Memory In Jane Eyre

Memory is an elusive friend. Sometimes we need to remember, but the memories do not appear. We want a glimpse of that correct answer, the one more than twice read during hours of study, but the data remains lost and the space on the answer sheet ends up unmarked.

Memory is a treacherous tool. Sometimes we need to forget, to bid farewell to a failure and start a fresh project. However, the stronger the impression the heaviest the memory sinks in our mind, and this is what happens to Written in the body’s protagonist.

This main character has no assigned name and gender in the pages of the book, and this ambiguity is ever present in its pages in an almost playful way, as if the author challenged the reader to make assumptions about it only

Nature is fecund but fickle. One year she leaves you to starve, the next year she kills you with love. That year the branches were torn beneath the weight, this year they sing in the wind. There are no ripe plums in August. Have I got it wrong, this hesitant chronology?

Perhaps I should call it Emma Bovary’s eyes or Jane Eyre’s dress. I don’t know.

She really does not know, she doubts the accuracy of her memories as much as the reader does. Put in context, this is not really as much of a distortion element than a natural consequence of what we are being told; this is a love story, and how the main character feels about Louise is the principal force pushing the story. Therefore, the fact the memories are printed with Louise as a forme is to be expected

Now here am I making up my own memories of good times. When we were together the weather was better, the days were longer. Even the rain was warm. That’s right, isn’t

So much that sometimes past feels more real than present, or at least she is tempted to feel so:

I was sitting on the bench smiling soaked to the skin. I wasn’t happy but the power of memory is such that it can lift reality for a time. Or is memory the more real place?

There is another aspect to memory in Written on the body. The narrator has a fixation with Louise, yes, but Louise is the body and the body is Louise. Fascinated with her physiognomy, after knowing about her leukaemia the protagonist becomes obsessed with anatomy:

I became obsessed with anatomy. If I could not put Louise out of my mind I would drown myself in her. Within the clinical language, through the dispassionate view of the sucking, sweating, greedy, defecating self, I found a love-poem to Louise. I would have her plasma, her spleen, her synovial fluid. I would recognize her even when her body had long since fallen away.

Louise is remembered through what her body means to the protagonist. Louise’s body is the map, and the study of anatomy is the guide to the paths it contains. This paths lead to the happy memories in which Louise is still with the