愛特伍式歌德：瑪格麗特•愛特伍《女祭師》中的創傷與書寫

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國立臺灣大學文學院外國語文學系碩士論文

Graduate Institute of Foreign Languages and Literatures College of Liberal Arts

National Taiwan University Master Thesis

愛特伍式歌德：瑪格麗特．愛特伍《女祭師》中的創傷與書寫

Atwoodian Gothic: Trauma and Writing in Margaret Atwood’s

Lady Oracle

林琦慧 Chi-hui Lin

指導教授：劉亮雅教授 Advisor: Prof. Liang-ya Liou

中華民國 97 年 6 月 June 2008

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Acknowledgments

I am most indebted to my advisor, Professor Liang-ya Liou, who kindly devoted her time to reading and criticizing my thesis, helping me re-organize my arguments and correct the mistakes. I wish to express my deepest gratitude to Professor Liou for her patient guidance and insightful instruction through the whole process of writing the thesis. My sincere appreciation next goes to Professor Yu-hsiu Liu and Professor Tsung-huei Huang.

Their critical suggestions in the oral defense helped me add important revisions to the thesis.

I am also grateful to my American Literature teacher in Tunghai University, Professor John Shufelt. He spent a lot of time discussing with me and assisting me in revising the thesis. Most important of all, Professor Shufelt has unshakable faith in me, shares his enthusiasm for literature with me, and encourages me to confront every challenge whether in academic or daily life.

I would like to express my genuine thanks to Judith Chen and Christine Liu because they unreservedly shared their experiences of writing theses with me. I have benefited from discussions with them and learned a lot from their positive attitudes towards life. Without their precious advice, the completion of the thesis would have been more difficult. I definitely owe my classmates a debt of gratitude: Claire Lin, Jill Shih, and Janet Chen.

Although writing a thesis is a lonely process, we support each other through the years of graduate study. My special thanks also go to my best friends, including Sunny, Carey, Lulu, Jia-hua, and Rui-wen.

Last but not least, I would like to thank my family. My parents and my older sister always encourage me not to give in to pressure and frustrations in my life. Because of their selfless love and never-ending support, I have the strength to accomplish the thesis. I want to dedicate the thesis to them.

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Abstract

This thesis examines how Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle critically employs Gothic conventions to discuss a female artist’s traumatic relationship with her mother and her quest for her own multiple identities through unconventional Gothic writings. As an Atwoodian anti-Gothic novel, Lady Oracle focuses on female body, identity, and complicated

mother-daughter relationship. By appropriating Sigmund Freud’s concept of the uncanny and theory of trauma, I argue that Atwood explores a female artist’s traumatic experiences in her childhood and adolescence, highlights her dilemma between desire for artistic career and for fulfilling ideal femininity, and finally investigates the artist’s reconciliation with her dead mother and acceptance of her multiple selves. Chapter One examines Atwood’s

appropriation of Gothic elements and her revision of three fairy tales, including “The Bluebeard,” “The Red Shoes,” and “The Little Mermaid.” Chapter Two analyzes the protagonist’s traumatic experiences and repetition compulsion as well as her maternal legacy.

Chapter Three illuminates the protagonist’s psychical journeys to communicate with her mother and her past selves. The last chapter discusses the ambiguous ending of this novel.

Key Words: Atwoodian Gothic, female body, identity, trauma, mother-daughter relationship

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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. There’s usually an area of reality in popular literature that’s hooking into the reality in the lives of the readers. Even Harlequin Romances. Those books are about the dream that we all secretly have— that everything can work out, that everything can be happy, that there is a Mr. Wonderful who does exist. The Gothic form centers on My husband is trying to kill me, and that’s of great interest when you think about it. (Ingersoll 107-8, italics original)

Atwood is concerned with a gender-specific genre, the Gothic (romances), and its connection with women’s (mis)understanding of the differences between romantic fantasy and reality.

She utilizes Gothic elements to narrate her tales and simultaneously critiques Gothic conventions and their underlying assumptions, such as value systems and power relations coded in the texts. Besides incorporating Gothic conventions to her own purposes, Atwood engages in not only rewriting ancient myths and fairy tales but also invoking allusions to other literary texts. In a sense, Atwoodian Gothic exhibits the function of intertextuality:

“By making the reader aware of the intertextual reference or allusion, the text alluded to is allowed a dialogue with the frame narrative; moreover, the self-reflexive, metafictional nature of the frame narrative is exposed at the same time” (Ljungberg 25). Atwood’s

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self-conscious revision of the embedded fairy tales, myths, and classical stories inverts received images and reflects a changing society. In Atwoodian Gothic, it is easy to see the traditional forms which are modified but still retain their original charge of menace and mystery, while balancing women’s urge toward self-discovery and self-assertiveness with self-doubts (Howells 64). She explores women’s immersion in Gothic fantasies and fairy tales, both of which convey romantic myths, female fears, and repressed desires. In so doing, Atwood accentuates women’s sense of not being free of traditional assumptions and myths about femininity.

Instead of completely discarding Gothic conventions, Atwood engages in reshaping the familiar materials of a “product” (the thing read, written) so as to analyze the dynamic

“process” (reading, writing) (Hutcheon 138). The relationship between “product” and

“process” also foregrounds the tension between “the outward-directed didactic / mimetic motivation” and “the more inward-directed self-reflexivity” (Hutcheon 140). Atwood’s novel, Lady Oracle, exemplifies her efforts to employ the conventional elements of Gothic romance, but at the same time expose stereotypical representations of men and women, cultural / ideological influences behind the appeal for female readers, and insidious fantasy of female victimization. By portraying Joan Foster as living a Gothic heroine’s life and writing Gothic novels, Atwood shows the heroine’s confinement within the paradigms of

conventional femininity. Moreover, Atwood’s use of Gothic features lays bare the limits of such literary conventions and the need of her female protagonist to confront complex reality.

Written from a self-consciously feminist perspective, Lady Oracle investigates complex notions of female body and identity which problematize dominant gender ideologies of Western / patriarchal society.

Both Eleonora Rao and Susanne Becker point out the importance of parody in Lady Oracle, revealing how the novel is a self-reflexive exploration of canonical, dominant literary forms (Rao134, Becker 153). Karen F. Stein also argues that Atwood not merely plays the

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role of a trickster who delights in fabricating, crossing generic boundaries, and disrupting conventions, but also often uses humor, parody, and satire to expose hypocrisy and pretension (6). Indeed, Atwood uses parody as a “metalanguage” to re-evaluate literary materials from a critical perspective and to effect discontinuity (Rao 29). Adopting a critical and ironic perspective on Gothic romance, she simultaneously describes and subverts ideological discourses and gender construction prevalent in the texts. In writing Lady Oracle, Atwood expresses “women’s concerns” for the roles they play and the life stories they tell. As she admits, “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?” (Ingersoll75). While Joanna Russ sees Gothic texts as a kind of “justified paranoia,” Atwood reminds us of the necessity to probe into the appeal of stories of persecuted heroines (Modleski 61). The potentiality of men to be murderers as well as rescuers of dependent women is inscribed in the culture and in the novels produced by the culture. Through her writing, Atwood undertakes her responsibility as a writer to examine the interaction between gender relations and socio-historical formations

