Written on the Body Study Guide

Jeanette Winterson was born in Manchester, England, on August 27, 1959. She was raised in nearby Accrington, Lancashire, by adopted parents, John William and Costance Winterson. The Wintersons were devout Pentecostalists who raised Winterson in the Elim Pentecostal Church to become a Pentecostal missionary (she started writing sermons at the age of 6). After coming out as a lesbian in her teens, however, Winterson left her parents’ home and attended Accrington College of Further Education. She supported herself financially by working a series of odd jobs, many of which she references in her later writing. She subsequently attended St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, and earned a Bachelor of Arts in English in 1981, after which she moved to London. She published her first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, in 1985, at the age of 25. In it, she presents a fictionalized account of her own upbringing and coming-out in a homophobic, fundamentalist Christian community. The novel was awarded the Whitebread Prize for Best Fiction, and in 1990, Winterson also wrote a screenplay for a television film based on the novel, which received much critical acclaim. Since her initial groundbreaking success, Winterson has published more than 25 books of fiction and nonfiction, as well as several collections of short stories and illustrated children’s books. Some of Winterson’s most notable works include the novel The Passion (1987), which won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for writers under 35 (and solidified Winterson’s reputation as a writer); Sexing the Cherry (1989), which won the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; Written on the Body (1992); a memoir entitled Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (2011); and Frankissstein: A Love Story (2019), which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Since 2012, she has taught creative writing at the University of Manchester. Winterson was married to British psychoanalyst, author, and social critic Susie Orbach from 2015 to 2019.

Despite the fact that Written on the Body features an ungendered narrator, the novel is frequently read through the lens of Winterson’s own identity as a lesbian and, for this reason, is even criticized for its lack of explicitness concerning lesbian love. Wrong or right, this focus may possibly be due to the burgeoning of queer theory, an area of academic criticism that takes as it focus on gender and sexual practices and identities that fall outside of cisgender and heterosexual “norms.” Furthermore, due to a perceived increase in violent, homophobic attacks in Britain throughout the decade, concerns around representation of queer protagonists were also on the rise. In fact, the 1990s saw a marked increase in queer activism, and historians qualify the period as one of great “progress” for LGBTQ+ rights in Britain (the appearance of Winterson’s film, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, on British television in 1990 attests to the social and cultural strides made in this regard). Beyond questions of gender and sexuality, the 1980s and 1990s were also a time of great social and political upheaval in Britain, including a rise in environmentalism, an increase in household wealth, and a general decline in religiosity, all of which are referenced to varying degrees in Written on the Body.

Written on the Body is an example of postmodern literature, which (though difficult to define) is characterized by its rejection of a single, foundational narrative. Indeed, Winterson’s use of an ungendered narrator, as well as the novel’s narrative fragmentation and chronological ambiguity, all serve to widen the scope of interpretation, making it an effective example of postmodern literature. Many of Winterson’s earlier works, including The Passion, Sexing the Cherry, and Frankissstein: A Love Story, are also considered to be postmodern works (though Winterson herself has historically disapproved of this characterization for her writing). Other examples of British postmodern novels published around the same time include Salmon Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), Graham Smith’s Waterland (1983), Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things (1992), and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000). Due to the novel’s erotic charge and the widespread tendency to read the novel through the lens of Winterson’s lesbianism, Written on the Body has also been compared to Monique Wittig’s The Lesbian Body (1973; translation, 1975) and Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood (1936).