1 Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit was first published in 1985 by Pandora Press, a small imprint launched by Routledge and Kegan Paul in response to the growing demand for women’s books by feminist activism.2 This fact forcefully conditioned the reception of Winterson’s first novel. Its reviewers described it as a heavily autobiographical Bildungsroman representing the process of individuation of a lesbian heroine at odds with the roles allotted to her by her family and religious community. After the publication of the author’s introduction to the Vintage edition of 1990,3 where Winterson insisted on the novel’s experimental character, this label was changed to that of Künstlerroman, the specific form of Bildungsroman associated with Modernism. Thus, Lynne Pykett described Oranges as ‘a portrait of the artist as a young working class lesbian who flees the nets of religion and community [in order to become] an artist/prophet.’4

2 This general outlook on the novel was challenged by Christine Reynier in her book Jeanette Winterson: le miracle ordinaire (2004), where Winterson is presented as a rebellious and anti-conformist writer and Oranges as an example of her ‘art of contestation,’5 aimed, like her other fictions, at attacking religious and political power.6 Interestingly, in order to substantiate this assertion, Reynier quoted the fictional Jeanette’s presentation of her mother, Louie, at the beginning of Oranges:

She had never heard of mixed feelings. There were friends and there were enemies.
Enemies were: The Devil (in his many forms)
Next Door
Sex (in its many forms)
Slugs
Friends were: God
Our dog
Auntie Madge
The Novels of Charlotte Brontë
Slug pellets7

3This black-and-white oppositional division into friends and enemies led Reynier to conclude that Jeanette’s mother had a Manichean vision of the world, while the fact that she incongruously put on the same footing slugs and the Devil, on the one hand, and God, the dog and Auntie Magde, on the other, was interpreted as evidence of a caricaturesque element in the character that prevents the readers’ identification and signals Louie as the target of satire (Reynier 17).

4Needless to say, this is an accurate description of Jeanette’s mother, a formidably opinionated and excessive woman, described by her daughter as a wrestler, in opposition to her meek and patient husband.8 Still, bearing in mind that any form of relation to the other rests on the double bind of confrontation and ethical responsibility, it might be useful to analyse Louie’s behaviour and worldview from the perspectives of political theology and ethics. My contention is that Louie’s stark division of the world into friends and enemies is symptomatic of an ethical deficiency that stems from her Old Testament conception of God as the upholder of the law, and of herself as this wrathful God’s representative on earth, that is, as a sovereign.

5Louie’s sovereign-like behaviour is clear from the beginning of the novel. She expects utter obedience and subservience both from her husband and her daughter, who thinks that her mother ‘never was particularly fair; she loved and she hated’ (Winterson 6). Although God occupies the first place in her list of friends, she does not feel inferior to him. Instead of kneeling, ‘[s] he always prayed standing up, ..., just as Bonaparte always gave orders from his horse’ (Winterson 4). As Jeanette acutely observes, this posture was indicative of her relationship of equality with God:

I do think that the relationship my mother enjoyed with God had a lot to do with positioning. She was Old Testament through and through. Not for her the meek and paschal Lamb, she was out there, up front with the prophets, and much given to sulking under trees when the appropriate destruction didn’t materialize. Quite often it did, her will or the God’s I can’t say.
(Winterson 4)

6Jeanette’s comparison of Louie to Napoleon and her ironic comment that her mother was herself capable of precipitating havoc if God’s wrath did not meet her expectations, together with Louie’s own conviction, repeatedly transmitted to her daughter, that she ‘can change the world’ (Winterson 10), all point to Jeanette’ mother as a Godlike sovereign with limitless power. This impression is reinforced by her religious activity. Just as Napoleon used maps and plans to organise and control his imperialist campaigns, so Louie every Sunday records in her ‘Missionary Map’ the progress of the Pentecostal Evangelist missionaries sent to convert the heathen in the remotest corners of the world: ‘On the front were all the countries and on the back a number chart that told you about Tribes and their Peculiarities’ (Winterson 4). This image of Louie poring over her world map, together with her apocalyptic leanings offer an accurate picture of Jeanette’s mother as a bellicose sovereign intent on expanding the borders of her theocratic empire through the subjugation of all the heathen in the world or, in her own religious terms, through the conversion of every Devil-like enemy to a Christian friend.

