Questing after strange fruit : an examination of the quest motif in Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not The only Fruit and Sexing The Cherry
Date
1994
Authors
Jones, Sheila Anne
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Abstract
Writer Jeanette Winterson once stated in an interview that "It's very important for me to find a form which fits my content," and in four of her six novels that form is an altered but still recognizable version of the quest paradigm. Her content reflects her desire to contest normative definitions of gender behaviour and sexual expression, and in Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit and Sexing the Cherry, Jeanette Winterson adopts the traditional quest-myth to portray the progress of her characters as they journey through a world in which gender and sexuality are deliberately foregrounded. Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit is the story of a young girl who grows up lesbian in a rigidly heterosexual religious community. The narrative, which weaves traditional fairy tales with Grail legend, follows the young girls' attempts to create a mythology to help her make some sense of her situation. In Sexing the Cherry, Winterson calls attention to the traditions of the quest-myth—the masculine subject of the quest, the rigid gender divisions, the inherent heterosexism, the objectification of women—through one narrator who wants to create himself in the image of the traditional hero but cannot, and through another narrator who is entrapped by these same social attitudes. In her novels Winterson favours the strategies Rachel Duplessis terms "writing beyond the ending," as she uses familiar fairy tales and myths as springboards for her own rewritten versions which call attention to the political and religious ideologies that construct and constrain the subjectivity of her characters. The frequent sexism of traditional myths and fair tales is deconstructed, in her rewritten versions, to reveal the underpinnings of social and sexual conformism.
This thesis examines Winterson's forays into the world of the quest-myth, and focuses on two novels—Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit and Sexing The Cherry—in particular. The Introduction offers a brief look at Winterson's penchant for rewriting fairy tales and myths in four of her six novels, and examines several recurring motifs in her fiction. Chapter One contrasts the traditions of fair tales and of the quest paradigm (as delineated by Northrop Frye and Joseph Campbell) with Winterson's own in Sexing the Cherry. Using vividly contrasting narrator, Winterson scrutinizes not only the sexist paradigm of the traditional quest, but also the ideological forces that construct normative definitions of love and desire. In the Conclusion I contrast the quests of the two novels. My intention in this thesis is not to question why Winterson uses the quest motif so much as study her use of the traditional quest paradigm to deconstruct how religious and political forces often conspire to force a certain form of conformity in the subjectivity of her characters.