Jeanette Winterson's View on Life

Jeanette Winterson's View on Life

A writer's style should be distinctive. Indeed, if it isn't distinctive, then it isn't a style. A creative person is someone who imagines what other people cannot. Their value to us lies in expanding our own possibilities. Walls fall. We break out. Art releases what was lost.

Jeanette Winterson

Sometimes it seems that our lives have been watered down. That somehow we have been cheated of the true meaning of what is before us. Especially here in America, millions of people live comfortable lifestyles: they have money, they have place, they have success. But still many of us are bored and unhappy. We wake up every morning, go to work, go to school, and come home without feeling a thing. We are de facto disenchanted and nobody really knows why. Our imagination dies long before our bodies die.

Jeanette Winterson is a writer whose work seems to be aimed at changing this for herself and, if we will listen to her, perhaps for us as well. Winterson reveals both the beauty and the horror with which we are confronted on a daily basis. She shows us new universes within our own, and parallel universes outside our own. Her writing teaches us to read between the lines of our everyday lives. Even when this is not an obvious message delivered through the content of her stories, we find it within her language. Her words reveal and unfold layers of unrealized meaning on every page, until the reader is gently lowered back into his or her own world with a new fascination and awe for what already existed.

Winterson's writing rejects our conventional perception of life. She reveals the shallow fulfillment inherent in traditional values, expands our notion of time and reality, and gives us new insig...

... middle of paper ...

...he is sick of our houses with ceilings and no floors and wants us to build houses instead with floors and no ceilings, houses that deny limits and embrace sheltered truths that help us deny the limits. She sees the power and beauty in both imagination and reality, and she finds no need to distinguish between the two, as both exist co-dependently, like structural elements of a house with no ceiling. In short, Jeanette Winterson wants to release, through her own art, the love for life that has been lost. She writes for our very lives and hers.

Works Cited

Kakutani, Michiko. "A Journey Through Time, Space, and Imagination." New York Times 27 Apr. 1990: C33.

Winterson, Jeanette. Art & Lies. London: Cape, 1994.

The Passion. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1998.

The World and Other Places. New York: Vintage, 2000.

Written On The Body. London: Cape, 1992.