Body Writing In Written On The Body

Jeanette Winterson(1959-) is a controversial but prominent contemporary British literary writer for her beautiful language and unique writing style. She concerns about and writes the female body. The words she used show that her knowledge about sex, quest for identity and thinking about desires. Written on the Body has created controversy and a high level of critical debate since its publication. Critics and scholars have studied it from different perspectives. However, not many scholars have probed into the body writing in Written on the Body from the perspective of body criticism. This thesis intends to analyze body writing in Written on the Body, which aims to explore the underlying intentions and significance of Winterson's focalization on the female body.Based on Michel Foucault's body theory, this thesis analyzes bodies in three different levels in Written on the body. First, the thesis focuses on the body as struggling site. It analyzes Louise's oppressed body and Inge's rebellious body, which aims to uncover the oppression of the female bodies imposed by male hegemony as well as how the female bodies rebel against the oppression to gain freedom and show Winterson's fierce criticisms on the male dominant culture which has disciplined and alienated the female bodies. Second, this thesis explores body as gender identity. By depicting the narrator's genderless body and Gail Right's masculine body, Winterson subverts the dichotomy of femininity and masculinity to reconstruct characters' gender identity in this novel. Third, this thesis discusses body as narrated object. Winterson challenges the authority of scientific narrative through rewriting Louise's body to create a self-made narrative which belongs to the female discourse. It also discloses the falsity of science. From the above analysis, we can know that body writing in Written on the Body is Winterson's writing strategy to rebel male-centered discourse hegemony and subvert the binary opposition between male and female. By writing female bodies, Winterson subverts the status of female as an object and reconstructs the dominant position of the female body. Meanwhile, Winterson strives to wake up their body consciousness, or rather, the original instinct inside the body, especially love, to revive the primitive instincts which is of great help to rescue female body from alienation and discipline and rebuild its vitality. Through body writing, Winterson aims to reconstruct the subjectivity that conforms to the females' own characteristics with the female's bodily discourse, which makes the female become the subject of articulating their own experiences to reconstruct the female discourse and narrative.