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Thesis Proposal Outline
Sarita Chuang, 492206010
Advisor: Kate Liu
Oct. 2004
Introduction
I. In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, the daughter Elizabeth does not identify with the
two major female figures in her life, her mother, Clarissa Dalloway, and her tutor, Doris
Kilman. Mrs. Dalloway and Kilman represent the dichotomy of women devised by
patriarchy -- docile, dutiful wife like Mrs. Dalloway/outlandish, unamiable single woman
like Kilman.
II. The problem I intend to solve in my thesis: & hypothesis
Can we view women’s writing as an emotionally and intellectually cathartic experience in
which the writer engages in continuous dialogues not only with herself, but also with her
mother(s) who transmits social customs and cultural myths that circumscribe the daughter’s
selves?
In other words, the mother acts as a cultural agent “who transmits social
mythology – fictional constructs into which the child is expected to fit” (Rosowski 89).
[Hypothesis]: During this experience, if internalized ‘false’ values – such as the dichotomy
of women – are expelled, then the woman, as a writer, may rids herself of the victim
position, accepting power and taking on the responsibility that comes along with it.
III. Numerous feminist writings during the 1970s seem to answer the question Woolf
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implies about the daughter’s (Elizabeth’s) choice.
1. The two areas interest me particularly are mother-daughter relationship and feminist
revisions of orthodox, Freudian psychoanalytic theories. (Though Kleinian object
relations theory does not belong to this period, Melanie Klein is a pioneer in revisions
of Freudian psychoanalysis and one of the earliest psychoanalysts to shift the focus of
children’s psychological development from their relation with fathers to that with
mothers)
2. I choose Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle because it portrays the array of questions I
am interested in – the victimization of women, mother-daughter cathexis, and whether
asserting one’s creativity through writing can empower oneself, or at least, helps the
writer to reach “creative nonvictimhood”.
3. The intertextuality between Lady Oracle, Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Ugly
Duckling” and Grimms’ “Rapunzel” about mother-daughter relationship
4. Joan’s struggle between exercising her creativity and fulfilling her role as wife: the
Bluebeard myth, Tennyson’s “Lady of Shallot”, and Anderson’s “The Red Shoes”.
5. Rewriting Gothic plot and the possibility toward devictimization.
IV. Questions related to Lady Oracle that I will probe further
1. How does Joan ensure her survival in a family where the mother does not love her and
the father is indifferent?
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2. Since Joan’s mother does not want her, why does she cling to Joan? Why does she
tempt Joan with food after Joan loses weight? Does her violent reaction to Joan’s
revelation that she will move out actually indicate her fear of losing Joan?
3. Joan also clings to her mother through incessant eating. How is this peculiar form of
mutual attachment related to Joan’s internalization of her mother’s values?
4. Does having no one to identify with always produce a negative impact on Joan?
5. Why is Joan afraid to let Arthur know that she writes Gothic novels?
Why does
Arthur feel threatened by Joan’s creativity after he knows Lady Oracle is published?
6. Joan ‘rewrites’ the audience’s response to the fat lady in her fantasy, so what happens
when Joan rewrites Gothic plot in her fiction?
Would she become empowered in the
process of rewriting and stop escaping from her own world?
Thesis Statement
I intend to demonstrate that although Joan falls into female victimization because she
internalizes her mother’s desire to collude in patriarchal plot against the female self and
is trapped in the construction of femininity in Gothic fiction, through the very act of
writing and rewriting, she engages in continuous dialogues not only with herself, but
also with the internalized mother.
Along with the dialogues comes self-recollection and
new awareness of nonvictimhood.
Methodology: Kleinian Object Relations Theory
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-- Margaret Mahler’s concepts of symbiosis
-- Melanie Klein: phantasy, fantasy, and the two positions: the paranoid-schizoid position and
the depressive position
Preliminary Results
I. Explication of the peculiar symbiotic relationship between Frances and Joan
II. Joan’s predicament in adult relationships is due to the transference from her childhood
experience.
III. The splitting of mother into the good/bad breast and whether Joan internalizes the
goodness.
IV. The enactment of paranoid-schizoid position and the fear of fragmentation in response
to her mother’s unloving attitude.
V. The depressive position as a defensive one and is operated in stressful situation.
VI. Joan’s fat lady fantasy and the intrusion of unconscious phantasy.
 the three fat lady fantasies
 the ambiguity of reality and the possibility to disrupt conventions
 The clashes among reality, fantasy, and phantasy open up new possibility for Joan to
accept and recognize the dynamic self.
Context
Thesis Outline and Timetable
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Thesis Proposal
Sarita Chuang, 492206010
Advisor: Kate Liu
Oct. 2, 2004
Introduction & Thesis Statement
In one afternoon tea scene in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, 17-year-old Elizabeth
leaves her tutor, Doris Kilman, in dismay, like a “dumb creature galloped in terror” (Woolf
146). Away from the stifling conversation with Kilman, Elizabeth muses upon her future.
She would not grow up to be like Kilman, nor would she wish to lead a life like her mother’s.
Elizabeth thinks about being a doctor or a farmer – “in short, she would like to have a
profession. She would become a doctor, a farmer, possibly go into Parliament if she found it
necessary . . . ” (Woolf 150-151). Whether Elizabeth becomes a doctor, a farmer, or a
parliament member is certainly left unanswered, given that the novel captures just one day in
Mrs. Dalloway’s life. Yet, why does Elizabeth find it difficult to identify with the two elder
women so close to her?
Why does Woolf arrange for Elizabeth to turn away from Kilman
and to wander alone in the streets of London?
