Writing through the body : the inscription of the female body in contemporary literature

Abstract

In ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, Hélène Cixous argues that ‘woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies.’ Cixous’s well-known essay stresses the ‘infinite poverty’ of writing that inscribes the female body, and suggests a coming-to-writing through the body. This dissertation seeks to revisit Cixous’s ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, analysing the inscription of the female body in contemporary literature with reference to the writing of Annie Ernaux, Elena Ferrante, Ian McEwan and Jeanette Winterson. In the introduction, a bibliographical timeline of the body in the critical tradition is observed, particularly with relation to writers who recognise the body as a material whose meaning may be revised. The first chapter delves into the multifaceted body: the desiring body; the maternal body; and the ageing body, proposing an inscription of the female body that is derived from experience. This chapter sets the theme of the body as perpetually fluid, emphasising the affinity between body and text in forming an embodiment of liminality that seeps through boundaries. The second chapter suggests a return to the origin, exploring the maternal body, mother-daughter relationships and their fluid bodily boundaries in Ernaux’s I Remain in Darkness and Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment. This chapter also analyses Julia Kristeva’s movement out of the chora, the maternal abject, and Ferrante’s frantumaglia, providing further insight into the complexity of mother-daughter relationships. The third and final chapter marks a return to desire with Winterson’s Written on the Body and McEwan’s On Chesil Beach, analysing the different manifestations of desire. This chapter, too, revisits Kristeva’s abject and what will here be referred to as the non-abject as each character navigates through the interaction of bodily boundaries in intimate relationships. This study concludes with the inscription of the female body as multitudinous, whose multiple tongues drip in the white ink that is derived from the mother’s breasts, marking woman’s introduction to writing, and the creation of a liminal enigma.