The Forbidden Fruit of 'Unnatural Passions': Breaking the Boundaries of the Bildungsroman in Jeanette Winterson’s "Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit".

Abstract

In "The History of Sexuality", Michel Foucault claimed that the category of the homosexual emerged towards the end of the nineteenth century and came to define a type of personality through the proliferation of medical, legal and psychological discourses. The crystallisation of queer identities in the twentieth century became progressively visible in literary fiction too, prompting new variations of longstanding literary patterns, such as that of the Bildungsroman. While traditionally following the quest for identity of a male hero from an early age into adulthood through a series of formative experiences, the Bildungsroman genre has been adapted also to articulate the modern urge of “coming out”. This thesis attempts to demonstrate how Jeanette Winterson subverts the conventional framework of the Bildungsroman in her groundbreaking novel "Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit". It first concentrates on the realist aspects of the novel to investigate how the narrative deviates thematically from the classical novels of formations. By focusing on the non-mimetic fragments of Winterson’s novel, this thesis then argues that she disrupts the formal features of the genre through the interweaving of fairy tales, dreams, hallucinations and mythical tales with the realist thread of the story. The final part analyses Winterson's narrative techniques as well as the unconventional modes of representation of the main character’s consciousness in order to observe how "Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit" evokes character identification and invites readers’ empathy. By taking the novel as a model, this thesis argues that contemporary Bildungsromane may enable a better understanding of marginalised subcultures, such as those belonging to the LGBTQ+ spectrum.