From the first, critics have regarded Lady Oracle as a feminist exploration of female ambivalence over the challenges of self-definition within an oppressively gendered society. Like earlier Atwood heroines, Joan Foster leans toward escapist fantasies as a means of coping with the stresses and insufficiencies of her life; she eventually channels that inclination into successful authorship of Gothic "bodicerippers." Atwood draws a clear parallel between the popularity of such formulaic fictions and the soul-numbing circumstances of the average woman's life. Her heroine, haunted by the fat girl she once was, as well as by the bitterly frustrated mother she had refused to.....
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