Power politics in Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle

1 Introduction

The issue of power politics is a crucial topic in Margaret Atwood’s work. From her earliest pamphlet of poetry, DoublePersephone (1961), to her latest novel, The Testaments (2019), power is a recurring theme. Atwood spells out her attitude to this issue in “Notes on Power Politics”: “Power is an environment. We live surrounded by it: it pervades everything we are and do, invisible and soundless, like air” (Atwood 1972: 7). According to Atwood, power is pervasive and diffused throughout all social relations. Atwood’s approach to power is similar to that of Michel Foucault, who treats power as “something which circulates” (Foucault 1980: 98). Foucault’s use of the word power “is always a short cut to the expression […] ‘the relations of power’” (Foucault 1988: 11). In Foucault’s opinion, power is a dynamic conception because “[i]n reality power means relations, a more or less organised, hierarchical, co-ordinated cluster of relations” (Foucault 1980: 198), therefore, the exercise of power can be seen in every stratum of society. Based on Atwood’s and Foucault’s ideas, Pilar Somacarrera highlights some main “hypotheses” when discussing power politics: “(i) That power is co-extensive with the social body” and “(ii) That relations of power are interwoven with other kinds of relations (production, kinship, family, sexuality) for which they play at once a conditioning and a conditioned role” (Somacarrera 2006: 291–303). Somacarrera stresses the permanent presence of power in Atwood’s works, be it political power or social power. My study will focus on Lady Oracle, Atwood’s third novel, published in 1976, arguing how power becomes a part of human life and how different levels of power interact.

2 Family upbringing in reinforcing gender roles

Children’s behavior is closely related to their family environment. Theorists believe that children are greatly influenced by their parents, who bear the main responsibilities for the children’s upbringing. Joan Foster, the protagonist in Lady Oracle, develops odd behavior mainly because of her family upbringing, especially her early socialization through her mother, Frances Delacourt, who teaches Joan about gender roles with regard to selfhood and personal relationships.

Understanding society’s concept of a feminine ideal is crucial to the comprehension of the actions of Joan’s mother. Around the 1950s, even though women enjoyed the achievements of the First Wave of feminism, there still existed a powerful image of the ideal woman, “the happy housewife heroine,” in Betty Friedan’s description, who “was healthy, beautiful, educated, concerned only about her husband, her children, her home” (Friedan 1963: 18). While free to enter the challenging world of men, women at that time were encouraged to seek their happiness and self-fulfillment in the household. Besides, postwar North America was in need of affection and security, traditionally represented by the family with the caring mother at the center. Large numbers of women fell prey to the ideal “happy housewife” image and rarely questioned its falsity, although they were increasingly dissatisfied with such a dream life.

Frances is born into a religious family; her parents are very strict with her. She must have been taught to be “an angel in the house” while growing up. At the age of sixteen, she runs away from home and never contacts her parents again. After marrying Joan’s father, Frances is left pregnant at home while her husband goes off to the Second World War and doesn’t come back until Joan is five years old. Francis has to bring up Joan all by herself, taking on responsibilities as both father and mother. Even when her husband is back, he is “simply an absence” (Atwood 1976: 66). Frances once complains about her life to her husband: “You don’t know what it was like, all alone with her to bring up while you were over there enjoying yourself” (Atwood 1976: 75). Frances is an unhappy woman in essence, with no one to help her in the nurturing and the education of her only daughter.

Stuck in family life with thwarted desires for romance, Frances deems motherhood as a profession, “to make the best of a bad job” (Atwood 1976: 75), and focuses on perfecting her daughter. She must have high expectations for Joan, because she names her after the famous American actress Joan Crawford, an embodiment of all the dreams and demands of society. Frances hopes that Joan can be “beautiful, ambitious, ruthless, destructive to men” (Atwood 1976: 38), that Joan will be successful some day and might enter the upper class, just like the screen characters Joan Crawford plays. In Joan’s memory, her relationship with Frances is quite “professionalized”: “She was to be the manager, the creator, the agent; I was to be the product […] She wanted me to do well, but she wanted to be responsible for it” (Atwood 1976: 64).

