University of Tulsa

Models for Female Loyalty: The Biblical Ruth in Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not the
Only Fruit
Author(s): Laurel Bollinger
Source: Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, Vol. 13, No. 2 (Autumn, 1994), pp. 363-380
Published by: University of Tulsa
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/464115 .
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 Models for Female Loyalty:
The Biblical Ruth in Jeanette Winterson's

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

Laurel Bollinger
University of Alabama, Huntsville

Literary models of development, from simple fairy tales such as Snow

White to complex bildungsromans such as Joyce's A Portraitof the Artistas
a Young Man, generally posit physical and/or emotional separation from
home and family as a necessary step in the process of maturation. For
conventional stories of male development (the paradigmatic Bildungsro-
man as established by Goethe), such models play out the dynamics of the
oedipal phase; the male infant recognizes physiological differences be?
tween himself and a female primary caregiver and learns to define his
gender and identity in terms of that opposition. Leaving home simply re?
peats this process for the adolescent. However, as psychologists from Sig?
mund Freud to Carol Gilligan have been telling us, the process is not so
simple for the female child. Not only does the female infant experience
less physiological difference, but connection to home and family generally
remain much more important to the girl during and after adolescence. In
an effort to stay connected to their families, adolescent girls frequently
resort to what Gilligan terms the "voice" option, meaning that, instead of
leaving, they speak out to express their dissatisfaction with the family
while still preserving the relationship.1 In other words, girls narrate their
concerns precisely so that those concerns will not destroy the familial
relationship.
Traditional stories of maturation, with their emphasis on an "exit" solu?
tion, cannot speak to the need for connection within female development,
nor can they provide a literary model for its occurrence in fiction. Yet. as
critics often warn, many alternative models for female development in?
stead advocate passivity and patience, encouraging Sleeping Beauty or
Rapunzel merely to await her rescuing prince and thus not to seek agency
or maturity on her own.2 More significantly, such models often posit the
relationship between women?particularly mother and daughter?as one
of competition, not companionship. While obviously such paradigms are

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limiting for all who wish to write of female maturation, the tendency to pit
women against women is particularly problematic for writers seeking to
construct narratives of development about lesbians or to include strong
mother-daughter ties.
Few literary models exist, then, for maturation narratives such as
Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, the coming-of-age
story of a young woman who grapples with her lesbianism while seeking to
maintain a relationship with a mother who cannot accept her daughter's
sexual orientation. Winterson's novel complicates the maturation narra?
tive of the protagonist, Jeanette, by insisting that she also come to grips
with her role in a Pentecostal evangelical church that inspires her to pub?
lic ministry yet rejects her words because she is a woman and a lesbian.
The central relationship in the text is between Jeanette and her mother,
whose commitment to evangelism leaves her uninvolved with Jeanette's
development and intolerant of her daughter's sexuality. Despite their dif?
ferences, however, Jeanette does not reject her mother, but continues the
relationship even after her mother has forced her to leave their home. Her
return suggests that, for this text, maturity consists in the continuation,
not the elimination, of mother-daughter relations.
Because few models exist for texts that place so high a value on mother-
daughter relations, Winterson relies on parody to produce a literary para?
digm that can account both for her own lived experience and for the
maturation story in her novel (with its strong autobiographical compo?
nent). While she uses a wide range of texts for this parody, her principal
source is the Biblical Book of Ruth, which she revises with an eye toward
both its thematic and its theological significance. The Book of Ruth cen?
ters on the relationship between Ruth and her mother-in-law Naomi and
contains perhaps the most profound expression of female loyalty in the
Bible. As such, it offersa model for Winterson's maturation narrative that
emphasizes the importance of female loyalty to female development. The
Ruth text enables Winterson to address the two major conflicts in
Jeanette's life: her sexual orientation and her connection to her mother.

Biblical Material

Winterson's parody interlaces Biblical materials with her fiction, using

the history of the Israelites to explore Jeanette's experiences of maturation.
Given the thematics of the novel, Winterson's choice of the Bible seems
especially appropriate; besides being a relevant cultural document, it is a
personal one as well since both Winterson and Jeanette were raised by

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Pentecostal evangelists. In this text, then, to parody the Bible is to place
both personal and cultural history under scrutiny.
In blending Biblical references with Jeanette's story,Winterson deliber?
ately challenges the distinction between fact and fiction as well as between
the novel she is writing and the Biblical texts she uses for her parody.
These Biblical texts are already problematic; not quite history and not
quite storytelling, their position on any kind of fact-fiction continuum
changes with the point of view of the observer. In the self-reflexive chap?
ter "Deuteronomy," Winterson suggests that the distinction between fact
and fiction arises from self-delusion; history and story are not in opposition
but are, like "knots" in a game of "cat's cradle," so hopelessly tangled that
we must learn to take pleasure in the blend.3 She plays out this concern
through a narrative technique that juxtaposes autobiographical units with
relatively strong truth claims (at least at the level of plausibility) next to
fairy-tale units whose truth claims rest on psychological verity alone. This
juxtaposition mirrors the actual narrative structure of her Biblical source
texts, which contain materials purporting to be myth, poetry, or history in
an often indecipherable blur.
Winterson's most explicit use of the Bible occurs in the chapter titles:
the firsteight books of the Bible, in order, from Genesis to Ruth. Although
the parody she constructs of the Bible is complex as a whole, her overt
references to most of these Biblical books are reductionistic, in that she
relies upon only the most general and conventional sense of each text. For
example, Winterson's "Genesis" chapter describes Jeanette's origins but
makes limited use of Genesis itself, a book that includes the Creation and
Fall, the Noah story, the tower of Babel, the calling of Abraham, the
sacrifice of Isaac, Lot and his wife?in other words, a wide range of stories
loosely connected through chronology and historical significance to the
ancient Hebrew people. Winterson suppresses the disorder of the original
text to parody conventional images of origin. In the "Genesis" chapter, the
Biblical allusions are predominantly to the New Testament origin narra?
tive rather than to the one contained in the Hebrew Bible: Jeanette
describes her mother's desire for a virgin birth and her resultant decision to
adopt a child, the star that guided her mother to the orphanage where
Jeanette was found, and the lack of Magi at her cradle. Winterson thus
contrasts her story with the predominantly male image of creation found
in both Biblical texts by removing any significant male figures from her
birth narrative. Rather than concentrating on the creative power of an
omnipotent Father, the text reproduces the conventionally passive Joseph-
figure in Jeanette's adoptive father; he has no real role in Jeanette's child?
hood and appears primarily as a victim of his wife's evangelism. The power
of creation rests with Jeanette's mother.

