Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit And Maggie And Me Analysis

Both Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and Maggie & Me feature powerful female characters looming, often very menacingly, over the heads of the protagonists. Jeanette’s mother is, of course, very active in the life of her daughter; Margaret Thatcher in some ways fills the void left by Damian’s often absent and detached mother. Counterintuitively, both serve as inspiration to their “children” as they come to terms with being gay. Certainly, neither Jeanette’s mother in Oranges or Margaret Thatcher in Maggie offer any explicit support for the exploration of queer identity. In fact, Jeanette’s mother seems averse to her daughter developing any kind of sexuality, let alone gay sexuality. Jeanette’s mother makes it clear from the beginning
Jeanette’s mother is an incredibly strong and willful woman, along with many other women in the church, and after Jeanette’s second relationship is revealed the church council reveals that this is to blame for her sexual deviance: “having taken on a man’s world in other ways [Jeanette] had flouted God’s law and tried to do it sexually...The devil had attacked me at my weakest point: my inability to realize the limitations of my sex” (136). While this allegation seems like the baseless theory of a group of conservative men trying to discount the validity of Jeanette’s sexuality, it does bear some truth in that her mother (and others in the church) serve as role models in defying gender norms and this world’s expectations. Her mother stands in stark contrast, for example, to the bovine Melanie, who gives up any hope of queer expression to marry and fulfill the demand of a heteronormative Christian society (though, admittedly, her mother also seems to have given up same-sex desire in order to fill her new role in the church). Similarly, Maggie’s “glamour” captures Damian’s attention from the beginning of the novel, as he feels the desire to “brush the dust from her big blonde hair like she’s a Girl’s World and tell her it’ll be all right” (3); he later seeks to emulate this glamour as Mary dresses him up in makeup. He often imitates women as he develops