Jeanette Winterson and Religion

Emily McAvan

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350096929
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Since the publication of her first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson quickly established herself as a powerful and insightful writer on sexuality and gender. However, the profound and persistent religious themes of her work have received much less critical attention.
Jeanette Winterson and Religion is the first in-depth study of the ways in which Winterson navigates the sacred and the profane in the full range of her writing, from her first novel to later works such as The PowerBook and The Stone Gods. This book reads the author's work alongside the theological turn in the thought of such theorists as Alain Badiou, John D. Caputo and Julia Kristeva as well as feminist and queer theologians such as Catherine Keller and Marcella Althaus-Reid. In this way, Jeanette Winterson and Religion reveals how Jeanette Winterson stakes out a unique and intriguing post-secular literary form of the sacred.

1

‘I Love Both of Them’: Queer Love and the Religious in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick famously began her foundational work Epistemology of the Closet with the declaration that much of Western culture is ‘structured – indeed, fractured – by a chronic, now endemic crisis of homo/heterosexual definition, indicatively male, dating from the end of the nineteenth century’.¹ Along with anti-abortion politics, the homo/heterosexual fracture has been one of the most powerful ways in which Christian belief is articulated in the United States and other Anglophonic countries over the last thirty years. The forceful homophobia of the Catholic Church’s clergy, the Church of the Later Day Saints, the Southern Baptist Convention and other evangelical groups has made opposition to gay rights a significant, perhaps dominant, position among religious conservatives. In such contexts, homosexuality is defined as always-already secular, with heterosexuality sanctified under the sign of the religious. Yet, although there are strong links between secular and queer and religious and straight, there is also a strong body of work from writers who problematize the easy conflation of these terms. As I have established in the Introduction, Winterson’s work is a particularly compelling example of not only what we might call post-secular writing, but also queer and feminist writing.

Critical approaches to Winterson’s work have largely been in the form of feminist (especially lesbian-feminist) and postmodern/post-structuralist theories, with queer theories emerging from the conversation between the two.² This substantial body of criticism has examined Winterson’s distinctive use of language, her invocations of gender, sexuality and desire, and the identity politics implications of her writing as a female writer, a lesbian and so on, yet the notable religious element to her work remains relatively under-theorized. Her most famous work, 1985’s autobiographical novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, stages the definitional conflict between religion and homosexuality, only to collapse it. In the novel, the teenage Jeanette falls in love with another girl in her evangelical church and, after a failed exorcism, is eventually expelled from her community as a result of her insistence upon not merely homosexuality’s acceptability, but its holiness.

In its alliance of sexuality with the sacred, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit comes close to what Argentinian theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid has called an ‘indecent theology’.³ The analysis of gendered and sexual relationships to the sacred by feminist and queer theorists is important for the study of Winterson’s text, for sacred and sexual are profoundly entangled in her work. In The Queer God, Althaus-Reid argues that ‘belief systems are organized around people’s bodies, and people’s bodies in relationships, and in sexual relationships’.⁴ She argues that religious belief is inextricably linked to sexual, gendered, raced and classed ideologies that are mediated through the body. Or as theologians Chris Boesel and Catherine Keller put it, ‘divinity comes […] encumbered by the projection of all manner of finite images derived from our bodily life: images of a lord or warrior, a friend or father, a humanoid love, and minimally, an inconspicuous personal pronoun [that is, he]’.⁵ So the kinds of bodies in the Christian imaginary, most especially that of God ‘himself’, are organized normatively, produced as discursive power along the lines of heterosexist, racist, misogynistic and imperialist thought. As well as the idealized bodies of the spiritual, aberrant bodies are produced that become formally constituted outside of the purvey of theology, and indeed outside of religion and religious communities in general (or, less formally, relegated unacknowledged inside the closet). To put it bluntly: queer bodies are rarely framed as holy bodies.⁶