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 Each of the other chapters contains similarly concrete references to the
Biblical text for which it is named. In "Exodus," Jeanette firstleaves her
family home to go to school, where she laments her inability to interpret
"the pillar of cloud" she, like the escaping Israelites, has to guide her in the
daytime?in this case, the ground rules of the world outside her church, a
world filled with teachers and fellow students who are uncomfortable with
Jeanette's interest in hell and damnation. The chapters "Leviticus" and
"Numbers" play offthe position of their Biblical source texts as constitut?
ing "The Law," and Winterson uses them to explore Jeanette's domination
by her mother and the church, including Jeanette's initiation into her
mother's brand of evangelizing. In addition, "Leviticus" devotes seven of
its fourteen pages to a story about a prince seeking perfection, an aim that
alludes to the Biblical text's "Holiness Code," the series of laws intended
to make the Hebrew people perfect in the eyes of God. The Biblical source
text demands animal sacrifices from those who fail to attain perfection;
similarly, Winterson's Prince makes sacrifices, but only to silence those
who suggest that he has gotten the definition wrong, that perfection is not
flawlessness but symmetry. "Numbers," whose Biblical text recounts the
wandering of the Israelites in the desert, shows Jeanette's "wandering"
from the strictures of her church because of her growing resentment of her
mother and "wandering" from heterosexuality through her love affairwith
Melanie. "Deuteronomy," subtitled "The Last Book of the Law," mirrorsits
Biblical text in being a non-narrative chapter devoted to establishing rules
for human behavior. Like its Biblical namesake, this chapter includes di?
etary prescriptions: "If you want to keep your own teeth, make your own
sandwiches" (p. 95). However, Winterson uses the rule to suggest the ne?
cessity of confirming facts for oneself; she terms secondhand information
"refined food" that contains insufficient"roughage" to prevent intellectual
"constipation" (p. 95). The dietary law serves as a metaphor for intellec?
tual integrity.In "Joshua," Winterson mentions the prophet Joshua at the
battle of Jericho and asserts, "That walls should fall is the consequence of
blowing your own trumpet" (p. 112), to describe the pain she experiences
at her growing estrangement from her mother as the two women do public
battle over Jeanette's lesbianism. "Judges" refersto the congregation's deci?
sion that Jeanette has usurped a male prerogative in her public ministry
and that this has led to her sexual orientation. They forbid her to preach
and exile her from her home when she refuses to renounce her lesbianism.
In contrast to the predominantly male "Judges" in the Bible, the people to
whom Jeanette must answer are primarily the powerful, articulate women
of her congregation, some of whom are themselves lesbians, but who none?
theless refuse to condone Jeanette's very visible sexual orientation. In each
case, the Biblical source text provides the chapter with a single donnee, as

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Henry James might have put it: one major idea that serves as the point of
departure for Winterson's parody.

Ruth and Female Loyalty

Winterson's use of the final Biblical text in the novel, the Ruth story,
differs sharply from her approach to the earlier source texts. Instead of
being limited purely to the "Ruth" chapter, the Ruth material defines the
nature of the novel as a whole by indicating the larger issues of mother/
daughter relations and female loyalty that face Jeanette. If, as I am suggest?
ing, the whole novel is in some respects a parodic retelling of the Ruth
story, then the interaction between the two versions reveals the points of
tension between Jeanette and the Biblical tradition: Jeanette's refusal of
the tradition and her self-fashioning through it.
Winterson signals the more significant role the Book of Ruth will serve
by her different treatment of the text itself. In contrast to the previous
chapters, there is no explicit reference to the Biblical source in "Ruth."
Moreover, there is an obvious departure in form: while in the earlier chap?
ters Winterson responded to the miscellany of her source texts by assuming
an artificial unity, in the "Ruth" chapter she fractures material that was
originally undivided. Unlike the earlier Biblical books, the Book of Ruth is
not a compilation of diverse stories, but one narrative unit presented in
four major scenes. In the "Ruth" chapter, however, Winterson interposes
two stories unrelated to the autobiographical narrative, stories that com?
prise almost one-third of the chapter. While fairy-tale segments occur else?
where in the novel, as a rule only one external story line appears per
chapter, often divided into several sections of fewer than two pages in
length. In "Ruth," however, two separate tales disrupt the narrative: a
Perceval story, a continuation from the previous chapter; and a highly
allegorical, fairy-tale version of the novel as a whole, the Winnet Stonejar
story,presented in its entirety in this chapter and, at roughly ten pages, the
longest single external sequence in the novel.4 By breaking apart the nar?
rative element of the Ruth source-material, Winterson need not respond
to the full story; instead she can focus on the thematic element that proves
most useful for her novel: Ruth's exploration of female loyalty.
The Ruth material offersboth counterpoint and parallel to the theme of
female loyalty as presented in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. In the Book
of Ruth, Naomi, her husband, and their two sons leave Judah to avoid a
famine. They settle in Moab, where the sons marry Moabite women, Ruth
and Orpah. The men soon die, leaving the three women childless widows
in a society where a woman's primary, if not only, source of protection lay

