To make a comprehensive survey of Joan’s journey into subjectivity, we should go back to her writings since they closely parallel her progress. In the beginning, her writing of Costume Gothics illustrates her dependence on a dichotomous fantasy world in stereotyped Gothic novels to evade the complicated reality. Meanwhile, she can only use various identities to match up conflicting roles set by society. In this phase, both of her Costume Gothics and her real life are Atwood’s parody of Gothic conventions. Afterwards, while trying to integrate her multiple selves, she composes a
28 Related perspectives see Karen F Stein’s Margaret Atwood Revisited, 61-62 and Hsiu-chuan Lee’s
“Screen, Maze, and the Female Dissimulation: Consuming Gothic Romance in Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle” 113.
Huang 67 feminist poem, Lady Oracle, to present a Gothic world in reverse of the conventional world. In this series of short verses, Joan creates a female figure, Lady Oracle, who is contrary to the stereotyped Gothic heroine that she has been familiar with. In one verse, the tears of Lady Oracle disclose women’s melancholy when she is “bent down / under the power” (221). Joan does not realize yet what this “power” is but the other figure in the poem tells us it might be the control from a male. Joan says, “This man was evil, I felt, but it was hard to tell…. He had many disguises” (221). Furthermore, in another poem, Lady Oracle reveals the figure of a woman of power and manifold faces:
She sits on the iron throne She is one and three
The dark lady the redgold lady The blank lady oracle
of blood, she who must be
obeyed forever (225).
Here Lady Oracle does not yield herself to the masculine power but sits on the throne, becoming the one who must be obeyed. The crucial part is that she is “one and three.”
She is not a flat character from Gothic romances but one with multiple faces. Such a feminine image with plural faces reveals Joan’s discontent with the one-sidedness of paradigmatic Gothic heroines. Hence, it is not surprising that when working on her Gothic romance later, Joan says she is tired of the heroine’s virtue and she even narrates the tale from the villainess’s viewpoint (319-20). Therefore, this
manifold-faceted Lady Oracle could be regarded as the prelude to Joan’s parodic work in her last Costume Gothic.
Little by little, Joan senses the contradictory nature of the conviction of patriarchy after she escapes to Italy because of the success of Lady Oracle. She
Huang 68 recognizes the disguise of the confinement from patriarchal ideology in her last Gothic Romance, Stalked by Love, as discussed in the former section. Rather than passively receiving the Gothic fantasy, Joan’s courage and transformation symbolize the possibilities for women not to be constrained by the dominant patriarchal
discourses. Her journey into female subjectivity thus provides a parodic vision of the fixed plot and characters in the Gothic. Most important of all, it is not until Joan’s recognition of the fabricated nature of these conventions that the mobility of her multiple selves truly stands for a resistance power against the fixed feminine image prescribed by patriarchy. Prior to the awakening, her various identities are merely busy making corresponding responses to different social expectations that are conflicting with one another.
In Lady Oracle, Joan tries various methods to mend the disparity between reality and the Gothic fantasy so as to be a “normal” woman in terms of patriarchy discourse. Multiple selves are, at first, the measures she adopts to maintain simplicity and the dichotomous order with which the conventional Gothic novels always end.
Nevertheless, as one “living in the real world but does it as though the other is the real one” (Oates 75), Joan’s misunderstanding of the essence of reality leads her to being haunted by her own multiple selves in grotesque forms. Only after she sees through the Gothic myth and accepts the multiple-dimension of reality can she avoid being fixed and constrained by the gender construction of the Gothic conventions. In other words, with the recognition of the affectation of Gothic fantasies, Joan’s life pattern based on multiple selves and escapes has finally turned into a point of resistance against the ideal feminine image and formulaic plots in Gothic fiction.
Such an ending also indicates that through a postmodernist reading, readers are encouraged to understand and reject the fantasy Gothic Romance produces
formulaically. It can be understood that the Gothic romances that feature the ideal
Huang 69 heterosexual family, the ideal female image, and romantic love are an apparatus that society uses to consolidate the gender construction based upon the patriarchal
ideology. Atwood’s parody of the Gothic conventions challenges or even subverts this perfect “mimetic realism” of Gothic fiction. Nowadays, the crucial problem is not only about how to distinguish fantasy and reality as depicted in “the Story-Haunted”
but also about how to face fantasy and reality.
It needs to be emphasized that Joan’s multiple selves not only evoke a response to dominant patriarchal discourse featuring reason and simplicity but, more important, construct a new philosophy featuring inclusion rather than exclusion. Instead of celebrating a temporary suspense of the patriarchal law like that in the carnival, Joan’s multiple selves, which involve the disintegration of unity, exist outside of the law.
