When the concept of love and passion emerges in literature, often a reader's immediate reaction is one of identification or distance with the work. Love and passion are intimate and therefore difficult to render universally in the outside world, with the ineffectiveness of language, social and cultural impasses and a multitude of other issues creating an "otherness" to the literary representation of the phenomena of love/ passion. The portrayal of love, however, often hides in subtleties that transcend social constructs or even perceived reality. In Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body, we are exposed, as the book's cover explains, to "love stripped of all its clichés and categories" through metaphors crafted in a real and compelling way. But the effectiveness also lies in Winterson's deconstruction of social and ideological views, which demonstrates how the unconscious impressions of modern ideology regarding love and desire cause immense conflict within oneself, leading to passionate anxiety, or even to the repression of desires through the objectification of memory, since the fulfillment of our desires inevitably leads to the expression of mortality, for example all human emotions, even love, come to a logical end. One of the finer points of Written on the Body is the exploration of desire in multiple points of view, but from a single narrator. The natural erosion of the nameless narrator's philosophy can work to draw in a reader, as there is essentially no judgment. The narrator's shoes are there to be filled as a voyeur, as a recognizable memory or experience, or as a rejection. The brazen display of passion against social norms, highlighted vividly in the opening pages by the mother of a traditional family she despised......middle of paper......the experience, a cathartic act of focused self-preservation towards completion or closure, both unattainable goals, but still a desire in their own right. As quoted by Harold Bloom in The Western Canon, an out-of-context reference to a quote by Friedrich Nietzsche, but applicable here, since the enactment of passion outside of ourselves is always the residue of real experience: “This for which we can find the world is something already dead in our hearts; there is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking” (Bloom 137). Once we identify the source of our passion and quantify it relative to our previous experience, we essentially “speak” it within our phenomenological dialogue between experience and interpretation, we are essentially the mother on the riverbank, talking about how we should be ashamed of ourselves for such excess and disobedience to traditional structures.