II. Lady Oracle as Anti-Gothic

Atwoodian Gothic, in essence, is anti-Gothic. As Atwood points out, an anti-Gothic examines “the perils of Gothic thinking” (Ingersoll 64). In her interview with J.R. Struthers, Atwood suggests that Lady Oracle is an “anti-Gothic” novel in which she reveals and

parodies the perils of Gothic thinking:

Gothic thinking means that you have a scenario in your head which involves certain roles— the dark, experienced man, who is possibly evil and possibly good, the rescuer, the mad wife, and so on— and that as you go to real life you tend to cast real people in these roles as Joan does. Then when you find out that the real

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people don’t fit these two-dimensional roles, you can either discard the roles and try to deal with the real person or discard the real person. (Ingersoll 64)

Joan’s fascination with romantic plots and Gothic thinking causes her to treat her lovers as heroes at first and then as villains. When she escapes from her relentless mother to England, Joan is immediately rescued by her first lover, the Polish Count. However, as their

relationship turns worse, the Polish Count begins to frighten Joan. Besides finding a revolver in his drawer, Joan also feels so threatened by his “baleful glances and the

oppressive silences” that she decides to leave him (LO 193). Joan meets her second hero when she is thinking about the plot of her Gothic romance, Escape from Love. Their encounter is like a typical Gothic scenario— a helpless maiden running from an evil man finally meets her hero: “There were footsteps behind her. She shrank into the shade of a tree, hoping to escape notice, but a shadow loomed against the setting sun, there was a hand on her arm, and a voice, hoarse with passion, breathed her name” (LO197, italics original).

In reality, “there was a hand on [Joan’s arm]. [She] screamed, quite loudly, and the next thing [she] knew [she] was lying on top of a skinny, confused-looking young man. Pieces of paper were scattered over [them] like outsized confetti” (LO197). Joan never hesitates to identify with the Gothic heroine who enacts the ready-made scripts for male persecutors and female victims. The parallel between her real life and her Gothic romance suggests that Joan is so overwhelmed by Gothic paranoia that she believes that the Polish Count or

somebody tries to hurt her. After leaving the Gothic world of Escape from Love, Joan in the real world is attracted to another romantic plot, namely, falling in love at the first sight. “I looked at him more closely. […] A melancholy fighter for almost-lost causes, idealistic and doomed, sort of like Lord Byron, whose biography I had just been skimming. We finished collecting the pamphlets, I fell in love” (LO 198). While working on Escape from Love, Joan literally falls in love with a “Byronic hero.” It seems that Joan hardly awakes from her Gothic fantasy and returns to reality. Atwood exposes and criticizes her protagonist’s

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tendency to apply the patterns and roles in Gothic romances to her real life. This young man does have a heroic name, Arthur. They get married but do not live happily ever after. Joan lives a duplicitous life because she wonders “if [Arthur had] known what I really like, would he still have loved me?” (LO 39). After receiving some voiceless phone calls and

threatening letters, Joan suspects that Arthur wants to kill her because he may discover the secrets about her past and her identity as a Gothic writer. Therefore, she chooses to run away, just like those “heroines on the run” in her Gothic romances. Joan interprets her life as if it were a Gothic text. As she claims, “[e]very man I’d ever been involved with, I realized, had had two selves”(LO 357). Men are regarded by her as the Gothic heroes who simultaneously assume the roles of villain and rescuer.

To define Lady Oracle as anti-Gothic, Atwood compares her novel with Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. Both Austen and Atwood expose and criticize the Gothic heroines’

inclination to apply the patterns and roles in Gothic fiction to the real world; to mistake life for fiction. Both of them exploit a recurrent motif in Gothic fiction, that is, the obscure cause of the wife’s death. Austen’s heroine, Catherine Morland, who indulges herself in Gothic stories (Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho), believes that her lover’s father, General Tileny, murders his wife. Atwood’s heroine, Joan Foster, also attributes her mother’s death to her father: “He was a doctor, he’d been in the underground, he’d killed people before, he would know how to break her neck and make it look like an accident.

Despite his furrows and sighs he was smug, like a man who’d gotten away with something”

(LO 215). Driven by Gothic thinking, Joan immerses herself in her imagination and seeks to prove her father’s guilt. Although Austen and Atwood create a mocking parody of the Gothic themes, it is worth discussing their difference. Austen’s sharper criticism of Gothic writers and readership seems to educate her readers towards a more critical literary taste while Atwood’s portrayal implicitly critiques the readers’ need for escapist literature, such as Gothic romance (Rao 30,137). Atwood claims that “[m]ost people find real life sadly

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lacking because it doesn’t measure up. Escape fiction, or Louis L’Amour’s Westerns, is a kind of wide-awake dreaming. It’s the enactment of a plot that is quite basic to a lot of people” (Ingersoll 167). In other words, Atwood is sympathetic as well as critical towards Gothic romance. For her, the Gothic text, different from the real world full of complexities, risks, and changes, presents “the simplicity of that world, where happiness was possible and wounds were only ritual ones” (LO 346). Joan’s obsession with Gothic fantasy is “produced within, and determined by, its social context” and serves as compensation for “a lack

resulting from cultural constraints” (Jackson3). Examining the compensatory function of Gothic fiction, Atwood, like Austen, insists that the readers should learn to distinguish imaginary worlds from the real world although she does not deny the pleasure gained from reading Gothic novels.

According to Ann McMillan, what permeates Gothic fantasy is the reinforcement of women’s innocent victimhood and the predictable ending by transforming villains into heroes at the hands of virtuous heroines (53). Her statement sheds light on a dangerous Gothic thinking in which women’s acceptance of victimization is related to their anticipation of a happy ending. They believe in the advent of the hero who is converted by “romantic love.”

To counter such a belief, Atwood challenges “triumph of true love” and “happy ending”

prevalent in Gothic romances. In Lady Oracle, although all of Joan’s lovers have names suggesting royalty— the Polish Count, Arthur, and the Royal Porcupine, none of them turn out to be the prince she hopes to find (Stein 61). Atwood discloses the veil of heroes and makes these men more “realistic” by giving them true names and ordinary habits. The Polish Count’s true name is Paul. The Royal Porcupine’s true name is Chuck Brewer. As for Arthur, after living with him, Joan realizes that he, unlike the Gothic hero living in a castle, “leave[s] [his] socks on the floor or stick[s] [his] fingers in [his] ears or gargle[s] in the mornings to kill germs” (LO 261).

