Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit Blog #8

As the book concludes, it was interesting to me that the ending wasn’t really a happy ending, but it also wasn’t sad. It felt a little unsatisfying to end the book without a traditional resolution, but overall I found it to be nice and somewhat peaceful. It feels like ultimately neither Jeanette or her mother really got exactly what they wanted from each other in life, but they are content and more or less okay with things the way they are. The fantasy story of Winnet feels very similar to Jeanette’s own story, and it reinforces the idea of this book as a Hero’s Journey. Just as Winnet had a dream about looking inside herself, Jeanette also was looking for herself for the whole book. In the end, it feels like Jeanette accepts both sides of herself, the religious upbringing as well as the fact that she is a lesbian. This fits into the “return with the elixir” part of the Hero’s Journey as the hero returns home because in this case, the “treasure” that Jeanette has gained is being content with her whole self. It’s interesting how Winterson wove in these fantastical tales to the story because it adds to the feeling that Jeanette has been on a journey much like Harry Potter or Frodo Baggins, just in a different way. Overall, I enjoyed this interesting book and it was very intriguing to see how this story can be interpreted as a hero’s journey.

I will focus on the character of the mother and specifically a paragraph where Jeanette describes how her mother and Melanie prepared a dish for “the town’s first mission for coloured people” where they made food using pineapples, assuming that that’s what they were comfortable eating. Jeanette says “everyone had to eat gammon with pineapple, pineapple upside-down cake, chicken in pineapple sauce, pineapple chunks, pineapple slice. ‘After all,’ said my mother philosophically, ‘oranges are not the only fruit” (Winterson, 368). I found this interesting for the obvious reason that the title of the book is used, in this case showing that Jeanette’s mother finally chose a fruit other than oranges and she realized that there are other fruits out there to eat. This is symbolic, I think, of Jeanette’s mother being more open minded and liberal in general. While she may not accept Jeanette’s homosexuality, she at least acknowledges that there are other “fruit,” meaning other ways to live our lives than the way she does. Secondly, the fact that Winterson describes the many dishes that her mother prepared using pineapple seems to show a kind of empathy and caring towards people that are different from herself. Instead of instating that they eat British food or something similar, she made the effort to try to appeal to their tastes and comforts. This feels like a big change for Jeanette’s mother, who has until this point been very rigid and strict with how she lives her life. While the book doesn’t end with Jeanette’s mother lovingly accepting her, this was still a big change in her character and it was nice to see.