How, after the short wandering, is Elizabeth
able to return to her mother “calmly and competently” (Woolf 153)? One thing is for certain –
Elizabeth exhibits awareness that she has more choices regarding her own life’s course than
her mother’s generation, and in this brief scene, Woolf seems to fling at later generations the
question whether daughters can transcend the rigid dichotomy of women devised by
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patriarchy – docile, dutiful wife like Mrs. Dalloway/outlandish, unamiable single woman like
Kilman?
If women need not be trapped in any form of dichotomy which undermines their
multiplicity, how do we free ourselves from the entrapment?
Through imagination?
Through creativity? Or through artistic creation?
In an attempt to answer the above questions, I would like to quote a line from Margaret
Atwood’s poem “Spelling”: “A word after a word after a word is power”, which indicates the
relevancy between women’s writing and acquisition of power.
Can we view women’s
writing as an emotionally and intellectually cathartic experience in which the writer engages
in continuous dialogues not only with herself, but also with her mother(s) who transmits
social conventions and cultural myths that circumscribe the daughter’s selves?
In other
words, the mother acts as a cultural agent “who transmits social mythology – fictional
constructs into which the child is expected to fit” (Rosowski 89). During this experience, if
internalized ‘false’ values – such as the dichotomy of women – are expelled, then the woman,
as a writer, may rids herself of the victim position, accepting power and taking on the
responsibility that comes along with it.
Incidentally, numerous feminist writings during the 1970s seem to answer the question
Woolf implies about the daughter’s (Elizabeth’s) choice. Since the 1970s, hitherto silenced
topics about female sexuality and desire have been widely written about, and among them the
two areas interest me particularly are mother-daughter relationship and feminist revisions of
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orthodox, Freudian psychoanalytic theories. Notable books centering on mother-daughter
relationships include Adrienne Rich’s Of Women Born, Nancy Chodorow’s The Reproduction
of Mothering, Vivien Nice’s Mothers and Daughters: The Distortion of a Relationship,
Nancy Friday’s My Mother/My Self: The Daughter’s Search for Identity, the collection of
essays The Lost Tradition: Mothers and Daughters in Literature, and Marianne Hirsch’s
Mother/Daughter Plot, with the first two focusing more on motherhood.
Revisions of
Freudian theories on femininity include Phyllis Chesler’s Women and Madness and Juliet
Mitchell’s Psychoanalysis and Feminism, Nancy Chodorow’s Feminism and Psychoanalytic
Theory, Barbara Hill Rigney’s Madness and Sexual Politics in the Feminist Novel: Studies in
Brontë, Woolf, Lessing, and Atwood, etc.
It is noteworthy that Margaret Atwood’s early
novels, The Edible Woman (1969), Surfacing (1972), and Lady Oracle (1976) coincide with
the rise of second-wave feminism in North America. More importantly, Atwood begins to
indicate a solution to women’s predicaments, that is, “to refuse to be a victim”.
In both
Surfacing and Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972), Atwood
emphasizes the issue of victimization and how does the victim achieves “creative
nonvictimhood” (Stein 146).
In my studies of feminist writings, I cannot help but wonder whether the most tragic
form of victimization is the one that mothers pass down to their daughters since it is easier for
daughters to identify with their mothers than sons and thus daughters tend to internalize their
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mothers’ values. Usually, the mother is not aware that the values she transmits to her
daughter are cultural myths or patriarchal construction of femininity which would undermine
the daughter’s dynamic subjectivity, as Adrienne Rich writes in Of Woman Born about “the
deepest mutuality and the most painful estrangement” of mother-daughter cathexis, “Psychic
osmosis. Desperate defenses. The power of the bond often denied because it cracks
consciousness, threatens at times to lead the daughter back into ‘those secret chambers . . .
becoming, like waters poured into one jar, inextricably the same, one with the object one
adored . . .’13 Or, because there is no indifference or cruelty we can tolerate less, than the
indifference or cruelty of our mothers” (231). The cruelty or indifference perhaps refers to
the mother’s desire to conform to social norms at the price of her daughter’s subjectivity.
Take the mother, Frances, in Lady Oracle for example, in order to conform to social
convention of a perfect housewife who maintains a tidy house and rears a presentable
daughter, Frances is indifferent to Joan’s feelings and tries incessantly to make Joan lose
weight.
Frances’ scrutinizing surveillance on Joan’s appearance is so apparent that even in
Joan’s dancing school performance (the mothball episode), she is the first one to point out
Joan is unfit among the 7-year-old girls. However, I do not intend to write my thesis in the
direction of mother-blaming literature.
I believe mothers, not just as women, but as human
beings, all have their limitations. For example, in Atwood’s novels, some mothers are war
brides. The mother in Lady Oracle is a war bride and has to raise Joan alone for five years.
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The mother in Cat’s Eye struggles to maintain a household in the wilderness during frequent
trips due to her husband’s job as an entomologist, and in The Blind Assassin, the mother
suffers from a frail body.
For my thesis, I choose Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle because it portrays the array of
questions I am interested in – the victimization of women, mother-daughter cathexis, and
whether asserting one’s creativity through writing can empower oneself, or at least, helps the
writer to reach “creative nonvictimhood”. The mother in Lady Oracle stands out among
those in Atwood’s novels.
Unlike the submissive mother in Surfacing or the absent mother
in The Edible Woman, the mother in Lady Oracle is domineering and full of rage.
Also, the
mother-daughter relationship in LO seems to be the most violent, compared to the ones in
Atwood’s other novels, such as Cat’s Eye and The Blind Assassin.
