Biblical Ruth

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 . Accessed: 25/07/2011 07:06
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Models for Female Loyalty: The Biblical Ruth in Jeanette Winterson's OrangesAre Not the Only Fruit
LaurelBollinger Universityof Alabama,Huntsville

Literary models of development, from simple fairy tales such as Snow White to complex bildungsromans such as Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as 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 Bildungsroman as established by Goethe), such models play out the dynamics of the oedipal phase; the male infant recognizes physiological differences between himself and a female primary caregiver and learns to define his gender and identity in terms of that opposition. Leaving home simply repeats this process for the adolescent. However, as psychologists from Sigmund 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" solution, 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 instead 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 363

limiting for all who wish to write of female maturation,the tendency to pit women against women is particularlyproblematic for writers seeking to construct narrativesof development about lesbians or to include strong ties. mother-daughter Few literary models exist, then, for maturation narratives such as Jeanette Winterson'sOrangesAre Not the Only Fruit, the coming-of-age story of a young woman who grappleswith her lesbianismwhile seeking to maintain a relationshipwith a mother who cannot accept her daughter's sexual orientation. Winterson'snovel complicates the maturationnarrative of the protagonist,Jeanette, by insisting that she also come to grips with her role in a Pentecostal evangelical church that inspiresher to public 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 leanette's development and intolerant of her daughter'ssexuality.Despite their differences, however, Jeanette does not reject her mother, but continues the relationshipeven afterher mother has forcedher to leave their home. Her return suggeststhat, for this text, maturityconsists in the continuation, relations. not the elimination, of mother-daughter Becausefew models exist for texts that place so high a value on motherdaughterrelations, Winterson relies on parodyto producea literaryparadigm that can account both for her own lived experience and for the maturation story in her novel (with its strong autobiographicalcomponent). 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 centers on the relationshipbetween Ruth and her mother-in-lawNaomi and contains perhaps the most profound expression of female loyalty in the Bible. As such, it offersa model for Winterson'smaturationnarrativethat emphasizesthe importanceof female loyalty to female development. The Ruth text enables Winterson to address the two major conflicts in Jeanette'slife: her sexual orientation and her connection to her mother.

Biblical Material Winterson'sparody interlaces Biblical materialswith her fiction, using the historyof the Israelitesto exploreJeanette'sexperiencesof maturation. Given the thematics of the novel, Winterson'schoice of the Bible seems besides being a relevant cultural document, it is a especially appropriate; personal one as well since both Winterson and Jeanette were raised by 364

Pentecostal evangelists. In this text, then, to parodythe Bible is to place both personal and cultural history under scrutiny. In blending Biblical referenceswith Jeanette'sstory,Winterson deliberately 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-reflexivechapWinterson suggeststhat the distinction between fact ter "Deuteronomy," and fiction arisesfromself-delusion;history and story are not in opposition but are, like "knots"in a game of "cat'scradle,"so hopelessly tangled that we must learn to take pleasurein the blend.3 She plays out this concern units with through a narrativetechnique that juxtaposesautobiographical relatively strong truth claims (at least at the level of plausibility) next to fairy-taleunits whose truth claims rest on psychologicalverity alone. This juxtaposition mirrorsthe actual narrativestructureof her Biblical source texts, which contain materialspurportingto be myth, poetry,or history in an often indecipherableblur. Winterson'smost explicit use of the Bible occurs in the chapter titles: the firsteight books of the Bible, in order,fromGenesis 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 generaland 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 sacrificeof 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 suppressesthe disorderof the original text to parodyconventional imagesof origin. In the "Genesis"chapter,the Biblical allusions are predominantlyto the New Testament origin narrative rather than to the one contained in the Hebrew Bible: Jeanette describesher mother'sdesirefor a virgin birth and her resultantdecision 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 predominantlymale image of creation found in both Biblical texts by removing any significant male figuresfrom her birth narrative. Rather than concentrating on the creative power of an omnipotent Father,the text reproducesthe conventionally passiveJosephfigurein Jeanette'sadoptive father;he has no real role in Jeanette'schildhood and appearsprimarilyas a victim of his wife'sevangelism.The power of creation rests with Jeanette'smother. 365

