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“A Highly Ambiguous Condition”: The Transgender Subject, Experimental Narrative and Trans-Reading Identity in the Fiction of Virginia Woolf, Angela Carter, and Jeanette Winterson
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Smith, J. A. |
| Copyright Year | 2006 |
| Abstract | ions that deny the specificity and particularity of everyday life, that generalize out of existence the particular and the local, that smother difference under the banner of universalizing categories" (463), love being a prominent example of one such “general abstraction.” As Roland Barthes asserts in A Lover's Discourse, uI-love-you is without nuance. It suppresses explanations, adjustments, degrees, scruples” (emphasis in original, 148). Winterson acknowledges love’s classification as a metanarrative and critiques how it has been used to ratify heterosexuality as “natural” as well as to order sexed identities in a rigid binary. Significantly, Written on the Body's narrator echoes Barthes’s sentiment about the phrase “I love you”: “Why is it that the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still the thing we long to hear? ‘I love you’ is always a quotation” {Lover’s Discourse 9). Yet, Winterson refuses to abandon love Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. altogether and, instead, presents her narrator’s struggles to come to a more postmodern understanding of it. From the outset of his/her story, Written on the Body's narrator asserts, “It [love] will not stay still, stay silent, be good, be modest, be seen and not heard, no” (9), and as Catherine Belsey defines “postmodern love,” it is “at once endlessly pursued and ceaselessly suspected. [ . . . ] It cannot speak, and yet it seems that it never ceases to speak in late twentieth-century Western culture” (685). This conflicted wavering between a continuous desire for love and a critical suspicion of it haunts the narrator, adding to the constant play o f variables featured throughout Written on the Body and finding a potently queer expression through the narrator’s transgendered body. Paradoxically placing love at the center of a disjointed postmodern world, the latter purportedly negating the former, Winterson highlights the transformative power she sees in love and accordingly presents new figurations and manifestations of romantic love beyond those prescribed by heterosexual and androcentric parameters that place a premium on reproduction and norms o f respectability.16 Additionally, Winterson figures love as central to the formation of one’s subjectivity; in The Passion, Henri asserts, “I know too that without love we grope the tunnels of our lives and never see the sun. When I fell in love it was as though I looked into a mirror for the first time and saw m yself’ (154). Winterson uses the inherent diffuseness of love and desire to enhance the inherent ambiguity of gender and identity, in general, giving the lie to compulsory heterosexuality and the binary gender schema it creates and maintains. Accordingly, Winterson constructs narratives of love that account for de-centered subjects and the play of language in a 17 postmodern context. In light of the inadequacies of current discourses on love that fail to depict love’s multivalent boundary-crossing nature, Winterson sets out to Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. revive, or re-vision, the language of love by contributing her own version of the romance to the genre. Despite the countless love stories that have already been told, Jeanette, the narrator of Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, asserts that although “diluted into paperback form,” romantic love can be found “in the original, written on tablets of stone” (170) and much of Winterson’s work can be read as an attempt to find this “original” story.18 Throughout Winterson’s work, she honors stories as “a way of explaining the universe while leaving the universe unexplained [. . .] of keeping it alive, not boxing it into time” (Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit 93).19 To enhance the productive possibilities of the ambiguity inherent in stories, Winterson weds the act of storytelling to the body, specifically to the touching of bodies and the transformative energy that such contact creates, thus adding the body’s variability to the already established fluidity of gender, sexuality, subjectivity, language and love. As for Written on the Body, reading the narrator as transgender enables a more complex understanding of the language surrounding the expression and description of love and the narrator’s attempt to construct a narrative around his/her experiences with his/her lover Louise outside of heterosexist norms and romantic cliches but, rather, within a postmodern context, after all o f the conventional narratives of love and identity have been shown to be unstable, uncertain, and unreliable. In addition, because the transgender, or ambiguously gendered, body figures so prominently in the telling of many o f Winterson’s love stories, queer conceptions o f space and time emerge that accommodate this queer body rather than