Like Elizabeth in
Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, Joan does not identify completely with the major female figures in
her life – her mother Frances and Aunt Lou, and her father is completely indifferent to her.
Then, how does Joan survive in such a family where her mother constantly scrutinizes her
body and does not accept her as she is, always trying to make her over?
How does Joan
solidify her existence, especially after she finds out that her mother does not want her?
Since her mother’s wish is to make Joan thin and beautiful, why does she tempt Joan with
cooking sprees and later attack Joan after she loses weight and reveals she is moving out?
Frances’ paradoxical behavior implies that her attachment to Joan is very complicated.
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Nancy Friday states in My Mother/My Self: The Daughter’s Search for Identity, “blaming
mother is just a negative way of clinging to her still”, could it be that the other way around is
also true (Chen 8)?
Frances needs the fat daughter around as an object towards whom her
power to manipulate, humiliate, and attack is directed.
way to cling to her mother who does not love her.
Likewise, Joan adopts a negative
Through binge eating, Joan can arouse
some kind of emotional response – anger - from her mother.
Although the mother’s anger
only makes the relationship more violent, it is better than the mother’s total indifference
towards her child.
In order for a child to survive, she must do everything she can to avoid
the caretaker’s indifference because indifference means possible abandonment. Frances and
Joan’s battle over the territory of Joan’s body, though violent, is the only way they can attach
to each other and through such attachment, a peculiar symbiotic relationship is formed.
Nevertheless, does having no one to identify with always produce a negative impact on
Joan? Doesn’t it also mean Joan is free to invent herself, and therefore avoids to be framed in
traditional female roles (a stark contrast to Joan’s fluid, discursive ‘selves’ is the Royal
Porcupine’s con-create art which frames dead animals)?
Why does Joan begin to wear a
mask of “kindly aunt and wisewoman” in high school when she knows she is “the duplicitous
monster I knew myself to be” (108-110)?
At the same time, though she has not lost any
weight, she despises the other two fat girls in school and feels ashamed to be seen with her
hefty aunt. Does this mean Joan has internalized her mother’s values despite her consistent
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I believe Joan is unaware of the process of internalization, just as she is unaware
her subjectivity is being fragmented – she is composed of four selves: a kind friend in school,
a “duplicitous monster” her friends should have been cautious of, a defying daughter, and a
Fat Lady in her fantasy.
Moreover, how does her internalization of her mother’s values
affect her interaction with men?
writes Gothic novels?
For instance, why is Joan afraid to let Arthur know that she
Why does Arthur feel threatened by Joan’s creativity after he knows
Lady Oracle is published?
It is intriguing that in her earliest fantasy, Joan transforms the
Fat Lady from a freak to be jeered at to a wonder woman who performs tricks and receives
tribute from the audience (119-120).
If Joan’s fat lady fantasies serve as an escape from
reality, what happens when Joan rewrites Gothic plot in her fiction?
Would she become
empowered in the process of rewriting and stop escaping from her own world?
Owing to my interest in mother-daughter relationship and psychoanalysis, especially
object relations theory, I find Kleinian object relations theory sheds light on the
mother-daughter relationship in Lady Oracle mainly because of Klein’s emphasis on the
infant’s phantasies against the mother’s breasts, phantasies being the unconscious
imaginative representations of bodily instincts, including oral, urethral, and anal phantasies
and desires (St. Clair 48).
Klein also points out that the mental world of phantasies is
normal for infants, but for adults, the chaotic world of phantasies takes the form of psychosis,
which is not normal (St. Clair 41).
I think the relation between infantile phantasies and
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adult psychosis might help explain why the adult Joan does so many ridiculous things, such
as having hallucinations of her mother, imagining Arthur as a wife-killer, and acting out a
whole escape scenario.
Meanwhile, as a poet, novelist, and illustrator, Atwood always
presents abounding and prolific intertextuality in her novels, and Lady Oracle is no exception.
Joan’s Costume Gothic Stalked by Love, which is later rewritten by Joan, is embedded in
Atwood’s novel Lady Oracle, which is a parody of traditional Gothic forms. More
explicitly, Joan’s collection of poems Lady Oracle is embedded in Atwood’s novel Lady
Oracle. Also, Atwood draws on several fairy tales and myths in Lady Oracle.
Therefore,
in this thesis, entitled Mother-daughter Relationship and Intertextuality in Margaret
Atwood’s Lady Oracle, I intend to demonstrate that although Joan falls into female
victimization because she internalizes her mother’s desire to collude in patriarchal plot
against the female self and is trapped in the construction of femininity in Gothic fiction,
through the very act of writing and rewriting, she engages in continuous dialogues not
only with herself, but also with the internalized mother. Along with the dialogues
comes self-recollection and new awareness of nonvictimhood.
First, I will examine
Joan’s relationship to her mother from a Kleinian point of view and explicate how the
allusions to Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Ugly Duckling” and Grimms’ “Rapunzel”
mirror the mother-daughter relationship. Then, after suggesting Joan’s escape from her
mother in search for the right men who would love her, I will explore how Joan is encaged in
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female fear of dismemberment and the dilemma of exercising her creativity and fulfilling her
husband’s expectation by examining the Bluebeard myth, the novel’s consistent reference to
Tennyson’s “Lady of Shallot”, and Anderson’s “The Red Shoes”. Furthermore, I will trace
Joan’s attempts to rewrite her Gothic novel and Atwood’s rewriting of Gothic plot. This
rewriting is a subversive act and indicates self-empowerment and devictimization.
