Winterson - Written on the Body

Explain!

Is there really any logical explanation, enlightenment for the way people think on gender?  I have yet to find any real explanation as to why bino-gender is not acceptable as a common designated gender, however, I know when I could not declare one or the other gender as mine, and I fought like hell to fit into a world that would not accept bino-gender as a true designated gender.  So, rather than change the world around me, I decided I would change me.  How did that work for me? It didn’t, instead of non-gendered, I was labeled intersexual which is what I am, but still without gender.  Does it matter, yes and no.       The more I fought, the more I found sexuality as well as one’s textuality is not so much outed in a binary world as it is outed in a fluid  world.  North America is a binary society, whether physically, emotionally, psychologically, spiritually, we have required gender separation in almost every juncture of existence here, therefore; nonconformity is dealt with quite harshly.   We seem to be a society that is binary though we try hard to speak inclusively, yet the true doing of inclusivity is a very difficult task, it seems no one wants to come down from the totem-pole and bask in that kind of valiance.  We take a personal detour, rather than fight about sexuality, let’s fight about love being given and taken by an indeterminate narrator and watch the sparks fly.

Personally, I felt the violence of the choice of the narrator to be ambiguous, (person vs. self, person vs. God, person vs. society) would most definitely take its toll on the psyche.  I feel its violence when the narrator is the only person in the novel who gets to be without a gender, is not exposed as deeply as say Louise.  Just because we know her name, we are immediately much more intimate with her.  “Louise, in this single bed, between these garish sheets I will find a map as likely as any treasure hunt.  I will explore you and mine you and you will redraw me according to your will.  We shall cross one another’s boundaries and make ourselves one nation”.   I find it pretty hard to believe one cares about the other when one is willing to expose the lover while him/her self remaining hidden behind genderitis.  However, I do understand that the purpose of the writing was to foil gender and make it noticeable that one does not have to tell the gender of the narrator.  Still I say if in fact gender can be hidden then so can the object of affections gender be hidden.

I must definitely agree that it is easy to read this text and put self into the folds of its pages, and even feel pious about it.  I am not sure if our writer wants us to be that invested in the work, that intimate with the work. Or actually the writer might be interested in our investment, but would the narrator?  I am not reading their work to get at their private lives, I am reading their work because I need the depth-charge it carries…As for herself, “I am a writer who happens to love women, she insists.  I am not a lesbian who happens to write.”  I too would be very upset if one judged my writing on my colored complexion rather than deal with what I had to offer as a writer and if critics suggested my writing (in order to be valid) had to deal with growing up black, or gangs, or any of the ‘Jim Crow’ stereotypes.                               

 I don’t really know if what she is saying is true, “I mean, for me a love story is a love story.  I don’t care what the genders are if it’s powerful enough.  And I don’t think that love should be a gender bound operation.  It’s probably one of the few things in life that rises above all those kinds of oppositions-black and white, male and female, homosexual and heterosexual.  When people fall in love they experience the same kind of tremors, fears, a rush of blood to the head…And fiction recognizes this.”  I also do not know if it needs to be true to be valid.  Still, I wonder what if the whole of the characters were as powerful as the narrator and were non-gendered what would change in the novel and why?   

Then another question slides in, is the narrator speaking to the implied reader or the actual reader?  We receive mental images while reading, images that are custom made by our experiences and familiarity that we bring to the text.  The implied reader is a model/role.  The implied reader is active and passive and the text will build his/her response, but he/she will create sense or significance from what they have read and they are also given the chore to build some consistency in what they have read.  So then both the implied reader and actual reader coexist, they are one person responding to the text in different ways.  If I myself am responding in different ways how is it possible to bring a definite ending to something that was meant to be stuck in different levels in my conscious?

