Unhappy Goddess in “Lady Oracle”

Joan’s quest for her dead mother is a reversal of the archetypal mother-daughter / Demeter-Persephone plot. In the Greek mythology, Persephone is the daughter of Demeter, the goddess of fertility and agriculture. While gathering flowers, Persephone is abducted by Hades, the god of the underworld. Demeter mourns ceaselessly for her lost child and all life withers and dies from her grief. Finally, at the command of Zeus, Persephone is allowed to spend half of each year with her mother (Zimmerman 200). In Lady Oracle, however, it is the daughter’s task to harken to the mother’s cry for understanding from the underworld.

Joan gives a vivid picture of experiencing her first underground journey: “I was walking along a corridor, I was descending. […] There was the sense of going along a narrow passage that led downward” (LO 266, 268). Further, this journey is triggered by

“psychological necessity”(Howells 70). For Joan, writing Gothic romances or creating happy endings can never satisfy her imagnination, alleviate her pain, or fill her innermost hollowness. Confronted with her writing blocks, Joan admits that she “need[s] to find

someone” (LO 266). She is convinced that she sees “someone in the mirror, or rather in the room, standing behind [her]” and that the person has “a message for [her]” (LO 267). It is her mother, transformed into the unhappy Goddess, who delivers the message: “At first the sentences centered around the same figure, the same woman. After a while I could almost see her: she lived under the earth somewhere, or inside something, a cave or a huge building;

sometimes she was on a boat. She was enormously powerful, almost like a goddess, but it was an unhappy power” (LO 269). The message is revealed in bizzare words, such as

“iron,” “throat,” “knife,” and “heart” (LO 269). Joan, in the center of word puzzle, is unable to interpret these words, but Atwood’s readers can see their explicit connection with Joan’s mother who is considered as cold as “iron” and who once uses a “knife” to hurt Joan, breaking her “heart.” Her mother’s existence cannot be denied even though Joan tries to distance herself from the unhappy Goddess by saying that “certainly she had nothing to do with me. I wasn’t at all like that, I was happy” (LO 269). In accordance with the myth of Demeter and Persephone, a breach caused by separation and death is undone by the mother’s power to fulfill a mutual desire for connection (Hirsch 5). When the daughter sets forth on a psychological jouney to rediscover her mother, the mother simultaneously calls her daughter, awakening in her a desire to know the untold story. Finally, the mother’s unhappiness is channeled through her daughter’s lines. As Joan says, “Lady Oracle” helps her “find the truth [and the] person that was waiting for [her]” (LO 268). Her mother, in a sense, is her muse to whom Joan owes her visionary poems.

The myth of Demeter and Persephone also represents the rebirth archetype.

Persephone’s rebirth and the renewal of life depend on her return to her mother. Joan, like Persephone, surfaces from the underworld with new knowledge which allows her “to assume the role of artist, synonymous with seer” (Rigney 7). Returning from the negotiation with her dead mother, Joan creates a book which is not so “Gothic” as her previous novels. She confesses that

[o]n rereading, the book seemed quite peculiar. In fact, except for the diction, it seemed a lot like one of my standard Costume Gothics, but a Gothic gone wrong.

It was upside-down somehow. There were the sufferings, the hero in the mask of a villain, the villain in the mask of a hero, the flights, the looming death, the sense of being imprisoned, but there was no happy ending, no true love. (LO 282) According to Gothic conventions, the heroines are supposed to suffer in exchange for men’s love and protection in the setting of a heterosexual marriage. Joan unwittingly challenges the golden rules of Gothic romances, namely, true love and a happy ending. In a sense, she calls into question the reasons for the Gothic heroines’ suffering. “Lady Oracle” is well received by feminists because the poems are thought to be about the struggle between the sexes in the disguise of a sad story of an unhappy queen and her knight “who [is] evil… but it [is] hard to tell” (LO 269). This book is interpreted by Joan’s reviewers as a furious

comment on love and marriage: “Modern love and the sexual battle, dissected with a cutting edge and shocking honesty” (LO 283). Joan refuses to see this book as complaints about her own marriage; however, “Lady Oracle” does express her inner voice. As Joan recalls, her husband never knows that behind her “compassionate smile” is “a set of tightly clenched teeth, and behind that a legion of voices, crying, What about me? What about my own pain?

When is it my turn?” (LO 107, italics original). Both an understanding of her mother’s unhappiness and her assimilation of her mother’s enormous power contribute to Joan’s

acknowledgement of her creativity and her first subversive rewriting of romance conventions.

I regard “Lady Oracle” as a turning point in Joan’s writing career not only because it is significantly different from her previous Gothic novels but also because in writing it she is compelled to face the urgent need to deal with her traumatic relationship with her mother.

In other words, she cannot escape listening to the (m)other’s voice. As Cathy Caruth argues,

“the voice of the other addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality or truth which cannot be linked only to what is known, but also to what remains unknown in our very actions and

our language” (4). The truth about her mother is that she has her own story, her own wound. “Through the very possibility and surprise of listening to another’s wound,” Caruth suggests, Joan will understand that “one’s own trauma is tied up with the trauma of another”

(8). Central to their reunion is the restoration of their speech and their mutual comfort in communication (Grace 38). Even though her mother is dead, Joan can change her life and repair their relationship.