Methodology
Although psychoanalytic approach has been adopted by numerous research on Lady
Oracle, the approach to analyze Lady Oracle with object relations theory composes only a
small proportion. Most Atwood scholarship based on psychoanalytic approach develops
their argument from French psychoanalysis, centering on Lacanian and Kristevan
psychoanalysis, as in Sonia Mycak’s In Search of the Split Subject: Psychoanalysis,
Phenomenology, and the Novels of Margaret Atwood, Eleonora Rao’s Strategies for Identity:
The Fiction of Margaret Atwood, Shannon Hengen’s “‘Your father the thunder/your mother
the rain’: Lacan and Atwood”, Jessie Givner’s “Mirror Images in Margaret Atwood’s Lady
Oracle”, and Frank Davey’s “Lady Oracle’s Secret: Atwood’s Comic Novels”
Occasionally, Freudian account on the death drive and creativity is incorporated (see
Mycak’s book). Among the Atwood scholarship gathered in Taiwan, only J. Brooks
Bouson’s “Lady Oracle’s Plot against the Gothic Romance Plot” explicitly points out that
Melanie Klein’s account of splitting the mother into good/bad mother explains “the recurrent
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pattern of splitting found in Atwood’s fictional representation of the mother” (71). Splitting
is a defense mechanism arising from the infant’s conflicting perceptions about the mother and
is a “developmental and defensive process” (St. Clair 190). For example, Joan’s lie to
Arthur about her good but dead mother indicates the enactment of splitting mechanism.
Since Kleinian approach to mother-daughter relationship in Atwood’s fiction has not
been widely investigated and due to my interest, in my thesis focusing on Lady Oracle, I
decide to adopt Kleinian object relations as the major theoretical support for the
mother-daughter cathexis.
Moreover, the British school of psychoanalysis has made
significant contribution to decipher the nature of artistic creativity, and I plan to probe further
into object relations aesthetics*, hoping this aspect of criticism would help me interpret both
Atwood’s and Joan’s writings.
I believe Klein’s observation of child psychology is suitable
because of her emphasis on the child’s biological, innate desire to survive by clinging to the
mother’s breasts, as well as her concept of phantasy.
Indeed, Klein’s usage of the word
“breast” is both literary and metaphorical. Joan’s behaviour of binge eating, along with her
hope that through incessant eating, her mother would not desert her; is like an infant’s
fantasizing the breast as being an inexhaustible one and an “aftereffect of nostalgia for the
womb”. Joan’s desire to cling to her mother is like the infant’s nostalgia for the womb, that
is, to become inseparable with the mother.
In my thesis, I would rely on Margaret Mahler’s
concepts of symbiosis to analyze the painful, yet undifferentiated mother-daughter dyad.
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However, if Joan uses eating to maintain an inseparable relationship with her mother,
why does she later use eating and becoming obese as a means to derogate her mother, so
much so that she derives pleasure from making her mother cry?
Klein’s description of the
splitting mechanism, the breast being split into the good/bad breast might help answer this
question. The bad breast is the one projected with hatred because “the real object never
corresponds to the psychic object” (Kristeva 92).
Joan finds out that the real object, her
mother, can not correspond to the psychic object , that is, a supplier of pleasure.
Instead of
maternal love, Frances treats Joan with hostility, and Joan reacts with similar hostility.
Then, how does Joan resolve the discrepancy between the real object and the psychic object?
Drawing on Klein’s idea of phantasy** and an incident in which Joan feels like “a single
enormous breast” (114), I would also make a hypothesis that Joan’s way to respond to this
discrepancy is to turn her body into a breast-like physique.
My hypothesis holds that since
Joan cannot gain pleasure, security, and love from her mother and in mourning the loss of the
good breast, Joan compensates the loss unconsciously by recreating “the breast” in herself.
In the English language, there are numerous words to describe an obese person, yet why is it
the word “breast” that surfaces in Joan’s mind when she describes her own physicality?
I
think it indicates Joan’s phantasy to connect with a psychological mother because phantasies
are specifically related to bodily process like eating, defecating, and sexual excitement, and in
an infant’s mental world, phantasy is directly related to sucking at its mother’s breast.
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*See Elizabeth Wright’s Psychoanalytic Criticism: A Reappraisal and Nicola Glover’s
Psychoanalytic Aesthetics: The British School.
**According to A Dictionary of Kleinian Thought, unconscious phantasies underlie every
mental process, and accompany all mental activity. They are the mental representation of
those somatic events in the body which comprise the instincts, and are physical sensations
interpreted as relationships with objects that cause those sensations . . . Phantasy is the mental
expression of the instinctual impulses and also of defence mechanism against instinctual
impulses.
Preliminary Result
How do we make sense of the unusual interaction between Joan and her mother, which
is neither based on love nor care for each other?
Their major interaction is through
attacking each other; Frances works relentlessly to trim down Joan, and Joan gains pleasure
from frustrating her mother.
Indeed, the two forms a peculiar symbiotic relationship.
I
contend that it is this symbiotic relationship which trapped Joan in phallocentric values that
her mother transmits.
The term symbiosis is borrowed from biology to indicate the mutual
interdependence of two organisms, but it might be misleading. Symbiosis, first advanced by
Margaret Mahler in the 1960s, describes the infant’s mental life with respect to her
experience with the mother; terms like merger, undifferentiatedness, and boundarylessness
might be more appropriate.
In some mother-infant pairs, the moments of
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undifferentiatedness become “intense and conflicted formative experiences with lifelong
consequences”.
