Church imagery
The imagery of the Bible, of Jesus, of the church (both building and people) form an important current of information that helps the reader contextualize Jeanette's story. Church can be insulating, so Jeanette has to explore beyond her community to experience diversity. Church becomes a kind of universal, rigid, perfunctory practice that has almost nothing to do with Jeanette's personal experience of life. The church imagery becomes dull and dies to her when she begins to discover her own beliefs about life. Yet, she holds the sacredness of religion in tension with her frustration, admitting that maybe, just maybe, her mother is only a bad example of a good religion.
The sexual imagery of lesbian attraction
Many erotic moments arise in this story, forming a pattern of sexual imagery that underscores the involuntary, obvious, compulsory nature of sexuality. Jeanette's mother believes that lesbians are all church-haters who pick being gay to spite Jesus Christ, but that is obviously not what the imagery depicts. The imagery depicts a very normal sexual Bildungsroman where the lesbian bit is just as automatic for Jeanette as sex itself. Her mother is clearly wrong about the experience of being a lesbian.
The self, told through imagery
Many of the descriptions of the home are portraits of Jeanette's experience of self. Jeanette used to live under the authority of her religious mother, so she often experienced her surroundings with frustration, tension, and sometimes a hopeless feeling of being trapped. The black and white of her mother's point of view stands against the experience of herself, but as the imagery suggests, she begins to find freedom by leaving.
Diversity and the imagery of nature
The title refers to this set of imagery. What could one possibly say about plant and animal life without starting at nature's perplexing ability to produce life of all sorts of different shapes and sizes? The variety of nature is one of the most obvious features of it, but Jeanette's mother's point of view stands in opposition of this natural celebration of diversity. Jeanette's view of flourishing is rooted in the beauty of difference, diversity, and harmony, because that is the way she sees order and chaos represented in nature, as the non-singular Orange from the title implies.