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in her male relatives. Naomi resolves to return to Bethlehem and urges her
daughters-in-law to return to their mothers to seek husbands among their
own people. Orpah, although unwilling, obeys her mother-in-law, but
Ruth refuses, uttering the justly famous lines, "Whither thou goest, I will
go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and
thy God my God: Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried:
the LORD do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part thee and
me" (Ruth 1:16-17).5 Naomi makes no reply, but the two women return
together to Bethlehem. Once there, Ruth undertakes their support by
gleaning behind the barley threshers, where she catches the eye of Boaz, a
wealthy man who instructs his threshers to leave her extra grain. When
Ruth tells Naomi about this encounter, Naomi announces that Boaz is one
of her kinsmen-redeemers under the levirate, the practice through which
the closest kinsman of a dead man married his childless widow, enabling
the woman to produce children who would carry on the family name and
inherit the family property. At the end of the harvest, Naomi tells Ruth to
approach Boaz in the darkness, to uncover him, and to put her head at his
feet, after which "he will tell thee what thou shalt do" (Ruth 3:4).6 Ruth
does as her mother-in-law suggests, but rather than waiting for Boaz to take
the initiative, she demands that he fulfill his responsibility to her under
the law. Boaz praises her for seeking him out as a kinsman despite his
advancing years, and he agrees to marry her, provided an unnamed nearer
kinsman (whose responsibility the marriage would more properly be)
refuses to do so. Boaz confronts this kinsman before the village elders
about a plot of land Naomi is selling, and when it is revealed that the
person who purchases it will also have to marry Ruth, the kinsman
refuses.7 Boaz, himself a childless widower, marries Ruth. When the cou?
ple's son is born, a chorus of the women of Bethlehem rejoice, for under
the law this boy will function as Naomi's son and inherit accordingly.
While clearly this is a complex text, and one that I will try to unpack
more fully below, perhaps its most radical element lies in its treatment of
female loyalty, an issue obviously of concern for Winterson's novel. In the
Ruth text, Ruth's determination to choose Naomi does not represent an
explicitly lesbian decision; however, it does represent one of the unusual
instances where the Bible depicts profound female solidarity. This has such
a threatening potential that at least one Biblical scholar argues that Ruth
follows Naomi solely to demonstrate her love for her dead husband and
seeks out Boaz only to provide her dead husband with named heirs.8 By
contrast, Phyllis Trible claims the Ruth text as the site of the most aston?
ishing female loyalty in the Bible because "not only has Ruth broken with
family, country, and faith, but she has also reversed sexual allegiance. . . .
One female has chosen another female in a world where life depends upon

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men. There is no more radical decision in all the memories of Israel."9
Ruth's decision to stay with her mother-in-law rather than to seek a hus?
band violates the basis of her culture or, as Claude Levi-Strauss would
argue, of culture in general as founded on the exchange of women. Ruth's
dedication to Naomi represents a radical revaluing of connection between
women.
Because the Book of Ruth does not conform to expected cultural pat?
terns, a certain amount of interpretive maneuvering has been necessary to
account for its inclusion in the Biblical canon. Much as the early Church
Fathers reclaimed the sensuality of the Song of Songs through strictlyspiri?
tual exegesis, Ruth was read as justifying the spread of Christianity among
the gentiles. Not only could the text be cited as the story of the first
significant conversion, but since Ruth's son Obed fathers Jesse who fathers
King David, the patristic tradition held that the lineage of Jesus Christ
contained the blood of Ruth the (gentile) Moabite. While contemporary
readers tend not to be troubled by the issue of conversion, the affection
between Ruth and Naomi has continued to demand reclamation. Ruth
1:16-17 is often quoted in wedding ceremonies, thus recovering its excep?
tional female loyalty for an explicitly heterosexual context. This very use,
however, underscores the potential sexuality of the original utterance.
Winterson patterns Jeanette's quest for love after the relation between
Naomi and Ruth, and in so doing echoes both traditional interpretive
gestures. Jeanette's major love affairs,with both Melanie and Katy, occur
because of Jeanette's evangelizing?her lovers are converts she has won to
the Pentecostal church. At one level this indicates Jeanette's effortsat self-
justification: her relation with the women centers on teaching them mat?
ters of doctrine. Like the Church Fathers with the Song of Songs, Jeanette
prefers the sexual to be safely concealed within the spiritual. At the same
time, Jeanette seeks the faithfulness expressed in the Ruth story: Ruth the
convert showed complete devotion to the woman who led her into faith;
perhaps Jeanette could find such loyalty in a woman she brings to faith.
And while the liturgical use of the Book of Ruth reserves the text's poten?
tial sexuality for heterosexual application, Jeanette, by modeling her own
relationships after Ruth, reappropriates this sexuality while reasserting the
primacy of loyalty between women.
Jeanette expresses perhaps the most poignant plea for devotion, as
strong as Ruth's for Naomi, in the "Ruth" chapter itself. Remarking that
no human affection has matched her youthful ideal of a relationship with
God, she cries out for a lover who will never betray her:

I want someone who is fierceand will love me until death and know that
love is as strongas death. . . . Romantic love has been diluted into paper-

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 back formand has sold thousands and millions of copies. Somewhere it is
still in the original,writtenon tablets of stone. I would cross seas and suffer
sunstrokeand give away all I have [forlove], (p. 170)