Moreover, Atwood calls into question the simplistic opposition between (female) victims

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and (male) victimizers. She comments on Joan Foster’s self-imposed victimization:

She’s not particularly a victim. Although she’s a survivor, I wouldn’t say that that’s what categorizes her. Certainly many of her complicated problems are caused, not by her victimhood or her survivorhood, but by her romanticism. She’s someone who is attempting to act out a romantic myth we’re all handed as women in a non-romantic world. (Ingersoll 107)

The distinction between (male) victimizers and (female) victims is not absolute. Women’s insistence on their passivity and victimhood may lead them to unwittingly endorse patriarchal conventions. Also, such self-perception precludes women from taking responsibility. The Gothic thinking sacrifices human complexity, justifies female ritual victimization, and reinforces the limits of social conventions. Atwood’s anti-Gothic aims to defy the view of traditional Gothic as a means to restore and “reassert the values of society, virtue and propriety” (Botting 7). Gothic fiction which is filled with escapist fantasies and women’s self-renunciation provides temporary alleviation and an outlet for women’s feeling of frustration or despair. However, these stories simultaneously represent “collective repression and suppression,” which perhaps end in more destructive results: further

(self-)victimization, fragile interpersonal connections, and unresolved anguish (Vickroy 4).

In Lady Oracle, Atwood portrays how a woman’s traumatic experiences lead to her

immersion in Gothic fantasy and how she deals with her trauma by re-establishing the bond with her mother. As an “anti-Gothic,” Lady Oracle presents a female artist’s pursuit of, not a happy union with the hero, but reconciliation with her mother as well as her inner selves.

III. Overview of the Thesis

Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle, which exploits and parodies the Gothic genre, poses questions about female body, writing, and identity. Atwood employs Gothic features to depict a female artist’s traumatic experiences and her self-discovery through writing. The

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protagonist of the novel, Joan Foster, is a Gothic heroine who seeks to escape from threats and yearns to be rescued and loved by the novel’s various heroes. In addition to a

clandestine writer of Gothic romances, Joan Foster is also the famous poet of a book of mysterious poems, “Lady Oracle.” As a female artist figure, she encounters the dilemma of being torn between art and love. Many critics observe that Joan Foster fabricates her life story and her vicarious Gothic heroines to forget her painful past and to evade her

unacknowledged complicity (Fee 44, Ljungberg 113, Rigney 62, Stein 61).

Joan Foster’s Gothic novels reflect literary conventions and social demands on women.

In the process of writing, not only do her past memories haunt her but she also develops multiple identities. Thus, Joan leads a life full of hallucination and duplicity. Eventually, her writing becomes her survival tool economically and psychically. She writes the poems,

“Lady Oracle,” to express her anxiety about marriage and fear of loss of identity. Moreover, in the course of writing her latest Gothic Romance, Stalked by Love, Joan Foster gradually sees through the monstrous appearance of her mother who is both a victimizer and a victim.

As Becker notes, Lady Oracle presents the feminist Gothic’s critiques of the problematic dimensions of feminine ideals when Atwood repeats those ideals but reinforces the hidden horrors of the heroine (159). The plot of Stalked by Love parallels Joan Foster’s life and leads her to confront her multiple selves returning from the past. This significant encounter helps Joan Foster free herself from the long-term duplicitous life, accept “the monstrous / inadequate part inside her” (Sciff-Zamaro 37), and learn to cope with her multiple selves.

This thesis aims to discuss the following question. In exploring and revisiting the conventions of Gothic romance, how does Lady Oracle examine the process of the

protagonist’s confrontation with trauma and reveal her recognition through Gothic writings?

I argue that in Lady Oracle, Atwood explores a female artist’s traumatic experiences caused by patriarchal conventions which impinge on her body and identity, highlights her

ambivalence toward artistic career and love, and finally suggests that Joan Foster’s writing

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helps her accomplish the quests for self and her dead mother.

Chapter One examines how Atwood critically appropriates a number of Gothic elements to make Lady Oracle a haunted text while at the same time rewriting fairy tales to reveal her Gothic heroine’s innermost fears. The first section draws on Freud’s theory of the uncanny and related concepts, such as the return of the repressed, the unspeakable, live burial, and the double. By discussing the spectral appearance of Joan’s mother, the Fat Lady fantasy and Joan’s old clothes which come to life, I argue that Joan is haunted by her traumatic past and subject to the prescriptive notions of female body and identity. The second section explores Atwood’s revision of three fairy tales: “The Bluebeard,” “The Red Shoes,” and “The Little Mermaid.” The Bluebeard tale has different versions. Atwood exploits the version in Grimm’s Fairy Tales. By rewriting a well-known tale, Atwood examines the juxtaposition of women’s reliance on men’s rescue and female fear of male violence. Atwood employs Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Red Shoes” and “The Little Mermaid” to analyze her protagonist’s dilemma between artistic career and men’s love.

Chapter Two centers on Joan’s relationship with her mother. This chapter discusses Joan’s traumatic experiences and her mother’s gender inculcation, both of which entrap Joan in repetitions of self-denial and indulgence to the plots of Gothic romances. Analysis of Joan’s trauma sheds light on the socio-cultural systems in which she lives. The first section focuses on Joan’s traumatic experiences in her childhood and adolescence, including her ambivalent relationship with her mother, her failed ballet performance, her identity crisis for being called “an accident” by her mother, her suffering from the Brownies’ bullies, and her mother’s death. Being traumatized, Joan’s behavior, nightmares, and Gothic writing can be regarded as stemming from “repetition compulsion,” which represents trauma survivor’s impotent attempt to dominate traumatic events by reenacting previous experiences. The second section delves into the influences of her mother’s gender inculcation on Joan’s

preoccupation with her body and her belief in women’s passivity and victimhood. I suggest

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that Joan’s choice to write Gothic romances is not by mere chance. As a product of the maternal legacy, Joan’s Gothic romances duplicate the myth of idealized femininity and gender stereotypes.

Chapter Three explores Joan’s underground quests for her dead mother and her multiple identities in the process of writing “Lady Oracle” and Stalked by Love. The first section illustrates Joan’s reconciliation with her dead mother when she creates a collection of poems,

“Lady Oracle.” I investigate Atwood’s use of Goddess myths and intertextual allusion to Alfred Tennyson’s “the Lady of Shalott.” First of all, Atwood reverses the Greek mythology of Demeter and Persephone. It is the daughter who saves her mother from the underworld.

Joan uses her writing to retrieve her mother’s existence. Then Atwood employs the myth of the Triple Goddess to reveal the multiple dimensions within Joan’s mother who is seen as three-headed monster in Joan’s dream. Moreover, Atwood’s intertextual allusion to

Tennyson’s “the Lady of Shalott” reveals similar difficulties confronting Joan and her mother (as well as most women). The dominant themes in “the Lady of Shalott” of female

incarceration, self-renunciation for love, and tragic death also prevail in the life story of Joan’s mother. After understanding her mother’s predicament, Joan finally comes to terms with her mother. Joan’s quest for her mother is conducive to her introspection. The second section concentrates on Joan’s self-discovery. First, I discuss Joan’s identification with the Gothic villainess of her novel, Stalked by Love, and her critical reflections on Gothic

romances. Joan starts to doubt and challenge idealized femininity embodied by the virtuous Gothic heroine, the inevitable death of the threatening Gothic villainess, and heterosexual marriage as the only happy ending. Second, I explore Joan’s confrontation with her

obliterated past and acceptance of her multiple selves. I argue that Joan gradually possesses a new perception of self in the course of reconstructing her bond with her deceased mother.

By handling her traumatic relationship with her mother, Joan is able to embrace her multiple selves as part of herself.

