F AC U L D A D E D E LE T R A S
UNIVERSIDADE DO PORTO
Diana Mihai
2º Ciclo de Estudos em Estudos Anglo-Americanos, Variante Estudos sobre Mulheres
Literary Renderings of Visual Culture: Intermedial
Practices and Definitions of Feminine Identity in
Margaret Atwood’ s Lady Oracle, Cat’s Eye and
Surfacing
2012
Orientador: Professor Rui Carvalho Homem
Classificação:
Ciclo de estudos:
Dissertação/ relatório/ Projeto/ IPP:
Versão definitiva
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Abstract
This thesis looks at Margaret Atwood´ s Lady Oracle, Cat´s Eye and Surfacing in relation to
various concepts of femininity. It draws upon theories of visual culture while it emphasizes
conventional patterns in the construction of the female image. The thesis’s goal is to demonstrate
the impact of visual culture on the development of female selfhood from the perspective of the
three novels by Margaret Atwood that are mentioned above. The author’s use of intermediality
entails a more in-depth analysis of gender identity and the secondary sources that I have chosen
deal with the construction of gender identity, the visual media representations of femininity and
the word-image relationship. The idea that transpires throughout the thesis is that the way we
process visual information is conditioned by the surrounding cultural and social conventions. I
conclude that the chosen novels call for the production of new cultural codes and, by extension,
new visual representations, so that different understandings and concepts of femininity could be
incorporated.
Resumo
Esta tese analisa as obras de Margaret Atwood intituladas Lady Oracle, Cat’s Eye e Surfacing
em relação aos vários conceitos de feminilidade. É inspirada pelas teorias de cultura visual e
salienta os modelos convencionais na construção da imagem da mulher. O objetivo da tese é
demonstrar o impacto da cultura visual no desenvolvimento da individualidade feminina na
perspetiva dos três romances de Margaret Atwood que foram mencionados anteriormente. A
utilização da intermedialidade nestas obras requer uma análise aprofundada da identidade do
género e as fontes secundárias abordam a construção da identidade do género, as representações
da feminilidade nos medias visuais e a relação entre palavra e imagem. A ideia que se revela na
tese é que o modo como nos processamos a informação visual é condicionado pelas convenções
culturais e sociais que nos rodeiam. Em conclusão, os romances propõem a produção de novos
códigos culturais e, por extensão, de novas representações visuais, de modo que diferentes
entendimentos e conceitos da feminilidade possam ser incorporados.
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Table of Contents
1.Introduction……………………………………………………………………………….... .3
1.1. Margaret Atwood’s Fiction and Socio-Cultural Context………………………………….7
1.2. Intermediality and Word-Image Relationship in Margaret Atwood’ s Works: A Few Notes
on Visuality in Western Culture……………………………………………………………...17
2. Culturally Coded Images of Femininity in Margaret Atwood’ s Lady Oracle…………….27
3. Visual Culture and Memory in Margaret Atwood’ s Cat’s Eye……………………………38
4. Challenging Cultural Conditioning and Visual Images of Femininity in Margaret Atwood’s
Surfacing……………………………………………………………………………………...52
5. Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………66
6. Works Cited………………………………………………………………………………..70
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1. Introduction
This thesis explores Margaret Atwood’ s literary perspective on visual culture’s
construction of female identity, particularly in Lady Oracle(p. 1976), Cat’s Eye (p. 1988) and
Surfacing (p. 1972). The primary aim is to show the visual culture’s representations which are
detrimental to women’s personal development. In doing so, I argue that the three mentioned
novels are literary reflections of this idea. Through their musings and desires, the main characters
of the novels call for innovation and change within their society. By analyzing Atwood’s Lady
Oracle, Cat’s Eye and Surfacing I am looking to shed light on the mechanisms behind the visual
representations of women both in mass culture and classical paintings. I will argue that images
are culturally coded and by doing so, I will point out their formative potential.
