SOURCE: Bollinger, Laurel. “Models for Female Loyalty: The Biblical Ruth in Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.” Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 13, no. 2 (fall 1994): 363–80.

[In the following essay, Bollinger examines the theme of female loyalty in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit with respect to the novel's appropriation of the Biblical Book of Ruth as both a model for a female bildungsroman and a parody of the Judeo-Christian tradition.]

Literary models of development, from simple fairy tales such as Snow White to complex bildungsromans such as Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, generally posit physical and/or emotional separation from home and family as a necessary step in the process of maturation. For conventional stories of male development (the paradigmatic Bildungsroman as established by Goethe), such models play out the dynamics of the oedipal phase; the male infant recognizes physiological differences between himself and a female primary caregiver and learns to define his gender and identity in terms of that opposition. Leaving home simply repeats this process for the adolescent. However, as psychologists from Sigmund Freud to Carol Gilligan have been telling us, the process is not so simple for the female child. Not only does the female infant experience less physiological difference, but connection to home and family generally remain much more important to the girl during and after adolescence. In an effort to stay connected to their families, adolescent girls frequently resort to what Gilligan terms the “voice” option, meaning that, instead of leaving, they speak out to express their dissatisfaction with the family while still preserving the relationship.¹ In other words, girls narrate their concerns precisely so that those concerns will not destroy the familial relationship.

Traditional stories of maturation, with their emphasis on an “exit” solution, cannot speak to the need for connection within female development, nor can they provide a literary model for its occurrence in fiction. Yet, as critics often warn, many alternative models for female development instead advocate passivity and patience, encouraging Sleeping Beauty or Rapunzel merely to await her rescuing prince and thus not to seek agency or maturity on her own.² More significantly, such models often posit the relationship between women—particularly mother and daughter—as one of competition, not companionship. While obviously such paradigms are limiting for all who wish to write of female maturation, the tendency to pit women against women is particularly problematic for writers seeking to construct narratives of development about lesbians or to include strong mother-daughter ties.

Few literary models exist, then, for maturation narratives such as Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, the coming-of-age story of a young woman who grapples with her lesbianism while seeking to maintain a relationship with a mother who cannot accept her daughter's sexual orientation. Winterson's novel complicates the maturation narrative of the protagonist, Jeanette, by insisting that she also come to grips with her role in a Pentecostal evangelical church that inspires her to public ministry yet rejects her words because she is a woman and a lesbian. The central relationship in the text is between Jeanette and her mother, whose commitment to evangelism leaves her uninvolved with Jeanette's development and intolerant of her daughter's sexuality. Despite their differences, however, Jeanette does not reject her mother, but continues the relationship even after her mother has forced her to leave their home. Her return suggests that, for this text, maturity consists in the continuation, not the elimination, of mother-daughter relations.

Because few models exist for texts that place so high a value on mother-daughter relations, Winterson relies on parody to produce a literary paradigm that can account both for her own lived experience and for the maturation story in her novel (with its strong autobiographical component). While she uses a wide range of texts for this parody, her principal source is the Biblical Book of Ruth, which she revises with an eye toward both its thematic and its theological significance. The Book of Ruth centers on the relationship between Ruth and her mother-in-law Naomi and contains perhaps the most profound expression of female loyalty in the Bible. As such, it offers a model for Winterson's maturation narrative that emphasizes the importance of female loyalty to female development. The Ruth text enables Winterson to address the two major conflicts in Jeanette's life: her sexual orientation and her connection to her mother.

BIBLICAL MATERIAL

Winterson's parody interlaces Biblical materials with her fiction, using the history of the Israelites to explore Jeanette's experiences of maturation. Given the thematics of the novel, Winterson's choice of the Bible seems especially appropriate; besides being a relevant cultural document, it is a personal one as well since both Winterson and Jeanette were raised by Pentecostal evangelists. In this text, then, to parody the Bible is to place both personal and cultural history under scrutiny.

In blending Biblical references with Jeanette's story, Winterson deliberately challenges the distinction between fact and fiction as well as between the novel she is writing and the Biblical texts she uses for her parody. These Biblical texts are already problematic; not quite history and not quite storytelling, their position on any kind of fact-fiction continuum changes with the point of view of the observer. In the self-reflexive chapter “Deuteronomy,” Winterson suggests that the distinction between fact and fiction arises from self-delusion; history and story are not in opposition but are, like “knots” in a game of “cat's cradle,” so hopelessly tangled that we must learn to take pleasure in the blend.³ She plays out this concern through a narrative technique that juxtaposes autobiographical units with relatively strong truth claims (at least at the level of plausibility) next to fairy-tale units whose truth claims rest on psychological verity alone. This juxtaposition mirrors the actual narrative structure of her Biblical source texts, which contain materials purporting to be myth, poetry, or history in an often indecipherable blur.