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is framed as a religious text itself, each chapter is named after a book of the Hebrew Bible, beginning with Genesis and ending, significantly, in Ruth. Jeanette’s mother Louie is described as being ‘Old Testament through and through. Not for her the meek and paschal Lamb, she was out there, up front with the prophets, and much given to sulking under trees when the appropriate destruction didn’t materialise.’⁷ Susana Onega argues convincingly that Jeanette’s birth in Oranges mirrors the birth of Christ in the New Testament, ‘thus equating Jeanette’s prescribed role as Evangelical preacher with Jesus’ mission to save the world’.⁸ Given this emphasis on the law, it is interesting to note that there is no exact prohibition against lesbianism in the Torah. The infamous verse in Leviticus 18:22 refers only to male homosexuality – ‘thou shalt not lay with mankind as with womankind’. For Jewish feminist theologian Judith Plaskow, the narratives of Torah are mediated from the start by masculinist interpretative frameworks with the result that women are spoken about by men but never speaking. As she puts it, ‘women’s revelatory experiences are largely omitted from the sources; narratives are framed from an androcentric perspective; the law enforces women’s subordination in the patriarchal family’.⁹ Despite the gaps in the law, Jewish tradition nevertheless contains a substantial amount of homophobia directed at women (for instance, famed medieval rabbinical interpreter Rashi’s commentary on the Talmud’s Yevamot 76a on lesbianism, as well as comments by Moses Maimonides aka the rabbi Ramban). The absence of lesbianism from the holiest books of Judaism and Christianity has most certainly not meant an absence of homophobia.

In describing what is treated as a religious transgression – sin – Louie uses the term ‘unnatural desires’, a term which makes from nineteenth-century sexological taxonomies a vague gesture towards a plethora of aberrant sexual practices. We know from the historiographical work of the likes of Michel Foucault and David Halperin that ideas of ‘the heterosexual’ and ‘the homosexual’ as inherent identity-forming characteristics emerged in Europe in the nineteenth century. Foucault famously argued in the first volume of The History of Sexuality that ‘the sodomite had been a temporary aberration, the homosexual was now a species’.¹⁰ Winterson gestures towards this sexological lineage when her narrator mentions that her church had ‘read Havelock Ellis and knew about Inversion’,¹¹ a claim mocked by the narrator who even as a child ‘knew that a woman was as far from a [male] homosexual as a rhinoceros’.¹² Of course, the primary referent of ‘unnatural desires’ in Oranges remains homosexuality; the invert, the masturbating child and the zoophile are nowhere to be seen. Instead, homosexuality has become, as Sedgwick argues, a site of primary identity formation and cultural antagonism over the course of the twentieth century.

Here, as with other religious condemnations of homosexuality, secular forms of subjectivity formation come to inflect the religious law of acts. Homophobic articulations like ‘hate the sin, love the sinner’ swerve awkwardly between older formulations of the act-based sodomite and the modern homosexual, with even celibate gay-identified Christians facing discrimination in some churches. This language of ‘nature’ recalls the debate between Augustine and Justin of Eclamus in the fourth century about nature, albeit with a modern twist. Where Augustine held that spontaneous sexual desire was proof of original sin, Justin argued that ‘natural sin does not exist’. Justin pointed out that ‘God made bodies, distinguished the sexes, made genitalia, bestowed the affection through which bodies would be joined […] and God made nothing evil’.¹³ While Augustine’s position on original sin was taken up by the church, over the course of modernity it has steadily lost ground as a form of ‘common sense’ in and out of churches. The naturalization of desire in general may be one of the effects of modern secularization, albeit still incompletely applied for homosexuality in particular.¹⁴

Religious rhetorics

But if the secular comes to infect the homophobia of religious communities, homosexuality for Winterson can be shown to be religious from the start. The homophobic sexological language of the church is rebutted with an individualized language based on emotion. Jeanette asks her girlfriend Melanie: ‘“Do you think this is an Unnatural Passion?” […] “Doesn’t feel like it. According to Pastor Finch, that’s awful.”’ While, as Michelle Denby points out,¹⁵ there is a certain kind of New Age individualized ‘spirituality’ apparent in this move towards the body and good feeling as the guarantor of truth, it’s also worth noting the individualized nature of evangelical Christian protestations of faith (and indeed broader historical movements of Protestantism as Max Weber argued). From this angle, Winterson’s individualization is more a mirror image of her community than exhibiting signs of the Eastern-influenced New Age. Jeanette articulates her desire through the religious, telling Melanie, ‘I love you almost as much as I love the Lord’,¹⁶ while her later relationship with Katy ‘did have a genuinely spiritual dimension’.¹⁷

Problematizing the idea of sexuality as a Fall, Jeanette defends herself with the refrain, ‘to the pure all things are pure’. Her love, it is clear, is not a sin. Instead, it is through the language of religious oratory that queer desire is expressed in the novel. Denby points out that ‘to the pure all things are pure’, reverses St Paul’s ideal of physical purity in 1 Corinthians 7 and Ephesians 5¹⁸ – in particular, Ephesians 5:3, which states that ‘among you there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality, or of any kind of impurity, or of greed, because these are improper for God’s holy people’. Winterson here makes purity a facet not of refraining from behaviour (as in the equation between virginity and purity), but rather a state of mind. Purity is less the inherent characteristic of bodies and actions than of the quality of the relationship between the people involved.

