Integrating Fantasy and Reality in Jeanette Wintersons Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit 在珍妮特·温特森的橙子中融入幻想和现实并不是唯一的水果.pdf

NB: this is the first two pages of a 11 page essay Integrating Fantasy and Reality in Jeanette Wintersons Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit Mara Reisman Northern Arizona University People like to separate storytelling which is not fact from history which is fact. They do this so that they know what to believe and what not to believe (93), observes the narrator Jeanette in Jeanette Wintersons boundary-crossing novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. By making the distinction between history and storytelling, Jeanette clearly defines fact and fiction, and by extension, the belief systems she has been brought up with -- religious fundamentalism and her mothers absolutist worldview -- as rigid binaries. Jeanettes declaration also exposes how authority is granted and maintained in this construction of the world in which there exist only opposing choices. Privileging one binary over the other becomes easy shorthand for determining right from wrong, thereby naturalizing moral judgments and perpetuating social, political, religious, and sexual norms. As Isabella C. Anievas Gamallo points out, establishing one particular narrative as official History becomes a strategy to impress and reinforce dominant ideological discourses (128). What Winterson shows in Oranges are the ways in which these dominant discourses can be overturned. Walls protect and walls limit, the narrator Jeanette notes, but It is in the nature of walls that they should fall (112). As this description suggests, the effort it takes to institutionalize and naturalize certain behaviors and beliefs -- to maintain the walls -- also points to places where the structures are weak because ideologies are in flux. In Oranges, stories are the places where ideologies are most unstable and visible. By narratively juxtaposing reality (Jeanettes history) with fairy tales and fantastic spaces, Win