Early Chapters: Jeanette's Childhood
Genesis: Jeanette's Origins
The novel's opening chapter is titled "Genesis" — the first book of the Bible, concerned with creation and origins. Winterson immediately establishes the parallel: just as Genesis tells the story of God creating the world, this chapter tells the story of Jeanette's world being created for her by her mother. The mother has adopted Jeanette as a project. Before the child even exists, her mother has dreamed the plan: she would "get a child, train it, build it, dedicate it to the Lord." The verbs — get, train, build — treat a daughter as a piece of work, and they establish that Jeanette has been claimed before she has any say in the matter. Her identity has been decided for her.
The opening line is one of the most famous in modern British fiction: "Like most people I lived for a long time with my mother and father. My father liked to watch the wrestling, my mother liked to wrestle." The pun on "wrestle" immediately establishes the mother as the dominant, combative figure and the father as passive. It also establishes the novel's distinctive ironic tone: Winterson describes extraordinary, even disturbing events with dry wit, forcing the reader to laugh at what is actually a suffocating, controlling environment.
The opening line establishes the mother's dominance, the father's passivity, and the novel's ironic tone. Winterson uses humour — the pun on 'wrestle' — to describe what is actually a controlling upbringing. The gap between comic delivery and disturbing content is a key technique.
The Mother's World: Friends and Enemies
Jeanette's mother has divided the entire world into "friends" and "enemies." Friends are "God, Our dog, Auntie Madge, The Novels of Charlotte Brontë, Slug pellets" — and Jeanette, "at first." Enemies are "The Devil (in his many forms), Next Door, Sex (in its many forms), Slugs" — a list whose absurd juxtaposition is characteristic of Winterson's humour. By placing Sex and Slugs in the same list as the Devil, Winterson shows how the mother's moral categories are both arbitrary and absolute. There is no middle ground: you are either righteous or damned.
The mother controls every aspect of Jeanette's life. She does not send Jeanette to school until forced to by the authorities, preferring to educate her at home through the Bible. She monitors Jeanette's reading, friendships, and activities. When Jeanette goes deaf, nobody notices. Jeanette assumes she is in a state of rapture; her mother assumes the same and tells the church it is "the Lord" working in mysterious ways, so word goes round that the child must not be spoken to. It takes Miss Jewsbury shouting "This child's not full of the Spirit, she's deaf" in a hospital ward to get her seen by a doctor. Winterson presents the mother's behaviour without explicit judgment, instead using the child narrator's accepting tone to let the reader see the dramatic irony: what Jeanette accepts as normal, the reader recognises as neglect and control.
The Church as Family
For the young Jeanette, the church is not just a place of worship — it is her entire social world. The congregation functions as an extended family, with figures like Elsie Norris providing warmth and affection that the mother cannot. Jeanette is valued within the church: she preaches sermons, participates in evangelism, and is seen as destined for missionary work. Winterson shows how the church gives Jeanette belonging and purpose — which makes her eventual expulsion even more devastating.
The church's services are vivid and physical: "speaking in tongues", exorcisms, laying on of hands, and passionate preaching. Winterson describes these scenes with a mixture of awe and irony — the child Jeanette finds them exciting and meaningful, while the adult narrator's tone subtly suggests their excess. The church is presented as a place of genuine spiritual experience but also of emotional manipulation: the congregation's fervour creates a pressure to conform that leaves no room for individual difference.
When Jeanette is finally sent to school, she is completely unprepared for the secular world. She has been educated exclusively through the Bible and has no experience of children outside the church. She brings religious tracts to school and tries to convert her classmates. Winterson uses this clash between Jeanette's religious world and the wider world for both humour and pathos: Jeanette is genuinely bewildered by a world that does not share her mother's categories. The school scenes establish a recurring pattern — Jeanette is an outsider wherever she goes, whether in the church (later, because of her sexuality) or in the secular world (because of her upbringing).
Exodus: Departure and Discovery
The second chapter, "Exodus" — titled after the book of the Bible about the Israelites' departure from slavery in Egypt — introduces Jeanette's first experiences beyond the mother's control. She goes to school, encounters secular children, and begins to see that other ways of living exist. The title is significant: just as Exodus tells of liberation from bondage, this chapter begins Jeanette's slow movement away from her mother's total control. But the exodus is incomplete — Jeanette remains deeply embedded in the church throughout her childhood, and her loyalty to the community is genuine.
Winterson uses the early chapters to establish the emotional stakes of the novel. If Jeanette's relationship with the church were simply oppressive, her later expulsion would be a straightforward liberation. But because the church also provides love, belonging, and purpose, leaving it means losing everything. Winterson builds the foundation of belonging first, so that its destruction has maximum emotional impact.
The early chapters establish the church as Jeanette's entire world — providing identity, belonging, and purpose. Winterson builds this positive foundation deliberately so that its later destruction has maximum emotional impact. The church is not simply oppressive; it is also the only community Jeanette knows.