i am never going to stop thinking about the way Jeanette Winterson used an orange demon to represent the struggles of a young lesbian with her religious identity and her sexuality, the way the demon is not a bad entity, subverting not God's place in Jeanette's life but the church's voice.
paradoxically the demon, who should be an evil entity, is actually the only character who gives Jeannette a choice, and when she choses it seems to leave but actually it's always there.
because Jeanette never stops to struggle, she never stops to be who she is, she just chose to not leave what she has known her whole life.
she leaves it in theory, since she goes to live somewhere else, but we don't see her life there, we don't see who she is when she is away from her home town or her mother and not because that is not her, not because her life doesn't matter outside of it, but because that is where she has her roots whether the people around her like her or not, and because nowhere in the world is she going to face herself in the same way she does at home.
she can leave, but the demon is never going anywhere and at some point she will have to face it again and again because of who she is.
the demon is persistent not because it signifies evil temptation, but because that is how persistent her society is in reminding her who she is. sometimes, you just have to accept the little orange demon, and with it yourself.
