Before answering problems about breaking the moralistic limitation, it is imperative to see how Atwood carries out her parody experiment on the Gothic from various angles in Lady Oracle to debunk the myth of the Gothic. Structurally speaking, the way in which the story is narrated by a Costume Gothic writer, Joan Foster,
creates a framed narrative, which has long been customized in Gothic works, and makes Lady Oracle a story about storytelling. The structure of Lady Oracle thus displays the characteristic Gothic features of self-reflexivity as well as a
postmodernist tendency. Moreover, the text interweaves stories of Joan’s Costume Gothic and those of her own life, both of which are con-fused together at the end of the story. This con-fusion of reality and fiction serves as a base of Atwood’s parody of the Gothic tradition. Hence the framework of Lady Oracle not only shows high self-reflexivity but also paves the way for its motif of the parody of Gothic
conventions, which could be regarded as Atwood’s first step to refashion the Gothic.
Frederic Jameson claims that parodies “ostentatiously deviate from a norm which then reasserts itself, in a not necessarily unfriendly way, by a systematic mimicry of their willful eccentricities” (16). As Jameson proposes, Lady Oracle assembles a dazzling collection of the Gothic conventions disguised in the Costume
Huang 28 Gothic that Joan writes and the dilemma she encounters in her real life.
Joan’s Costume Gothic, Stalked by Love, can best exemplify Atwood’s parody of the Gothic practices. First of all, Stalked by Love demonstrates typical Gothic settings, such as the maze in the Redmond Grange. The characteristics of the protagonist, Charlotte, are obviously a parody of the typical Gothic heroine:
Charlotte of course was an orphan. Her father had been the younger son of a noble house, disowned by his family for marrying her mother… Charlotte’s parents had died in a smallpox epidemic…She was brought up by her uncle, her mother’s brother, who was rich but a miser, and forced her to learn her present trade before he’d perished of yellow fever….She wished Redmond to know that she was not in his house, in his power, by choice but from necessity. Everyone had to eat. (30)23
Apart from her appearance,24 Charlotte markedly resembles Jane Eyre, in Charlotte Brontë’s novel of the same title, a typical female character in Modern Gothic—one that is chaste, brave, independent and intelligent but whose virtues confront threats from her male master. In fact, a stereotypical Gothic plot is revealed in Stalked by
Love. For example, the heroine has to be in shabby clothes; then waits for her
master’s carriage to fetch her; afterwards, she will worry whether servants will sneer at her upon arriving at the Grange. The heroines are never portrayed as aristocrats because this is an image that middle-class women are unable to identify with. What they rely on to weave their adventures is a modest one who is going on an adventure to an unknown place.
23 See the edition published by Anchor Books in New York, 1998. All references to this novel appear in the text.
24 The appearance of the heroines is another myth of the Gothic Atwood intends to undermine. The highly-resembling facial features of heroines in Joan’s Costume Gothic are designed to be as vague as possible so as to let readers identify easily with the heroines. As Joan once says, “The heroines of my books were mere stand-ins: their features were never clearly defined, their faces were putty which each reader could reshape into her own, adding a little beauty” (32).
Huang 29 In addition to the conventional Gothic background, Joan’s deliberation about the title of this story, with her hard-work to include key words, such as “Terror” and
“Love” (30), into her titles is another example showing the formulaic nature of the Gothic fiction. Joan’s statements, such as “if I could only get the clothes right,
everything else would fall into line” (155), make readers sense that the space and time of the tale is constructed only to make it easy for readers to take an imaginary venture;
thus there is no need to carry out any careful investigations of the real history.
Punter’s description of historical romance identifies the genre as one with
… dominant love-plot, generally set in the past but with very little attempt at real historical distancing beyond, perhaps, occasional vocabulary and
sometimes the interpolation of references to actual historical events….The same themes are repeated with only the slightest of variations and assumptions are frequently made which point to a readership already thoroughly familiar with a certain set of narrative and stylistic conventions (2).
Moreover, Joan gets used to sitting in front of the typewriter with her eyes closed, letting the plot just unroll itself (129). The way Joan produces Costume Gothic appears to be the most explicit exhibition of the formulaic fabrication of the Gothic narratives.
