LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 17:6 June 2017
ISSN 1930-2940

Managing Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
Editors: B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
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         L. Ramamoorthy, Ph.D.
         C. Subburaman, Ph.D. (Economics)
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Rebellious Homosexual Daughter vs. Religious Orthodox Mother –
A Study of Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

Vaishali Shivkumar Biradar, M.A., B.Ed., M.Phil.


Courtesy:
https://books.google.com/books/about/Oranges_Are_Not_the_Only_Fruit.html?id=CZOfOqstljI C&source=kp_cover

Abstract

Jeanette Winterson is a novelist but her approach is more of a story-teller than a writer. She tells a story every time and tries to connect the two worlds of fact and fiction as well as the world of the believed-to-be-normal people with the world of believed-to-be-abnormal/not acceptable people – the Third Gender.

In addition, she rejects the label ‘political’ writer – as she rejects almost all kind of the labels such as feminist or lesbian writer but her work is absorbed with a sense of political injustice and protest. It is argumentative, aggressive, confrontational, and impassioned speaking up on behalf of history’s silent majorities and minorities – women, gay people and the working class, including subjects like patriarchy, war, racism and capitalism.

Her literary art opens a door to a new consciousness through which we can examine the vulnerable, self-doubting, intricacies of the self. She questions and gives a constant insurrection of the patriarchal binary regulation of sexuality that unveils and lays exposed the constructed, gendered conception of the self, and the restrictiveness of the concept of love within the compulsory heterosexual economics. Love becomes a major theme, whereas gender becomes a subsidiary element in Winterson. Moreover, her female characters are stronger in comparison with her male characters. It gives a feminist approach to her writing, also, but she prefers going beyond that and that is how her literature becomes the literature of the Third gender. But still with her style of writing, by rejecting both sentimentality and the teaching or moralizing of the readers she awards them the complete authority to choose the multiple ways to interpret and assess her texts. She advocates alternative traditions to understand the sexual, emotional, and intellectual self. Through the use of characters who endeavor to discover and explore their sexual identity (e.g. Jeanette’s character in the novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit – a young woman’s search for identity – rather a self not bound under the title ‘gender’; and the whole process to ascertain her lesbian identity), Winterson deconstructs standard narrative conventions and shows how storytelling need not be subordinated to the constraints of the patriarchal grand narratives. Through her narrative techniques, she demonstrates some of the innovative and challenging ways of writing, presenting a strong alternative to the patriarchal constructed binary oppositions between the masculine and feminine identities. In this paper we shall see how she advocates this alternate tradition.

Keywords: Jeanette Winterson, Lesbian identity, Third gender, Patriarchy, Genderless self

Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette Winterson’s first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1987), is a semi-autobiographical novel in seven chapters named after the books of the Old Testament. The main character is Jeanette, a girl adopted by a working class couple active in a Pentecostal community. Jeanette is a naïve and yet very determined, self-assured girl. The mixture of early wisdom and childhood innocence is quite charming. In the course of the novel we see how Jeanette is trying to come to terms with what she herself experiences as good and that which her mother and Pastor Finch believe is virtuous. In that sense, it is a Bildungsroman. One of the themes in this book is the feeling of uncertainty Jeanette experiences, that she is trying to come to terms with: “I wasn’t quite certain what was happening myself, it was the second time in my life I had experienced uncertainty”. (Winterson, 1987, p.98) At the end of the novel, she opts for a life that embraces that feeling, leaving behind the certainties of the black-and-white world created by her mother.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Vaishali Shivkumar Biradar, M.A., B.Ed., M.Phil.
Lecturer – English (GES – Class – II)
Government Polytechnic for Girls
Surat
Gujarat
India
vaishali_jigs@yahoo.co.in

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