Winterson's most explicit use of the Bible occurs in the chapter titles: the first eight books of the Bible, in order, from Genesis to Ruth. Although the parody she constructs of the Bible is complex as a whole, her overt references to most of these Biblical books are reductionistic, in that she relies upon only the most general and conventional sense of each text. For example, Winterson's “Genesis” chapter describes Jeanette's origins but makes limited use of Genesis itself, a book that includes the Creation and Fall, the Noah story, the tower of Babel, the calling of Abraham, the sacrifice of Isaac, Lot and his wife—in other words, a wide range of stories loosely connected through chronology and historical significance to the ancient Hebrew people. Winterson suppresses the disorder of the original text to parody conventional images of origin. In the “Genesis” chapter, the Biblical allusions are predominantly to the New Testament origin narrative rather than to the one contained in the Hebrew Bible: Jeanette describes her mother's desire for a virgin birth and her resultant decision to adopt a child, the star that guided her mother to the orphanage where Jeanette was found, and the lack of Magi at her cradle. Winterson thus contrasts her story with the predominantly male image of creation found in both Biblical texts by removing any significant male figures from her birth narrative. Rather than concentrating on the creative power of an omnipotent Father, the text reproduces the conventionally passive Joseph-figure in Jeanette's adoptive father; he has no real role in Jeanette's childhood and appears primarily as a victim of his wife's evangelism. The power of creation rests with Jeanette's mother.

Each of the other chapters contains similarly concrete references to the Biblical text for which it is named. In “Exodus,” Jeanette first leaves her family home to go to school, where she laments her inability to interpret “the pillar of cloud” she, like the escaping Israelites, has to guide her in the daytime—in this case, the ground rules of the world outside her church, a world filled with teachers and fellow students who are uncomfortable with Jeanette's interest in hell and damnation. The chapters “Leviticus” and “Numbers” play off the position of their Biblical source texts as constituting “The Law,” and Winterson uses them to explore Jeanette's domination by her mother and the church, including Jeanette's initiation into her mother's brand of evangelizing. In addition, “Leviticus” devotes seven of its fourteen pages to a story about a prince seeking perfection, an aim that alludes to the Biblical text's “Holiness Code,” the series of laws intended to make the Hebrew people perfect in the eyes of God. The Biblical source text demands animal sacrifices from those who fail to attain perfection; similarly, Winterson's Prince makes sacrifices, but only to silence those who suggest that he has gotten the definition wrong, that perfection is not flawlessness but symmetry. “Numbers,” whose Biblical text recounts the wandering of the Israelites in the desert, shows Jeanette's “wandering” from the strictures of her church because of her growing resentment of her mother and “wandering” from heterosexuality through her love affair with Melanie. “Deuteronomy,” subtitled “The Last Book of the Law,” mirrors its Biblical text in being a non-narrative chapter devoted to establishing rules for human behavior. Like its Biblical namesake, this chapter includes dietary prescriptions: “If you want to keep your own teeth, make your own sandwiches” (p. 95). However, Winterson uses the rule to suggest the necessity of confirming facts for oneself; she terms secondhand information “refined food” that contains insufficient “roughage” to prevent intellectual “constipation” (p. 95). The dietary law serves as a metaphor for intellectual integrity. In “Joshua,” Winterson mentions the prophet Joshua at the battle of Jericho and asserts, “That walls should fall is the consequence of blowing your own trumpet” (p. 112), to describe the pain she experiences at her growing estrangement from her mother as the two women do public battle over Jeanette's lesbianism. “Judges” refers to the congregation's decision that Jeanette has usurped a male prerogative in her public ministry and that this has led to her sexual orientation. They forbid her to preach and exile her from her home when she refuses to renounce her lesbianism. In contrast to the predominantly male “Judges” in the Bible, the people to whom Jeanette must answer are primarily the powerful, articulate women of her congregation, some of whom are themselves lesbians, but who nonetheless refuse to condone Jeanette's very visible sexual orientation. In each case, the Biblical source text provides the chapter with a single donnée, as Henry James might have put it: one major idea that serves as the point of departure for Winterson's parody.

RUTH AND FEMALE LOYALTY

Winterson's use of the final Biblical text in the novel, the Ruth story, differs sharply from her approach to the earlier source texts. Instead of being limited purely to the “Ruth” chapter, the Ruth material defines the nature of the novel as a whole by indicating the larger issues of mother/daughter relations and female loyalty that face Jeanette. If, as I am suggesting, the whole novel is in some respects a parodic retelling of the Ruth story, then the interaction between the two versions reveals the points of tension between Jeanette and the Biblical tradition: Jeanette's refusal of the tradition and her self-fashioning through it.

Winterson signals the more significant role the Book of Ruth will serve by her different treatment of the text itself. In contrast to the previous chapters, there is no explicit reference to the Biblical source in “Ruth.” Moreover, there is an obvious departure in form: while in the earlier chapters Winterson responded to the miscellany of her source texts by assuming an artificial unity, in the “Ruth” chapter she fractures material that was originally undivided. Unlike the earlier Biblical books, the Book of Ruth is not a compilation of diverse stories, but one narrative unit presented in four major scenes. In the “Ruth” chapter, however, Winterson interposes two stories unrelated to the autobiographical narrative, stories that comprise almost one-third of the chapter. While fairy-tale segments occur elsewhere in the novel, as a rule only one external story line appears per chapter, often divided into several sections of fewer than two pages in length. In “Ruth,” however, two separate tales disrupt the narrative: a Perceval story, a continuation from the previous chapter; and a highly allegorical, fairy-tale version of the novel as a whole, the Winnet Stonejar story, presented in its entirety in this chapter and, at roughly ten pages, the longest single external sequence in the novel.⁴ By breaking apart the narrative element of the Ruth source-material, Winterson need not respond to the full story; instead she can focus on the thematic element that proves most useful for her novel: Ruth's exploration of female loyalty.

