國立交通大學
外國文學與語言學研究所文學組
碩士論文
女性自我之重塑：
瑪格莉特‧愛特伍德《女神諭》中的嘲仿志異
Refashioning Female Selfhood:
Parodic Gothic in Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle
研究生：黃怡潔
指導教授：馮品佳博士
摘要 瑪格莉特‧愛特伍德的《女神諭》是一部從多角度嘲仿志異的作品。愛特伍 德不謹藉由嘲仿志異來探討志異小說的傳統，更深入思考此一傳統如何影響女性 讀者，進而試圖為女性尋找走出此一傳統限制的可能性。愛特伍德的嘲仿志異從 小說的女主角（瓊‧佛斯特）展開，瓊本身就是一個浪漫志異小說的讀者與作家， 身為讀者，瓊過度沈溺於志異的幻想中而於現實生活面臨許多窘境，她為自己捏 造各種身份來解決問題，結果卻讓自己活得更像志異小說中被恐懼籠罩的女主 角，直到她嘲仿自己的志異小說，才看穿志異小說背後性別建構機制，也由於這 一層體悟給予她的多重身份新的意義和力量。值得注意的是瓊的問題來自於志異 傳統最後解決於重寫志異，愛特伍德則由嘲仿志異而突破此文類的陳規，這種在 問題內檢視問題的自我反省模式正是本文所欲討論的，自我反省的風格同為志異 文類和後現代主義的精神，我將分三章來討論愛特伍德如何藉由嘲仿展現此一精 神。論文第一章，首先經由回顧志異小說的發展歷史來呈現志異小說的傳統及其 與女性讀者的關係，最後回到愛特伍德創造《女神諭》的時空背景來推論其創作 動機；論文第二章，由瓊的志異創作和現實生活兩個層面來分析愛特伍德如何嘲 仿志異文類；論文第三章，釐清瓊所面對的恐懼為何，以及其後她如何藉由重寫 自己的志異小說而理解志異文類中性別建構的運作，最後走出恐懼面對自己。而 愛特伍德對志異嘲仿同時也於瓊的自我反省和自我探索旅程中完成。 關鍵字：嘲仿、志異、後現代主義、瑪格莉特‧愛特伍德
Abstract
Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle, a story centering upon Joan Foster, a Gothic writer of Romance, presents a parodic vision of the Gothic conventions. In this novel, Atwood revamps and probes the Gothic conventions to reflect how people,
particularly women, are shaped by them and to look into the im/possibility of
constructing female subjectivities within a patriarchal ideology. 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,” as a Gothic reader, Joan’s dependence on the Gothic fantasy makes her a Gothic heroine on the run. Such a comedic vision becomes a part of Atwood’s parody of the 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 in which she finally finds the exit from the Gothic maze. She releases herself from the Gothic conventions by parodying her own Gothic romances and her self-reflecting parody also bestows meanings upon her multiple selves. Through the 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. 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. She successfully examines how gender is constructed in the genre, and how these constructions can be challenged and changed.
Acknowledgements
Writing a thesis is a journey for me through which I stumble and learn. At first, it even seemed to be a journey without an end. Searching for new ideas, making them coherent, and strive for the right words and the correct format are all a painful process of learning for me. Hence, I realize that this thesis does not solely belong to me. I could never accomplish it without so many people’s help. I must express my respect and sincere gratitude to my advisor, Professor Pin-chi Feng. Without her instruction, encouragement, and endless patience, I wouldn’t have enough confidence to finish my thesis in time. And I would like to say thank you to Professor Ying-hsiung Chou and Professor Kwan-wai Yu for their valuable suggestions regarding my thesis. I am also deeply thankful for the support and profound love from my family. At last my special thanks to my friends, Michelle, Irene, Myra, and Ginhan who always comfort me whenever I feel frustrated. Thanks for all of you to accompany me on my thesis journey.
Table of Contents
Chapter One: Historical Review of the Gothic Convention...3
1.1 Introduction...3
1.2 Historical Retrospection of the Gothic Genre ...3
1.3 An Overview on Researches on the Gothic Conventions ...7
1.4 The Gothic as a Female Genre...10
1.5 The Gothic Genre as Escapist Genre ...16
1.6 Contextualizing Lady Oracle ...18
Chapter Two: Refashioning the Gothic Conventions ...25
2.1 The Danger of the Fantasy in the Gothic...25
2.2 Parodies of the Gothic in Joan’s Costume Gothic Style ...27
2.3 The Value of Reading the Gothic Style...31
2.4 Parodies of the Gothic Conventions in Joan’s Life ...34
Chapter Three: Rethinking Womanhood ...45
3.1 Female Bodies...46
3.2 The Norm Prescribed for Women ...50
3.3 Multiple Selves in Lady Oracle...54
3.4 The Recognition of the Nature of Reality ...58
3.5 The Mobility of Multiple Selves...66
Chapter Four: Conclusion ...71
Chapter One: Historical Review of the Gothic Conventions 1.1 Introduction
In her book, The Canadian Postmodern: A Study of Contemporary
English-Canadian Fiction, Linda Hutcheon designates self-reflexivity as a prominent
feature of postmodernism, whose embodiment in the literary field is parody. Hutcheon proposes that parodies of literary conventions indicate the awareness that literature is made out of literature; this kind of self-consciousness further turns into a means to reflect and interrogate the traditional humanist belief. It is the parodic uses and abuses of the conventions that make parody a typical apparatus for introspection in
postmodernist literature. From Hutcheon’s point of view, Margaret Atwood’s works, among postmodernist Canadian literary pieces, represent the illustration of such a parody of literary conventions.1
Lady Oracle is a story centering upon a Gothic writer of romance, Joan Foster,
who has lived her life with multiple identities and is always fleeing from various difficult situations. Her tale begins right after her fake death as she tells her story to a reporter. The structure of a story about story-telling first implies its involvement of narrative self-reflexivity. More important, Atwood revamps the Gothic conventions rather than merely treating them as a style, and probes these conventions to reflect how people, particularly women, are shaped by them. In other words, with the Gothic as a thematic and a narrative device, Atwood reexamines, in a humorous tone, the Gothic conventions in Lady Oracle to undermine the mystique of the Gothic so as to explore the theme of female confinement. In my thesis, I intend to investigate, through a postmodernist reading, how Margaret Atwood revisits the Gothic conventions by means of parodies to look into the im/possibility of constructing
1
For a detailed discussion of Canadian postmodernism and the relation of Margaret Atwood’s works with it, see Hutcheon’s The Canadian Postmodern, especially 1-23 and 138-157.
