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?