SOURCE: Bollinger, Laurel. “Models for Female Loyalty: The Biblical Ruth in Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.” Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 13, no. 2 (fall 1994): 363–80.

In the following essay, Bollinger examines the theme of female loyalty in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit with respect to the novel's appropriation of the Biblical Book of Ruth as both a model for a female bildungsroman and a parody of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Literary models of development, from simple fairy tales such as Snow White to complex bildungsromans such as Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, generally posit physical and/or emotional separation from home and family as a necessary step in the process of maturation. For conventional stories of male development (the paradigmatic Bildungsroman as established by Goethe), such models play out the dynamics of the oedipal phase; the male infant recognizes physiological differences between...