[In the following essay, Carter explores the mother-daughter relationship in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, arguing that Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre acts as a mother-text for the heroine, Jeannette.]

The narrator of Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit cites two of the most painful events of her childhood as follows: first, the moment in which she discovered, by reading Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre for herself, that her mother had been rewriting the ending of Brontë's story when reading it out loud to her (72–73). In the mother's version, Jane Eyre marries St. John Rivers and the couple become missionaries. The narrator of Oranges views her mother's revision as an act of betrayal and refuses to read Jane Eyre ever again. She then states that that event was just as shattering as the moment when she discovered her adoption papers hidden away in the back of a drawer. Although I am certain the discovery that one is adopted would be momentous, the intensity of the experience involving Jane Eyre is perhaps more difficult to comprehend. Nevertheless it offers tantalizing possibilities for the literary critic.

Those two events, fused into the narrative as almost a single experience of betrayal by the mother, form the starting point of my article. I intend to read Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by concentrating on several closely related issues that, for me, grow out of those narratorial “revelations” and, more generally, out of the text's representation of its central mother-daughter relationship. My paper falls into two sections: in the first I will discuss Oranges in the light of Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection; in the second I will put forward the argument that Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre occupies the space of a mother-text for Winterson's heroine.

As an introduction I want to make explicit some associated ideas that I hope the title of this paper will set into play. With the title “The Consuming Fruit: Oranges, Demons, and Daughters,” I have tried to evoke the image of a “fruit”—in this case a child and the text's shifting symbol of the orange—as active, as dynamic, and as possessing at least the potential to consume that which threatens to consume it. The “demon” refers to the “orange demon” that the heroine first encounters when she is locked in her mother's parlor for thirty-six hours (106) as a punishment for her “Unnatural Passions” (16). The orange demon is linked to Jeanette's distinctive creativity, her humor, her lesbianism, to all those qualities that the people around her would have her hold in check. Her conversation with the demon can, of course, be explained away as an hallucination, but so too can Jane Eyre's uncanny, and much discussed, experience in the red-room at Gateshead Hall (Brontë 18–20).

In The Powers of Horror, Kristeva discusses the drive within societies to “dam up the abject or demoniacal potential of the feminine” that does not “respect boundaries” and refuses to take up its position as “other” (65). I hope to demonstrate that that insight relates not only to the “monstrous” power of Jeanette's mother, but also to Jeanette herself and the “orange demon” of daughterhood.

Anyone who has read Oranges or watched the recent BBC television series would have been struck by the character of Jeanette's mother. She is a powerful, forbidding figure who dominates the young girl's life; the story the narrator tells is in one sense the story of a painful separation from this all-powerful figure who retains much of the authority of the pre-Oedipal mother, while at the same time standing firmly—as one critic argues—on the side of patriarchal law (Suleiman 137).

The narrator's struggle to define herself as separate from this overpowering mother is set within the confines of an oppressive English town in the 1960s and 1970s. Educated at home until the age of seven, the young Jeanette has an imagination that blossoms along unconventional lines as her mother feeds her a diet of religious fundamentalism. Jeanette “could not recall” a time when she did not know that she was “special” (4). Her mother's most explicit fantasy is that Jeanette will becomes a missionary, like the heroine in her own version of Jane Eyre. In her earliest years Jeanette successfully mimics her mother's desires, rising to a position of responsibility within the church, even preaching and organizing Bible study classes. In adolescence, however, she begins to threaten the security of the entire community as she strives to define and enact her difference from her mother and her mother's desires.

For Kristeva, as for Freud, the original “not self” of any individual is the mother. As the boundaries between the child's body and the mother's gradually become more and more distinct, the child suffers an enormous sense of loss for the wholeness he or she had once experienced with the mother. Throughout this “whole,” or pre-Oedipal stage, the child had not perceived itself as separate from the mother; the sense of loss that accompanies the child's realization of its separateness is, for Kristeva, complicated by fear—even horror. To develop a self the infant must retain its sense of difference from the mother: thus, the mother comes to represent the border between the self and the unknown. That border must be maintained at a distance because it retains the capacity to destroy—even devour—the child's emerging self. Paradoxically, the border is necessary to the child's development: It defines the child's sense of self by its very difference, its separateness.

There is the source of the process that Kristeva calls “abjection”: the process that expels the boundaries that threaten the self even as they define it; the expulsion of the abject, of “the place where meaning collapses” (2). Such a process, Kristeva argues, is essential for the individual's successful access to the social world; throughout our adult lives we work to maintain those boundaries at a safe distance. Many aspects of human existence can be read as representing abjection, but the body of the mother remains the primary object of abjection: the original not-self in every individual's history.

