The Anatomist of Love and Disease in Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body
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Francisco José Cortés Vieco
Abstract
Historically, both the male and the medical gaze have sexualized and pathologized the female anatomy. Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body simultaneously perpetuates and problematizes the alliance between patriarchy and science that objectifies and disempowers women and their own stories. Her novel’s genderless narrator first eroticizes her/his beloved Louise and later abandons her because she suffers with leukemia, leaving her in the hands of her husband-doctor, a man whom she no longer loves or trusts. Under the umbrella of medical humanities, this essay explores how Winterson’s narrator dehumanizes and silences Louise by becoming the anatomist of her cancer to possess her entirely from afar and to mourn the loss of access to her sexual body; vicariously experiencing leukemia through storytelling, and thus depriving Louise of her right to make choices in her life, the comforting presence of the person she loves by her side, and the therapy of narrating her own account about terminal illness on the look of death.
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© 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Light and Divine Wisdom: An Alternative Interpretation of the Iconography of the Fuller Brooch
- Tu beoð gemæccan: The Key Concept of Maxims I Representing One of the Fundamental Principles of the World Order
- Wulf and Eadwacer Reloaded: John of Antioch and the Starving Wife of Odoacer
- Sensational News about Nature: Risk and Resilience in Satirical Ozone Poetry of the Victorian Era
- Influences of George Gordon Byron on Asdren
- Construction of Identity/World and ‘Symbolic Death’: A Lacanian Approach to William Golding’s Pincher Martin
- The Anatomist of Love and Disease in Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body
- Conventions of the Ungendered Narrative
- “In My Mind’s Eye”: On the Relocation of Hamlet’s Story by Michael Almereyda
- ‘Force’ and ‘Chi’: Duality, Identity, and Struggle in Star Wars and Buchi Emecheta’s Kehinde
- Anxious Dynamics of Exile and the Ambivalence of Arab American Identity in Diana Abu-Jaber’s Crescent: Critical Reflections and Contemplations
- Between Remembering and Confession: A Refugee Narrative in Dina Nayeri’s Refuge
- Orfeo: A Posthuman Modern Prometheus. Uncommon Powers of Musical Imagination
- On Literary Apathy: Forms of Dis/Affection in My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)
- Reviews
- Roberta Frank. 2022. The Etiquette of Early Northern Verse. Conway Lectures in Medieval Studies 2010. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, xxx + 265 pp., $ 65.00.
- Claire Breay and Joanna Story (eds.), with Eleanor Jackson. 2021. Manuscripts in the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: Cultures and Connections. Dublin: Four Courts Press, xvii + 256 pp., numerous colour illustr., € 58.50.
- Mark Amsler. 2021. The Medieval Life of Language: Grammar and Pragmatics from Bacon to Kempe. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 264 pp., 2 figures, 2 tables, € 106.00.
- Alexandra Barratt and Susan Powell (eds.). 2021. The Fifteen Oes and Other Prayers: Edited from the Text Published by William Caxton (1491). Middle English Texts 61. Heidelberg: Winter, xxxvi + 54 pp., € 44.
- Carolin Gebauer. 2021. Making Time: World Construction in the Present-Tense Novel. Narratologia 77. Berlin/Boston, MA: De Gruyter, xvii + 378 pp., 5 tables, 5 illustr., € 99.95.
- Kai Wiegandt. 2019. J. M. Coetzee’s Revisions of the Human: Posthumanism and Narrative Form. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, ix + 280 pp., € 90.94.
- Linda K. Hughes, Sarah Ruffing Robbins and Andrew Taylor with Heidi Hakimi-Hood and Adam Nemmers (eds.). 2022. Transatlantic Anglophone Literatures, 1776–1920: An Anthology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 808 pp., 60 illustr., £ 29.99/$ 39.95.
- Juliane Braun. 2019. Creole Drama: Theatre and Society in Antebellum New Orleans. Writing the Early Americas 4. Charlottesville, VA/London: The University of Virginia Press, 280 pp., 12 illustr., $ 69.50.
- Lisa Gotto. 2021. Passing and Posing between Black and White: Calibrating the Color Line in U. S. Cinema. Film Studies. Bielefeld: transcript, 247 pp., 30 figures, € 49.00.
- Daniel Stein. 2021. Authorizing Superhero Comics: On the Evolution of a Popular Serial Genre. Studies in Comics and Cartoons. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, xv + 315 pp., 28 illustr., $ 34.95.
- Books Reviewed: Anglia 140 (2022)