To parody the Gothic is not only to duplicate it but to deviate from it also. The departure from the customary Gothic versions is the most intriguing part in Lady
Oracle. Joan’s inability to follow the costumed rules of Gothic emplotment is one
explicit illustration. In writing Stalked by Love, Joan swerves from the conventional viewpoint by siding with the villainess, Felicia. To switch the point of view from Charlotte, the heroine, to Felicia is a very subtle but significant transition. It starts from Joan’s sympathy for her character, Felicia:Sympathy for Felicia was out of the question, it was against the rules, it would
Huang 30 foul up the plot completely. I was experienced enough to know that. If she’d only been a mistress instead of a wife, her life could have been spared; as it was, she had to die. In my books all wives were eventually either mad or dead, or both. But what had she ever done to deserve it? How could I sacrifice her for the sake of Charlotte? I was getting tired of Charlotte, with her intact virtue and her tidy ways….Even her terrors were too pure, her faceless, murderers, her corridors, her mazes and forbidden doors. (319-20)
Through this switch of viewpoint, Atwood successfully undermines the stereotypes of Gothic characters and reverses the dichotomous representation of women in literature.
She blurs the line between heroine and villainess by challenging inveterate prototypes of characters. This design not only mocks the deep-rooted practice of female virtue required in Gothic plots, but also induces readers to ponder the forces behind the construction of such a female image.
Concerning the production of characters, Rosemary Jackson considers that the creation of seemingly realistic characters actually involves ideological significance and purposes. She states:
‘Character’ is itself an ideological concept, produced in the name of ‘realistic’
representation of an actual, empirically verifiable reality outside the literary text…It[Realism] presents its practice as a neutral, innocent and natural one, erasing it own artifice and construction of the ‘real.’ ‘Character’ is one of the central pivots of this operation. (83)
Accordingly, to deconstruct typical characters in Gothic novels embodies the
challenge to the ideology behind the practice. Before probing more deeply Atwood’s criticism of the ideology behind the Gothic, it is crucial to examine her attitude towards the genre.
Huang 31
2.3 The Value of Reading the Gothic Style
Atwood’s parody of the Gothic does not mean that she is disdainful of the genre.
Instead she presents a dialectic conversation about the nature of the Gothic through Arthur’s viewpoints and Joan’s voice. In Arthur’s opinion, Gothic romances are
“worse than trash, for didn’t they exploit the masses, corrupt by distracting, and perpetuate degrading stereotypes of women as helpless and persecuted?” (31) Arthur’s statement ruthlessly pinpoints the most controversial part of the Gothic. Joan also recognizes those Gothic clichés which Arthur points out but she just cannot get away from the Gothic. She says, “They did and I knew it, but I couldn’t stop”; hence she dares not tell Arthur that she earns her life by writing Costume Gothics (31). On the other hand, she tries to defend her point of view, too, and argues:
Life had been hard on them [female Gothic readers] and they had not fought back, they’d collapsed like soufflés in a high wind. Escape wasn’t a luxury for them, it was necessary. They had to get it somehow. And when they were too tired to invent escapes of their own, mine were available for them at the corner drugstore, neatly packaged like the other pain killers… The truth was that I dealt in hope, I offered a vision of a better world, however, preposterous. Was that so terrible? (31-32)
Through Joan Foster’s voice, Atwood reveals the subtle relationship between women readers and the Gothic genre. She contemplates the function of the Gothic fiction from a positive viewpoint as well, rather than simply negating the pleasure of reading Gothic stories. Besides, Joan points out that it is indiscreet to justify women’s need for reading the Gothic romances in public. She does not try to explain the female need of escape to Arthur, for “that would have been treading on Arthur’s most sensitive and sacred toe” (33). Atwood implies that the fantasy trip is mostly appreciated by women for by nature it is inaccessible and incompatible with the dichotomous thinking. In
Huang 32 terms of the binary logic, Gothic novels would either mislead women or conduct them.
Arthur, who always follows this concept, believes that the Gothic “corrupts” women;
hence for him, Gothic novels are things without any values. But for Joan, Gothic fantasy realizes that those impossible things come true in real life, offering an escape from reality. Fantasy trips thus work as a resting space for women.
