The Discourse of the Female Body
From Difference in Gender to Difference from the Gender in
Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
Prep. Ileana SIREŢEANU
Universitatea ,,Transilvania” Braşov
This paper attempts at identifying the mechanisms of articulating the female lesbian
discourse in Jeanette Winterson’s first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, laying emphasis on
both the difference in gender and the difference from the gender. It also aims at discussing the
importance of female bodily manifestations as means of articulating a new type of discourse where
gender is no longer the only difference.
Published in 1985, Jeanette Winterson’s first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, opens
a series of very intriguing novels whose main concern seems to revolve around the re-definition of
gender boundaries and the invention of a new type of discourse which would assert a new
difference. Winterson’s novels no longer fall into the classical gender difference male versus
female, they make way for a new and certainly very problematic issue: the difference from the
gender, i.e. female versus female and being different within the same gender. Jeanette Winterson
belongs to the new wave of lesbian writers who no longer fear the overt expression of their
difference, yet the analysis of her novels also reveals a new type of discourse which no longer
restricts to feminist issues, but goes beyond and re-discusses them.
I have chosen to concentrate on Winterson’s first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, as
it seems to be the initial point in the development of this new type of feminine discourse and as it
sets the patterns that will organize her other novels as well.
In a very recent article that discusses the traits of the new lesbian discourse, Elaine J.
Lawless claims that:
“lesbian women are not writing on their bodies a discourse that has been designed and enforced by
the patriarchy; this new textual discourse is, rather, a consciously written female discourse
intended to disrupt cultural norms and create new possibilities for female personal and group
identity” [1].
Therefore, lesbian writers write not only outside patriarchal rules, but also outside what has already
become traditional feminist discourse, because their dicourse no longer questions only the male
norm, but also challenges the feminist discourse in their attempt to devise a group identity within
the same gender. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is set inside a religious community which
frantically teaches the word of the Bible and therefore the patriarchal values but quite surprisingly
women are pictured as spreading the word. Male figures are passive recipients of female will and
this seems to provide the grounds for the reading of a matriarchal rule behind the patriarchal explicit
setting.
Consequently, Winterson’s first novel approaches both male and female discourses,
deconstructing and subverting the former while re-shaping and nuancing the latter. Essentially,
Oranges Are not the Only Fruit takes up the grand narrative of the Bible and re-arranges it
according to the special needs of this new type of dicourse. The novel is structured in several
chapters, whose titles overtly refer to those of the Bible as a clear means of subverting patriarchal
values. This re-writing of the grand narratives of patriarchal thinking such as the Bible or the
traditional fairy-tales is not very new for feminist postmodern writings (the case of Angela Carter’s
postmodern fairy-tales is widely known), but Winterson’s approach is unusually challenging as it
questions not only strict religious canons, patriarchal rules and values and implicitly patriarchal
literature, it also revisits female perspectives on them.
Designed as an autobiographical novel, (Winterson herself acknowledges it in the introduction to
the novel) Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit voices a very young narrator, who is no longer I, the
woman, different from men, but I, Jeanette, the woman different from the other women. Readers
witness a child narrator developing into an adolescent as she gradually discovers and thus traces the
boundaries of her difference. In the same article, Elaine J. Lawless insisted on the fact that:
” lesbians are reclaiming the authority for their own definition of sexuality and being; by doing so,
they defy the heteropatriarchy's notions of what it means to be female, sexual, even human. They
are deconstructing the heterosexual hegemony that is propagated in every aspect of the dominant
culture. By "writing" their identity on the text of their own bodies, they are, in effect, (re)writing
themselves” [2].
Winterson’s young narrator is not sexed. This is in fact a characteristic of all narrators in
Winterson’s novels who seem to be in between gender boundaries, somehow androgyns, sexually
unmarked. They grow into sexed bodies and voices as they narrate themselves, because all the
novels are written in the first person singular.
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit introduces a child narrator, aged seven, entrapped within a
fanatically religious family, where the mother is the central figure and the father merely
instrumental: „ my father liked to watch the wrestling, my mother liked to wrestle” [3]. The figure
of the active mother overlaps that of God in the child’s perception, and both love and religion
become compulsory and therefore undesirable to the child. We discover in the first chapter,
Genesis, motivations for all that is to happen consequently. For instance, the fact that the child has
been adopted can be read both literally and metaphorically, explaining the forced circumstances of
her development and her eventual refusal of her taught being. We therefore assist to a clash between
nature and imposed culture, where nature is discovered gradually and strongly opposed to the set of
ready-made and served rules. Quite surprisingly, in this case, the imposing figure, the embodiment
of the oppressor is not the father. It is the dominant, active mother who becomes the representative
of the norm, the dominant culture, the sameness. The adopted child does not adopt at her turn the
rule of the mother, as she does not naturally belong to her family. Metaphorically, the patriarchal
rule imposed through the mother figure is delivered in the form of a recurrent oranges treat, since
„oranges are the only fruit, she [the mother] always said”. [4] The child accepts the treat up to a
point in her life when she abruptly discovers that oranges are not the only fruit, that there are also
bananas, pineapples, melons. Beyond the literal level of interpretation, Jeanette Winterson seems to
say that men are not the only fruit for women and viceversa, that similarly there might also be other
ways of perceiving the world and life in general than the patriarchal, traditional one. Thus, she
manages to articulate the beginnings of a new type of discourse, that of the difference within the
difference, which quite surprisingly is not twice marginal, as we would expect it to be, but rather
self-assertive and definitory.
