This lecture demonstrates the preoccupation of Lady Oracle with the multiplicity of subjectivity, first in respect of the male, and then in respect of the female characters. As the discussion proceeds, broader interpretations of the novel and its themes emerge. References are to the London edition of Lady Oracle by Virago Press, 1984.
1. Overview: Themes
A. Lady Oracle brings together many themes and ideas, but centrally it comically explores the fragmentation and multiplicity of women’s and men’s subjectivity. Margaret Atwood shows how the boundaries of the personality are fluid, how multiple selves and roles merge and separate within the one individual, and how “real” experience is interpenetrated with fantasy. Her protagonist is a woman who habitually fantasises and lies to others and to herself, but who still retains readers’ interest and sympathy. Lady Oracle poses the integration of subjectivity as a goal, and may suggest that integration is unattainable. Conversely, Lady Oracle celebrates fantasy and the multiplicity of inner experience as an expression of creative abundance.
B. More seriously and moralistically, Atwood’s novel raises the issue of women’s responsibility to others, as against their responsibility to themselves. It explores the related issue of the private and social functions of romance and fantasy. Atwood seems to suggest that the comfort which romance and fantasy offer women comes at an unacceptable cost, since these escapes induce women to play out social roles which are not always natural or fulfilling.
2. Multidimensional Male Characters
A basic list of the varied selves of major male figures in Lady Oracle is easy to compose:
At home, Joan’s father is the passive, absent, indifferent husband and father theorised by such writers as Nancy Chodorow and Dorothy Dinnerstein. In public life, he is the authoritative anaesthetist with power over life and death.
Joan’s first lover, Paul, is a respectable bank-worker, but he has an exciting, romantic past, while the possibility of a dangerous present is suggested by the revolver which he hides in his drawer under his boxer shorts. In addition, Paul is simultaneously an aspiring serious writer and “Mavis Quilp,” the author of doctor-nurse romances.
Joan’s later lover, the romantic, artistic Royal Porcupine, with his opera cape has a secret self, the prosaic, crew-cut Chuck Brewster.
Joan’s husband, Arthur, is likewise a romantic personality but differs from Joan’s lovers in that his multiple selves, some miserable, others exultant, emerge in sequence, not simultaneously–see Lady Oracle pp. 211-212.
3. Multidimensional Female Characters
On the other side of the gender divide, Aunt Lou in private life appears as Joan’s bright, confident and above all loving aunt. She defies the conventions by living alone but regularly entertaining a lover. In employment, her public life in more than one sense, she is the severe and authoritative public relations officer for a sanitary napkins manufacturer.
Joan’s mother is constructed by Joan in an imposing array of different shapes, which blend fantasy with Joan’s fictional “reality.” These are explained in detail in SECTION 4B below (scroll to the end). Suffice for now to say that this multiplicity is represented symbolically by Joan’s dream of her mother as having three heads (pp. 66-67). She also has a symbolically double mouth: a false mouth painted over the outline of her real lips.
In respect of Joan herself, if we leave our analysis of Joan’s fantasy selves to the end (Section 4B), her selves in “real” life (as narrated and composed by herself–so it’s not really “real”) make a formidable list:
a) butterfly ballerina and mothball;
b) Brownie;
c) a fat young self, named by Joan to Arthur as “Aunt Deirdre”;
d) Louisa K. Delacourt, the writer of Gothic romances;
e) the successful “high-brow” author of the book of poems, titled “Lady Oracle,” combining the styles of Rod McKuen and Kahlil Gibran (pp. 250-251);
d) nurturing wife, which is the role that Joan plays out for Arthur;
e) and finally the romantic selves that she dresses up as and acts out with the Royal Porcupine.
Lady Oracle opens at the end of Joan’s story, when she is trying to abandon most of these selves and to start afresh, after having pretended to commit suicide. BUT instead, in Italy she goes on to develop yet another persona, which involves burying the clothes of the old self, and entirely remaking her external image. In the last chapter she is still telling lies, developing a fantasy relationship with a new man, and switching from costume Gothic romances to science fiction. The reader is likely to feel comically exasperated and slightly stunned, by the unending creative sequence.
