Winterson’s Written on the Body ended tragically in such a way that left me significantly dejected after putting the book down. Winterson had successfully set up one of the most passionate and dramatic romances I have read between two characters and then ripped them apart. Going into my initial reading, I was under the impression that, upon hearing of Lousie’s cancer diagnosis, the narrator would stay with her and care for her through her illness, which is where the book would then carry into a conversation about women’s bodies when they’re sick and how the meaning of their bodies’ changes. Instead, the narrator explored Lousie’s body in a way which was separated and isolated from reality. The narrator would repeatedly fantasize about Lousie’s body, sick or healthy, in a grief-stricken haze. The use of a medical textbook as a backdrop for the narrator’s fantasies creates the impression that their imagined representations of Lousie are grounded in some kind of objective facts, that the picture is guided by science. In reality, being separated physically by hundreds of miles, the narrator has no capacity to accurately imagine Louise’s body as it actually is. The moment the narrator left Louise was the moment Louise became a memory for good. This leaves me with the question: What does this thereby say about a woman’s body when it is sick or dying? If the only representation we are provided is one which is a memory of a healthy body suspended in time, inaccurately modified by medical textbooks and speculation, does the body cease to exist in any meaningful way when it becomes sick?
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