As the narrative progresses, we assist to an awakening of the child and later of the adolescent
narrator, from an initial stage of taught innocence and conformity to the imposed canon to a state of
unaware rebellion and denial of the whole set of rules, values and regulations so far taken for
granted. The discovery of her body, more precisely of her bodily needs, is a crucial step in the
defining process of her identity, which neither conforms to the male nor to the female. Winterson
does not present the narrator of her novel through physical description. I would even say that she
stubbornly refuses to look at her. Yet, the body acquires huge importance in the construction of a
different identity through the processes it undergoes and accomplishes. For instance, there are
numerous instances in the novel when the girl is watched while eating. As a child she is fed by the
forster mother and she never seems to enjoy the food. As with everything else in her life, she is
taught to enjoy the food her mother feeds her and obliged to eat oranges instead of grapes, beef
instead of chips. A psychoanalytical reading would, at this point, connect food to sexuality, and
therefore the denial of given food to a denial of taught sexuality:
„Potted beef, and be thankful....Eat this and be quiet.
Why can’t I have chips?
...There’s no potatoes.”[5]
The invention of a new type of sexuality is therefore not overtly displayed through shocking
images charactersitic to postmodern writing, it is merely inferred between the lines. The growing
body is mirrored in action and never exposed to the eye of the reader, who at times might get the
impression that the character/narrator is androgynous. The discourse of the body becomes the
central issue of the novel, since it discusses and re-invents the norm. But, the body, in her case, is
not a unifying entity, a totalizing shape to bear a coherent content. In Winterson’s case, the body is
fragmented and sometimes disabled as if to mark its impossibility as well as that of its owner to
subscribe to a particulat gender category. As Judith Butler has argued in Bodies That Matter,
objects have a discrete set of boundaries, but bodies do not; instead, it is the act of labeling bodies
and sexuality according to heterosexual standards ("woman" or "she is a lesbian") that creates or
defines bodily limitations. Fragmented bodies in postmodern fiction can therefore disrupt traditional
images of women's bodies and undermine dominant ideologies; or as Linda Hutcheon has suggested
more broadly, postmodern texts can "denaturalize some of the dominant features of our ways of
life". [6]
Thus, apart from the narrative discourse we also witness another more subtle discourse, that
of the body in search of an identity. That is why, at the beginning, the narrator is sexually
unmarked, a child. The she-child finds it impossible to conform to the rule of the mother or to that
of the father. It is her own type of rule that she needs to dicover in order to affiliate herself to a
group, which even though marginal becomes central from her perspective. Consequently, I fully
agree with Lawless’s claim that:
„lesbians are reclaiming the authority for their own definition of sexuality and being; by doing so,
they defy the heteropatriarchy's notions of what it means to be female, sexual, even human. They
are deconstructing the heterosexual hegemony that is propagated in every aspect of the dominant
culture. By "writing" their identity on the text of their own bodies, they are, in effect, (re)writing
themselves.”[7]
There also another important aspect when discussing the construction of this new type of identity,
namely the fact that Winterson chooses to define it as deviance from the norm. Therefore, the norm
remains the criterion according to which a new identity is being labelled, but it turns into an object
of subversion. The choice of the Bible as the starting point for the narrative does not only hints at
subverting religion as a central discourse in patriarchal society, it also aims at deconstructing
patriarchal literature, since the Bible stands for the Book of traditional literature. Likewise,
Winterson inserts in the narrative several fairy-tale and legend episodes, which apart from including
the novel in the tradition of what is today called magical realism, also support the subversion of
patriarchal literature with oral tradition as its starting point. The same Elaine J. Lawless said in this
respect that:
„lesbian women are not writing on their bodies a discourse that has been designed and enforced by
the patriarchy; this new textual discourse is, rather, a consciously written female discourse
intended to disrupt cultural norms and create new possibilities for female personal and group
identity.” [8]
Consequently, Winterson moves from asserting the classical difference in gender, through the
subversion of patriarchal grand narratives, to asserting a new type of difference, that from the same
gender. We assist therefore to the construction of new category, a new type of discourse, which
although female is not feminist. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is an experimental novel in the
sense that it experiments the possibilities of creating a new discourse within the boundaries of
another. It is perhaps her most „innocent” novel as it restrains to discussing the origins and the
motivations of this difference within the difference. It lacks aggressiveness and to some extents it is
even a lyrical novel in the sense that it presents the poetics of a new type of difference: the
difference from the gender.
References:
Lawless, Elaine J.: Claiming Inversion Lesbian Constructions of Female Identity as
Claims for Authority in Journal of American Folklore. Volume: 111. Issue: 439. 1998, p. 2
ibid., p. 10
Winterson, Jeanette: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, London, Vintage, 1985, p. 3
ibid., p. 20
ibid., p. 21
Hutcheon, Linda: Poetica Postmodernismului, Bucuresti, Univers, 2001
Lawless, Elaine J: Claiming Inversion Lesbian Constructions of Female Identity as
Claims for Authority in Journal of American Folklore. Volume: 111. Issue: 439. 1998, p. 12
ibid., p. 12