In her overview of fantasy, Rosemary Jackson comments: “Like any other text, a literary fantasy is produced within, and determined by, its social context. Though it might struggle against the limits of this context, often being articulated upon that very struggle, it cannot be understood in isolation from it” (3). The fantastic mode and the protagonist’s fantasy in Lady Oracle, as Jackson has suggested, are a reflection of the social context at that time. While Charlotte Brontë presents certain typical types of early Victorian women’s lives—poor governess (Jane Eyre), passionate wife (Bertha Mason), and young heiress (Blanche Ingram)—in Jane Eyre, how does Atwood contextualize women’s lives of her time in Lady Oracle? How does Atwood reach to reflect on contemporary female culture by reexamining a literary tradition?
To understand thoroughly Atwood’s parodic treatment of Gothic conventions in
Lady Oracle, it is necessary to consider the context within which Lady Oracle was
conceived. Gothic Boom (1960-1970) and the second wave of feminist movement (1960-1980) may very possibly be two major social phenomena which influencedHuang 19 Atwood to choose the Gothic conventions as the major subject matter in her fiction.18
Connecting Atwood’s Lady Oracle with the Gothic boom, Becker suggest: “In a postmodern recognition of popular culture, Atwood’s self-consciously Gothic fiction deals with this important phenomenon of contemporary female culture, and explores the attractions of these pulp romances” (12). Moreover, the Gothic Boom also makes Atwood directly face the collapse of genres. From Hutcheon’s point of view, the boundary between genres may be blurred but are not unrecognizable. Literary conventions are played in postmodern art form like parody’s uses and abuses of the texts and the traditions. In a postmodernist refashioning, the Gothic, like other genres, becomes a suggestion towards appropriation or misappropriation, as Jameson
indicates. Punter points out, that around 1960 to 1970, in the popular culture, the term Gothic was adopted by publishers to sell “a particular genre of paperback historical romance… a medley of slightly perverse romance and tame supernaturalism” (2).
Becker calls it “the explosion in paperback romance market” (12). Speaking of the concept of genre, Fredric Jameson suggests genres have in fact been “literary institutions or social contracts between a writer and a specific public” (106) where
“with…the opening of the work of art itself to commodification, the older generic specifications have been transformed into a brand-name system” (107). The Gothic, as a brand-name, does not “die out but persists in the half-life of the subliterary genres of mass culture” (Jameson 107). It is easily available in drugstores and again acquires a specific group of female readers, as it did two centuries ago. From Jameson’s point of view, the political significance of such a social repeat is related to the work of capitalism. Yet besides economic transformation, why does the Gothic capture Atwood’s attention after two hundred years?
During the1960s and 1970s, whilst women actively demanded social and
18 For Gothic Boom and related issues, see Susanne Becker’s Gothic Forms of Feminine Fictions.
Huang 20 economic equality, the return of Gothic novels simultaneously indicated women’s contradictory feelings about the simplified order as implied in the Gothic tradition. In her book, Margaret Atwood Revisited, Karen F. Stein observes and comments on the relationship among the popularity of Gothic novels, social change and women at that time:
Because the Gothic mode reveals anxiety about the changing place of women in families, it may be that times of changing social roles lead to the production of Gothic fiction. Atwood wrote her first three novels in a time of feminist
political activism that saw a flowering of Gothic novels by women…. These ironic, darkly humorous novels conclude ambiguously, with their protagonists poised to encounter new possibilities, but the outcome is uncertain. (58)
Stein’s argument indicates that the horror which Gothic has always reflected is female anxiety to the change of social expectations. Facing the possibility of new women’s roles which the feminist movement may bring out, women shed their uneasiness in the Gothic genre.
Such an association, based on social factors, corresponds to Bette B. Roberts’s examination of the reason for the Gothic Romance appealing to women in late eighteenth century England. “In the genre of gothic fiction,” states Roberts, “they create an ambivalence of a more social than psychological perspective” (51). Roberts suggests that the rise and popularity of the Gothic Romance is related to various social transformations, such as “the emergent middle-class sex role of delicacy and domestic idleness, and their repressed desire to escape from it” (51). The observations of Stein and Roberts about these two periods of Gothic popularity show that Gothic fiction, to some extent, mirrors women’s anxiety about their social roles in a patriarchal society.
While the Gothic starts to spring up in the late eighteenth century, the middle-class women are the main readers, for whom reading Gothic tales is a way to fulfill their
Huang 21 fantasy about fleeing from their domestic roles. The return of the Gothic two hundred years later reflects a different social condition. The major readers are not restricted to middle-class women but include lower-class women as well. What contemporary women struggle to free themselves from is not only the domestic space but a new role that the second-wave feminist movement may bring out. The social expectations of women have changed with time; therefore what women face in the twentieth century is a more complicated situation than that in the late eighteenth century.
