“Fantastical Projects” in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

At the end of Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (OAN), the main character Jeanette returns to her childhood home, which she had been kicked out of as a teen for being a lesbian. A little older and wiser, the adult Jeanette sits at the fireplace waiting for her mother and admits to herself that her mother had “tied a thread around [her] button, to tug when she pleased” (176). She ruminates on a woman “in another place” that might save her, or might not. Her thoughts are interrupted by her mother’s entrance, and she fetches her headphones as she is told. The very last sentence is her mother’s voice, calling out for Manchester, bringing no response. I found it interesting that Winterson chose to include this future fictional woman, concluding the book with both Jeanette and her mother in wait of someone or something while so aware of their entanglement with each other—the book forever seals this tie as mother and daughter, for better or for worse. Considering this scene as an example of the running themes of queer imagination and future-oriented thinking in Oranges, I am interested in how Lee Edelman’s discussion in “The Future is Kid Stuff” (TFKIS) might serve to illuminate or expand those themes.

I. Introduction: Futurities

Lee Edelman is concerned with the idea of the Child as a kind of fetish object for society, in a way that ideologically defines and limits politics while being completely fictional. For Edelman, politics is the means by which the subject of the signifier—us—attempts to create the conditions that will allow us to find meaning or make the self whole, which Edelman considers “impossible” (8). That project of finding the self in the merged realms of the Imaginary and Symbolic is set within a linear timeline that moves along the present while thinking of the past and towards the future. And this project’s framework is set by the notion and symbol of the Child—in both the sense of the child we once were and since has been lost as well as the Child that reassures us of “revolutionary possibility” (TFKIS 11) in the future. And not only is Edelman concerned by the value we place on the Child, but he is also critical of the value placed on the future itself. 

Winterson, on the other hand, is more preoccupied by religion than politics. This isn’t a very far reach from the framework that Edelman provides; he acknowledges religion as the “successfully accomplished work of ideological naturalization” with its “absolute and invisible authority” as proof of that (TFKIS 15). Establishing the success of religion and God as a kind of social order that he wants to discuss, futurity expands that concept of ideology-shaping and argues how reproductive futurity (sometimes hand in hand with religion, other times not) becomes the “secular theology” (TFKIS 12). Winterson’s novel steps back into theology. She explores a “Revelations”-touting cult, and as religion stands in for politics as the ruling social order and God mostly stands in for Child for its telos, we can see Edelman’s interpretation of Lacanian desire repeat in a similar pattern for Oranges, constructing something like his reproductive futurity, something like a religious futurity. A social consensus forms around, not necessarily the figure of the child or God, but perhaps the idea of future salvation—a purity or innocence before the “original sin.” 

It’s important to note that still, in both, “The Child…marks the fetishistic fixation of heteronormativity: an erotically charged investment in the rigid sameness of identity that is central to the compulsory narrative of reproductive futurism” (TFKIS 21) and at the same time, “the cult of the Child permits no shrines to the queerness of boys and girls, since queerness…is understood as bringing children and childhood to an end” (TFKIS 19). While the religion in Oranges is not necessarily a “cult of the Child,” the origins and practices of religious homophobia are necessarily entangled in political concern for heterosexual reproduction (Foucault notes how discourses on sexual practices were largely shaped by “canonical law, the Christian pastoral, and civil law” (Foucault 37)). Using the Lacanian framework of the imaginary and symbolic as a means to find the self/meaning, and the ideas introduced by José Esteban Muñoz’s “Disidentifications,” I will explore the ways in which Oranges is a queer project for meaning-making, in context with Edelman’s theory. 

II. The Religion Project

Edelman argues that the fantastical project of politics is that “marriage of identity to futurity in order to realize the social subject” (14). Certainly no character in the novel embodies this hope more than Jeanette’s mother and her religious practice. Oranges frames itself with a family structure that is outwardly heteronormative: mother, father, and child. However, Winterson opens the book being quick to note that the mother had a “mysterious attitude towards the begetting of children” (2), opting to adopt a child instead. And the speaker, Jeanette, explains “[her mom] was very bitter about the Virgin Mary getting there first” (OAN 2), suggesting that it was not pregnancy that she found disagreeable, but rather the act of sexual conception. What are the logical “merits” of heterosexuality without reproduction? Edelman argues that the “biological fact of heterosexual procreation bestows the imprimatur of meaning-production on heterogenital relations” (13) or, in other words, the mere possibility of child-rearing creates meaning for heterosexual relations. Then, the idea of a straight family, the implication of heterosex, and the presence of a child are all colored with “meaning,” because they all indicate reproduction, which must be inherently meaningful.

Unraveling the guise, it becomes less about the intercourse or having a biological child at all, but rather those three things (the idea, implication, and presence) that end up enough to equate to meaning.  For Jeanette’s mother, who has little to no regard for her husband except that his only vice was gambling and that he was easy enough to reform for the Lord (36), that bare concept of meaning is certainly enough to convince her to adopt a child. But her mother’s devotion to constructing a family is not rooted purely in reproductive futurism. “‘The church is my family,’” she says (OAN 37). 