However, Joan turns out to be a failure in the eyes of her mother. She is fat when small and gradually becomes more overweight, which is against the image of perfect femininity: slim and beautiful. Thinking that it is impossible for a fat girl to have good chances in life, Frances tries to force Joan to lose weight, sending her to a dance school, taking her to see a psychologist, mixing laxatives in chocolate cakes, etc. Joan, on the other hand, refuses to be the daughter of her mother’s dreams and rejects the role of the submissive female who is valued for her appearance. Thus begins the war between the daughter and the mother. Joan defies her controlling mother, using food as her only weapon:

By this time I was eating steadily, doggedly, stubbornly, anything I could get. The war between myself and my mother was on in earnest; the disputed territory was my body […] I swelled visibly, relentlessly, before her very eyes, I rose like dough, my body advanced inch by inch towards her across the dining room table, in this at least I was undefeated. (Atwood 1976: 67)

Here Atwood brings eating into direct relationship with gender politics. The unhappy mother intends to control Joan by trying to limit her food consumption. In “You are what you eat: The politics of eating in the novels of Margaret Atwood,” Emma Parker argues that the way Joan’s mother always draws a bigger mouth around her own with lipstick “mirrors her desire for power in the same way as her attempt to control what goes into her daughter’s mouth” (Parker 1995: 358). Joan’s obesity is a contradiction to the stereotypical image of feminine beauty, and thus becomes the biggest failure of her mother’s identity as a successful housewife who likes to keep everything within the confines of her control.

The power struggle between Joan and Frances is actually the epitome of family relations which are “the principal conduits between cultural ideology and the individual unconscious” (Wyatt 1991: 104). Joan lives in a traditional family with “its overpresent, and domestically powerful but socially devalued mother, and its absent, but socially powerful, father” (Bouson 1993: 64). In the different stages of her growth, her parents cannot provide any ordinary human warmth for her. Joan’s father is only “a name,” “a story” which her mother would tell her before he came back from the war (Atwood 1976: 66). Even when he is back home, he remains a stranger to Joan. As an anesthetist, he is busy studying and spends a lot of time at the hospital. In Joan’s eyes, he is someone who is “not to be disturbed” and who has no expectations for her (Atwood 1976: 74). Joan and her father seldom talk: “I kept waiting for him to give me some advice, warn me, instruct me, but he never did any of these things. Perhaps he felt as if I weren’t really his daughter” (Atwood 1976: 74–75). Joan’s mother, in contrast to her husband’s absence and silence, devotes her life to the family, coping alone with domestic life and making “her family her career as she had been told to do” (Atwood 1976: 179). However, nobody appreciates her. Her husband feels ashamed of her and her daughter rebels against her. In the male-ordered culture, Frances eventually feels a diminished sense of self, as someone who is stranded in a house, a “plastic-shrouded tomb from which there was no exit” (Atwood 1976: 180). Herself a victim to society’s demands on women, Frances dutifully acts as a “cultural agent” who transmits stereotypes and the conventional roles of women to her daughter. As is mentioned by J. Brooks Bouson, “she urges her daughter to consent to femininity. Acting as an agent of masculine culture, Joan’s mother represents the repressive social forces that have traditionally crippled women” (Bouson 1993: 65). A primary force in her daughter’s identity formation, Frances conspires to curtail Joan’s development of self-worth and poses a threat to the developing girl.

Through her mother’s influence, Joan becomes assimilated in the patriarchal culture, which can be seen from her choice of reading and writing as well as her attitudes toward love and marriage. As Gayle Greene has indicated, Joan starts reading escape fiction because she is “starved, deprived of maternal nurturance” (Greene 1991: 170). Greene points out how Joan, as a child, consumes romances in the same manner as she devours food, because this kind of fiction works as “a tranquilizer or restorative agent” whose “short-lived therapeutical value […] is finally the cause of its repetitive consumption” (Greene 1991: 170). In the novels she later writes, Joan repeatedly tells the story of an innocent young woman in the power of a beautiful but heartless woman (her rival/mother), and a cold, distant father/husband. Just as her mother hopes for rescue through romance and sees marriage as proof of success, Joan, along with her heroines, is always waiting to be rescued by love and marriage. As is observed by Kim L. Worthington, it is from her mother that Joan learns to hide her own personality, by hiding first behind her layer of fat and then behind her bland mask of social acceptability (Worthington 1996: 295). Despite the traumatic relationship with her mother, Joan tries hard to make herself into an ideal of femininity.

3 Society’s construction as manipulative power

Most teenagers get their ideas about how life ought to be from society at large. They are, in a way, molded by the culture. Apart from parents, teachers, peers, and the media are primary influences in their growth. Through the description of the protagonist’s coming-of-age in Lady Oracle, Atwood takes on the issue of cultural control of women as represented in prescribed images or roles for them. The small details that form the everyday life of Joan are “in a wider perspective highly gendered” (Gregersdotter 2003: 79) and part of a larger picture of a patriarchal society.