4. Blending of Selves: The Interpenetration of Fantasy with the Novel’s “Reality”
A more sinister point about the creative and comic abundance of identities in Lady Oracle is that the boundaries between the multiple selves within individuals, and even the boundaries between individuals, sometimes turn out to be permeable. Lady Oracle uses this permeability insightfully, to provide a warning.
Within Joan’s consciousness, “real-life” characters tend to merge with the creations of her fantasy life. Reality and fantasy interpenetrate throughout the novel, but excessively and more obviously towards the end. Atwood invites the reader to understand “reality” by contrasting it with fantasy, and fantasy by contrasting it with “reality,” making for a mutually illuminating commentary.
I’ll explain by a further consideration of the complexities, first of the male, then of the female characters.
4A. The Blending of Male Characters with Each Other and with Fantasy Figures
Lady Oracle comically exposes Joan’s propensity to choose lovers and her husband according to her romantic ideas and fantasies. The comedy may however conceal a longing for the solid reality of unfantasised companionship and love between the sexes. Many women readers will recognise aspects of their own psyches and experience in Joan. Through her Atwood explores the pervasiveness and power of romantic delusion. She induces the reader to inquire into the social functioning of romance and fantasy in both popular and high-brow culture. The conclusion reached is that romance and fantasy, willingly consented to and pursued by women, are an important instrument of patriarchal ideology, tending to maintain and reproduce over generations unequal power relationships between men and women.
The merging of the male characters with fantasy figures and with each other in Joan’s consciousness is easy to observe. Joan is attracted to each of her different men because of their fantasy associations. She is attracted to Paul because of his romantic European past, and to the Royal Porcupine because he wears the costumes of past eras and is loyal to the royal family. These features recreate physically in the present the heroes of Joan’s Gothic fantasy books. Romance is incorporated in Arthur‘s name, which is that of a European cultural icon remade again and again since the early Middle Ages–that of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Like his namesake, Arthur champions lost causes. The fact that Arthur is scornful of romance, and an extreme realist who reads only books with footnotes, is a key irony of Astley’s novel. Since Arthur cannot and does not want to dance, he is symbolically the opposite of the Royal Porcupine, who loves to swirl Joan around in romantic waltzes. Joan’s fantasy life as she writes her Gothic novels in secret allows her to survive having Arthur as her husband, but the couple’s psychological disjunction is obvious.
[SIDE COMMENT: It is worth noting in passing that other female protagonists in books authored by women, such as Jane, the wife in The Yellow Wallpaper, consider it safer in a patriarchal society to do their writing in secret. A woman writer’s need for her own space for creative thinking is the central thesis of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, which recalls Jane Austen’s hiding of her novel drafts from visitors. The Bronte sisters, Charlotte, Emily and Ann, likewise concealed their authorship of novels of enduring value from their father and the wider world.]
Joan’s emotional and imaginary blending of her lovers–Paul, the Royal Porcupine and Arthur–with fantasy figures, means that she does not truly see them, or relate to them for what they are. An alarming development towards the end of her narrative is that the fantasy figures begin to take on lives of their own, which threaten to prevail over the “real” figures (which of course are those created by Atwood). In Joan’s latest Gothic romance, one of the titles of which is Terror at Redmond Grange, Redmond, the archetypal romantic hero, begins to merge with Arthur, while Otterly, Felicia’s lover, merges with the Royal Porcupine. References to these mergers begin obliquely. For example, Felicia making love with Otterly parallels Joan making love with the Royal Porcupine, seen in their post-coital posture and conversation (p. 317). Later, however, the alarming merging of Arthur too with Otterly is revealed in so many words (pp. 322-23).
