Written on the Body: Lambda Literary Award (Vintage International)

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Brooks, Libby (2 September 2000). "Power surge". The Guardian. London. Archived from the original on 12 October 2008 . Retrieved 11 December 2016. Winterson, Jeanette (12 June 2010). "Once upon a life: Jeanette Winterson". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Archived from the original on 5 July 2018 . Retrieved 12 January 2019– via www.theguardian.com. The narrator settles to live in an old cottage and have a job at the local bar, far away from Louise. At this point begins the grief and doubt in the made decision and exploration of the body anatomy as a way to remember and worship the lost lover. The Daylight Gate by Jeanette Winterson – review". The Guardian. 16 August 2013. Archived from the original on 4 June 2014 . Retrieved 9 October 2013.

The narrator and Louise become lovers. The narrator tells Jacqueline right away, allowing her the dignity of walking away before the lies become too much to overcome. Jacqueline takes the news with outrage, destroying the apartment she shared with the narrator in an attempt to injure in response to her own pain. The narrator is not bothered by Jacqueline's anger and instead focuses on Louise. Louise tells her husband about their affair, also reluctant to live with lies. For a time Louise and the narrator carry on their relationship in her husband's house. However, Elgin eventually has enough of their relationship. Louise decides to file for divorce. The narrator and Louise are enjoying their blissful passion but, of course, there has to be trouble in paradise. Elgin reveals that Louise has cancer and the narrator is forced to make a decision, a decision that isn't even his/hers to make. At the end, the decision proves to be wrong, and the narrator begins to realize that it may have been more selfish instead of heroic. The novel breaks again from its conventional structure to offer a series of narrative poems on various parts of the body, including the skeleton, the skin, the cranial cavity, and the eye. 13y isolating and examining the parts of the body, the narrator burnishes her or his love for Louise in its particulars. Yet Winterson’s language for the first time seems less clever, less daring than before, as if by accepting the medical book’s categories and definitions her own adventurous language is stilted. These are familiar body parts, with familiar assumptions of what the body is and does. The one exception is the section on the nose, which is really a section on the scent of Louise’s vagina. In this loving, earthy detail, Winterson can shine, perhaps because she is claiming this untraveled literary territory as her own. “I shall visit her gamey low-roofed den and feed from her,” the narrator declares. The writing is provocative, and, more than in any of the other descriptions of the body parts, the narrator’s obsessive desire shines through. As a storytelling organization we are encouraged by projects like Written on the Body. This anthology is in the vanguard of a growing body of storytelling rooted in transgender and non-binary experiences. The acts of writing, reading and sharing these stories has the capacity to build empathy, to heal and to empower more individuals to share their stories as well.

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Saint Louis University Libraries". lib.slu.edu. Archived from the original on 13 January 2019 . Retrieved 12 January 2019. Critical discussions of the story tend to focus on whether Kafka is foreseeing the murderous regimes of Hitler and Stalin (or even the tortures practiced in our own day). Is the apparently liberal and humanitarian visitor too cautious in declaring his opposition to this brutal method of execution, which is in any case on the verge of obsolescence? Is Kafka saying that life is bound to involve suffering? These are all intriguing questions and one can speculate endlessly on what the sage of Prague is really on about. But I would like to draw your attention to a more specific point in the story. The ‘sentence’ that is written on the condemned man's body is not what is to be done to him but the lesson that the authorities say he needs to learn. In the case of the prisoner in the story it's ‘honour thy superiors’ and in the case of the officer, who eventually decides to feed himself to the machine, it is ‘be just’. Nevertheless, the cliché second chance at love is given at the end, but the narrator is still unsure whether this is the happy ending, unsure what comes after. They are "let loose in open fields", let loose because of the unpredictability of life, it is a satisfying ending to the novel, but it doesn't mean the end of their story. Update this section!

Bilger, Audrey (1997). "Jeanette Winterson, The Art of Fiction No. 150". The Paris Review. No.145. Archived from the original on 15 June 2023 . Retrieved 1 November 2023. Leigh Gilmore, “An Anatomy of Absence,” The Gay 90’s ed. Thomas Foster et al. (New York: New York UP, 1997): 224–51. I said: ‘Oh good. Now I can sleep easy in my bed tonight.’ The senior man exchanged a glance with his colleague and said: ‘So can we, laddie, so can we’. The vesicles multiplied, itched like hell, scabbed and eventually went away. I survived. But I felt as if one of the wings of the angel of death had casually brushed over my face. We never told my parents.

About Shahd Alshammari

Through a Disability Studies lens, Dr Shahd Alshammari of Gulf University for Science and Technology in Kuwait discusses Written on the Body, a 1994 novel by Jeanette Winterson, in terms of love and loss and the discovery of the failed and deformed body.