Lady Oracle by Margaret Atwood

First published: 1976

Type of plot: Satire

Time of work: The late 1940’s to the 1970’s

Locale: Toronto, Canada; Terremoto, Italy; London, England

Principal Characters:

• Joan Delacourt Foster, the narrator, an author of romance novels
• Fran Delacourt, Joan’s middle-class, social-climbing mother
• Aunt Lou, Joan’s aunt, who opens the world of fantasy for Joan
• Arthur Foster, Joan’s idealistic husband, who fights for “almost lost” causes
• The Royal Porcupine, an eccentric artist who preserves road-killed animals
• Paul, the Polish Count, a political refugee who writes romance novels

The Novel

Lady Oracle is a five-part narrative in which Joan Foster, the first-person narrator, tells the story of her life. Spanning the time period from the early 1940’s through the mid-1970’s, Joan’s story describes her growing up in Toronto, becoming an author of gothic romances, marrying, and faking her suicide to escape the complicated turmoil of her life. The first narrative begins immediately following Joan’s phony suicide. Planning her “death” very carefully, she aims for a neatness and simplicity in it that would counter the spreading tendency of her life. Yet having fled to Terremoto, Italy, the very place where she and her husband, Arthur, had vacationed the previous year, Joan begins to regret going there. Her attempts at disguise are ineffectual, and her romances (written under an assumed name) are not going well. Overcome with nostalgia, she is forced to admit that, rather than beginning a new life, she has brought the past with her.

In the second narrative, Joan describes her childhood in Toronto. She recounts the misery of being a fat child and the discomfiture her obesity caused her beauty-obsessed mother and her Brownie companions. One of their pranks, tying Joan up on a bridge over a Toronto ravine where she is eventually rescued by the same man who had earlier exposed himself to her, causes her anxieties about identity. Further confusion ensues about her mother, who holds Joan responsible for the incident. Other painful episodes erode her self-image, and, to accommodate perceived expectations of her, Joan begins to explore and sustain various identities. The third narrative reveals Joan living in a Toronto rooming house following an attack by her mother. Using the name of her aunt, Louisa K. Delacourt, who has left her two thousand dollars on condition that she lose one hundred pounds, she begins to write gothic romances. Joan achieves a new shape and determines that she needs to construct a past to accompany it. Traveling to London, England, she meets Paul, the Polish Count, who becomes her first lover because she mistakes the offer to share his apartment as a gesture of friendship. Later, when she meets Arthur, she falsifies her past, neglecting to tell him of her childhood obesity, the facts of her earlier relationship, or her authorship of gothic romances. When her mother dies accidentally, Joan goes home to Toronto and is shocked to find that her father has already given away her mother’s clothes. Searching for clues about her mother’s life before she was born, Joan locates a photograph album containing a picture of her father and another young man with their heads cut out. Joan begins to understand her mother’s anger resulting from her entrapment in the role of making her family her career.

The fourth narrative tells of Arthur’s coming to Toronto to find Joan and of their marriage. Unknown to Arthur, Joan continues writing romances, mainly as a defense against the complexity of his nature. Joan seeks stability in writing fantasy and maintaining the identities of both Joan Foster, wife of Arthur, and Louisa K. Delacourt, writer of popular romances. A foray into automatic writing produces Lady Oracle, a book of quasi-mystical poems that propels her into becoming an overnight literary cult figure. Her notoriety initiates an affair with a bizarre avant-garde artist named The Royal Porcupine and also incites Fraser Buchanan to discover her various identities and blackmail her. Joan’s inability to cope with the tangle of her life or manage her separate identities prompts her staged suicide and her journey abroad for yet another life.

The fifth section brings the reader full circle. In Terremoto, Joan learns that in Toronto, two friends who aided her in her “suicide” have been arrested for murder. She determines to go back and rescue them. She strikes a reporter with a bottle, knocking him unconscious. While nursing him back to health, she makes the first step toward her real new life—telling the truth about her life to him, vowing to give up romance writing, and facing Arthur with the truth.