Huang 2 female subjectivities within a patriarchal ideology.
Critical readings of Lady Oracle could be divided roughly into two contrary camps. Some stress that the multiple identities of the protagonist, Joan, is an
illustration of her escape pattern from complicated reality, and what she tries to learn is how to piece her fragmented selves together to form an integrated self. Conversely, others perceive her various identities as a survival strategy which enables her to own subversive power against a patriarchal context.2 In other words, Joan’s multiple identities used to be deciphered as either an escape from reality or a strategy against patriarchy. My reading, however, emphasizes how Joan comes to realize the nature of reality and patriarchy through struggling among her multiple selves.3 Only after she sees through the sexual polarity hidden in the mimetic realism of Gothic novels she has been reading can she turn her multiple selves into a weapon to fight against the fixed gender roles that the patriarchy imposed upon women. Thus I would like to study the process of Joan’s struggle between reality and fantasy through which she gains the insight into the mechanism of the patriarchic gender construction.
My thesis is divided into three parts. In the first chapter, I aim to investigate how the Gothic style is viewed as a female genre by studying its conventions. I intend to focus on the Gothic tradition step by step, starting from the review of the
development of the Gothic and its nature, and proceeding to the emergence of the term female Gothic, then to its major themes, especially that of escape, and finally to the social context in which Atwood creates a Gothic heroine on the run. The second part of my thesis consists of a close reading of the Costume Gothic Joan writes, and the dilemma she encounters in her real life, to analyze how Margaret Atwood parodies
2
For essays alluding to Joan’s multiple selves, see Rosowski; Stein 41-63; Rao 64-73; Masse 250-264; Stales; Chen and Lee.
3
In her M.A. thesis, “The Three Metamorphoses in Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle,” Chia-fung Lin holds similar viewpoints, contending that the protagonist’s recreation of herself is a transformation. She analyzed it with the three metamorphoses in Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
Huang 3 the Gothic conventions. Following the close textual analysis, I will proceed to study how Joan transforms her multiple selves into a strategy to fight against the imposed norm of ideal woman of patriarchy in the last chapter to examine how Atwood’s parody of the Gothic demystifies the genre and suggests the possibility of an alternative female subjectivity.
1.2 Historical Retrospection of the Gothic Genre
First, the original Gothic pattern deserves an examination. A brief historical retrospect of the rise and fall of the Gothic conventions provides the basic
understanding of the development of the Gothic.4 Literary critics and historians mostly agree that Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story (1764) starts the genre of the Gothic fiction. The genre has flourished from approximately the end of the 18th century when Clara Reeve publishes The Old English Baron: A Gothic
Story (1778), written in imitation of Walpole’s Castle of Otranto. Near the end of the
century, Ann Radcliffe, who distinguishes herself by The Mysterious of Udolpho (1794), and Matthew Lewis, celebrated for his creation of The Monk (1796), with other anonymous writers at that time, establish the tradition of the Gothic genre. Typically the Gothic conventions include medieval or remote settings, such as ruined abbeys, castles and graveyards, ghosts or supernatural power, tyrannical heroes and persecuted heroines. Mental stimulations, emerging from the gloomy castle, diabolical deeds, or even the enactments of licentious desires, are not only the source of terror but that of pleasure. This kind of overindulgence in fantastic ideas which challenges reason and morality constructs a subversive power of the Gothic. However, before long, the excess and clichés of the Gothic conventions make them a target of many
4
In this introductory historical overview I consulted Botting’s Gothic, Geary’s The Supernatural in
Huang 4 satires and parodies. Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1803), for instance, is one of the most outstanding examples. The prime of the Gothic novels did not last long, though the genre prevails. It is generally acknowledged that the Gothic heyday ended in the year when Charles Robert Maturin presented Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), a fantastic tale about wanderers; it is generally regarded as the last “true” Gothic text.5 Nevertheless, the Gothic mode, which in a broader sense delves into the dark side of society and the human psyche, has been transformed and incorporated into various other genres, instead of falling into demise. The gloomy Romantic heroes in Romantic literature, for instance, are greatly inspired by some Gothic images. The wanderers—a Gothic figure condemned to roam on the edge of society— is a typical Romantic hero of the Gothic mold, such as the one in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The
Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798). In addition, a Byronic hero, alienated from the
rest of the world owing to his extreme passion, is another transformation of Gothic villain. Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë is one archetypal example of the tortured Byronic hero with passions strong enough to destroy himself and people around him. Accordingly, Maggie Kilgour suggests that some might consider the Gothic as “a transitional and rather puerile form which is superseded by the more mature ‘high’ art of the superior Romantics, such as Coleridge, Keats, and especially, Byron [Lord Byron] who both realizes and renders redundant the gothic hero-villain” (3).
It is in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1831) that a new type of Gothic figure is created. The monster in Frankenstein is one both natural and unnatural, living and dead, human and inhuman, blurring all established boundaries. On the other hand,
5
In his introduction of The Supernatural in Gothic Fiction, Geary points out that critics generally agree that Walpole’s Otranto (1764) inaugurates the age of the Gothic fiction, but they hold diverse viewpoints about its end. Some regard Maturin’s Melmoth (1820) as the end; others think James Hoggs’s The Private Memoirs and Confession of a Justified Sinner (1824) is the one.
Huang 5 Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847) forges representative Gothic female
heroines —the secret insane wife and the plain governess, reserved but talented, and the young innocent heiress. What is in common among them is the imprisonment from which they try to escape. Issues about the recurrence of the escape theme in the Gothic will be discussed later.