Each of the other chapterscontains similarlyconcrete referencesto the Biblical text for which it is named. In "Exodus," Jeanette first leaves her family home to go to school, where she laments her inability to interpret "the pillarof cloud"she, like the escapingIsraelites,has to guide her in the daytime-in this case, the groundrules of the world outside her church, a worldfilled with teachersand fellow students who are uncomfortablewith Jeanette's interest in hell and damnation. The chapters "Leviticus"and "Numbers" play off the position of their Biblical source texts as constituting "The Law,"and Winterson uses them to exploreJeanette'sdomination by her mother and the church, including Jeanette's initiation into her mother'sbrand of evangelizing. In addition, "Leviticus"devotes seven of its fourteenpages to a story about a prince seeking perfection, an aim that alludes to the Biblical text's "HolinessCode," the series of laws intended to make the Hebrewpeople perfect in the eyes of God. The Biblicalsource text demands animal sacrificesfrom those who fail to attain perfection; similarly,Winterson's Prince makes sacrifices,but only to silence those who suggestthat he has gotten the definition wrong,that perfection is not flawlessnessbut symmetry."Numbers,"whose Biblical text recounts the wandering of the Israelites in the desert, shows Jeanette's "wandering" from the stricturesof her church becauseof her growingresentmentof her fromheterosexualitythroughher love affairwith mother and "wandering" mirrors its subtitled"The LastBook of the Law," Melanie. "Deuteronomy," Biblical text in being a non-narrativechapterdevoted to establishingrules for human behavior. Like its Biblical namesake, this chapter includes dietary prescriptions:"If you want to keep your own teeth, make your own sandwiches"(p. 95). However, Winterson uses the rule to suggestthe necessity of confirmingfacts for oneself; she terms secondhand information "refinedfood"that contains insufficient"roughage" prevent intellectual to 95). The dietary law serves as a metaphorfor intellec"constipation"(p. Winterson mentions the prophetJoshuaat the tual integrity.In "Joshua," battle of Jericho and asserts,"That walls should fall is the consequence of blowing your own trumpet"(p. 112), to describethe pain she experiences at her growingestrangementfromher mother as the two women do public decibattle over Jeanette'slesbianism."Judges" refersto the congregation's sion that Jeanette has usurpeda male prerogativein her public ministry and that this has led to her sexual orientation. They forbidher to preach and exile her fromher home when she refusesto renounce her lesbianism. In contrast to the predominantlymale "Judges" the Bible, the people to in whom Jeanette must answerare primarilythe powerful,articulatewomen of her congregation,some of whom are themselves lesbians,but who nonetheless refuseto condone Jeanette'svery visible sexual orientation. In each case, the Biblical source text providesthe chapter with a single donnee,as 366

Henry Jamesmight have put it: one majoridea that serves as the point of departurefor Winterson'sparody. Ruthand FemaleLoyalty Winterson'suse 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 materialdefines the nature of the novel as a whole by indicating the largerissues of mother/ daughterrelationsand female loyalty that face Jeanette. If, as I am suggesting, 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 refusalof the tradition and her self-fashioningthrough it. Winterson signals the more significantrole 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 departurein form:while in the earlierchapters Winterson respondedto the miscellanyof her sourcetexts by assuming an artificialunity, in the "Ruth"chapter she fracturesmaterial that was originallyundivided.Unlike the earlierBiblical books, the Book of Ruth is not a compilation of diverse stories, but one narrativeunit presented in four majorscenes. In the "Ruth"chapter,however, Winterson interposes two stories unrelated to the autobiographicalnarrative,stories that comprise almost one-third of the chapter.While fairy-talesegmentsoccur elsewhere in the novel, as a rule only one external story line appearsper 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-taleversion of the novel as a whole, the Winnet Stonejar story,presentedin its entirety in this chapterand, at roughlyten pages, the longest single external sequence in the novel.4 By breakingapartthe narrative 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 materialoffersboth counterpoint and parallelto the theme of female loyalty as presented in OrangesAre Not theOnly 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 marryMoabite women, Ruth and Orpah. The men soon die, leaving the three women childless widows in a society where a woman'sprimary,if not only, source of protection lay 367