Yet the argument proves to be unconvincing for the members of Jeanette’s church. Onega notes that ‘Jeanette must fight the religious community alone, armed only with her trust in God’s words’.¹⁹ At her exorcism, Pastor Finch frames religious devotion as mutually exclusive from same-sex love. Jeanette says, ‘I love her’ (meaning Melanie), to which Finch replies ‘then you do not love the Lord’. Jeanette rebuts this opposition, saying ‘yes I love both of them’,²⁰ a statement which I take as emblematic of the refusing of a binary between the religious/secular. Here, as in other places in the novel, the queer relationship to God becomes narrativized as a kind of love affair, an ultimately failed one less because of the divine than the mediation of a church which is shown to be sinful.

Queer prophets

One of the ways in which Winterson’s work collapses boundaries and hierarchies is in its adoption of a prophetic voice. Onega has argued convincingly that Winterson can be considered part of a broader visionary tradition in English literature that stretches from William Blake and the Romantic poets, and culminates with the modernists (Eliot and Joyce in particular). Indeed, as Onega rightly notes, Winterson’s work is profoundly interested in the role of the prophet, especially in Oranges.

Where a simplistic understanding of the role of a prophet often includes solely their clairvoyance of future events, the Biblical prophets were much more complicated in function. As Rabbi Abraham Heschel writes, ‘the prophet is not only a prophet. He is also poet, preacher, patriot, statesman, social critic, moralist.’²¹ Each one of these functions is put into play in proclaiming the prophet’s message. Heschel talks about the psychological make-up of the prophet: a sensitivity to evil, an iconoclast, a flouter of all forms of authority and common practice, a pathos for the life of God, austere and compassionate at the same time. The prophet condemns the evils of their society and the complacency that allows them to take place. A prophet is someone who proclaims fidelity to their ideals, and bemoans the consequences of a lack of faith. He or she talks at ‘an octave too high’,²² with a message so far from the norms of civil society that it appears to be another language altogether. Yet, as Heschel writes, ‘prophetic utterance is rarely cryptic, suspended between God and man; it is urging, alarming, forcing onward, as if the words gushed forth from the heart of God, seeking entrance to the heart and mind of man, carrying a summons as well as an involvement’.²³ One cannot be unmoved by the prophet’s message; it is the unmoved and hypocritical that the prophet targets.

It is not only the Hebrew Bible that features prophetic language. Northrop Frye argues that, although it also takes in metaphor, abstraction and descriptive language, the Bible primarily functions as ‘kerygma, proclamation’.²⁴ Kerygma is the preaching of the New Testament to the unconverted, to pagans. Like the language of Heschel’s prophets, kerygma makes demands upon its listeners, demanding faith and action alike. Kerygma in modern thought is primarily associated with the theologian Rudolf Bultmann, who opposes it as myth.

We can see this prophetic voice of Winterson’s most clearly in Oranges, where she takes in the evangelizing of her Pentecostal upbringing. Louie, the mother of Jeanette, the heroine of the novel, is a figure of Biblical proportions, who draws strongly on the prophetic tradition in the way she imagines evangelical outreach to the non-believers.²⁵ She flouts the social norms of the small Lancashire town in which they live, antagonizing her neighbours and ignoring the concerns of Jeanette’s teachers about her child’s overzealous religiousness. Jeanette’s mother Louie lists her enemies, praying vengeance upon them. Yet hers is no nihilism, but rather a black-and-white worldview in which sin is ever-present and the world is ripe for conversion. Jeanette and her mother climb a hill at the end of their street, which looks down upon the entire town in which they live: ‘We stood on the hill and my mother said, “This world is full of sin.” We stood on the hill and my mother said, “You can change the world.”’²⁶ Similarly, Jeanette’s other female role model Elsie ‘liked the prophets’ and enjoys a needlework sampler that Jeanette sews with a quote from Jeremiah: ‘the summer is ended and we are not yet saved’ (Jer. 8:20). The work of the prophet, of evangelizing to the un...