In Joan’s painful recollection about her childhood, the most destructive thing to her was “the attitudes of society” (Atwood 1976: 102) manifested through her teachers and schoolmates, as well as her angry mother and absent father. Joan’s mother enrolls her in a dancing school, in the hope that it could improve the way she looks. Like most little girls at that time, Joan loves ballet and idealizes ballet dancers because “it was something girls could do” (Atwood 1976: 39). However, she is quite ignorant of the main reason for the girls being enrolled in this body-shaping class: their parents hope that ballet will make them “graceful and appealing to watch,” and thus “ready […] for the gaze of the hero” (Fee 1993: 54). Because of her large size, Joan is forced by Miss Flegg, the dancing teacher, to abandon her butterfly costume in the ballet performance and dance instead the role of a mothball. Worse still, Joan has to hang a large sign around her neck that says MOTHBALL, which, according to Miss Flegg, will allow the audience to understand what Joan is supposed to be. Excluded from this important performance in her life, and with the label “mothball” pinned on her, Joan feels the humiliation: “yet even though I was concealed in the teddy-bear suit, which flopped about me and made me sweat, I felt naked and exposed, as if this ridiculous dance was the truth about me and everyone could see it” (Atwood 1976: 47). Although Joan receives genuine applause for her mothball dance, her experience in Miss Flegg’s ballet class fills her with rage. In the meantime it is crucial to her understanding that thin women and fat women are treated differently. From that moment onwards, Joan always fears that she is wrong in other people’s eyes. She is assailed by self-doubt and emotional insecurity. The recurring Fat Lady image, an image of “the other reduced to a comic spectacle set against the antithetical ‘normality’ of the spectator” (Staels 1995: 72), is indicative of Joan’s negative self-image.

Later on Joan is enrolled in Brownies, where she has to mimic socially accepted behavior. All the Brownies are supposed to try to be the same. They learn the same ritual rhyme, wear the same uniform, and chant in unison. The coded concepts at Brownies are, in Joan’s opinion, analogous to her mother’s authoritative voice. Joan remembers how the girls “were led across cardboard stepping stones that read cheerfulness, obedience, good turns and smiles” (Atwood 1976: 58). She also remembers a song the girls are taught to sing – “Here you see the laughing Gnomes, /Helping mothers in our homes” (Atwood 1976: 51) – it is a song about what little girls are expected to do at home. Hilde Staels, in Margaret Atwood’s novels, notices that “gnomic” also means “a collective, anonymous and authoritative voice which speaks for and about what it aims to establish as ‘accepted’ knowledge or wisdom. […] Girls who do not match the image in the mirror are doomed to be failures” (Staels 1995: 75). Therefore this song reflects society’s restraining demands regarding femininity and also shows how one actually learns to fit in the social structure.

However hard Joan tries to assimilate into the Brownies, she is nevertheless “an alien from beyond the borders” (Atwood 1976: 49). Joan is easily brought to tears, which is against the norm of the Brownies: “we don’t like to see unhappy faces at the Brownies; we like to see cheerfulness” (Atwood 1976: 54). Joan is once isolated in the cloakroom for her crying and asked by the teacher to learn to control herself. In order to prove that she is not different from others, Joan wants eagerly to conform to the values of her peers. However, she has a troubled relationship with her companion Brownies, who persecute her for deviating from prescribed female conduct. Joan is tormented by her companions, who order her to walk ahead in a scary ravine so that they can “keep an eye on” her from behind (Atwood 1976: 57). She is punished by them for her inappropriate behavior – for skipping “too heavily,” for not standing “straight enough,” for having a rumpled tie and dirty fingernails, or for being fat (Atwood 1976: 55). As a child, Joan already suffers from a deep feeling of inadequacy.