in her male relatives.Naomi resolvesto returnto Bethlehem and urgesher daughters-in-lawto return to their mothers to seek husbandsamong 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 barleythreshers,where she catches the eye of Boaz, a wealthy man who instructs his threshersto leave her extra grain. When Ruth tells Naomi about this encounter,Naomi announces that Boazis one of her kinsmen-redeemers under the levirate, the practice through which the closest kinsman of a dead man marriedhis childless widow, enabling the woman to producechildren who would carryon the family name and inherit the familyproperty. the end of the harvest, Naomi tells Ruth to At approachBoaz 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-lawsuggests,but ratherthan waiting for Boazto take the initiative, she demands that he fulfill his responsibilityto her under the law. Boaz praises her for seeking him out as a kinsman despite his advancing years,and he agreesto marryher, providedan unnamednearer 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.7Boaz, himself a childless widower,marriesRuth. When the couple'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, perhapsits most radical element lies in its treatment of female loyalty,an issue obviously of concern for Winterson'snovel. In the Ruth text, Ruth's determination to choose Naomi does not representan explicitly lesbian decision; however, it does representone of the unusual instanceswhere the Bible depicts profoundfemale solidarity. This has such a threatening potential that at least one Biblical scholar arguesthat Ruth follows Naomi solely to demonstrateher love for her dead husband and seeks out Boaz only to provide her dead husband with named heirs.8 By contrast, Phyllis Tribleclaims the Ruth text as the site of the most astonishing female loyalty in the Bible because "not only has Ruth brokenwith family,country, and faith, but she has also reversedsexual allegiance.... One female has chosen another female in a worldwhere life dependsupon 368

men. There is no more radical decision in all the memories of Israel."9 Ruth'sdecision to stay with her mother-in-lawrather than to seek a husband violates the basis of her culture or, as Claude Levi-Strausswould argue,of culture in general as founded on the exchange of women. Ruth's dedication to Naomi representsa radicalrevaluingof connection between women. Because the Book of Ruth does not conform to expected cultural patterns, a certain amount of interpretivemaneuveringhas been necessaryto account for its inclusion in the Biblical canon. Much as the early Church Fathersreclaimedthe sensualityof the Song of Songs throughstrictlyspiritual exegesis, Ruth was read as justifyingthe spreadof Christianityamong the gentiles. Not only could the text be cited as the story of the first significantconversion, but since Ruth'sson Obed fathersJessewho fathers King David, the patristic tradition held that the lineage of Jesus Christ contained the blood of Ruth the (gentile) Moabite. While contemporary readerstend not to be troubledby the issue of conversion, the affection between Ruth and Naomi has continued to demand reclamation. Ruth 1:16-17 is often quoted in weddingceremonies, thus recoveringits exceptional female loyalty for an explicitly heterosexualcontext. This very use, however, underscores the potential sexuality of the original utterance. Winterson patternsJeanette'squest for love after the relation between Naomi and Ruth, and in so doing echoes both traditional interpretive gestures.Jeanette'smajor love affairs,with both Melanie and Katy, occur because of Jeanette'sevangelizing-her lovers are converts she has won to the Pentecostal church. At one level this indicatesJeanette'seffortsat selfjustification:her relation with the women centers on teaching them matters of doctrine. Like the Church Fatherswith the Song of Songs, Jeanette prefersthe sexual to be safely concealed within the spiritual.At the same time, Jeanette seeks the faithfulnessexpressedin the Ruth story:Ruth the convert showed complete devotion to the woman who led her into faith; perhapsJeanette could find such loyalty in a woman she brings to faith. And while the liturgicaluse of the Book of Ruth reservesthe text's potential sexuality for heterosexualapplication,Jeanette, by modeling her own this relationshipsafter Ruth, reappropriates sexualitywhile reassertingthe primacyof loyalty between women. Jeanette expresses perhaps the most poignant plea for devotion, as strong as Ruth's for Naomi, in the "Ruth"chapter itself. Remarkingthat no human affection has matched her youthful ideal of a relationshipwith God, she cries out for a lover who will never betray her:
I want someone who is fierce and will love me until death and know that love is as strong as death. . . . Romantic love has been diluted into paper-