My reason for undertaking this research on Margaret Atwood’s novels was to be able to
provide a significant analysis on the formation of female selfhood through the patterns made
available by the surrounding visual culture to which Western society has become increasingly
responsive. Her mix of visual art and language gave me the necessary tools with which I could
attain my objectives. In an interview, she notes that “we are great categorizers and pigeonholers
in our society, and one reason is to put them[people] safely into pigeonholes and then dismiss
them, thinking we have summed them up” (Atwood qtd. in Bouson 1993: 3). Taking the imagery
of the pigeonhole as a starting point, one can notice the most conformist characters of her novels
willingly inhabiting small compartments designed to make everybody fit(ting) within their
delineations while the main characters who want to take a step away from them go through
exhausting processes of censorship. Renouncing the habit of looking solely within frames,
Atwood’s novels reflect a widened perspective on gender identity. Secondly, the reason for
which I have chosen Lady Oracle, Cat’s Eye and Surfacing is that they are involved with
childhood memories which intervene in the narration with the purpose of making the main
characters and narrators aware of the various sources which brought about their state of mental
turmoil.
In order to answer the question on how do images have a substantial effect on the
development of female identity one must establish the answer as to why they are allowed this
authority. The introductory part of the first chapter traces the commonly accepted notions of
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femininity which lie within the bounds of Western culture. I focus at this incipient stage of the
dissertation on the period between the sixties and seventies to provide the context within which
Atwood wrote her earlier works. To do so, I will mention the Second Wave of Feminism,
concentrating on the objectives of the movement and their relation with Atwood’s literary ideas.
I mention her early works and outline some of her main themes and ideas which underlie her
fiction. From the overall presentation of the social and cultural context which informed Atwood’
works, I move forward to discuss the theories on visual culture and to reveal how they fit within
Atwood’ s later works.
In the second part of the first chapter I argue that visual representations are, in fact, visual
extensions of the Western system of knowledge which contains and spreads the conventional
views on gender identity which were explored in the introductory part of the first chapter.
Having within them normative patterns for representing gender identity, their authority increases
in the eyes of a public which feeds on conventions. In order to exemplify this idea, I use the
visual reproduction of a Pre-Raphaelite painting (Millais’ Ophelia) and a visual example of
representations of femininity from a number of Vogue magazine. Placing them together, I will
pinpoint to some of the key the conventional features of femininity which are spread via visual
culture.
I offer an overview of the theoretical contributions on intermediality and by doing so, I
examine the relationship between word and image so as to provide the main theoretical
framework within which I will work in the following chapters. I draw on the instructive
examples given by WJT Mitchell in Iconology and Susan Sontag’s On Photography. I advance
in my examination of these theories to give a historical account of the development of
ocularcentrism in Western culture in order to indicate that the power of images lies not only in
the concepts that are imprinted on them but also in the Western tendency to focus on visuality.
In relation to visual culture, one of the main collections of short fiction that present the
reader with the mechanisms of contemporary visual culture is Wilderness Tips. It shows how the
people involved in publicity image-making use the techniques of photography to manipulate the
picture. It is underlined that in people’s minds such a picture is seen as an accurate representation
of reality. The publicity industry uses both text and image to create desires. The aim is to make
the viewing subject feel that what he/she is or has is not enough, which brings us to the idea that
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publicity images generate anxiety. Through such images their creators rely on conventional
mindsets to make their visual products seem legitimate.
In the second and third chapter I will take a look at how the main characters and narrators
of Lady Oracle, Cat’s Eye and Surfacing weigh up the presence of mass culture’s images. Joan,
Elaine and the nameless character of Surfacing are prompted to incorporate and assimilate the
unwritten rules of behavior which their society promotes. In these novels, mass culture will be
seen as a mechanism for the proliferation of patriarchal concepts on gender identity.
The widely accepted vision of womanhood and the traditional views on gender identity
are analyzed through the lens of Atwood’s Lady Oracle, Cat’s Eye and Surfacing. In these
novels, the cultural fabrication of gender identity comes to the surface. The main characters take
journeys into their childhood and by means of them, they challenge the society and culture that
laid the basis of their identities. In Surfacing and Cat’s Eye the characters’ journeys are more
empirical than in Lady Oracle, for the reason that Elaine and Surfacing’s nameless character take
an actual journey to their hometowns whereas Joan merely goes through her childhood
memories. Regardless of this, the act of remembering has a strong effect in every novel.
The characters of Atwood’ s novels develop within the cultural and social arrangements
of a Western society. For historical reasons to which I will be referring only briefly, Western
societies are prone to display features which are patriarchal and ocularcentrist. Through an
analysis of visual culture one can see how these two features are intertwined to eventually
construct gender identity. There are two main areas within visual culture which are given a
special interest in Atwood’ s novels and by extension in my dissertation : advertising/publicity
images and photographs which are found especially in magazines and paintings. Within the area
of advertising, photography is the medium that most efficiently gives the illusion of authenticity
to a picture.
