Exodus - The Journey Begins

• What is the connection to the Exodus story?
• Are mother and daughter getting closer or growing apart?
• Why does Jeanette start to turn away from biblical themes?

In this second chapter Jeanette’s exposure to the wider world of school life begins to bring her into conflict with her mother and the church community. As she comes into contact with other children her own age, with very different views and family backgrounds, she starts to question the hitherto world that her mother has constructed for her, where religion has all of the answers to life’s many dilemmas and her mother has a response to everything. Jeanette begins to learn ‘that even the church was sometimes confused’, although she freely admits to this being a problem she ‘chose not to deal with for many years to come’. This chapter also sees Jeanette become increasingly isolated: from her peers at school, but also from her mother, who spends more and more time away from home on important church business.

At school Jeanette is clearly out of place. Her deeply held religious beliefs, and her interpretation of life through the lens of the bible, sets her apart from the other children and make her as a troublemaker in the eyes of her baffled teachers. On a school trip to Chester zoo, in sewing classes with Mrs White and, symbolically, in a disused P.E. cupboard, Jeanette feels her isolation acutely. School is somewhere she does not ‘seem to learn anything or win anything’; instead, she longs for the long summer trips to Morecambe with her mother and her ‘family’ the church.

In one typical episode of seeming rebellion, Jeanette is sent to the head teacher, Mrs Vole, for frightening the other children with her talk of damnation. Despite her precious reading and writing, her teachers are unnerved by her behaviour and threaten to write report her actions to her mother. But rather than punish Jeanette her mother simply takes her to the cinema as a ‘treat’. Although all the other children continue to ‘avoid’ her, Jeanette is not worried because she is convinced by her faith that ‘she is right’. She declares that she loves her mother ‘because she always knew exactly why things happened’. 

Yet at the same time that Jeanette is becoming increasingly alienated from her peers at school, there are also some signs that she is slowly growing apart from her mother and beginning to question some of her views. The beginnings of Jeanette’s emotional and physical distance from her mother coincides with her mother’s long absences from home whilst doing work for the church in Wigan. In one episode Jeanette’s mother, and the rest of her church’s small community, interpret Jeanette’s silence as a sign of God’s rapture. The reader begins to see the extreme consequences of her mother’s faith, and the painful reality of Jeanette’s childhood. The truth of Jeanette’s adenoids is only finally discovered by chance, when Jeanette seeks the attention of an outsider, Mrs Jewsbury, in another comic scene at the local post office. Mrs Jewsbury is rightly appalled at the failure of Jeanette’s mother to notice the problem and, moreover, her absence at this time of need. She immediately takes Jeanette to hospital where she can be treated. This whole story illustrates the extent to which at this stage of Jeanette’s life her mother ‘wasn’t listening’ and that her curiosity and that many of her daughter’s pains went largely ‘unnoticed’.

During her stay in hospital the reader sees more signs of the growing separation between mother and daughter. Jeanette yearns for her mother’s moving guidance, but all she seems capable of offering her daughter is oranges – both a sign of her mother’s lack of compassion and also a symbol of her inability to see beyond her own interpretation of events – at this stage of the novel oranges are very much the ‘only fruit’. In this chilling foreshadow of events to come – namely in the daughter’s challenge to the mother’s cast iron authority – the oranges can also be seen as a potent metaphor of rebellion, an allusion to the role that fruit played in man’s quest for God-like knowledge in the Garden of Eden and his subsequent punishment to a life of mortality on earth.

As with the previous chapter, Winterson ends Exodus with an unusual and seemingly out of place story that does not immediately seem to relate to the main narrative. This merging of different genres and narrative styles is very much a feature of the experimental approach to storytelling that Winterson takes and, as before, helps the reader to gain an insight into Jeanette’s ever-changing world. This narrative digression begins with the biblical reference to the children of Israel whom upon the escape from Egypt ‘were guided by the pillar of cloud by day, and the pillar of fire by night’. Unlike the Israelites who understood these strange signs, for Jeanette the pillar of cloud is ‘perplexing and impossible’, a reflection of her own confusion at this point in her life when she had ‘abandoned biblical themes’ in favour of individualistic literary models like William Blake and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

The story about the emperor Tetrahedron reads less like a traditional fairy tale than the digression at the end of Genesis and more like a piece of personal mythology. The story is both an expression of Jeanette the growing writer’s artistic expression – where she is able to rearrange everyone else ‘version of the facts’ into something that relates to her own experiences – and a powerful manifestation of her emerging individuality. Like the elastic bands in the story, in her hands ‘stories of love and folly’ can be stretched this way and that way or dissolved entirely. The power resides with the storyteller, rather than the characters whose lives are written about by others. Jeanette’s admission that ‘no emotion is the final one’ feels like a recognition that her life does not have to confirm to other people’s expectations, even her own mother’s. Jeanette has truly begun her own version of the Exodus story.