The Ruth material offers both counterpoint and parallel to the theme of female loyalty as presented in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. In the Book of Ruth, Naomi, her husband, and their two sons leave Judah to avoid a famine. They settle in Moab, where the sons marry Moabite women, Ruth and Orpah. The men soon die, leaving the three women childless widows in a society where a woman's primary, if not only, source of protection lay in her male relatives. Naomi resolves to return to Bethlehem and urges her daughters-in-law to return to their mothers to seek husbands among their own people. Orpah, although unwilling, obeys her mother-in-law, but Ruth refuses, uttering the justly famous lines, “Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God: Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: the LORD do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part thee and me” (Ruth 1:16–17).⁵ Naomi makes no reply, but the two women return together to Bethlehem. Once there, Ruth undertakes their support by gleaning behind the barley threshers, where she catches the eye of Boaz, a wealthy man who instructs his threshers to leave her extra grain. When Ruth tells Naomi about this encounter, Naomi announces that Boaz is one of her kinsmen-redeemers under the levirate, the practice through which the closest kinsman of a dead man married his childless widow, enabling the woman to produce children who would carry on the family name and inherit the family property. At the end of the harvest, Naomi tells Ruth to approach Boaz in the darkness, to uncover him, and to put her head at his feet, after which “he will tell thee what thou shalt do” (Ruth 3:4).⁶ Ruth does as her mother-in-law suggests, but rather than waiting for Boaz to take the initiative, she demands that he fulfill his responsibility to her under the law. Boaz praises her for seeking him out as a kinsman despite his advancing years, and he agrees to marry her, provided an unnamed nearer kinsman (whose responsibility the marriage would more properly be) refuses to do so. Boaz confronts this kinsman before the village elders about a plot of land Naomi is selling, and when it is revealed that the person who purchases it will also have to marry Ruth, the kinsman refuses.⁷ Boaz, himself a childless widower, marries Ruth. When the couple's son is born, a chorus of the women of Bethlehem rejoice, for under the law this boy will function as Naomi's son and inherit accordingly.

While clearly this is a complex text, and one that I will try to unpack more fully below, perhaps its most radical element lies in its treatment of female loyalty, an issue obviously of concern for Winterson's novel. In the Ruth text, Ruth's determination to choose Naomi does not represent an explicitly lesbian decision; however, it does represent one of the unusual instances where the Bible depicts profound female solidarity. This has such a threatening potential that at least one Biblical scholar argues that Ruth follows Naomi solely to demonstrate her love for her dead husband and seeks out Boaz only to provide her dead husband with named heirs.⁸ By contrast, Phyllis Trible claims the Ruth text as the site of the most astonishing female loyalty in the Bible because “not only has Ruth broken with family, country, and faith, but she has also reversed sexual allegiance. … One female has chosen another female in a world where life depends upon men. There is no more radical decision in all the memories of Israel.”⁹ Ruth's decision to stay with her mother-in-law rather than to seek a husband violates the basis of her culture or, as Claude Lévi-Strauss would argue, of culture in general as founded on the exchange of women. Ruth's dedication to Naomi represents a radical revaluing of connection between women.

Because the Book of Ruth does not conform to expected cultural patterns, a certain amount of interpretive maneuvering has been necessary to account for its inclusion in the Biblical canon. Much as the early Church Fathers reclaimed the sensuality of the Song of Songs through strictly spiritual exegesis, Ruth was read as justifying the spread of Christianity among the gentiles. Not only could the text be cited as the story of the first significant conversion, but since Ruth's son Obed fathers Jesse who fathers King David, the patristic tradition held that the lineage of Jesus Christ contained the blood of Ruth the (gentile) Moabite. While contemporary readers tend not to be troubled by the issue of conversion, the affection between Ruth and Naomi has continued to demand reclamation. Ruth 1:16–17 is often quoted in wedding ceremonies, thus recovering its exceptional female loyalty for an explicitly heterosexual context. This very use, however, underscores the potential sexuality of the original utterance.

Winterson patterns Jeanette's quest for love after the relation between Naomi and Ruth, and in so doing echoes both traditional interpretive gestures. Jeanette's major love affairs, with both Melanie and Katy, occur because of Jeanette's evangelizing—her lovers are converts she has won to the Pentecostal church. At one level this indicates Jeanette's efforts at self-justification: her relation with the women centers on teaching them matters of doctrine. Like the Church Fathers with the Song of Songs, Jeanette prefers the sexual to be safely concealed within the spiritual. At the same time, Jeanette seeks the faithfulness expressed in the Ruth story: Ruth the convert showed complete devotion to the woman who led her into faith; perhaps Jeanette could find such loyalty in a woman she brings to faith. And while the liturgical use of the Book of Ruth reserves the text's potential sexuality for heterosexual application, Jeanette, by modeling her own relationships after Ruth, reappropriates this sexuality while reasserting the primacy of loyalty between women.

Jeanette expresses perhaps the most poignant plea for devotion, as strong as Ruth's for Naomi, in the “Ruth” chapter itself. Remarking that no human affection has matched her youthful ideal of a relationship with God, she cries out for a lover who will never betray her:

I want someone who is fierce and will love me until death and know that love is as strong as death. … Romantic love has been diluted into paperback form and has sold thousands and millions of copies. Somewhere it is still in the original, written on tablets of stone. I would cross seas and suffer sunstroke and give away all I have [for love].