Approximately two centuries prior to the publication of Atwood’s Lady Oracle, Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey is another remarkable parody of the Gothic
convention. In this novel, Jane Austen, like Atwood, also attempts to rethink the influence of the genre from an objective position; both of them carry on a dialog with the Gothic conventions with high self reflexivity. Northanger Abbey is composed of a series of incidents encountered by the protagonist, Catherine Morland, who indulges herself in Gothic reading and fancies herself as some of the heroines of the Gothic.
Even though she lived in the era of the Gothic boom, Jane Austen, with her acute observation and through her depiction of Catherine—a typical reader of the Gothic fiction, not only vividly depicts a middle-class female’s reading pattern in the late eighteenth century to the early nineteenth century, but also accurately points out the influence that the Gothic fiction exerts on readers. Howells even claims that
Northanger Abbey is “the most self consciously literary of all Jane Austen’s novels”
(114).
In her book, Strategies for Identity: The Fiction of Margaret Atwood, Eleonora Rao compares Lady Oracle with Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. Rao first confirms the provocation of the parody in Northanger Abbey. For Rao, “while parodying the popular Gothic and sentimental texts of the time, Northanger Abbey offers a criticism of the genre, as well as an analysis of the form of the novel, and touches on the value of reading novels” (28). She then suggests Lady Oracle employs a similar strategy with Northanger Abbey on account of their reliance on parody for the purposes of
Huang 33 reflection. The crucial point, according to Rao, is that their attitudes are
diverse—Austen is serious and critical of conventionalized Gothic formulae, while Atwood is humorous and tries to ponder the pleasure it offers. However, contrary to Rao’s argument, some critics highly appreciate the comic components in Northanger
Abbey. For example, Howells claims, “She [Jane Austen] does so here in Northanger Abbey through comedy, with supreme literary tact trying to laugh readers out of their
errors by showing what happens to her heroine when she indulges in too much Gothic fiction.” (116). Here the “errors” are committed by novelists. Howells contends that the goal Jane Austen keeps in mind is to criticize novelists for not using theirimaginative talents to good purposes. In Howells’s opinion, Northanger Abbey, more than making parodies of the novels of the circulating library, discusses the way in which fiction is related to real life through imagination. Catherine Morland, like Joan Foster portrayed by Atwood, stands for those who “live with” the Gothic but act as if they “live within” it (Feng, 10). By expressing both satires as well as sympathies for Catherine’s imaginative response to life, “Jane Austen is exploring the imaginative propensities of the ordinary human mind, showing the extent to which imagination colours daily experience and judgement” (Howells, 115). What Jane Austen calls to the attention of Gothic readers is “a balanced awareness of the interplay between imagination and reason” (Howells, 130). Jane Austen’s stated awareness of her role as an omniscient author at the end explicitly implies “her delight in fiction making” as well as “her balanced awareness of precisely what kind of activity she is engaged in”
(Howells, 115) Instead of condemning the fantastic elements in Gothic fiction, Jane Austen indicates “the irresponsibility of those writers who trivalise their important insights into human behaviour merely to frighten silly girls” (Howells 115).
Therefore, even though both Northanger Abbey and Lady Oracle delve into the relation between Gothic fantasy and real life to search for a balance, their authors
Huang 34 have different focal points. Jane Austen, according to Howells, attributes the fault to novelists’ abuse of imagination, whereas Atwood, in my opinion, mediates between the desire of both readers and writers for Gothic fantasy. However, in view of the fabrication of Gothic fantasy, is Joan Foster’s self defense for the value of the Gothic still persuasive? To see how Atwood treats the genre from a novelist’s perspective, we shall observe her description of the protagonist of Lady Oracle, Joan Foster, who is a Gothic reader as much as a writer.