A climactic merging of all the significant male figures in Lady Oracle occurs when Felicia, who is one of Joan’s fantasy selves in Terror at Redmond Grange, penetrates to the heart of the mysterious maze in the grounds. The maze is an evocative symbol. It suggests the intricacies of Joan’s life, with its labyrinthine interweaving of “reality,” fiction and fantasy, all three of which are already complex in themselves. The transformations undergone by Redmond at the climactic moment of the “terror” (pp. 342-43) contains glimpses of Joan’s father (“white gauze mask”); Paul (“a pair of mauve-tinted spectacles,” see p. 145); the Royal Porcupine (“red beard and moustache,” see p. 239); the man with burning eyes and icicle teeth, who Joan half-fears, half-hopes will rescue her after she’s been left tied-up on the bridge as a child (pp. 59-60); and finally Arthur (“wearing a turtle-neck sweater”). All of these images of the important men in Joan’s life finally merge back into the archetypal romantic male of Gothic fantasy, Redmond. But when Joan resists Redmond’s invitation to waltz for ever, insisting that I know who you are, he goes through his last transformation as the skull, the emblem of death, who is bent on murdering Joan. The meaning is plain and inescapable: Joan’s submissiveness to fantasy threatens the death of her true self. In essence, it is suicide.
SOLVING THE LADY ORACLE RIDDLE: I don’t think that Atwood is condemning men per se in this novel. Instead she is revealing the destructive potential of romance and fantasy in women’s lives. She shows that fantasy has the capacity, if the woman consents, to detach her from her own particular needs and her pursuit of true happiness and fulfillment. Women turn their lovers and husbands into their killers by consenting to their own murder-by-delusion. Romance and fantasy, as promoted by Gothic fiction of the Harlequin and Mills & Boon series, and other popular fantasy writing, sugar-coat traditional submissive or wifely ways of relating to men. They induce many women to live lives of service in a domesticity that is neither congenial nor fulfilling. In extreme cases such restricted lives lead to psychological death (Joan’s sight of the skull). The woman sacrifices her unique talents and unique potential to social demands disguised as romance.
Rescuer or Murderer?
If, on the basis of the “solution” revealed at the climax of the Terror (pp. 342-43), we look back over the male characters in Lady Oracle, we can see an ambivalence in their depiction which justifies the solution just proposed to the Lady Oracle‘s riddle and, indeed, makes this solution inevitable. The males are almost always presented ambivalently as rescuer/saviour (on the one hand) and as murderer/rapist/destroyer (on the other). In addition, every male character in Lady Oracle is in one way or another associated with death. Atwood’s insight seems to be that, when a woman utilises romantic attachment as a “rescue” from, say, the independence of earning her own living, of finding fulfillment in her own vocation, or of grappling with her own problems and failings, this isn’t a rescue at all. Instead, that woman is consenting to, and even abetting, her own murder. Indeed, there’s no evidence that such “rescues” are possible or ever really happen.
Joan’s Father. These points can be exemplified at length because incidences recur throughout the novel. As a doctor Joan’s father has resurrected many would-be suicides (p. 70). Even though (in a very funny scene) at least one of those he saves is very angry at having been brought back to life, Joan’s father certainly qualifies as a rescuer. On the other hand, he’s an anaesthetist–someone whose professional function is to “put people to sleep,” a form of death or at least a way of escape. In an act of marital terrorism, Joan’s mother reveals at a dinner party that during the war her husband killed enemy agents face-to-face and “up close” (p. 75). He is further identified as a killer through his favourite books, which are murder mysteries (p. 70). Murder mystery is indeed one of the many forms of popular and other writing contained within and parodied by Lady Oracle. Under this genre, hints are given that Joan’s father is the murderer of Joan’s mother, who dies from a mysterious fall, apparently caused by her bedroom mules (slippers). Even stronger hints are given that Joan’s father is the metaphoric (psychological) murderer of her mother, because he failed to obtain the abortion she wished for, and because of his absence from and absence-while-present in the family home. Her father is probably the threatening male presence that climaxes Joan’s nightmare about her three-headed mother (pp. 66-67).
