Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit Blog #1

My initial reaction was mostly about how this is different than What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. In the short stories, everything happened so quickly and characters were barely introduced, sometimes not really at all. Here in Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, we get a lot more time to learn about the characters, especially the daughter and her mother. I found a lot of the writing to be a bit funny and humorous, but some of the actual events in the book are a little confusing and abstract, so I had to re-read some sections but overall I enjoyed getting to know these characters. So far, the mother seems very religious in a kind of fearful and old-fashioned way, while the daughter is a little more independent and isn’t as involved in religion as her mother. I also noticed that the chapter titles of the book are from the Bible, so I wonder how the mother’s religion will be a part of the book in the later chapters. I was thinking that this chapter probably has some connections to the Book of Genesis in the Bible, but I’m not sure what they might be. The only similarity might be that the daughter was adopted from an orphanage because the mother had a kind of waking dream about her. This feels like a biblical story and I’m sure there are many more connections that I don’t know about. It might be worth looking into the Bible stories and how they compare to each chapter.

I was focused on the characters of the mother and daughter mainly. The mother is clearly very religious, yet she doesn’t seem like the typical type of a religious wife that is quiet and obedient. Instead, she is more independent than I would expect. For example, while explaining how she was adopted, the daughter says, “We stood on the hill and my mother said, ‘You can change the world” (Winterson, 36). I might be wrong, but I would usually think of the stereotypically religious mother to tell their children to be obedient and to not make people upset, yet here the mother is telling her daughter to change the world. The daughter on the other hand, is different because she is not yet very religious like her mother, but she also seems kind of free-spirited. Talking about the vising pastor at the church, the daughter says, “His teeth stuck out, and his voice was squeaky, even though he tried to make it deep and stern. Poor Mrs Finch. How did she live with him? Then I remembered the gypsy. ‘You’ll never marry.’ That might not be such a bad thing after all” (Winterson, 43). This pastor was visiting to give a talk on demons, so you would think that the daughter would be afraid of him and would respect him completely, yet she comments on his ugly teeth and mentions that she might never want to get married. I think this part of the chapter does a good job of showing us that the daughter is a free thinker and she is not necessarily going along with her mother’s wants for her to be a strict religious follower. Overall, these two characters were interesting to be because they are complex and have multiple sides to them.