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back form and has sold thousands and millions of copies. Somewhere it is still in the original, written on tablets of stone. I would cross seas and suffer sunstroke and give away all I have [for love]. (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 mirror the 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 [10r], 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.""1 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 fulfill the 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 covenant 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 offers insight 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 'aheb, 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'shesedis the gracious hospitality of her daughters-in-law:"May the Lord deal kindly with dealtwiththedeadandwithme"(RSV). At the heart you, as you have[already] of Naomi's poem, both in structureand in meaning, these female foreigners become models for Yahweh. They show the deity a more excellent way.14 370

Ruth's loyalty to Naomi, and by extension perhapsfemale loyalty in general, becomes the noblest action possible, worthy of imitation even by God. Although Winterson may not have had the Hebrew word itself in mind, repercussionsof the remarkare clear even in the English: perfect loyalty between women sets the standardfor 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 continue their relationship. This, after all, is an act of hesedfounded on the model of the Ruth text. Naomi herself did not receive the hesedof God; she was left in a strange land without husband or sons and thus without means of supportor defense. Ruth, also without husband or sons, chooses to sacrificeher country and possiblyher own access to male kin or progeny out of hesedfor Naomi. In herself electing to practice hesed,Jeanette too expresseswhat she has not received; her mother has, in her words, "betrayed"her, which she defines as "promisingto be on your side, and then being on someone else's" (p. 171), by rejecting Jeanette's role in public ministry.Jeanette, who constantly repeatsher need for someone who will not betrayher, chooses firstnot to betray;she does not desert her mother. Like Ruth, she chooses female loyalty. Ruthand FemaleDevelopment Winterson'suse of this Biblical materialemerges in part from the folkloric genre of the Ruth text. As Jack Sasson points out, Ruth conformsto the pattern establishedby Vladimir Propp'sstructuralanalysisof the Russian folktale: the story opens with a lack (both of food and of male children), includes a repetition by threes (Naomi's three requestsof Ruth to return to her mother), a donor (Boaz), a false hero (the unnamed kinsman), and so on.15 In addition, the story begins with a conventional, almost fairy-taleopening, which Campbelltranslatesas "Once, in the days when the Judgeswere judging,there came. .. ."16Campbellfinds the syntax unusualbecauseof its double story openers,and suggeststhat the openrather than ing, as well as the story itself, works to assert "plausibility" "historicity"1'7-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 transmissionin anything resemblingits currentform. Despite some controversy,most scholarsagree that it was composed by one individual, who may or may not have been In committing to prose form what was originally a verse narrative.18 this, Ruth should be viewed as a kunstmirchen, artisticfairytale like many of an the Grimm'sBrothers'marchen,tales often obtained from oral narratives 371

but then formulatedand reworkedinto highly artistic constructs.19More importantlyfor our purposes,the Ruth text seems to perform a similar psychosocialtask to that undertakenby the fairy tale, in that it pays particular attention to issuesof psychologicaldevelopment and socialization. This psychosocial element constitutes the most significantcomponent of Winterson'suse of the Ruth material. Like the fairy tales Snow White or Cinderella, the Book of Ruth contains a story of female maturationthat explores the traditionalroles expected of young women. In her essay "Feminismand FairyTales,"Karen Rowe notes,
Fairytales . . . respondto the need for both detachment fromchildish sym-