In language pieced together from the most powerful statements of love in

the Bible,10 Jeanette envisions the perfect lover, one who would mirrorthe
faithfulness Ruth offered to Naomi in her cry of devotion. Because
Jeanette finds such romantic love all but unattainable, her quest leads her
back to the Ruth text more directly: she too concentrates on her relation
to a maternal figure. At the conclusion of the novel, she chooses to return
to her mother despite their conflicts. Jeanette's action thus reproduces the
theology of the Ruth text; she opts to express to her mother the same hesed
Ruth showed Naomi.
Hesed ["7011], an important concept in the Bible and particularly in
Ruth, is difficult to translate; the concept includes loyalty, duty, mercy,
goodness, and kindness, but none of these words captures the force of the
Hebrew. As Katharine Sakenfeld explains it, hesed is "always requested and
carried out within the heart of some publicly identifiable relationship."11
She goes on to note that hesed presupposes at least four factors: (1) the
person who requests hesed cannot solve his or her own problem; (2) the
action requested is of profound significance, for the asker's descendants,
homeland, or personal survival; (3) only the person asked can actually
fulfillthe need; and finally, (4) the person asked is absolutely free to refuse
the request.12 As such, hesed is loyalty established by covenant, whether
through family ties or, in its best-known expression between David and
Jonathan, through friendship and love. As Edward Campbell puts it, "hesed
is more than the loyalty which one expects if he [or she] stands in cove?
nant with another person?it is that extra which both establishes and
sustains covenant. It is more than ordinary human loyalty; it imitates the
divine initiative which comes without being deserved."13
This concept emerges in the Book of Ruth in a way that offersinsight
into Jeanette's decision in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. Hesed proves to
be the dominant description of the relationship between Naomi and Ruth
rather than yaheb,the Hebrew for "love," which appears only once in the
final lines of the book. Naomi uses the idea of hesed in an extraordinary
manner when she asks her daughters-in-law to leave her and then wishes
them well, as Trible explains:

Strikingly,the basis upon which Naomi invokes Yahweh's hesedis the gra?
cious hospitalityof her daughters-in-law:"May the Lord deal kindly with
you,as you have[already]dealtwiththedead and withme" (RSV). At the heart
of Naomi's poem, both in structureand in meaning, these female foreigners
become models forYahweh. They show the deity a more excellent way.14

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Ruth's loyalty to Naomi, and by extension perhaps female loyalty in gen?
eral, becomes the noblest action possible, worthy of imitation even by
God. Although Winterson may not have had the Hebrew word itself in
mind, repercussions of the remark are clear even in the English: perfect
loyalty between women sets the standard for divine mercy.
While this model of perfection may cripple Jeanette's ability to form
romantic attachments, it does enable her to return to her mother to con?
tinue their relationship. This, after all, is an act of hesed founded on the
model of the Ruth text. Naomi herself did not receive the hesed of God;
she was left in a strange land without husband or sons and thus without
means of support or defense. Ruth, also without husband or sons, chooses
to sacrifice her country and possibly her own access to male kin or progeny
out of hesed for Naomi. In herself electing to practice hesed, Jeanette too
expresses what she has not received; her mother has, in her words, "be?
trayed" her, which she defines as "promising to be on your side, and then
being on someone else's" (p. 171), by rejecting Jeanette's role in public
ministry.Jeanette, who constantly repeats her need for someone who will
not betray her, chooses firstnot to betray; she does not desert her mother.
Like Ruth, she chooses female loyalty.

Ruth and Female Development

Winterson's use of this Biblical material emerges in part from the folk-
loric genre of the Ruth text. As Jack Sasson points out, Ruth conforms to
the pattern established by Vladimir Propp's structural analysis of the Rus?
sian folktale: the story opens with a lack (both of food and of male chil?
dren), includes a repetition by threes (Naomi's three requests of Ruth to
return to her mother), a donor (Boaz), a false hero (the unnamed kins?
man), and so on.15 In addition, the story begins with a conventional,
almost fairy-tale opening, which Campbell translates as "Once, in the days
when the Judges were judging, there came. . . ."16 Campbell finds the syn?
tax unusual because of its double story openers, and suggests that the open?
ing, as well as the story itself, works to assert "plausibility" rather than
"historicity"17?again much like a conventional folktale. The Book of
Ruth fails in one respect to satisfy the general definition of a folktale: it
seems unlikely that it ever had a period of oral transmission in anything
resembling its current form. Despite some controversy, most scholars agree
that it was composed by one individual, who may or may not have been
committing to prose form what was originally a verse narrative.18 In this,
Ruth should be viewed as a kunstmarchen,an artistic fairytale like many of
the Grimm's Brothers' mdrchen, tales often obtained from oral narratives

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but then formulated and reworked into highly artistic constructs.19 More
importantly for our purposes, the Ruth text seems to perform a similar
psychosocial task to that undertaken by the fairy tale, in that it pays par?
ticular attention to issues of psychological development and socialization.
This psychosocial element constitutes the most significant component of
Winterson's use of the Ruth material.
Like the fairy tales Snow White or Cinderella, the Book of Ruth con?
tains a story of female maturation that explores the traditional roles ex?
pected of young women. In her essay "Feminism and Fairy Tales," Karen
Rowe notes,

Fairy tales . . . respond to the need forboth detachment fromchildish sym-

bioses and a subsequent embracementof adult independence. Yet, this evo?
lution dooms femaleprotagonists(and readers) to pursueadult potentials in
one way only: the heroine dreamilyanticipates conformityto those predes?
tined roles of wife and mother.20

