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 1-2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “Genesis”
Content Warning: This section contains depictions of anti-LGBTQIA+ bias and abuse.
Both of Jeanette’s adopted parents like wrestling: Her father loves to watch it on the television and her mother loves to wrestle others with her faith. Jeanette’s mother is very religious and classifies the people around her as either her friends or enemies. Love and hate are her two emotions, and she exhibits this with her hatred for the people Next Door. Every Sunday morning, Jeanette’s mother prays for the downfall of her enemies and tracks the progress of missions through the World Service on her radiogram. The news of these missions impacts everyone’s day as good news yields meals and bad news yields brooding.
Her mother is their local church’s Missionary Secretary, and on Sunday afternoons, Jeanette and her mother walk their dog around town. When they reach the highest point of a hill, Jeanette looks down and sees the Ellison tenement, the place where she buys black peas and fights with wealthy children. One time, as she buys black peas, an old woman tells her she will never marry. Jeanette does not want to marry a man, but rather hopes to be like the two old, single women who live together and run the town’s paper store. She is friendly with the women, but when they invited Jeanette to the beach, Jeanette’s mother does not let her go, saying that they have “Unnatural Passions.”
At the top of this hill, Jeanette’s mother prays and tells Jeanette her conversion story. She converted to the church after mistakenly attending on of Pastor Spratt’s Glory Crusade meetings. She keeps a picture of him on a mission trip by her bedside and is in frequent communication with him. Interspersed between Jeanette’s mother’s stories, the novel presents a brief fairy tale depicting a sensitive princess taking charge of a small village. In this story, the princess takes over responsibility from an old, hunchbacked woman who soon dies, leaving the princess alone to oversee the village. Jeanette’s mother goes on to tell Jeanette that she adopted her after a dream she had of dedicating a child to the Lord and raising her to serve him. She tells Jeanette that Jeanette can change the world.
That night, the church has a visiting pastor, Pastor Finch, who asks Jeanette’s age. She is seven, and, though he at first makes holy references to the number, he soon suggests that the number is associated with temptation and Hell, implying that Jeanette could be possessed. He later finds Jeanette playing with dolls and takes issue with her depiction of David and the lion. Jeanette, wanting to play with Noah and the whale, replicates their story with David, and makes the lion eat him. Pastor Finch steps in to correct her, but as he does so, she walks away.
Jeanette, her mother, and her mother’s friends Auntie May and Auntie Alice, leave the church and walk home through Factory Bottoms, the poorest section of town. The people Next Door used to live there, explaining in part Jeanette’s mother’s aversion to them. As they pass Arkwright’s For Vermin, Mrs. Arkwright calls them in and gifts Jeanette some empty tins to store her belongings in. As they continue through the neighborhood, Jeanette sees the area as an evil place.
Jeanette’s mother goes to bed at four in the morning and her father, who works early, rises at five, meaning Jeanette spends most of her night beside her mother. Many nights are filled with eggs, bacon, and the Bible. In her early years with her adoptive family, these nights are the only kind of education she receives, where she learns of animals and the race between good and evil from her mother’s reading of the Bible. Jeanette’s mother does not want her to attend the local school, as she calls it a Breeding Ground, believing “Unnatural Passions” arise there. One day, the family receives a big envelope demanding Jeanette’s presence at school. Jeanette runs to the toilet to sit and think about what comes next.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Exodus”
Jeanette will go to school even though her mother does not want her to because her mother does not want to go to prison. Her mother does not sleep the night before her first day because she must rise early with Jeanette to help her prepare. Around this time, Jeanette loses her sense of hearing for three months. She notices one day that the world is quiet, but no one notices because the people in her church believe that her silence is a sign of her being in rapture of the Lord. She is compared to Testifying Elsie, a numerologist who always gives thanks during sermons.
When Jeanette realizes that she is deaf, she tries to tell her mother. Her mother dismisses her, and the next day, when Jeanette is ready to try again to convince her, she finds her mother gone. She is at the hospital for Auntie Betty, and as Jeanette walks through town, she runs into Ms. Jewsbury, who notices that something is wrong. Jeanette takes her to the post office, where she uses pieces of paper to write out that she cannot hear. Ms. Jewsbury takes Jeanette to the hospital, where she fights with Jeanette’s mother, trying to convince her that her daughter’s silence is not mere spirituality. A doctor soon confirms the diagnosis of Jeanette’s hearing loss, and she is prepped for surgery the next day. Her mother leaves, saying she will be back and that everything will be alright. Jeanette is scared of going under for the surgery, worried that she will die, but the surgery is a success.
As Jeanette recuperates in the hospital, the Christmas season comes and her mother, too busy with church activities, rarely visits her. Elsie, however, visits Jeanette every day and keeps her company. Jeanette’s mother, though she cannot come, often sends Jeanette’s father to the hospital with oranges for Jeanette. Oranges are the only fruit her mother ever gives her to eat and often says that they are the only fruit. Jeanette soon recovers and spends some nights with Elsie at her house as her mother, who is away conducting an audit of the Society for the Lost in Wigan, cannot care for her. Elsie shows Jeanette her three mice, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego—the names of figures from the book of Daniel in the Bible—who live in a painted box meant to look like a fiery furnace. She gives Jeanette advice on making peace between the physical and spiritual world as she continues to grow, and it becomes harder to reconcile the two.
Jeanette attends school, hoping to learn more about life, but after three terms she is miserable. She hates dance class and hides in the shoebox room. She often thinks of the campaign her church is planning for the summer to convert people in Devon. One night, her mother reminisces and tells her about when they built the gospel hall in town, showing her a photo album with all her old flames in it. There is a woman in the album, a sister of one such old flame, and Jeanette’s mother asserts that she does not know how the picture got into the book. The next time they look at it, the picture is gone.