Furthermore, the view of the mother’s “magnification” of the infant’s
experience holds that “when something the infant experiences crosses paths with experiences
that are emotionally fraught for the mother, that are full of conflict, anxiety, and/or
ambivalence, her handling of the infant will reflect that conflict and affect the child in
profound ways” (Pine).
I think this view is very similar to the early and even lifelong
pattern of interaction between Joan and her mother.
When Joan watches her mother put on
makeup, she also notices the sad expression on her mother’s face no matter how much
makeup she applies, suggesting the mother’s dismay absorbed into the child through gazing.
On one hand, the mother deliberately distances herself from Joan and avoids physical contact
with Joan because she does not want to disarrange her dress and hair and because she is
occupied by her own sadness and anger toward her husband.
On the other hand, she is
enthusiastic in making Joan over into a slender girl, transferring her own anger and
frustration onto Joan. The mother’s attitude is quite ambivalent, and certainly in response to
an ambivalent mother, the child would have to employ tactics in order to survive. The
tactics Joan takes on include: first, to escape into a textualized world, including movies and
fantasies, a tendency which gradually takes over her interaction with “real people” and results
in her reliance on textualized identities; secondly, to treat life with passivity, which later
influences her relationship with men.
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Some may still ask if Joan and her mother are not intimate, how is “symbiotic” the
proper term to describe their relationship?
I think one has to bear in mind that in Mahler’s
symbiotic phase, the way such relationship is beneficial to mother or infant is vastly different.
Actually, the mother’s magnification of her infant’s merger experience does not end in
infancy; “as is true in any region of conflict-ridden object relations, once begun it will be
drawn on thereafter by both participants, as it becomes the predominant form of attachment to
the other” (Pine). Joan’s mother transfers her frustration onto Joan, while Joan’s only way
of communicating with her mother is through binge eating, which is also the only way to
arouse her mother’s intense emotion, anger, toward Joan. Their interaction might not seem
healthy in a common sense, but Frances’ anger towards Joan, along with Joan’s defiance
against the mother is their only form of attachment to each other. Regarding the parents’
influence on Joan, I agree with Frank Davey that:
Most of Joan’s difficulties with adult relationships are caused by transferences
and projections from childhood experiences. A mother who is narcissistic and
isolated and a father who is absent, aloof, and through war duties and his work as
an anaesthetist has had the power of life and death over others, together lock
Joan into relationships with similarly aloof men to when she metaphorically
gives life and death power over herself.
Consequently, whether Joan could free herself from phallocentric values depends on the
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goodness she internalized as a child, and on whether by expelling or destroying the bad, she
also destroys the good she should have retained.
To explicating the splitting of the mother
into good and bad, I shall focus on one important scene in which Joan, as a young child,
watches her mother put on makeup in front of a vanity table.
In this “treat, privilege” given
by her mother, Joan admires her mother’s beauty, and is quite fascinated – “I thought my
mother was very beautiful, even more beautiful when she was colored in” (75).
Nevertheless, in her dream, her mother has three heads like a monster, as a result of the
reflection from the triple mirror.
Based on the Kleinian analysis, in Joan’s phantasy, she
splits her mother into a three-headed monster, which would be considered as the bad breast,
and mother with make-up, the good breast.
One indication of Joan’s internalization of the
good is her attempt to put on makeup, and covers her entire face with blue eye shadow, blue
being associated with the Virgin and purity (Davidson 56). With the color blue, Atwood
implies that before Joan enters the sexual arena, she is exempt from the social/cultural
construction of woman’s beauty.
If makeup indicates that a woman has to wear disguise in
order to please or survive in a patriarchal society, then Atwood certainly questions this notion,
for instead of making her happier, the process “appeared to make her sadder, as if she saw
behind or within the mirror some fleeting image she was unable to capture or duplicate” (75).
The splitting of maternal image implies the paranoid-schizoid position Joan enters.
Klein’s term position, derived from her major concept of paranoid-schizoid position and
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depressive position, is “meant to reflect a strategic grouping of anxieties and defenses that are
not restricted to the earliest stages but can persist and recur through life” (Doane 10,11).
That is to say, a position, as a set of psychic functions, is present not only during the first year
of life, but also “at all times thereafter and can be reactivated at anytime” (Phillips).
Later
in Joan’s dream, she wants a man to enter and find out about her mother’s secret, indicating
her wish to expel the bad into the outside world and her wish to separate from the symbiotic
relationship (the schizoid element). Similarly, after Joan enters high school and internalizes
the mainstream standard for women’s appearance, she starts to feel ashamed about her hefty
aunt, though she is also a fat girl. She, like her mother, also puts on a disguise in order to
survive in high school, behaving like a sponge without sexual desires. After the mothball
episode, when she literally feels betrayed by her mother, thus experiencing the outside world
persecuting her (the paranoid element), she starts to eat incessantly out of the fear of
fragmentation. The fear of fragmentation is central to the ego’s handling of persecutory
anxieties (Craib 71). The fear of fragmentation is further strengthened when Joan learns
that she was initially not wanted by her mother: “I ate to defy her, but I also ate from panic.
Sometimes I was afraid I wasn’t really there, I was an accident” (89).
Instead of being
diminished, Joan continues to eat in order to “become solid, solid as stone” so her mother
won’t be able to get rid of her.
It is not surprising that in “Importance of Symbol-formation”,
Klein describes that in the paranoid-schizoid position, the child’s aim is to “possess himself
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of the contents of the mother’s body and to destroy her by means of every weapon which
sadism can command” (Doane 8). Joan eats incessantly not only to defy her mother, but
also to make sure her mother wouldn’t desert her.