Given this interpretation of the fairy tale's maturation theme, the Book of
Ruth offers an atypical blend of the radical and the conservative. Al?
though Ruth eventually conforms to traditional female roles, she does not
passively await a husband; instead she demands her rights under the kin?
ship law and, remarkably, receives praise for this assertiveness. More im?
portantly, Ruth's progression into adulthood does not demand that she
make a choice between "symbiosis" with a maternal figure and the "inde?
pendence" signaled by marriage; even after she weds Boaz, Ruth's ties to
Naomi remain so close that Ruth's son is Naomi's as well. In this story,
unlike Snow White or Cinderella, women need not be in competition, and
female loyalty can extend beyond the marriage ceremony.
Although the Ruth story offersa powerful model of female bonding, it
still visualizes (heterosexual) marriage and motherhood as requisite for
female fulfillment.This element becomes the principal point of difference
in Winterson's revision of the Ruth text. By focusing her attention primar?
ily on the firstchapter of Ruth, Winterson concentrates on the relation
between Ruth and Naomi without requiring that her heroine follow any
conventional path to marriage, or even to fulfillment purely through a
romantic association, be this with man or woman. At the same time, as in
the Ruth text, Winterson suggests that maturity must incorporate mother-
daughter ties; Jeanette does not abandon relations with her mother, de?
spite her mother's rejection of Jeanette's sexuality.
Yet although both protagonists pursue connections to a maternal figure,
neither Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit nor Ruth actually explores the
relation of a daughter to her biological mother. In both cases, the daugh?
ters are one step removed: Ruth relates to her mother-in-law, Jeanette to

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her foster mother. In this, the two texts again reveal their similarities to
the psychological mechanisms of fairy tales. As Rowe explains it, in narra?
tives of female maturation, examining the actual maternal figure may be
too threatening to risk. Folktales and fairytales frequently split the mother
figure into the fairy godmother (or sometimes the perfect-but-now-dead
mother) and the wicked stepmother or witch, enabling a reader to probe
elements of the relationship without confronting the full complexity of her
emotions. By creating a negative maternal figure,the fairy tale permits an
adolescent girl to examine her mounting resentment of her own mother
without contesting her continued longing for the "good" mother of her
childhood and her dreams.21 Her arrival at mature subjectivity demands
that the girl both detach from and identify with her mother, and the fairy?
tale fragmentation of the maternal figure facilitates both developmental
tasks. Like a fairy tale, both Ruth and Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
divide the maternal role into multiple figures, with the split occurring
primarily at the level of the "absent" and the "present," subordinating
"good" and "evil." The biological mothers of the two protagonists are con?
spicuously absent from both tales. Ruth's mother never enters the story
except to function as a reference to place: Ruth is instructed to go back to
her "mother's house" in Moab (Ruth 1:8). Her refusal positions Naomi as
the maternal figure to be interrogated. In Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit,
Jeanette is not permitted to see her "real" or birth mother and so must
come to grips with the foster mother who raised her.
The two stories use these differentconfigurations of the mother-daugh?
ter relationship to construct the possibility of continued female loyalty
within the maturation narrative. Although Ruth probably entered Na?
omi's household in early adolescence, the fact that Naomi is not really
Ruth's mother makes it unnecessary for Ruth to undergo the painful divi?
sion/connection struggle with her. In addition, because Naomi is actually
Ruth's mother-in-law and because Ruth has already fulfilled the cultural
expectations of marriage, the Biblical tradition can pronounce Ruth a her?
oine for her decision to remain with a maternal figure at all costs. Were
Naomi actually Ruth's mother, this choice might well be taken to repre?
sent a condition of psychological immaturity or be censured in some other
manner as a threat to the exogamic tradition.
In Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, the position of the mother figure as a
foster mother makes Jeanette better able to experience her resentment, but
also seems to facilitate her ability to forgive her mother. After all, as a
foster child, she was specially "chosen" by her mother to a degree impossi?
ble for a birth mother, and the "Genesis" chapter explores the influence
this has on Jeanette's imagination. Her foster mother decided to find a
particular child to raise:

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 My mother,out walking . . . dreamed a dream and sustained it in daylight.
She would get a child, train it, build it, dedicate it to the Lord:
a missionarychild,
a servant of God,
a blessing, (p. 10)

Jeanette's image of herself as specially chosen dominates her self-definition

during her childhood; her mother chose her to be a missionary, and so she
expected to be a missionary. She believes herself selected by both God and
her mother for service to God. After Jeanette has experienced the darker
side of both her mother and her church, she acknowledges that her rela?
tionship to her mother is not wholly satisfactory,but it is not one that she
can escape: "Families, real ones, are chairs and tables and the right number
of cups, but I had no means of joining one, and no means of dismissing my
own; she had tied a thread around my button, to tug when she pleased"
(p. 176).
Readers tend to react with surprise that Jeanette returns to her mother
at the end of the story;22 conventional stories of female maturation require
that the daughter leave the mother in order to experience independence
and adulthood, and Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit does not conform to
this pattern. Even the title, which at firstseems to be a rejection of the
mother's frequent assertions that "oranges are the only fruit" (emphasis
mine), turns out to entail an acceptance of the mother: during "the town's
firstmission for coloured people," Jeanette's mother feeds them all pineap?
ple as a gesture to their difference, announcing, "After all . . . oranges are
not the only fruit" (p. 172).23 Here again the Ruth text is relevant because
it offersa response to the mother that does not demand rejection but also
does not preclude independent action. In returning to her mother at the
conclusion of the novel, Jeanette acknowledges that relationships con?
tinue even after one goes away (the thread is still tied around the button);
she chooses to continue the relationship with her mother in person rather
than only through memories and resentments.24 Indeed, by positioning
this return at the conclusion of this bildungsroman, Winterson suggests
that maturation consists in the return to, not the flight from, familial or
maternal ties. Just as her mother had initially selected her, now Jeanette
deliberately selects her mother, like Ruth, who freely selected Naomi.
In depicting such mother-daughter loyalty, Winterson's source-text
Ruth goes beyond the conventional fairy-tale configuration. Fairy tales are
widely recognized as important contributors to the socialization process of
children, particularly in the manner in which they concretize the child's
internal concerns through their psychologically resonant plots. Bruno Bet?
telheim suggests that, among other things, fairy tales enable the child to