Later in the nineteenth century, the Gothic mode is continuously deployed within “the forms of realism, sensation novels and ghost stories especially” (Botting 113). In the mid-nineteenth century, the Gothic European tradition is further
disseminated to the new world of North America where writers of the Gothic tradition, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Brockden Brown and Edgar Allen Poe, attempt to free themselves from the Gothic conventions rooted in the European continent, to endow it with a new life within the American context. Eugenia C. Delamotte suggests that what they use is the “Gothicists’ techniques if not all of their material” (8). In other words, American novels in the Gothic style do not simply inherit the Gothic elements but display the transformation of them: for example, the replacement of wilderness for haunted castles. In addition to new forms of traditional Gothic images, the terrors of supernatural forces are also substituted for the dark corner in the human mind and society, like “mysteries and guilty secrets from communal and family pasts” (Botting 114-15). Meanwhile, Gothic writing is less discernible in Britain. By the mid-nineteenth century, the terror and horror of the Gothic are represented in “Ghost stories” and “sensation novels” in England. The difference of these types of narrative from the earlier time is that the realistic scenes take the place of supernatural mystery; for example, the urban Gothic in which representations of cities’ horror lead to an interrogation of social justice. The shifts of the Gothic conventions in both Britain and North America during this period are evident in “the domestication of the Gothic styles and devices within realistic setting and modes of writing,” because the
Huang 6 medieval background and the aristocratic villains are no longer the objects of terror in the bourgeois culture of the nineteenth century (Botting 123).
What deserve more attention are the double and the vampire who are both conventional Gothic figures that reappear in two prominent Gothic texts: Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). The former makes uses of scientific devices to explore the shadow of human nature and the latter portrays supernatural forces as a part of natural world and human mind. With psychological research and scientific progress, both Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Dracula show how Gothic fictions probe more deeply into
the ambiguous territory of the social and human world, breaking the boundary between reason and irrationality, good and evil, life and death, and so forth.
In the last chapter, “Twentieth-Century Gothic,” of his book, Gothic, Botting states that in the twentieth century “Gothic is everywhere and nowhere” (155). He points out that Gothic is represented in even more various forms: science fiction and horror films are two major types that refract the innermost fears and anxiety of modern people. The popularity of horror movies, in particular, indicates the universal uneasiness. Besides, works reflecting on modernity, such as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of
Darkness (1902) and Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis (1916), could also be included in
a more inclusive Gothic category.
Moreover, from about 1950 to 1990, a subgenre called New American Gothic appeared in the academic field. According to Punter, “New American Gothic is said to deal in landscapes of the mind, settings which are distorted by the pressure of the principal characters’ psychological obsessions” (3). This trend accentuates degeneracy such as the distorted psyche of the protagonist and social decay. Through the use of first-person narratives, what readers see is not an objective world but a grotesque world of the distorted psyche of the protagonists.James Purdy, Joyce Carol Oates,
Huang 7 John Hawkes and Flannery O’Connor are the representative writers of this subgenre (Punter 3).6
It is to this territory of the Gothic that Atwood returns again and again, using its conventional motifs and its subversive nature. Gothic images and themes, such as female fears, ghosts, split self and so forth, circulate in Atwood’s literary creation. For example, Surfacing(1972) is a ghost story; Lady Oracle(1976) is narrated by a Gothic writer, and the protagonist of Cat’s Eye(1988) is haunted by the past and by her
doppelganger Cordelia. Atwood’s Gothic style fiction all show a high self-reflexivity
by which she explores the attractions of the Gothic and deals with the issues about contemporary female culture, which will be probed more in the end of this chapter.
1.3 An Overview on Researches on the Gothic Conventions
In recent decades, the influence of the Gothic has recaptured critical attention. Scholars have devoted themselves to reexamining the genre’s emergence, popularity, decline, as well as its formulaic content and its dark nature. The Gothic genre made its debut in Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto in 1764 as a new, original and even radical literary form, but soon degenerated into a stereotype and served as material for the satire in Northanger Abbey in 1803. The Gothic genre was extremely popular from roughly 1760 to 1820, with a rapid rise and fall. It is indeed not an easy task to give the Gothic genre an explicit definition. It can be viewed as a prelude to Romanticism, which includes many Gothic elements. From a historical viewpoint, it can also be seen as a reflection of the terror coming from the serious violations against
monarchical orders, such as the French Revolution.7 With its involvement with the
6
Karen F. Stein offers another list of Gothic novels by women during this period: Doris Lessing’s The
Four Gated City (1969) and the Summer before the Dark (1973), Susan Fromberg Schaeffer’s Falling
(1973), and Sheila Ballantyne’s Norma Jean the Termite Queen (1975).
7
In addition to the connection with French Revolution, Kilgour, in her book The Rise of the Gothic
Huang 8 dark aspect of humanity and society, it is always associated with psychological or criminal fiction. With its abundant descendants which flourished after its supposed “demise,” the term Gothic has come to include an increasingly wider scope of works and categories, making it even more difficult to clarify the genre.
Consequently, it appears to be easier to analyze the Gothic genre through its conventions than its nature. The research into the form of the Gothic thus takes an “inventory approach” (Delamotte 7).8 Academics tend to initiate their examination from conventional settings (for example, castles in ruin, haunted house with secret locked chambers, and gloomy yet sublime natural spectacles), characters (a
persecuted heroine who is innocent and intelligent; a tyrannical hero who sometimes is also a villain; a villainess, and a talkative servant), and devices ( plots such as a heroine, leaving where she grows up, undertakes a journey to an unknown place in which she encounters a threatening male) that are apparently repeated elements in the Gothic novels. However, analyzing the shared characteristics of a certain genre does not mean lifting the veil of its mystery, but might result in difficulties in constructing its unity from these fragmented pieces. Maggie Kilgour comments:
At times the Gothic seems hardly a unified narrative at all, but a series of framed conventions, static moments of extreme emotions—displayed by characters or in the landscape, and reproduced in the reader—which are tenuously strung together in order to be temporized both through and into narrative, but which do not form a coherent and continuous whole. (5) Hence, the inventory approach to the Gothic has led to many debates. To get out of the impasse, re-investigating the original prototype of the Gothic in the eighteenth century is one workable alternative.
