Lady Oracle Themes

Lady Oracle Themes

As in Atwood's other foray into sexual politics exposes the alienating forces in contemporary society which thwart the individual's attainment of an integrated identity. Joan gradually discovers that all the people she knows are as fragmented and unknowable as she believes herself to be.

In reaction against the conditions that seem to deny her control over her life, she wills into being several distinct personae for herself, attempting thereby to repudiate her past and to allow her imagination freer rein than society normally tolerates. She thus makes the fractured modern ego the foundation of her complicated existence, eventually becoming so caught up in her fictionalizing power that she plots her own death to resolve the increasing confusion among her separate selves. When her efforts to manipulate life as if it were art prove futile, she recognizes the need to bring those selves into coherent relation to one another;...
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