Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body: The Non-gendered Narrator and the Lesbian Hero PDF

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Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body: The Non-gendered Narrator and the Lesbian Hero Trabajo de Fin de Grado en Estudios Ingleses Raquel González Fernández Tutora: Carolina Fernández Rodríguez Facultad de Filosofía y Letras Curso 2018/2019 Julio, 2019 2 Raquel González Fernández 1. Contents 1. C...

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Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body: The Non-gendered Narrator and the Lesbian Hero Raquel González

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Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body: The Non-gendered Narrator and the Lesbian Hero Trabajo de Fin de Grado en Estudios Ingleses

Raquel González Fernández

Tutora: Carolina Fernández Rodríguez

Facultad de Filosofía y Letras

Curso 2018/2019

Julio, 2019

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Raquel González Fernández

1. Contents

1.

Contents.......................................................................................................... 2

2.

Abstract .......................................................................................................... 3

3.

Introduction .................................................................................................... 4

4.

Theoretical Framework .................................................................................. 6 4.1.

Narratology ............................................................................................. 6

4.2.

Feminist Literary Criticism ..................................................................... 8

4.3.

Queer Theory ........................................................................................ 10

4.4.

Lesbian Feminist Criticism ................................................................... 12

5.

The Non-gendered Narrator ......................................................................... 15

6.

The Lesbian Hero and the Body................................................................... 23

7.

Conclusion.................................................................................................... 31

8.

Works Cited.................................................................................................. 33

Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body: The Non-gendered Narrator and the Lesbian Hero

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2. Abstract

The aim of this paper is to analyse Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body (1992) in order to understand how the narrator operates within the novel. Applying narratology together with feminist literary criticism, queer theory and lesbian feminist criticism and combining notions and ideas that belong to those fields, we hope to gain deeper knowledge regarding how Winterson works with language to play with the narrator’s gender and sexuality. The use of a nongendered narrator offers a space in which to analyse gender roles, stereotypes and heteronormative language and behaviour, as well as to delve into the effect they produce in readers. Besides considering the question of the narrator’s undetermined gender, this paper will also explore the character of Louise as a potential lesbian hero. We hope to determine the process through which she becomes a lesbian hero and what she actually means for the narrator and the novel itself.

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Raquel González Fernández

3. Introduction

Written on the Body is a novel written by postmodern writer Jeanette Winterson. It was originally published in 1992. The plot focuses on the love of two people: one being the narrator and the other a married woman called Louise. Throughout the novel, Winterson allows the reader to witness the development of this relationship from the narrator’s perspective. Not only is the progress of the relationship described, but readers are also given glimpses of the narrator’s numerous previous relationships. The main reason for my interest in this novel is the narrator, as readers are never given a definite clue that indicates the narrator’s gender. As we read and analyse their1 many interactions —romantic and sexual— with women, men, and finally with Louise, we may try to gather evidence of their gender basing our proofs on stereotypes of the two binary genders, and gender roles. The experience of reading this novel forces readers to continually reconsider their preconceived ideas and opinions about gender roles and what a man and a woman are supposed to be. The aim of offering an in-depth analysis of this novel is to try to understand how Winterson manages to play with readers’ pre-established ideas about gender and sexuality by means of postmodern language. In the first place, we will try to understand how Winterson is able to build a character without ever revealing their gender, and how she makes readers wonder whether the narrator is a woman, a man or both at different points in the novel. The narrator is presented to the readers as a person with many different traits that on some occasions may lead the reader to believe they are a woman, but on others may push them to believe they are, in fact, a man.

Since the narrator’s gender is not clearly defined in the novel, I will be using the third-person plural pronouns or both masculine and feminine third-person pronouns to refer to them throughout the rest of the paper.

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In the second place, we will try to analyse how readers may try to guess the narrator’s gender through the character of Louise and the narrator’s sexual identities. This relationship is usually one of dependence within mainstream society, but it may not be as useful as it may seem in trying to finally determine the narrator’s gender. After this, we will consider a possible lesbian relationship between the narrator and Louise if the former were to finally be confirmed to be a woman. Finally, we will analyse Louise’s character as a lesbian hero and how her status in the novel as such is achieved through the changes Winterson makes in the inscriptions of her body throughout the novel. In order to carry out this analysis, we will be using concepts and ideas from different theoretical fields. For the study of the narrator, it will be necessary to delve into narratology and its application to literary theory. Besides that, notions related to feminist literary criticism, queer theory and lesbian feminist criticism will be used to understand how stereotypes, gender or sexuality work in this novel so that it can achieve its goal, which is to make readers question their prejudices about gender and sexuality.