In the chapter “Genesis,” we can see a little bit of the mother’s interiority in her ruminations of what was possible and impossible for her, that she likes to speak French and play the piano (9). Then, Winterson switches gears on the narrative into a story of a sensitive princess who is preyed upon a hunchback who ties her into her duties of “(1) [Milking the goats] / (2) [Educating people] / (3) [Composing songs]” (9), a list indented to its own on the page. The princess stays, forgets about her old life, and the hunchback dies, grateful. Immediately after, Winterson recounts the mother’s reason for adopting her—a divine dream of a child that she would get to raise to become a “missionary child, a servant of God, a blessing” (10), in the similar 3-object list format as the princess’ duties. The hunchback and mother are clearly analogous. So the most peculiar line at the end of this passage is, “She had a way out now, for years and years to come” (10). A way out of what?  Jeanette is the Child figure of reproductive futurity in the sense that her mother places value on Jeanette’s innocence and potential. But at the same time, the future for her mother is death and heaven, with Jeanette as her project that would give her purpose—a project that is seemingly always ongoing, futuristic, and without a definite end.

. . .

IV. The Biomythography Project

. . .

The confusion, or rupture of the self, derives from the truth that their relationship feels good. So much so that Jeanette decides that “Melanie is a gift from the Lord, and it would be ungrateful not to appreciate her,” in direct contradiction to the pastor’s declaration that they are “under Satan’s spell” (OAN 104). Jeanette insists she loves both God and Melanie and the pastor replies that she cannot (OAN 105). In the “Judges” section, Jeanette is kicked out of her mother’s house for refusing to repent. A key point that Edelman makes is that the framework of social reality, whether it is politics or religion, is experienced as a “fantasy…that assures the stability of our identities as subjects and the coherence of the Imaginary…through which those identities appear to us in recognizable form” (7). This suggests that the fantasy might fall apart where the identity becomes unstable or the Imaginary becomes illogical or, conversely, should the fantasy collapse, so goes the identity and the Imaginary as it’s known. For Jeanette, the incompatibility of church and her queer pleasures is the trigger of realization that something essential is missing in the Symbolic/social order/the church. Unlike for Elsie, Miss Jewsbury, and her mother, religion and god become an insufficient framework for Jeanette to find meaning from as she begins desiring. And this is also how the speaker and the author begin to converge.

The Symbolic moves from sermons about Revelations and hell to the queer biomythography as “a sort of necessary reassurance by seeming to give a name to what, as Real, remains unnameable” (TFIKS 26). We come back to the story of the hunchback and princess; Winterson weaves in these dreams or random insertions of a separate timeline throughout the novel, sometimes told like a Brothers Grimm fairytale. They are set quite literally in an imagined past, aiming to illustrate something about the present reality indirectly. In one example, Jeanetter listens to a sermon that ends with the declaration that “Perfection…is flawlessness” (OAN 60), and the next few pages is about a story of a prince who, in search of perfection, kills his advisers and a perfect woman for stating that perfection is not flawlessness. This story is in conversation with the rest of the book, about being sinless versus goodness and the unforgiving violence of of those who cannot tolerate flaws. But Winterson chooses to write it as a fable, as though simply stating disagreement with the pastor would be insufficient. However, the novel dissociates from itself in these extra-narrative moments, as they don’t reveal something about Jeanette’s character directly and never exactly. 

Edelman explains that “the queerness of which I speak would deliberately sever us from ourselves, from the assurance, that is, of knowing ourselves and hence of knowing our ‘good’... where [Lacan’s characterization of truth] does not assure happiness…[or even] the good” (5). In other words, Edelman’s queerness aims towards a truth that considers the subject ungraspable but more “real,” in accepting that essential incomprehensibility. In Oranges, her mother and Elsie’s sexuality stay unidentified and she presents her mother’s mind as “complicated” (128) and often contradictory despite her air of authority (for example, “...oranges. ‘The only fruit,’ she always said” (29) versus “‘After all,’ said my mother philosophically, ‘oranges are not the only fruit.’”(172)). Winterson leaves us with questions and the subject remains unknowable, but still the details, as scattered or undecided as they are, “tend to the real.” 

Not only through the book’s themes, but in the way that the book deals with those themes, through allegory and through giving language to what it can while something remains imperceptible, the book itself seems to be a self-actualization project of sorts. It does not claim to be the radical queer future that Edelman might like, but the two works are both skeptical of placing value on futurity. And it may be impossible to tell what is fabricated and what is not, but that is not the concern of Winterson’s biomythography. Rather, it is the self that might emerge out of the fiction, a merging of the current self (as Jeanette the character or Jeanette the author) with an imaginary one from the past (as the princess/perfect woman/Sir Perceval or Jeanette the character) in order to eventually pry out the meaning.