49 pages • 1 hour read
Jeanette WintersonOranges Are Not the Only Fruit
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1985A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary: “Leviticus”
One Sunday, Jeanette and her mother return home with Mrs. White to lots of noise coming from Next Door. They realize that the neighbors are having sex, and her mother sends Jeanette out of the house for ice cream from the passing truck. When she returns, they play the piano and sing hymns loudly, much to their neighbors’ dismay, who soon come out to protest the noise. Soon after she converted, Jeanette’s mother was recommended by Pastor Spratt to be the new treasurer for the Society for the Lost in Wigan. She takes the job and is very successful, bringing in a lot of money through different initiatives and mail-order religious products.
The society has a yearly retreat to an affiliated boarding house in Morecambe, and it is there that Jeanette meets a friend of her mother’s. The woman is a wreath-maker who later begins collaborating with an undertaker and offers Jeanette a Saturday job. One year, the Society for the Lost has a special conference in Jeanette’s town, and she passes out tracts in the rain at market. Mrs. Arkwright lets her do so under her tent and Jeanette succeeds in passing out every single one. Later, at the service, she has her first spiritual disagreement over a sermon about perfection.
A fairy tale is once again introduced. As the story goes, there once was a beautiful woman with healing powers who lived deep in a forest and a prince who searched the land for a perfect and flawless wife. As he searches, his companion, an old goose, tells him that perfection does not exist and assures him he will never find it. The prince, annoyed by such counsel, beheads the goose. Over the next three years, the prince writes a treatise called “The Holy Mystery of Perfection” and gives a copy to each of his advisors for reference. One advisor goes into the forest to read and finds the woman with healing powers. He believes she is perfect and demands she marry his prince, but she refuses, saying she does not wish to marry.
The advisor brings the prince to the woman and he meets with her for three days, during which she explains to him that perfection is balance. He realizes that despite her appearance and fine qualities, the woman has flaws, and he gives up on his quest to find a perfect wife. He plans to admit that he is wrong to his subjects, but his most trusted advisor won’t let him, saying that a prince cannot be wrong. They call the nearby village together and when the woman emerges from the crowd and declares, like the goose, that what the prince wants cannot be found, they behead her. From her body springs a lake of blood and only the prince survives by climbing a tree. He sees a man below him selling oranges and buys a dozen as he prepares to depart for his journey home. The prince also asks the man if he has any books he could read on his journey and the man tells him of a book about making the perfect man. The prince takes it and leaves just as the man hints that the book is Frankenstein.
Chapter 4 Summary: “Numbers”
Jeanette begins having a recurring dream in which she is married at the altar, but her future husband is always revealed to be a horror. Sometimes he is a pig and other times he is her mother. She hears other women in her life lament their relationships and marriages and feels the attention of men as she walks around town. Jeanette is confused when people tell her every girl finds the right man, as she believes she sees the opposite around her. She reads “Beauty and the Beast” one day at the library and wonders how many women are upset when their love and kisses don’t change the nature of their husbands.
She tries to talk about love with her aunt but is told she is too young to understand, and even when Jeanette asks her mother why she married her father, her answer is vague. Her mother often invokes the romance of Jane Eyre and St. John Rivers, from her favorite novel to read to Jeanette as a child, as an example of pure love. Jeanette, now literate, reads Jane Eyre on her own and realizes that her mother changed the story to hide that the protagonist goes back to Mr. Rochester.
On washday, Jeanette hides in the dustbin and listens to other women in the neighborhood. Doreen complains that her husband is cheating on her and that she should have known her marriage would become this because of her husband’s lackluster courting of her. He often came to her house and spent time drinking with her father instead of taking her out. Doreen also worries that her daughter, Jane, may have a romantic relationship with her friend, Susan. She is concerned that someday the same rumors that swirl around the women from the paper shop will be said about her own daughter. Jeanette puts love out of her mind, as she is determined to be a missionary anyway, but does think that she may one day fall in love.
Jeanette and her mother take the bus into town one day for some shopping and meet Auntie May and Ida, one of the paper shop women, on the way. They agree to meet later at Trickett’s for a cup of Horlicks. When Jeanette asks her mother for a new coat, her mother denies her, but while at the butcher shop, Jeanette gets caught on a hook and tears one of the sleeves off. Her mother begins taping it and when Mrs. Clifton walks by and asks if Jeanette needs a new coat, Jeanette says no, only to be quickly corrected by her mother who says they are going to get one that day.
They find a bright pink coat from the SURPLUS section of a local store and stop at the fish stall in the market where Jeanette meets and is immediately taken with Melanie, the girl who works there on Saturdays. Jeanette and her mother meet her friends at Trickett’s and Jeanette is offered a Saturday job washing dishes. She starts that day. As the weeks pass, Jeanette stops by the fish stall every Saturday hoping to see Melanie. One week when she is not there, they run into each other, and Melanie explains that she has a new job at the library.
Jeanette invites Melanie to church, and on the day she attends, Pastor Finch returns in a van painted with alternating scenes of heaven and eternal damnation. That day, he preaches a sermon on “Unnatural Passions” and at the end of the sermon, Melanie, who looks uncomfortable throughout the service, gets up and asks forgiveness and is “saved.” Melanie joins the church and Jeanette becomes her counselor. She goes to Melanie’s house every Monday and is happy to finally have a friend.