Since childhood, Joan regularly attends the Hollywood movies with Aunt Lou, and she is an avid reader of escape fantasies, historical romances, murder mysteries, and fairy tales, all of which convey the idea of stereotypical notions about how women ought to behave. Cultural myths about women are, in Marilyn Patton’s words, “very much a form of ‘power politics’” (Patton 1991: 29). Women readers are seduced by the cultural and literary stereotypes presented in the fantasies and romances. Atwood herself calls these popular writings “the band-aid theory of literature” (Garrett-Petts 1988: 85), “a Disneyland of the soul containing Romanceland, Spyland, Pornoland and all other Escapelands which are so much more agreeable than the complex truth” (Atwood 1992: 393). Joan and almost all the female characters in Lady Oracle are victims of these fairy tales, which give expression to the prevalent bias and prejudice in society. Joan and girls like her absorb the popular fairy tales of “Snow White,” “Bluebeard’s Castle,” “The Little Mermaid,” “The Frog Prince,” and “The Red Shoes” in early childhood, which create in them “a life-long desire for romance” (Vevaina 1996: 52). Joan’s fascination with “fluffy skirt” and “glittering tiara” (Atwood 1976: 102) comes from these fairy tales, which emphasize physical beauty and fine clothes. These stories also imply that girls who deserve happiness are “invariably gentle, affectionate, forgiving, obedient, hardworking and home loving” (Vevaina 1996: 52). Joan learns from the Little Mermaid in the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale that “[i]n order to get a soul you had to suffer, you had to give something up” (Atwood 1976: 218). In the Andersen story, the Little Mermaid falls in love with a prince. She sacrifices both her feet and tongue for the prince’s love. Without the tongue, she loses her ability to sing. The story ends with the prince marrying another woman, which means the Little Mermaid loses both art and love although she gets a soul. The message Joan receives from her favorite film The Red Shoes is quite similar. Moira Shearer as a ballet dancer is “torn between her career and her husband” (Atwood 1976: 79) and finally throws herself in front of a train. The inner conflict between career and domesticity is reflected throughout the film. Just like the Little Mermaid, Moira Shearer is punished for wanting to be both an artist and loved. These female images in the media stereotype women, who, as Maggie Humm suggests, are “torn between unconscious feminist questions and the stereotypical answers which society provides” (Humm 1991: 127). Through the recurring romantic narratives in mainstream culture, which dictates the way women are perceived, how they act, and even how they look, Lady Oracle shows the constraining myths that delude and limit women’s worldviews. By “never achieving the hard core of self that comes not from fantasy but from mastering reality,” girls like Joan are doomed to “suffer ultimately that bored, diffuse feeling of purposelessness, non-existence, non-involvement with the world that can be called anomie, or lack of identity, or merely felt as the problem that has no name” (Friedan 1963: 181).

4 Self-watching as internalized power

In Lady Oracle, Joan maintains an ambivalent relationship with her mother until the very end of the narrative. From the perspective of Hilde Staels, Joan’s “traumatic and antithetical relationship with her mother continuously determines Joan’s self-image(s) and her view of external identity” (Staels 1995: 72). The mother, in Staels’ opinion, remains Joan’s “mirror” (Staels 1995: 72) though they are emotionally distant. In other words, Joan has made her mother’s desires her “internalized norm” (Staels 1995: 73). In talking about the process of “internalization” in Joan’s life, Tobi Kozakewich takes into consideration “the phallocentric nature of both the field of cultural production and the field of power that provides its broader social context,” and concludes that Joan remains incapable of “restructuring the gendered power relations that govern those fields, in large part because she has internalized them” (Kozakewich 2006: 189). When discussing power and dialogue in Atwood’s three novels – Cat’s Eye (1988), The Robber Bride (1992), and Alias Grace (1996) – Katarina Gregersdotter proposes two types of power: “the power exercised over another through watching, and the internalized power over oneself which can be termed self-watching” (Gregersdotter 2003: 15). Though Gregersdotter doesn’t mention Lady Oracle in her discussion, her viewpoint is pertinent to the subject explored here. Watching, as a kind of power, is aimed to objectify. In the eyes of a watcher, “a subject becomes an object”, and watching is, according to Gregersdotter, “similar to a subtle type of surveillance system” (Gregersdotter 2003: 14). Throughout her life, Joan feels permanently under surveillance and controlled by her mother and society at large. Moreover, she has made self-watching her internalized power.

The internalization is highly complex. In Foucault’s writing about the Panopticon, its great achievement is “to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power” (Foucault 1997: 201). In other words, the sense of the presence of a watcher is very important for the discipline of prisoners. Foucault maintains that the person

who is subject to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection. (Foucault 1997: 202–203)

In Foucault’s notion of disciplinary society, “power is dissociated, diffuse, and pervasive; as such, it is internalized, and thus self-policing” (Hite 1995: 141). The objects of power internalize the norm to such an extent that they are unable to question it or disobey the rules. The same is true for the women in Lady Oracle, who play a great part in their own imprisonment because, in the patriarchal system with “a built-in panoptic schema” (Gregersdotter 2003: 19), the watcher becomes internalized in the watched. John Berger states that “[f]rom earliest childhood [a woman] has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually” (Berger 1977: 46), and Joan and girls of her age best represent an internalization of patriarchal values of femininity. Just like the inmates of the Panopticon, they practice discipline through self-surveillance.

