Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit Literary Elements

Coming-of-age (Bildungsroman) lesbian novel

A Pentecostal community in an unnamed village in the north of the England in the 1960’s.

First person narration by protagonist which occasionally lapses into third-person to tell stories-within-the-story and in some instances directly addresses the reader in the second person.

The tone varies according to the protagonist state of mind and circumstances being related. Generally speaking, the mood of the novel is a kind of sardonic wistfulness.

The protagonist is a semi-autobiographical version of the author who also happens to be named Jeannette. The antagonist is most accurately summed up as the collective religious-based discrimination against Jeannette’s lesbianism endowed in family members, friends, church leaders and most other members of the congregation.

The conflict of the story is centered almost entirely in the opposing points of view toward same-sex desires, actions and relationships, pitting most of the rest of the cast of characters as an army of God declaring war against Jeannette. The centerpiece of this conflict is an exorcism performed by the church to rid Jeannette of the demon leading her lesbianism.

The novel reaches its climax with Jeannette’s decision to accept who she is and what she wants even though this means has little choice but to leave the church and sacrifice the only sense of community and family she has ever known.

When the Gypsy reads Jeannette’s palm early in the novel, her foretelling of the future subtly and obliquely foreshadows the root cause of the conflict which will drive the entire narrative: “You’ll never marry

The title itself receives the ultimate responsibility of being used for the purpose of understatement: “And so, for the length of the mission, everyone had to eat gammon with pineapple, pineapple upside-down cake, chicken in pineapple sauce, pineapple chunks, pineapple slice. ‘After all,’ said my mother philosophically, ‘oranges are not the only fruit.’”

Multiple: the novel overflows with literary allusions, most obviously in the subtitling of individual chapters after book of the bible: “Genesis,” “Deuteronomy,” “Ruth” among others. In addition to the bible, however, among the more essential allusions to understand are those referencing the novel Jane Eyre, the gospel music of Johnny Cash and mystic visions of poet/artist William Blake.

Biblical imagery is fundamentally essential to the narrative. Less omnipresent, but equally significant, is the imagery that associated Jeannette’s mother’s obsession with oranges as the only fruit with being a metaphor for conventional conservative ideology.

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A parallel is created between the content of each chapter and the content of the book of the bible for which the chapter is subtitled. “Leviticus” is one of those books of the bible that is often skipped over by casual readers because it is essentially a listing of laws, rules and regulations to live by which Moses handed down to the Israelites. Likewise, the “Leviticus” chapter of the novel is especially concerned with the rigid rules that Jeannette’s mother expects people to live by. “Joshua” by contrast is an exciting adventure story in the bible climaxing with the collapse of the walls of Jericho that is paralleled by the walls blocking Jeannette’s acceptance of her sexuality beginning to crumble down around her.

The novel is a rare example of a story that is essentially dependent upon the use metonymy. It is explicitly utilized throughout the story: “The church is my family” and ‘The church will not see you suffer” both utilize this literary technique to embody within a single symbolic entity the literal collective attitudes and engagements of every member of the congregation and all church workers.

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