(p. 170)

In language pieced together from the most powerful statements of love in the Bible,¹⁰ Jeanette envisions the perfect lover, one who would mirror the faithfulness Ruth offered to Naomi in her cry of devotion. Because Jeanette finds such romantic love all but unattainable, her quest leads her back to the Ruth text more directly: she too concentrates on her relation to a maternal figure. At the conclusion of the novel, she chooses to return to her mother despite their conflicts. Jeanette's action thus reproduces the theology of the Ruth text; she opts to express to her mother the same hesed Ruth showed Naomi.

Hesed an important concept in the Bible and particularly in Ruth, is difficult to translate; the concept includes loyalty, duty, mercy, goodness, and kindness, but none of these words captures the force of the Hebrew. As Katharine Sakenfeld explains it, hesed is “always requested and carried out within the heart of some publicly identifiable relationship.”¹¹ She goes on to note that hesed presupposes at least four factors: (1) the person who requests hesed cannot solve his or her own problem; (2) the action requested is of profound significance, for the asker's descendants, homeland, or personal survival; (3) only the person asked can actually fulfill the need; and finally, (4) the person asked is absolutely free to refuse the request.¹² As such, hesed is loyalty established by covenant, whether through family ties or, in its best-known expression between David and Jonathan, through friendship and love. As Edward Campbell puts it, “hesed is more than the loyalty which one expects if he [or she] stands in covenant with another person—it is that extra which both establishes and sustains covenant. It is more than ordinary human loyalty; it imitates the divine initiative which comes without being deserved.”¹³

This concept emerges in the Book of Ruth in a way that offers insight into Jeanette's decision in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. Hesed proves to be the dominant description of the relationship between Naomi and Ruth rather than 'āhēb, the Hebrew for “love,” which appears only once in the final lines of the book. Naomi uses the idea of hesed in an extraordinary manner when she asks her daughters-in-law to leave her and then wishes them well, as Trible explains:

Strikingly, the basis upon which Naomi invokes Yahweh's hesed is the gracious hospitality of her daughters-in-law: “May the Lord deal kindly with you, as you have [already] dealt with the dead and with me” (RSV). At the heart of Naomi's poem, both in structure and in meaning, these female foreigners become models for Yahweh. They show the deity a more excellent way.¹⁴

Ruth's loyalty to Naomi, and by extension perhaps female loyalty in general, becomes the noblest action possible, worthy of imitation even by God. Although Winterson may not have had the Hebrew word itself in mind, repercussions of the remark are clear even in the English: perfect loyalty between women sets the standard for divine mercy.

While this model of perfection may cripple Jeanette's ability to form romantic attachments, it does enable her to return to her mother to continue their relationship. This, after all, is an act of hesed founded on the model of the Ruth text. Naomi herself did not receive the hesed of God; she was left in a strange land without husband or sons and thus without means of support or defense. Ruth, also without husband or sons, chooses to sacrifice her country and possibly her own access to male kin or progeny out of hesed for Naomi. In herself electing to practice hesed, Jeanette too expresses what she has not received; her mother has, in her words, “betrayed” her, which she defines as “promising to be on your side, and then being on someone else's” (p. 171), by rejecting Jeanette's role in public ministry. Jeanette, who constantly repeats her need for someone who will not betray her, chooses first not to betray; she does not desert her mother. Like Ruth, she chooses female loyalty.

RUTH AND FEMALE DEVELOPMENT

Winterson's use of this Biblical material emerges in part from the folkloric genre of the Ruth text. As Jack Sasson points out, Ruth conforms to the pattern established by Vladimir Propp's structural analysis of the Russian folktale: the story opens with a lack (both of food and of male children), includes a repetition by threes (Naomi's three requests of Ruth to return to her mother), a donor (Boaz), a false hero (the unnamed kinsman), and so on.¹⁵ In addition, the story begins with a conventional, almost fairy-tale opening, which Campbell translates as “Once, in the days when the Judges were judging, there came. …”¹⁶ Campbell finds the syntax unusual because of its double story openers, and suggests that the opening, as well as the story itself, works to assert “plausibility” rather than “historicity”¹⁷—again much like a conventional folktale. The Book of Ruth fails in one respect to satisfy the general definition of a folktale: it seems unlikely that it ever had a period of oral transmission in anything resembling its current form. Despite some controversy, most scholars agree that it was composed by one individual, who may or may not have been committing to prose form what was originally a verse narrative.¹⁸ In this, Ruth should be viewed as a kunstmärchen, an artistic fairy tale like many of the Grimm's Brothers' märchen, tales often obtained from oral narratives but then formulated and reworked into highly artistic constructs.¹⁹ More importantly for our purposes, the Ruth text seems to perform a similar psychosocial task to that undertaken by the fairy tale, in that it pays particular attention to issues of psychological development and socialization. This psychosocial element constitutes the most significant component of Winterson's use of the Ruth material.