So where does this ‘gynocriticism’ end?  Do we continue to question women’s roles comparative to a ‘phallogocentric’ (Phallus and word centered) ideal which challenges the control of women by means of sexual/social influence and power?  Or do we find new social constructs to write by, to read by, and to live by?  Or are we to live by what is ‘culturally chic’ today?    “We shall overcome some day.”        

A Single Day/A Single Work Of Art

            I do believe that it is possible that a single work of art is capable of covering the enormity of human life in one day.  In fact, I believe that a single word can keep a person awaiting a hope, a dream for decades.

            Using Ms. Virginia Woolf’s style of writing, stream of consciousness, allowed Mr. Cunningham to write in depth, to expose the superficial to write the characters in a more intensified way.  The exposure gave the characters room to be natural in processing their thoughts, making some sense of their world.  For instance, on page 192 Mrs. Brown has picked Ritchie up from the sitter and they are on their way home, “Mommy, I love you…I love you too baby, …she can hear the flannelled nervousness lodged now in her throat, the effort she must make to sound natural.”  Most scenes or realities about mothers would never depict a mother making an “effort to sound natural”.  Most mothers are seen as perfect.  I think this was bold and different, but true to Mrs. Brown’s character, it is a peak into the character’s most intimate thoughts into her ill-ease with her child, her lack of nurturing skills, as well as awkwardness in being someone’s “wife”.    Thinking of the psychological level one is able to see past that one moment into Mrs. Brown’s being and understand that this is a part of who she is not just a moment she was caught up in time, but a real glimpse into her agitation with mothering and being a “wife”. 

            Sometimes intimacies are almost too privately valuable to share, but Mr. Cunningham makes this book work sharing loads of intimacies through these three women that otherwise would have died on the say “cutting board floor” had he not used a psychological realm to share them in.  A second intimacy is again Mrs. Brown who kisses Kitty in the sweetest and most intimate way, but then we find out that Kitty is the one who pulls away first.  What an intimate thing to know about Laura, she would take risks, her family, her position as that “wife”,  and that very friendship is on the line here and Laura accepts the “Laura is the odd one, the foreigner, the one who can’t be trusted.  Laura and Kitty agree, silently, that this is true.” 

            Mrs. Brown is currently reading Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway who is in a heterosexual marriage,  “…yet her most passionate memory is of a kiss shared thirty years earlier with a woman.”  It seems that Mrs. Brown is moving towards lessening constraints on herself as a woman, but there are yet anxiety driven intimacies that continue to stress life as one may want to live it.  Because Mrs. Brown has used Mrs. Dalloway as a source of strength to begin to move away from convention and to find some beauty even in her romance with death, she is using her to experience some shavings of life.  

            Mrs. Brown is locked into an asphyxiating marriage; symbols are used such as water, which allows a story to be told without the use of words.  Here we find water, the source of life, cleansing, and the center of regeneration.   In this part of the story Mrs. Brown is immerged in water, from which she awakens and decides to live.    To be immersed in water then to re-emerge without having been dissolved in the water is to return to the well-spring of life, to regain fresh strength, or to die a symbolic death.   Again, this is intimate to peer into a rented room and watch a woman caress her unborn, sit her method of death hear her, and have her read her way into life at the same time as Mrs. Woolf is walking into a body of water to end her life is almost too intimate to watch.    But I believe this little delicious intimacy is what makes the book so astounding.        

            Through the characters speaking to me, the reader, their internal struggles, loves, fears, anger, and confusion, I am allowed to taste (like the base of a good soup) the base of their lives, the things that matter most to them.  The captivation for me has been being a living (be)ing exposed to the deepest intimacy of other people’s lives.  The term (be)ing is important here to me because (be) to exist, to live now means my mind has not been shut down while reading but it has absorbed the undercurrent of life and death from my reading.  Therefore, as I am being alive while reading, I am also become a part of Mr. Cunningham’s story of these three women.  I know weird huh!  So, I find the book is capable of capturing more than the vastness of its characters lives in one day, I find it also capable of captivating me and changing my own life in one day.