One of the main tendencies with which Lady Oracle, Cat’s Eye and Surfacing are
concerned is the internalization of mass culture’s representations, especially when the
construction of female identity is brought into discussion. This concept explains the social
behavior of women as it has two main sources: the need to avoid social isolation and the social
training that is at work in Western society to identify oneself with the images of mass culture.
The point which I underline in these chapters is that these memories reveal the marks of
popular culture on female identity. Dissecting their childhood memories help the characters
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understand the source of their feelings of melancholia. Their main course of action is analyzing
how visual culture triggered their feelings, molded their appearance and steered their behavior.
In addition to this observation, I will show that the female selfhood which was constructed by
means of visual culture retains features of a patriarchal order.
These novels contain memory narratives where the narrators and main characters look
back on their past, on their relationships and on the society of their childhood. In Lady Oracle
the social atmosphere from the main character’s childhood is presented as bleak and unforgiving,
in the same manner as in Cat’s Eye. The female characters are subject to intense scrutinity and
judgment, each ill-fated attitude towards them being justified only by codes and norms. The
characters of Lady Oracle and Cat’s Eye often find themselves examining their appearance. Joan
makes efforts to grow slimmer and Elaine is being shaped by the representations of a PreRaphaelite painting. However, the nameless main character in Surfacing ponders on her friend’s
Anna vanity which is revealed by her obsessive looking into the mirror.
Lady Oracle describes the embodied experience of its main female character and narrator.
Body image is tightly connected to social expectations and the manner in which one views
oneself is steered by the society’s expectations. Being an overweight child that wanted to wear
the pink suits and leggings which are typical of ballet dancers, she was perceived as grotesque
and inappropriate. In turn, such images and concepts related to gender identity are used and reused in visual culture.
The public’s obsession with certain images and representations is in accordance with
conventional understandings of gender identity. In Lady Oracle the female body must fit within
strict boundaries, the desirable images of femininity involve allure in Elaine’s case and the
sexualization of female body is manifested in Anna, one of the characters of Surfacing.
In these novels we are presented with a culture that curbs freedom of expression, as the
characters’ social environment gives them a limited array of possibilities to form their identity.
In the world of publicity images, the idea that is extensively promoted is that happiness comes
with the willingness to comply with its visual norms.
Among the three main characters Joan has the weakest sense of self as she was more
pressured to embody the representations of popular culture. As such, she has a series of doubts
related to the validity of her actions and thoughts. In comparison, Elaine presents a strength of
self which she started developing after she broke the connections with the three friends who were
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in the habit of controlling her behavior. In the novel, her psychological journey involves a
search for the source of her melancholia being already equipped with a sound knowledge of who
she is and why she acts in the manner in which she acts. At the beginning of Surfacing, the main
character and narrator is already leaving behind the(visual) conventions of her society as she
expresses her dissatisfaction with her present condition and she starts the trip back to her
hometown with a willingness to change her perspective on life, and the reader sees her
succeeding.
Finally, Surfacing will show that one needs to take a more critical stance towards the representations
which are contained by one’s culture. I will end my thesis with this novel because aside from gathering
observations on (visual) culture it puts forward the idea that other meanings must be produced, and the
understanding that one has of the gender relations and the role of the individual within society has to be reassessed and changed and the cliché of fresh perspective gains a different aspect, one which is more revealing.
1.2. Margaret Atwood’s Fiction and Socio-Cultural Context
Atwood´s early fiction coincides with the rise of the second wave of feminism.
Although her inspiration was not drawn from the movement, the author´s concerns resemble
those of the second-wave feminists. In order to connect Atwood´s early fiction to the second
wave of feminism, it is necessary to mention what prompted the movement in the first place.
Beginning with the second wave of feminism, female scholars and activists have found that the
problem of society concerning women resided in the mainstream definitions of femininity.
Women´s social condition in the sixties and the period that led up to this decade was defined by
various political and cultural factors. From a political point of view, Kate Millett shed light on
patriarchy as a political characteristic and at the same time “as a profound organizational
principle that affected all of culture and society (Gerhard 2001: 92). It was perceived by Millett
and by feminists of her caliber as interior colonization. In her 1979 book Reinventing
Womanhood Carolyn Heilbrun characterized the tendency of women in Western society to abide
by disadvantageous rules of social practice and to internalize them, as an effort to avoid
isolation:
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Women try to evade the psychological isolation of the outsider not by bonding
with each other but rather by taking on the status of their husbands, if they are
housewives, or by accepting the status of honorary male if they succeed in
penetrating the professional or business world (1979: 39).