7Louie’s missionary activity has a clear political dimension, since, as Carl Schmitt argues in The Concept of the Political, ‘the specific political distinction to which political action and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.’9 As Schmitt pointed out in an earlier book entitled Political Theology,10 to the sovereign, the world is divided by the border separating the interior realm of the law, peopled by friends, and the exterior realm of lawlessness, peopled by enemies. As the upholder of the law, the sovereign has overall control of the interior realm, but what makes the sovereign’s position unique is his Godlike capacity to declare a state of emergency and act outside the law. As Kenneth Reinhard explains, the fact that the sovereign can cross the border between the law and lawlessness implies that this border ‘is permeable and, by extension, that the relationship of interiority (friends) and exteriority (enemies) is unstable’ (Reinhard 11). Thus, while the capacity to suspend the law situates the sovereign in a unique position of power, the permeability of the border opens up the possibility of ‘a mode of political relation that would not be based on the friend-enemy couple, but on the neighbour as a third term, one that... is no less central to religious discourse, sociality, and political theology’ (Reinhard 13). From this insight, Reinhard goes on to argue for the possibility of replacing Schmitt’s traditional notion of a political theology of the sovereign with the new notion of a political theology of the neighbour.

8Reinhard characterises the transition to this new political theology as an ‘event’ in Alain Badiou’s sense of the term, that is, as ‘a decision, one that involves work, a force and forcing rather than... passivity’ to address the neighbour, and neighbourhood, in terms of openness (Reinhard 67). As Reinhart explains, to Badiou,

a neighborhood is an open area in a world: a place, subset, or element where there is no boundary, no difference, between the inside of the thing and the thing itself. Similarly, an element can belong to a set without being included in that set.... Hence to say that one element is neighbor to another is to assert that they are included in a common open set.... Furthermore, since the union of two open sets is another open set, the union of two neighbourhoods is itself open and thus presents new possibilities of neighboring. (Reinhard 66)

9As is well known, according to Badiou, the rare event that constitutes the occasion for the transformation of the world takes place within the domains of four basic truth procedures: politics, science, art, and love.11 Drawing on this, Reinhard contends that, while the sovereign follows the truth procedure of politics in his relation to friends and enemies, the difficult and conscious decision to address the neighbour in terms of openness is ruled by the truth procedure of love:

If the situation, the state of affairs, the status quo of a particular world, presents itself as if it were unified, love is what “fractures” the imaginary unity, brings out the universal truth of disjunction in a particular situation. The world that love opens, the new neighbourhood, within the political and beyond the familial, is the only place where the two may be encountered as such. Badiou suggests that to love the neighbour is to create a new open space, a new universality in a particular place. (Reinhard 68–69)

10The revolutionary potential of love to trigger off an event capable of breaking up the political division of the world into friends and enemies would explain why Louie’s missionary zeal is accompanied by an absolute incapacity to love both physically and affectively. There are numerous examples of Louie’s atrocious lovelessness towards her daughter, as, for example, when she leaves alone the stone-deaf and terrified child in the awe-inspiring Victorian hospital to be operated of adenoids; or when she goes to Wigan coinciding with her convalescence, so that Jeanette has to stay with Elsie Norris, a well-meaning but decrepit member of their religious community (Winterson 27, 31). Louie’s incapacity to love her daughter is clear proof of her unethicality, since, according to Emmanuel Lévinas, mother-love is the most ethical form of love, as it fulfils itself in bearing and gives priority to the responsibility for the other over any form of self questioning.12 What is more, Louie is equally incapable of loving her husband: she refuses to cook the Sunday dinners he cherishes whenever the Missionary Report is bad (Winterson 5); and she makes Jeanette sleep in the matrimonial bedroom with him, while she is awake, so as to avoid sexual intercourse with him (Winterson 15). As Jeanette remarks at the beginning of the novel, her mother ‘had a mysterious attitude towards the begetting of children: it wasn’t that she couldn’t do it, more that she didn’t want to do it. She was very bitter about the Virgin Mary getting there first’ (Winterson 3). Louie’s physical and spiritual incapacity to love is the symptom of the ethical deficiency that prevents her from making the difficult decision of opening up the boundaries of her theocratic empire, thus thwarting her evolution from power-seeking and egotistic sovereign to a fully autonomous subject. From the perspective of Jacques Lacan’s logics of sexuation, Louie’s choice of subject position would not correspond to the position of woman, but of man, since, as Reinhard explains:

The subjective decision that results in masculine sexuation is the choice not to choose, the decision to remain in a liminal position by both accepting subjection to the law of castration and maintaining the belief in the existence of at least one man who has escaped that law, while enforcing it on all others. (Reinhard 11)

11In keeping with this, Louie tried to sublimate her impossibility of experiencing jouissance by imitating the Virgin Mary: she gave up her love affair with Pierre (Winterson 36) and also, possibly, with Eddie’s sister;13 married instead the forbearing and fittingly named Joe; and arranged for the adoption of a baby girl. The terms in which this adoption is narrated situate Jeanette on a par with the birth of Jesus Christ. Louie, however, is not equated with the Virgin Mary but with Zeus, the Greek King of the Gods, giving birth to Athena from his head:

