Novel Bodies: Corporeality and Textuality in Contemporary Women's Fiction Julie Scanlon Submitted for the degree of Ph.D. Department of English Literature October 2002 ABSTRACT This thesis queries whether a relationship between bodies in texts and the narratology and stylistics of texts might be reconceived beyond metaphor. Specifically, it examines the textual politics arising from the representation of ambiguously-bounded bodies. Each of the four contemporary women's novels that I examine represents disorderly bodies in the first-person narrative voice, and the implications of this for considerations of identity, agency and feminism are considered. The thesis is divided into five chapters, the first introducing the reader to theories that frame the subsequent close textual analyses of the novels. Chapter One contextualizes my work in relation to the existing parameters of discussions of textual-corporeal relations and considers approaches to the ambiguously-bounded body and its symbolic function in society, ranging from the work of Mary Douglas and Mikhail Bakhtin to that of Susan Bordo and Julia Kristeva. In Chapter Two, the transsexual metamorph of Angela Carter's The Passion ofNew Eve (1977) is examined in terms of its transformative properties and its relationship to intertextuality. The plural, fluid, lesbian bodies of Monique Wittig's The Lesbian Body (1973) are discussed in connection with the text's transitivity choices and manipulations of discourses, in Chapter Three. Chapter Four investigates the depiction of the ambiguously-gendered body of the narrator of Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body (1992) in comparison with the novel's depiction of sexed bodies through a discussion of concealment, cliche, synecdoche and focalization. Chapter Five examines the anorexic body of Jenefer Shute's Life-Size (1992) and the representation of its relationship to language on diegetic and narrative levels. In the Conclusion to the thesis, I indicate the ways in which taking a stylistic or narratological approach to textual-corporeal relations can be productive in illuminating textual politics, particularly from a feminist perspective. CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS CHAPTER ONE:- INTRODUCTION 1 Contextualizing the Body .......................................................... 1 Textualizing the Body .............................................................. 11 CHAPTER TWO:- MORPHING BODIES, MORPHING TEXTS: ANGELA CARTER'S RE-VISIONS ........................................................ 20 Transsexuality and Metamorphosis .............................................. 23 A Baroque Accrual of Sources ................................................... 32 Tiresias - An 'Interrupted Continuum' .......................................... 34 The Tiresias of 'Reflections' ...................................................... 47 Conclusion - 'The Waste Land' as Contrast .................................... 50 CHAPTER THREE:- 'XX+XX=XX': MONIQUE WITTIG'S REPRODUCTION OF TIlE MONSTROUS LESBIAN ................................................... 53 Writing Lesbian ..................................................................... 55 Lesbian Embodiment .............................................................. .. 60 Lesbian Relationships .............................................................. 62 Lesbian Agents ...................................................................... .. 66 Lesbian Discourse .................................................................... 73 Lesbian Conclusions ................................................................ .. 82 CIIAPTER FOUR:- READING THE AMBIGUOUSLY-GENDERED BODY AS JEANETTE WINTERSON WRITES IT ....................................... 85 'You can't see what I can see' ...................................................... 93 Specularization, Synecdoche and the Minor Characters ........................ 99 The 'Mistress of Cliche' ............................................................. 112 The Sick Body ............. .......... ... .. ............ ..... .... .... .. .. .... ...... 117 Conclusion .............................................................................. 126 CIIAPTER FIVE:- BEING liFE-SIZE: JENEFER SHUTE DIETS WITH WORDS ................................................................................... 128 Anorexia and Aphasia ............................................................... 132 Reclaiming Language ................................................................ 140 A Sense of Perspective ............................................................... 143 Words as Food ........................................................................ 149 Food as Bodies, Bodies as Food ................................................... 155 Conclusion ............................................................................. 159 CONCLUSION:- A FEMINIST NARRATOLOGY OF TIlE BODY? ................. 160 BmLIOGRAPIIY ................................................................................. 164 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Many thanks to the following for support, help and encouragement in various forms: Alex Amison, Katya Bargna, Dave Edwards, Rachel Falconer, Michael Scanlon, Sue Vice, Elsie Walker. Sections of Chapter Three have been published in Paroles Gelees, 16.1 (1998) 1 CHAPTER ONE Introduction In the wealth of theorizations of the corporeal in recent decades, few critics have succeeded in identifying a textual-corporeal relationship pertaining to the specifics of narrative and style that goes beyond metaphor. It is commonplace, for example, to refer to bodies as texts and texts as bodies or to speak of 'writing the body'. Immediately, the latter phrase recalls ecriture feminine and its essentialist problematics if it is taken as anything other than a metaphorical exploration. Instead, in this thesis, I take a narratological approach to the question of bodies and texts, examining whether there can be a more direct or literalized relationship between bodies and the texts in which they appear. Specifically, I consider whether there is any dialogue that suggests a textual openness and interaction with the fruitful instability of the ambiguously-bounded body. The four primary texts that I examine handle very different, challenging 'novel' bodies: the transsexual metamorph of Angela Carter's The Passion of New Eve (1977); the plural, fluid lesbian bodies of Monique Wittig's The Lesbian Body (1973); the ambiguously-sexed and concealed body of Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body (1992); and the anorexic body of Jenefer Shute's Life-Size (1992). J The interplay between the implied bodies and their respective texts is foregrounded by the fact that all four works employ first-person homodiegetic narrators. Contextualizing the Body Perspectives on 'the body' range from Judith Butler's questioning of whether there is any body perceptible outside of discourse, to an essentialist idea of the body as the underpinning of J Angela Carter, The Passion of New Eve (London: Virago, 1982; Victor Gollancz, 1977). Subsequent references are to the Virago edition. Monique, Wittig, The Lesbian Body, trans. by David Le Vay (Boston: Beacon, 1986); trans. of Le corps lesbien (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1973). Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body (London: Vintage, 1993; London: Jonathan Cape, 1992). Subsequent references are to the Vintage edition. Shute, Jenefer, Life-Size (London: Mandarin, 1993; Seeker and Warburg, 1992). Subsequent references are to the Mandarin edition. 2 experience seen, for example, in the work of Helene Cixous. In Gender Trouble, Butler asks: 'Is there a "physical" body prior to the perceptually perceived body? An impossible question to decide'.2 In a later work, she states that 'insofar as the extra-discursive is delimited, it is formed by the very discourse from which it seeks to free itself.3 By contrast, and as Janet Wolff observes, the ecriture feminine proposed by Cixous depends upon a body that is constant, not subject to cultural modifications in ideology (Wolff, p.133). Although bodies possess certain physical compositional similarities, these similarities are elided by a very different kind of 'matter' - that of the cultural and material conditions in which bodies exist. Monique Wittig's critical writings precede those of Butler in advocating a committed social-constructionist position and, as I shall discuss in Chapter Three, an understanding of Wittig's critical work illuminates her challenging fiction. But Wittig does not extend quite as far as Butler in asking whether there is a body that exists that is pre- or extra-discursive, as Butler herself indicates (Gender Trouble, p.115). Wittig's materialist feminism critiques and distances her work from that of the more well-known French feminist theorists that comprise of Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva as well as Cixous. Her distance from these theorists arises from a political aversion to psychoanalysis, which she sees as ahistorical and apolitical, as Diana Fuss observes.4 Butler's 2 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990), p.114. Butler is far from the only feminist to consider this question but is possibly the most well known. See also Janet Wolffs chapter, 'Reinstating Corporeality: Feminism and Body Politics', in her Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women and Culture (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), pp.l20-141. Subsequent references to Wolff are to this work. 3 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive