An Analysis Of Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit From The Perspective Of Bildungsroman

Jeanette Winterson is a contemporary British female writer.In 1985,the debut Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit was published,and won a Whitbred Prize for a First Novel in the same year.Winterson has been made an OBE(Officer of the Order of the British Empire)in 2006.These have laid her status in the British literary world.In this novel,Winterson depicts a story of a lesbian girl who brought up in a religious family.Faced with many queries and oppression,she recognizes her true self and becomes a new independent woman.Domestic and foreign scholars have made some achievements in the research of Jeanette Winterson and Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.These achievements are mostly reflected from the perspectives of narrative techniques,feminism,gender theory and biblical themes.From a new perspective of Bildungsroman,this thesis attempts to analyze the growing process of the heroine Jeanette from a young girl who has no self-awareness and is subject to religious imprisonment,to a new woman with self-awareness.This thesis falls into three parts: introduction,main body and conclusion.The introduction part briefly presents the life of Jeanette Winterson,the main content of the novel,and introduces the status of research at home and abroad.The first chapter is the theoretical basis,mainly discussing the origin and development of Bildungsroman.At the same time,it explores the three factors of Bildungsroman from the three aspects: protagonist’s confusion,initiation mentors and epiphany.The second,third and fourth chapters respectively explain the growth process of Jeanette in the novel from the above three theoretical elements.The second chapter analyzes the confusion of the protagonist Jeanette.Confusion is mainly manifested in the queries about the teachings of Pentecostalism and the puzzle of love.The third chapter studies the two aspects of active initiation mentors and passive initiation mentors.These people enrich the protagonist’s life experience and social cognition from both positive and negative aspects.The fourth chapter analyzes the protagonist Jeanette,with the help of the initiation mentors and her own efforts,gets out of confusion and gains epiphany in both religion and love parts.Thus she gets rid of the bondage of the church and the family,living independently,accepting her gender identity,and finally pursuing love bravely.The conclusion section summarizes the main contents of the full text.This thesis analyzes the growing process of the protagonist Jeanette from the puzzle to the epiphany from the perspective of Bildungsroman.The purpose of this thesis is to reveal how the protagonist Jeanette gets out of confusion,and grows up from a non-self-conscious and religiously imprisoned little girl to an independent new woman with self-awareness who bravely gets rid of the imprisonment in family and religion.Winterson inspires the marginalized people who are oppressed and persecuted to smash the shackles and pursue the freedom and happiness.