Like the fairy tales Snow White or Cinderella, the Book of Ruth contains a story of female maturation that explores the traditional roles expected of young women. In her essay “Feminism and Fairy Tales,” Karen Rowe notes,

Fairy tales … respond to the need for both detachment from childish symbioses and a subsequent embracement of adult independence. Yet, this evolution dooms female protagonists (and readers) to pursue adult potentials in one way only: the heroine dreamily anticipates conformity to those predestined roles of wife and mother.²⁰

Given this interpretation of the fairy tale's maturation theme, the Book of Ruth offers an atypical blend of the radical and the conservative. Although Ruth eventually conforms to traditional female roles, she does not passively await a husband; instead she demands her rights under the kinship law and, remarkably, receives praise for this assertiveness. More importantly, Ruth's progression into adulthood does not demand that she make a choice between “symbiosis” with a maternal figure and the “independence” signaled by marriage; even after she weds Boaz, Ruth's ties to Naomi remain so close that Ruth's son is Naomi's as well. In this story, unlike Snow White or Cinderella, women need not be in competition, and female loyalty can extend beyond the marriage ceremony.

Although the Ruth story offers a powerful model of female bonding, it still visualizes (heterosexual) marriage and motherhood as requisite for female fulfillment. This element becomes the principal point of difference in Winterson's revision of the Ruth text. By focusing her attention primarily on the first chapter of Ruth, Winterson concentrates on the relation between Ruth and Naomi without requiring that her heroine follow any conventional path to marriage, or even to fulfillment purely through a romantic association, be this with man or woman. At the same time, as in the Ruth text, Winterson suggests that maturity must incorporate mother-daughter ties; Jeanette does not abandon relations with her mother, despite her mother's rejection of Jeanette's sexuality.

Yet although both protagonists pursue connections to a maternal figure, neither Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit nor Ruth actually explores the relation of a daughter to her biological mother. In both cases, the daughters are one step removed: Ruth relates to her mother-in-law, Jeanette to her foster mother. In this, the two texts again reveal their similarities to the psychological mechanisms of fairy tales. As Rowe explains it, in narratives of female maturation, examining the actual maternal figure may be too threatening to risk. Folktales and fairy tales frequently split the mother figure into the fairy godmother (or sometimes the perfect-but-now-dead mother) and the wicked stepmother or witch, enabling a reader to probe elements of the relationship without confronting the full complexity of her emotions. By creating a negative maternal figure, the fairy tale permits an adolescent girl to examine her mounting resentment of her own mother without contesting her continued longing for the “good” mother of her childhood and her dreams.²¹ Her arrival at mature subjectivity demands that the girl both detach from and identify with her mother, and the fairy-tale fragmentation of the maternal figure facilitates both developmental tasks. Like a fairy tale, both Ruth and Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit divide the maternal role into multiple figures, with the split occurring primarily at the level of the “absent” and the “present,” subordinating “good” and “evil.” The biological mothers of the two protagonists are conspicuously absent from both tales. Ruth's mother never enters the story except to function as a reference to place: Ruth is instructed to go back to her “mother's house” in Moab (Ruth 1:8). Her refusal positions Naomi as the maternal figure to be interrogated. In Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette is not permitted to see her “real” or birth mother and so must come to grips with the foster mother who raised her.

The two stories use these different configurations of the mother-daughter relationship to construct the possibility of continued female loyalty within the maturation narrative. Although Ruth probably entered Naomi's household in early adolescence, the fact that Naomi is not really Ruth's mother makes it unnecessary for Ruth to undergo the painful division/connection struggle with her. In addition, because Naomi is actually Ruth's mother-in-law and because Ruth has already fulfilled the cultural expectations of marriage, the Biblical tradition can pronounce Ruth a heroine for her decision to remain with a maternal figure at all costs. Were Naomi actually Ruth's mother, this choice might well be taken to represent a condition of psychological immaturity or be censured in some other manner as a threat to the exogamic tradition.

In Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, the position of the mother figure as a foster mother makes Jeanette better able to experience her resentment, but also seems to facilitate her ability to forgive her mother. After all, as a foster child, she was specially “chosen” by her mother to a degree impossible for a birth mother, and the “Genesis” chapter explores the influence this has on Jeanette's imagination. Her foster mother decided to find a particular child to raise:

My mother, out walking … dreamed a dream and sustained it in daylight. She would get a child, train it, build it, dedicate it to the Lord:

                    a missionary child,
                    a servant of God,
                    a blessing.

(p. 10)

Jeanette's image of herself as specially chosen dominates her self-definition during her childhood; her mother chose her to be a missionary, and so she expected to be a missionary. She believes herself selected by both God and her mother for service to God. After Jeanette has experienced the darker side of both her mother and her church, she acknowledges that her relationship to her mother is not wholly satisfactory, but it is not one that she can escape: “Families, real ones, are chairs and tables and the right number of cups, but I had no means of joining one, and no means of dismissing my own; she had tied a thread around my button, to tug when she pleased” (p. 176).

