So why the fairy tales? We should remember that, as Jeanette/Winterson tells us, stories are "a way of explaining the universe while leaving the universe unexplained" (93). Everything in a novel refracts the intentions of the author. Bakhtin reminds us that you can't separate the form from the content the fairy tales aren't a sideshow or a diversion, they're part of the meaning of the text as much as the plot is. This novel, as Mikhail Bakhtin would say all novels are, is heteroglossic, different-tongued.
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is filled with embedded narratives like the fairy tales. She had a steady diet of oranges, so to speak. These are the stories that young Jeanette needed to hear but never did, the kind of stories that could have helped her operate in the world, but she never received she only had one source of stories, her mother's (often warped) Bible tales. One of the meanings of the oranges comes from fairy tale narratives embedded in the text of the novel, like the tale of Sir Perceval or the tale of Winnet. Look, why oranges anyway? When one of my students asked that in class, we came up with a tremendous list of resonances and symbolisms that the oranges have in this novel- the cover of my edition, at least, makes a sort of "forbidden fruit" interpretation obvious. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson
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