Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit Analysis

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As chapter 1 has shown, lesbian literature has been evolving from earlier work by Sappho, where lesbianism in poetry is ambiguous, to Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness (1928) where gender and sexuality are more outspokenly presented and brought to the surface. This chapter, as well as the following, will present a case study that shows a certain way of portraying lesbian identities and stereotypes. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985) by Jeanette Winterson, published at a time when gender and sexuality became a topic of interest in British popular culture (Bentley, 108). As Bentley states in Contemporary British Fiction (2008) the novel reacts to this sudden interest in gender and sexuality by “breaking down and challenging prescribed attitudes (especially religious ones) to sexuality and to the role of the nuclear family in the maintaining established gender roles” (108). Before moving on to exploring how Oranges pushes back against these normative gender roles and what stereotypes Winterson uses in the novel, I will present some general information on the author and the novel.
Jeanette Winterson was born in 1959 in Manchester. She was adopted into the Winterson family when her biological mother was unable to take care of her nine other siblings. She was raised in Accrington with her adoptive parents, who were Pentecostals: which are “a religious evangelical group who read the Bible more or less literally, and believe in the Second Coming of Christ and the End of the

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