Readers tend to react with surprise that Jeanette returns to her mother at the end of the story;²² conventional stories of female maturation require that the daughter leave the mother in order to experience independence and adulthood, and Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit does not conform to this pattern. Even the title, which at first seems to be a rejection of the mother's frequent assertions that “oranges are the only fruit” (emphasis mine), turns out to entail an acceptance of the mother: during “the town's first mission for coloured people,” Jeanette's mother feeds them all pineapple as a gesture to their difference, announcing, “After all … oranges are not the only fruit” (p. 172).²³ Here again the Ruth text is relevant because it offers a response to the mother that does not demand rejection but also does not preclude independent action. In returning to her mother at the conclusion of the novel, Jeanette acknowledges that relationships continue even after one goes away (the thread is still tied around the button); she chooses to continue the relationship with her mother in person rather than only through memories and resentments.²⁴ Indeed, by positioning this return at the conclusion of this bildungsroman, Winterson suggests that maturation consists in the return to, not the flight from, familial or maternal ties. Just as her mother had initially selected her, now Jeanette deliberately selects her mother, like Ruth, who freely selected Naomi.

In depicting such mother-daughter loyalty, Winterson's source-text Ruth goes beyond the conventional fairy-tale configuration. Fairy tales are widely recognized as important contributors to the socialization process of children, particularly in the manner in which they concretize the child's internal concerns through their psychologically resonant plots. Bruno Bettelheim suggests that, among other things, fairy tales enable the child to participate in the Freudian family romance by offering stories that help “manage the contradictory feelings which would otherwise overwhelm him at this stage of his barely beginning ability to integrate contradictory emotions.”²⁵ Bettelheim's assumption of the male gender of the child here not only partakes in the Freudian view, but also conforms to the masculinist biases of many fairy tales, where the boy's progression to king is presented far more often than any comparable rise to authority/subjectivity on the part of the girl.²⁶ In contrast, the Book of Ruth, with its emphasis on Ruth's assertion of her rights within a narrative based on loyalty, hints at the possibility of what Marianne Hirsch terms the “feminist family romance.” She describes this as a “psychoanalytic re-vision of Freudian paradigms, which highlight[s] mother-daughter bonding as a basis for a vision of gender difference and female specificity.”²⁷ The feminist family romance represents the woman not as the object of a male child's desire, but as herself a subject, capable of relating her own story. The daughterly text under this paradigm, Hirsch remarks, often positions itself at an uncomfortable distance from the maternal perspective, which is still silent and silenced under the weight of the daughter's emerging subjectivity. Only in postmodern literature, Hirsch suggests, do texts begin to imagine the inclusion of the maternal as a position capable of its own subjectivity.²⁸

Unsurprisingly, the Book of Ruth does not emerge as an example of a fully realized feminist family romance; the text falls into silence when the daughter herself becomes a mother. Likewise, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, in its revision of Ruth, does not grant the mother full subjectivity (and Jeanette never envisions herself entering the maternal role). At the same time, in suggesting the necessity for mother-daughter bonding, Winterson's novel moves toward a space where subjectivity can be constructed out of female connection rather than exclusively through separation and silencing.

POSTMODERN PARODY

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit parodies Biblical narratives, enabling Winterson to construct a maturation narrative that need not reject female/familial loyalty and that can address lesbian maturation. As Linda Hutcheon reminds us, postmodern parody, no longer strictly a comic genre, enables parodists to repeat material we define as (capital L) Literature with ironic difference in order both to explore and to confront their position within the tradition—a possibility particularly valuable for members of oppressed or marginalized social groups.²⁹ For example, modern feminist revisions of fairy tales reveal the masculinist biases of the original stories, while reclaiming their folkloric structure and language to offer more egalitarian messages.³⁰ In parodying the Bible, essentially the master text of Western civilization, Winterson explores her position as a woman and a lesbian within the Judeo-Christian (male and heterosexual) tradition.

The Bible is not the only text that Winterson employs; she parodies fairy-tale language and motifs (primarily in her repeated departures from overtly autobiographical sections), as well as more conventional literary sources such as Grail-quest narratives, Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, and Christina Rossetti's “Goblin Market.” Her Biblical allusions, however, structure the novel and provide what I have argued is its paradigmatic text, the story of Ruth. In Ruth, Winterson finds a text that speaks of female and familial loyalty, but does so in ways that are not immediately useful for Winterson as a lesbian. By parodying the text, Winterson can take what does work for her narrative purposes—female loyalty—without falling into the conventional heterosexual assumptions her source text makes.

The Bible offers Winterson not only a thematic for her narrative, but also a paradigm to subvert and reappropriate through parody. Her fusion of the Bible with her novel illuminates the contrast between the original Biblical text's masculinist perspective and Jeanette's experiences in a church largely organized and managed by women, while highlighting Jeanette's position outside the text and the congregation as a lesbian. Winterson describes the difficulty that this type of juxtaposition creates, and in so doing offers an analysis of the parody she employs: “What constitutes a problem is not the thing, or the environment where we find the thing, but the conjunction of the two; something unexpected in a usual place (our favourite aunt in our favourite poker parlour) or something usual in an unexpected place (our favourite poker in our favourite aunt)” (p. 45). In this text, the “problem” is not the discussion of the coming of age of a lesbian woman, regardless of her religious background, nor the use of the Bible as the defining text for a novel, but the positioning of the two together. As Hutcheon notes in her discussion of parody, “the Greek prefix para can mean both ‘counter’ or ‘against’ AND ‘near’ or ‘beside.’”³¹ Winterson's use of Biblical imagery blends the two definitions of para: the contrast between the Biblical material and the character's lived experience places Jeanette against the tradition that she narrates, but the occurrence of this narration within chapters named for Biblical books reiterates the significance the Bible has had for her within that contrast. The presence of Biblical material, then, constitutes not so much a mockery, which has often been associated with parody, as it does a pastiche, an unsatirical blend of history and story with the problematic realms of autobiography, fairy tale, and Biblical narratives—genres that typify the “cat's cradle” (p. 93) approach Winterson describes.

