The turning point happens when Joan uses her real name to publish Lady
Oracle, a Gothic gone wrong. Prior to Lady Oracle, Joan had secretly published a
great number of Costume Gothics under her aunt’s name. These Gothic romances, though they give her some pleasure, fail to guarantee her integrity. She longs to be acknowledged as the true Joan Foster by the public but simultaneously fears it. One day, as she came to a dead end in her Costume Gothic, Love, My Ransom, Joan decides to “simulate” the scene that she is working on. This is her first attempt at automatic writing which symbolizes her consciousness of the formulaic nature of conventional Gothic novels. Joan used to produce her Costume Gothics mechanically.Following the Gothic conventions, she closes her eyes and let the formulaic plot unroll itself. This kind of mechanic production always works until Joan is writing
Love, My Ransom, when the Gothic formulae cannot satisfy her any more. Thus, she
simulates the scene of her Gothic romance by trying automatic writing. To her surprise, she composes instead several feminist poems. These poems born from automatic writing are a creation of spontaneity, different from her former mechanic reproduction of the fixed paradigmatic Gothic tales.The automation writing draws forth those that are innermost in Joan’s
Huang 59 mind—her confusion, anxiety, and fears of the patriarchal ideology. Through the process of automatic writing, Joan escapes from the frame of her conscious thought and has chance to explore her unconscious world. In other words, while trying automatic writing, Joan gets out of the rational patriarchal discourse but enters an unknown space where she encounters her thoughts and emotions that have been repressed by patriarchy before. Hence, the automatic writing is a significant step in Joan’s artistic as well as personal “awakening.”
In Joan’s eyes, her poems look like her Costume Gothics, but this time it is “a Gothic gone wrong. It was upside down somehow… [because] there was no happy ending, no true love” (232). The female figure in one of her poems is no longer a pure Gothic heroine but one whose tears are “the death you fear” (221). Joan’s feminist poems that reverse the conventional Gothic elements are actually the metamorphosis of her former Costume Gothic. However, she has not yet sensed the analogy between her Gothic works and her real life at this moment. She will not get the point until she works on her last Costume Gothic, Stalked by Love, which I will discuss in the next section.
Later, she published her poems, Lady Oracle, under her own name and received an encouraging review which she knows clearly is fabricated by her editors who make sure that they have sent the book to someone would like it. Yet, a disaster – and what worries her most – is followed by her exposure of her true self. It is too difficult for others, not to mention her husband, Arthur, to believe in her talent and her automatic writing, Instead of pulling her selves together after publishing Lady Oracle under her real name, Joan finds it harder and harder to grab reality, feeling the author of Lady
Oracle is not herself. She confesses how she feels threatened by what is happening
around her and to her, “It was as if someone with my name were out there in the real world, impersonating me, saying things I’d never said but which appeared in theHuang 60 newspapers,…my dark twin…She wanted to kill me and take my place” (250). While endeavoring to unite her fragmented selves, she ends up being haunted by her
multiple selves, including the names of Aunt Lou, the ghost of her mother and in particular the image of the Fat Lady.
After she becomes a public figure following the success of Lady Oracle, the Fat Lady, who used to walk across the tightrope in her dreams, loses her balance and falls
“in a slow motion, turning over and over on the way down” (250). The Fat Lady in Joan’s dream embodies Joan’s fear in her real life. The Fat Lady’s endeavor to keep her balance on the tightrope parallels Joan’s wary arrangement of her multiple selves in order to live up to the social expectations. However, now while she reveals one of her selves to the public, the Fat Lady falls in her dream. Her falling in a slow motion vividly depicts Joan’s panic of losing her balance which has always been tottering.
Later, Joan leaves the Royal Porcupine. While she prepares to tell the truth about her self to Arthur, wishing him to bring her back to safety, this time she cannot help but see the Fat Lady skating gracefully with the thinnest man in the world on the ice. The Fat Lady intrudes into Joan’s real life now. Yet, as the thin man lifts the Fat Lady and throws her, the Fat Lady is floated up and hung in suspense. Her secret that, although she is large, she is actually very light is disclosed. “They had to keep her [the Fat Lady] tethered to her bed or she’d drift away, all night she strained at the ropes….
They were going to shoot her down in cold blood, explode her, despite the fact that she had now burst into song” (274). At this time, the floating Fat Lady, who cannot reach the solid ground, symbolizes Joan fears that there will be no hope for her to go back to the social order. Worse still, she is terrified that this social order might be going to destroy her. While Joan ventures to build her own subjectivity, the
predicament of the Fat Lady which embodies Joan’s fear, is more and more alarming.