Points to consider:

• What is the significance of the literary figures that Jeanette evokes in this chapter?
• What else might be the importance of the story at the end of the chapter? How do the themes of the story match up with events in the her life?
• What is the tone of the main narration in this chapter? Why might such an approach be used to relate the details of this stage of her life?
• What other indirect ways are used to show Jeanette's growing separation from her mother?
• Why might Jeanette liken this point of her childhood to the second book of the Old Testament?

Genesis - In the Beginning...

• What should we make of this young girl’s life?
• Why is this book so unusual in its style and structure?
• Is this a work or fact or fiction?

In many respects the first line sets the ironic tone for the rest of the book: although it is certainly true that ‘like most people’ Jeanette ‘lived with her mother and father’, the life that she goes on to describe with them is undoubtedly far removed from many people’s experiences of childhood. Indeed, much of this first chapter is taken up with an account of the unusual circumstances of Jeanette’s ‘special’ upbringing, in a ‘town stolen from the valleys’ where everybody knows everybody else’s business and any kind of difference is frowned open. This seems like it is going to be a novel concerned with breaking out from societal and cultural constraints.

This opening chapter then, ostensibly organised around an account of a typical Sunday when Jeanette is seven years old, is dominated by details of the protagonist’s relationship with her evangelical mother. The mother is a larger than life figure. Her outlook on life is entirely influenced by her religion and her desire to spread God’s word to all the heathen in the world, including next door. In Jeanette’s mother’s eyes there are only ‘friends and enemies’, and ‘at first’ her adopted daughter Jeanette can be counted amongst her friends, a daughter born of ‘immaculate conception’ whose purpose she is led to believe is ‘to change the world.’ For now Jeanette seems at ease in her closeted religious environment, but there are ominous signs of the struggle to come, in particular in her mother’s venomous attitudes towards the two old spinsters who run the paper shop, whose implied feelings towards each other she considers to be ‘unnatural’.

In her descriptions of her home life and of the people that inhabit her narrow horizons, Jeanette’s narrative retains much of this early ironic detachment. This playful device is signalled by the prevalence of parenthetical comments about incidents and other characters and the comical juxtaposition of the ordinary with the absurd. For instance, following one of Jeanette’s mother’s strange proselytising judgements about the importance of the sacrificial lamb, Jeanette deploys a large dose of black humour, writing how they always ‘had it on Sundays with potato’. This narrative distance enables the author to paint a vivid portrait of the mother as a fiery evangelical mother, whilst simultaneously allowing the daughter to retain the air of knowingness that the older Jeanette must possess in her reconstruction of the narrative.

Black comedy is not, however, the only element of narrative play at work in this opening chapter, marking Oranges as a distinctly contemporary novel. There are the Biblical chapter headings, the insertion of fairy tales (or rather pastiches of the styles of the traditional fairy tales) and also the loose narratives movement between past and present. This narrative freedom, described by Winterson in her introductory notes as like a ‘spiral’ structure, help to create a natural sense of rhythm, making the Jeanette’s story seem spontaneous and rather freer than some of the constraints she is perhaps describing. Jeanette’s account of her childhood skits from one memory to another, all of which are centred on this single Sunday, and all designed to portray the uniqueness of Jeanette’s childhood, one dominated by a religiously zealous mother and an austere church community, and where the voice of an adopted father is silent.

Points to consider:

• What do you think is the purpose of the fairy tale? It might help to look at the story itself and how it might relate to aspects of Jeanette’s life e.g. the idea of distraction as a comfort. It is also useful to consider the wider purpose of fairy tales and how these stories compete with the other stories in the book i.e. the Bible and the main coming of age narrative. Should any of these narratives be privileged? Can they all ultimately be considered to be works of fiction?
• What should we make about the absence of the father? How does his silence position us as a reader?
• The life that Jeanette endures is brutal and restrictive, but in her retelling of it (presumably at a much later point in time) seems remarkably free of bitterness. Why might this be the case?
• The protagonist shares her first name with the writer and many of the factual details of Jeanette’s life are similar to those of her author, Winterson. To what extent should we see Oranges as an autobiographical work? Is this simply a realised account of the writer’s own life, or is there more to the text than this? Is autobiography ever more than a work of fiction?