Far from seeing Mother as a victim of a repressive society Essay Example

the teachings of the Pastors. It is often suggested that Mother is a good, attentive mother only in this one area of Jeanette's life, but tragically absent in others, and this distance is represented by the symbol of the Orange fruit.

Winterson's portrayal of her certainly is relentlessly critical, and there are many incidents of wrongdoing, mistreatment or neglect throughout the novel. One notable incident, in 'Exodus', where Jeanette contracts deafness, shows that Mother does not realise what is really wrong. "On the night I realised I couldn't hear anything...

I couldn't attract her attention, so I took an orange and went back to bed" (p24). It marks an unpleasant episode in Jeanette's life when she felt alone and isolated physically and mentally. This is when Mother, the church and congregation fail her for the first time, and Mother's indifference when faced with pleas for help foreshadows Jeanette's future rejection. On realising her true sexuality, Jeanette muses on the impossibility of having any kind of relationship with Mother in 'Judges' :"My mother has always given me problems because she is enlightened and reactionary at the same time.

..she saw it as a wilful act on my part to sell my soul"(p128). Jeanette realises that she is thinking about her own instincts and others attitudes, but Mother is incapable of doing so.

Jeanette describes her mother's character in 'Genesis' when she says "She had never heard of mixed feelings. There were friends and there were enemies." This description lays the backdrop for the future conflict Jeanette will have with her mother's personality. Mother's dualistic views of Binary Opposition are deeply impressed upon Jeanette as a child. According to her,

the world is black and white with no layers in-between or possibility of individuality. Yet on reaching adolescence, she falls into more middle ground.

Homosexuality falls outside of Mother's assumed heterosexual binary. Jeanette criticises her mother's perspective and suggests that the world does not exist only in such narrow margins. This is further described from a metaphorical slant when Jeanette struggles to remove the peel of the orange she has been given by Mother after her exorcism in Joshua, p113; "The skin hung stubborn, and soon I lay panting, angry and defeated. What about grapes or bananas?" With age, Jeanette has grown irritated with the dichotomy upon her life and seeks alternatives. Mother further enforces her views by saying in a sinister way, ".

..you've made your choice now, there's no going back." (p113).However, there is evidence in the novel that suggests more complicated feelings towards Mother, and that the relationship is/was not always a struggle.

Winterson writes a comic send-up of Mother's aspirations "She had a way out now, for years and years to come". She seems to imply that her Mother was bored of the everyday life of the housewife and that adopting Jeanette gave her not a sense of purpose, but something to occupy her time with. Immediately after, a short passage creates a sense of suspended time: "We stood on a hill and my mother said 'This world is full of sin'. We stood on a hill..

.mother said 'You can change the world'" (p10). The simple repetition and use of biblical, rhetorical language give Mother's words a momentous quality and encapsulate her strong beliefs as something to be admired. Also the hope

and belief Mother puts in Jeanette makes the reader feel as if she has only good intentions for her daughter - for Jeanette to make the world a better place - usually something scorned at or reserved for 'hippie' or more liberal parenting.The setting of the novel, the society of the early 1960's northern working class industrial town, has a close knit community.

Change is slow in all aspects of life, including primarily family structures. Mother marries her husband seemingly not for love, but because it was taken for granted that a child could only be raised in a nuclear family unit. The lack of modernity has negative effects on the characters. Before the second feminist wave had really taken root in Britain, attitudes to women and their autonomy and sexuality remained patriarchal.

There is no hint of the 'Swinging 60's in the story and a poor working class family, especially one engrossed in evangelical Christianity, would be far removed from the events of the decade. Because of this, Jeanette's family and the members of the church remain in sort of time warp, unable to move on with more progressive attitudes developing in society at the time. Therefore, far from repressing her daughter, Mother could well be a victim of repression herself due to the society she lives in. Her extremism and sense of superiority ostracise her from most people.

May and Mrs White are her only real friends; others are wary of her because of her apparent classicism and snobbery. The church is the only arena in which she can enact her quest for power and influence, and where she can assert her views with

authority and follow her ambitions. But her reasons for enlightenment are shown as fleeting and hypocritical-"a lot of women found the Lord that week". Mother defers to Pastor Finch and Spratt, both males with more power but clearly not more sense, and accepts to lose power and influence (in the church) when Jeanette sexuality threatens the natural order, and it is construed that this was because the women were taking male roles: "She (Mother) ended by saying that having taken on a man's role and world in other ways I had flouted God's law and tried to do it sexually" (Judges, p132).In having a feminist critical approach to this question, it could be read that 'Oranges.

..' is a lesbian Bildungsroman, and points to the social and political changes that have enabled a defiant lesbian heroine to emerge in literature. Typical of feminist readings is the focus on the Mother-Daughter relationship.

Many feminist writers try to dispel the patronising saying "Like mother, like daughter", but on the other hand it is feminist to say that the history of women in society can be shown in the relationships between mothers and daughter - the next generations of women are affected by what their mothers were like as models and carers. Feminist psychoanalysts have argued that continued connection or a return to the mother is part of a woman's process of maturation, with the mother-daughter bond central to the development of female subjectivity.Ultimately, I feel that in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Winterson presents a fairly critical view of women, but only in the context of Mother's environment. Mother has a strong will and imposes herself upon

the narrative, which can only be seen as constructive to bringing the novel's vividness to the fore. Winterson manages to explore relationships between women that had not previously been dealt with in a way that is both comical and emotionally affecting.