Subversion Of Patriarchy And Quest For Self Through Parody In Oranees Are Not The Only Fruit

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit eminently employs parody as a postmodern narrative technique. This paper would first trace its etymology back to ancient Greek when the word parodia can denote a song either sung beside or against another. It is a process of deflating the original and to fit the new wine into the old bottles. Then it is ascertained that parody either ridicules or criticizes the original text through imitation and conscious critical mockery by a differentiation from related terms like travesty, burlesque, satire and intertextuality.Afterwards, focus would be directed onto modernist and postmodernist parody, where several approaches to parody are covered, including the concept of "defamiliarization" proffered by Viktor Shklovsky, Mikhail Bakhtin and his "carnivalization", as well as the idea of Linda Hutcheon. Parody de-familiarizes and re-contextualizes the past form, breeding renewal and progress; it in a carnivalesque spirit profanes the sacred and becomes a subversive force. In the postmodern era, parody problematizes the representation of history and grants discourse to the marginalized.Thereafter the paper analyzes Winterson’s use of parody in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. First Winterson re-contextualizes the Bible with playful manner to subvert the patriarchal discourse. The biblical framework is carefully inspected. Apart from the Bible, Winterson parodies a number of literary works, legendries and fairy tales, constituting a web of intertextual relations, further dissolving binaries and obscure boundaries, and opening the texts for multiple interpretations. Parody is employed as means to question and re-evaluate traditional ideology and quest for self and identity.