The ramifications of these widely accepted definitions of femininity were mostly seen
when women reached the point in their lives when they needed to get married. Marriage
represented the stage when they officially had to take upon a self-effacing role. Furthermore,
motherhood along with marriage were seen as a fulfillment of femininity. As such, there was a
problem of identity as in white middle-class circles people did not expect women to develop a
strong sense of selfhood. Betty Friedan called it the “malaise” of the white middle-class woman
that was caused by a “denial of human potential” which was inherent in the popularly accepted
definitions of femininity (Gerhard 2001: 88).
Given the situation, female scholars asked for a re-definition of the concepts of
womanhood. In her study on feminine identity, Carolyn Heilbrun sets forth the idea that
“women´s position in society, or at least their traditional view of their position, puts them under
social and psychological pressures that continually undermine their ability to bond” (1979: 39).
The study continues with an emphasis on the necessity for women to bond and form a coherent
movement that would counteract women´s unsatisfactory position. As she argues, this was a
purpose that met with a high amount of resistance because of the deep-rooted mindset which
they actually intended to counteract.
The need to redefine womanhood has been crystallized in this movement, but still the
cause did not receive the support which was needed because of aggressive attempts at keeping
the conventional statute of women. In such a context, second-wave feminists put across the idea
that more women had to be first of all, aware of the lack of privileges which were characteristic
of the period between the sixties and the seventies’ social organization. Women still believed
that they could attain womanhood through marriage, birth and child raising and imposed those
views on the younger generation. As Heilbrun noted, the women who attained high positions
were taking pride in the features of manhood that were ascribed to their personality.
In other words, the main objective of second-wave feminists was to make the public
aware of the cultural fabrication of gender identities. The concept of femininity was especially
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examined and deconstructed by them because it was “a cultural construct permeated with social
values that had little basis in biology or genuine female experience”(Gerhard 2001: 88). In the
late seventies and early eighties feminists sought to give a new form to mainstream culture as
they realized that changing the culture and changing mentalities was one of the basic courses of
action.
From her first novel, Atwood reiterates the idea that there is no boundary between the
public and the personal as the public aggressively influences every aspect of human identity.
Some of her female characters act in such a manner that places them in line with popular
expectations, only to find themselves feeling uncertain about their decisions, questioning
throughout the plot the morals of the very society that aims to mold their character. When her
early works were published, Atwood gave a series of counter arguments to the idea that her
novels were the product of the second wave of feminism. With regard to Edible Woman she
argued that she doesn’t “consider it feminism”, she “simply consider[s] it social realism. That
part of it is simply social reporting” (Atwood qtd. in Tolan 2007: 3). Atwood was also invoking
the chronological argument that, for example, Edible Woman which was published in 1969 was
conceived in 1965, at a time when the Women’s Liberation Movement had not been officially set
in motion. She enlists among her influences Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan’s works
which in turn were the ground works on which the liberation movement of the late sixties and
early seventies was built: “I myself see the book as protofeminist rather than feminist: there was
no women’s movement in sight when I was composing the book in 1965, and I’m not gifted with
clairvoyance, though like many at the time I’d read Betty Friedan and Simone de Beauvoir
behind locked doors” (Atwood qtd. in Tolan 2007: 9). Atwood’s stance towards the second wave
of feminism was not dismissive as one can deduce, from the passages above, that rather than
taking upon an ideological path, she responded to the problems which the women were dealing
with in her period. However, what particularly connects Atwood to the second wave of feminism
in her first novel Edible Woman is the inspiration she drew from her period´s context, the
rendering of the effects which the social organization of the sixties had on a woman´s psyche. In
order to avoid generalizations, it is important to note that the effects were not the same for every
woman. As we have seen before there were women who were content in their role as supporters
of their male partners and at the same time, there was a handful of women who entered a maledominated area of work only to end up looking down on other women. Nevertheless, Atwood
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keeps in mind the women that feel the need to not comply and to question the role they have
been given. Thus, in Edible Woman, the reader is introduced to the psychological journey of the
woman who detects the flaws in the way society is treating her gender and by extension herself
as an individual but who has no resources to fight against them.
In the first chapter of the novel, the inner workings of corporations are closely examined.