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In Conclusion I examine the ambiguous ending of Lady Oracle. Joan finally gives up being a Gothic romance writer and tells her story to a male reporter. While some critics think that Joan makes no progress because she still falls into another romantic relationship with the reporter, I argue instead that Atwood shows the female artist’s voice to tell her story and her resistance to a conclusive interpretation.

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Chapter One

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman

Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle is not only a female Gothic novel but also a

Künstlerroman. Atwood portrays a female artist’s pursuit of her identity and the struggles with her mother as well as her discarded selves. Facing the difficulties in her life, the protagonist, Joan Foster, is preoccupied with fear. As Ellen Moers observes, “fear” is the overriding force behind the Gothic in which “fantasy predominates over reality, the strange over the commonplace, and the supernatural over natural, with one definite auctorial intent:

to scare” (90). Nevertheless, Atwood’s Lady Oracle is not merely intended to scare. Its principal aim is to examine the reasons behind the Gothic heroine’s fear. In Love, Mystery and Misery, Coral Ann Howells argues that Gothic novels are full of unresolved conflicts and repressions, accompanied by crises which are the outward signs of inward tensions, but consistently avoid any clear analysis of the relation between startling effects and their possible causes (13).

Atwood, instead, employs Gothic texts and exploits fairy tales to probe into notions of gender construction, particularly in relation to female identity and body. Feminist criticism views Gothic novels as stories of gender inequality and women’s concomitant anxieties.

Becker furthermore lays bare the psychological disturbances of the Gothic heroine’s mental state: She is “a divided subject” who is torn between “the conscious and socially acceptable movement towards the ‘happy ending’ with the hero” and “the unconscious and socially muted desire for a female community”(“Postmodern Feminine Horror Fiction” 76).

Therefore, there is always a gap between the feminine ideal and women’s ability to fulfill this ideal, particularly, in the form of a disciplined female body. Gothic horrors are related to the complex process of constructing female subjectivity and the development towards such an illusion of ideal femininity. It is the myth of idealized femininity that shapes Gothic forms.

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If Gothic texts are treated seriously, we may realize that all the details and abnormalities are symptoms indicative of unconscious desires and fears. In this chapter, I argue that Atwood employs conventional Gothic elements and rewrites fairy tales to illuminate Joan Foster’s haunted traumatic past and her fear of male rejection / violence as well as loss of identity.

I. Gothic Elements

Howells points out that fear is the core of the Gothic sensibility, including fear of ghosts, fear of the dark, women’s fear of men, fear of what is hidden but might leap out unexpectedly, and fear of something floating around loose which lurks behind everyday reality (63).

Creating the atmosphere and emotion of fear is obviously bound up with the hallmark of Gothic fiction, the uncanny. Sigmund Freud’s significant essay on the uncanny was first published in 1919. It begins with a broad definition. “The uncanny is undoubtedly related to what is frightening— to what arouses dread and horror… it tends to coincide with what excites fear in general” (“The Uncanny” 219). He further thinks of the uncanny as the effect of projecting unconscious desires and fears onto the environment or other people. The uncanny constitutes “the class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar” (“The Uncanny” 220). For instance, a lot of hair-raising delineation in literature is inspired by hidden anxieties concealed within the subject, who then interprets the world according to his or her apprehension. The first step toward understanding this notion is to examine the word in German. The Uncanny (das Unheimlich) is the negation of das Heimlich that signifies both homely (heimlich) and native (heimisch) (“The Uncanny” 220).

The connotation of das Heimlich includes something familiar, friendly, cheerful, comfortable, and intimate. On the contrary, das Unheimlich summons up the unfamiliar, uncomfortable, strange, alien, and unknown. In addition, while das Heimlich is related to something hidden and obscured, das Unheimlich indicates that something that ought to remain hidden and kept out of sight is exposed, uncovered. Thus, the uncanny revelation effects a disturbing

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transformation of the familiar into the unfamiliar. Freud concludes that the uncanny is “in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression” (“The Uncanny” 241). Freud also regards anything uncanny or anything that provokes dread as being caused by cultural taboos. The drives which challenge the reality principle have to be repressed because of cultural continuity. Many uncanny incidents are the embodiment of long familiar anxieties and desires which have undergone repression and now return from it.

The uncanny which prevails in Gothic texts allows an articulation of the unutterable which threatens to transgress social norms.

In The Coherence of Gothic Conventions, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick points out two crucial elements in the Gothic: the unspeakable and live burial (4-5). In fact, both elements are related to Freud’s conception of the uncanny because they are simultaneously familiar and alien to us. These two elements also indicate what is hidden, secret, repressed since it is often blocked off from consciousness, and something menacing because it is alive and ready to spring out, transformed into some monstrous shape (Howells 63). In Lady Oracle, the mother’s astral body, the Fat Lady fantasy, and the old clothes buried underground all convey the uncanny and supernatural images as well as the protagonist’s obsession with her past, no matter how hard she tries to forget.

Joan’s mother, Frances Delacourt, is her formidable rival. She desperately wants to leave her mother’s home and plans to start a different life by creating new identities. Yet, her mother and all the agnozing memories about her ceaselessly haunt Joan. The

appearance of her mother’s astral body signifies the return of the dead and, more specifically, the return of the repressed. After leaving home for a long time, Joan suddenly sees her mother in her apartment:

She was standing, very upright, on the clay-colored rug, dressed in her navy-blue suit with the white collar; her white gloves, hat and shoes were immaculate, and she

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was clutching her purse under her arm. Her face was made up, she’d drawn a bigger mouth around her mouth with lipstick, but the shape of her own mouth showed through. Then I saw that she was crying soundlessly, horribly; mascara was running from her eyes in black tears. (LO 208)

This supernatural phenomenon vividly expresses the feeling of uncanniness. The ghost of Joan’s mother is a peculiar commingling of familiar and unfamiliar because she wears her usual dress but unusually cries in front of her daughter. In addition, a ghost arouses the viewer’s terror and discomfort because the return of the dead disturbs the symbolic order.

Admittedly, the emblematic fear within Gothic fantasy is that somebody or something that seems to be dead and buried might not be dead at all. Thus, Gothic terror is aroused when something familiar or unknown cross the forbidden barriers between dream and waking, life and death. Furthermore, her mother’s silence makes Joan more disconcerted and angry.

She cannot help wondering, “[w]hat did she want from me? Why couldn’t she leave me alone?” (209). The uncertainty of silence aggravates the viewer’s fear but at the same time it implies that something secret has come to light. Because their traumatic relationship in the past remains unresolved, Frances, in order to communicate with her daughter, makes her way crossing the boundary between life and death. In consequence, the mother’s ghost, infringing on the symbolic order, constantly haunts the daughter.

