Analysis Of Lady Oracle By Margaret Atwood
In presenting Joan Foster as Fat Duenna, Atwood delves into what can be seen as a feminist novel. In a male dominated society, Joan is forced to play a predefined role, and her success solely depends on her female body and female beauty. She spends her childhood, adolescence, and adulthood invisible to the world as her fat figure makes her want to crawl into a corner and wrap her arms tightly around her legs to appear smaller. “You can’t change the past, Aunt Lou used to say. Oh, but I wanted to; that was the one thing I really wanted to do. Nostalgia convulsed me”. Joan’s task of identity development during her childhood is plagued by victimization, evasion, and unhappiness, thus she grapples for safety, fantasy, and love as an adult.
The overarching theme of accepting yourself for who you are is extremely challenging for Joan. Her inability to escape her wall of flesh and reminiscence of distressing youth prevents her from achieving her world of perfection. Throughout the novel, Joan emphasizes her obesity and how her shape rejects the ideals of femininity. She resorts to gorging on food to keep her insultation, invisibility, and retaliates against her thin, beautiful, and demanding mother. The mother-daughter relationship is one of the most important interactions of the heroine’s childhood. Rejected and unwanted, Joan is lonely and lacks love because her mom treats her like an irreparable and useless object. When Joan “reached the age of six the pictures stopped abruptly” as her mother gives up on her grotesque figure and does not want to treasure any memories of her. With an unbearable and antagonistic attitude, her mom continues to nag, grind, and condition Joan into mental dissatisfaction of her body. Joan refuses diet, clothing, or any method to be socially accepted despite the numerous attempts. She does the exact opposite of what her mother wants and becomes what her mom dreads the most – a fatter girl. Atwood demonstrates a disfunctional and problematic relationship between mother and daughter because this communication is crucial for a child’s upbringing.
A significant reason to why Joan refuses to become a woman at all is because she despises and is disgusted by her mother, thus refuses to become the ideal of femininity. Her mother’s actions and emotional abuse steals Joan’s autonomy and obliterates the ideal to be respected only for a thin and attractive appearance. Consequently, her retaliation leads to the subconscious realization that she is a duplicitous copy of her mother. A sponsored monster who wants to embody her success as the perfect wife and lover, as her mom wants to embody the perfect mother. Her mother weighs life’s success with an ideal household with furniture in prime condition, while Joan weighs it with the hope of escaping her terrible childhood with a man.
In presenting Joan as an escapist, Atwood demonstrates that it is equally futile to live a fantasy marriage. Joan plays the role of a compassionate sidekick and wife, consoling her husband Arthur through his crises, while she in return expects nothing. She yearns for a knight in shining armor – a romantic, heroic, and satisfying man who will elope with her to paradise island. When she gets married to Arthur, she hides all her past stretch marks in life. Although tempted to confess, she controls these impulses in effort to become the type of wife that she believes Arthur wants. As the ego gratification maker for Arthur, Atwood shows that Joan’s main goal is to become the ideal wife for Arthur by living up to his expectations of pleasure and satisfaction. Even cooking for the first time is not a challenge for Joan. Joan’s battles with her weight and her problematic relationship with an offensive and abusive mother are probably not what Arthur expects of his wife. Joan believes that to have a pleasant future, the past must be proper. Since her past was haunted and disparaged by pounds, she diverges from her task to coming to terms with her childhood by creating an entirely new, pristine, and principled history. Joan continuously revises her autobiography and applies a layer of sugar to her nightmares and perpetual fears in horror that Arthur would find out her true massive form. All of this leads to a tangled web of illusions, lies, and misery which is all of Joan’s making. Having sailed into a marriage of false colors, little escape and satisfaction, Joan is left to crave perfection and more safety in various romances.
Self-deception and drowning in pretense and lie are Joan’s method of pervading her former humiliations as a fat girl and her failures to admit or acknowledge the real cause of her consecutive failures. She dramatizes her vicious victim cycle and continues to live a life with unresolved childhood traumas. Joan is foolish throughout her entire faulty plan to escape, continuously refusing to act like a responsible woman. She is “a sorry assemblage of lies and alibies”, because lying was the tactic she learned as a girl prejudiced by her weight to escape, only to be met my more failures. Nostalgia convulses Joan because her past is what she believes has ruined her life. The reason why she is unsatisfied and unhappy is because of her weight, but even after she loses a hundred or so pounds, the results do not change. She is still the same anxious, obese, and invisible girl, not woman, who is even more of a fugitive form from herself. Aunt Lou was right – you cannot change the past, but the past can change you.