While Winterson relies heavily on the Bible and particularly on the Ruth story to construct Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, she maintains an appropriately postmodern ambivalence toward most of the Biblical canon and, with it, literary and cultural traditions as well. Jeanette seems to give voice to this ambivalence when she imagines what might have happened had she been able to remain with her mother and within the tradition:

I could have been a priest instead of a prophet. The priest has a book with the words set out. Old words, known words, words of power. … The words work. They do what they're supposed to do; comfort and discipline. The prophet has no book. The prophet is a voice that cries in the wilderness, full of sounds that do not always set into meaning.

(p. 161)

Winterson's novel is the work of the prophet; she explodes the tradition by revealing where the book's words are no longer words of power for her. Because of her gender and sexuality, Winterson finds no place in the text already constructed for her, and her use of the first seven Biblical books explores her distance from that text.

In Ruth she finds an echo of what she seeks—loyalty between women that itself becomes part of a mature subjectivity. Unlike Ruth, Jeanette leaves her primary mother figure, but in keeping with the loyalty the Book of Ruth explores, Jeanette returns to continue the relationship. In this, Winterson creates a feminist family romance, where the development of female subjectivity and self-empowerment demands the continuation of the mother-daughter relationship, not its rejection. She offers female loyalty as an important site for female development, not a limited and limiting role between masculine attachments. She thus exposes what in Ruth parallels Jeanette's experience while rejecting Ruth's ultimate advocacy of traditional female options. However, her parody does not seek to destroy the original text—she does not render Ruth useless for or threatening to a modern reader. Her revision reclaims the original text as a literary model of maturation by embracing the opportunity it suggests for female loyalty and mother-daughter bonding. In her parody of this work, she fragments the originally tightly constructed tale, as if in the fracture in the tradition thus created she could finally make room for herself. In so doing, she suggests that for the writing of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Ruth too can be a “fruitful” text.

Notes

1. This “voice” contrasts to the “exit” option more often utilized by boys—that is, simply leaving the family (either physically or emotionally) when they feel overly confined by it. While both options are available to and used by both genders, Gilligan's research reveals that girls employ the “voice” option more readily than they do the “exit” option, while the reverse is true for boys. See Carol Gilligan, “Exit-Voice Dilemmas in Adolescent Development,” in Mapping the Moral Domain: A Contribution of Women's Thinking to Psychological Theory and Education, ed. Gilligan, Janie Victoria Ward, and Jill McClean Taylor, with Betty Bardige (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 141–58.

2. For more on alternate literary models for female development narratives, see the invaluable collection The Voyage In: Fictions in Female Development, ed. Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch, Elizabeth Langland (Hanover, New Hampshire: Published for Dartmouth College by The University Press of New England, 1983). In that collection, see particularly Karen E. Rowe, “‘Fairy-born and human-bred’: Jane Eyre's Education in Romance,” pp. 69–89, and Ellen Cronan Rose, “Through the Looking Glass: When Women Tell Fairy Tales,” pp. 209–27, for sustained treatment of the fairy tale as a literary model for narratives of development.

3. Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1987), pp. 93–95. Further citations will appear parenthetically in the text.

4. The Winnet Stonejar sequence repeats the novel's plot by reframing it in a more traditional model; instead of emphasizing the connection between mother and daughter, this narrative focuses on the daughter's relation to her (adoptive) father, a sorcerer who persuades her that she has no mother and teaches her his magic but expels her for her sexual interest in another man. In this story, Winterson seems to play with (among other things) the notion of departure as necessary for maturity since in contrast to the novel as a whole, the protagonist of this version does not and cannot return home.

5. All citations of the Bible will refer to the King James Version, unless otherwise indicated.

6. Jack M. Sasson, in Ruth: A New Translation with a Philological Commentary and a Formalist-Folkloric Interpretation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), p. 70, points out that in Hebrew the word for foot used here, regel …, often appears in the Hebrew Bible as a euphemism for “testicles,” or more generally, “sexual organs.” Although he goes on to insist that nothing sexual could possibly have been intended here, the bulk of the philological evidence suggests otherwise.

7. Under Gō'ēl, the nearest able kinsman would be obligated to purchase or redeem land sold by a widow so that the property would remain within the family. This practice is essentially parallel to the levirate, although concerned with land rather than offspring. In most circumstances, the same kinsman would be required to perform both obligations.

8. Nelson Glueck, Hesed in the Bible, trans. Alfred Gottschalk, ed. Elias Epstein (Cincinnati: The Hebrew Union College Press, 1967), pp. 40–41.

9. Phyllis Trible, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality, ed. Walter Brueggemann and John R. Donahue (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1989), p. 173. I do not agree with Trible here that Ruth has abandoned family because obviously her choice to follow her mother-in-law represents a strong allegiance to family. It is certainly true that she rejects her biological family in favor of the ties she established through marriage. I would point out, however, that Hebrew wedding customs suggest that the bride may have been a young teenager upon entering her husband's family; thus Naomi would have functioned as a mother through much of Ruth's adolescence. This point will be explored more fully below.