Jeanette tries to fit in at school but cannot. Early on, she is assigned to write an essay about her summer and read it to the class. The essay is all about her religious activities. The teacher stops her before she can finish and makes her put it away. In sewing class, she makes a sampler for Elsie that says, “THE SUMMER IS ENDED AND WE ARE NOT YET SAVED” (40). It earns disapproval and wariness from her instructor. The other kids hit her at recess, but afterward, she is the student called to see the head of the school. The teachers are worried by her preoccupation with religion, an example of which is how she learned her animals from Deuteronomy. Jeanette’s religious expression manifests in more ways than art, however, as she strangles another student to demonstrate the horrors of Hell. The head of the school decides to call her mother.
Her mother explains that both she and Jeanette are meant to be apart from others and that is why they struggle to make friends. Jeanette tries her hardest at school to win a prize, submitting her sampler for a needlework prize, but is dismissed by her teacher, who doesn’t find its color palette or message to be noteworthy. She understands that her teacher dislikes religious themes, and with Elsie’s help, comes to understand that everything created has value apart from its creator. She understands that her work, even if it is not valued by her teacher, is still valuable to her and others. Jeanette begins entering more artistic competitions at school, and with help from Elsie, moves away from religious subjects. Nevertheless, she continues to lose and must watch as less complex works win the prize she wants.
As Jeanette progresses through school and learns more about the world, she begins struggling to reconcile the world of the Bible with reality. She thinks of how the pillar of cloud that leads the children of Israel out of Egypt is just fog and that the emperor Tetrahedron shares a name with a shape that can be made by stretching an elastic band over well-placed pins. With this in mind, she imagines the emperor in a world and kingdom made completely of rubber bands.
Chapters 1-2 Analysis
Genesis and Exodus are the first two books of the Bible, and their stories share direct connections with the events of these first two chapters in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. In Genesis, God creates the world in six days, taking the seventh to rest. It is the origin story of the Bible, and this first chapter of the novel, titled “Genesis,” details the early stages of Jeanette’s relationship with her mother. In this chapter, Jeanette is young, and not yet required to go to school. She spends her time with her mother and stays up at night with her, learning lessons from the Bible. In this way, Jeanette’s mother teaches Jeanette her worldview and the rules of their life in the church.
The next chapter, “Exodus,” follows Jeanette as she leaves her mother’s house for the first time for school and is introduced to a new world away from her. At school, she struggles to make friends or win the affection of her teachers, often focusing too much on religious topics. The book of Exodus in the Bible details another departure, that of the Israelites out of Egypt. Each marks a turning point for the protagonist—in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette, and in the Bible, the Israelites. As the novel progresses, the chapters and books of the Bible continue to align themselves through similar plots.
In the early stages of Jeanette’s childhood, the role of religion in her mother’s life quickly becomes apparent. Her mother not only considers the church to be her family but holds many responsibilities within the community. The value of these responsibilities as compared to those of raising Jeanette become apparent when Jeanette loses her hearing and must undergo surgery. The surgery is a success, but her mother is noticeably missing from her bedside: “My mother came to see me quite a lot in the end, but it was a busy season at church. They were planning the Christmas campaign” (29). While Jeanette recovers in the hospital, her mother attends to her church duties rather than comforting and supporting her. She takes her responsibilities seriously, but at the detriment to her daughter. The surgery represents the scariest event in Jeanette’s life, but her mother values the Christmas campaign more than helping her through this difficult time.
Even when Jeanette recovers, her mother is not there to see her home: “I had to go and stay with Elsie for a couple of days, until my mother got home from Wigan, where she was auditing the Society for the Lost” (31). Jeanette’s mother takes a trip away from town and away from her recovering daughter, because an audit takes precedence over Jeanette’s health. Her mother’s actions during this time show the Religious Impact on Family Relationships as religious responsibilities possess a more important place in her life than the care for her daughter. In these early moments, the divide that will eventually open between Jeanette and her mother over her sexuality begins to appear, as her mother holds her religious devotion closer than Jeanette.
Jeanette’s first introduction to LGBTQIA+ identity and relationships happens in “Genesis” with the disapproval of her relationship with the two women who run the local paper shop and the condemnation of their living arrangement. These two women are older, single, and supposedly only have one bed in their home. Jeanette feels a kinship with them and is excited when they invite her to the beach, only to be crushed by her mother’s refusal to let her go: “[W]hen my mother said firmly and forever, no. I couldn’t understand why not, and she wouldn’t explain. She didn’t even let me go back to say I couldn’t” (6). Jeanette’s mother does not want her to associate with the women or spend any time with them. The severity of her disapproval is so pronounced that she even forbids Jeanette from shopping at their store. Jeanette’s confusion over her mother’s reaction is soon complicated even more when she overhears her speaking about it to a friend: “I heard her telling Mrs. White about it. She said they dealt in unnatural passion. I thought she meant they put chemicals in their sweets” (6). Jeanette’s mother’s reaction and her accusation of “Unnatural Passions” demonstrate how the Stress of Religious Fundamentalism on LGBTQIA+ Relationships impacts Jeanette’s conception of love between women. The two women are discussed in negative ways and their life together is scoffed at and called unnatural. Even at a young age, Jeanette sees this association and assumes it means something more sinister, like poisoning their candy. The negativity associated with them demonstrates to a young Jeanette that a relationship between two women is not acceptable.
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