“The man with the icicle teeth” and “the daffodil man.” The unresolved ambivalence of the male rescuer/murderer is powerfully summed up during Joan’s mistreatment as a Brownie by Marlene and the others (pp. 59-60). The “man with the icicle teeth” is ambiguously the handsome stranger of romances, “very tall, in a black suit,” and, at the same time the death’s head devouring and destroying life. He returns later in these same ambiguous shapes in Joan’s book of poetry, “Lady Oracle,” another literary genre contained within Astley’s novel, and the one that provides a model-in-miniature of most of the themes. The “daffodil man” who also features in the episode of the bridge (pp. 60-61) is ambiguously a courtly, romantic figure, bowing and presenting the little lady with flowers, and a “flasher,” exercising the power of embarrassment by exposing himself. He is also of course a potential abductor and rapist.
Paul and the Royal Porcupine, both romantic fantasy lovers of Joan’s are also strongly associated with death, Paul through his revolver, and the Royal Porcupine through the road-kills that constitute his “art.”
Finally, Arthur joins the group when Joan becomes convinced, towards the climax of the novel and before her flight to Italy, that someone, probably Arthur, is trying to kill her. Joan thus comes to live out in her own life the murder-mystery-thriller lived out also in her parents’ relationship and culminating in her mother’s death. Joan relives her mother’s story when she turns Arthur, either in her fantasy or “actually” (i.e. in terms of the novel’s “reality”) into a figure of death. Romance and death are again conjoined. In one way or another, either physically or psychologically, women who live by romance die by romance.
Of course in the comic resolution of Lady Oracle, Joan does not die but merely pretends to commit suicide. Joan’s father’s resurrecting of the man attempting suicide had already introduced suicide as a powerful metaphor. That both the genuine would-be suicide and the pretend suicide should live on is appropriate in a comic novel. However, the implications of the metaphor are clear: women are not psychologically murdered by men. Instead, fascination with romantic escape and the false hope of rescue leads them to consent to the demise of their own potential and fulfillment. By revealing this, Lady Oracle gifts its women readers with an understanding essential for liberation.
4B. The Blending of Female Characters with Each Other and with Fantasy Figures
So far we have considered fragmentation and multiplicity within the male characters of Lady Oracle. We have demonstrated their tendency to merge with each other, especially through the association of every one of them with death. We focused on the ambiguity of romantic male figures as rescuers and/or murderers of the consenting female self. Now we’ll attempt a parallel consideration of Joan and her mother’s fantasy selves, in a further exploration of Lady Oracle‘s riddling message.
JOAN
Joan’s multiple real-life identities are listed above in Section 3. Joan takes on these false selves so that she can keep the affection and interest of the men in her life. In addition, she maintains a long list of fantasy or “shadow” selves, which reflect her “real” (i. e. fictional in Atwood’s novel) experience in various ways.
An early model for Joan is the actress, Joan Crawford, the queen of screen tragedy, after whom her mother named her (p. 42). This naming began Joan’s career in female fantasy. Joan Crawford was a central figure in women’s fantasy lives in the 1950s, when Joan was growing up. Joan’s mother probably intended Joan Crawford to model “success” to her daughter.
The butterfly ballerina is another important early fantasy, consciously adopted by Joan herself, and often linked with the harem girl, who is yet another female fantasy figure. The slim and glittering figure of the ballerina is an emblem of idealised femininity that is still potent in Western cultures.
Because Joan wants both the rewards of conforming femininity and the rewards of autonomy and self-fulfillment, early in her life she blends the ballerina with the fat lady whom she sees at a fair. The fat lady is an emblem of a woman who is marginalised and freakish, because she dares to put her own needs first and to be herself. She sits knitting, confident and at peace, unperturbed by the jeers of the fascinated, gawking crowd (p. 90). Later the fat lady reappears as a tight-rope walker, triumphantly crossing the whole of Canada but now to the applause of the watching crowd (pp. 102-103). Joan fantasises that this imperturbable, contradictory version of herself will one day gain recognition for a marvellous feat.
Within the Gothic fantasy novel, Terror at Redmond Grange, Joan identifies with both the slim Charlotte, who is the stock heroine in such writings, and the voluptuous Felicia, who is the stock “other woman,” the heroine’s unscrupulous rival. Usually sexually experienced, this mistress figure typically tries to separate the hard-mouthed, tall and rapacious, dark-haired and darkly-dressed hero from the virginal heroine. Once again we see Joan’s irreconcilable desire for both femininity and autonomy in her identification with both of these fantasy selves.