The Characters

The characters of Atwood’s novel function not only as individuals but also as a means of exploration of new identities for Joan. Joan searches for her self in the characters she creates in her romance novels—in that they are all versions of herself—and in the “escapes” she precipitates from her various relationships. Her identity confusion, which centers on two images of herself—a ballerina and a circus fat lady—is played out through her writing of fantasies. As narrator of Lady Oracle, Joan describes the significant people in her life in terms of restrictions that mass-produced fantasies place on women. She registers certain cultural attitudes regarding femininity within the descriptions of herself and other characters in the novel. Joan’s mother, Fran Delacourt, is perceived by Joan as a mother-monster, an evil queen presiding over Joan’s tormented childhood. Fran is disgusted with Joan’s obesity and seeks constantly to change her into someone else. Her efforts to ascribe to Joan the girlhood ideal of femininity strikes Joan as so loathsome that Fran seems transformed by her three-way mirror into a three-headed monster. Joan hates not only her mother but also the mother within herself. After Fran’s death, Joan’s image of her cold, menacing mother continues to suffocate and cause her to fear engulfment by her mother. Toward the novel’s end, Joan witnesses another spectral visitation of her mother’s image and begins to understand that her mother, for good or ill, is part of her own personality. Although Aunt Lou appears to Joan as cuddly and loving (the opposite of her mother), it is she who begins many of the fictions Joan never outgrows. Aunt Lou signs her name to pamphlets she does not write, conceals facts about her life from Joan, and leaves Joan inheritance money that will free her from her mother and start her on a new life.

Paul, the Polish Count, is a strange and mysterious author of romance novels who regales Joan with accounts of his heroic escape from Poland. Assigned a fictional role as gothic hero by Joan, he fails to fulfil her erotic fantasy in his unromantic pajamas. Paul, whom Joan suspects of having a secret, sinister life, has “two selves,” which indicates Joan’s fear of the man she looks to for rescue.

Arthur Foster also follows the romantic pattern begun by Paul. Melancholy and idealistic Arthur appears to be aloof, covering his real romantic nature with feigned indifference. Although his “Byronic” looks remind Joan of the hero of her current novel, once married to Joan, he soon becomes ordinary and therefore “multidimensional and complicated like everyone else.”

The Royal Porcupine, with whom Joan has an affair when the romance in her marriage fades, seems in part the perfect romantic hero. A bizarre, avant-garde artist whose works include the bodies of road-killed animals, he wears a cape, dresses in absurd costumes, and waltzes in his apartment clad only in a lace tablecloth. When the Royal Porcupine, alias Chuck Brewer, commercial designer, confesses to Joan that he would like to lead a normal life, their affair is doomed.

Critical Context

Margaret Atwood’s third novel, Lady Oracle continues her woman-centered approach, specifically her elaboration of the effects of romance fantasies upon women. An astute observer of culture, Atwood believes that popular fiction successfully connects with the reality of women’s lives and thereby perpetuates ideologies that limit their self-definition and self-fulfillment. The energies of Lady Oracle toward enumerating women’s needs in a male-defined society follow themes that had begun years earlier in her prose and poetry. Her first major collection of poetry, The Circle Game (1966), although demonstrating a more private voice, contains images of repression and attempted escape with special aversion to patterns of myths that bind human beings. The Animals in That Country (1968) suggests the Canadian search for identity in the face of false perceptions encouraged about Canada, particularly among Americans. The Journals of Susannah Moodie (1970), a modern-day look at the mid-nineteenth century settler in Canada, continues a preoccupation with a search for identity amid repressive circumstances. Furthering the emphasis on the submerged side of life, Atwood published Procedures for Underground in the same year.

Atwood’s prose craft is an outgrowth of her early apprenticeship. The Edible Woman (1969) describes a movement away from romantic connections, and in Surfacing (1971), Atwood angrily rejects masculinist culture and idealizes femininity. Following Lady Oracle, Life Before Man (1979) contests the socially accepted myths of romantic love and marital harmony. Bodily Harm (1981) and The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) lay bare the misogyny, or hatred of women, inherent in a patriarchal culture, whereas Cat’s Eye (1988) and The Robber Bride (1993) reject the idea of women’s superiority, focusing on the power politics of women’s relationships and exposing them as potentially exploitative and oppressive. Atwood’s books sound a cautionary voice about the damaging effects of society’s repressive forces.

Bibliography

Bouson, J. Brooks. Brutal Choreographies: Oppositional Strategies and Narrative Design in the Novels of Margaret Atwood. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993. A chronological discussion of Atwood’s novels, emphasizing the psychological and political concerns in each.

Hutcheon, Linda. “From Poetic to Narrative Structures.” In Margaret Atwood: Language, Text, and System, edited by Sherrill E. Grace and Lorraine Weir. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1985. Brief but informative discussion of the life/art opposition in Lady Oracle.

Rigney, Barbara Hill. Margaret Atwood. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1987. Contains a chaper on Lady Oracle that depicts Joan Foster as one who escapes reality and lives only in her art.

Rosenberg, Jerome H. Margaret Atwood. Boston: Twayne, 1984. Comprehensive study of Atwood’s works and development of her craft.

Vincent, Sybil Korff. “The Mirror and the Cameo: Margaret Atwood’s Comic/Gothic Novel, Lady Oracle.” In The Female Gothic, edited by Juliann E. Fleenor. Montreal: Eden Press, 1983. Explores Lady Oracle as an example of a new subgenre, the Comic/Gothic.