Eating is used to reach both aims: to
possess the mother, as well as to destroy, to sabotage/undermine the mother.
As the above paragraphs indicate, Joan and her mother form a complicated, enclosed
familial dyad.
Her father, mostly an absence, does not do anything to change Joan’s
relationship with her mother, thus leaving the two trapped in a prolonged symbiotic
The father’s indifference and absence make the Freudian account invalid; “in
relationship.
the Freudian account, a third figure, the father, intervenes to break up the relation between the
mother and infant”.
On the contrary, in Klein’s account, “there is no third figure, but
instead a new position – the depressive position – at which the infant arrives as a
consequence of perceiving the mother as a whole person” (Doane 9).
I would contend that
Joan is mostly trapped at the paranoid-schizoid position, and the depressive position is
deferred after and in response to her mother’s death.
Klein depicts the depressive position as an early “reality testing”, and a prototype of the
process of mourning.
The earliest depressive position for a subject takes place in response
to the loss of the mother’s breast.
In “Mourning and Its Relation to Manic-depressive States”,
Klein writes:
The object which is being mourned is the mother’s breast and all that the breast
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and milk have come to stand for in the infant’s mind: namely, love, goodness and
security. All these are felt by the baby to be lost, and lost as a result of his
uncontrollable greedy and destructive phantasies and impulses against his
mother’s breasts. (345)
The enactment of the fat lady fantasy arising after Joan becomes a public figure could be
viewed as both a defensive mechanism and a depressive position. As Joan learns to cope
with her popularity and to keep her secret identity as Louisa K. Delacourt at bay, she is also
mourning for her lost sense of security. Even though she becomes a slender and attractive
woman, she can’t accept her present image: “When I looked at myself in the mirror, I didn’t
see what Arthur saw. The outline of my former body still surrounded me, like a mist, like a
phantom moon, like the image of Dumbo the Flying Elephant superimposed on my own”
(259). The process of mourning refers back to Joan’s earlier experience when she first loses
weight and is molested by men on the bus.
In this earlier experience, Joan mourns for the
loss of security embodied in her former hefty figure, for a plenitude she feels she has
destroyed, “an insulation, a cocoon . . . a disguise” (167).
The first unconscious phantasy of
her body as a source of security is implied by Joan’s description of her body as a breast when
she was embraced by a boy for no specific reason in high school.
Klein’s phantasy differs from the Freudian fantasy.
unconscious activities.
Klein uses phantasy to denote all
Phantasy describes the arena in which one’s earliest active relation to
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23
reality, an awareness of one’s own uncontrollable greed, and an inconsolable sorrow for a
plenitude one feels one has destroyed are played out (Phillips).
In fort/da game, the child
pretends he is in control of his mother’s movements by manipulating actual objects in games
so as to “master a painful situation” (Thurschwell 87). Joan’s mental world is more
complicated and ambivalent.
Atwood presents not only Joan’s fantasy, but also her phantasy.
Phantasy is more dominant during Joan’s childhood, and as she grows up, fantasy takes over
phantasy and phantasy is repressed. However, in extreme anxiety, Joan gradually loses
control of her own fantasy and her phantasy begins to surface.
Joan’s fat lady fantasy could be considered as a strategic and defensive position Joan
undertakes when facing a threatening situation.
The fat lady, an afterimage from the freak
show at the Canadian National Exhibition, is Joan’s projection of herself, and this fantasy
remains with Joan from her adolescent years to adulthood.
I would center my analysis on
three of Joan’s fat lady fantasies. First, the fantasy occurs when Joan feels uncomfortable
about her rising publicity after Lady Oracle was published and feels threatened by her “dark
twin”, her “funhouse-mirror reflection”.
In fact, Joan muses to herself, “She (the fat lady)
was taller than I was, more beautiful, more threatening. She wanted to kill me and take my
place . . . ” (304). Secondly, the fantasy returns when Joan agonizes over confessing her
extramarital affair to Arthur (333). Thirdly, the fat lady seems to take on a life of her own
when Joan’s textualized self can no longer serve as an escape from reality, thus losing its
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appeasing quality: Joan asked anxiously, “when would they be joyful enough, when would
my life be my own?” (388).
In one aspect, Joan’s playing and manipulation of the images in
her fantasy are like the Freudian symbolization modeled on “fort/da game” in that by
repeating and reenacting an unpleasant experience, Joan is able to ward off some anxieties
she experiences in reality.
In the first and the third fantasies, Atwood’s description of the relationship between
woman’s body and clothing is significant for the relationship is also discerned in Joan’s
earlier experience of mourning.
In the first fantasy after Joan becomes a famous writer, the
fat lady performs a striptease, “removing her veils, one after another, but no one would
whistle, no one would yell Take it off baby” and Joan feels that “without my magic cloak of
blubber and invisibility I felt naked, pruned, as though some essential covering was
missing”(304, 305).
If flesh means a form of protection like a magic cloak that keeps a
woman away from sexual molestation, and clothing which should have been a “covering”
cannot provide protection, with one veil removed after another, leaving the woman to be
cornered and exposed, this means reality is full of ambiguities. And since an inner world of
phantasies is characterized by a series of images and passing forms acquired from the outside
world, we might further infer that the line between reality and fantasy is really ambivalent
(Phillips).
For Joan, the reality on the surface is composed of various confinement on
women, either on her bodily image or on her performance as a housewife, so her writing in
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fact can take advantage of the ambiguity underneath patriarchal conventions and open a way
to disrupt the conventions.
In fact, in Joan’s last fantasy, Atwood reverses the traditional
order of woman’s relation to clothing.