1688” (13).
8
According to David Punter, Eino Railo’s The Haunted Castle (1927), with its listing of themes and settings as one approach to study Gothic fiction, could be considered the beginning of the trend. (16)
Huang 9 The goal of the Gothic genre is not primarily to portray realistic characters or events but to arouse the extreme emotions of its readers by putting them in a thrilling, suspenseful and uncertain atmosphere, which explains why in the late eighteenth century it was believed that reading Gothic novels would bring about a corrupting influence on the morals of the readers.9 It was generally feared by earlier
conservative moralists that readers of the Gothic narratives, fascinated with the escapist imagination or indulging in mental stimulation, will ultimately lose family values and detach themselves from the social order and norms. The worries of the moralists are that the Gothic awakens something repressed in the human mind that is also contrary to the dominant principles of social values. Devendra P. Varma
comments,
The late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries have been recognized as, in all essentials, dominated by a strict concept of reason…. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw a new recognition of the heart’s emotions and a reassertion of the numinous. It was these factors that produced the ‘Gothic’ horror. (210)
The horrors born from the revival of those restrained emotions turn to be the source of the Gothic power of subversion. With the potential to recover a suppressed primitive and barbaric imaginative freedom, Gothic novels symbolize a threat to the tyranny of reason and to the constraining aesthetic ideal of order. Moreover, in psychoanalytical terms, the Gothic that reflects the return of the repressed is where “subconscious
9
In Gothic, Botting quotes T. Row’s statements in Gentleman’s Magazine (1767) to demonstrate the common thinking about moral degeneration at that time: “Tis not only a most unprofitable way of spending time, but extremely prejudicial to their morals, many a young person being entirely corrupted by the giddy and fantastical notions of love and gallantry, imbibed from thence”(26). In The Rise of the
Gothic Novel, Kilgour refers to a review of “Emmeline, the Orphan of the Castle” in Analytical Review
(1788) to show similar ideas: “The false expectations these wild scenes excite, tend to debauch the mind, and throw an insipid kind of uniformity over the moderate and rational prospects of life, consequently adventures are sought for and created, when duties are neglected and content despised” (7).
Huang 10 psychic energy bursts out from the restraints of conscious ego” (Kilgour 3). However, while the psychoanalytical approach to the Gothic has been adopted by many scholars, we need to explain further why the Gothic particularly enchants women.
John Frow, speculating on the nature of genre, once asked in his article, “Reproducibles, Rubrics, and Everything You Need: Genre Theory Today,” whether genres are theoretical or historical; through studying the proposals of Tzvetan Todorov and Hans Robert Jauss, he concludes:
If genres are actual and contingent forms rather than necessary and essential forms, they are nevertheless not arbitrary. And this in turn means that the “internal” organization of genre can be understood in terms of particular historical codifications of discursive properties. (1629)
Accordingly, we must reconsider the social background of the late eighteenth century with the rise of female interest in the Gothic in order to understand the nature of the genre.
1.4 The Gothic as a Female Genre
The emergence of the middle class in the eighteenth century is a crucial social factor that led to the popularity of the Gothic because it was the bourgeois women who were the main readers of Gothic novels. In her dissertation, Bette B. Roberts analyzes what was fashionable for women to read at that time from a social economic viewpoint. She proposes that at that time though women of lower classes were
exploited ruthlessly in the factories, there emerged a new leisure group consisting of bourgeois women. These women were completely dependent for their living upon their men, whose fortune was sufficiently enormous to guarantee their wives and daughters a wealthy life. Hence, since bourgeois women were confined in the domestic space, they had more time to read. For middle-class women readers at the
Huang 11 end of the eighteenth century, the Gothic Romance not only filled up their idle time but exerted a compensatory function as escapist literature, providing pleasure and therapeutic value.10The fact that the Gothic novels were read primarily by women, therefore, can be viewed as one outcome of the transformation of social structure.
J.M.S. Tompkins’s research of popular novels during this era further points out the significance of the circulating libraries. He asserts that three-quarters of the reading public were women and that the circulating libraries “catered especially for their leisure” (120). In addition, Eugenia C. Delamotte, while studying the Gothic from a feminist viewpoint, also alludes to how the Gothic novels flourished in the time of the circulating libraries. She points out that “The Gothic romance in the 1790s was one of the first varieties of mass-market fiction, associated with William Lane’s profitable and prolific Minerva Press and with the relatively new phenomenon of circulating libraries” (8). This new phenomenon of circulating libraries brings about
new issues as well—why was it the Gothic novels that attracted women? Which Gothic elements interest them most, happy marriages at the ending or the suffering and persecution suffered by those female protagonists? What do women want and acquire from reading the Gothic novels? In terms of psychological needs, does Gothic fiction satisfy women’s desires or mirror their fear? More important, is Gothic fiction a reinforcement of the patriarchy system or an escape from confined domestic roles— in other words, do they bind or liberate women? There is no simple answer to these complicated questions because the dual nature of the Gothic is two sides of the same coin.
To study Atwood’s parody of the Gothic as a reflection of patriarchy in Lady
10
For a thorough survey of the historical and social background about the relationship between the Gothic Romance and women in the late eighteenth century England, see Roberts’s The Gothic
Romance: Its Appeal to Women Writers and Readers in Late Eighteenth-century England, 1-58 and
Huang 12
Oracle, I am concerned more about the genre’s wrestle with the dominant ideology.
Putting the dual nature aside, Gothic novels, with a great many female readers, have always functioned as a feminine space for communication. Michelle A. Masse also alludes to her positive attitude toward the Gothic and declares that “the secret knowledge of the subversion is preserved, guarded, and passed on among
communities of women in the Gothic” (252). Through exploring domestic topics, female writers voice their discontent under the patriarchal system through this genre, since the medieval background of Gothic novels not only veils women’s criticisms but simultaneously offers more room for them to articulate their ideas about society. Gothic themes about female persecution gradually expand and evolve into gender issues, including female sexuality, identity and fear: for example, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) which illustrates attitudes in the nineteenth century toward women’s physical and mental health and themes regarding
motherhood in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987).