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participate in the Freudian family romance by offering stories that help
"manage the contradictory feelings which would otherwise overwhelm
him at this stage of his barely beginning ability to integrate contradictory
emotions."25 Bettelheim's assumption of the male gender of the child here
not only partakes in the Freudian view, but also conforms to the masculi?
nist biases of many fairy tales, where the boy's progression to king is pre?
sented far more often than any comparable rise to authority/subjectivityon
the part of the girl.26 In contrast, the Book of Ruth, with its emphasis on
Ruth's assertion of her rights within a narrative based on loyalty, hints at
the possibility of what Marianne Hirsch terms the "feminist family ro?
mance." She describes this as a "psychoanalytic re-vision of Freudian para?
digms, which highlights] mother-daughter bonding as a basis for a vision
of gender difference and female specificity."27The feminist family romance
represents the woman not as the object of a male child's desire, but as
herself a subject, capable of relating her own story. The daughterly text
under this paradigm, Hirsch remarks, often positions itself at an uncom?
fortable distance from the maternal perspective, which is still silent and
silenced under the weight of the daughter's emerging subjectivity. Only in
postmodern literature, Hirsch suggests, do texts begin to imagine the in?
clusion of the maternal as a position capable of its own subjectivity.28
Unsurprisingly, the Book of Ruth does not emerge as an example of a
fully realized feminist family romance; the text falls into silence when the
daughter herself becomes a mother. Likewise, Oranges Are Not the Only
Fruit, in its revision of Ruth, does not grant the mother full subjectivity
(and Jeanette never envisions herself entering the maternal role). At the
same time, in suggesting the necessity for mother-daughter bonding, Win?
terson's novel moves toward a space where subjectivity can be constructed
out of female connection rather than exclusively through separation and
silencing.

Postmodern Parody

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit parodies Biblical narratives, enabling
Winterson to construct a maturation narrative that need not reject female/
familial loyalty and that can address lesbian maturation. As Linda
Hutcheon reminds us, postmodern parody, no longer strictly a comic
genre, enables parodists to repeat material we define as (capital L) Litera?
ture with ironic difference in order both to explore and to confront their
position within the tradition?a possibility particularly valuable for mem?
bers of oppressed or marginalized social groups.29 For example, modern
feminist revisions of fairy tales reveal the masculinist biases of the original

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stories, while reclaiming their folkloric structure and language to offer
more egalitarian messages.30 In parodying the Bible, essentially the master
text of Western civilization, Winterson explores her position as a woman
and a lesbian within the Judeo-Christian (male and heterosexual)
tradition.
The Bible is not the only text that Winterson employs; she parodies
fairy-tale language and motifs (primarily in her repeated departures from
overtly autobiographical sections), as well as more conventional literary
sources such as Grail-quest narratives, Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking
Glass, and Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market." Her Biblical allusions,
however, structure the novel and provide what I have argued is its para?
digmatic text, the story of Ruth. In Ruth, Winterson finds a text that
speaks of female and familial loyalty, but does so in ways that are not
immediately useful for Winterson as a lesbian. By parodying the text, Win?
terson can take what does work for her narrative purposes?female loy?
alty?without falling into the conventional heterosexual assumptions her
source text makes.
The Bible offersWinterson not only a thematic for her narrative, but
also a paradigm to subvert and reappropriate through parody. Her fusion of
the Bible with her novel illuminates the contrast between the original
Biblical text's masculinist perspective and Jeanette's experiences in a
church largely organized and managed by women, while highlighting
Jeanette's position outside the text and the congregation as a lesbian. Win?
terson describes the difficultythat this type of juxtaposition creates, and in
so doing offersan analysis of the parody she employs: "What constitutes a
problem is not the thing, or the environment where we find the thing, but
the conjunction of the two; something unexpected in a usual place (our
favourite aunt in our favourite poker parlour) or something usual in an
unexpected place (our favourite poker in our favourite aunt)" (p. 45). In
this text, the "problem" is not the discussion of the coming of age of a
lesbian woman, regardless of her religious background, nor the use of the
Bible as the defining text for a novel, but the positioning of the two to?
gether. As Hutcheon notes in her discussion of parody, "the Greek prefix
para can mean both 'counter' or 'against' AND 'near' or 'beside.'"31 Win?
terson's use of Biblical imagery blends the two definitions of para: the
contrast between the Biblical material and the character's lived experience
places Jeanette against the tradition that she narrates, but the occurrence
of this narration within chapters named for Biblical books reiterates the
significance the Bible has had for her within that contrast. The presence of
Biblical material, then, constitutes not so much a mockery, which has
often been associated with parody, as it does a pastiche, an unsatirical
blend of history and story with the problematic realms of autobiography,

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fairy tale, and Biblical narratives?genres that typifythe "cat's cradle" (p.
93) approach Winterson describes.
While Winterson relies heavily on the Bible and particularly on the
Ruth story to construct Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, she maintains an
appropriately postmodern ambivalence toward most of the Biblical canon
and, with it, literary and cultural traditions as well. Jeanette seems to give
voice to this ambivalence when she imagines what might have happened
had she been able to remain with her mother and within the tradition:
I could have been a priestinstead of a prophet. The priesthas a book with
the wordsset out. Old words,known words,wordsof power. . . . The words
work. They do what they'resupposed to do; comfortand discipline. The
prophethas no book. The prophetis a voice that cries in the wilderness,full
of sounds that do not always set into meaning, (p. 161)