If the feminine ideal has changed with the coming of the second wave of the feminist movement, then what kind of attitudes were women in the late twentieth century supposed to adopt when facing the conflict between the traditional female role as a wife in the domestic sphere and those new models as economically independent career women? Becker calls it an era of “neo-gothic” when “images of career women and new fathers, alternative modes of family organization and single parenting mark the way toward a new post-feminist [or] post-patriarchal culture. Neo-gothicism reflects the feminine dimensions of the ongoing cultural and literary change” (4).
Nowadays women’s fears are restricted not only in the domestic space but involve ongoing social expectations, including various tags created by the media to label women.19 In Lady Oracle, Atwood seems to be a prophet who foresees this social phenomenon that has become more and more obvious today, and she knows that the route away from these constraining labels is the mobility which could be observed from the protagonist in Lady Oracle.
While it is becoming harder and harder to define the female norm today,
Atwood’s exploration of female subjectivity in her parody of Gothic can be viewed as
19 Actually at the beginning of the twentieth-first century, more and more tags with degrading implications were produced by media, such as some terms in Japanese culture— rotten girl (腐女子), undergods (負け犬, women past thirty, not being married, similar with Spinster [剩女] in Chinese) and kan butu on na (干物女ひものおんな, women in twenties who make no effort to have a social life).
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“a reaction to… the feminine ideal of the time: Woman as produced by totalizing discourses of femininity” (Becker 160). In Karla Hammond’s interview, Atwood herself also alludes to her curiosity about the relationship between women and the Gothic:
I’m interested in the Gothic novel because it’s very much a woman’s form. Why is there such a wide readership for books that essentially say, “Your husband is trying to kill you”? People aren’t interested in pop culture books out of pure random selection. They connect with something real in people’s lives.20 If pop culture books are somehow connected with something in reality, then what is the relationship between Gothic plots about suspicion of husbands’ murder and women’s anxiety for their subjectivities, as opposed to the social expectations demanded by the patriarchal ideology, as discussed above? Let us read the text more closely to see how Atwood reflects this question in the next chapter and ultimately goes beyond the patriarchal discourse embedded in the conventional Gothic narrative in order to present other options for women to build a flexible subjectivity of their own.
Before analyzing by what means the protagonist, Joan Foster, breaks the constraint of the customized formality, we need to give attention to how Atwood presents that of the Gothic. Geary suggests “What is needed to move beyond vague generalizations and stereotypes is an examination of how particular Gothic novelists manipulate inherited literary motifs and conventions so as to create a fictional mode which diverges from earlier literature” (4). Corresponding to Geary’s proposal, the approach Atwood takes to expose the stereotype of the Gothic is to parody it.
Therefore, after the brief introduction of the Gothic Conventions and its
20 All interviews with Margaret Atwood mentioned in this thesis are quoted from Margaret Atwood Conversations, edited by Earl G. Ingersoll.
Huang 23 relationship with women in the first chapter, I will proceed to examine how Atwood parodies this genre in Lady Oracle. Among the various subgenres of the Gothic, the target for Atwood’s parodies is Costume Gothic, a framed form which has long been popular with female readers. My thesis explores two layers of parodies—Atwood’s parody of the Gothic conventions and Joan’s parodic re-creation of Costume Gothic.
The second chapter is about Atwood’s parody of the Gothic and the third chapter concerns Joan’s. In the former section, I plan to study how Atwood presents the formulaic nature of Costume Gothic by parodying Joan’s Gothic works and Joan’s real life. In the latter section, I try to examine how Atwood leads Joan, who represents Costume Gothic readers as well as writers, to parody her own Gothic writings. In my opinion, this design not only releases Joan from the stagnant Gothic conventions but also revives the subversive potential of the Gothic genre. In other words, Atwood employs the subversive nature of the Gothic to critique and poke fun at the formulaic nature of the Gothic conventions so as to further interrogate the ideological
underpinnings of this genre.
In the next chapter, I intend to investigate Atwood’s treatment of the Gothic reader’s dilemma between reality and fantasy, namely what dangers readers who believe in the Gothic imagination will encounter in a real world? First, I will see how such a topic is treated before by taking “The Story-Haunted” (1837) as an example.
Then, I will continue to study the Costume Gothic that Joan Foster writes to illustrates how Atwood parodies the formulaic nature of Gothic romances. Following this, because both Lady Oracle and Northanger Abbey discuss the influence the Gothic exerts on readers, I will make a short comparison between them. Finally, at the end of the second chapter, I will examine those romantic fantasies that Joan Foster indulges in until she suspects that her husband tries to murder her, from which the effect of Atwood’s skilful reversion of the conventional Gothic plots will also be discussed.
Huang 24 Following this, I will analyze the way in which the Gothic fantasy leads to Joan Foster’s struggle between fantasy and reality in the third chapter, beginning with her tangled relationship with her mother because of her obese body. Through this
investigation, I will examine the norms prescribed for women as those that
conventional heroines show in Gothic novels. At the end of the third chapter, I will focus on how Joan’s parody of her Gothic writing makes her multiple selves function as an agent of mobility against the fixed roles for women.
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