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4. Theoretical Framework

4.1. Narratology Narratology is the discipline dedicated to the study of the universal structures within narratives. It focuses on the common patterns that can be found within narrative texts, not just written —fictional or non-fictional— but also texts from a broad range of different media such as films or music. However, for the purpose of this discussion, we will focus on the application of narratology theory to literary fiction. Although narratology is tightly intertwined with many other areas of the Humanities, the ones that could be considered the closest for the major applications to these fields would be: semiotics, linguistics and literary theory. While analysing narratives we should not forget that narration is art; however, as Wayne Booth states in his book The Rhetoric of Fiction, “Narration is an art, not a science, but this does not mean that we are necessarily doomed to fail when we attempt to formulate principles about it” (1983, 164), and the same would be true in the case of music or the plastic arts. Taking into consideration the various aspects of narratology helps us understand not just the effects caused by the text on the reader and the reasons behind them, but it may also contribute to one’s perception of the work or the author’s intention. Examining what narratives have in common and what makes them different narratively speaking is the ultimate purpose of narratology (Prince 1982, 7); it differs from other disciplines that likewise deal with literary texts in that narratology does not focus on aspects related to aesthetics, history, or genre: it concentrates on formal aspects that may later be applied to the study of the effects on the reader and the reasons behind them.

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The main narratological aspect that we are going to consider in this discussion is the concept of the narrator, as the aim of this dissertation is to analyse Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body (1993). Usually, when we think about narrators we classify them according to very basic labels like “third-person” or “limited;” nevertheless, Booth argues that these terms “tells us little about how they [narrators] differ from each other, or why they succeed while others described in the same terms fail” (1983, 150). Narratology studies narrators in an effect-oriented manner, not just determining their type, but scrutinizing the narrator’s features that explain why one narrator works in one text but not in another, or why a certain narrator in a particular narrative produces a specific effect2 on the reader. One of the elements that will be undoubtedly useful while discussing one specific narrator is the variations of distance, which require three considerations: the distance from the narrator to the implied author, to the characters in the story, and to the reader’s norms (Booth 1983, 156). Narratology is generally considered as a discipline that developed in the structuralist environment at the beginning of the 20th century, having been influenced by authors such as Barthes, Genette or Propp; however, when structuralism was replaced by poststructuralism in the 1960s, narratology was transformed. Even though there are obvious changes from the purely structuralist narratology of the discipline’s beginnings to the poststructuralist and postclassical variants of later years, there is still a strong component in narratology that focuses on the structures of the stories and texts. Postclassical narratology is more open than its predecessor regarding the elements and factors it considers relevant to its field of studies, and also to the media that those analyses are applied to. Sex and gender are two aspects that many feminist critics and theorists have been trying to incorporate to the corpus of narratology; simultaneously, many narratologists argue against that incorporation claiming that the aforementioned elements do not constitute a specific difference within a narrative. This would mean that those elements would be useless in pursuing one of the main functions of narratology, namely, to examine what makes two narratives different from each other. Despite this, many feminist

“Narratology has been important in accounting for the exact mechanism through which these various illusions are achieved” (Brook-Rose 1990, 290). One of the aims of looking for the universal of narratives is to determine which illusions or effects they may cause on a reader.

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theorists and a few narratologists do believe that gender and sex are worth considering within narratology. One of the most convincing counterarguments given by some of them is that there are other elements traditionally examined in narratology that are not present in every narrative: indeed, narratologists pay considerable attention to space, even though it is possible to have a narration without space being referred to (Prince 1995, 76). In her article “Sexing the Narrative: Propriety, Desire, and the Engendering of Narratology,” Susan S. Lanser argues for including gender and sex in narratological studies: That narratological practice, proper or improper, has to do not only with science but with desire. What we choose to support, to write about, to imagine—even in narratology—seems to me as much a function of our own desire as of any incontrovertible evidence that a particular aspect of narrative is (im)proper or (ir)relevant. (1995, 93)

This statement seems to convey the idea that many narratologists do not want to include gender and sexuality in their field of study because they do not desire to do so, and not because they have strong arguments against it. In this paper, the narratological analysis will go alongside the concepts of gender and even sex, in an attempt to prove how useful gender and sex can be to narratology.