According to Freud, “the primitive fear of the dead is still so strong within us and always ready to come to the surface on any provocation. Most likely our fear still implies the old belief that the dead man becomes the enemy of his survivor and seeks to carry him off to share his new life with him” (“The Uncanny” 242). To survive and get a different life from her mother, the Gothic heroine not merely fears being “like” her mother, sharing the same fate, but also fears “being her mother.” In Gothic tradition, the evocation of the uncanny involves the figures of the double with emphases on identity in physical appearance and the feeling that past and present are intermingled (Modleski 69-70). Since she has

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uncanny sensations that the past is repeating itself through her, the Gothic heroine feels suffocated and desperate in her inability to break free of the past. Needless to say, Joan does not want to be (like) her mother. Yet, they definitely mirror each other. Atwood has the daughter repeat a similar destiny and exhibit similar habits of her mother despite their

different physical features. Frances ran away from home at sixteen. Similarly, Joan leaves her mother’s house at nineteen seeking a better life. Both advocate ideal femininity and marriage at first, but eventually witness a disillusionment with romantic ideology. After going through disappointing marriages, both indulge themselves in palliatives. In other words, Frances relies on alcohol when she realizes that she cannot help her husband’s career.

She drinks more and more as soon as she feels solitary and abandoned by her husband and daughter. As for Joan, she counts heavily on writing Gothic romances to take a break from her marriage with a politically frenzied husband. Joan admits that “[i]t was only after I got married that my writing became for me anything more than an easy way of earning a living.

I’d always felt sly about it, as if I was getting away with something and nobody had found me out” (LO 257). Joan even compares her Gothic writing to painkillers. Without it, Joan, like her mother, “drink[s] too much” (LO 258). As Atwood observes, “the ghost that one sees is in fact a fragment of one’s own self which has split off” (Fee 65). Therefore, on the level of the supernatural, there is the phenomenon of ghosts trangressing boundaries between life and death, while on the psychological level there is the erosion of boundaries between the self and the monstrous (m)Other (Howells 63).

In addition to her mother’s spectral return, Joan also experiences the Fat Lady fantasy several times. The origin of the fantasy is traced to a childhood memory when her Aunt Lou took her to the Canadian National Exhibition but kept her from visiting “the Freak Show”

(LO 103). The Fat Lady was a public display of “the fattest woman in the world,” but Joan never saw her although she wanted to. Without seeing the real person, Joan depends on her imagination to construct the first of the Fat Lady’s images: she is “sitting on a chair, knitting,

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while lines and lines of thin gray faces filed past her, looking, looking” and she wears “gauze pants and a maroon satin brassiere, like the dancing girls, and red slippers. […] One day she would rebel, she would do something” (LO 104). The recurrence of the Fat Lady fantasy shows that uncanny events involve a sense of repetition and unsettle time and space, order and sense (Royle 2). Whether she is obese or slim, Joan is inclined to intertwine herself with the Fat Lady who gradually penetrates her daily life. For example, when Joan and Arthur watch the Olympic doubles figure-skating championships, she suddenly believes that the female skater becomes the Fat Lady, in a new costume:

The Fat Lady skated out onto the ice. I couldn’t help myself. It was one of the most important moments in my life, I should have been able to keep her away, but out she came in a pink skating costume, her head ornamented with swan’s-down.

With her was the thinnest man in the world. […] Her secret was that although she was so large, she was very light, she was hollow, like a helium balloon, they had to keep her tethered to her bed or she’d drifted 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…. (LO 333-4; ellipses in source)

The appearance of the Fat Lady “corrodes the vision of reality” and “abolishes time and space” (Day 34). Although Joan has never seen the Fat Lady, her innermost anxiety about her true identity and her uneasiness about the relationship with men intermingle and result in the unpredictable appearance of the Fat Lady. At the moment of its occurrence, Joan is caught between her marriage with Arthur and her affair with the Royal Porcupine. Each man has different expectations of Joan whose true self is buried in order to meet social demands. Furthermore, Joan’s dancing Fat Lady is the representation of her own miserable ballet performance in her childhood. This experience of déjà-vu is an uncanny revelation of Joan’s repressed past. Atwood examines the horror of imprisonment within the female body.

Initially, Joan is trapped by her body as a result of her “grotesque” obesity. Yet, when she

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loses weight, Joan continues to be haunted by visions of the Fat Lady and by her former fat self. Joan’s anxiety about her body also tirggers her identity crisis. In Gothic texts, the fear of loss of identity is manifested though the frequent appearances of doubles and mirrors (Ljungberg 125). As Joan describes, “[w]hen I looked at myself in the mirror, I didn’t see what Arthur saw. The outline of my former body still surrounded me, like a mist, like a phantom moon, like the image of Dumbo the Flying Elephant superimposed on my own” (LO 259). Joan’s fat self, embodied by the Fat Lady, is like her double and her “shadowy twin, thin when [Joan is] fat, fat when [Joan is] thin” (LO 298).

Joan tries hard to get rid of the fat self and to erase her previous life. When she

becomes a celebrity because of her well-received poems, her effort to conceal the past fails.

Thus, Joan fears being exposed in public and feels being taken over by her dark twin:

I felt very visible. But 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 the newspapers, doing things for which I had to take the consequences: my dark twin, my funhouse-mirror reflection. She was taller than I was, more beautiful, more threatening. She wanted to kill me and take my place, and by the time she did this no one would notice the difference because the media were in on the plot, they were helping her. (LO 304)

Her innermost fear is aroused because of her dark twin who owns a “more threatening” power.

Since Joan subjects herself to the prescriptive myths of ideal femininity advocated by mass media and patriarchal culture, she is anxious about meeting social demands on the female body and afraid of being replaced. Rather than seeing the connection to her dark twin, Joan endeavors to project her monstrous desire onto her dark twin. A “normal” woman,

according to what she has been taught, should be dependent, compliant rather than threatening. Joan’s attempt to reject the unwanted and fearful part of the self, however, reinforces the existence of repressed desire and challenges the notion of a unified self. As

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Joan finds that there is “no difference” between her dark twin and herself, this inability to distinguish between “what is me and what is not-me, what is real and what is imagined” (Day 22) shows that a space is opened up for doubles and split selves, which are not total opposites but dependent on each other. No matter how hard she tries, Joan fails to escape from the dark self within her mind.

Joan’s flight from the confines of her traumatic past and her own body drives her into the ultimate escape, death. While she fakes her suicide and flees from a blackmailer to Italy, Joan never succeeds in eluding her own life because she has to face “the return of the

repressed” from time to time. As soon as she arrives in Terremoto, Italy, Joan not only buries her old clothes but also changes her appearance by cutting and dyeing her remarkably red hair. As time goes by, nevertheless, the “inanimate” clothes do not rest in peace but come to surface. Joan restlessly feels,

[b]elow 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 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. It would have no features, it would be smooth as a potato, pale as starch, it would look like a big thigh, it would have a face like a breast minus the nipple. (LO 388-9; ellipses in source)

The clothes embody the familiar characteristics of Joan’s previous self, a combination of blankness and obesity. When she was a fat girl, Joan was less attractive and noticeable because in the eyes of other people she is “a huge featureless blur” (LO 94). As a teenager, Joan also perceives herself as “a single enormous breast”(LO 114-5). The inanimate clothes are transformed into a familiar persona again, namely, the Fat Lady.

She rose into the air and descended on me as I lay stretched out in the chair. For a moment she hovered around me like ectoplasm, like a gelatin shell, my ghost, my

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angel; then she settled and I was absorbed into her. Within my former body, I gasped for air. Disguised, concealed, white fur choking my nose and mouth.

