Narrating Memory in Jeanette Winterson's Lighthousekeeping: Identity, Body and Space

Abstract

This article analyzes Jeanette Winterson’s Lighthousekeeping (2004) within the concept of memory through a close textual analysis and explores how memory plays a role in shaping an individual’s identity and how body and spaces form memory. An individual as a spatial temporal being perceives the world through sensory perceptions of her/his body and forms her/his body and spatial memories through this interaction. The recollections of these memories, pleasant or painful, affect the present. This study also highlights the effectiveness of recreations and reinterpretations of the past on an individual’s existence, and investigates how spatial and body memories are important in recollections of the events that have psychological impacts on an individual’s identity and existence, and how the past, namely memories, functions for the self-realization. This article dwells on the function of the past through storytelling in the construction of identity by referring to body and space in Lighthousekeeping. The lighthouse and stories function to form spatial and body memory that shape identity and shed light on psychology and existence by exploring the relationship between mother and daughter and the role of body in establishing this relationship.