Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle is a feminist metafiction novel; within its pages a collage of multiple narratives explore the gender politics of the world inhabited by its protagonist, Joan Delacourt / Foster. The novel starts at its end, Joan has faked her death in order to escape and create a new life. Beginning at the end implies this is Joan’s next novel, therefore the character representations are subject to her narrative position. Embedded within Atwood’s exterior narrative, Joan’s memory narrative and fictional writing are women writing about relationships between mothers and daughters, relationships with men and women’s relationships with themselves. Atwood challenges, and to some extent parodies the traditions of writing throughout
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Joan cannot help “but come under the influence of the old fables and codes, even though she consciously exploits them in her fiction and exposes them to constant satirical scrutiny in her everyday life” (Barzilai 252). The main intertext in Lady Oracle is “The Red Shoes” by Hans Christian Anderson and the film of the same name. “Atwood’s female characters . . . face the double and potentially triple bind of Moira Shearer’s role in the film . . . they can “dance” (be artists, be “themselves,” be “free”) or marry (be conventional, be-for-others, conform to societal rules), but they cannot do both” (Wilson 121). When Joan dances “through the broken glass” (Lady Oracle 235) she symbolically breaks free of these constraints, “You could dance, or you could have the love of a good man . . . I wanted the good man; why wasn’t that the right choice? I was never a dancing girl anyway” (335). Rewriting the end of her novel and allowing Felicia to escape the clutches of her villainous husband, enables Joan to rewrite herself, together they are able to escape the maze. The metaphorical drowning that enables Joan’s recreation makes Atwood’s novel a Künstlerroman. Through the various modes of writing and dual personalities, Joan writes her way to a new beginning. Her inability to complete her novel or “contain” herself and the multiple levels of maturity within Lady Oracle are evidence of this change. In becoming an autonomous being, Joan recognises that neither she nor her readers need be victims of the romance myth any longer; giving up the Costume Gothics frees Joan and her female readers from this
Joan cannot help “but come under the influence of the old fables and codes, even though she consciously exploits them in her fiction and exposes them to constant satirical scrutiny in her everyday life” (Barzilai 252). The main intertext in Lady Oracle is “The Red Shoes” by Hans Christian Anderson and the film of the same name. “Atwood’s female characters . . . face the double and potentially triple bind of Moira Shearer’s role in the film . . . they can “dance” (be artists, be “themselves,” be “free”) or marry (be conventional, be-for-others, conform to societal rules), but they cannot do both” (Wilson 121). When Joan dances “through the broken glass” (Lady Oracle 235) she symbolically breaks free of these constraints, “You could dance, or you could have the love of a good man . . . I wanted the good man; why wasn’t that the right choice? I was never a dancing girl anyway” (335). Rewriting the end of her novel and allowing Felicia to escape the clutches of her villainous husband, enables Joan to rewrite herself, together they are able to escape the maze. The metaphorical drowning that enables Joan’s recreation makes Atwood’s novel a Künstlerroman. Through the various modes of writing and dual personalities, Joan writes her way to a new beginning. Her inability to complete her novel or “contain” herself and the multiple levels of maturity within Lady Oracle are evidence of this change. In becoming an autonomous being, Joan recognises that neither she nor her readers need be victims of the romance myth any longer; giving up the Costume Gothics frees Joan and her female readers from this