Oranges are Not The Only Fruits Essay

Submitted By sigmarieeg
Words: 1123
Pages: 5

Dilsi Escorbores
EN115
Prof.Diana Wilkins
03/23/2015

In this book Jeanette Winterson used words and explanations that create the binaries present in Jeanette's life and though she examines the lies created by principal narratives, and her examination of it. First pointer her to the other side of the dilemmas she is presented with. Her meaning is still based on the same linguistic, and her meaning becomes decentered around the same principal narrative.Jeanette Winterson novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, which the narrator is violently exorcised by the elders and her mother (Pentecostal Church). Jeanette gains meaning revolve around her purpose as vessel of good and evil via God. No matter how one chooses to interpret Jeanette's age, it is completely accepted that Jeanette's life is ruled by a spiritual world. Jeanette learns early that her life is only important in the spiritual realm. At the age of 15 she falls in love with another girl member of the Church call Melanie.
When her mother goes on, she affirms the Church's patriarchal belief that "the message belonged to the men". By assuming to turn preacher, the girl narrator had "taken on a man's world," not just in a social but a sexual form. Her adoption of the male role of a preacher led in their opinion to her adoption of the equally "unnatural" role of a lesbian lover. The elders of the Church accordingly attempt to alter her sexual orientation by depriving her of the Word, forbidding her to preach. Her response is to employ her own words in Oranges Are the Only Fruit, a text in which she can reconstitute her sexual subjectivity through the signifying power of language.
She declared lesbian orientation was a major factor in affecting the prejudices of the heterosexist. Yet Written on the Body (that I read last year) by Jeanette W; with its sexually indeterminate narrator is a deliberate try to dispense with distinctions of gender and to meditate on the nature of love stripped of its specifically hetero and homosexual features. It is my argument that Written on the Body, like Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, concentrations on the power of language to create both subjectivity and sexuality and that to concentrate on the lesbian subject blinds reviewer and critic alike to the obsessions and very real distinction of the novel.
Jeanette's mother introduces more meaning into Jeanette when she tells her about Pierre. Her mother reveals that you might feel like you are in love when really you not. When Jeanette spends the night with Melanie she is consoled by the thought that it felt right and not like an (unusual passion). She gets confronted by the church and is told that she is demon possessed. After revealing this to her mother, her mother conspicuously makes herself rare contrast to the pride she had over her daughter.
Jeanette innocently invalidated the happy interpretation her mother had of her deafness, and views herself as being isolated in punishment for her wickedness, this occurs when her demons, responsible for her sins, are being exorcised. Since Jeanette's meaning is constructed from a spiritual perspective, references to spirituality have a strong effect on her sense of identity. Her sense of identity is one that agrees with her mother's sense of identity. All pride and shame felt for her daughter are directly a result of spiritual interpretation. Jeanette quickly learns the consequences for questioning those interpretations. Spiritual meaning is still the dominant essence of Jeanette's character, and after her confrontation with the church she sleeps with Ms.Jewsbury; Jeanette had considered her mother's story of Pierre in regards to Melanie, but ultimately ignored the message to not trust her body. When she being confronted by the church, Jeanette explores her sensuous identity with a woman she is not enamored with and hates it.
Jeanette has taken in her mother's narrative and incorporated her own experience into the interpretational binary