One day, Jeanette’s mother tells her that she believes Jeanette has a crush on a boy at church. Jeanette is shocked. The boy is named Graham, a new convert, and Jeanette spends time teaching him to play the guitar. Her mother thinks that the crush is advanced enough to tell Jeanette about Pierre, her biggest flame, as a warning. Her mother met Pierre in Paris and had a strange, buzzing feeling about him she believed was love. He was not smart or attractive, but he told her she was beautiful every chance he had. She thought they would marry. One day, she goes to the doctor and she tells him she feels that she is in love. He tells her that her feeling is a stomach ulcer. She takes the medicine prescribed and is cured of her so-called love and leaves Pierre.
Jeanette spends a night with Melanie, whose mother is away, and they read the Bible together. They hug and Jeanette recognizes new feelings in herself. She and Melanie agree that these cannot be “Unnatural Passions” because they feel so natural and right. As time goes on, they spend more and more time together and soon do everything with one another.
Chapters 3-4 Analysis
Leviticus and Numbers are the third and fourth books of the Bible. In the Bible, Leviticus details the rules and laws about how to worship God that were relayed from God to Moses first and then to the nation of Israel. The following book, Numbers, then follows the nation of Israel as it breaks God’s trust by not obeying the laws; the nation then wanders into the wilderness for 40 years. Notably, Leviticus is the book of the Old Testament which contains the oft-quoted verse indicting intimacy between members of the same sex (18:22).
The corresponding chapters of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit loosely follow those of the Bible by showing the beginnings of Jeanette’s resistance to the church’s teachings and the start of her relationship with Melanie. In these chapters, Jeanette learns of the association between sex and sin: “I didn’t quite know what fornicating was, but I had read about it in Deuteronomy, and I knew it was a sin. But why was it so noisy? Most sins you did quietly, so as not to get caught” (54-55). Her confusion about sex as a sin is amplified by the rumblings she hears about “Unnatural Passions” between women. She is essentially given the rules that sex and romance between women are sins, and yet, when she meets Melanie, she begins to push against this notion. She is attracted to Melanie and finds herself thinking of her: “I didn’t mind the work, and there wasn’t much spit in the glasses, besides it gave me time to think about the fish stall, and Melanie” (85). As Jeanette begins exploring her feelings for Melanie, she begins straying from the prescribed rules set by her mother and the church, foreshadowing the beginning of a larger rift to come.
When Jeanette and Melanie begin a romantic relationship, it is the first time that Jeanette can truly begin exploring her sexuality and identity away from the pressures of the church. Her longstanding disapproval of men and her concern about needing to marry one is assuaged by her connection to Melanie. The feelings are confusing and new, but not negative: “She stroked my head for a long time, and then we hugged and it felt like drowning. Then I was frightened but couldn’t stop. There was something crawling in my belly. I had an octopus inside me” (92). As she and Melanie grow closer, Jeanette experiences both her mind and body reacting to Melanie’s company and touch. In these moments, Jeanette begins exploring and defining her Sexuality and Personal Identity. As she does so, she remembers the many condemnations she hears from the people in her life at the church and at home. “Unnatural Passions” are on her mind, but she struggles to reconcile this sin with what she feels: “‘Do you think this is Unnatural Passion?’ I asked her once. ‘Doesn’t feel like it. According to Pastor Finch, that’s awful.’ She must be right, I thought” (92). Their time together and feelings for one another are positive and come from a place of love, making it hard for them to associate their relationship with the horrifying and sinful “Unnatural Passions” that Pastor Finch describes. This dissonance between the “Unnatural Passions” as defined by the church and their relationship impacts the development of Jeanette’s identity, as it puts her faith and commitment to the church at direct odds with her commitment to her own happiness and Melanie.
This theme is reinforced by the fairy tale found in Chapter 3. This fairy tale tells of a prince in pursuit of perfection, and, throughout the story, his belief in perfection yields grotesque results. The prince is convinced that perfection must exist, so he beheads his trusted advisor, the goose. Likewise, the village beheads the woman when she declares that perfection does not exist. The story suggests that when someone insists on perfection and encounters something that contradicts this ideal, they must either abandon their belief in perfection, or they must force the world around them to conform to this ideal. Similarly, Jeanette’s mother has a perfect vision for who Jeanette is and who she will become. Although Jeanette’s mother sees that just like any human being (and like the woman in the story), Jeanette has flaws, her mother tries to force Jeanette into the perfect mold she has in mind for her. That the text reinforces this theme using a fairy tale has the effect of invoking an air of make believe: Fairy tales are by definition stories that are unrealistic. Hence the use of a fairy tale to mirror the dynamic between Jeanette and her mother conveys that Jeanette’s mother is living in a fantasy world.
The strong connection between church and family in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is often demonstrated by Jeanette’s mother’s commitment to the church but is also explored in her motivations for adopting Jeanette and her plans for her daughter’s future. When Jeanette hears her mother’s stories of the past, she learns that her mother adopted her because of her mother’s wish to devote a child to God. This is echoed when Jeanette asks why she married her father: “We had to have something for you, and besides, he’s a good man, though I know he’s not one to push himself. But don’t you worry, you’re dedicated to the Lord. I put you down for missionary school as soon as we got you” (75). Jeanette’s mother dedicates her daughter to God and plans out her life in ways that will benefit the church and her mission to spread their message. The Religious Impact on Family Relationships is strong in Jeanette’s family because of her mother’s control over her. Her mother does not see Jeanette merely as her daughter but as a means to an end, by which Jeanette serves a purpose. In her mind, Jeanette is meant to be a sign to God of her own devotion, in which she spends her life cultivating her daughter to serve the church and spread its message. She signs Jeanette up for missionary school when she adopts her as a baby, signifying her ultimate goal of making Jeanette into a missionary. In this way, their bond is less defined as that of a mother-daughter relationship but more as a mentor-acolyte dynamic.
Related Titles
By Jeanette Winterson
