Sex & The Book / Lesbian love and sexual ambiguity in Jeanette Winterson's poetic eros

Jeanette Winterson was born in Manchester in 1959. Adopted by a couple belonging to the Pentecostal Church of Elim, she grew up in Accrington, Lancachire, educated with religious rigidity so that she too would become a missionary destined for the work of evangelization. At sixteen, however, he became aware of his homosexuality and ran away from home. He attended English literature at Saint Catherine's College in Oxford, doing the most disparate jobs to support himself in his studies. At twenty-six he moved to London, where he published his first novel, There are not only oranges, winner in 1985 of the prestigious Whitbread First Novel Award and then transposed into the successful British television series of the same name. An activist for the rights of the lesbian community, she was first linked to Pat Kanavagh, her literary agent, then - for twelve years - to Peggy Reynolds. Awarded with prizes and honors, including the title of officer of the Order of the British Empire, she has been teaching creative writing at the University of Manchester since 2012.

It arches its body like a stretched cat. She rubs her pussy on my face like a filly against a fence. It smells of the sea. It smells like those pools of water among the rocks in my childhood. There is a starfish inside. I crouch down to savor the salt, run my fingers around the edge. It opens and closes like a sea anemone. Each day is filled with new waves of desire.

The passage you have just read is taken from the novel Written on the body, published in 1992 and immediately became a cult, for the lesbian and non-lesbian community. It is an intense and passionate text entirely dedicated to the love for the beautiful Louise, a woman with fiery red hair and sensual and Victorian charm. Winterson guides us in a sort of elegy dedicated to her and to love itself, moving between different temporal planes, reflections on the reasons of the heart and those of the flesh, with a sensual and poetic writing that seems to spring from the depths of the bowels. But the great peculiarity of the novel lies in the fact that the sex of the protagonist, as well as the first person narrator, remains unknown, it is never revealed.

See also

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Making love in the water

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We therefore do not know, nor will we ever know, whether it is a man or a woman who has such an all-encompassing, almost obsessive feeling for Louise - whether it is a man or a woman who craves her so much despite already having a girlfriend and Louise herself. is married to another. And again, will it be a man or a woman who savors her sex and finds the scent of childhood, the sea, the very reason for the passage of time? And who will be pining for her when she discovers her illness which, like a true femme fatale, will bring her in the balance between life and death? Of course there are details in the text, clues, which at times seem to make us reach out for one hypothesis or the other - but in the end, does it really matter? I am a soul and a body to love, sometimes a man, sometimes a woman, an original hermaphrodite as in the legend of Plato. Because just as Louise needs to feel totally involved in order to reach an orgasm, with the brain, the flesh and the heart, in the same way the protagonist abandons himself to love in its entirety, in his being male and female together, becoming an uninterrupted flow of words, because "love demands expression".

It is not easy to say, love. Yet Jeanette succeeds perfectly, drags us into her hymn at times so erotic and carnal, at other times poetic and almost heartbreaking, but always dictated by a flame that is impossible to silence. And while we get lost in the fragments of his love speech, we find ourselves, our stories, our joys and our sufferings and we almost seem to float - together with this sexless voice - in the heart of the feeling that makes the world go round.


Of Giuliana Altamura

Here you can read the previous appointment with the Sex & The Book / Sexual initiation and discovery of eros in the verses of Goliarda Sapienza