After all, they developed the mediums through which the long-contested ideas of femininity were
disseminated. In this regard, Atwood focuses on male privilege in the Western patriarchal society
while she directs her criticism at consumerism. Through her main character’s profession she
gives a detailed account of consumer behavior. Before she gets married, Marian’ s job is to test
the market by conducting interviews on how a product is being received by its consumers. In the
period which she spends at the company she describes the distribution of power: her company
was divided into three layers where the upper layer was composed mostly of men: “On the floor
above are the executives and the psychologists – referred to as the men upstairs, since they are all
men” (1998: 45).
These passages of the novel indicate the mechanisms through which power is ascribed to
various groups of people. Pilar Somacarrera draws a comparison between Atwood’s and
Foucault’s views on power as she states that for both of them power does not come from one
core source and it is not located in one place it is suffused through all social relations. Thus, it is
hard to pinpoint where power comes from : “power after all is not real, not really there: people
give it to each other” (Atwood qtd. in Somacarrera 2006: 45). Although the feminist slogan
“Personal Is Political” was not among Atwood’s influences, it is, nevertheless, a view which she
shared with the feminists of the sixties and seventies. The suffusion of politics into personal lives
is exemplified in Edible Woman, in the passages where Marian’s friend Ainsley experiences
second thoughts about her abilities to raise a male child alone. Upon her visit to the doctor’s
office she is informed that a boy must have a strong male role model because the child will likely
grow up to be a homosexual. One notices from these passages that family planning and the
accepted image of harmonious family life was controlled by political factors: “And I was so
happy, and I was doing my knitting and everything during the first speaker – he talked about the
Advantages of Breastfeeding. They even have an Association for it now” (1998: 245).
In the sixties, Atwood represented relationships as a social practice within which the man
was given the power to expand his influence over the life of his wife. In Edible Woman the
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narrator says about her fiancé that he monopolizes her, which hints that such a relationship
begins to have corporatist features. By mentioning Power Politics, Nischik holds that Atwood is
fighting against
Binary gender relations that leave even the most intimate love affairs exposed to
political power structures. The code of idealized romantic love is crossed by the
code of political (gender) equality, making the reality of love part of political
activity(2009: 40).
In the case of Edible Woman Ainsley’ s determination and self-confidence is deterred by
external influences from her social environment. If, at the beginning, she felt confident in
bringing up a child by herself towards the end her independent self does not seem enough. In
referring to her short stories, Nischik puts forward the idea that Atwood’s short fiction is full of
characters who dangle between two opposite states (i.e. passivity/activity, action/reactions,
initiative/blockage)(Nischik 2009: 75). Although Edible Woman is a novel, the behavior of the
two main female characters exhibits the same schism. While Ainsley takes a more assertive
stance in planning her life but finds opposition to her views, Marian is aware of her own
passivity and at the same time she reacts against it. The structure of the novel brings to surface
the split in her personality: the first and third chapter are written in the first person and the
second one is presented in a third-person narrative.
As she provides the reader with Marian and Ainsley’s experience in the early sixties’
society, Atwood paints a clearer image of the imbalance in gender relations which was prevalent
in that period. The unevenness of the ways in which men and women were expected to perform
their roles in society represents the focus of Power Politics as well. A poem which belongs to
the Power Politics collection, “She considers evading him” begins by emphasizing the
complying acts to which the lyrical I has to resort and the pressure of a relationship that demands
only compromise from her: “I can change my-/self more easily/than I can change you” (Atwood
1978: 143). The poem suggests that the expectations for the female partner to renounce aspects
of her personality is deeply-rooted in the way one views relationships as it emphasizes the
difficulty with which the man is ready to strike a balance.
Furthermore, Atwood’s character’s lives are marked by ambivalence which is caused
particularly by the aggressiveness of their social environment which asks from them to take upon
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roles that come against their need for freedom of thought and action. The reason for these
confusing outlooks on life is the internalization of features which are of political, cultural or
social nature. This idea echoes Millett’ s description of the practice of internalizing only the
features which are demanded by society as interior colonization, a term which was used in the
first passages of the thesis. In relation to this, Atwood emphasizes that “to acknowledge the
victim position but to explain it as an act of God, the dictates of Biology (in the case of women
for instance), the necessity decreed by History, or Economics, or the Unconscious, or any other
large general powerful idea” is one of the basic victim positions (Somacarrera 2006: 44). In this
description, Atwood brings together the whole range of arguments which were used to justify the
inferior position which women(especially the ones who were part of the white middle-class)
were pushed by their society to take. Firstly, she brings forward the common explanation for
women’s confinement to the private space as a divine duty. The dictates of biology brings
forward for consideration the popular conviction that motherhood is another factor in a woman’s
life that keeps her tied to home life.