biosesanda subsequent embracement adultindependence. thisevoof Yet, lutiondoomsfemale (and to adultpotentials in protagonists readers) pursue to one wayonly:the heroinedreamily anticipates conformity thosepredestinedrolesof wife and mother.20 Given this interpretationof the fairy tale's maturationtheme, the Book of Ruth offers an atypical blend of the radical and the conservative. Although Ruth eventually conformsto traditionalfemale roles, she does not passively await a husband;instead she demandsher rights under the kinreceives praise for this assertiveness.More imship law and, remarkably, portantly, Ruth's progressioninto adulthood does not demand that she with a maternalfigureand the "indemake a choice between "symbiosis" 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 marriageceremony. Although the Ruth story offers a powerfulmodel of female bonding, it still visualizes (heterosexual) marriageand motherhood as requisite for female fulfillment.This element becomes the principalpoint of difference in Winterson'srevision of the Ruth text. By focusingher attention primarily on the first chapter of Ruth, Winterson concentrates on the relation between Ruth and Naomi without requiringthat 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 suggeststhat maturitymust incorporatemotherdaughter ties; Jeanette does not abandon relations with her mother, despite her mother'srejection of Jeanette'ssexuality. Yet although both protagonistspursueconnections to a maternalfigure, neither OrangesAre Not the Only Fruit nor Ruth actually explores the relation of a daughterto her biological mother. In both cases, the daughters are one step removed:Ruth relates to her mother-in-law,Jeanette to 372

her foster mother. In this, the two texts again reveal their similarities to the psychologicalmechanismsof fairytales. As Rowe explains it, in narratives of female maturation,examining the actual maternal figuremay be too threateningto risk.Folktalesand fairytales frequentlysplit the mother figure into the fairy godmother (or sometimes the perfect-but-now-dead mother) and the wicked stepmother or witch, enabling a readerto probe elements of the relationshipwithout confrontingthe full complexity of her emotions. By creating a negative maternalfigure,the fairy tale permitsan 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.21Her arrivalat mature subjectivity demands that the girl both detach from and identify with her mother,and the fairytale fragmentationof the maternal figure facilitates both developmental tasks. Like a fairy tale, both Ruth and OrangesAre Not the Only Fruit divide the maternal role into multiple figures, with the split occurring primarilyat the level of the "absent"and the "present,"subordinating "good"and "evil."The biological mothersof the two protagonistsare conspicuously absent from both tales. Ruth's mother never enters the story except to function as a referenceto place: Ruth is instructedto go back to her "mother's house" in Moab (Ruth 1:8). Her refusalpositions Naomi as the maternal figureto be interrogated.In OrangesAre 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 differentconfigurationsof the mother-daughter relationship to construct the possibility of continued female loyalty within the maturation narrative. Although Ruth probably entered Naomi's household in early adolescence, the fact that Naomi is not really Ruth's mother makes it unnecessaryfor Ruth to undergothe painful division/connection strugglewith 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 traditioncan pronounceRuth a heroine 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 represent a condition of psychologicalimmaturityor be censuredin some other manner as a threat to the exogamic tradition. In OrangesAre Not the Only Fruit,the position of the mother figureas a fostermother makesJeanette 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 impossible for a birth mother, and the "Genesis"chapter explores the influence this has on Jeanette's imagination. Her foster mother decided to find a particularchild to raise: 373

My mother, out walking . . . dreameda dreamand 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'simage of herself as speciallychosen dominatesher self-definition duringher childhood; her mother chose her to be a missionary,and so she She believes herselfselected by both God and expected to be a missionary. her mother for service to God. After Jeanette has experienced the darker side of both her mother and her church, she acknowledgesthat her relabut tionship to her mother is not wholly satisfactory, it is not one that she can escape:"Families,real ones, arechairsand tables and the right number of cups, but I had no means of joining one, and no means of dismissingmy 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 storiesof female maturationrequire that the daughterleave the mother in order to experience independence and adulthood, and OrangesAre Not the Only Fruitdoes not conform to this pattern. Even the title, which at first seems to be a rejection of the mother's frequent assertions that "orangesare the only fruit" (emphasis mine), turns out to entail an acceptance of the mother:during"the town's firstmission for colouredpeople,"Jeanette'smother feeds them all pineapple as a gesture to their difference, announcing, "After all
. .