Winterson's novel is the work of the prophet; she explodes the tradition by
revealing where the book's words are no longer words of power for her.
Because of her gender and sexuality, Winterson finds no place in the text
already constructed for her, and her use of the firstseven Biblical books
explores her distance from that text.
In Ruth she finds an echo of what she seeks?loyalty between women
that itself becomes part of a mature subjectivity. Unlike Ruth, Jeanette
leaves her primary mother figure,but in keeping with the loyalty the Book
of Ruth explores, Jeanette returns to continue the relationship. In this,
Winterson creates a feminist family romance, where the development of
female subjectivity and self-empowerment demands the continuation of
the mother-daughter relationship, not its rejection. She offersfemale loy?
alty as an important site for female development, not a limited and limit?
ing role between masculine attachments. She thus exposes what in Ruth
parallels Jeanette's experience while rejecting Ruth's ultimate advocacy of
traditional female options. However, her parody does not seek to destroy
the original text?she does not render Ruth useless for or threatening to a
modern reader. Her revision reclaims the original text as a literary model
of maturation by embracing the opportunity it suggests for female loyalty
and mother-daughter bonding. In her parody of this work, she fragments
the originally tightly constructed tale, as if in the fracture in the tradition
thus created she could finally make room for herself. In so doing, she sug?
gests that for the writing of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Ruth too can
be a "fruitful" text.

NOTES

I would like to acknowledge the assistance I received on earlier versions of this

essay fromBrenda Silver and Lee Talley, as well as the carefulreading and advice
fromLee Mitchell, whose comments have been, as always, invaluable.

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 1 This "voice" contraststo the "exit"
option more oftenutilizedby boys?that
is, simply leaving the family(either physicallyor emotionally) when they feel
overly confined by it. While both options are available to and used by both gen?
ders, Gilligan's research reveals that girlsemploy the "voice" option more readily
than they do the "exit" option, while the reverseis true forboys. See Carol Gill?
igan, "Exit-Voice Dilemmas in Adolescent Development," in Mapping theMoral
Domain: A Contributionof Womens Thinkingto Psychological Theoryand Education,
ed. Gilligan, Janie Victoria Ward, and Jill McClean Taylor, with Betty Bardige
(Cambridge: Harvard UniversityPress, 1988), pp. 141-58.
2 For more on alternate literarymodels forfemale
development narratives,see
the invaluable collection The VoyageIn: Fictionsin Female Development,ed. Eliza?
beth Abel, Marianne Hirsch, Elizabeth Langland (Hanover, New Hampshire: Pub?
lished forDartmouth College by The UniversityPress of New England, 1983). In
that collection, see particularlyKaren E. Rowe, "'Fairy-born and human-bred':
Jane Eyre'sEducation in Romance," pp. 69-89, and Ellen Cronan Rose, "Through
the Looking Glass: When Women Tell FairyTales," pp. 209-27, forsustainedtreat?
ment of the fairytale as a literarymodel fornarrativesof development.
3
Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (New York: Atlantic
Monthly Press, 1987), pp. 93-95. Furthercitations will appear parentheticallyin
the text.
4 The Winnet Stonejar sequence repeats the novel's plot by reframingit in a
more traditional model; instead of emphasizing the connection between mother
and daughter,this narrativefocuses on the daughter'srelation to her (adoptive)
father,a sorcererwho persuades her that she has no mother and teaches her his
magic but expels her forher sexual interestin another man. In this story,Winter-
son seems to play with (among other things) the notion of departureas necessary
for maturitysince in contrast to the novel as a whole, the protagonistof this
version does not and cannot returnhome.
5 All citations of the Bible will referto the King JamesVersion,unless other?
wise indicated.
6 JackM. Sasson, in Ruth:A New Translationwitha Philological and
Commentary
a Formalist-Folkloric Interpretation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1979), p. 70, points out that in Hebrew the word forfoot used here, regel[^31],
often appears in the Hebrew Bible as a euphemism for "testicles," or more gen?
erally,"sexual organs." Although he goes on to insist that nothing sexual could
possibly have been intended here, the bulk of the philological evidence suggests
otherwise.
7 Under Go el, the nearest able kinsman would be obligated to purchase or
redeem land sold by a widow so that the propertywould remain within the family.
This practice is essentiallyparallel to the levirate,although concerned with land
ratherthan offspring. In most circumstances,the same kinsman would be required
to performboth obligations.
8 Nelson Glueck, Hesed in theBible,trans.AlfredGottschalk, ed. Elias
Epstein
(Cincinnati: The Hebrew Union College Press, 1967), pp. 40-41.
9
PhyllisTrible,God and theRhetoricof Sexuality,ed. Walter Brueggemannand
John R. Donahue (Philadelphia: FortressPress, 1989), p. 173. I do not agree with