Obliterated. (LO 389)

As Freud claims, “[t]o some people the idea of being buried alive by mistake is the most uncanny thing of all” (“The Uncanny” 244). Joan’s old clothes which represent her

previous identities (a fat girl, an inept wife, a mistress, and a writer) obliterate the distinction between the past and the present, fantasy and reality. According to Joan’s description, a monstrous creature comes to life, crawls back to her, and tries to suffocate her inch by inch.

This time, it is Joan who feels like being buried alive. An uncanny effect is easily produced

“when the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced” (“The Uncanny” 244). In Lady Oracle, we can identify various uncanny features, such as a compulsive behavior pattern (compulsion to repeat), a doubling and multiplying of characters, an animation of inanimate objects. All of these are bred by the subject’s unconscious fears, or more

specifically, by what the subject represses. In other words, what is experienced as uncanny is the embodiment of Joan’s anxieties, transformed into concrete shapes external to herself.

Indeed, unspeakable and indelible fears constantly disturb Gothic heroines despite the fact that romantic love and heterosexual marriage as a happy ending prevail in most Gothic romances. The primary terror at the heart of the female Gothic tradition is the terror of male rejection or violence (Fee 63). In Lady Oracle, Joan Foster portrays a Gothic heroine’s fears of men’s violence and rejection. Such fears also explain her ambivalence toward femininity, particularly, in terms of her body. Due to her obese body, she is seen as not “feminine”

enough but this paradoxically protects her from being harrassed. Therefore, Joan confesses that she has never developed the usual female fears. Even Joan’s mother who warns her about bad men lurking in the dark does not believe that she would be molested. As Joan says, “[i]t would have been like molesting a giant basketball” (LO 166). While her fatness leads to male rejection, which is her mother’s main concern, her giant body simultaneously

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gives her power to deal with men’s violence: “I knew I would be able to squash any potential molester against a wall merely by breathing out” (LO 166). Nevertheless, Joan sometimes

“secretly” feels eager to have “images of exuding melting femininity and soft surrender”(LO 166). After becoming slim and pretty, Joan feels restless so that she longs to be fat again.

Joan’s fat body strangely provides a sense of security because it is “an insulation, a cocoon and a disguise” (LO 167). Above all, a fat woman seems immune to the menacing gaze of men. Since she is too large to draw men’s interest, she obtains invisibility. The only influence of her fat body which Joan wants is to “be merely an onlooker again, with nothing too much expected of me” mainly because “without my magic cloak of blubber and

invisibility I felt naked, pruned, as though some essential covering was missing” (LO 167).

In fact, whether fat or slender, the female body is inevitably the target of male gaze. While

“normally” slim women may be whistled on the street, fat women can be a “spectacle,” like the Fat Lady, on display in an exhibition.

In Gothic novels, a more deep-seated fear which the heroine harbors is that of loss of identity, a loss that can lead to madness or even death. Such a female fear reflects the situation of many married middle-class women who constitute the main readership of the Gothic genre. A respectable, innocent, and protected woman has to leave her family where her identity, however restricted, is comparatively secure. After she marries a qualified suitor, her husband, who takes the place of her father, is entitled to have sexual rights and absolute authority over her. Michelle Massé has coined the term “marital Gothic” to describe stories in which a recently married woman discovers with horror that her husband who should support her new identity and listen to her voice, in reality, fails to do so (20). Therefore, horror returns in the new home of the couple, conjured up by denial of the heroine’s identity and autonomy. Atwood exploits familiar features from fairy tales to explore female fear of male indifference / violence and of loss of identity. Her revision of fairy tales

simultaneously duplicates and undercuts gender myths and stereotypes.

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II. Fairy Tales

Gothic fiction is characterized by a specific collection of motifs and themes, many of which come through folklore, fairytales, and myths (Howells 63). Atwood’s attempt to examine fairy tales within Gothic stories reveals the sexual politics embedded in society.

She comments on Grimm’s Fairy Tales in her interview with Karla Hammond:

Grimm’s Fairy Tales are just as much myth or story as anything else. But some get repeated so often in the society that they become definitive, i.e. myths of that society. […] The unexpurgated Grimm’s Fairy Tales contain a number of fairy tales in which women are not only the central characters but win by using their own intelligence. Some people feel fairy tales are bad for women. This is true if the only ones they’re referring to are those tarted-up French versions of “Cinderella”

and “Bluebeard,” in which the female protagonist gets rescued by her brothers.

But in many of them, women rather men have the magic powers. (Ingersoll 114-5) While highlighting the self-destructive belief on women’s passivity and dependence on men’s salvation, Atwood also discusses her protagonist’s potential of “magic powers.” She

appropriates “The Bluebeard” to critique male violence / social restriction imposed on female body and mind. In addition, She employs “The Little Mermaid” and “The Red Shoes” from Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales to examine her protagonist’s fear of male indifference and of losing her identity.

1. The Bluebeard

The basic structure of the Bluebeard tale is similar to traditional Gothic romances. A wealthy, powerful man brings his young bride to his castle and forbids her to open a certain door. Out of curiostiy, the bride insists on opening the door. As soon as she knows the secret behind the door, she dies. As usual, the heroine puts herself in danger but is unable to rescue herself. The villain’s identity is revealed and next comes the true hero / rescuer.

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The heroine survives and marries again, to her Mr. Right. The rule of a happy ending is important in fairy tales even though the Bluebeard tale begins with events surrounding a murderous husband and a marriage trap. It was not until 1697 that the tale received its clearest codification in Charles Perrault’s fairy tale, “Barbe Bleue” (Grace 248). In Perrault’s version, the terrified wife asks her sister Anne to “go up… upon the top of the tower, and see if my brothers are not coming” (Perrault 109). In the end, the helpless woman is saved by her brothers who kill the villain-husband. The woman then inherits her husband’s wealth, rewards her brothers, and marries a good man. The final rescue, which restores the heroine to her place in the patriarchal structure by subsuming her to the hero in marriage, exposes the most fundamental source of violence in the story (Hite 154). That is, a society that defines all possible male-female relations in terms of masculine control, female vulnerability, and heterosexual marriage produces terror for women.

The Bluebeard tale alluded in Lady Oracle is the Grimms’ “Fitcher’s Bird” which has great influence on Atwood. Atwood admits that she loves the complete, unexpurgated Grimm’s Fairy Tales, which she read at six, and that one of her favorite stories was “Fitcher’s Bird” (Ingersoll 70-1). The Grimms’ “Fitcher’s Bird” is about a disguised wizard

(sometimes Death or the devil) whose touch forces pretty girls to leap into his basket. When he takes them to his castle, he gives them an egg to be carried everywhere and keys to every room but one, which he forbids them to open. This is a test before marriage. Most versions of the tale have three sisters: the first two cannot resist curiosity and open the door, discovering the former brides’ chopped-up bodies, and dropping their eggs in blood. As soon as the wizard sees the egg’s indelible blood stains, the two sisters join the corpses. The third sister is curious but more clever. When she enters the door, she does not carry the egg, which will be the evidence of her disobedience and transgression. She passes the test, deceives the wizard, and finally gains power over him. In the Grimms’ version, there is no rescuer for the sisters. In the end, the third sister puts her sisters’ bodies together and

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disguises herself as a bird to flee. This time, it is not the bride but the groom (the wizard) that dies in a communal execution.

