Lady Oracle

infobox Book |
name = Lady Oracle
title_orig =
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image_caption =
author = Margaret Atwood
illustrator =
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country = Canada
language = English
series =
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publisher = McClelland and Stewart
release_date = 1976
english_release_date =
media_type = Print
pages = 376
isbn = ISBN-10: 0771008384 ISBN-13: 978-0771008382
preceded_by = Surfacing
followed_by = Life Before Man

"Lady Oracle" is a novel by Margaret Atwood. It was first published by McClelland and Stewart in 1976.

Plot summary

The novel's protagonist, Joan Foster, is a romance novelist who has spent her life running away from difficult situations. The novel alternates between flashbacks from the past and scenes from the present. Through flashbacks, the reader sees her first as an overweight child whose mother constantly criticizes her, and later, hiding her career, her past as the mistress of a Polish count, and her affair with a performance artist called The Royal Porcupine from her bipolar husband Arthur.

In the present, she has recently published a volume of feminist poetry which becomes a breakthrough success and is overwhelmed by the pressures of sudden fame. Joan panics after receiving a blackmail attempt from someone who has found out about her secrets. With the help of two acquaintances, she fakes her own suicide and then flees to Italy.

Major Themes

Duality and Multiplicity

The themes of duality, duplicity and multiplicity are explored in some depth in "Lady Oracle". Joan Foster, the novel’s protagonist, retains a number of separate identities, sometimes sequentially and sometimes simultaneously. Throughout the course of the novel, we see many separate versions of Joan Foster. The novel’s “present” is set in Italy, following Joan’s staged suicide. Within this narrative we hear of Joan’s unhappy childhood at the hands of a mother who tries to get Joan to conform to her own ideal. Through these memories we also see her escape from her mother, become a writer of popular Gothic romance, pursue a relationship with a Polish count, marry a revolutionary activist, become a celebrated poet and, finally, plan her escape to Italy.

Joan’s attempts at creating and maintaining multiple selves appear doomed to failure. At the very end of the novel Joan admits “I’ve always been terrified of being found out.” A clue as to what it is that terrifies her is given in the line: “All my life I’d been hooked on plots,” and it appears that she tries to construct her life as if it were a fictional plot. Joan appears to be drawn to romantic notions of relationships. She meets Paul, a Polish count, in typically romantic fashion when he “rescues” her as she falls off a bus. Her relationship with the artist known as The Royal Porcupine bears some of the features of a romantic fiction. The Royal Porcupine wears a cape and sports a ridiculous name, whilst Joan herself has become known by an unusual name: “Lady Oracle.” Furthermore, after staging her own suicide, Joan longs to be rescued again, this time by Arthur, her husband, to whom she sends a card to alert him to his role – or her notion of his role – in her fantasy scenario. It appears that she envisions herself as a heroine in one of her own Gothic romances. As Joan, or Louisa K Delacourt (to use her “romantic fiction” pseudonym) writes her final gothic romance, reality and fiction seem to merge, and people and plots from Joan’s real life begin to make appearances in her novel. Felicia, a character in the that novel, "Stalked by Love", echoes Joan’s life by miraculously returning after drowning and refers to another character, Redmond, as “Arthur”. “Who is Arthur?” replies the fictional Redmond. Arthur, of course, is the husband of the author, not a character in the book. A little later the fictional world itself begins to break down, as Joan starts to use strange similes, comparing a perfume to the smell of “the edges of swamps”, and speaking of “her head that spread like fire, her mind that spread like cancer or pubic lice”.

This is the point at which fiction and reality finally start to become united for Joan. As critic Coral Ann Howells notes, until this point “Joan assumes no responsibility for what she writes.” She has never written anything as “herself.” [Howells, Coral Ann. "The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood (Cambridge Companions to Literature)"] The Gothic romances have been written by “Louisa K Delacourt” and the book of poetry, "Lady Oracle", was written through the phenomenon of “automatic writing” by Joan in a trance-like state.

It may seem a little strange that Joan fails to maintain her multiple selves successfully. Almost every other character in the book also has at least two personalities and yet appear to manage them successfully. Joan’s father’s career as a professional assassin during the war contrasts with his current medical career (although, as an anaesthetist, he still holds a responsibility over life or death); the Royal Porcupine is later revealed to be a rather ordinary person called Chuck Brewer; another character, Leda Sprott, a spiritualist, reappears in the guise of the Reverend Eunice P. Revele; Paul, the Polish count also writes “nurse” novels under the wonderfully silly pseudonym, Mavis Quilp, and even a flasher and child molester is also seen as a kindly man who rescues Joan when, as a child, she is tied to a tree by her school friends. Furthermore, Arthur too is described by Joan as having “phases.”

There is a crucial difference between the multiplicity of these other characters and Joan’s own multiplicity, however. Whereas Joan attempts to manage her many personalities simultaneously, other characters appear to adopt theirs in a sequential manner. Therefore Joan’s multiple selves conflict and struggle to co-exist, whereas other people dispense with “old” personalities before adopting a new one. Thus Arthur goes through “phases” that occur sequentially; Chuck Brewer announces of the Royal Porcupine: “I killed him” in order to start a more genuine relationship with Joan; the persona of Leda Sprott is abandoned prior to the invention of the Reverend E.P. Revele, and Joan’s father’s life as an assassin in the French-Canadian resistance is concluded prior to the time when he become a doctor. Other characters experience no conflict between their sequential multiple selves, but Joan has difficulty in combining hers simultaneously. Despite appearing powerless to change, Joan appears to recognise that her problems stem from the incompatibility of her separate lives: “If I brought the separate parts of my life together (like uranium, like plutonium, harmless to the naked eye, but charged with lethal energies) surely there would be an explosion. Instead I floated, marking time,” she notes.

Joan’s multiple lives may be regarded as unsuccessful not only because she tries to maintain them simultaneously but also because she tries to keep them separate. She does not allow these separate realities to exist in harmony. It is perhaps true to say that all people have multiple selves: One person may be, at times, mother; professional person; lover; wife, and so on. Usually these separate roles coexist peacefully, but Joan attempts to separate her different roles, fearing “an explosion” if any of her identities transgresses its boundaries. Joan’s multiple lives refuse to stay within their boundaries, however. The theme of transgression of boundaries is echoed in Joan’s mother’s refusal to stay dead, as her ghost – real or imagined by Joan – crosses the boundary to return to the living world. Joan’s life follows a similar pattern as she herself refuses to “stay dead” after her fake suicide. Perhaps we can infer from this that it is normal to have multiple and separate lives as long as you accept that that is the case and do not try to separate them. If, however, one “self” attempts to deny the existence of the others, then chaos will be the result.

Eventually Joan appears to find some resolution to her duplicitous problems. At the conclusion of the novel, having caused the hospitalisation of a reporter by hitting him with a Cinzano bottle, she resolves to tell her tale, truthfully, to him. She feels that she has never been truly loved in the past, and indeed, how could she be loved without revealing her true self? Her partners could only love a constructed version of Joan – Joan herself admits that Arthur “loved me under false pretenses” (Atwood, Lady Oracle, p. 345). She considers the possibility of another pretence, such as feigning amnesia, but instead opts to face reality, although, with the line “Right now, though, it’s easier just to stay here in Rome” (Atwood, Lady Oracle, p. 345), one wonders if she may still find reasons to avoid any unpleasantness.

References