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Contemporary Women's Writing 2008 2(1):50-69; doi:10.1093/cww/vpn001
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

On Finding the Balance between Earth and Sky: Jeanette Winterson, Charlotte Brontë, and the "Bluebeard" Tale

Heta Pyrhönen

University of Helsinki, Finland

Correspondence: heta.pyrhonen@helsinki.fi

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Jeanette Winterson's debut novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), is one of the most notable postmodern rewritings of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847).1 Winterson acknowledges her debt to Brontë on the novel's first page, and throughout, manifold intertextual links are obvious. Both novels are fictional autobiographies focusing on a young woman's Bildung narrative. Winterson, however, departs from the heterosexual romance of Jane Eyre by replacing Jane's love for Mr. Rochester with the love of a heroine having the same first name as the author—Jeanette—for Melanie. While this change surely is significant, what unites the novels is their shared emphasis on the religious and spiritual dimensions of love. Jane believes that she is called to serve God as Rochester's wife; Jeanette too must decide what role God plays in matters of the heart.

Jane Eyre's religious views have provoked lively debate (see, for example, Gilbert and Gubar, Lamonaca, Peters, . . . [Full Text of this Article]


   Jeanette's Mother as Bluebeard God
 

   Jeanette as the Wifely Christ
 

   Construction as the Prophet's Task
 

   Winterson's Fetishistic Writing Strategy
 

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