That makes seven fantasy selves by my count–no wonder Joan feels divided and uncertain!
JOAN: METAPHORS AND SYMBOLS
a) The Heart of the Maze
Joan’s main female fantasy selves come together in the climax, when Joan identifying with Felicia penetrates to the heart of the maze, the symbolic centre of her own labyrinthine “reality.” Here, as “Lady Redmond” she meets four earlier versions of “Lady Redmond,” the wife-figure of female fantasy novels. Two of these wives are similar to Felicia–voluptuous redheads with the “small white teeth”–both the hair and the teeth are stock features of these minor villainesses. A third wife is a blend of Aunt Deirdre and Aunt Lou, an identity concocted by Joan to deceive Arthur and the reading public. The fourth is the blended butterfly ballerina-fat lady. These wives at the heart of the maze which is Joan’s complicated being are some of the multiple selves that she has assumed in order to relate to her male lovers. They are not Joan as she knows herself to be. Redmond has already murdered the four earlier Lady Redmonds, and threatens in this episode to murder Felicia/Joan. We saw earlier that murder is a metaphor for the psychological death of the wife-figure, as her “reality” is invaded and fragmented by multiple fantasy selves.
b) The Ambiguous Metaphor of Dancing
The struggle between autonomous self-fulfillment and service, between responsibility to others and to oneself, characterises many women’s lives. Lady Oracle embodies this struggle in the ambiguous metaphor of dancing, which is mostly attached to Joan, and which recurs constantly. Dancing with a tall stranger is the essence of Mills-&-Boon-type romance (see p. 23), but dancing alone (“to one’s own tune”) can be synonymous with autonomy. The ambiguities of this metaphor nevertheless go beyond this.
We saw above that the ballerina is a symbol of feminine conformity (p. 43). However, in the story of Moira Shearer it represents a woman’s self-fulfillment through outstanding proficiency in a rigorous art. In the movie, The Red Shoes, the dancer performed by Shearer is torn by the archetypal female conflict: she must choose between her vocation of dancing and her marriage to “a handsome opera conductor.” Unable to resolve this conflict she commits suicide (p. 82), which, as we have seen, is another potent metaphor in Lady Oracle. The Little Mermaid in the Andersen fairy tale (p. 216) sacrifices her art, her tongue and her beautiful song, in order to dance with her beloved, the handsome prince, but every step which she takes on her human feet stabs like a sword. This is a close parallel with Joan, whose feet hurt when she wears old-fashioned shoes to dance with the Royal Porcupine (pp. 254-55). The fat lady tends to break out of the dancing fantasy and to be herself at all costs–for example, when her dance becomes a strip-tease (p. 251); and when, while figure-skating, a form of dancing, she blows up and floats away joyfully, like a helium balloon (p. 273). The ambiguity of the dancing metaphor is finally resolved when Joan, in Italy, begins to dance alone (i.e. pleases herself in her own autonomous dance), but succumbs to the fantasy of a handsome partner (“an arm slid around my waist”). Then the fantasy suddenly deflates: she dances through broken glass and injures her feet, like the Little Mermaid (pp. 334-35). The warning to women not to succumb to romantic delusion is obvious, and grimly comic.
c) Joan’s Ambiguous Fatness
For many feminists, fatness is a statement of autonomy, an act of defiance against the ubiquitous diet and exercise industries. (See Susie Orbach’s book, Fat Is A Feminist Issue.) Joan became fat as a protest against the conformist feminine regime imposed on her by her mother. When she was a young adult her fat was a warm insulation that mostly protected her from sexual connection and male demands.
On the other hand, Joan’s fatness can be understood not as defiance, but as an aspect of her fantasy life and an escape. Joan’s mother is ambiguous in the ways she “discourages” Joan’s fatness. For example, she makes Joan a chocolate cake packed with laxatives. Similarly, Aunt Lou, who appears to love Joan, accepts her fatness while she is alive. However, the condition of her will which requires Joan to lose weight suggests that Aunt Lou regards slimness, if not desirable in itself, as being in Joan’s best interests.