In the last fantasy, it is Joan’s buried clothes that
grow into a woman, act with a woman’s life force, and “wear Joan” with her “white fur”
(389).
I believe the question Atwood intends to ask by blurring the dichotomy is how can a
woman situate herself in a society where her dynamic self is limited by the mode of duality?
If, in Joan’s case, to survive and to become publicly acknowledged and even popular in the
sexual arena is at the stake of sacrificing one’s security, aren’t we constantly mourning for
the goodness we have lost or destroyed?
The second fat lady fantasy taking place when Joan is about to confess her affair with
the Royal Porcupine to Arthur suggests the intrusion of unconscious phantasy.
The more
Joan struggles to keep her two identities separate (Louisa K. Delacourt/Joan Foster), the more
she works to keep a rigid division between reality and fantasy, the wilder her fantasy becomes.
As a teenager (before she loses weight and becomes a Gothic writer, thus no need to struggle
over the two identities), fantasy for Joan is purely like a game she can manipulate.
Nevertheless, after Joan marries Arthur, as she deliberately wants to draw the line between
fantasy and reality, fantasy takes over her reality, partially if not entirely; later, even
unconscious phantasy surfaces. The scenario in which Joan was to confess her affair with
the Royal Porcupine is classic – the fat lady skates into the figure-skating TV program both
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Arthur and Joan are watching, and Joan can no longer manipulate her: “It was one of the most
important moments in my life, I should have been able to keep her away” (333). This is
when Joan’s unconscious phantasy intrudes and becomes blurred with Joan’s conscious
fantasy.
In Joan’s earliest adolescent fantasy, Atwood makes it clear that Joan is the initiator
of her fantasy: “I returned to an earlier fantasy” (119). On the contrary, in this scenario,
“The fat lady skated out onto the ice. I couldn’t help myself”. The change of subject is
important.
Since phantasies mark the borderline between the inside and outside world and
give forms to repressed ideas (Craib 66), the clashes among reality, fantasy, and phantasies
provide a clue to the multiplicity of Joan’s psyche and anticipates Joan’s realization: “I was
more than double, I was triple, multiple, and now I could see that there was more than one
life to come, there were many” (298).
Context
Mother-daughter relationship has been the concern for female writers since the 19th
century. Writers like Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and Virnigia Woolf have all portrayed
the theme of mother-daughter relationship, but this relationship is not the primary concern in
their writings. Mother-daughter cathexis was seldom explicated, and the role of mother is
limited to either caretaker or dutiful wife whose responsibility is to fulfill her husband’s needs.
The intimate interaction, or the lack of interaction between mothers and daughters and the
reason behind such lack, had not been depicted as the major, if not sole, concern in a single
literary work, not to mention the mother’s legacy to her daughter.
In the works of the 19th
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century, mothers’ legacy to her daughters and their voices are silenced.
27
In some rare
occasions, the mother’s predicament related to her personal desire is explored. For example,
in Daniel Delonda (1876), George Eliot depicts an unorthodox mother, Princess Alcharisi,
who agonizes over choosing her career as a singer and abandoning her son Daniel.
Princess
Alcharisi states clearly that “a great singer and actress is a queen, but she gives no royalty to
her son”.
Compared with their mothers, daughters in the 19th century fiction show more
resilience against the predicaments in their life.
Unlike their mothers whose activities are
confined to domesticity, daughters in the 19th century fiction have moved beyond the realm of
domesticity.
However, their success is still appraised by whether they conform to
conventional female roles in a patriarchal society.
Jane's triumph resides in assuming the role of wife.
Take Jane Eyre (1847) for example,
The ending of Jane Eyre – Jane’s
marriage to Rochester – is fixated and implies a definite final resolution for the heroine.
The laws of female family romance are disrupted at the end of the 19th century and at the
beginning of the 20th century.
Woman writers of the late 19th century and early 20th century
seem more interested in describing mothers’ psychological conflicts when they are torn
between personal desires and traditional demands of maternal responsibilities. Some of
their works reflect female characters who do not content themselves with traditional roles and
have the courage to alter their life’s course.
Edna Pontellier in Kate Chopin’s The
Awakening (1899) is an unconventional heroine, who finds little contentment in her role as
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wife and mother.
28
Yet, Edna’s determination to fulfill her sexual desire and to pursue an
identity of her own is thwarted by an oppressive society which thrusts her into the tragic
death.
In the early 20th century, there must be numerous women who, like Edna, are
unsatisfied with traditional social roles and are full of passion and artistic intuition.
there no other outlets, except suicide, for them?
Are
Did female writers after Kate Chopin
present different possibilities for the endings of their heroines?
With the emergence of
stream of consciousness, writers are equipped with a technique to illustrate the complicated
depth of feminine psyche and more capable of exploring new possibilities for female
characters.
For example, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway demonstrates the multiplicity of
Clarissa’s sense of self, composed by recollection of the past, her desire to retrieve the state
of purity, her attachment to Peter Walsh, and her responsibility as a wife of a Parliament
member. Nevertheless, as a mother, Clarissa is still silent. We readers feel a connection
with Clarissa because her psychological complexity is revealed to us by Woolf, yet in the
novel, Clarissa never speaks out for herself: “With twice his wits, she had to see things
through his eyes – one of the tragedies of married life. With a mind of her own, she must
always be quoting Richard” (Woolf 86). The gap between Clarissa and her husband is
indicated by her retreat into the bedroom and the solitary bed.
Clarissa’s ambiguous feeling
towards her marriage implies the uncertainty of her identity and her suppressed subjectivity.