Subsequently, while receiving anonymous telephone calls and notes, the Polish
Huang 61 Count reaches Joan and makes Joan again fantasize about him as her “lost love” and
“rescuer” (280). But at this moment she knows well that this kind of fantasy provides no comfort and help; her life has evolved into a situation beyond her control. There is no hope of being rescued by her “heroes”—Paul, Arthur, Chuck Brewer. Where is the outlet for this Gothic “reality”? The visit of Fraser Buchanan makes the situation even worse. His inquiry about Joan intensifies her terror of the exposure of her multiple identities. At first, with her multiple identities, Joan fears that no one knows her true self; yet at last what frightens her is that someone might have found out about her true identity. Her multiple selves at this moment become a confinement from which she struggles to free herself. Escaping from her self-made entrapment ironically makes Joan a literal Gothic heroine on the run.
As she attempts to organize the riddle of her chaotic life, Joan suddenly
suspects it is Arthur who is behind all of the mysterious notes and telephone calls and is trying to destroy her. The success of bringing her genuine self to the public only results in the need for her to execute this public self. And to plot her own death again renders her the playwright as well as the persecuted heroine once more. Joan
unwittingly transforms her life into a Gothic tale which is set in Italy this time.
Intending to create a new self in Italy after her fake death, Joan, with a new name, is eager to discard her former selves. She decides to cut off her too noticeable
“waist-length red hair” (10); afterward she burns it over the gas burners and dyes her hair. Then she buries her clothes, feeling as if she is getting rid of “the corpse” (16) of someone she has killed. Nevertheless, this kind of ritual does not succeed in expelling those ghosts of her selves; her former selves, like her past, are still haunting her, making her life more gothic:
Below me, in the foundations of the house, I could hear the clothes I’d buried there growing themselves a body. It was almost completed; it was digging itself
Huang 62 out, like a huge blind mole, slowly and painfully shambling up the hill to the balcony…a creature composed of all the flesh that used to be mine and which must have gone somewhere. (321)
All her dreadful former selves have flesh and blood, going to devour their
creator—Joan Foster. What is worse is that Joan is considered a witch by local people after they discover she had burned her clothes, cut her hair, and appeared with a new name. Joan wonders, “If I got a black dress and long black stockings, then would they like me?” (337). However, in reality, even with the right clothes things will not just become all right like the person in her costume gothic.
Not knowing what else she can do, Joan decides to run away again, but fails because someone has drained the tank of her car, which renders her life an even more ridiculous version of Gothic plots about blackmail and kidnapping. She pictures how she will be tortured: “would they keep me in a cage and fatten me up as was done among primitive tribes in Africa, but with huge plates of pasta, would they make me wear black satin underwear…would I become one of those Fellini whores, gigantic and shapeless?” (329). Having come this far, Joan’s fantasy is becoming more and more absurd. And with her death under the investigation, there is no way back to her life before. What else can she rely on when her fantasy is no longer sufficiently convincing to comfort her? What if people find the truth of her fake death? What will happen if she comes to admit that the Gothic plots she depends on is only mimetic realism?
Regardless of all these unsolvable problems from the past, Joan tries to
concentrate on her Costume Gothic so as to make a living like before. However, while working on Stalked by Love she has difficulty reaching the pre-supposed ending. She gets tired of the heroine, Charlotte, and feels sympathetic towards the villainess, Felicia. As discussed in the second chapter, this is Joan’s start to parody the
Huang 63 conventional Gothic. She cannot simply believe those formulaic Gothic characters and plots any more. This time in her dream the Fat Lady rises into the air and then descends on her. Joan is absorbed into the Fat Lady. The past haunts her, and drives her to face the unsolved conflict between the model feminine image and her true self.
She has transformed into her character Felicia, who has not drowned but has returned to Redmond, calling Redmond by the name of Arthur and begging for his love. Her separation of reality and fantasy no longer works now. Her Costume Gothic and her real life overlap and mingle together.
Parallel to Joan’s situation, both Charlotte and Felicia, who represent different aspects of Joan, go inside the maze. Charlotte, a standard female model, goes into the maze even although Joan warns her worriedly. Her journey inside the maze proceeds well but soon she regrets this, since she is now anxious to go out but is caught by Felicia. Charlotte’s adventure corresponds precisely to Joan’s pursuit for the norm in the patriarchal maze and Joan’s uncertainty followed. The plot in which Charlotte
encounters Felicia is a parallelism with Joan’s fabricated identity meeting her true self.
In Stalked by Love, Charlotte is rescued in time, as in the conventional Gothic plot.
Yet, Joan is unable to be contented with such an outcome; hence she makes Felicia, who stands for Joan’s inner self, go into the maze as well. Contrary to Charlotte’s happy ending, Felicia encounters four women who grotesquely embody Joan’s fears originating in the past and which have haunted Joan throughout her life:
The third was middle-aged, dressed in a strange garment that ended halfway up her calves, with a ratty piece of fur around her neck. The last one was
enormously fat. She was wearing a pair of pink tights and a short pink skirt covered with spangles. From her head sprouted two antennae, like a butterfly’s, and a pair of obviously false wings was pinned to her back. (341).
