But Joan hates the paradigmatic prefect image of women. Joan’s body, as a result, becomes the battlefield where she resists her mother’s concept of conforming to a feminine norm. Unacknowledged by the gender role according to dominant
patriarchal thinking, Joan longs for the recognition from her mother as well. Rather than losing weight, the tactic she adopts is to gain weight so as to defy her mother’s image-building project. She eats avariciously to declare the war between her mother and her. As Joan recalls, “By this time I was eating steadily, doggedly, stubbornly, anything I could eat. The war between myself and my mother was on in earnest; the
Huang 47 disputed territory was my body” (65-66). Obesity successfully makes Joan visible and endows her with the power to force her mother to look at her. Her every movement and action in the house becomes “a sort of fashion show in reverse, it was a display”
(67). Not content with her achievement, she also puts on the most noticeable clothes, those “offensive hideousness, violently colored, horizontally striped” (83) she can find, to enrage her mother and ultimately make her cry. Experiencing “the joy of self righteous recrimination” (84), Joan claims triumphantly, “I had defeated her: I wouldn’t ever let her make me over in her image, thin and beautiful” (84).
In fact Joan’s violent protest against her mother’s value system can be traced back to her traumatic childhood memory of dancing classes. In one of the recitals, she is forced to play a mothball rather than a butterfly, simply owning to her obesity.
Feeling disappointed, humiliated and even enraged, Joan has not realized that she is punished for her offense against the standard of the female body. She inflicts her resentment on the stage in her performance:
It was a dance of rage and destruction, tears rolled down my cheeks behind the fur, the butterflies would die…. “That isn’t me,” I kept saying to myself,
“they’re making me do it”; yet even though I was concealed in the teddy-bear suit, which flopped about me and made me sweat, I felt naked and exposed, as if this ridiculous dance was the truth about me and everyone could see it. (46) The mothball penalization seems to remind Joan that by being a woman, one can either be a norm or a monster. Joan is so eager to clarify that she, a fat girl, should not be humiliated and forced to become a mothball; she can dance as gracefully as those butterflies. It is “they” who make her do it. This traumatic memory remains with her, making her not only “wary of any group composed entirely of women, especially women in uniforms” (83) but also oppose her mother’s efforts to transform her into a norm. When others attempt to confine her through her body, she risks her own body as
Huang 48 a revenge tool.
Feminist criticism has long linked the women’s sphere with their bodies.
Anorexia nervosa (bulimia) in particular has been a major feminist issue. Gilbert and Gubar state that “the prominence of anorexia nervosa as a female dis-ease and a theme in women’s literature suggests the women’s representation of food often reflects guilt and conflict about their bodies, appetites, and desires” (390). According to this observation, Joan’s eating disorder is an act of resistance embodying an
ambivalence toward her mother who implements the patriarchal values. On one hand, she resents her mother for trying to transform her into a norm, but on the other hand, she desires her mother’s recognition as well. Furthermore, it is not only Joan’s mother but Joan herself who feels uncomfortable with her fleshy body also. Trying on her butterfly costume for dancing, Joan finds herself “grotesque,” “obscene,” and
“indecent” in the short pink dancing skirt, with her waist, arms and legs exposed. She describes herself “monstrous,” comparing herself with the tragic heroines in Little
Mermaid and The Red Shoes (215-16). The figure of “the fat lady,” which haunts her
throughout her life, is thus born from the uneasiness about her “abnormal” body. No matter where she goes, or escapes, she considers herself the one different from the norm, being unable to get rid of the image of “the Fat Lady.” Joan’s plump body distinguishes and separates her from the others; she therefore loses the ability to fulfill the ‘appropriate plots’ designed for her by her mother and the patriarchal ideology.Issues about female body as the motif of Lady Oracle imply the fear of contemporary women. Women nowadays do not merely have to deal with the conventional domestic roles but are required to keep their figures fit as well. The stereotypical image of female beauty is imposed upon women through various channels in modern society. To some degree, women are obliged to perform this
“duty” since if they fail to do so, what they receive from others will not be sympathy
Huang 49 but laughter, like what Joan has experienced when playing a mothball on the stage.
The infliction of this kind of prescribed beauty can be understood as a process of gender construction. As a little girl, Joan used to observe attentively how her mother applied makeup, attempting to figure out the correct formulas of being a woman.
Women are not born as “a woman” but are led to learn to be one. Gender does not have any biological nature but a process of construction.
In her book, Technology of Gender, Teresa de Lauretis presents four propositions to anatomize “gender” as a cultural concept:
(1) Gender is a representation….
(2) The representation of gender is its construction….
(3) The construction of gender goes on as busily today as it did in earlier times, say the Victorian era….
(4) Paradoxically, therefore, the construction of gender is also effected by its deconstruction. (3)
Among these four points, the former two arguments make an illuminating footnote to Joan’s primary memory about cosmetics. To learn how to be a woman is to learn how to reproduce the paradigmatic image already set for women. “Although a child does have a biological sex, it isn’t until it becomes (i.e., until it is signified as) a boy or a girl that it acquires a gender…”. De Lauretis continues on her observation about the construction of gender, “Gender is not sex, a state of nature, but the representation of each individual in terms of a particular social relation which pre-exists the individual”
(5).
Moreover, this representation of gender is actually the process of its
construction. To restate this more accurately, being a woman can be realized as the process of being constructed as a woman. De Lauretis succinctly concludes that “[t]he construction of gender is both the product and the process of its representation” (5). In
Huang 50
Lady Oracle, the problem Joan Foster is obliged to face is exactly this process of
construction. If the destination of the construction is too far to achieve, the process will never end. Joan discovers that some of the makeup tools even cause pain to her mother: “instead of making her [Joan’s mother] happier, these sessions appear to make her sadder, as if she saw behind or within the mirror some fleeting image she [is]unable to capture or duplicate”(62-63). Pursuing an inaccessible female image, Joan’s mother undergoes a painful process of gender construction the result of which seems destined to be distressing. In Joan’s dream, her mother, in front of her vanity table with three mirrors, has three actual heads rather than just reflections. In Joan’s eyes, her mother, who has tried exhaustedly to duplicate the paradigmatic female image is transformed into “a monster” (63) haunting Joan thereafter. The only one prescribed scenario leading to happiness terrifies Joan; the last thing she wants to see is herself looking like her mother. Nevertheless, the conventional happiness, as in those Costume Gothics plots, fascinates her as well; the dream she longs for is to
accomplish the task her mother fails to complete. What she has not realized is that her fear and dream are actually the same thing— while struggling to free herself from the prescribed gender scenario, she is also longing for the happiness the scenario
promises.