- 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
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