Compared to Clarissa’s oscillation between personal desire and wifely duties, Clarissa’s
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29
daughter, Elizabeth, exhibits awareness that she can have a greater possibility to choose her
own life’s course than her mother. Elizabeth muses on her future of being a doctor, a farmer,
or a parliament member.
By slightly hinting at new possibility for daughters, Woolf seems
to fling at later generations of writers the question of whether daughters can transcend rigid
gender construction of femininity, whether daughters can speak out, unlike their silenced
mothers. Or more importantly, can daughters break down social constraints on women and
find space to exert their multiplicity or their artistic endeavor without being oppressed?
Can we find an echo or attempt to answer Woolf’s question regarding daughters’ choice
in women’s writings during or around the period of second-wave feminism?
While the
institution of mothering remains a major concern among feminist theorists and women’s
struggle against the restrictive role of wife or mother continues to be a major theme in fiction,
as in Doris Lessing’s “To Room 19” and The Golden Notebook, Margaret Atwood’s fiction
stands out as proto-feminist and innovative in that her novels not only shift the focus from
mothers to daughters, but also satirize cultural myths about women in her witty and
humorous tone.
Seldom do we see a tragic ending for the heroines in her fiction, nor a
definite happy ending.
If tragic ending for heroines in the late 19th century fiction means
committing suicide, in Atwood’s Lady Oracle, the heroine surprises us and subverts such
ending by staging her own death and “coming back to life”.
It is this flowing quality that
appeals to Atwood’s wide readership. Atwood starts out as a poet and as an extremely
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30
productive writer, her novels encompass a wide range of concerns, from ecofeminism in
Surfacing to dystopia in The Handmaid’s Tale, from women’s rivalrous friendship in Cat’s
Eye and The Robber Bride to the bleak, virus-ridden doom for all human beings in Oryx and
Crake.
The protagonists in her fiction are as various as her concerns, yet one common goal
for them is to achieve physical and psychic survival in the patriarchal society. The richness
of their means for deliverance is especially appealing.
Either the women are driven to have
a combat with their own bodies through anorexia or bulimia, as in The Edible Woman or Lady
Oracle, or they are involved with artistic creation, as in Cat’s Eye.
Thus, judging from the
multiplicity of Atwood’s fictional characters, themes, and intertextuality , Atwood has
answered Woolf’s question and even moves beyond Woolf.
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Tentative Thesis Outline
Chapter One: Introduction
 context
 methodology
 thesis statement
Chapter Two: Mother-daughter Relationship: Rapunzel and The Ugly Duckling
I. a peculiar symbiotic relationship, drawing on Mahler’s theory
II. Rapunzel: the daughter’s “fate” is predetermined by the mother’s desire for outward,
superficial beauty
♦ the Rapunzel Syndrome:
* “Rapunzel and the tower are the same. These heroines have internalized the values of
their culture to such an extent that they have become their own prisons” (Barzilai
231).
* In the Rapunzel Syndrome the Rescuer is not much help: The three men in Joan’s life
all turn out to be plain and ordinary. They are only rescuers in Joan’s imagination.
III. phantasy and the splitting mechanism
IV. paranoid-schizoid position and the splitting mechanism
V. the Ugly Duckling:
♦ Frances as the ambivalent mother, the collapsed mother, and the unmothered mother
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(Estés 186)
♦ Joan takes on the exile of the unmatched child.
VI. Fantasy as playing (games) and expulsion
-- play is a form of expulsion of relationships with “objects believed to exist
internally” (Hinshelwood 10)
-- play, dreams, and acting out are all regarded as expression of phantasy.
-- the infant and the child in adult Joan
-- games with the Royal Porcupine as acting out of fantasy and phantasy
Chapter Three: Rewriting Gothic plot: Bluebeard, Red Shoes, and Lady of Shallot
I. Bluebeard: fear of husband as murderer and fear of female dismemberment:
-- Joan, like the wife in Bluebeard, is playing house with Arthur and blind to see Arthur
is suppressing her creativity. (the dark man in Joan’s dream p.258)
-- the Royal Porcupine’s obsession with animal corpses and his desire to frame Joan &
making love to Joan’s body parts
-- Joan outwits Buchanan (another predator) by backtracking and looping, as
Bluebeard’s wife reestablish sovereignty over her own life.
II. Red Shoes: sneaking a secret life, splitting in two
-- Joan pretends to be an obedient wife when with Arthur, and acts another way
(mischievous sexual goddess) when with the Royal Porcupine.
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-- the movie Red Shoes: subversion of the tragic ending of a ballerina torn
between her love life (husband) and her art. (+ also discussing about Lady of Shallot)
III. Rewriting Gothic plot
-- If men have a dual rote in women’s lives, then women must exhibit a corresponding
duality . . . The heroine’s happiness, perhaps even her life, hinges on the Gothic
hero’s decision. (Davidson)
-- Joan’s life mirrors the victim in a Gothic romance, constantly escaping/on the run
and waiting for the right man to come along.
-- Joan’s real change occurs when she is in Terreomoto (earthquake), where she has no
access to the symbolic (the language).
Her Costume Gothic Stalked by Love
mirrors her psychological transformation.
Chapter Four: Conclusion
Tentative Working Timetable
first draft
first draft
revision
revision
revision
Ch. 2
Ch. 3
intro. (Ch.1)&
Ch. 2
Ch. 3, intro.
conclusion (Ch. 4)
(Ch.1) &
conclusion (Ch.4)
Oct. Nov.
Nov. Dec.
Dec.
Jan.
Feb.
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---.
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Chuang
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37
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