Jeanette Winterson

Susana Onega

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781847796042
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Australian & Oceanian History
• Index: History

This is the first full-length study of Jeanette Winterson's complete oeuvre, offering detailed analysis of her nine novels as well as addressing her non-fiction and minor fictional work. Susana Onega combines the study of formal issues such as narrative structure, perspective and point of view with thematic analyses approached from a variety of theoretical perspectives, from narratology and feminist theory to Hermetic and Kabalistic symbolism, to provide a comprehensive 'vertical' analysis of Winterson's novels. Onega reveals the books as complex linguistic artefacts, crammed with intertextual echoes. She demonstrates the inseparability of form and meaning within Winterson's work, and positions her within the wider context of contemporary British fiction alongside fellow visionaries such as Peter Ackroyd, Maureen Duffy and Marina Warner.

1
Of priests and prophets

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit was published as a paperback by Pandora Press in 1985. As Jeanette Winterson notes in the Introduction to the Vintage edition of the novel, she wrote it ‘on a £25 office Goliath with an industrial quantity of Tipex’, ‘during the winter of 1983 and the spring of 1984’, at a time when ‘I was unhappy in London, didn’t want to be in advertising or banking like most of my Oxford contemporaries, couldn’t bring myself to hold down any job that hinted of routine hours’.¹ Patricia Duncker has pointed out how the mid-eighties was a significant moment for the women’s movement, ‘after the defeat of the miners’ strike, during the consolidation of Thatcher’s right-wing rule over Britain’, and how Oranges ‘would not have been published at all without the 1970’s revolution in feminist writing and the demand for women’s books’.² The book was accepted for publication on the recommendation of Philippa Brewster, the Pandora Press publisher to whom the Vintage edition of the novel is dedicated. As Duncker recalls, Pandora Press was ‘an imprint of a mainstream publisher, Routledge and Kegan Paul [which] had been set up in competition with the other feminist houses, Virago, Onlywomen, Sheba Feminist Publishers and The Women’s Press’.³ Launched by this important publishing house, Oranges soon became a bestseller, winning the 1985 Whitbread Award for First Novel. Its unexpected success brought the twenty-four-year-old writer to general notice, including that of large book chains like W. H. Smith, whose monopolistic policy largely determines the failure or success of new writers, books and publishers.⁴

The back cover of the 1990 Pandora Press edition described Oranges as the ‘touching and humorous account of an unusual childhood with an extraordinary mother’. The unusual child is a little girl teasingly called Jeanette who, like Jeanette Winterson, lives in a working-class town in Lancashire with her adoptive parents, Jack and Louie. Like Winterson’s own mother, the fictional Jeanette’s foster mother is a militant member of the Pentecostal Evangelical Church and has taken great pains to educate her daughter in her faith.⁵ The novel relates Jeanette’s process of maturation from admiring and obedient child, to rebellious adolescent and ideologically self-assured and free adult, as the progressive revelation of her lesbianism clashes with her mother’s religious and moral ideas. Given its subject matter and the imprint under which it appeared, Oranges was unanimously classified by its early reviewers as a realistic and heavily autobiographical comedy of ‘coming out’, in line with the feminist novels that had begun to appear in small marginal presses in the English-speaking world from the 1960s onwards. In general, these early feminist novels followed the traditional hero’s quest pattern of the Bildungsroman, adapted to express the process of self-assertion of a heroine invariably at odds with the social roles of housekeeper, wife and mother allotted to her by patriarchal ideology.

Like the reviewers, Winterson’s publishers were eager to stress the autobiographical element in Oranges, in their case because they thought it essential for the young writer’s career. Thus, in the note on the author that appears in the Penguin edition of The Passion, the publisher selected from the writer’s real life the same episodes that make up the stages in the quest for maturation of the fictional Jeanette, purposely confusing Jeanette Winterson’s life with that of her literary namesake. However, as Roz Kaveney acutely pointed out in a review of Oranges, there is no way of knowing ‘[w]hether or not what seems unequivocally presented as fiction is literally autobiographical – the shamelessness could be that of photographic veracity or that of audacious invention – ’.⁶ Kaveney’s rational doubt was enhanced by the author herself in the Introduction to the Vintage edition of the novel when, to her self-posed question ‘Is Oranges an autobiographical novel?’ she responded: ‘No not at all and yes of course’.⁷ Winterson has said several times that Oranges is not a realistic novel of ‘coming out’, but rather ‘experimental’ and ‘anti-linear’ (O vii) so that ‘you can read it in spirals’.⁸ Further, in Art Objects, she compares it to Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Gertrude Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and contends that the three books belong to a hybrid new type she describes as ‘a fiction masquerading as a memoir’ (AO 53).

