Jeanette Winterson, young and naive grew up with teachings of the bible pumping through her veins. As her Mother taught her, their lives revolved around the Lord, everything that happens is of the Lord\u2019s doing and the Lord was never wrong. Jeanette\u2019s Mother made it a point to teach her daughter about the The Bible inside and out. Jeanette was trained to be a loyal member of the church but, what if this training clouded her judgement rather than helping her find her way to blissful salvation?
\nJeanette has a wall built between her and reality. It is clear in the novel when the author states, \u201cI learnt that it rains when clouds collide with a high building, like a steeple, or a cathedral; the impact punctures them, and everybody underneath gets wet. This was why, in the old days, when the only tall buildings were holy, people used to say cleanliness is next to godliness. The more godly your town, the more high buildings you\u2019d have, and the more rain you\u2019d get.\u201d (Winterson 15)
\nIt is obvious to anyone who has faith in the sciences that the occurrence of rain is far more complex than the collision of cloud and tall building. Though the idea that this is so is kind of cute in a fairytale sort of way, it is simply not so. As a young child, Jeanette is naive because she knows nothing about the world outside the church.
\nThough we haven\u2019t reached the point in the story where Jeanette comes out, it can be assumed, with such a strict loyalty to the Lord, that revealing her sexuality was an incredibly difficult thing to do. In the novel, when discussing two unmarried women who ran a shop together, Jeanette heard her Mother say, \u201cthey dealt in unnatural passions\u201d (7). The term \u201cunnatural\u201d has synonyms such as outrageous, bizarre and preposterous, creating a negative stigma around the word thus, creating a negative stigma around women loving women. Being taught that being lesbian is unnatural at a young age can certainly make it difficult to accept your sexuality.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Jeanette Winterson, young and naive grew up with teachings of the bible pumping through her veins. As her Mother taught her, their lives revolved around the Lord, everything that happens is of the Lord\u2019s doing and the Lord was never wrong. Jeanette\u2019s Mother made it a point to teach her daughter about the The Bible … Continue reading Naivety and Unnatural Passions<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3225,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[111423],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-155","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fall-2016"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3225"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=155"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}