I would argue that in at least two ways abjection can be seen to operate on the surface of Winterson's text. First, and most obviously, in the narrator's relationship with her mother, and second on the communal level where the expulsion of the abject takes on ritualistic proportions. In the second scenario Jeanette, the narrator, herself comes to occupy the place of that which is abject.

The mother-daughter relationship depicted in Oranges, on the individual level, may be read as dramatizing the process of abjection—the daughter's development as a subject relies on a process of separating herself from a dominating, even monstrous, mother who threatens to engulf her selfhood. The text's “icon”—as the narrator herself calls it—of the orange is bound up with many stages of this process of separation. However, the function of the orange-as-symbol is to some degree a shifting one. Most obviously it stands, boldly, for the narrator's sense of her own identity, but warm in color and distinctly breast-like, the orange also has the capacity to feed and nurture the growing Jeanette in ways that her mother clearly cannot. In that sense the oranges may be read as signifying the boundary between mother and daughter.

The oranges begin as a food championed by the mother and fed to the young Jeanette at all kinds of inappropriate moments, often accompanied by the chant, “oranges are the only fruit.” We might speculate that the mother feeds oranges to her daughter in an attempt to satisfy the child's demands: in other words, she gives oranges instead of herself. When Jeanette is old enough to begin making her own choices, she circulates oranges, as she circulates herself, within a broader community of “mothers,” women who satisfy her various and developing needs. She sometimes “breaks” an orange with one of these women in an almost ritualistic dramatization of the act of “giving” her body to other women. Jeanette thus defines her separateness partly through exerting her right to choose fruit other than the obvious. Perhaps her mother is at last beginning to recognize this separateness when toward the end of the novel, she states, “after all … oranges are not the only fruit” (167, my italics).

On the communal level, abjection can be seen to operate when Jeanette begins to make choices and is herself expelled, cast out, abjected from the close-knit religious community of her childhood. She is expelled because she is seen to cross the borders that threaten the precarious social order, not only by her lesbianism but later by her willingness to work at the local funeral parlor.

According to Kristeva, the human corpse is “the most sickening of wastes” (3); the ultimate disruption of the boundaries that signify, “identity, system, order” (4). She writes:

The corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost abjection. It is death infecting life. Abject. […] Imaginary uncanniness and real threat, it beckons to us and ends up engulfing us.

(4)

Jeanette, a young girl already expelled from the security of her family home, her church, and her love affair, now seeks refuge with and receives an income from the dead. Cheerfully, she makes-up the faces of corpses and cleans out the back of the hearse.

In my view, Jeanette appears to threaten the fabric of the social order so profoundly because she does so from both inside and outside. To quote Kristeva once again:

Excrement and its equivalents (decay, infection, disease, corpse, etc.) stand for the danger to identity that comes from without: the ego threatened by the non-ego, society threatened by its outside, life by death. Menstrual blood, on the contrary, stands for the danger issuing from within the identity (social or sexual); it threatens the relationship between the sexes within a social aggregate and, through internalization, the identity of each sex in the face of sexual difference.

(71)

Thus, Jeanette not only threatens to disrupt the security of the community from the outside, through her involvement with “excrement and its equivalents,” but she also threatens it from within, as she visibly crosses the border between child and woman. From the community's perspective those transgressions are further compounded by the abjectivity of her “Unnatural Passions.” And her visibility poses the problem for the symbolic order: If woman signifies nothing, absence, lack, then how does it read a young girl's changing body, the onset of menstruation and, in Jeanette's case, the visibility of her sexual preferences? As one of the novel's characters—herself a lesbian—asks Jeanette: “[W]hy haven't you been a bit more careful?” (103). In other words, “Why did you allow yourself to be seen crossing boundaries?” Thus the community constructs Jeanette as representing its own (potential or actual) transgressions: as the subject who refuses to take her place in the symbolic.

But Jeanette manages to outrage the community's sense of its own “cleanliness” still further: During two separate events involving the one corpse she mixes death with food—thus crossing the boundary that separates bodily contamination from bodily nutrition. Significantly, in both instances the food she happens to serve is, appropriately, ice cream: deathly cold and soggy. On the first occasion Jeanette, whose other part-time job is driving an ice-cream van, is accused of “making money from the dead” when her van is accosted by the excited crowd that has gathered outside the house of her newly dead friend, Elsie (148). Jeanette must serve the customers if she is to make her way to Elsie's front door. On the other occasion, Jeanette is required to serve dessert—ice cream once again—at Elsie's wake. One member of the congregation, turning her back on vanilla ice cream simply because it is Jeanette who offers it, remarks to Jeanette's mother, “Oh she's a demon your daughter.” “She's no daughter of mine,” is the mother's swift reply (153). Jeanette serving ice cream is interpreted not only as Jeanette dishing up the chill of death, but also of disruption and difference.