4.2. Feminist Literary Criticism Feminist literary criticism is the literary criticism that puts its focus on analysing literature through the lens of feminist theory, whose aim is to understand the inequality and power imbalance suffered by women due to their gender. Considering that the basis of feminist literary criticism is feminism, it could be said that at least one of its purposes is to be a tool for political and social awareness. Although it has become more mainstream since second-wave feminism of the late 19th century, this approach to literary criticism has a long history and began to offer some major contributions during the first wave or suffragist movement. One of the primary goals of feminist literary criticism —principally in its beginnings but still nowadays— is to analyse the literary canon and to consider the absence of women writers while trying to retrieve those forgotten works created by

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women and, in addition, to consider and scrutinize women characters within male writers’ works. Annette Kolodny, in an article titled “Some Notes on Defining a ‘Feminist Literary Criticism,’” wrote: I am nevertheless persuaded that feminist criticism will, for a time, remain a quite separate and necessarily compensatory kind of activity, attempting to make up for all that has previously been omitted, lost, or ignored, and practiced for the most, part by women. Not merely because women, more than men, need to celebrate their newly discovered right to expression and validation in the arts, but more so because the kind of rigorous stylistic and linguistic analysis called for here will depend on an awareness of and sensitivity to the many layers of female experience and its consequent verbal expression. (1975, 92)

In this extract, Kolodny does not only touch upon the topic of the aforementioned relation between feminist literary criticism and the canon, but she also mentions one of the most argued topics within feminist literary criticism: aesthetics. The concept of aesthetics is not something universal and is not inherent in the text, but a cultural and historical value produced by the act of reading (Eagleton 1996, 5). This is the reason why a specific social group in a determined period of history may not agree or identify with the established canon, and that is also why feminists acknowledge that the works they value may not be considered by the canon or not appreciated by people not concerned about feminist theory. Feminist literary criticism aims to deconstruct a phallocentric canon and reconstruct it again including women and women’s perspectives. There are many approaches that can be taken into account when analysing the role of women in relation to literature: women are writers, women are readers, women are characters, women are critics. Although feminist literary criticism considers and examines all of these, for the purpose of this paper it becomes necessary to clarify which women’s roles are relevant for the discussion. First, the author of the novel under consideration, Written on the Body, is a woman and, secondly, at least one of the most important characters in it is a woman too. Intersectionality is also going to be a key term in this paper. It is not possible — or at least not adequate— to talk about a woman as a character, as a writer or as a critic without including other labels that are also constituents of her identity. We cannot presume to write a comprehensive analysis with a feminist literary criticism approach without considering every part of a woman’s identity. This is the reason why in her article

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“Feminist Literary Criticism: How Feminist? How Literary? How Critical?,” Susan S. Lanser states that it is time to change the term “woman,” which tends to refer to white, heterosexual and professional women, for the plural “women,” which includes all social classes, sexual identities and orientations, races, and nationalities; in doing so, we are led to realize how feminism and feminist literary criticism have benefited certain women and have excluded a much larger, poorer, and more racially and sexually diverse community (Lanser 1991). Up until this point, “woman” had become generalising just as “man”: Instead of “Man” we are now presented with a generic “Woman,” a term, like the universal “man” or “human,” that hides or denies differences in situation and experience, privilege and power —its content based not on actual commonalities between people, but on the experiences and interests of some who have the position and ability to impose these terms and define what they mean for themselves and others. (Strickland 1994, 265)

Although Lanser and Susan Strickland’s words were written in the 1990s —just after second-wave feminism— and both the feminist movement and feminist literary criticism have evolved since then, it is still important today to uphold this substitution as a goal.

4.3. Queer Theory The term “Queer Theory” was first used by the feminist theorist Teresa de Laurentis in her book Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities published in 1991. Although from then on it started to be considered a critical field of its own, it has its origin in many other critical theories such as gay theory, lesbian theory or feminist theory. In its beginnings, two of its most important goals were to dismiss the notion of heterosexuality as the criterion for any sexual and romantic interaction, and to dispute the assumption that gay theory and lesbian theory were the same thing. Queer theory —solidly based on the theory of deconstruction originated by the philosopher Jacques Derrida— has tried since its origins to deconstruct many monolithic conceptions related to gender and sexuality. In terms of undertaking the discussion surrounding sexuality and its different identities, “it was Foucault’s overall model of the discursive construction of sexualities

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that was the main initial catalyst for queer theory” (Spargo 1999, 26). Michel Foucault3 published his book The History of Sexuality in 1976 and although queer theory did not exist at that time, he is nonetheless considered one of the forefathers of queer theory. Heteronormativity constitutes the cultural norm in which the heterosexual subject holds the power and, through it, shapes and controls all the other sexual identities and practices within an enormously diverse range. This is one of the most basic ideas of queer studies: Het[erosexual] culture thinks of itself as the elemental form of human association, as the very model of intergender relations, as the indivisible basis of all community, and as the means of reproduction without which society wouldn’t exist. (Warner 1995, xxi)

Heterosexuality is not only considered the norm in terms of sexual identity but, in addition, the expected patterns followed in a heterosexual relationship o...