Chapter 2 - Exodus

Personal Reflections

Here the narrator finally goes to school and we see how she gets along with other kids her age. Or rather, how she does not get along with them very well and they find her to be weird due to her unconventional Pentecostal religious background. Even the teachers seem confused and somewhat disturbed by the subject of her creative work in class even though she displays great artistic talent and intelligence. We see in these experiences an aspect of growing up in culty religious groups that is not often noted: people from outside of the community don't understand you and (quite reasonably) don't want to get involved in fundamentalist culture or teachings, which further isolates you from the world at large. I felt bad reading about how the other kids treated Jeanette like a weirdo and a freak because of her strange religious proclivities, but I have to say that I felt somewhat conflicted by this chapter. While my parents were Christian and foisted some aspects of religion on me while I was growing up, I was lucky enough to not be a part of a controlling, fundamentalist, or openly bigoted church the way Winterson was, and so I was given space to question the faith and develop my own beliefs as a teenager. As a result, I've had a very negative view of fundamentalist, cult-like, and conservative Christian groups (like the one described in the novel) since I was an adolescent, and have tried to avoid getting caught up in their mindset and practices from that time to the present. So I probably treated the Jeanettes in my life about the same as her classmates did in this chapter. Should we have been better and kinder to the fundie kids? I'm not sure what to say to that. I don't think it's a fair to ask a child to navigate the complexities of religious cults and abusive family dynamics when they're just trying to make friends at school, much less if the fundie kid in question is saying things that are ignorant or openly bigoted. But it also doesn't seem right to abandon these kids just because of the way they were raised. I guess the responsiblity probably ultimately falls on the schools and parents and larger community rather than on the other children; ideally we would live in a society that recognized the harms religious conservativism can bring to all those involved and took proactive steps to do something about it, including encouraging all the children to socialize regardless of their religious and cultural backgrounds. But it's hard not to feel a little guilty retroactively for not doing more, the way Elsie did.

Beyond the school aspects, I'm still figuring out how I feel about the story as a whole. I feel like it's still slow-going and the plot hasn't really picked up yet. But I'm sure that will change as our narrator gets a little older and starts to have more overt conflict regarding her and faith and identity. But the seeds are definitely being planted with the relationship she has with her mother, even if the rest of it seems fairly opaque to me at this time.

Critical Response

I'm particularly intrigued by the scene where the narrator's mother talks about her old flames and includes "a yellowy picture of a pretty woman holding a cat" alongside a parade of men. When the narrator asks about it, her mom says she's not sure how that got in there, and then after that it's gone. When considering the theme of sexuality in this novel (since I know going in that the story is in large part focused on Jeanette's experience of coming out as a lesbian alongside her coming of age), this sequence has some interesting implications. Did her mother also have feelings for other women? Did she act on those feelings with the woman in the photograph? Is the reason she is so strident in preaching against the dangers of "unnatural passions" that she herself was once under their sway? Given the larger context, it's hard to read this passage any other way. Analyzing this detail through the lens of character as well as theme, we can see it as another way in which Jeanette's mother serves as a foil to her daughter: while on the surface seeming very different, they are so similar to each other in terms of their backstories and certain internal motivations that the differences are very revealing.

Another parallel between the two of them comes up later in this scene, where the narrator's mother finishes telling the story of how she met the narrator's father, and it comes out that "Of course, her own father was furious" and "told her she'd married down...and promptly ended all communication. So she never had enough money and after a while she managed to forget that she'd ever had any at all." From then on, whenever Jeanette asks about the rest of her mother's family, she dismisses the line of questioning by simply declaring that the church was her family now. Given that we know that the narrator will later be kicked out of the house by her mother for her religious and sexual transgressions, it is interesting here to see how both women have their own falling out with their families of origin, but in different directions (with one being pulled into the arms of the Pentecostal Church and the other driven away from it). In both cases, though, they become estranged from parents because of choosing disapproved romantic partners. Especially in light of the gender non-conformity I discussed in the previous chapter, it seems that the narrator's mother has more in common with Jeanette than she might care to admit. It makes me wonder how much of her religious fervor and abusive treatment of her daughter is an extension of how she feels about herself, and the shame that she potentially carries for not being able to live up to the standards of womanhood she has set for herself. But we will see how that plays out in future chapters.