“Round and round he walked, and so learned a very valuable thing:
That no emotion is the final one” (Winterson, 52)
In the book of Exodus, the Israelites leave Egypt where they were enslaved and wander the desert to find the chosen land. In the last paragraphs of the Exodus Chapter, Jeanette’s story represents how she leaves her own mother’s expectations. Jeanette describes two shapes in her made up story: (1) a 3-dimensional tetrahedron and (2) a 1- dimensional isosceles triangle. The first represents herself, while the later represents her evil mother. A tetrahedron can be made with different materials. For instance, we read about Jeanette making a tetrahedron with rubber bands but I realized that someone can also make that shape by stacking oranges. Even though oranges may be the easiest to stack due to their symmetrical nature, apples, though more difficult, can also be stacked. This is consistent with the theme of the novel; oranges are not the limiting factor in building a tetrahedron, other factors can be manipulated to have the same result. The geometrical shapes allude to the characters that they represent. While Jeanette’s Mom only sees through her own perspective and stays in 1-dimension like an isosceles triangle, we see the many tetrahedron faces of Jeanette throughout her novel.
This three-dimensionality is illustrated through Jeanette’s curiosity and imagination. In her fairytale, the Tetrahedron received a gift of midgets. The midgets acted out different plays while the Tetrahedron walked around. As the Tetrahedron walked around he noticed “that no emotion is the final one” (Winterson, 52). The midgets represent the stories that Jeanette has been told her entire life. In her narrative, she speaks through biblical stories because all she knows are these stories, and therefore the bible parallels the script of her own upbringing. “No emotion” means that that script is up for interpretation. Ultimately, this shows that there is a piece is her life that is undetermined and blank which defies the boundaries that are written out for her by her mother and the church.