In spite of its simple outline, the Bluebeard tale implies the complexity of sexual politics.

The forbidden door embodies a prohibited space for women. They are asked to obey patriarchal rules and repress their curiosity. The prohibiton prevents women from having knowledge or experience which may be dangerous but worth the risk of acquiring it.

According to Anne Williams, “the Bluebeard’s secret is the foundation upon which

patriarchal culture rests: control of the subversively curious female, personified in his wives”

(41). A woman’s curiosity, or her desire for more knowledge beyond the domestic sphere threatens men and is regarded as social transgression. Furthermore, prohibition and female obedience in the Bluebeard tale shed light on the repression of sexuality in Gothic tales. For female characters, repression reveals either complete denial of sexuality and adoption of childish qualities or deep attraction to a powerful male figure, which is expressed as

daughterly love and obedience. On the one hand, both Gothic romances and the Bluebeard tale reveal female masochistic identification and female fear of male violence. Hence, the Bluebeard plot embedded in most Gothic romances is likely to disturb female readers and stir up their discontent with their own situations. On the other hand, just as the horrors of transgression sometimes become a powerful means to reinforce the value or necessity of social restrictions, the reading experience may forestall the readers’ subversiveness. After all, female readers of Gothic romances can experience fear and desire by identifying Gothic heroines without risk and leaving the house.

Compared with the heroines in fairy tales, Joan does not consider herself self-reliant and admits that she is never the clever third sister in the fairy tale:

[I]n any labyrinth I would have let go of the thread in order to follow a wandering light, a fleeting voice. In a fairy tale I would be one of the two stupid sisters who open the forbidden door and are shocked by the murdered wives, not the third,

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clever one who keeps to the essentials: presence of mind, foresight, the telling of watertight lies. I told lies but they were not watertight. (LO182)

Represented as a strategic device for survival, deception is crucial for Joan to conceal socially unacceptable parts of her self in order to retain men’s love. While dealing with male

indifference, Joan inevitably fears a loss of identity connected to her uncontrollable doubling or reduplication (Fee 64). Therefore, Joan confesses that “I was more than double, I was triple, multiple, and now I could see that there was more than one life to come, there were many” (LO 298). In Lady Oracle, the notion of a coherent, unified self is called into question when Atwood highlights the protagonist’s self division as well as her duplicity.

According to the formula of the Bluebeard tale, Joan finally enters the labyrinth in her Gothic novel, Stalked by Love, and opens the door. In the center of the maze, she meets her

multiple selves and recognizes her Gothic fantasies about men. After opening the door, she at first believes the only way out of the maze is through male rescue: “There, standing on the threshold, waiting for her, was Redmond [the Gothic hero]” (LO 415). First, Joan believes that he is her rescuer. Then she knows: “Redmond was the killer. He 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” (LO 415, ellipses in source).

At this moment, Joan exhibits a typical women’s fear of male violence as the bride realizes that her husband is a murderer. At the same time, she is afraid to be replaced because she is not “thin and flawless.” This self-abasement results from her mental wound as a rejected child. In addition, the ending of Stalked by Love undermines Joan’s oversimplified

perception about men, or in Shuli Barzilai’s word, her “Bluebeard Syndrome” (250). Joan witnesses the transformation of Redmond / Bluebeard. The distinction between rescuers and villains is ambiguous because Redmond’s face in turn metamorphoses into the faces of the various men in Joan’s life, including her father, the Polish Count, the Royal Porcupine, the villain from her poetry, and Arthur. Atwood successfully rewrites the Bluebeard tale

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because when the wife opens the door, what she finds is that a man, just like herself, has multiple identities. Most importantly, when the man wants to rescue Joan and promises that they will dance together forever, she refuses. After telling the man “I know who you are”

(415), Joan decides to dance alone and thus achieves self-deliverance. Although at first she identifies with the doomed wife in the Gothic, Joan ends up becoming the third sister in

“Fitcher’s Bird” to rescue herself.

In many versions of the Bluebeard tale, the wives are beheaded and their bodies are the husband’s collections and trophies. Similarly, Joan’s body rarely belongs to herself. It is for her mother’s expectations, for her aunt’s condition (to get her money by losing one hundred pounds), and for her lovers’ and husband’s visual satisfaction or desire. What is more, Joan’s mental wounds separate her from her mother and even from part of herself.

She fabricates a new life, creates different identities, and buries her past as well as all

memories about her mother. In addition to the theme of self-deliverance in “Fitcher’s Bird,”

Atwood also adopts the “re-membering” theme from this fairy tale. “Fitcher’s Bird” is about escaping from marital dismemberment and, in particular, physical dismemberment. In the end, the third sister rejoins the severed pieces of her sisters and disguises herself as a bird to flee. She succeeds in re-creating life and re-gaining freedom from a marriage trap. In Lady Oracle, the re-membering theme underscores Joan’s acceptance of her multiple

identities and reconciles Joan with her mother. Joan’s story testifies to women’s recognition of their multiple identities and their rebirth by “re-membering (re-discovering), speaking, and dancing their own texts as well as the old stories” (Wilson 122). Despite the fact that Joan finally refuses to dance with the man, Atwood draws our attention to her female artist’s doubts about dancing alone by evoking the dancing figures in Andersen’s fairy tales.

2. The Red Shoes & The Little Mermaid

Atwood’s appropriation of Andersen’s “The Red Shoes” and “The Little Mermaid”

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reveals a female artist’s dilemma between her artistic career and her desire for men’s love.

The either / or choice encountered by women, particularly female artists, adds complexity to Atwood’s Gothic novel. Andersen’s “The Red Shoes” is a moralistic tale. The protagonist, Karen, is punished for her vanity and ingratitude. She forgets her Christian obligation to be humble. Ceaselessly dancing in red shoes becomes her punishment rather than a gift.

Dancing is so painful for her that Karen eventually asks an executioner to cut off her legs.

The tale shows the conflict between the girl’s love for dance and the submissive piety demanded by a paramount patriarchal institution, the church. Karen’s dancing, viewed as self-expression, defies the traditional notion of female decency and obedience. In folklore, dancing is often associated with enchantment, taboos, deception, captivity, and (especially for women) punishment (Wilson 121). The color red is associated with blood. Therefore, dancing in red shoes becomes a curse. Karen finally reconciles herself to sufficient piety and restricted mobility so that she can resist this curse. Her story indicates that the price of women’s self-expression is “[b]lood, the elemental fluid, the juice of life, by-product of birth, prelude to death. The red badge of courage” (Atwood, Dancing Girls 191-2).

In Lady Oracle, Joan has doubts about the choice to fulfill woman’s traditional roles or to realize her own dream after watching Moira Shearer’s 1948 film “The Red Shoes.” In the film, Moira Shearer plays a ballet dancer torn between her career and her husband.