. oranges are

not the only fruit"(p. 172).23Here again the Ruth text is relevantbecause it offersa responseto the mother that does not demand rejection but also does not preclude independent action. In returningto her mother at the conclusion of the novel, Jeanette acknowledges that relationships continue even afterone goes away (the thread is still tied aroundthe button); she chooses to continue the relationshipwith her mother in person rather than only through memories and resentments.24Indeed, by positioning this return at the conclusion of this bildungsroman,Winterson suggests that maturationconsists 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-taleconfiguration.Fairytales are widely recognizedas importantcontributorsto the socializationprocessof children, particularlyin the manner in which they concretize the child's internal concerns throughtheir psychologicallyresonantplots. BrunoBettelheim suggeststhat, among other things, fairy tales enable the child to
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participate in the Freudianfamily romance by offering stories that help "manage the contradictory feelings which would otherwise overwhelm him at this stage of his barelybeginning ability to integratecontradictory emotions."25Bettelheim'sassumptionof the male gender of the child here not only partakesin the Freudianview, but also conforms to the masculinist biases of many fairy tales, where the boy's progressionto king is preon sented far more often than any comparablerise to authority/subjectivity the part of the girl.26In contrast, the Book of Ruth, with its emphasison Ruth's assertion of her rights within a narrativebased on loyalty, hints at the possibility of what Marianne Hirsch terms the "feminist family romance."She describesthis as a "psychoanalytic re-vision of Freudianparabonding as a basis for a vision digms, which highlight[s] mother-daughter The of genderdifferenceand female specificity."27 feminist familyromance 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 daughterlytext under this paradigm,Hirsch remarks,often positions itself at an uncomfortable distance from the maternal perspective, which is still silent and silenced under the weight of the daughter's emergingsubjectivity.Only in postmodern literature,Hirsch suggests,do texts begin to imagine the inclusion 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 realizedfeminist family romance;the text falls into silence when the daughter herself becomes a mother. Likewise, OrangesAre 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 suggestingthe necessity for mother-daughter bonding, Winterson'snovel moves towarda space where subjectivitycan be constructed out of female connection rather than exclusively through separationand
silencing.

Postmodern Parody OrangesAre Not the Only Fruit parodies Biblical narratives, enabling Winterson to construct a maturationnarrativethat 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 parodiststo repeat materialwe define as (capital L) Literature with ironic difference in orderboth to explore and to confront their valuable for memposition within the tradition-a possibilityparticularly bers of oppressed or marginalizedsocial groups.29For example, modern feminist revisions of fairy tales reveal the masculinistbiases of the original 375

stories, while reclaiming their folkloric structure and language to offer more egalitarianmessages.30 parodyingthe Bible, essentiallythe master In 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 (primarilyin her repeated departuresfrom overtly autobiographicalsections), as well as more conventional literary the sourcessuch as Grail-questnarratives,Lewis Carroll'sThrough Looking Glass, and Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market."Her Biblical allusions, however, structurethe novel and provide what I have arguedis its paradigmatic 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 immediatelyusefulfor Winterson as a lesbian. By parodyingthe text, Winterson can take what does work for her narrative purposes-female loyalty-without falling into the conventional heterosexualassumptionsher source text makes. The Bible offers Winterson not only a thematic for her narrative,but also a paradigmto subvertand reappropriate throughparody.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'sposition outside the text and the congregationas a lesbian.Winterson describesthe difficultythat this type of juxtapositioncreates,and in so doing offersan analysisof the parodyshe employs:"What constitutes a problemis 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, regardlessof her religiousbackground,nor the use of the Bible as the defining text for a novel, but the positioning of the two together. As Hutcheon notes in her discussionof parody,"the Greek prefix Winparacan mean both 'counter'or 'against'AND 'near'or 'beside."'31 terson's use of Biblical imagery blends the two definitions of para: the lived experience contrastbetween the Biblical materialand the character's places Jeanette against the tradition that she narrates,but the occurrence of this narrationwithin chapters named for Biblical books reiteratesthe significancethe Bible has had for her within that contrast.The presenceof 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 problematicrealms of autobiography, 376

fairy tale, and Biblical narratives-genres that typify the "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 priest instead of a prophet. The priest has a book with
the words set out. Old words, known words, words of power. .
.

