Feminist Gothic novel

Press, 10 December 1983, Page 22

Feminist Gothic novel

Lady Oracle. By Margaret Atwood. Virago Press, 1982. 345 pp. $11.95 (paperback). (Reviewed by Reginald Berry) Originally published, in 1976. and now issued in New Zealand by the feminist publishers Virago, the Canadian writer Margaret Atwood's third novel follows “The Edible Woman” (1969) and the feminist classic “Surfacing” (1972) as an updated version of a popular fictional form. With “The Edible Woman" it was domestic comedy, with “Surfacing" the ghost story. With “Lady Oracle,” Atwood creates a hilarious and penetrating parody of the Gothic novel.

From its beginnings in the eighteenth century, the Gothic novel has always been known as women’s fiction. This is certainly the case now: to realise this, one has only to look at the lurid covers of the modern Gothic novels, aglow with moonlight and peopled with tight-bodiced beauties looking back over their shoulders at mysterious and ominous castles. In her novel, Atwood deploys the selfdramatising character Joan Foster, who under the alias Louisa K. Delacourt actually writes these things, which she calls “Costume Gothics.” It is appropriate that Foster lives in Toronto, location of the world’s largest publisher of Gothic fiction and romances, and out of her life there Atwood creates a portrait of the writer that could easily be classed as Feminist Gothic.

As usual, Atwood begins the novel with a superb and startling sentence: “I planned my death carefully; unlike my life, which meandered along from one thing to another, despite my feeble attempts to control it.” This is the occasion for Foster to begin telling her life story, in which we learn not only that she has not planned her “death” at all carefully (her faked suicide has been discovered), but that she has not made any attempts to control her life, preferring to go with the flow. Where the flow goes is usually disastrous. From a stultifying existence in suburban Toronto, she flees into the dubious consolation of fat, reaching almost 20 stone by age 15.

From there she deflates herself, runs away to London, learns to write Costume Gothics under the tutelage of her first lover, a Polish Count, and meets her husband, a tedious Canadian graduate student. From London, they return to Toronto while he pursues a thesis and whatever political cause is fashionable and she sinks into boredom. To a certain extent she is able to alleviate the boredom by taking an eccentric artist-lover named The Royal Porcupine. (As a satiric selfreference to her critical book on Canadian Literature. “Survival." Atwood makes his artistic speciality the presentation of highway-squashed animals in ornate portable freezers.) However, as The Royal Porcupine gradually reveals himself as ordinary Chuck Brewer, our heroine sinks more desperately into the world of her Costume Gothics, and her life begins to imitate art. Foster admits that she is “hooked on plots” early on in her career as a writer, and with incredible skill (and hilarity) Atwood weaves the narrative strands together so that the events of Joan's life and those of her current novel, “Stalked by Love," are virtually inseparable. When a blackmailer and her husband’s political involvement complicate her newlyfound fame as a feminist poet (hence the title “Lady Oracle”), Joan jumps out of her densely plotted life into Lake Ontario and surfaces in Italy, away from it all. Or so she hopes. At first glance, “Lady Oracle” is not the novel one would have expected from Atwood after “Surfacing.” But here there is the satne process of overcoming the crippling duplicity of mind" that the modern woman often faces. “Hadn’t my life always been double?” Joan Foster asks. “There was always that shadowy twin, thin when I was fat, fat when I was thin, myself in silvery negative, glowing in the black sunlight of that other world.” Where “Surfacing” leads the reader to the point of emergence from the double life, “Lady Oracle” goes on to pose the moral dilemma: what responsibility does liberation entail? The answer, as with all important works of fiction, is in the novel, and in the reader.