According to Sharon Rose Wilson, dancing as a ballerina is not only individualistic and self-expressive but also selfish and unfeminine because such dancing takes on implications beyond compliance to role-conditioning (129). In spite of her rebellious pursuit of art, the ballerina ultimately commits suicide by throwing herself in front of a train. Joan explains the reason why she adores the unfortunate ballerina: “not only did she have red hair and an entrancing pair of red satin slippers to match, she also had beautiful costumes, and she suffered more than anyone” (LO 93, italics mine). Joan not only has the same kind of red hair but, more importantly, easily identifies with the female character’s life story full of

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suffering and indecision. Moreover, the ballerina’s story sheds light on Joan’s pursuit of her artistic career. The ballerina at first represents a wish-fulfillment dream for Joan who

“wanted to dance and be married to a handsome orchestra conductor, both at once” (LO 93-4).

However, after she decides to “dance for no one but [herself],” she cuts her feet on broken glass in her balcony (LO 405). Her bloody feet look like “[t]he real red shoes,” punished for dancing (LO 406). Then, Joan realizes the double bind of Moira Shearer’s role in the film:

she can dance (be artists, be free) or marry (be conventional) but she cannot do both.

In Lady Oracle, Atwood highlights “dancing” and “women’s self-sacrifice” when she creates a female artist, Joan Foster, who often compares herself to the woman in red shoes and the Little Mermaid. For Atwood, the mermaid is an “archetypal victim / artist” who sacrifices her tongue in order to search for her true love (Rigney 9). She renounces her talent for singing in exchange for the prince’s attention. However, the mermaid with human legs is incapable of walking or dancing well. As Atwood points out, “[i]f you want to be female, you’ll have to have your tongue removed, like the Little Mermaid” (Second Words 225). In a sense, femininity is in conflict with creativity. The fact that Joan conceals her writing talent from her husband is not only due to her feeling of being torn between

femininity and artistic creativity, but also because “secrecy” is a woman’s way of coping with the fear of success. Her successful writing career becomes “a challenge to the male ego”

(LO 326). As Joan’s lover criticizes, she is “a threat” (LO 327). The concealment of her writing talent makes Joan gradually feel “something was missing” (LO 261-2). Although she succeeds in possessing an ideal female body, Joan perhaps loses her soul. She “just drifted around, singing vaguely, like the Little Mermaid in the Andersen fairy tale. […]

She’d become a dancer, though, with no tongue” (LO 262). When facing the dilemma between her artistic career and romantic love, Joan chooses love and marriage. She may not be aware that she is following her mother’s expectations: first you get a pretty body, then you catch a man. Joan also confesses that she “had this unnatural fear that if you danced they’d

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cut your feet off so you wouldn’t be able to dance” (LO 405). She worries that even if she finally overcomes her fear and dances, “they cut your feet off” and “[t]he good man went away too, because you wanted to dance” (LO 405). To keep her marriage, Joan chooses a duplicitous life because she realizes that neither the Little Mermaid nor Moira Shearer “had been able to please the handsome prince; both of them had died. […] Their mistake had been to go public” (LO 262). In order to survive, she decides to “do her dancing behind closed doors” (LO 262). Yet, Joan is not quite sure about her decision because she says,

“[i]t was safer, but….” (LO 262, ellipses in source).

Her uncertainty looms in her writing processes and finally evokes her vision of a dancing Fat Lady:

My old daydreams about the Fat Lady returned, only this time she’d be walking across her tightrope, in her pink tutu, and she’d fall, in slow motion, turning over and over on the way down…. Or she’d be dancing on a stage in her harem costume and her red slippers. But it wouldn’t be a dance at all, it would be a striptease, she’d start taking off her clothes, while I watched, powerless to stop her. She’d wobble her hips, removing her veil, one after another, but no one would whistle, no one would yell Take it off baby. I tried to turn off these out-of-control fantasies, but couldn’t, I had to watch them through to the end. (304-5, ellipses and italics in source)

Joan’s obsession with the Fat Lady together with her anxiety about her body and her writing career not merely creates an uncanny and supernatural effect but also expresses Joan’s

conflicting desires for both men’s attention and a career as a writer. Here the Fat Lady, who is dressed like Joan in her ballet recital in the past, transcends the time-space boundary and disturbs Joan’s sense of self at present. Being a successful writer, Joan fears that she may become unattractive to men, just like a fat woman whose striptease is ridiculous rather than sexy. Moreover, since dancing is a metaphor for writing, Joan also worries about repeating

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the failure in her ballet performance, particularly when she relies on writing to support herself economically and psychically. Atwood is concerned most specifically with the role of women as artists and with the price of art. As Joan describes it: “At every step I took, small pains shot through my feet. The Little Mermaid rides again... hobbling through the gauntlet of old women, who would make horns with their hands, tell the children to throw stones, wish me bad luck. What did they see? […] A female monster, larger than life, larger than most life around here anyway” (LO 407). Unlike the original image of the sweet Little Mermaid in Andersen’s tale, Atwood’s female artist needs to break through the prescriptions of female roles and express her repressed desires, which are regarded as monstrous.

Regardless of the price, however, Atwood condemns her female artists to the choice of art.

As she states,

[y]ou would come to a fork in the road where you’d be forced to make a decision:

“woman” or “writer.” I chose being a writer, because I was very determined, even though it was very painful for me then (the late ’50s and early ’60s), but I’m very glad that I made that decision because the other alternative would have been ultimately much more painful: it’s more painful to renounce your gifts or your direction in life than it is to renounce an individual. (Ingersoll 117)

Atwood shows, from “The Little Mermaid” and “The Red Shoes” (the film), that a woman is punished for wanting both to be an artist and to be loved. At the same time, she reminds us that to sacrifice art for love is, ironically, to sacrifice art, love, and the self as well.

Rewriting the famous fairy tales in Lady Oracle, Atwood successfully calls our attention to the differences within similarities. While no longer agreeing to amputation or, like Andersen’s Karen, depending upon a male angel to open the maze enclosing and excluding her, Joan opens the closed door by herself. Like Fitcher’s third bride in “Fitcher’s Bird,”

Joan discovers that she is not a passive victim and that men, not necessarily Bluebeards, are also human and vulnerable. The Little Mermaid who renounces her voice for the prince’s

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love finally loses her life. Joan instead survives. More importantly, she retrieves her voice so that like the Grimms’ Robber Bride in “The Robber Bridegroom,” she can tell her and her sisters’(mother’s) story. Atwood utilizes many familiar elements from fairy tales, thereby aiding reader’s recognition of the intertextuality of fairy tales. At the same time she wittingly defamiliarizes, transgresses, and often parodies these elements. This also makes Atwoodian Gothic “uncanny.”

III. Conclusion

Although Lady Oracle is a comic Gothic novel, its intent is serious. By incorporating Gothic conventions, its parodic humor exposes the myths and conventions of social

construction of gender and shows how these are perpetuated in literature. In her poem

“Hesitations outside the Door,” Atwood writes, “[i]f we make stories for each other / about what is in the room / we will never have to go in” (Selected Poems 171). Unless we examine the truth / myth behind the door, women’s lives still seem inescapably shaped by patriarchal forces lurking in Gothic texts.