Human Being Identity Protection in Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Sexing the Cherry, and Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Abstract

This study explores the human identity protection in Jeanette Winterson’s novels, focusing on Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Sexing the Cherry, and Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? Through a combination of narratological, deconstructive, and psychocritical approaches, the research analyzes how Winterson constructs literary strategies to defend marginal identities, particularly queer and female. The narrative structures of her works, often non-linear and symbolic, reflect a deliberate disruption of normative frameworks that threaten selfhood. Her deconstruction of love, sexuality, and social happiness challenges traditional binaries and reclaims emotional and psychological space for the rejected self. Writing becomes a site of resistance, where trauma is not only represented but transformed into a tool of empowerment. The study concludes that Winterson’s fiction functions as a literary sanctuary for endangered identities, using metaphor, myth, and autobiographical resonance to protect and assert the human being’s right to define and narrate their own existence.