Love, Convention, Religion in Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit

Tuesday, 08 March 2005 01:00

Introduction

“Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit”, Jeanette Winterson’s first and autobiographical novel, was published in 1985 and it gained her worldwide fame. It is a challenging novel because it challenges everything that church and society consider being normal and natural. It is a novel of rebellion because the main protagonist, Jeanette, rebels against the authority of the church and its “natural” order. It is a novel of quest because a young girl tries to find herself and her own attitude toward life. It is a brave novel because the heroine is not afraid to follow her own instincts and reject everything that restricts her freedom of choice.

It is also a coming-of-age/coming out story because Jeanette is going through a difficult process of growing up in an ecclesiastical environment, to her final coming out to herself and to others and then rejection of all social and moral values, viewed as such by her family and the church. It is a rejection of uninteresting and compulsory heterosexuality and the world of religious dogma. This is a story about love and its terrible struggle to survive in such a world. It has to struggle for its survival only because it is the love shared by two women. This lesbian love is viewed as abnormal and unnatural by almost everyone and our heroine condemns and rejects everything “normal and natural”, her family, church, but not her God, to help this love find its way.

Jeanette’s early religious education

The novel begins with the description of Jeanette’s family. Her parents belong to a middle working class. They are Pentecostal Evangelical Christians, extremely religious, living in a small town in the north of England. Jeanette’s mother, who adopted Jeanette when she was little, is very devout and she has devoted her whole life to the church and missionary work. She is very active, in every way, while her husband is totally passive and he rarely appears in the novel.

From the first few pages, we learn about her attitude towards life and sex and her notions about the eternal fight between good and evil, tight and wrong. There are no mixed feelings; she always thinks in binary terms. There are friends and there are enemies. “Enemies are: The Devil (in his many forms), Next Door, Sex (in its many forms), Slugs. Friends are: God, Our Dog, Auntie Madge, The Novels of Charlotte Brontë, Slug Pellets.”[1]

Jeanette’s mother has very eccentric interpretation of God’s word. She has promised God that she will “get a child, train it, build it and dedicate it to the Lord: a missionary child, a servant of God, a blessing.” [2]She has never been delighted with the idea of begetting a child and so she adopted Jeanette from an orphanage and now prepares her to become part of her natural and divine plan.

She even adjusts the ending of “Jane Eyre”, the only non-Bible book she reads to her daughter; Jane and the priest live together in a celibate marriage, akin to that of Jeanette’s parents, and go to India to do some missionary work. Many years later, Jeanette is deeply disappointed discover her mother’s fabrication, a betrayal and a lie: Jane, in fact, does not marry St. John but goes back to marry Rochester.

She is so obsessed with Jeanette’s religious home education that she avoids to send her to school explaining that school is a “Breeding Ground, they’ll lead you astray.” [3]Of course, she will have to send her anyway. As for sex, she is very much against it. Sex must be avoided at all costs, even in marriage, and she warns Jeanette never to “let anyone touch her Down There.”[4] She is disgusted with Next Door having sex every day and when she hears it, she puts her hands over Jeanette’s ears so that she cannot hear it. She even forbids her daughter to watch Wildlife programs for fear they might be a bad influence upon her. Jeanette must be pure, devout and led to perfection in order to do her future missionary work.

She herself had had an affair with Pierre in Paris before she was truly devoted top the Lord but she thinks of it as of her near downfall and rarely talks to Jeanette about it. She forbids Jeanette to go to the paper shop held by two women because she is sure they deal in “Unnatural Passions”.

Of course, she never explains to Jeanette what it means. In her view, Miss Jewsbury is not holy because she is still single and not young anymore. Mother’s strange views are shared by most members of their evangelical community. Being single and not young is a certain sign of dealing in “Unnatural Passions” and persons having these characteristics must be avoided and condemned by church. Everything that is different is not tolerated. Other religions are not acknowledged and everybody not belonging to their church is not yet saved by the Lord.

As for Jeanette, she is more than willing to fulfill her mother’s expectations. She thinks it is a good thing she is destined to become a missionary some day and not having to get married because she does not like men at all. A woman from her neighborhood told her that she had married a beast and Jeanette herself is convinced that other men she knows are not much better. Most of them look like beasts, drink and beat their wives and their marriages are not happy. She thinks about it a lot but the feeling prevails that she will one day fall in love like everybody else. And she does, a couple of years later.

