Not an Easy Beauty: Nature, Dicothomies and Lesbian Resistance in Jeanette Winterson's Work

In this paper, I compare two works by contemporary British author Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985) and Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (2011), focusing on each text's thematic engagement with environmentalism and the natural world. Both texts are closely intertwined with Winterson's life: they trace her childhood and adolescence and chart her coming-of-age as a lesbian writer whose queerness is rejected-and at times violently regulated-by her orthodox adoptive mother. I argue that nature functions as a potential shelter or site of refuge from the intolerance that the protagonists face. I analyze the protagonists' years of solitude in the countryside, where Winterson's autobiographical persona confronts depression while simultaneously seeking hope through the search for her biological mother. Within this context, I explore how Winterson navigates and subverts patriarchal dichotomies that align femininity with nature and masculinity with culture and reason. Additionally, I also consider an equivalence between the figure of the adoptive mother and a harsh or inhospitable natural world, reflecting Winterson's fraught relationship with maternal care and nurture. After tracing the ways in which Winterson engages themes of resistance, escape, and isolation, I conclude that her representations of both maternal figures and natural spaces are marked by profound ambiguity. In Winterson's work, mothers and landscapes are united by ambivalence, resisting easy categorizations as either idyllic or hostile.