitary love does not correspond to the shared outpouring, to the loss of boundaries which takes place for both lovers when they cross the boundary of the skin into the mucous membranes of the body, leaving the circle which encloses my solitude” (“Questions to Emmanuel Levinas” 180). Her description of the crossing of the boundary between lovers in this passage could be a description of the genuine encounter between the narrator and Louise at the end of the novel.

5. Although these numerous affairs are presented comically, there is a kind of urgency about some of them that indicates the narrator's greater investment. The narrator seems crushed when one lover, Bathsheba, returns to her husband. With Jacqueline, she consciously seeks out a long-term, committed relationship, and when she leaves Jacqueline for Louise (with guilty doubts about her choice), Jacqueline's revenge is brutal and devastating.

6. See 89, 106, 118, 124–25 for other passages on writing on the body.

7. In “The Fecundity of the Caress,” Irigaray writes, “The other cannot be transformed into discourse, fantasies, or dreams. It is impossible for me to substitute any other, thing or god, for the other—because of this touching of and by him, which my body remembers” (An Ethics 216). This cautionary remark certainly bears on the narrator's deep involvement in finding a stand-in for Louise in the form of a scientific knowledge of the body.

8. The body of the anatomy textbook is more likely to be a “universal” male body than a female body, except in the chapter on reproduction.

9. Several critics and commentators on the novel see this section in a very different light. Christy L. Burns sees the narrator's writing in this section as “playful and erotic” (11). She also claims that the narrator counteracts the clinical textbook language though her own rewriting of it (Burns refers to “the narrator's own resistance to the callousness of that language and her/his attempt to fantasize Louise's presence into being” [11]). Laura Reed-Morrison reads the section in a similar way, writing that “the narrator … rewrites sterile medical language as something transcendently personal” (1). See Carolyn Allen, Following Djuna 76 and Daphne M. Kutzer 143 for similar comments on this section. Taking a different approach, I argue that a strong undercurrent of violence marks this section, because the model of the anatomy textbook is not just “clinical” but dehumanizing on several levels, and the narrator's language is taken over by it.

10. While working in the British Museum, the narrator reflects on a visual image of a pilgrim and a maze in an illuminated manuscript in which these figures illustrate the letter “L.” The narrator asks herself, “How would the pilgrim try through the maze, the maze so simple to angels and birds. I tried to fathom the path for a long time but I was caught at dead ends … I gave up and shut the book, forgetting that the first word had been Love” (88). Again, at this stage, the narrator is simply not up to the task of finding her way through the maze of love, either literally or, as here, figuratively.

11. Louise's angelic status makes her a figure of the fluid boundary as much as the narrator is through her undeclared gender. In chapter 4, I discussed Irigaray's figure of the angel, which stands for the merging of opposed terms and the crossing of boundaries on many levels. See Written on the Body 54, 131, 160 for references to Louise as an angel.

12. For readings of the ending as fantastic, see Burns 14–15 and Allen, Following Djuna 71–72.

13. This passage alludes to John Donne's “The Good Morrow” and “The Sun Rising.”

14. This could also imply that the narrator's penis is too small to be caught in the trap. There are other suggestions that the narrator could be male, such as his/her boyfriend “Crazy Frank,” who wears nipple rings in an attempt to be “deeply butch” (92). Crazy Frank seems like a gay man, thus leading the reader to consider whether the narrator might be a bisexual man. Most of the evidence, however, points to the narrator being female.

15. For one example of such an interview, see Winterson, “I fear insincerity,” where she says that Written on the Body is based on her affair with her former agent, Pat Kavanagh. Allen cites similar reasons for reading the narrator as a woman (Following Djuna 48–49). She also situates the narrator's unspecified sex in the context of fear of loss, which is the key to her argument about women's fiction in the Barnes tradition. The unspecified sex works to undercut the similarity of the lovers' bodies, which threatens “loss of boundaries” in the psychological sense (49).

16. These passages may be read in another sense as well, however. Although I maintain that the narrator is a woman, it is possible to imagine such passages being written about a certain kind of relationship between a man and a woman. This would be the sort of true union between the sexes that Irigaray describes in the context of wonder.

17. Winterson reserves the genderless status for her narrator: all the other characters are decidedly male or female.

18. Indeed, the position of the universal is not just available to men but is by its very definition a male position, as the use of “he” in English as the “universal” pronoun attests.

19. Burns notes the similarities between Written on the Body and Wittig's The Lesbian Body. I will be exploring the connections between the novel and Wittig's critical writing in The Straight Mind. All further references are to this text. Kutzer mentions in passing that Written on the Body “comes quite close” to Wittig's call for a “minority point-of-view that becomes truly universal,” but she discusses neither the means of achieving this nor the ramifications of it in the novel (140).

20. Wittig writes that “straight society is based on the necessity of the different/other at every level … what is the different/other if not the dominated?” (29).

21. This statement should be qualified. The narrator makes several references to past boyfriends, but far more to girlfriends. Like Robin Vote in Nightwood and J in The Talking Room, her sexuality is not easily contained. All three women are bisexual in terms of their sexual practice but seem to be lesbian in terms of identity and desire.

22. We learn more about Elgin than we do about Louise or the narrator (of whom we learn nothing at all). We learn of his family and childhood, his career path, his sexual interests (masochism), and the history of his relationship with Louise.

23. My experience of teaching the novel to undergraduates is telling. Many of my students were preoccupied with “finding out” the narrator's “real gender,” to the point of asking me if Winterson revealed what it “really was” in interviews.

24. In her essay on the convergence of feminism and postmodernism in three of Winterson's novels (see 143, 149), Laura Doan addresses the issue of Winterson's female characters usurping masculine power in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and The Passion. In my reading, the universal voice of the narrator in Written on the Body has a similar function. Doan's readings of Winterson's various strategies for challenging the gender binary and the institution of heterosexuality (including parody, cross-dressing, and grafting) are similar to my readings of Barnes and Hauser in particular. I see my reading of the narrative voice in Written on the Body as a further stage in what Doan calls Winterson's creation of “a sexual politics of heterogeneity and a vision of hybridized gender constructions outside an either/or proposition” (154).