Gothic novels thus work as a communication space where feminine issues can be discussed. Though the Gothic transforms with time, early Gothic narratives and feminine themes of the Gothic are frequently embedded within new works, such as Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Atwood’s Lady Oracle (1978), Aritha van Herk’s No Fixed Address: An Amorous Journey (1986), and A.S. Byatt’s Possession:
A Romance (1990). Susanne Becker states that this “neo-gothicism—the feminine
excess in postmodern times— promises new, exiting dynamics for the textures of gender and culture” (13). Among the mixture of various generic conventions in Atwood’s works, including those of Greek myth, fairy tales, realistic novels, autobiographies, romances and so forth, indeed draws a great many critical
Huang 13 attentions.11 The recurrence of the Gothic themes creates an intertextual network, which plays an important role in postmodernism inasmuch as it indicates the nature of self-reflexivity. As Linda Hutcheon suggests, “It is precisely this intertextuality that brings about a direct confrontation with the issue of the relations of art to world outside it—to the world of those social, cultural, and ultimately ideological systems by which we all live our lives” (9). In other words, the network of intertextuality endows the old tradition with new life, endowing it with a potential to reflect and examine contemporary society.
Consequently, because of its popularity with women, both as writers and as readers, the Gothic has been a prominent part of female culture and some critics even go so far as to name it a woman’s genre. Nevertheless, even though Gothic fiction has always been popular with female readers, it was not until 1978 that Ellen Moers coined the term “Female Gothic” to identify it as a specific subgenre that explores the relationships between mothers and children. In the following year, 1979,Gilbert and Gubar published The Madwoman in the Attic to examine Victorian literature, among which are included several Gothic novels, from a feminine viewpoint.12 They draw their title from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre in which Rochester’s mad wife is locked in the attic, and argue that female writers in the nineteenth century were
metaphorically “madwomen” on account of the strict gender construction enforced upon them. Madness, as Gilbert and Gubar contend, is a symbol of female anger and revolt. Later, more and more critics reexamined the relationship between the Gothic and female issues. In her essay on reading and writing the female Gothic, Pin-chia Feng furthermore argues for the necessity of the term “female Gothic,” not only
11
Essays about Atwood’s re-visitation of literary conventions have been studied by many critics; for some examples within the last ten years, see Kolodny, Rao, Stein and Wilson.
12
The works Gilbert and Gubar examine cover pieces by Jane Austen, Mary Shelly, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, George Eliot and Emily Dickinson.
Huang 14 because the Gothic deals with female gender issues but also on account of its
ideological significance of domesticating women, like other female genres such as “conduct book” and “the female Bildungsroman.” Feng proposes that these three female genres, in terms of the educational function, all direct the sexual drive to reading so as to consolidate the established moral standards. The main difference of the Gothic from the other two genres lies, however, exactly on the Gothic’s potential subversive power, for it also teaches middle class women readers the forbidden knowledge in their life circle (Feng 14-16).
However, along with forbidden knowledge, the Gothic novels present unrealistic expectations of an idealized life that echoes the patriarchal values. The Gothic ending disposed to return to the order seems to indicate that for both heroines as well as readers the domestic space is the only appropriate destination of women’s adventure. The logic that a momentary subversion of order must be followed by the restoration of a norm renders the Gothic, like the carnivalesque, only a temporary subversion against order. As Kilgour argues, “Reading is thus a dangerously conservative substitute for political and social action, offering an illusory
transformation to impede real change by making women content with their lot, and keeping them at home-- reading” (8).13 The duality of the Gothic genres reminds us of Stephen Owen’s comment that “The politics of genre is intensely territorial, and the hinterlands of a genre are often contested territory” (1389).
When confronted with the interaction between the Gothic genre and the
13
Some critics think that, compared with the thrilling adventure in the text, the moral teaching in the end has less influence on readers than the breathtaking escape. The moral conclusion does not obliterate the pleasure of reading terrors. Robert Keily, for example, proposes that the moral commentary “does not address itself to and certainly does not “solve” the psychological problems which have been so impressively raised earlier” (253). On the other hand, some argue that the
conventional ending of the Gothic is because all the novelists, many of whom are middle-class women, know is dissatisfaction and anxiety, and they are thus not always totally in control of their fantasies. (For the detailed discussion of the related issues, see Howell’s Love, Mystery and Misery: Feeling in
Gothic Fiction 5-27.) So with such a weak ending, the subversive potential of the Gothic is still in
Huang 15 dominant ideology, critics have different perspectives toward this interaction. On one hand, some critics regard Gothic fiction an accessory to the patriarchal ideology. For instance, though investigating the dual nature of the Gothic, Kate Ferguson Ellis still connects the rise of the Gothic with the vision of an ideal heterosexual family. Bridget Fowler similarly argues that traditional Gothic fiction makes women rely more on the family myth than before. While attempting to decode the formula of Gothic genre, Bette B. Roberts considers the formulaic plot of the Gothic to be a passive struggle of female protagonists against the tyranny of male villains, yet with virtues rewarded at the end. On the other hand, Susanne Becker argues that the Gothic is situated between the dominant ideology and the resistance to it. Janice Radway, being more optimistic, further contends that even though what Gothic genre produces is a dominant ideology of a patriarchic society, reading could still be reactionary and subversive. With
particular emphasis on the interaction between reader and text, Radway suggests that the very act of the reading desire may reveal a reader’s dissatisfaction about the status
quo.14
With contradictory interpretations of the Gothic, Michelle A. Masse’s theorization of the genre connects both obedience and subversion with the Gothic genre. She argues that Gothic subversion, unlike aggression, undermines domination from within and the secret knowledge of it lies exactly in its seemingly non-resistance, which echoes the passivity of the Gothic heroines. Masse thus concludes that the apparent obedience of the Gothic heroines is a style of self-assertion rather than surrender.15 Faced with these diverse arguments, we can be sure that it is on its
14
Concerning those perspectives mentioned above see Ellis’s The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels
and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology; Fowler’s The Alienated Reader: Women and Romantic Literature in the Twentieth Century and Radway’s Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature.