In sum, fatness in Lady Oracle, like dancing, demonstrates the complexity and uncertainty of women’s choices. These metaphors are a twentieth-century version of the riddling messages of the Delphic oracle.
JOAN’S MOTHER
The ambiguous self-hood of Joan’s mother can be expounded under the headings of murderess and victim.
MURDERESS
Joan sees her mother in terms of the wicked older women vilified in patriarchal fairy tales. However, Joan is an unreliable narrator if ever there was one! The reader is not obliged to accept her judgments or version of “reality” (meaning the novel’s fictional reality).
The specific fairy tale Joan evokes in respect of herself in relation to her mother is Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. This was an immensely popular full-length cartoon feature produced in 1937 by Walt Disney and shown repeatedly in movie theatres during Joan’s (and Atwood’s) childhood. Like the wicked queen, Joan’s mother spends (wastes?) much time anxiously peering into her triple mirror, to check and repair her beautiful, artificially perfect appearance. Also like the wicked queen, who of course tricks Snow White into eating a poisoned apple, Joan’s mother feeds her daughter the chocolate cake “poisoned” with laxatives. In a fury, Joan’s mother also tries to stab her. A feature of the movie, Snow White, was the long, “murderous” fingernails of the wicked queen; Joan’s mother’s fingernails are similar (pp. 67-68).
Joan received little or no love from her mother. This lack was the buried cause of her rich fantasy life, her fragmentation, her multiple identities and her insecurity. Like the death-dealing male fantasy figures in Joan’s life, and her unreal relationships with men, the disastrously unhappy relationship between Joan and her mother continually threatens Joan with psychological death, and even with actual death. After her mother’s dies Joan is still not able “to let her go”; instead she devotes herself to a futile quest for the mother love that was withheld from her in childhood. Lady Oracle represents this quest of Joan’s, with its threat of psychological death, through a powerful sequence of recurring metaphors, as follows:
a) Mirror-Writing
When Joan looks into the candle-lit mirror, firstly to experiment with automatic writing, and then to compose the poems for her “Lady Oracle” volume, she meets a deeply threatening female presence. The most dramatic occasion is when the candle blows out, and Joan is trapped behind the mirror until Arthur rouses her (pp. 221-23). It is not until the very end of the novel, when Joan is in Italy, that the threatening woman in the mirror is revealed to be Joan’s mother (pp. 329-30).
b) Joan’s Poetry Collection, Lady Oracle
The development of Joan’s mother as a death-figure is made obvious by the progress of the Lady Oracle poems. As the dark Lady Oracle, the witch and sorceress figure in these poems, Joan’s mother threatens to absorb her daughter, i.e. the red-gold lady, into herself. The progressive absorption can be traced by considering the extracts from poems in the Lady Oracle collection. Joan describes the dark female figure as “enormously powerful, almost like a goddess, but it was an unhappy power” (p. 222)–an obvious evocation of her mother’s (and every mother’s) power to either uplift or to hurt. In a later extract the threesome–the “one and three”–consisting of the sorceress or “the blank lady oracle of blood,” “the dark lady” and “the redgold lady,” forms an awesome trinity that commands Joan’s life in the form of “she who must be obeyed forever.” In other words, Joan and her mother will have merged together in Joan’s psyche. If Joan is ever to be truly autonomous and fulfilled, she must somehow free herself from her mother’s destructive and deep-seated inner presence.
c) The Lady of Shalott and the Dangers of Mirror-Gazing
This same threat of an unbreakable internal merging of Joan with her mother, denying Joan her adult autonomy, is presented by reference to The Lady of Shalott, by the Victorian poet, Alfred, Lord Tennyson. The poem features a Lady who, because of a curse, can view life outside the window of her castle only by gazing into a mirror. Both Joan’s mother and Joan are mirror-gazers, and the threat to Joan is that as a mirror-gazer, i.e. as someone dominated by fantasy, she will never break her identification with her mother. However Tennyson’s poem brings us to another possible interpretation of Joan’s mother, one that she herself is unwilling to contemplate, but for which she supplies the reader with ample clues. This interpretation is that Joan’s mother is as much a victim as a murderess.
