Jeanette Winterson (post 5): In award-winning first novel, “Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit,” first-person narrator, Jeanette, speaks with an alternate personality.

According to the author’s memoir (see previous post), her mother and religious community did literally attempt to exorcise demons which they alleged had caused her lesbian relationships. But the memoir did not include Jeanette’s conversation with her demon. The novel does.

Jeanette thinks of this experience in terms of demon possession or nonspecific madness (and not in terms of multiple personality, the psychiatric perspective):

“Everyone has a demon like cats have fleas…

“ ‘If I let them take away my demons [thinks Jeanette, about her pending exorcism], I’ll have to give up what I’ve found’ [love with a woman].

“ ‘You can’t do that,’ said a voice at my elbow.

“ Leaning on the coffee table was the orange demon.

“ ‘I’ve gone mad,’ I thought.

“ ‘That may well be so,’ agreed the demon evenly. ‘So make the most of it.’

“ ‘What do you want?’ [Jeanette asks].

“ ‘I want to help you decide what you want’…Everyone has a demon as you so rightly observed,’ the thing began, ‘but not everyone knows this, and not everyone knows how to make use of it’…

“ ‘But in the Bible you keep getting driven out,’ [says Jeanette].

“ ‘Don’t believe all you read’ [the demon replies]” (1, pp. 108-109).

Jeanette says that everyone has a demon. The demon agrees, adding that many don’t realize it or know how to use it.

Jeanette and her demon are right in regard to novelists, most of whom have multiple personality. And even if novelists don’t know they have it, or don’t think of it in those terms, they know how to make use of it in their writing process.

1. Jeanette Winterson. Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit. New York, Grove Press, 1985.