Before her fall from grace Jeanette has occupied a unique position within the congregation. She was “chosen”—adopted—at a very young age so that her adoptive mother might fulfill her own dream of becoming a missionary—from a safe distance, through another person. The young Jeanette is “special,” and at times treated as a kind of mystic. Indeed, her mother and the rest of the church-going community misread a severe ear infection, or rather its accompanying loss of hearing, as spiritual ecstasy (22–23). The mother was prone to that kind of misreading. She tells Jeanette that once, years ago in Paris, she mistook the symptoms of a stomach ulcer for the stirrings of romantic love (85).

Although the child Jeanette was granted a unique position, in adolescence her lesbianism marks her femaleness as excessive. It cannot be read and, therefore, represents the point at which the community's sense of its own meaning collapses. That situation is complicated by the fact that the church's “strong women”—her mother included—have offered Jeanette role models that have lead her to have faith in the power of her own femaleness. Those models, however, are defined and sustained by patriarchal law, and the young Jeanette has not understood the significance of their limitations. Instead, she has viewed her own behavior within a continuum that includes women like her mother. Thus she experiences a profound shock, a profound loss of meaning, when her mother betrays her publicly:

The real problem, it seemed, was going against the teachings of St Paul, and allowing women power in the church. Our branch of the church had never thought about it, we'd always had strong women, and the women organized everything. Some of us could preach, and quite plainly, in my case, the church was full because of it … then a curious thing happened. My mother stood up and said she believed this was right … Until this moment my life had still made some kind of sense. Now it was making no sense at all. My mother droned on about the importance of missionary work for a woman, that I was clearly such a woman, but had spurned my call in order to wield power on the home front, where it was inappropriate …

So there I was, my success in the pulpit being the reason for my downfall. The devil had attacked me at my weakest point: my inability to realize the limitations of my sex.

(131–32, my italics)

By siding with the church rather than her daughter, the mother, in one swift movement, has come perilously close to destroying Jeanette's complex, still-emerging sense of self. But the mother does more than just collude with the crude, sadistic exorcism that her daughter undergoes; she appears to be the driving force behind it.

Cinema critic Barbara Creed's reading of female “possession” in horror films, which also draws upon Kristevan theory, may prove useful here:

The possessed female subject is one who refuses to take up her proper place in the symbolic order. Her protest is represented as a return to the pre-Oedipal, to the period of the semiotic chora … [as] a return of the unclean, untrained, unsymbolised body. Abjection is constructed as a rebellion of filthy, lustful, carnal, female flesh.

(38)

For Kristeva the speaking subject—man or woman—speaks or writes from a position within the symbolic. Creed's reading does not address the issue of what takes place when the subject who speaks appears to do so from out of the experience of abjection itself. An exploration of that issue is well beyond the scope of this paper, but I will make one suggestion that I feel is applicable to Winterson's text.

As narrator, Jeanette is invested with an authority that would seem to disallow her abjecthood. Rather than being the point at which meaning disappears, she is—for the reader—the point at which meaning is generated. The bold, idiosyncratic voice of the mature narrator distances her—and the reader—from the pain of the past; the humor of the text also functions as a strategy that draws reader and narrator together in a bond of shared secrets and shared values. Once the expelled object of her church's defilement rites, the older narrator now adopts storytelling as a medium through which she enacts her own rite of purification. By immersing herself in the past, by writing-out her abjected self, the narrator expels that past. And the subject who speaks from the pages of the text is in a sense spoken by this process.

In my introduction, I suggested that Jeanette's rejection of Jane Eyre is bound up closely with her complicated relationship to her mother. I will now elaborate on the way in which I read this interconnectedness and in the process draw together some of the threads of this discussion.

In a sense, Jeanette's first-person narrative of female development follows the framework laid out by Charlotte Brontë in her now-classic tale of a young woman's struggle for selfhood. Jane Eyre has become, to borrow Gayatri Spivak's phrase, “the feminist individualist heroine of British fiction” (251, my italics). Jeanette's quest for autonomy is, therefore, acted out within the narrative confines constructed not by one mother but by two. Although both “mothers” have proclaimed their separateness, Jeanette—as the daughter of both—is in the position of being constrained by both mothers. The framework of the mother's desires is difficult to escape, but so too is the narrative paradigm of Jane Eyre. Both mothers threaten her identity even as they define it.

In my view, Jeanette composes and superimposes her own quest narrative on the imprint of earlier texts, both private and public. That her action is to some degree self-conscious is perhaps evidenced by the smattering of fairy-tale narratives that surface regularly in Oranges: tales that fragment and re-shape her personal experiences within a mythological paradigm.¹

The only mother missing here is Jeanette's birth mother who, as a shadowy figure, is glimpsed only briefly. Her story, and the stories she might have told, are completely absent. I should stress, however, that the narrator knows more about her than she discloses to her readers, because she has overheard “every word” of a conversation between her adoptive and birth mothers.