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Trible here that Ruth has abandoned familybecause obviouslyher choice to follow
her mother-in-lawrepresentsa strongallegiance to family.It is certainlytrue that
she rejects her biological familyin favorof the ties she established throughmar?
riage. I would point out, however, that Hebrew wedding customs suggestthat the
bride may have been a young teenager upon enteringher husband's family;thus
Naomi would have functionedas a mother throughmuch of Ruth's adolescence.
This point will be explored more fullybelow.
10 Besides the obvious referenceto Ruth in Jeanette'sinsistence on unending
love, the line "Love as strongas death" comes fromthe Song of Songs 8:6, and the
lines about crossingseas and suffering sunstrokeecho the journey of the lovers in
that book. The end of that sentence, "and give away all that I have," suggests
Jesus'scommand to the rich to sell their possessions and give everythingto the
poor for love of God, an injunction found in several of the Gospels. The stone
tablets allude to the Ten Commandments, also writtenon stone. My point here,
however,is less to unpack all of the Biblical referencesin this passage than to stress
that Jeanette'simage of love is utterlydependent on a Biblical model, which she
derives froma varietyof source texts.
11 Katharine Doob Sakenfeld,
"Loyaltyand Love: The Language of Human In?
terconnectionsin the Hebrew Bible," MichiganQuarterlyReview,22, No. 3 (1983),
197.
12 Sakenfeld,
pp. 197-98.
13 Edward F.
Campbell, Ruth: A New TranslationwithIntroduction, Notes, and
Commentary,in Anchor Bible, ed. William Foxwell Albright and David Noel
Freedman (New York: Doubleday, 1975), p. 81.
14 Trible, p. 169, her emphasis.
15 Sasson,
pp. 200-15.
16
Campbell, p. 49.
17 Campbell, pp. 49, 59.
18 Jacob M. Myers,The Linguisticand
LiteraryFormof theBook of Ruth(Leiden,
Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1955), pp. 42, 64; Sasson, p. 214.
19 Heinz Rolleke, "New Results of Research on Grimm's
Fairy Tales," in The
BrothersGrimmand Folktale,ed. James M. McGlathery (Chicago: Universityof
Illinois Press, 1988), pp. 107-08.
20 Rowe, "Feminism and Fairy Tales," in Don't Bet on thePrince:
Contemporary
FeministFairyTales in NorthAmericaand England,ed. JackZipes (New York:Meth?
uen, 1986), p. 214.
21 See Rowe, "Feminism and Fairy Tales," p. 213, and also Bruno Bettelheim,
The Uses of Enchantment:The Meaning and Importanceof Fairy Tales (1976; rpt.
New York: Vintage, 1989), pp. 68-69.
22 A session on Winterson in one of
mygraduateseminarsat PrincetonUniver?
sity(ProfessorBrenda R. Silver, "Modern Post Modern," English 566, 8 December
1989) illustratedsuch an assumption.The membersof the class, almost all women,
expressed anger and dismay that Jeanettechose to returnto her motheronce she
had made the decision to leave; theirexpectations included the terminationof the
mother-daughterrelationshipas a necessary step in self-actualization.
23 Jeanette'sacceptance of this
phrase as the title of her narrativemightimpli-

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cate her in her mother'sracistassumptions,thus underminingsome of the positive
connotations I have associated with her maturation.I would suggestthat the title
instead aligns the Otherness ofJeanette'ssexual preferenceswith racial Otherness,
neitherof which lies within her mother'spowers of understandingor control. It is
interestingtoo to note that this phrase representsthe one instance in the novel of
Jeanette'smotheracknowledgingthat she may be mistakenor may not completely
understand?in other words, the one moment in the text where the mother too
seems to grow,thus paving the way fora similar growthof understandingtoward
Jeanette(understanding,admittedly,does not fullyoccur withinthe confinesof the
novel, but her permittingJeanetteto returnhome impliesa willingnessto come to
an understandingof her daughter). Although criticssuch as Rebecca O'Rourke, in
"Fingersin the Fruit Basket: A FeministReading of JeanetteWinterson'sOranges
Are Not theOnly Fruit,"in FeministCriticism:Theoryand Practice,ed. Susan Sellers
(New York: HarvesterWheatsheaf, 1991), have oftencriticizedWintersonforher
ratherharsh treatmentof her family,this moment, at least, does not portraythe
mother as one-dimensional.
24 The phrase "tied a thread around my button" originates in the Winnet
Stonejar sequence, in which the protagonistdoes not returnto her family.Winter-
son's repetitionof the phrase in Jeanette'sportionof the narrativeemphasizesthat
return is only one option in the continuation of the relationship,but one that
Jeanettefreelychooses.
25 Bettelheim,p. 69.
26 The princessbecoming
queen cannot be seen as a comparable event in most
fairytales because this still locates the girl child in a subordinaterole, with hus?
band replacing fatheras the occupant of the subjective position. Her becoming
queen occurs only as an accident of her connection to the male subject.
27 Marianne Hirsch, The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative,Psychoanalysis,
Femi?
nism (Indianapolis: Indiana UniversityPress, 1989), p. 15.
28 See Hirsch, chapter 4.
29 See Linda Hutcheon's
chapteron parodyin A PoeticsofPost-Modernism: His?
tory,Theory,Fiction(New York: Routledge, 1988), and "The Politics of Postmod?
ernism: Parody and History,"CulturalCritique,5 (Winter 1986-87), 179-207. In
the latter,Hutcheon advocates a redefinitionof parodyas "repetitionwith critical
distance that allows ironic signaling of differenceat the very heart of similarity"
(p. 185), a process that she sees as enabling parodists to use intertexualityfor
political statements.
30 See, forexample, Angela Carter,The BloodyChamber(1979;
rpt.New York:
Penguin, 1987); Rapunzel's Revenge: Fairytalesfor Feminists(Dublin: Attic Press,
1985); and Zipes, ed., Don't Bet on thePrince.Rapunzel'sRevengecontains parodic
rewritingsof familiarfairytales; forexample, Snow White arrangesa labor union
and contemplates a corporatemergerwith the mine owner,Mr. Prince,while Cin?
derella, who dreamsof managing a fast-foodrestaurantchain, rejectsthe overtures
of the prince in orderto reorganizethe palace on an economically stable basis as a
catering service. This collection tends to offerhumorous revisions,although the
Zipes anthology contains several parodic, nonhumorous tales.
31 Hutcheon, "The Politics of Postmodernism,"
pp. 185-86.

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