VICTIM
John William Waterhouse: “The Lady of Shalott” (1888)
In The Lady of Shalott (1833), the Lady sits in her castle weaving, and watching in her mirror the reflections of travellers as they pass beside the river below. Sir Lancelot, yet another archetypal romantic figure with coal-black curls and shining armour, sings as he rides by on his way to Camelot. Overcome by love, the Lady leaves her loom, crosses the room, and looks at him directly. The mirror cracks, the curse comes upon her. She finds a boat and writes her name on the prow. As the boat drifts downstream she sings her last song, a holy carol, and dies. When the boat arrives at Camelot, Sir Lancelot is among the crowd that gathers to see this marvel. He comments casually on her beauty, oblivious to her love for him and to the part he played in her death. Most of the elements of this story reincarnate, both in Atwood’s novel Lady Oracle, and in Joan’s poetry collection, “Lady Oracle.”
The key is the symbolism of the mirror. The mirror-world represents fantasy-life; this is harmless, and the Lady can pursue her art of weaving based on her fantasy-life, i.e. her mirror-view of the scenes outside her window, for as long as she does not attempt to realise (or live out) her fantasy. When, inspired by Lancelot’s male beauty, she attempts to to do this, she destroys her art–“Out flew the web and floated wide”–, activates the curse, and causes her own death.
Therefore Lancelot in the poem and in the novel is yet another death-dealing male fantasy figure, of the Redmond “handsome stranger” kind. Tennyson’s poem embodies the point which Atwood makes elsewhere through her novel’s suicide narratives, especially Joan’s pretended suicide at the end. This is that women bring about their own destruction when they absorb the fantasies of their culture, and relate to men in “unreal” ways. The “real” Lancelot in the poem, as opposed to the fantasy figure imagined by the Lady, is unaware of the destruction he causes. His obliviousness is an exact parallel for Arthur’s ignorance of Joan’s rich fantasy life.
As far as Joan’s mother is concerned, Tennyson’s poem shows that like the Lady with whom she is closely identified, Joan’s mother is a victim who confused and blended romantic fantasy with “real” life. This is why Joan’s mirror-gazing is so dangerous to her: it threatens to merge her with the Lady and with her mother as a woman who has been destroyed by trying to actualise fantasy in the “real” world.
The clues to Joan’s mother’s status as a victim are many. A tragic submerged perspective in the narrative pities her as a woman who failed to nurture her own reality and her own talents, and so did not survive in a patriarchal society as an autonomous being. Her assumed murder by her husband, who refused her an abortion when young, a powerful metaphor for this, has been discussed above. The symptoms of Joan’s mother’s inner devastation include the contrast between her young (1949), smart and beautiful, house-decorating self, and the desperately unhappy alcoholic persona of later years. Joan’s mother cannot love her daughter, because she sees Joan, by her mere existence, as an important cause of her own destruction. This failure to love her daughter represents just as massive a deprivation for the mother, as it is for Joan. Joan inadvertently reveals the terrible emptiness of her mother’s life as she accompanies her husband in his climbing of the career ladder. Her sterile house, in which no one can relax, is a substitute for having real enterprises directed to her own fulfillment. She takes up projects like Joan’s slimming regime for the same reason–to try to fill her empty life. By cutting the faces from the photos of her lovers in the album, Joan’s mother shows that she attributes her destruction to the men in her life. In herself, she has become nothing but an an emblem for wifely resentment and revenge.
Joan’s final vision of her mother, desperate for understanding, weeping and excluded (p. 329) is double-edged. It suggests, as we have already seen, that Joan must defend herself from merging with her mother and therefore sharing her death-by-fantasy. But it also reveals a way in which Joan might attempt to relate to her dead mother. That is, through understanding and having compassion for her as a victim.