2.4 Parodies of the Gothic Conventions in Joan’s Life
As discussed earlier, Becker suggests that Atwood tends to parody in a light voice. In Lady Oracle, the shared appreciation of the Gothic tradition between the author and readers produces a comic effect at the expense of the protagonist Joan Foster. An idealized Gothic heroine is always innocent but intelligent, and has the uncanny ability to find the exit from a maze. Yet, ironically, Joan is neither pure nor smart enough, not to mention her clumsy escapes. Joan believes that she could only be
“one of the two stupid sisters… not the third, clever one” (151) or be one of
“Cinderella’s ugly sisters” (255). Joan’s funny description of herself mocks conventional character prototypes and discloses that those “master plots,” which define what an ideal woman is, are in fact nothing real but “mimetic realism” (Becker 187). As Becker proposes, “What all these intertexts share is the mockery of mimetic realism, and what their superimpositions in Lady Oracle effect is the refusal of any
‘master’-plot, of any hierarchy of discourses” (186-87). The pertinent remark
“mimetic realism” pierces to the core of the Gothic myth. All the problems Joan Foster and Gothic readers encounter are in consequence of failing to recognize this fact. Accordingly, how Atwood leads such a parodic Gothic protagonist to find the outlet from her maze and from patriarchic ideology is what I am most concerned with.
Huang 35 More specifically, the process by which Joan Foster—as a Gothic writer, reader and character— struggles from being mired in the myth of the Gothic to dispel this myth is crucial.
Like her misrecognition of the romance plots, Joan’s obsession with
advertisements is another embodiment of her misunderstanding of reality. When the underwear advertises itself “for lovers only” (27), Joan receives it without any doubt and buys it for when she goes with her lover, Royal Porcupine. She admits that “I was a sucker for ads, especially those that promised happiness” (27). Actually, at the very beginning of this novel, after arriving in Terremoto in Italy, Joan imagines herself enjoying a suntan “as a Mediterranean splendor, golden-brown, striding with laughing teeth into an aqua sea” (4) but immediately we see how she only gets burned since she has not applied any suntan lotion. Meanwhile, sitting on the balcony, she immediately falls into another fantasy, believing that if she can stand on the right balcony long enough at the right time, “something would happen: music would sound…” (4).
Nevertheless, the real situation is that the balcony where she is standing now is only five feet off the ground and there is no hearing of any magical music. All these
fantasies, which can be easily seen in advertisements or movies, are standard formulas of happiness produced by capitalism. Without the wisdom to see through the
mechanism, Joan makes her life look ridiculous and comic.
Instead of looking things from social and economic viewpoints, Freud interprets fantasy as an articulation of lack. For Freud, fantasies, like nocturnal dreams, are an imagined scene representing the fulfillment of a wish which belongs to unsatisfied persons. Freud first associates fantasies with children’s play since it is too difficult for human nature to give up on the pleasure of imagination, so “the growing child, when
Huang 36 he stops playing, gives up nothing but the link with real objects;25 instead of playing, he now phantasises” (145). Freud then suggests, “We may lay it down that a happy person never fantasizes, only an unsatisfied one. The motive forces of fantasies are unsatisfied wishes and every fantasy is the fulfillment of a wish, a correction of unsatisfying reality” (146). In other words, adults employ the pleasure of fantasy as a substitute for the realization of their wishes. Joan creates a castle in the air to
experience the happiness of being a fairy-tale princess, a fantasy that cannot possibly come true.
Moreover, Joan’s fantasy not only implies her lack but contextualizes
contemporary women’s anxiety of the conflict between the perfect feminine image as represented in the Gothic Romance, and the various social roles they need to play in reality. What makes Joan as well as romance readers more uneasy is that they cannot get rid of the pleasure from fantasizing, namely, reading and writing Gothic romances.
While connecting the writing with daydreams, Freud specifically limits the writing within the genres of “romances and short stories, who [which] nevertheless have the widest and most eager circle of readers of both sexes.” (149). Plots of fantasy are hardly a portrayal of reality; typical characters in Gothic romances are even particularly regardless of the variety of human characters in real life. However, departure from reality is not what concerns readers most. They actually tend to ignore it. What matters is that the fantasy in romances provides a similar pleasure resembling play activities in childhood which people are ashamed to repeat when they are adults.
According to Freud, the creative imagination that novelists display in the Gothic are not irresponsible, as Howells claims; on the contrary it enables readers to enjoy their own pleasure originating from childhood play without self-reproach or shame. As
25 “To link his [the child’s] imagined objects and situations to the tangible and visible things of the real world…is all that differentiates the child’s ‘play’ from ‘phantasying’ (Freud 144).