38 pages • 1 hour read
Jeanette WintersonWritten On The Body
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1992A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Pages 9-49Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Pages 9-24 Summary
The novel’s anonymous, gender-neutral, first-person narrator begins by asking a rhetorical question: “Why is the measure of love loss?” (9). As the narrator reflects on the end of an affair, the narrator equates it to withered grapes left on the vine. The narrator notes that romantic love requires vibrancy and expression in order to remain alive; otherwise, love becomes an idea articulated in clichés, such as “Love is blind” (10), that trivialize the emotion.
The narrator describes an August afternoon spent on a canoe trip with a lover, later revealed to be Louise Rosenthal. Louise decides to swim naked, which upsets a mother picnicking on the riverbank with her husband and children. The narrator juxtaposes this experience with the recollection of an argument on another August afternoon, when the narrator accuses Louise of wanting their relationship to be intensely hot at all times: “92 degrees even in the shade” (12). The narrator asks whether this desire stems from Louise’s Australian nationality and then reflects on the human need for answers to questions. The narrator wonders whether it is better not to ask any questions.
The narrator reveals a number of adulterous affairs and describes a typical conversation in which a lover explains that despite her infidelity, she does love her husband: “He’s not like other men […] We talk” (14). The narrator is tempted to feel flattered that a lover so attached to her spouse would engage in an affair and suggests that the affair has actually enhanced the health of the marriage, which might otherwise have become “a shell” from which “its inhabitants both fled” (15).
The narrator assumes that when Louise says, “I’m going to leave” (18), her intention is to leave the narrator and return to a monogamous marriage with her husband. However, Louise is fully committed to the new relationship, depicting her function as that of a genie committed to granting the narrator’s wishes. The pair celebrates by eating in a café housed in a former church; the narrator suggests that this meal is their wedding. Later, the narrator recollects the intensity of their sexual relationship and the narrator’s exploration of Louise’s body.
The narrator intersperses recollections of Louise with those of past affairs. The narrator relates an anecdote regarding a nature-obsessed past lover who insisted on having sex outdoors; the relationship ends when a National Health Service doctor removes a thistle from the narrator’s body and comments on the availability of clinics for “people like you” (20).
Another past lover, a radical Dutch woman named Inge, “was a committed romantic and an anarcha-feminist” (21). The conflict between these intellectual positions complicates Inge’s revolutionary activities. For example, when ordered to blast the lift in the Eiffel Tower because it is a phallic symbol, Inge’s devotion to the romantic young lovers who frequent the site renders her unable to do so. Viewing a museum exhibition of Renoir’s nudes, Inge is appalled by the thought of the meager salaries that the female models would have been paid. The relationship ends due to Inge’s paranoia regarding traditional means of communication, such as telephones, and the couple’s decision to remain in contact via a flock of carrier pigeons who proved unable to navigate between London and Holland.
Pages 25-49 Summary
The narrative introduces Jacqueline, an ex-lover whom the narrator meets through friends, “the mistress of one of them, confidante of both” (25). The narrator has bought a new flat with the help of a £10,000 gift of guilt money from another former lover, Bathsheba, who had transmitted “emotional clap” (25) to the narrator.
Jacqueline, a zoo employee, is patient, unsophisticated, decent, and unmarried. The narrator settles into a comfortable domestic arrangement with the young woman, albeit one devoid of passion: “Late night TV and snoring side by side into the millennium” (26). The narrator equates this relationship to “container gardening” (27), in comparison to the untamed quality of prior entanglements. While the narrator is pleased that Jacqueline will retaliate when shouted at, a friend advises the narrator to “[p]ick on someone your own size” (28).
Then the narrator meets the beautiful, red-haired Louise, who becomes a friend to both the narrator and Jacqueline. Louise is married to Elgin, a gifted physician who was raised as an Orthodox Jew but who has broken with tradition. Although the narrator believes that they have just met, it is later revealed that Louise has stalked the narrator for over two years, having first observed the narrator in the British Library while the narrator was working on a translation.
