Abstract
Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle (1976) has often been categorized as a postmodern fiction for its writing strategy that performs the fluid subjectivity of a subject with its seemingly disordered form. With its multi-layer narrative style, Atwood delves into the dynamics of human subjectivity which is always in a process of forming and transforming as it encounters and interacts with objects. By exploring the way how the heroine Joan comes to build her multiple selves and structuralize narrative by an ongoing fictional writing, this thesis discusses the dynamic human subjectivity and the interactive relationship between the subject and the objects. Joan Foster, the heroine and narrator, is a writer of Gothic Romance. As she speaks her own past and present, the narrative that is supposed to be her real life accounts comes to blend into the Gothic Romance which she is constantly composing. Thus, by breaking down the multi-layer and intersecting narrative, this thesis contends that Atwood creates a multi-layer narrative structure to present the complexity of human subjectivity that repeatedly recreates itself. Atwood arranges Joan’s life story and dilemma by means of a Gothic story into order to blur the boundary between real and literary world and thereby foregrounds the fictionality of subjectivity. As Joan writes about the frustrated and victimized Gothic heroine, she is also enacting how one’s self-image is first and foremost a socio-constructed recreation. For such a self-recreating process, Joan is both the creator and the subject of her writing. Joan’s subjectivity fluctuates with her narrative and no fixed subjectivity can be arrived at. Lady Oracle, by parodizing the convention of Gothic Romance, reveals how “the eternal feminine” is imposed upon women and forces them to identify themselves with a socio-cultural fictionalized image of what women should be. The entire process is like a repeated mirroring effect that Michel Foucault proposes in his theory of heterotopias. Therefore, this thesis also applies Foucault’s concept of heterotopias as an approach to explore how the mirroring process functions to form and reform one’s subjectivity. By comparing Joan with other characters and popular culture, this thesis argues that Joan’s multiple selves are merely the projections of her life experiences. Through discussing Lady Oracle with Foucault’s concept of heterotopias, this thesis concludes that the idea of heterotopias suggests new possibilities to analyze one’s fluid subjectivity which is within a postmodern narrative frame.