Aunt Lou’s impact and the humiliation of performing as a mothball come to life. Joan
Huang 64 cannot escape from these problems all her life. The only way out of the maze is the door that Redmond guards. The door symbolizes the juncture between patriarchal ideology and the desired freedom. Resisting the temptation of Redmond’s embrace, namely the happiness patriarchy promises, Felicia/Joan realizes the true nature of the Redmond/ Arthur/ patriarchy. Redmond “was a killer in disguise, he wanted to murder her as he had murdered his other wives….He wanted to replace her with the other one, the next one, thin and flawless” (343)
While Redmond is about to kill Felicia, in the meantime, Joan hears footsteps outside the door of her Italian residence. Joan chooses not to escape and instead opens the door, staying where she is and facing reality. She is aware that she has spent too much of her life “crouching behind closed doors, listening to the voice on the other side” (341). Mustering up her courage, she turns the handle easily and overcomes the man outside. Shocked by her own strength, Joan says, “I certainly didn’t think I would knock him out like that; I suppose it’s a case of not knowing your own
strength” (344). Feeling sorry about what she has done, she takes care of that man and determines to go back to Canada to face the problem of her multiple selves. There is no specific ending of Lady Oracle, yet instead of escaping, Joan no longer merely believes in the formulaic Gothic romances but has power to resist them. It takes Joan a long time, struggling to come to this moment of enlightenment.
The first step of her awakening occurs when she listens to her mother’s anger rather than habitually identifying with Aunt Lou’s escapism. Throughout Joan’s life, the depression of her mother is embodied in various forms to deliver messages to Joan, who nevertheless is never capable of deciphering them. The first time happens when Leda tells her that her mother’s astral body stands unhappily behind her in Jordan Chapel. The second message comes when Joan sees her mother, who weeps even more desperately than before, in London. Meanwhile Joan does not know that her
Huang 65 mother has died; it is when she receives her father’s telegram that she speculates whether her mother has something to tell her. But at that time, Joan is unable to
realize her mother’s tears and still dreams of her mother as “three-headed,” “menacing and cold” (213). Later, as her mother’s ghost appears at her wedding, Joan, feeling sympathy for her, starts to contemplate why her mother, who has devoted her whole life to building a “happy” family, receives no appreciation.
Ultimately, when she has no way out of her dilemma in Italy for the first time, Joan listens to her mother cautiously and tries to understand her:
She was dressed in her trim navy-blue suit with the tight waist and shoulder pads, and her white hat and gloves. Her face made up, she’d drawn a bigger mouth around her mouth with lipstick, but the shape of her mouth showed through. She was crying soundlessly, she pressed her face against the glass like a child, mascara ran from her eyes in black tears. (329)
Gradually, Joan comes to realize that what has caused her mother’s tragedy is the conflict between the patriarchal confinement and feminine subjectivity. She then reinterprets the meaning of her name: “Maybe my mother didn’t name me after Joan Crawford after all, I thought; she just told me that to cover up. She named me after Joan of Arc…” (337). Faced with the mission of breaking the myth of patriarchy, which her mother has expected her to accomplish, Joan again wants to escape on the impulse:
Didn’t she know what happened to women like that? They were accused of witchcraft, they were roped to the stake, they gave a lovely light; a star is a blob of burning gas. But I was a coward, I’d rather not win and not burn, I’d rather sit in the grandstand eating my bag of popcorn and watch along with everyone else. (337)
At this moment, Joan experiences the pain of seeing through the patriarchal fantasy,
Huang 66 and yet is afraid of possessing the power of insight.28 She thinks it will be easier to be an innocent woman who simply believes in the fantastic world that Gothic romances create.
Despite the fact that Leda Sprott tells her about her power, Joan always tries to evade it and keeps on asking herself: “I wasn’t sure I really wanted great powers.
What if something went wrong? What if I failed, enormously and publicly?... It was easier not to try” (108). Unfortunately, her fear does come true: she creates a Lady a woman of dark power in her book, Lady Oracle— “She was enormously powerful, almost like a goddess, but it was an unhappy power” (221) At that time, she refuses to admit her power, either, and continues to say “I wasn’t at all like that [Lady Oracle], I was happy. Happy and inept.” (221). Resisting her mission, she pretend to be dead in order to flee from all troubles. It is after a long journey that she has the courage to open the door; and at last she can bravely face Arthur who for a long time has been the measure for her behavior. Now she says “He [Arthur] loves me under false pretense, so I shouldn’t feel too rejected when he stops” (345).