In Jeanette Winterson’s Written On The Body the narrator provides us with an account of a relationship. At times male, at other times female, and most time ungendered, the author uses imagery from nature to reinforce one of the major themes of her book that love as well as life, promises the possibility of renewal after death/loss.
We see that this novel deals with the death and loss of a loved one through illness and death, specifically cancer. What we see the author parallel is the way that much as the genetic code of life has a death process written into it, so love has death written into its genetic code. Yet, through the language of love we are somehow able to reverse this process, as with life, in order to defy our own mortality and the decay, disease, and death of life and love. We see this most clearly when the narrator goes to the library to bring home a book on anatomy. As he/she reveals “Within the clinical language, through the dispassionate view of the sucking, sweating, greedy, defecating self, I found a love-poem to Louise. I would go on knowing her, more intimately than the skin, hair and voice that I craved” (Winterson 111).
The authors uses a great deal of natural imagery. The difference between life and death and love and unloved is the difference between wet and dry, warm and cold, or cloudy and sunny. The authors frames her story within a drought “It hasn’t rained for three months. The trees are prospecting underground, sending reserves of roots into the dry ground” (Winterson 9).
We see that like those who are dying and prospecting for a way to live or like those who are unloved and send the roots of longing prospecting for love, human beings are of nature. The drought that begins the story is like the drought the narrator experiences when Louise leaves for the summer. Yet, nature can play tricks on us, confound us, and ruin the best laid plans of mice
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