Abstract
Atwood’s ironising of women’s Gothic Romance fiction makes Lady Oracle a compelling and unsettling novel. Writing within and against the limits of the genre, exploiting and challenging its norms, she interrogates its stereotypes of womanhood as she explores the compensatory function of so-called escapist literature. As Lady Oracle reworks older fictional forms — the Gothic, the sentimental novel, the picaresque and fairy tales — it becomes the locus where a plurality of styles and traditions are revisited. Such a medley probes notions of unity in generic classification to subvert conventional hierarchies, dismantling their conventional iconographies. Lady Oracle also interrogates the notion of unity in terms of attitude to subjectivity and ‘character’. By refracting the identity of her protagonist through a plethora of projected personae, At wood emphasises the liberating aspects of a multiple, plural subjectivity, with the text withholding judgement on a range of issues and, by focusing on the fractured self of a polymorphic protagonist, endorses process and change. Deconstructing the homogeneous ego, Lady Oracle yields a gendered vision wherein the figure of woman assumes a multiplicity of roles and positions.
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Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
I am large, contain multitudes.
Walt Whitman, Song of the Open Road, I.
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Notes
G. Gibson, ‘Interview with Margaret Atwood’, in Eleven Canadian Writers Resolution: Global (Toronto, 1973).
L. Fielder, ‘The Death and Rebirths of the Novel’; ‘Response: American Fiction’, Salmagundi, vol. 50–1 (1980) pp. 142–52; 153–71.
F. Sharpshott, ‘The Last Word in Criticism’, Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada Resolution: Global (1982), pp. 117–28.
C. Guillen, Literature as a System Resolution: Global (Princetown, N. J., 1971) pp. 386; 12. A reading of the novel in terms of only one genre, such as the Picaresque (L. Freibert, ‘The Artist as Picaro’, Canadian Literature, vol. 92 (Spring 1982) pp. 23–33), does not account for the implications of the contamination within genres that is present in Lady Oracle. Undoubtedly, certain elements of the Picaresque do appear in the novel, the most evident being that of the artist as a trickster, but on the whole the novel defies generic classifications (C. Guillen, ‘Toward a Definition of the Picaresque’, in Guillen, Literature as a System, pp. 71–106).
Margaret Atwood, Lady Oracle Resolution: Global (London, 1982) p. 226. Further references to this edition are given in the text.
M. Atwood, ‘Superwoman Drawn and Quartered: the Early form of She’ (1965), in Second Words Resolution: Global (Toronto, 1982) pp. 35–54, esp. p. 54.
M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist Resolution: Global (London, 1981) pp. 315, 364.
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Quoted by S. Grace, Violent Duality: A Study of Margaret Atwood Resolution: Global (Montreal, 1980) p. 76.
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R. B. du Plessis, ‘For the Etruscans’, in E. Showalter (ed.), The New Feminist Criticism Resolution: Global (London, 1985) pp. 271–91, esp. p. 276.
T. Moi, Sexuality/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Criticism Resolution: Global (London, 1985) p. 167.
Margaret Atwood, You Are Happy Resolution: Global (Toronto, 1974) p. 43.
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© 1994 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Rao, E. (1994). Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle: Writing against Notions of Unity. In: Nicholson, C. (eds) Margaret Atwood: Writing and Subjectivity. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23282-6_7
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