The point I wish to emphasize here is that for Jeanette the adoptive mother's story is a lie, just as her claim to the “truth” of parenthood is a lie. The real ending of Jane Eyre has been concealed from the child just as her adoption has been concealed. The mother's version of Jane Eyre thus comes to stand for the narrator's dream of a lost, impossible wholeness: a wholeness that neither the “real” Jane Eyre nor her “real” mother could ever grant her. And the imaginative potential of the mother's creativity—the “rewriting” of daughter as well as text—is overlooked in the narrator's desperate quest for separateness. Thus adoption may be seen as one of the strategies by which Winterson explores the perimeter of the mother-daughter relationship: the doubleness of Jeanette's adoption highlighting the fictitious nature of any return to a lost wholeness.

Jeanette's first experiences of narrative, like that of many people, seems to have been closely bound up with the voice and the body of the mother. One might speculate that perhaps those were also her earliest critical experiences. In an essay published in 1989, critic Jane Gallop questioned whether or not, “women's studies, [and] studies by women, differ from those performed by male scholars in that the woman, perhaps because of her more permeable self-boundaries, tends to get entangled with the object of study” (17–18). Gallop borrows and expands upon Ronnie Scharfman's ideas to suggest that the feminist reader or critic who sees herself “reflected” in some way in a text constructs that text as mother, with herself as daughter (18). That is, the woman reader, who within the psychoanalytic paradigm possesses a fluid sense of self-boundaries, will not necessarily perceive the object of study as essentially separate from herself. She will see herself in the object and the object in herself; her relationship with the object of study in a sense mirrors her relationship with her original “object”—her mother. Gallop raises this issue in the context of the reader-daughter who remains to some degree entangled in the reflection of a monstrous mother who represents both self and other.

I have already suggested that the narrator of Oranges writes-out her past self and her close association with the abject; however, the multiple—and powerful—“mothers” who have threatened her identity are also expelled during this process. Paradoxically, that writing-out also represents the drive to re-write the shattered story of pre-Oedipal wholeness, to regain the fairy-tale love affair with the mother's voice, the mother's body. In this sense the daughter's text is a reconciliation with the early pleasure experienced with both mother and mother-text.

The form that the reconciliation takes reproduces the entanglement of the mother-daughter relationship on a number of levels: readings become texts; daughters become mothers. As Jane Gallop writes, “The literary critic is that kind of monster” (20). Although Narcissus drowned in the beauty of his own reflection, he was at least separate from that reflection; he was the subject looking. For the demon-daughter as reader or as critic, the situation is not so clear-cut. She is still attempting to disengage herself from the murky waters of daughterly ambivalence, and sometimes she is not sure what she sees in its depths.

In conclusion, perhaps it is possible to relate this notion of “reproduction” more directly to Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. Surely the potential threat posed by Jeanette's behavior is what so horrifies the evangelistic community that they cast her in the role of the abject. If demonic daughters are seen to cross the border into womanhood, then, for the security of the social order, their excesses must be “dammed up.” However, if “excessive” daughter-readers like Jeanette produce mother-texts like Oranges, then the flow of this demon is, in fact, much more difficult to arrest. For we, as daughter-readers, will in turn produce more texts. And so on—each entangled in her own reflection. Perhaps, unwittingly, Jeanette's mother refers to this kind of academic, critical propagation when she calls the system of formal education, from which she is so keen to protect Jeanette, “the Breeding Ground” (16, my italics).

Note

1. These analogous “fairy-tales,” with their dark, sparse, and unconventional humor, make up a substantial proportion of the novel and deserve to be the object of a separate discussion. See, in particular, the fascinating tale of the prince who searches for and finds the “perfect” woman, has her beheaded, and is then offered a copy of what appears to be Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (58–65).

Works Cited

Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. 1847. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953.

Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge, 1993.

Gallop, Jane. “The Monster in the Mirror: The Feminist Critic's Psychoanalysis.” Feminism and Psychoanalysis. Ed. Richard Feldstein and Judith Roof. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989.

Kristeva, Julia. The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1982.

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. Dir. Beeban Kidron. Dram. Jeanette Winterson. BBC Enterprises, 1990.

Scharfman, Ronnie. “Mirroring and Mothering in Simone Schwarz-Bart's Pluie et vent Télumée Miracle and Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea.” Yale French Studies, 62 (1981) 88–106.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakrovorty. “Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism.” Critical Inquiry 12.1 (1985): 243–261.

Suleiman, Susan Rubin. “Mothers and the Avant-Garde: A Case of Mistaken Identity?” Femmes=Frauen=Women. Ed. Francoise Van Rossum-Guyon. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1990.

Winterson, Jeanette. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. 1985. London: Vintage, 1991.