Within this context, Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit sets out to explore, redefine and reassert the notion of the individual subject from the position of its autodiegetic books of the Old Testament. Postmodernist literature is characterized by distinctive features (among many others) such as the radical loss of belief in and recurrent attempts to deconstruct both the traditional master narratives upon which Western thought is based and the idea of the “bourgeois individual subject” as aunified stable entity,”which is denounced by (Fredric Jameson and other analysts of postmodernism) as one of the most widespread artificial constructions of the patriarchal system, of realistic fiction and of the Western world view at large” (Onega) and, the struggle of social groups marginalized by the dominant “andró- (phallo-), hetero-, Euro-, ethno- centrisms” (Linda Hutcheon,) for a space in cultural expression and social recognition. The novel was read in the light of the emerging “lesbian theories,” and the confrontational overtones of the author’s declarations about her sexual preferences certainly served to reinforce the political agenda of the text. This approach to the novel happened to dominate and supersedes any other, but beyond this reading approach it is remarkable to observe how the novel is structured as a chaotic system constituted by several layers of signifícation whose interaction creates infinite patterns of interpretation which plays with the postmodernist notions of identity, shaping up an postmodernist antitotalizing narrative.
The story of young Jeanette, the character, clearly echoes the author’s own story: the protagonist falls in love with another girl, and has to fight her emotional way through the coercive norms of her religious community in the North of England. Jeanette Winterson’s novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit when published in 1985 as her first novel, it was unanimously regarded as “a realistic and heavily autobiographical comedy of ‘coming out’” (Onega ) in which the narrative structure employs elements derived from the Bildungsroman tradition -expression of the heroine’s quest for individuation, as much as a feminist gesture of self-assertion, deployed in a hostile Pentecostal Evangelist environment.
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