. The words

work. They do what they're supposed to do; comfort and discipline. The prophet has no book. The prophet is 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 first seven 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 offers female loyalty as an important site for female development, not a limited and limiting 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 suggests 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 from BrendaSilver and Lee Talley,as well as the carefulreadingand advice from Lee Mitchell, whose comments have been, as always, invaluable. 377

1 This "voice"contraststo the "exit" option more often utilizedby boys-that is, simply leaving the family (either physically or emotionally) when they feel overly confined by it. While both options are available to and used by both genders, Gilligan's researchreveals that girls employ the "voice"option more readily than they do the "exit"option, while the reverse is true for boys. See Carol Gilligan, "Exit-VoiceDilemmas in Adolescent Development," in Mappingthe Moral Domain:A Contribution Women's to of Theoryand Education, Thinking Psychological ed. Gilligan, Janie Victoria Ward, and Jill McClean Taylor,with Betty Bardige (Cambridge:HarvardUniversity Press, 1988), pp. 141-58. 2 For more on alternate literarymodels for female development narratives,see the invaluable collection The VoyageIn: Fictionsin FemaleDevelopment, Elizaed. beth Abel, MarianneHirsch, ElizabethLangland(Hanover,New Hampshire:Published for DartmouthCollege by The University Pressof New England, 1983). In that collection, see particularlyKaren E. Rowe, "'Fairy-bornand human-bred': Jane Eyre'sEducationin Romance,"pp. 69-89, and Ellen Cronan Rose, "Through the LookingGlass:When WomenTell FairyTales,"pp. 209-27, for sustainedtreatment of the fairy tale as a literarymodel for narrativesof development. 3 Jeanette Winterson, OrangesAre Not the Only Fruit (New York:Atlantic Monthly Press, 1987), pp. 93-95. Furthercitations will appearparentheticallyin the text. 4 The Winnet Stonejar sequence repeats the novel's plot by reframingit in a more traditional model; instead of emphasizingthe connection between mother and daughter,this narrativefocuses on the daughter'srelation to her (adoptive) father, a sorcererwho persuadesher that she has no mother and teaches her his magic but expels her for her sexual interest in another man. In this story,Winterson seems to play with (among other things) the notion of departureas necessary for maturity since in contrast to the novel as a whole, the protagonist of this version does not and cannot return home. 5 All citations of the Bible will refer to the King James Version,unless otherwise indicated. 6 Jack M. Sasson, in Ruth: New Translation A witha Philological and Commentary a Formalist-Folkloric (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, Interpretation 1979), p. 70, points out that in Hebrew the word for foot used here, regel [b;1], often appearsin the Hebrew Bible as a euphemism for "testicles,"or more generally, "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 essentially parallel to the levirate, although concerned with land ratherthan offspring.In most circumstances,the same kinsman would be required to performboth obligations. 8 Nelson Glueck, Hesedin the Bible,trans. Alfred Gottschalk, ed. Elias Epstein (Cincinnati: The Hebrew Union College Press, 1967), pp. 40-41. ed. 9 Phyllis Trible,God and the Rhetoric Sexuality, WalterBrueggemannand of John R. Donahue (Philadelphia:FortressPress, 1989), p. 173. I do not agree with

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Triblehere that Ruth has abandonedfamily becauseobviouslyher choice to follow her mother-in-lawrepresentsa strong allegiance to family. It is certainly true that she rejects her biological family in favor of the ties she established through marriage. I would point out, however, that Hebrew wedding customs suggestthat the bride may have been a young teenager upon entering her husband'sfamily; thus Naomi would have functioned as a mother through much of Ruth's adolescence. This point will be explored more fully below. 10 Besides the obvious reference to Ruth in Jeanette's insistence on unending love, the line "Loveas strong as death"comes from the Song of Songs 8:6, and the lines about crossing seas and sufferingsunstrokeecho 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 everything to the poor for love of God, an injunction found in several of the Gospels. The stone tablets allude to the Ten Commandments,also written on stone. My point here, however, is less to unpackall of the Biblical referencesin this passagethan to stress that Jeanette'simage of love is utterly dependent on a Biblical model, which she derives from a variety of source texts. 11 KatharineDoob Sakenfeld, "Loyaltyand Love: The Languageof Human Interconnections in the Hebrew Bible,"Michigan Review,22, No. 3 (1983), Quarterly 197. 12 Sakenfeld, pp. 197-98. 13 EdwardF. Campbell, Ruth:A New Translation with Introduction, 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.
'5 Sasson, pp. 200-15. 16 Campbell, p. 49.