Love and religion

Falling in love with Melanie makes Jeanette think more intensely about her church, not as a “sacrament of love but as an exercise in power” and realize that “heterosexuality is not the only way to live and, indeed, might not always be the best way to live.[5]

 

She is happy with her love and she experiences neither shame not self-doubt. To her, this relationship with Melanie is most natural and right because she learnt at an early age that “everything in the natural world was a symbol of the Great Struggle between good and evil.” [6]So, if her love is not evil, it must be good and right. By embracing a credo (“To the pure all things are pure”[7]), that assures her of rightness of her love, she reconciles her private involvement with women and her public position in church. Her lovers go to church, listen to her preach and then go home to make love. “She perceives no discrepancy, moral or otherwise, between her sexual preference and the prescriptions of the church because she believes, like Winterson, that love shouldn’t be gender-bound.”[8]

Jeanette realizes at an early age that heterosexuality, disgusting and uninteresting, is made possible through conspiracy and coercion. When Pastor Spratt asks her “Do you deny you love this woman with a love reserved for man and wife”, she answers, “No, yes, I mean of course I love her.”[9]Jeanette denies not her love for another woman but the suggestion that it is a love “reserved for man and wife”. Thus, she “simultaneously refuses patriarchal insistence to read her relationship as a pale imitation of heterosexuality and affirms that it is something other, perhaps even more.”[10]

When Pastor announces that her love for Melanie is unnatural, she cites St. Paul in Romans: “I know and am persuaded in the Lord that nothing is unnatural in itself; it is made unnatural by those who think it is unnatural.”[11] The problem, as Jeanette sees it, stems not from her longings for women but from others’ inability to see and accept the loveliness of sexual love shared between women. The crucial words “It’s you not us”[12]affirm her profound conviction that her love is good and rights and others’ inability to acknowledge it is their own problem and any attempt to condemn it constitutes perversion.

The church grants Jeanette a lot of power – she can preach to the congregation and, therefore, influence it. In the view of the church fathers, Jeanette’s masculine access to the religious domain is what allows her to usurp masculine power in the sexual domain. According to their logic, Jeanette’s “unnatural passions” arise, as Jeanette explains, from “allowing women power in the church, …in taking on a man’s world, in other ways, I had flouted God’s law and tried to do it sexually… So there I was, my success in the pulpit being the reason for my downfall. The devil had attacked me at my weakest point: my inability to realize the limitations of my sex.”[13]

In Winterson’s view, the homosexual is not an imitation of a heterosexual; the lesbian is not an inferior version of a man. When Jeanette’s mother, in referring to her daughter, mutters “with disgust”, “aping men”, the narrator responds: “Now if I was aping men she’d have every reason to be disgusted. As far as I was concerned, men were something you had around the place, not particularly interesting, but quite harmless. I had never shown the slightest interest for them, and apart from my never wearing a skirt, saw nothing else in common between us.” [14]Later, after two gay men enter the church holding hands and Jeanette’s mother comments “should have been a woman that one”, the narrator observes: “This was clearly not true. At that point, I had no notion about sexual politics, but I knew that a homosexual is further away from a woman than a rhinoceros. Now that I do have a number of notions about sexual politics, this early observation holds good. There are shades of meaning, but a man is a man, wherever you find it.”[15] Winterson observes that homosexuals, male or female, with sexual politics or without, are not one gender trapped in the opposite body.

Jeanette loves both God and Melanie and thinks that God is good and that her love is a gift from God and, therefore, must be appreciated. She feels that God is not her enemy but his servants are. That is why she decides to leave everything, her family and church, but not her God. The decision is difficult but she is both brave and aware that there is no choice that does not mean a loss. “It is not judgment day but another morning.”[16]

[1] Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, London, Vintage, 1991, p.3

[2] Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, London, Vintage, 1991, p.10

[3] Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, London, Vintage, 1991, p.16

[4] Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, London, Vintage, 1991, p.86

[5] Helen Barr, Face to Face, p.30, quoted in The Lesbian Postmodern, ed. by Laura Doan, p.141

[6] Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, London, Vintage, 1991, p.16

[7] Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, London, Vintage, 1991, p.103

[8] Laura Doan, editor, The Lesbian Postmodern, New York, Columbia University Press, 1994, p.144

[9] Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, London, Vintage, 1991, p.103

[10] Lora Doan, editor, The Lesbian Postmodern, p.145

[11] Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, script, London, Pandora Press, 1991, p.40

[12] Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, London, Vintage, 1991, p.103

[13] Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, London, Vintage, 1991, p.132

[14] Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, London, Vintage, 1991, p.126

[15] Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, London, Vintage, 1991, p.126

[16] Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, London, Vintage, 1991, p.134

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