Analyse the relationship between body and writing in Winterson and Lispector

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The concept of écriture féminine first came from Cixous’ essay, “The Laugh of the Medusa”. As a major aspect of French feminism, écriture féminine is a way of liberating the feminine from phallocentric traditions that has repressed feminine sexuality and imagination for centuries. Western knowledge has progressed through the standards of objectivity and rationality (e.g. logocentric thought) and thereby excluding the feminine experience and making women into the “other”. Dallery in “The Politics of Writing (the) Body: Écriture Féminine” claims that not only has history excluded women’s voice and input to its knowledge, but “even when the discourse is ‘about’ women, or women are the speaking subjects, (it) they still speak(s) according to phallocratic codes”.  Activity/passivity, reason/body, man/woman – these are some of the dichotomies that violently separate the feminine from history. There is thus this need to break down the binary, patriarchal structures that shape literature and language and to do so, women must subvert these binaries that privilege the first term and seek ways to empower the second. To write the body is a form of exploring écriture feminine, to realise oneself sexually and textually through the act of writing ones’ (subjective) existence. We do not need to reduce it to its biological functions, but explore the coded language behind it because the body is inscribed with a language of its own, a poetic and fluid language. It is, as Cixous states, that “woman must put herself into the text – as into the world and into history – by her own movement”.

Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body and Clarice Lispector’s The Hour of the Star are both stories that explore this relationship between language and body. In Winterson’s novel, the extract used as a blurb on all of the editions (found on page 89 of the novel) is:

“Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights: the accumulations of a lifetime gather there. In places the palimpsest is so heavily worked that the letters feel like Braille. 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”.

These words sum up the novel, in terms of écriture féminine. The narrator recognises the importance of the body, of the secrets that the body can reveal, and thus hides it from “prying eyes”. We can assume that the narrator, a subversive, fickle Lothario was, prior to meeting Louise, a secretive person, unwilling to be with someone long enough for that person to understand him/her. Indeed, as readers we still do not know enough about the narrator to figure out his/her gender. However, meeting Louise (and love) has changed him/her; Louise has read (or exposed) the narrator’s body and by doing so, finally allows the narrator to express his/her real self. Winterson gives love the power to articulate. But love, as a subject and as a language in itself has been reiterated time and time again so as to render it a form of clichéd articulation. It seems almost paradoxical to give a clichéd language power. However, by consciously acknowledging the fact that love has been exhausted and verbalised so extensively and repeatedly that it is impossible to create something new, Winterson tackles this linguistic complication effectively. “’I love you’ is always a quotation”, the narrator states on the first page of the novel. Following on the next page is a steady string of clichés: “Love makes the world go round. Love is blind. All you need is love. Nobody ever died of a broken heart” etc, and then: “it’s the clichés that cause the trouble”. This last statement is repeated four more times throughout the novel; its self-conscious emphasis reminds readers that though the words themselves are clichéd, they still have some form of power, some emotion behind the superficiality, otherwise they would not be able to “cause trouble”. However, the clichéd language, despite being self-conscious, is still inscribed with the patriarchal structure of language that it derives from. Winterson also invents elaborate and surprisingly original metaphors - “Love demands expression. It will not stay still, stay silent, be good, be modest, be seen and not heard, no. [...] It is no conservationist love. It is a big game hunter and you are the game”). These metaphors are not constrained by the generic and syntactical structures of prose, it instead exudes poetry, imagination and irrationality. Mixing the clichéd with original metaphors for love, Winterson expresses a feminine textuality of poetics that subverts the conventions of writing whilst reinforcing the clichés, making sure that it doesn’t sound too familiar and adding a refreshing twist to what would otherwise be another love story.

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The undisclosed gender of the narrator is an important aspect of the novel, one that changes the interpretation of the text depending on the way readers imagine the narrator. Many readers find that it is almost impossible to read the novel without imposing their own assumptions as to the gender of the bisexual narrator. It is easy to presume that the narrator is a woman, according to Winterson’s own gender as the writer of this novels, but this is an erroneous way of reading the novel because, as Winterson states: “I am a writer who happens to love women. I ...

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