Lady Oracle | Social Concerns

Lady Oracle Social Concerns

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 emulate, turns her own adulthood into fictions intended to satisfy the string of fantasy-sated males who enter her life. Because each approaches her with his own definition of the desirable female, she concocts a variety of identities to mask the "infelicities" of her true character. Joan's dilemma, finally,...
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