Written on the Body
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Jeanette Winterson in her novel Written on the Body never indicates the gender of the protagonist. The narrator is clearly defined as a human being, but the gender of that human being is just as carefully eliminated from consideration by the reader. Winterson thus deviates from certain formal elements in literary structure by not fully identifying the protagonist by gender, and her reason for doing so thus becomes an issue for consideration. Her reasons for this are several. first, she thinks the sex of the protagonist/narrator to be irrelevant to the humanity of that character, and the novel is an exploration of humanness and not gender as such. Second, as noted, the author deviates from a formal literary structure by not identifying the gender of the protagonist, and she does so to create a literature that speaks to a broader audience in a more direct way, without the shift that would take place if the character were clearly male or female. Third, she is undercutting the usual conventions built up around the idea of gender and showing love and human feelings to be beyond issues of gender, linking us all together more than gender can separate us. The narrator is a recovering romantic who is reconsidering the way she/he has pursued love in the past and who intersperses thoughts of this rethinking with recollections of former lovers, both male and female. The fact that the protagonist has had lovers of both genders only contributes to the difficulty the reader has in
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1112
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page)
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