15
In her article, “Subversion and Lady Oracle” Masse, besides presenting her attitude towards the Gothic, discusses how Joan Foster adopts the strategy of “aggression” and “subversion” to resist the patriarchy ideology.
Huang 16 fluctuation between obedience and subversion that the Gothic genre survives and flourishes. This agreement prompts another question—what have long women submitted to? In other words, what do women long to escape from through reading this escapist genre?
1.5 The Gothic Genre as Escapist Genre
Imprisonments and escapes have always been prominent Gothic themes. For example, escape from the castle and home is a common plot of the Gothic narrative. During the late eighteenth century and the heyday of the Gothic, women were restricted in their domestic life under the domination of patriarchy. Reading for them was a way to escape from reality. The adventure the heroines experience and the persecution imposed on them both give pleasant sensations similar to
sadomasochism.16 Whereas escape stands for the metaphoric meaning of release from cultural containment, the escape from the imprisoning castle symbolizes the power of mind over the external circumstance. The theme of escape means so much to readers that some Gothic critics lay more emphasis on the theme of escape than on the perfunctory moral conclusion at the end. For example, Fred Botting explicitly points out:
The escape from confinement, in narrative or reading, is no more than a prelude to a welcome return. The ambivalence remains, not only in the way that the home seems to conceal horrifying secrets but in the possibility that the escape, especially for readers, into imagined worlds and events may be more pleasure than the return to domesticity. (70)
It is obvious that what readers desire is that ambiguous world in the Gothic novels
16
See Feng’s “Writing and Reading Women/Women Writing and Reading—the Female Gothic and
Huang 17 where escape from reality is possible, rather the dichotomous world outside.
Nevertheless, Tompkins reminds us that the meaning of escape varies with time. “It is, however, only at the end of our period that the attention of the novelist was turned to the prison-breaker; the early romance writers, who were mostly women, saw in the prison one more example of their favourite virtue, fortitude” (89). The attitude to the escape theme in the eighteenth century is different from that in the nineteenth century. It was in the nineteenth century that more and more writers explored issues about evading the external constraint. In their book, The Madwoman in the Attic, Gilbert and Gubar take Jane Eyre (1847) as an illustration for rebellious feminism. They contend that the subtext of the anger and destructive power of the imprisoned madwoman, Bertha Mason Rochester, stands for an exemplary theme of the
nineteenth-century women’s writing.17 Moreover, from a study of Wilkie Collins’ The
Dead Secrets (1857), Tamar Heller suggests that what Collins has presented is not
only a narrative of women’s submission but also “a plot of feminine subversion that resembles a narrative pattern feminist critics have identified in nineteenth-century women’s writing” (3).
Aside from the varied perspectives of escape with time, what women ultimately struggle to escape from is the prescribed ideal feminine image and
gender-construction. The escape theme in the Gothic narrative evolves from escapes from castles/haunted houses/ domestic spheres into counteraction to the ideological enclosure of femininity in the binary gender construction. The Gothic genre creates anti-realism/fantasy to resist thepatriarchal master narrative of a coherent and unified subjectivity. To be more specific, the Gothic produces the most grotesque literary female figures, such as madwomen or monstrous feminine images so as to ridicule the formulated feminine model. Becker even contends, “The resonant ‘madwoman in the
17
Huang 18 attic’ is a clue to the attractions of Gothic form for feminine fictions” (10). The
fascination for the Gothic is that it foregrounds the hidden horrors of a unifying image of woman to make female readers face up to their anxiety and fear.
The escape theme draws us back to rethink the effect of such a metaphorical gesture. Does the Gothic transcend the everyday world regardless of its ambiguous ending? Furthermore, is the Gothic a contradictory tale itself or a critique of the order? There are more than two hundred years between Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto and Atwood’s Lady Oracle. Does Atwood successfully provide an alterative exit for the Gothic readers in her parodic Gothic?
1.6 Contextualizing Lady Oracle
In her overview of fantasy, Rosemary Jackson comments: “Like any other text, a literary fantasy is produced within, and determined by, its social context. Though it might struggle against the limits of this context, often being articulated upon that very struggle, it cannot be understood in isolation from it” (3). The fantastic mode and the protagonist’s fantasy in Lady Oracle, as Jackson has suggested, are a reflection of the social context at that time. While Charlotte Brontë presents certain typical types of early Victorian women’s lives—poor governess (Jane Eyre), passionate wife (Bertha Mason), and young heiress (Blanche Ingram)—in Jane Eyre, how does Atwood contextualize women’s lives of her time in Lady Oracle? How does Atwood reach to reflect on contemporary female culture by reexamining a literary tradition?
To understand thoroughly Atwood’s parodic treatment of Gothic conventions in
Lady Oracle, it is necessary to consider the context within which Lady Oracle was
conceived. Gothic Boom (1960-1970) and the second wave of feminist movement (1960-1980) may very possibly be two major social phenomena which influenced
Huang 19 Atwood to choose the Gothic conventions as the major subject matter in her fiction.18
Connecting Atwood’s Lady Oracle with the Gothic boom, Becker suggest: “In a postmodern recognition of popular culture, Atwood’s self-consciously Gothic fiction deals with this important phenomenon of contemporary female culture, and explores the attractions of these pulp romances” (12). Moreover, the Gothic Boom also makes Atwood directly face the collapse of genres. From Hutcheon’s point of view, the boundary between genres may be blurred but are not unrecognizable. Literary conventions are played in postmodern art form like parody’s uses and abuses of the texts and the traditions. In a postmodernist refashioning, the Gothic, like other genres, becomes a suggestion towards appropriation or misappropriation, as Jameson
indicates. Punter points out, that around 1960 to 1970, in the popular culture, the term Gothic was adopted by publishers to sell “a particular genre of paperback historical romance… a medley of slightly perverse romance and tame supernaturalism” (2). Becker calls it “the explosion in paperback romance market” (12).Speaking of the concept of genre, Fredric Jameson suggests genres have in fact been “literary institutions or social contracts between a writer and a specific public” (106) where “with…the opening of the work of art itself to commodification, the older generic specifications have been transformed into a brand-name system” (107). The Gothic, as a brand-name, does not “die out but persists in the half-life of the subliterary genres of mass culture” (Jameson 107). It is easily available in drugstores and again acquires a specific group of female readers, as it did two centuries ago. From Jameson’s point of view, the political significance of such a social repeat is related to the work of capitalism. Yet besides economic transformation, why does the Gothic capture Atwood’s attention after two hundred years?
