\u201cThat was a bad example but I knew what she meant. It meant that to create was a fundament, to appreciate, a supplement. Once created, the creature was separate from the creator, and needed no seconding to fully exist. \u201c(Winterson, p.46).
\n\u201cI don\u2019t know if it\u2019s up your street, it tells you how to build a perfect person, it\u2019s all about this man who does it, but it\u2019s not food if you ain\u2019t got the equipment\u201d (Winterson, 67).\u201d<\/p>\n
The ideas of perfection and separation are major themes in Jeanette Winnterson\u2019s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. In the chapter entitled Exodus, Elsie tells Jeanette that \u201conce created, the creature was separate from the creator, and needed no seconding to fully exist.\u201d This line strikes me as a perfect description of Jeanette\u2019s character. Jeanette is separate from almost everything in her life. She\u2019s adopted, making her physically separated her biological mother. She also expresses doubts about her mother during several point in the novel, saying that \u201cpeople didn\u2019t understand the way she thought; neither did I, but I loved her because she always knew exactly why things happened\u201d (43). She\u2019s isolated at school, seen as something of a \u2018religious fanatic\u2019 which leads to abuse from both the students and the teachers, but after her temporary hearing loss, realizes that her church sometimes gets things wrong. In short, Jeanette has been shaped by all these factors in her life, but is completely separate from all of them and does not need their validation to continue to exist.
\nWhen I was reading the chapter Leviticus, I was struck by the line towards the end of the story about the prince searching for the perfect woman to marry: \u201cI don\u2019t know if it\u2019s up your street, it tells you how to build a perfect person, it\u2019s all about this man who does it, but it\u2019s not food if you ain\u2019t got the equipment\u201d (Winterson, 67). In the same chapter, Jeanette talks about how she was enraptured by a sermon about being perfect. The story referenced in the quote is the story of Frankenstein and his monster. This implies that a person created solely to be perfect is predisposed to become a monster. I think this is included as a warning to Jeanette. Frankenstein\u2019s monster was created to be a perfect human, but once released from his creator, he becomes a murderous monster, disgusted with his creator and with his situation. Jeanette is becoming separated from her creators and she may soon find herself changing from perfect to \u2018monstrous\u2019.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cThat was a bad example but I knew what she meant. It meant that to create was a fundament, to appreciate, a supplement. Once created, the creature was separate from the creator, and needed no seconding to fully exist. \u201c(Winterson, p.46). \u201cI don\u2019t know if it\u2019s up your street, it tells you how to build … Continue reading Perfection and Separation<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3262,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[111423],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-168","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fall-2016"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168","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\/3262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=168"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=168"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=168"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=168"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}