The ‘Escape Artist’: Lady Oracle

Abstract

In a poem entitled ‘Hesitations outside the Door’, Atwood writes, ‘If we make stories for each other/about what is in the room/we will never have to go in …’ (Selected Poems, 171). She refers to the story of Bluebeard and the forbidden castle room which contains the bodies of murdered former wives, ‘the thin women’ who hang ‘on their hooks, dismembered’. But Atwood is also making a statement about the misuse of art; she implies that one may escape confrontation with reality by creating fiction. As the protagonist of Surfacing misuses art to create an alternative and more ideal world through her drawings and her ‘alibis’, so Joan Foster of Lady Oracle is also an ‘escape artist’ (367), intent on evading reality and commitment by ‘writing’ her world. She moves through mirrors and through her own self-deluding fictions into a realm of fairy tales and myth where, instead of escaping, she becomes trapped in the very surfaces she strives to create. Although she searches for her self in many mirrors and in the numerous gothic romances she writes for her living, romances in which all the heroines are always versions of herself, Joan never comes to terms with a reality beneath the surface of her schizophrenic existence.