The narrator walks to Louise’s house one evening to visit unannounced and spends time drinking in the kitchen with her as Elgin is cloistered in his office playing computer games. Louise invites the narrator to the opera the following evening. Louise is described as looking exquisitely and effortlessly gorgeous. She tells the narrator about her history and how she met Elgin when she bested him in a college debate tournament. She implies that Elgin has masochistic sexual tendencies.
The narrator, aware that Elgin is traveling on business, arrives at Louise’s house one day as she is cooking. The narrator wonders if “food [is] sexy” (36), and then ponders the erotic qualities of various food products. Louise asks whether the two will have an affair. The narrator reflects on a desire to avoid another adulterous affair now that the narrator has settled into a life of predictable domesticity with Jacqueline. For the narrator, an emotional affair has already begun with Louise. When the narrator consults a friend for advice, the counsel is to “run a wife in every port” (40).
The narrator becomes increasingly annoyed with every nuance of Jacqueline’s behavior: her clothes; her predilection for turning on the radio immediately upon her arrival home; the fact that she smells like the zoo where she works. Contemplating an invitation to visit Louise at her house, the narrator dreams about a former girlfriend who worked in papier-mâché. In the dream, the narrator visits the girlfriend’s house and is assaulted at crotch level by a papier-mâché serpent. Laughing at the narrator’s anxiety, the woman demonstrates that the serpent head has a rat trap in the jaw and can chop a leek, which she announces they will be eating later. The next morning, the narrator notes, “For the first time in my life, I want to do the right thing more than I want to get my own way” (44).
Despite being thoroughly besotted with Louise, the intellectual concept of adultery repulses the narrator. Nonetheless, as soon as Elgin travels for business, the pair begins an affair.
Pages 9-49 Analysis
The early pages of the novel establish that the narrator is a mystery to the reader: unnamed, ageless, and genderless, and this ambiguity establishes a major theme of the novel: sex and gender. As well, the narrator appears to be unreliable as the narrator’s actions repeatedly contradict the narrator’s stated beliefs.
The narrator is intensely focused on language and linguistics, and this motif suggests the importance of communication to the narrator. The novel begins with the narrator reflecting on the semantic imposition of meaning on romantic language. Later, the narrator recalls breaking into a former lover’s lumber room (or store room) in order to retrieve letters that the narrator had sent, which the narrator describes as “tak[ing] back the last of myself” (17). The narrator’s attitude towards language is possessive, and the papers on which the narrator writes can be compared to the body, or bodies, of the title of the novel.
The narrator also considers the ethical implications of having a series of affairs with married women, which is another important theme of the novel. One married lover implies that she might have enrolled in Open University classes as a diversion from the tedium of her life had the love affair not presented itself. Ruminating upon these comments leads the narrator to conclude that the affair may have served to actually bolster the marriage and save it from an excruciating death from boredom.
As the story progresses, however, the narrator elaborates on the theme of marriage and fidelity by revealing a more complicated view of infidelity. Despite the narrator’s boredom while with Jacqueline, the narrator is hesitant to be unfaithful to her. The narrator attempts to resist the temptation to enter into an affair with Louise, especially as memories of past affairs turn darker. The narrator’s attitudes toward domesticity also reflect contradictory views on infidelity. The narrator expresses boredom and irritation with the narrator’s staid domestic life with Jacqueline, and the narrator’s dream about the papier-mâché snake reveals a fear of being “castrated” by domesticity. At the same time, the narrator fetishizes food and the act of cooking, breaking into Louise’s kitchen to touch the ordinary, everyday objects that she uses.
The tone of the writing shifts markedly over the course of the story. The narrator begins with the somber image of a dry landscape and withering grapes, symbolic of the end of the affair with Louise. In recounting time spent with Louise, the narrator is more joyous, particularly when Louise declares that she is leaving her husband. Memories of past lovers reveal a droll humor, such as when the narrator is drafted into Inge’s plan to bomb a public urinal in Paris. Assigned to clear the building, the narrator is infuriated when the urinating men ignore the warning to evacuate until the narrator threatens them with a gun. The narrator notes, “I’m a mild-mannered sort but I don’t like rudeness” (23). Then, as the narrator gets closer to recounting the first meeting with Louise, their memories of past lovers become more bitter and sad, providing a counterpoint for the ecstasy of their affair with Louise.
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