expel it. Transgender characters figure centrally in Winterson’s re-vision of the romance, revising the language of love as a kind of textual touching as well as revising the space and time in which they appear as queer, and it is within this re-visionary language of romance that a transgender gaze emerges. Additionally, adopting a transgender approach to Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the reading of Winterson’s novels provides an interpretive model through which to understand the novels’ unconventional styles that erase the separation between reader and narrator and enables the reader to identify with the narrator and his/her longings, thereby universalizing the transgender point o f view and placing the reader in a position to occupy a transgender reading position. Although there are moments in which the transgender gaze pops up in several o f Winterson’s novels, such as The Passion, The PowerBook, Lighthousekeeping, and Sexing the Cherry, this gaze is most solidly established and maintained in Written on the Body, and ultimately, the reader is embedded in the transgender gaze at the conclusion of Written on the Body. “And so the word was made flesh”: A Postmodern Language o f Love Although each of her novels is an attempt to re-present love more faithfully, Written on the Body is Winterson’s most extended and concentrated critique of the language surrounding romantic love, and it is therefore within this novel that she directly attacks conventional narrative formulations of love and the language used to establish parameters around it. Winterson highlights the play of language and condemns those discourses that define and regulate love, seeing their motivation as restrictive and prescriptive. Just as Written on the Body's narrator’s gender and body is more subversive when understood as transient and fluid, so too is language, and Winterson’s narrator uses language’s instability to undermine narratives that define romantic desire as heterosexual and delimit gender as binary. Halberstam and Livingston see this proliferation of romance narratives and emphasis on marriage as decidedly linked to heterosexuality and the myths of monogamy and restraint that are threaded through it. This constant generation of romances “registers the pathos of normative heterosexuality locked into a sad groove, constantly generating narratives of sentiment and romance to cover over the obvious confusion and lack of faith that Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. plagues all attempts to mate for life” (Halberstam and Livingston 7-8). Just as heteronormativity is incapable of envisioning sexuality beyond those behaviors shared between men and women in the service of reproduction, it is also unable to stifle desire’s unruly nature despite its best efforts, like the institution of marriage and circulation of romantic narratives that are intended to make this institution appealing and bearable, and ultimately sets up relationships for failure and disappointment. As part o f the narrator’s struggle to communicate his/her love for Louise, s/he disassembles the conventional romance narrative by revealing the lies surrounding the very character of romantic love. The narrator initiates his/her rumination on love by questioning the very term itself: “A precise emotion seeks a precise expression. If what I feel is not precise then should I call it love? [. . .] I want the diluted version, the sloppy language, the insignificant gestures” (10). The dominant portrait of love is that it is a clear-cut emotion expressed by such symbols as red hearts, marriage ceremonies, love letters, flowers, etc. and the incessantly repeated phrase “I love you.” This portrait of a tidy love is crafted so as to place parameters around a slippery emotion that drifts across borders of gender, sexuality, and established norms of propriety, yet the narrator recognizes time and again that this portrait is false, and a primary concern of Written on the Body is how language is used to construct a false sense of reality, along with false images of gender and sexuality, cliches being a particularly rich target for the narrator. As Winterson asserts in Art Objects, “What have I said in Written on the Body ? That it is possible to have done with the bricks and mortar o f conventional narrative, not as monkey-business or magic, but by building a structure that is bonded by language” (189-90). Therefore, the brunt of the narrator’s critique falls on cliches because they only offer categorization, generalizations, and prescription and rob language of its vitality. Specifically, the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. narrator attacks the greatest romantic cliche of all: the phrase “I love you.” The narrator wonders, “Why is it that the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another 20 is still the thing we long to hear? ‘I love you’ is always a quotation” (9). This s |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1992&context=dissertations |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1992&context=dissertations&httpsredir=1&referer= |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
