The Waiting Room & Written On The Body
In Jeanette Winterson’s Written On The Body and Lisa Loomer’s The Waiting Room, we come across many issues that are significant to our lives from sexuality and gender to health and patriarchal oppression. Winterson’s novel uses an ungendered narrator that allows us to transcend the binary determinants of sexuality (i.e., male versus female and heterosexual versus homosexual) and view sexuality in a universe not limited by such distinctions. In The Waiting Room Loomer presents us with another universe that is not limited like its real counterpart. For in her waiting room there are no limitations of time and space and we meet three women from three different eras, all of whom are a commentary in one way or another of the gender/sexuality limitations of their time. Both of these authors examine elements of identity and self-development that are pertinent to our time, by fashioning language, imagery, and setting into a means of conveying the problem of discovering the elusive self. A comparison of the themes, setting, and characterizations in these works will be rendered, showing how the pursuit of the self through love is a disease (Written On The Body) as is the pursuit of self through beauty (The Waiting Room). A conclusion which will address the different perspective of the authors on themes of gender, sexuality, and gender.
In Written On The Body, Jeanette Winterson gives us a novel whose style is reinforcing of its theme. The theme is primarily the limitations of self that are perpetuated by a binary view of the world. In others words, a view of good versus evil, men versus women, black versus white, and a host of other binaries that define things into concrete absolutes with two options. If something is good by a certain definition, then everything else that does not meet that definition is judged, vilified, and rejected as bad. These kinds of value judgments that are soci...