10. Besides the obvious reference to Ruth in Jeanette's insistence on unending love, the line “Love as strong as death” comes from the Song of Songs 8:6, and the lines about crossing seas and suffering sunstroke echo the journey of the lovers in that book. The end of that sentence, “and give away all that I have,” suggests Jesus's command to the rich to sell their possessions and give everything to the poor for love of God, an injunction found in several of the Gospels. The stone tablets allude to the Ten Commandments, also written on stone. My point here, however, is less to unpack all of the Biblical references in this passage than to stress that Jeanette's image of love is utterly dependent on a Biblical model, which she derives from a variety of source texts.

11. Katharine Doob Sakenfeld, “Loyalty and Love: The Language of Human Interconnections in the Hebrew Bible,” Michigan Quarterly Review, 22, No. 3 (1983), 197.

12. Sakenfeld, pp. 197–98.

13. Edward F. Campbell, Ruth: A New Translation with Introduction, Notes, and Commentary, in Anchor Bible, ed. William Foxwell Albright and David Noel Freedman (New York: Doubleday, 1975), p. 81.

14. Trible, p. 169, her emphasis.

15. Sasson, pp. 200–15.

16. Campbell, p. 49.

17. Campbell, pp. 49, 59.

18. Jacob M. Myers, The Linguistic and Literary Form of the Book of Ruth (Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1955), pp. 42, 64; Sasson, p. 214.

19. Heinz Rölleke, “New Results of Research on Grimm's Fairy Tales,” in The Brothers Grimm and Folktale, ed. James M. McGlathery (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), pp. 107–08.

20. Rowe, “Feminism and Fairy Tales,” in Don't Bet on the Prince: Contemporary Feminist Fairy Tales in North America and England, ed. Jack Zipes (New York: Methuen, 1986), p. 214.

21. See Rowe, “Feminism and Fairy Tales,” p. 213, and also Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (1976; rpt. New York: Vintage, 1989), pp. 68–69.

22. A session of Winterson in one of my graduate seminars at Princeton University (Professor Brenda R. Silver, “Modern Post Modern,” English 566, 8 December 1989) illustrated such an assumption. The members of the class, almost all women, expressed anger and dismay that Jeanette chose to return to her mother once she had made the decision to leave; their expectations included the termination of the mother-daughter relationship as a necessary step in self-actualization.

23. Jeanette's acceptance of this phrase as the title of her narrative might implicate her in her mother's racist assumptions, thus undermining some of the positive connotations I have associated with her maturation. I would suggest that the title instead aligns the Otherness of Jeanette's sexual preferences with racial Otherness, neither of which lies within her mother's powers of understanding or control. It is interesting too to note that this phrase represents the one instance in the novel of Jeanette's mother acknowledging that she may be mistaken or may not completely understand—in other words, the one moment in the text where the mother too seems to grow, thus paving the way for a similar growth of understanding toward Jeanette (understanding, admittedly, does not fully occur within the confines of the novel, but her permitting Jeanette to return home implies a willingness to come to an understanding of her daughter). Although critics such as Rebecca O'Rourke, in “Fingers in the Fruit Basket: A Feminist Reading of Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit,” in Feminist Criticism: Theory and Practice, ed. Susan Sellers (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), have often criticized Winterson for her rather harsh treatment of her family, this moment, at least, does not portray the mother as one-dimensional.

24. The phrase “tied a thread around my button” originates in the Winnet Stonejar sequence, in which the protagonist does not return to her family. Winterson's repetition of the phrase in Jeanette's portion of the narrative emphasizes that return is only one option in the continuation of the relationship, but one that Jeanette freely chooses.

25. Bettelheim, p. 69.

26. The princess becoming queen cannot be seen as a comparable event in most fairy tales because this still locates the girl child in a subordinate role, with husband replacing father as the occupant of the subjective position. Her becoming queen occurs only as an accident of her connection to the male subject.

27. Marianne Hirsch, The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989), p. 15.

28. See Hirsch, chapter 4.

29. See Linda Hutcheon's chapter on parody in A Poetics of Post-Modernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1988), and “The Politics of Postmodernism: Parody and History,” Cultural Critique, 5 (Winter 1986–87), 179–207. In the latter, Hutcheon advocates a redefinition of parody as “repetition with critical distance that allows ironic signaling of difference at the very heart of similarity” (p. 185), a process that she sees as enabling parodists to use intertexuality for political statements.

30. See, for example, Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber (1979; rpt. New York: Penguin, 1987); Rapunzel's Revenge: Fairytales for Feminists (Dublin: Attic Press, 1985); and Zipes, ed., Don't Bet on the Prince. Rapunzel's Revenge contains parodic rewritings of familiar fairy tales; for example, Snow White arranges a labor union and contemplates a corporate merger with the mine owner, Mr. Prince, while Cinderella, who dreams of managing a fast-food restaurant chain, rejects the overtures of the prince in order to reorganize the palace on an economically stable basis as a catering service. This collection tends to offer humorous revisions, although the Zipes anthology contains several parodic, nonhumorous tales.

31. Hutcheon, “The Politics of Postmodernism,” pp. 185–86.

I would like to acknowledge the assistance I received on earlier versions of this essay from Brenda Silver and Lee Talley, as well as the careful reading and advice from Lee Mitchell, whose comments have been, as always, invaluable.