This paper aims to propose Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body as a melancholic text. It approaches Written on the Body through the melancholic mechanisms of Sigmund Freud, Julia Kristeva and Judith Butler. Each of them suggests different melancholic mechanisms but the text is possible to be read through three lenses because Written on the Body contains various melancholic meanings.
First, the article demonstrates the narrator of Written on the Body as a melancholic subject from Freud's mechanisms: the disturbance of self-regard, the loss that is unconscious, and the conflict due to ambivalence. Melancholic subject invests its libidinal investment into itself, so it can result in the subject's committing suicide. In the end of the text, the advent of Louise means the death of the narrator.
Second, the paper shows that Written on the Body consists of melancholic writing through Kristeva's mechanisms. For Kristeva, the melancholic writing is the melancholy cannibalistic imagination. The subject tears, cuts up, swallows, digests the object: the narrator identifies Louise as the melancholic cannibalism. According to Kristeva, the melancholy can be recovered through sublimation and appear through poetic writing. In Written on the Body, the narrator find a love-poem for Louise.
Finally, through Butler's mechanism, it notes that Written on the Body is a subvert text because melancholic incorporation (melancholic identification) contains both the prohibition and the desire, and so embodies the ungrieved loss of the homosexual cathexis. For a subvert text the narrator is a lesbian and the melancholic subject is constitutive of the human subject. The melancholic subject absorbs Louise on her body.