The incompatibility of the critics’ and the author’s descriptions of the novel points to the fact that Oranges is both linear and realistic and anti-linear and experimental. Its main storyline follows the traditional narrative pattern of the Bildungsroman: it is narrated retrospectively by the adult protagonist, beginning with her childhood recollections at the age of seven and ending in the adult narrator’s present at the age of twenty. This type of apparently realistic and simple ‘autobiographical’ narration is a well-worn literary technique that has been used from Lazarillo de Tormes and Defoe’s Moll Flanders to Dickens’s Great Expectations, a novel which, like Oliver Twist and David Copperfield, tells the story of a child trying to survive in the most extraordinary circumstances of family and social milieu.⁹ In this type of retrospective narration the adult narrator-character focalises the past events from the perspective of his or her childish self, thus producing an ironic distance between the all-knowing adult narrator and the purblind character which increases the suspense, since the reader can only grasp the facts narrated as they are being lived by the child, understanding them imperfectly or completely misunderstanding them, and has to wait until the end of the novel to discover the truth about them. This is an important narrative limitation that not only subjects the reader’s understanding of the events narrated to the childish perception of the protagonist, but also colours the narration with the child’s fanciful interpretation of events. Focused from the childish perspective of the protagonists, the adult characters in Dickens’s novels often become oddly bizarre and grotesque, either huge and threatening monsters or ludicrously absurd speaking parrots caught up in some foible or peculiarity of their own.

A similarly grotesque and comic effect is perceptible in Oranges. From little Jeanette’s perspective, some adult characters are ludicrous and bizarre, like old, stone-deaf Mrs Rothwell, who is always having spiritual trances, or Mrs Arkwright, the owner of the vermin shop, who likes giving the ‘nipper’ empty tins of various pesticides, to ‘keep its marbles and stuff in’ (O 14–5). Or also Mrs Butler, the former owner of the Morecambe guest house, and her friend, the once ‘official exorcist to the Bishop of Bermuda’, who was allowed by Mrs Butler to ‘practise voodoo on some of the more senile patients’ at the local old folk’s home where she now worked (O 176). Also in Dickensian fashion, minor characters in Oranges are often associated with a ruling passion or a distinctive personal trait, so that, as Rebecca O’Rourke has noted, the reader has the impression that ‘everyone in the novel but Jeanette is one-dimensional’.¹⁰ A pointed example of this is Betty, the ill-tempered waitress at Trickett’s snack bar, who is always scolding her customers and has been wearing the same pair of glasses ‘stuck together with band aid’ for many years (O 81, 169). By contrast, other characters, usually men, are depicted as monstrous, terrifying or disgusting – for example, Pastor Finch, the expert in demons, who terrified Jeanette in the presence of her mother and other members of the religious community the first time they met (O 11–12).

Although apparently realistic, some episodes in Jeanette’s life story in fact have a distinctive fairytale flavour. Jeanette feels for her mother the type of unquestioning love associated with fairytale heroines, and she is treated by her with the harshness and cruelty of a fairytale stepmother. Like Cinderella’s stepmother, Jeanette’s foster mother expects perfect obedience from her, never thanks her for doing all types of odd jobs and errands, and is totally blind to the child’s sense of shame or self-respect. Thus, she hires her to do the washing up at Trickett’s while she is having a cup of Horlicks with her friends (O 82), and when Jeanette falls ill with an inflammation of the adenoids she leaves her unattended for days on end. When, eventually, a member of their religious community takes her to the big and frightening Victoria Hospital, Jeanette is left there alone with the only comfort of a bag of oranges, while her mother busies herself ‘with the Lord’ or waits at home for the plumber (O 26–9). Like a fairytale heroine, the only weapon Jeanette has to console herself is the power of her imagination. Thus, she attempts to overcome her fear and misery by transforming a boring and sticky orange peel into an empty igloo, the site of a fully engaging and dramatic story about ‘How Eskimo Got Eaten’ (O 27).