During the1960s and 1970s, whilst women actively demanded social and
18
Huang 20 economic equality, the return of Gothic novels simultaneously indicated women’s contradictory feelings about the simplified order as implied in the Gothic tradition. In her book, Margaret Atwood Revisited, Karen F. Stein observes and comments on the relationship among the popularity of Gothic novels, social change and women at that time:
Because the Gothic mode reveals anxiety about the changing place of women in families, it may be that times of changing social roles lead to the production of Gothic fiction. Atwood wrote her first three novels in a time of feminist
political activism that saw a flowering of Gothic novels by women…. These ironic, darkly humorous novels conclude ambiguously, with their protagonists poised to encounter new possibilities, but the outcome is uncertain. (58)
Stein’s argument indicates that the horror which Gothic has always reflected is female anxiety to the change of social expectations. Facing the possibility of new women’s roles which the feminist movement may bring out, women shed their uneasiness in the Gothic genre.
Such an association, based on social factors, corresponds to Bette B. Roberts’s examination of the reason for the Gothic Romance appealing to women in late eighteenth century England. “In the genre of gothic fiction,” states Roberts, “they create an ambivalence of a more social than psychological perspective” (51). Roberts suggests that the rise and popularity of the Gothic Romance is related to various social transformations, such as “the emergent middle-class sex role of delicacy and domestic idleness, and their repressed desire to escape from it” (51). The observations of Stein and Roberts about these two periods of Gothic popularity show that Gothic fiction, to some extent, mirrors women’s anxiety about their social roles in a patriarchal society. While the Gothic starts to spring up in the late eighteenth century, the middle-class women are the main readers, for whom reading Gothic tales is a way to fulfill their
Huang 21 fantasy about fleeing from their domestic roles. The return of the Gothic two hundred years later reflects a different social condition. The major readers are not restricted to middle-class women but include lower-class women as well. What contemporary women struggle to free themselves from is not only the domestic space but a new role that the second-wave feminist movement may bring out. The social expectations of women have changed with time; therefore what women face in the twentieth century is a more complicated situation than that in the late eighteenth century.
If the feminine ideal has changed with the coming of the second wave of the feminist movement, then what kind of attitudes were women in the late twentieth century supposed to adopt when facing the conflict between the traditional female role as a wife in the domestic sphere and those new models as economically independent career women? Becker calls it an era of “neo-gothic” when “images of career women and new fathers, alternative modes of family organization and single parenting mark the way toward a new post-feminist [or] post-patriarchal culture. Neo-gothicism reflects the feminine dimensions of the ongoing cultural and literary change” (4). Nowadays women’s fears are restricted not only in the domestic space but involve ongoing social expectations, including various tags created by the media to label women.19 In Lady Oracle, Atwood seems to be a prophet who foresees this social phenomenon that has become more and more obvious today, and she knows that the route away from these constraining labels is the mobility which could be observed from the protagonist in Lady Oracle.
While it is becoming harder and harder to define the female norm today,
Atwood’s exploration of female subjectivity in her parody of Gothic can be viewed as
19
Actually at the beginning of the twentieth-first century, more and more tags with degrading implications were produced by media, such as some terms in Japanese culture— rotten girl (腐女子), undergods (負け犬, women past thirty, not being married, similar with Spinster [剩女] in Chinese) and kan butu on na (干物女ひものおんな, women in twenties who make no effort to have a social life).
Huang 22 “a reaction to… the feminine ideal of the time: Woman as produced by totalizing discourses of femininity” (Becker 160). In Karla Hammond’s interview, Atwood herself also alludes to her curiosity about the relationship between women and the Gothic:
I’m interested in the Gothic novel because it’s very much a woman’s form. Why is there such a wide readership for books that essentially say, “Your husband is trying to kill you”? People aren’t interested in pop culture books out of pure random selection. They connect with something real in people’s lives.20 If pop culture books are somehow connected with something in reality, then what is the relationship between Gothic plots about suspicion of husbands’ murder and women’s anxiety for their subjectivities, as opposed to the social expectations demanded by the patriarchal ideology, as discussed above? Let us read the text more closely to see how Atwood reflects this question in the next chapter and ultimately goes beyond the patriarchal discourse embedded in the conventional Gothic narrative in order to present other options for women to build a flexible subjectivity of their own.
Before analyzing by what means the protagonist, Joan Foster, breaks the constraint of the customized formality, we need to give attention to how Atwood presents that of the Gothic. Geary suggests “What is needed to move beyond vague generalizations and stereotypes is an examination of how particular Gothic novelists manipulate inherited literary motifs and conventions so as to create a fictional mode which diverges from earlier literature” (4). Corresponding to Geary’s proposal, the approach Atwood takes to expose the stereotype of the Gothic is to parody it.