And so it was that on a particular day, some time later, she followed a star until it came to settle above an orphanage, and in that place was a crib, and in that crib, a child....
Such tender flesh.
Her flesh now, sprung from her head. (Winterson 10)

12Needless to say, this association with Zeus reinforces Louie’s identification with an omnipotent male sovereign. As we have seen, the sovereign has the prerogative to suspend the law. Echoing this, Louie constantly makes exception to her own observation of the biblical commandments that she is simultaneously attempting to enforce on everyone else. She removes the Wise Men from the Nativity crib because ‘she did not believe there were any wise men’ (Winterson 3); and she excludes shrimps from her list of unclean animals, because ‘she liked to eat them in a muffin’ (Winterson 42). As Jeanette ironically comments, confronted with the moral dilemma of having to choose between the law and her appetite, her mother eventually ‘agreed with St Paul that what God has cleansed we must not think common. After that we went to Molly’s seafoods every Sunday’ (Winterson 42).

13For all this, however, Louie refuses to make use of the sovereign’s most important prerogative: the capacity to cross the border between the interior realm of the law, peopled by friends, and the exterior realm of lawlessness, peopled by enemies. What she does instead is to permit little Jeanette to cross it occasionally for her own egotistic reasons: although Louie considers the gipsies as unholy, and therefore enemies, she allows Jeanette to go to the fair once a year on condition that she brings back a tub of black peas she loves eating (Winterson 6). The child’s solitary trips to the gipsy fair are the first in a number of crossings of the border between friends and enemies which will be decisive for her individuation process. As she explains, after being at the fair, Jeanette realises that the gipsies are in fact easy going and friendly people:

my mother called them fornicators but on the whole we got on very well. They turned a blind eye to toffee apples going missing, and sometimes, if it was quiet and you didn’t have enough money, they still let you have a ride on the dodgems. (Winterson 6)

14Translating this into Reinhard’s political theology of the neighbour, it might be stated that, by crossing the border to the realm of the gypsies and finding that her mother’s despicable aliens are in fact rather friendly, little Jeanette is opening up the possibility of establishing a new mode of political relation with a third party: ‘the neighbour—the figure that materializes the uncertain division between the friend/family/self and the enemy/stranger/other’ (Reinhard 18). Jeanette’s opening up of new possibilities of relation with the others contrasts with her mother’s repeated refusal to change her oppositional division of the world, even after she discovers the scandal surrounding the Morecambe guest house, hosted by members of her religious community.14 From this perspective, Louie’s refusal to accompany her daughter to the fair, like her inclusion of ‘Next Door’ in her list of enemies constitutes a telling example of her unethicality and incapacity to love.

15According to the Old Testament, God is the principle of good and evil, that is, a God who maintains the principle of the law, but who can also subordinate its own law to love and tone down in practice the inescapable harshness of the Scriptures. This possibility of attenuating the rigor of divine justice through the practice of love is echoed by the biblical injunction in Leviticus to love one’s neighbour as oneself, even in preference to one’s own people.15 Louie has many traits in common with the Old Testament God that Freud characterised as a jealous and wrathful God in Moses and Montheism;16 but she lacks this God’s benign and redemptive facet, his capacity to attenuate justice through love.

16As Slavoj Žižek, Eric L. Santner and Kenneth Reinhard explain in the Introduction to The Neighbour: Three Inquiries in Political Theology, what is most striking about the injunction in Leviticus to love one’s neighbour is the sheer difficulty of following it:

In both Judaism and Christianity, the commandment in Leviticus 19: 18 to ‘love your neighbour as yourself’ functions most canonically as the central law or moral principle par excellence, the ethical essence of true religion, in tandem with the commandment to ‘love God.’ But the meaning of neither of these injunctions can be taken as self-evident.... For sceptical readers, both religious and secular, the commandment to love the neighbour has seemed far from rational and has, in fact, appeared deeply enigmatic—indeed, it is an enigma that calls us to rethink the very nature of subjectivity, responsibility, and community.17

17Thus, while according to Greco-Roman or ‘pagan’ ethics, the keys to happiness are moderation and temperance, ‘Judaism opens up a tradition in which an alien traumatic kernel forever persists in my neighbour; the neighbour remains an impenetrable, enigmatic presence that, far from serving my project of self-disciplining moderation and prudence hystericizes me’ (Žižek, Santner and Reinhard 5).

