Angela Francis

Obsessive Love, Projection, and the Body in Written on the Body and The Stillest Day 

      It is easier to describe a state of obsessive love than it is to explain how or why one moves through it. Places take on meanings that previously remained hidden, all of which hinge on the other’s presence, absence, or desire, while mental snapshots of the love-object come unbidden, sometimes of the person entire but often piecemeal: the hands, the forearm, the upper lip.

      After describing his focus on the parts of his love-object’s body, Barthes suggests that such a state is more akin to the fetishization of a corpse than it is to love; only when he considers the person entire does his “desire [cease] to be perverse…I return to an Image, to a Whole: once again, I love” (A Lover’s Discourse 72). If this “perverse desire” is not love proper, I suggest it is analogous to obsession. I argue such a focus on parts of the body might be considered perverse not only because of the fragmentation involved but also because of the additional transgressions of bodily boundaries that follow.

      This paper will explore this concept through Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body and Josephine Hart’s The Stillest Day. The protagonist of each novel attempts to attain knowledge of the object of his/her obsession and mastery over the feelings such obsession engenders. At the same time, they both fragment the targets of their obsessions and layer additional meanings onto the resulting body parts, sometimes shortly before projecting each part onto, and potentially into, themselves.

 Angela J. Francis is a doctoral student in the English program at the CUNY Graduate Center. Focusing largely on literature from the 20^th and 21^st centuries, her research interests include methods of representing the body in depictions of obsessive love and grotesque corporeality in African American magical realism.