Eleonora Rao suggests that Atwood’s texts partake of a logic of “both/and” rather than
“either/or” (xviii). Joan’s acceptance of multiple selves embodies this logic. With the example that Joan, besides being Joan Foster, needs to be Louisa K. Delacourt as well, Rao proposes that Joan needs both reality and fantasy. She argues, “Joan’s stories represent for her a way of enjoying, in close conjunction, both fantasy and reality, something which Arthur could not possibly have accepted. For Joan it is not an
either/or: it is an and” (93). What Rao tries to advance here is that Joan’s multiple
selves represent an inclusion of contradictory concepts such as reality and fantasy, which Joan needs both to maintain the balance of her life. On one hand, Joan works on her Gothic fantasy as Louisa K. Delacourt but on the other hand, in her real life, she tries to be an ideal wife according to social expectations. Only when she can play both roles well does Joan feels a sense of security. Hence, in terms of Joan’s multiple selves, reality and fantasy do not exclude each other but work as complementary elements.With the courage to open the door to confront reality, Joan ultimately comes to
Huang 70 comprehend that she relies on not only the Gothic fantasy but also on the real life, which explains why she is unable to live only with either the Royal Porcupine or Arthur. Compared with Joan, there is no reality in Royal Porcupine’s life because for him “reality and fantasy were the same thing” (270) while there is no fantasy for Arthur, who completely denies it, considering the Gothic Romance as “trash of the lowest order” (31).29 Only Joan, once caught in the web interwoven by fantasy and reality, relies on both and realizes both. Her journey to search for female subjectivity blurs the boundary between reality and fantasy. In addition to breaking the
dichotomous concept, the logic of “both/and” further corresponds to the feminine refusal to be defined. Therefore, the mobility of Joan’s multiple selves not only criticizes the formulaic Gothic conventions but also provide the way out of the confinement of patriarchal ideology. This mobility is a transformed escapism which indicates a self-conscious exploration of alternate space and forms. It means a release from cultural constraints rather than just simply running away. By recognizing the true significance of her multiple selves, Joan is able to go beyond the norm that her mother and society have been trying to impose on her and starts a new life with autonomous agency.
29 In fact Arthur has fantasy too, though he totally denies it. Joan, while in Italy alone, recalls that “he liked living out of suitcases. It must’ve made him feel like a political refugee, which was probably one of his fantasies, though he never said so” (20).
Huang 71
Chapter Four: Conclusion
In Lady Oracle Atwood parodies the Gothic conventions to call into question the Gothic genre and the ideology it implies. In the first chapter, the historical review of the Gothic shows that the genre itself possesses several unique characteristics.
Although the prime of the Gothic novels only lasts around half of a century, from Walpole’s Otranto (1764) to Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), the Gothic genre has built a solid set of conventions which was widely employed thereafter.
Furthermore, because of the excess of the conventional Gothic elements, the Gothic becomes a target of many parodies, such as Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, by which the Gothic presents its nature of self-consciousness. Both writers and critics explore it to discuss issues about imagination, escapes and female subjectivities.
There is no exception in Lady Oracle; the crucial point is how Atwood not only rewrites the Gothic, but transcends its conventions as well to question the gender construction behind it. Through a postmodernist reading, the nature of self-reflexivity is clearly revealed in Atwood’s parodic Gothic and it is also the self-reflexivity that endows Joan’s multiple selves with the power to free herself from the confinement of patriarchy.
The nature of self-reflexivity is one of the problematics that I have worked on in my thesis. Critical interpretations of Lady Oracle have stressed Atwood’s parodic treatment of the Gothic genre through which the self-consciousness of the artificiality in the Gothic has been widely discussed. What critics pay little attention to is the significance of this particular sense of self-consciousness for Joan’s multiple selves.
Most of them tend to define Joan’s multiple selves as either an escape from patriarchy or a strategy against patriarchal rule. My reading, however, emphasizes how
self-reflexivity bestows new meanings to Joan’s multiple selves and thereby
empowers her. To examine Lady Oracle by analyzing what parody means to Joan as a
Huang 72 Gothic reader provides a more comprehensive perspective on Atwood’s parody of the Gothic.
Atwood explores the Gothic from the viewpoints of both Gothic writers and Gothic readers. From this aspect, there are two layers of Atwood’s parody of the Gothic—the parody of Joan’s Gothic works and that of her real life. In reality, Joan is a Gothic reader who indulges and believes in Gothic fantasy. As a result, she tends to cast real people in stereotyped Gothic characters. Her dependence on the Gothic fantasy causes her many troubles and comically makes her a Gothic heroine on the run. Such a comedic vision becomes one important part of Atwood’s parody of fixed feminine images in the Gothic conventions.
On the other hand, Joan’s problems about her relationship with her mother and her various identities will not be solved until she rethinks and rewrites her own Gothic tales. As a Gothic writer, Joan goes through three phases of Gothic creation. At first, she uses her aunt’s name to publish Costume Gothics, which are filled with the clichés of the Gothic genre. This is the most obvious part of Atwood’s parody of the Gothic conventions. Then, when Joan has difficulty in reaching a pre-supposed ending to one of her Costume Gothic novels, she tries the automatic writing and creates the feminist
Lady Oracle. This series of verses that inverts the Gothic elements is a metamorphosis
of Joan’s former conventional Gothic romances, and the three-faceted goddess in the poem further symbolizes female anger under the confinement of gender construction.This second phase of Joan’s writing indicates Joan’s gradual awakening from the constraint of patriarchy, and foreshadows her parodic reconstruction of her own Gothic novels. At last, after Joan fakes her death and listens to her mother’s anger, she works on her last Costume Gothic novel, Stalked by Love. In this novel, not only the Gothic conventions are reversed but the boundary between fantasy and reality blurs.
Two female protagonists in Stalked by Love enter the maze and confront all Joan’s
Huang 73 fears. Stalked by Love is Atwood’s parody as well as Joan’s. Joan releases herself from the Gothic conventions by parodying her own Gothic romances and her self-reflecting parody endows meanings on her multiple selves.
With her realization of the nature of fabrication in the Gothic, Joan comprehends the mechanics of gender construction in patriarchal thinking. Her multiple selves, therefore, stand for a refusal of the fixed feminine role prescribed by patriarchy, and represents the mobility that enables Joan to accommodate all
possibilities, including contradictions between reality and fantasy. Now Joan, herself, is the Lady Oracle with multiple faces who has the power to embrace her own future.
Hence, in Lady Oracle, Atwood parodies Joan’s life/ reality and her Gothic
writing/fantasy to undermine the seemingly realistic conventions of the Gothic from within. Through the parody of the genre, she successfully examines how gender is constructed in the genre, and how these constructions may be challenged and changed.
Huang 74
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