Campbell, pp. 49, 59. and Formof the Bookof Ruth(Leiden, Jacob M. Myers,The Linguistic Literary Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1955), pp. 42, 64; Sasson, p. 214. 19 Heinz Rolleke, "New Results of Research on Grimm'sFairy Tales,"in The Brothers Grimmand Folktale,ed. James M. McGlathery (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), pp. 107-08. 20 Rowe, "Feminismand FairyTales,"in Don't Bet on the Prince:Contemporary Feminist ed. FairyTalesin NorthAmericaand England, JackZipes (New York:Methuen, 1986), p. 214. 21 See Rowe, "Feminismand Fairy Tales,"p. 213, and also Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaningand Importance Fairy Tales (1976; rpt. of New York:Vintage, 1989), pp. 68-69. 22 A session on Winterson in one of my graduate seminarsat Princeton University (ProfessorBrendaR. Silver, "ModernPost Modern,"English 566, 8 December 1989) illustratedsuch an assumption.The membersof the class, almost all women, expressedanger and dismay that Jeanette chose to return to her mother once she had made the decision to leave; their expectations included the termination of the mother-daughterrelationship as a necessary step in self-actualization. 23 Jeanette'sacceptance of this phrase as the title of her narrativemight impli17
18

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cate her in her mother'sracist assumptions,thus underminingsome of the positive connotations I have associatedwith her maturation.I would suggestthat the title instead aligns the Otherness of Jeanette'ssexual preferenceswith racialOtherness, neither of which lies within her mother'spowersof understanding control. It is or interestingtoo to note that this phraserepresentsthe one instance in the novel of Jeanette'smother acknowledgingthat 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 for a similar growth of understandingtoward Jeanette (understanding, admittedly,does not fully occur within the confines of the novel, but her permittingJeanette to returnhome implies a willingness to come to an understanding her daughter).Although critics such as Rebecca O'Rourke,in of "Fingersin the Fruit Basket:A Feminist Reading of Jeanette Winterson'sOranges Are Not theOnly Fruit,"in Feminist Criticism: ed. Theoryand Practice, Susan Sellers (New York:HarvesterWheatsheaf, 1991), have often criticizedWinterson for her rather harsh treatment of 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 Stonejarsequence, in which the protagonistdoes not returnto her family.Winterson's repetition of the phrasein Jeanette'sportion of the narrativeemphasizesthat return is only one option in the continuation of the relationship, but one that Jeanette freely chooses. 25 Bettelheim, p. 69. 26 The princessbecoming queen cannot be seen as a comparable event in most fairy tales because this still locates the girl child in a subordinaterole, with husband replacing father as 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, Feminism (Indianapolis:Indiana University Press, 1989), p. 15. 28 See Hirsch, chapter 4. 29 See Linda Hutcheon'schapteron parodyin A Poetics Post-Modernism: Hisof tory,Theory,Fiction(New York:Routledge, 1988), and "The Politics of Postmodernism: Parodyand History,"CulturalCritique,5 (Winter 1986-87), 179-207. In the latter, Hutcheon advocates a redefinitionof parodyas "repetitionwith critical distance that allows ironic signaling of difference at the very heart of similarity" (p. 185), a process that she sees as enabling parodists to use intertexuality for political statements. 30 See, for example, Angela Carter,The Bloody Chamber (1979; rpt. New York: Penguin, 1987); Rapunzel's Revenge:Fairytales Feminists(Dublin: Attic Press, for contains parodic 1985); and Zipes, ed., Don't Bet on the Prince.Rapunzel's Revenge rewritingsof familiarfairy tales; for example, Snow White arrangesa labor union and contemplates a corporatemergerwith the mine owner, Mr.Prince, while Cinchain, rejects the overtures derella, who dreamsof managinga fast-foodrestaurant of the prince in orderto reorganizethe palace on an economically stable basis as a catering service. This collection tends to offer humorousrevisions, although the Zipes anthology contains several parodic, nonhumoroustales. 31 Hutcheon, "The Politics of Postmodernism," pp. 185-86.

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