Desire and Disease In Jeanette Winterson's "Written on the Body"

1. Introduction The most striking feature of Jeanette Winterson’s novel Written on the Body is the genderless narrator of whom we hardly know anything. Winterson once said that her novel is an experimental piece of work: All my work is experimental in that it plays with form, refuses a traditional narrative line, and includes the reader as a player. By that I mean that the reader has to work with the book. In the case of Written on the Body, the narrator has no name, is assigned no gender, is age unspecified, and highly unreliable. I wanted to see how much information I could leave out – especially the kind of character information that is routine – and still hold a story together.1 I want to focus on desire and disease as I think these are the two main themes that build up the framework of the novel and hold the story together. I will first look at what the terms desire and disease imply and then analyse their function in the novel. 2. Desire 2.1 Desire in theory Jacques Lacan (French psychoanalyst, 1901-1980) is of the opinion that desire is a longing to return to a state of completeness. In the symbolic system a subject faces a split of self and self-representation. This split is then experienced as desire for what is lacking (in the Lacanian scheme: the phallus)2. Judith Butler thinks that heterosexual logic associates identification with desire, saying that if one identifies as a given gender, one must desire a different gender.3 In this heterosexual logic woman is the object of desire while man is the subject. One might think that this contradicts the Lacanian idea of desire, where the woman is lacking the phallus and therefore has to be the one who desires and longs for completeness. This apparent contradiction, however, is due to the fact that we have to distinguish desire from straightforward sexual desire. One also has to remember that Written on the Body is an attempt to deregulate desire, liberating it from the binary regimes of gender and sexuality.4 1 Interview with Winterson on her Official Website. 2 Keith Green and Jill LeBihan, “Feminism, Literature and Criticism”, p.265 3 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter, p.239 4 Christy R. Stevens, “Imagining Deregulated Desire”