18 This allusion to hysterisation points to the dangers the biblical injunction to love your neighbour as yourself has for the subject’s project of being. As Reinhard notes:

Neurosis and psychosis represent two asymmetrical modes of the failure to love the neighbour: whereas the neurotic becomes an autonomous subject of desire in turning away from the impossibility of the command to love the neighbour, the psychotic fails to achieve subjectivity while succeeding in experiencing the other as radically other, loving the neighbour not wisely, but too well. (Žižek, Santner and Reinhard 7)

19In other words, if Jeanette is to encounter the neighbour without setting into jeopardy her own self development, she must learn to love well. My contention is that, to do so, she will have to guide herself by that sense of ethical responsibility for the other, the neighbour and the universe that Emmanuel Lévinas sees as the ontological function of woman/the feminine.18 As is well known, Lévinas exemplifies this ethical position in the biblical figure of Rebecca (Genesis 24), the young woman chosen by Abraham’s servant Eliezer to please Isaac, after having tested her hospitality, that is, ‘her ability to perceive the Other’s demand as a demand that is meant for her’ (Lévinas 127).

20At the beginning of the novel, Jeanette, like her mother, has great difficulties in looking at the other in the face. So much so, that Jeanette compares going to school at the age of seven to the Israelites’ crossing of the desert (Winterson 48), a dangerous journey across foreign territory peopled by hostile aliens whose rules she does not understand. All her attempts to comply with the wishes of her teachers are rejected. Her school mates mock, abuse and even attack her physically (Winterson 40), and she responds to their hostility by terrorising them with hell-fire tales (Winterson 39). The incompatibility of their respective worldviews leave Jeanette ‘in a fog, perplexing and impossible’ that transforms her daily world into ‘a world of Strange Notions, without form, and therefore void,’ requiring constant translation into her own terms: ‘I comforted myself as best I could by always rearranging their version of the facts’ (Winterson 48–49). When her mother explains this situation by telling her that they ‘are called to be apart,’ Jeanette reflects: ‘My mother didn’t have many friends either. People didn’t understand the way she thought; neither did I, but I loved her because she always knew exactly why things happened’ (Winterson 46). As this reflection suggests, the aspect of her mother’s character that Jeanette valued most was precisely her reassuring capacity to arrange the world in black-and-white terms. However, after Mrs Virtue’s horrified reaction to the apocalyptic sampler Jeanette had made for Elsie Norris, the child realises that her teacher’s dislike of her needlework had nothing to do with the sampler itself but with Mrs Virtue’s own inability to set it into its proper context:

I knew that my sampler was absolutely right in Elsie Norris’s front room, but absolutely wrong in Mrs Virtue’s sewing class. Mrs Virtue should... have had... the far-sightedness to realise that there is a debate going on as to whether something has an absolute as well as a relative value; given that, she should have given me the benefit of the doubt.
(Winterson 45)

21The revelation that value depends on context and that everyone deserves the benefit of the doubt puts an end to Jeanette’s attempts to translate the values of others into her own terms. This decision may be said to constitute an event in Badiou’s sense of the term, marking Jeanette’s ethical move away from her mother’s political theology of the sovereign to a new political theology of the neighbour. This move is alle-gorised in the tale that closes the second chapter of the novel. Jeanette has just learnt at school that ‘Tetrahedron is a mathematical shape that can be formed by stretching an elastic band over a series of nails’ (Winterson 49). And she imagines that ‘Tetrahedron is an emperor,’ living in ‘a palace made absolutely from elastic bands,’ ‘beloved by all’ except for ‘the foul Isosceles sworn enemy to the graceful Tetrahedron’ (Winterson 49). As the allusion to the feud between the three-dimensional polyhedron and the one-dimensional triangle suggests, Emperor Tetrahedron is universally loved because, unlike the triangle, he has four faces that allow him to contemplate simultaneously the many tragedies and comedies acted by midgets in the revolving theatre of the word:

They acted them all at once, and the emperor, walking round his theatre, could see them all at once, if he wished.
Round and round he walked, and so learned a very valuable thing.that no emotion is the final one. (Winterson 49)

22The Emperor’s insight that ‘no emotion is the final one’ offers a salutary alternative to Louie’s Manichean world of love and hate. At the same time, the fact that Jeanette transforms the tetrahedron, one of Plato’s perfect solids (Timaeus ca. 350 BC), into an Emperor made, like his palace, of elastic bands, offers an uncannily accurate picture of an endlessly transformable world of ever-changing, permeable borders, ruled by a sovereign capable of paying equal attention to every single subject in his elastic domain. Unlike Louie’s oppositional world of friends and enemies, this all-inclusive world is based on an ethics of love and respect for the other and ruled according to a political theology of the neighbour.

23The novel closes with the intimation that Jeanette has eventually contributed to the expansion of her mother’s narrow world by including lesbian love within it, and that, adopting Emperor Tetrahedron’s ethical multiperspectivism, she is living according to her own values while refusing to judge those of her mother and, following Rebecca’s example, offering her unconditional love.