Therefore, after the brief introduction of the Gothic Conventions and its
20
All interviews with Margaret Atwood mentioned in this thesis are quoted from Margaret Atwood
Huang 23 relationship with women in the first chapter, I will proceed to examine how Atwood parodies this genre in Lady Oracle. Among the various subgenres of the Gothic, the target for Atwood’s parodies is Costume Gothic, a framed form which has long been popular with female readers. My thesis explores two layers of parodies—Atwood’s parody of the Gothic conventions and Joan’s parodic re-creation of Costume Gothic. The second chapter is about Atwood’s parody of the Gothic and the third chapter concerns Joan’s. In the former section, I plan to study how Atwood presents the formulaic nature of Costume Gothic by parodying Joan’s Gothic works and Joan’s real life. In the latter section, I try to examine how Atwood leads Joan, who represents Costume Gothic readers as well as writers, to parody her own Gothic writings. In my opinion, this design not only releases Joan from the stagnant Gothic conventions but also revives the subversive potential of the Gothic genre. In other words, Atwood employs the subversive nature of the Gothic to critique and poke fun at the formulaic nature of the Gothic conventions so as to further interrogate the ideological
underpinnings of this genre.
In the next chapter, I intend to investigate Atwood’s treatment of the Gothic reader’s dilemma between reality and fantasy, namely what dangers readers who believe in the Gothic imagination will encounter in a real world? First, I will see how such a topic is treated before by taking “The Story-Haunted” (1837) as an example. Then, I will continue to study the Costume Gothic that Joan Foster writes to illustrates how Atwood parodies the formulaic nature of Gothic romances. Following this, because both Lady Oracle and Northanger Abbey discuss the influence the Gothic exerts on readers, I will make a short comparison between them. Finally, at the end of the second chapter, I will examine those romantic fantasies that Joan Foster indulges in until she suspects that her husband tries to murder her, from which the effect of Atwood’s skilful reversion of the conventional Gothic plots will also be discussed.
Huang 24 Following this, I will analyze the way in which the Gothic fantasy leads to Joan Foster’s struggle between fantasy and reality in the third chapter, beginning with her tangled relationship with her mother because of her obese body. Through this
investigation, I will examine the norms prescribed for women as those that
conventional heroines show in Gothic novels. At the end of the third chapter, I will focus on how Joan’s parody of her Gothic writing makes her multiple selves function as an agent of mobility against the fixed roles for women.
Huang 25
Chapter Two: Refashioning the Gothic Conventions 2.1 The Danger of the Fantasy in the Gothic
Confronting the dual potential of the Gothic genre – the domination of the patriarchal ideology and the potential subversive power against it – what is the
attitude that Margaret Atwood adopts for her interpretations of the Gothic conventions in Lady Oracle? In an interview with Joyce Carol Oates, Atwood expresses her
interests in the Gothic myth which is also what she attempts to break away within
Lady Oracle:
[T]he center character [of Lady Oracle] is a writer of Gothic romance partly because I’ve always wondered what it was about these books that
appealed—do so many women think of themselves as menaced on all sides, and of their husbands as potential murderers? And what about that “Mad Wife” left over from Jane Eyre? Are these our secret plots?
The hypothesis of the book [Lady Oracle] insofar as there is one: what happens to someone who lives in the “real” world but does it as though this “other” world is the real one? (75)
In fact, Atwood’s experiment about one’s dilemma between the world of real life and that of fantastic novels is not an original one, since there have been numerous debates over the reader’s ability to handle the extreme emotions Gothic novels provoke and the moral degeneration that might follow it. The negative consequences of reading the Gothic have thus been emphasized in a number of Gothic narratives as well, in which the heroines, by indulging in reading, suffer from their own imagination and
sensitivity and the loss of their abilities to discriminate between art and life.
An example from the past offers us a chance to see the evolvement over the two hundred years. “The Story-Haunted” (1837) is a work with an intention to warn
Huang 26 against over-indulgence in fictitious terrors.21 The protagonist of the tale is a young man who has difficulty differentiating between the world of the Gothic and reality. He was brought up in a solitary library, reading romances to his mother. His mother dies in terror as the protagonist reads aloud one Gothic tale in which a man is pursued by his own phantom. This young man is thus left alone and enters the real world.
However, he is entirely unfit for the society since he views everything literally based upon those Gothic romances he reads. The protagonist, haunted by stories, later falls in love with the specter whom he images, who has all characteristics of the heroines in Gothic romances.
It is in Gothic tales such as “The Story-Haunted” that the most powerful critiques of the nature of simulated reality in the Gothic are presented. Maggie Kilgour considers it to “internalize external criticism” (7).She further points out that the enchantment of the Gothic lies exactly in the fact that it satisfies readers’ desires by embodying their imagination while punishing it simultaneously.22 The example of “The Story-Haunted” indicates that the Gothic has always been a highly self-reflected literary form. Kilgour’s statement testifies to this perspective; she argues that the Gothic is “a highly wrought, artificial form which is extremely self-conscious of its artificiality and creation out of old material and traditions” (4). This kind of
self-consciousness of the artificiality in the Gothic tradition is also the base for self-reflexivity in postmodernism. The former reveals the nature of simulation in literary works, while the latter discloses that literature is made out of literature. In this
21
The “Story-Haunted” is one of the tales Edith Birkhead provides in her book, The Tale of Terror (1921). In this book, Birkhead does not emphasize the problematic nature of the Gothic but makes a complete introduction to the major Gothic texts that have survived the aggression of the history. The online book is available at Project Gutenberg.
<http://infomotions.com/etexts/gutenberg/dirs/1/4/1/5/14154/14154.htm>
22
Kilgour takes Caleb Williams Godwin’s Maria and Matthew Lewis’s The Monk to discuss how desires are realized through imagination which creates an illusory substitute for desire. (85-7, 156-8) The danger lies in the madness coming from too long indulgence in the fantasy which “may create a world that is an alternative to reality but can never transform it” (86).
Huang 27 respect, both of them manifest an awareness of the nature of fabrication in literary creation. However, from a conservative moralist’s viewpoint, to accuse the
imagination power in the traditional Gothic conventions, as in “the Story-Haunted” is a means to maintain the established social order. Hence the decisive point is how Atwood in Lady Oracle transcends the moralistic level of the Gothic to keep the subversive power of the genre as she simultaneously parodies it in order to find an exit for women’s anxiety for varying social expectations.
2.2 Parodies of the Gothic in Joan’s Costume Gothic Style
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:
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