Like the story and characters, the setting is clogged with intertextual echoes of various canonical literary texts. Although the industrial Lancashire town where Jeanette lived with her adoptive parents might resemble Accrington (Winterson’s real home town), in fact, its description produces a baffling effect of déjà lu, insistently bringing to mind D. H. Lawrence’s description of the Bottoms, the ‘great quadrangles of dwellings on the hillside of Bestwood’ where the Morels went to live with other miners’ families at the beginning of Sons and Lovers.¹¹ The Morels’ house was ‘an end house in one of the top blocks, and thus had only one neighbour’.¹² Jeanette’s family house is also ‘almost at the top of a long, stretchy street’ (O 6), and their only neighbours are a family Jeanette’s mother hates because they are not religious and because they used to live at the ‘Factory Bottoms’, a place frequented by gypsies and the very poor, where Jeanette is forbidden to walk on her own (O 14). A great amount of Mrs Morel’s frustration with her married life stemmed from the fact that she had lost contact with her Puritan middle-class family when she married Mr Morel. Likewise, Jeanette’s mother, Louie, went down in the social ladder when she married Jack, a factory worker and a gambler she had ‘reformed’, just as Mrs Morel hoped to make her husband give up drink. By marrying Jack, Louie incurred the wrath of her middle-class father, who ‘promptly ended all communication. So she never had enough money and after a while she managed to forget that she’d ever had any at all’ (O 37).

At the beginning of Sons and Lovers, Mrs Morel reluctantly allows her seven-year-old son William to go to the wakes.¹³ The boy’s struggle between staying longer on his own or yielding to his mother’s entreaties to return home with her and Annie inaugurates a recurrent pattern in the relationship between Mrs Morel and her two favourite sons, William and Paul, pointing to the crucial factor in the boys’ quest for maturation. This episode is echoed by Jeanette’s remark at the beginning of Oranges that from the top of her hill one could see ‘Ellison’s tenement, where we had the fair once a year’ (O 6). The narrator then goes on to explain how, on one occasion when she was there alone, an old gypsy had taken her hand and told her her future: ‘“You’ll never marry,” she said, “not you, and you’ll never be still”’ (O 7). This episode has a similarly proleptic function, foreshadowing the crux in Jeanette’s maturation process, while the fact that the episode has to do with a fortune teller further enhances the literariness of the chapter, expanding its intertextual indebtedness to Lawrence’s novella The Virgin and the Gipsy (1930) and to numberless romances and fairytales that have the fortune teller as a topos.¹⁴

The realism of Jeanette’s autobiographical narration is further undermined by the novel’s division into eight chapters called after the ‘Octateuchus’, that is, the first eight books of the Old Testament: ‘Genesis’, ‘Exodus’, ‘Leviticus’, ‘Numbers’, ‘Deuteronomy’, ‘Joshua’, ‘Judges’ and ‘Ruth’. This establishes a parodic equivalent, between, on the one hand, the stages in Jeanette’s quest for maturation and, on the other, the biblical narration covering God’s creation of the world, his designation of the Israelites as his chosen people, their search and struggle for the Promised Land, coming finally to ‘Ruth’ – that is, to the story of redemption of a woman enduring threefold marginalisation, as a woman, as a poor widow and as a stranger with a different religion.

What is more, the linearity of Jeanette’s retrospective account is constantly interrupted by the interpolation of fairytales and fragments of myth which recur with a difference and/or elaborate on key motifs in Jeanette’s narration, like musical variations in a symphony, adding to the realistic and the biblical, a fictional and a mythical layer. In the first chapter, Jeanette’s adoption is described as the materialisation of one of her mother’s dreams (O 10). In it, Jeanette’s adoption is narrated l...