In Joan’s case, the process of internalization is shown through her self-doubt, self-loathing, self-constraint to the point of self-denial. The constitution of Joan as a subject is always threatened by the authoritative voices – first her mother’s, later society’s – embedded in her brain. Foucault argues in “The subject and power” that “[t]here are two meanings of the word ‘subject’: subject to someone else by control and dependence; and tied to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge. Both meanings suggest a form of power which subjugates and makes subject to” (Foucault 1984: 420). In a gendered society where women’s options are limited, Joan forever feels insecure about her identity and fears that her image is wrong in other people’s eyes. With the money left by Aunt Lou after she dies, Joan tries hard to lose weight and transform into a female beauty. However, Joan realizes that she has the “wrong past” even with the “right shape” (Atwood 1976: 141). In her never-ending search for a “different” and “more agreeable” personal history for herself (Atwood 1976: 141), Joan fabricates a number of identities, all of which signify an attempt to meet masculine desire. Staels believes that “[t]he signification process reveals how Joan turns herself into final objects, solidifying or materializing reflections of herself which she reads in the eyes of others” (Staels 1995: 76). In a situation of being regularly watched, Joan has to rely on the judgments of others, which become her self-image.

A victim of self-reflection, Joan falls into the habit of continually surveying herself through her writing of Gothic romance, which stresses the terror of loss of identity. A Gothic plot essentially tells of the victimization of the heroine whose social identity has been disrupted, usually by dangers from “forces in society and in themselves” (McMillan 1988: 52). As is mentioned by Gina Wisker, tamed maidens in traditional Gothic are usually caught in confined spaces such as “castles, corridors, dungeons, prisons and homes”; moreover, they are “caught within systems which construct them in limiting ways and in prison-house versions of self which they internalize” (Wisker 2016: 76). As a creator of popular art which reduces life to cliché, Joan knows full well that she is engaged in a dubious enterprise:

These books, with their covers featuring gloomy, foreboding castles and apprehensive maidens in modified nightgowns, hair streaming in the wind, eyes bulging like those of a goiter victim, toes poised for flight, would be considered trash of the lowest order. Worse than trash, for didn’t they exploit the masses, corrupt by distracting, and perpetuate degrading stereotypes of women as helpless and persecuted? They did and I knew it, but I couldn’t stop. (Atwood 1976: 30)

Due to her victim mentality, Joan feels she can’t stop, and goes on to defend her writing as a way to help the women readers: “Life had been hard on them and they had not fought back, they’d collapsed like soufflés in a high wind. Escape wasn’t a luxury for them, it was a necessity […]. And when they were too tired to invent escapes of their own, mine were available for them at the corner drugstore, neatly packaged like the other painkillers” (Atwood 1976: 30–31). Gothic thinking is dangerous in that it serves as a drug which might lead to disastrous addiction although it could dull the pain for a short while. Women readers of Gothic romance internalize gendered narratives whose purpose is to infantilize, diminish, and disempower them. Finally, these women who trap themselves in their own fantasies are left stranded and emptied out. Joan writes Costume Gothics in order to satisfy her desire for romance: the “daffodil man,” the Polish Count, her husband Arthur, and the Royal Porcupine are very much like figures from traditional Gothic tales. Joan lives according to their versions of what women should be and should want, which she internalizes and enacts. In so doing, she imposes her fantasies about popular Gothic romances on real people and real situations. In Atwood’s words, Joan is “attempting to act out a romantic myth […] in a non-romantic world” (Hammond 1992: 107). In writing Gothic fantasies, Joan participates in the “reproduction and maintenance of the power politics that underlies these popular romances” (Staels 1995: 85). Just like the female characters in the Costume Gothics she is writing, Joan is entrapped in a maze where she cannot find her way out: “I was stuck there, in the midst of darkness, unable to move […] I’d lost all sense of direction” (Atwood 1976: 225). The image of Joan’s being stuck in a maze may be regarded as a metaphor for her inner feeling of isolation and the absence of a stable identity. Joan comes to embody the alienated female individual at a loss with patriarchal values.

5 Conclusion

Atwood believes “the personal is political,” a concept developed out of the women’s liberation movement in the 1960s. For her, the public world of power politics extends right into the private world. In describing Joan Foster’s surviving childhood and her struggle in a patriarchal society where women are expected to adapt themselves to masculine desires, Atwood explores a world where personal lives are molded and defined by the broader political and social setting. It is not by mere chance that Joan is fascinated with (writing) the Gothic; her desire for romance reflects women’s imprisonment in the feminine ideal. In this way, Lady Oracle retains the “original charge of menace and mystery” (Howells 2005: 53) in Gothic conventions, meanwhile it focuses on the theme of sexual politics.