Employing a unique sexually undetermined narrator lends the novel to a feminist criticism as well as queer theory.
Written on the Body, by Jeanette Winterson, is a clear example of this stance. Consequently, the borders between male/female, sex-wise, and masculine/feminine, gender-wise, have been blown up. Accordingly, "violent hierarchy" has been disintegrated without favoring one of the poles over another. The demolition of stereotypical social molds hallmarks the era of postmodernism boundaries between binary oppositions have been dissolved. The determination of the narrator's sex enables the reader to read many of the messages wrapped in the text at least it determines the narrator's gender as a man or woman.
Being closely attached to the social role of a male or female, gender is one of paramount topics studied by cultural criticism. This theory scrutinizes the social structures of a civilized society as well as a primitive one: their functions, traditions and taboos as illustrated within literary works. These shifts serve to form an idea of the translator’s awareness of the importance of gender in Winterson’s novel.Ĭultural criticism seeks to shed light on the social structure and social function implied in literary discourse. The comparison of the original and the translation was carried out by using Kitty Van Leuven-Zwart categorization system, the purpose being to identify shifts that are relevant for the narrator’s gender and the perception of it. To draw up this typology, I consulted a number of scholarly works on gender in language use and in translation. To explore gender in language use in Written on the Body I drew up a typology of gender clues in (written) language and applied them to the novel.
Given Winterson’s contestational stance on gender, sexuality and identity and their subsequent transposition into and representation in fiction, and the numerous critical responses the book has received from scholars and others working within gender studies, etc., the translation was examined to see whether the emergent translation strategy manifested an awareness of Winterson’s sometimes evasive style of writing in the novel. The focus is in particular on how the translator dealt with difficult issues of gender, sexuality and identity in the novel. In my master’s thesis I examine the translation tactics and overall strategy used in the Dutch translation Op het lichaam geschreven (1992) of Jeanette Winterson’s novel Written on the Body (1992).
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