In her short stories, Atwood reveals that such experiences through which her characters
have to go through are affected by the social context which she depicts as being “sick”1.
According to Nischik, these experiences ultimately have effects on the individual’s psyche
(2009: 74). In this overbearing atmosphere, readers are led to understand the importance of
women bonding, something that Carol Heilbrun proposed as well. As a result, female characters
have to focus their attention on other female characters to find out more about their personality
and about the way in which they have viewed the concept of femininity throughout their lives.
Her collections of short stories, Bluebeard’s Egg and Wilderness Tips present characters
in moments of revelation when they understand that they have been seeing the world around
them through the lens of conventions and popular convictions. The narrator of “Betty”
remembers the unfairness with which she judged her neighbor, the title-character of the story,
and the misperception she had of Betty’s husband as an outstanding man. Seeing Betty through
the lens of what she was supposed to be was detrimental because as one finds out from the
ending of the story, no one could have known if all the internal struggles that the narrator
1
Nischik uses this term in her book on Atwood’s fiction, Engendering Genre, in order to explain the pressures
which her female characters experience in a Western social context and which push them into “a more acceptable
world of madness (2009: 74).”
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presented to the readers were factual as no one around her gave it a second thought. In this short
story, views on marriage and femininity are closely examined. The narrator’s father considered
that when husbands left women it was because of their foolishness. Here it is revealed that, in
conventional terms, the woman’ s duty was to do her best in keeping her married status and the
private sphere was hers to handle.
"Betty's a fool," my father said. "She always was." Later, when husbands and
wives leaving each other became more common, he often said this, but no matter
which one had left it was always the woman he called the fool. His highest
compliment to my mother was that she was no fool (Atwood 1998: 59).
During her childhood the narrator’s opinion of her neighbor did not differ from that of her
father’s as Betty was the person whose life was of slight importance. Fred was the focus of her
attention as well as of her sister’s. He had the privilege of leading a more complex life while
Betty remained at home. By extension, her only interests were the activities which she had to
carry on in the house. As such, Atwood reveals that Betty’s assumed triviality was the product
of the society that asked women to dedicate their lives to their homes. The narrator does not
consider this until she gets to an adult stage. Moreover, at this stage, she understands that her
memories about Betty were more influential in the development of her personality than she
knew.
Childhood memories are frequently depicted in Atwood’s short fiction and novels. The
characters go through various of moments from the period when they were most impressionable.
The reader notices that, as the adult versions of the main characters dig deeper into their
childhood, they begin to find more explanations about their present condition.
In her short fiction the importance of remembrance and the search of her characters for
discovering what formed their identity is conceived in different ways from Dancing Girls to
Wilderness Tips. As opposed to her first collection of short stories entitled Dancing Girls or her
first novel where the female characters are drawn into endless despair and where the plot is
dominated by confusion, Bluebeard’s Egg reveals characters who have more potential for
success:
In contrast to Dancing Girls, however, where stories on these themes are suffused
with desperation and hopelessness, the stories of Bluebeard’s Egg hold out a
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glimmer of hope, alternative realities, which provide a source of comfort for the
(usually female) protagonists in their times of crisis – not solving their problems,
but at least rendering them more tolerable (Nischik 2009: 149).
With the publication of Wilderness Tips, the characters of Atwood’s short fiction pass to a
higher level where they can look at their condition with humor and resourcefulness. They hold
more answers with regard to their own identity than the ones from previous collections. The
characters from Wilderness Tips “have a greater ability to transcend catastrophies in their lives,
achieving at least the suggestion of a ‘fresh beginning’” (Nischik 2009: 150).
A number of stories in Wilderness Tips are narrated retrospectively,
demonstrating on the one hand how experiences from the past are reinterpreted in
retrospect, and on the other how formative they can be ( Nischik 2009: 151).
I argue that the realization of the formative potential which the evaluation of the past has,
is found in Bluebeard’s Egg as well. Wrapped in a veil of mystery by society’ s dismissal of
women’s identities, dead characters remain stuck in the minds of the narrators and of the main
characters and emerge as the plot evolves. Usually the characters belong to the narrators’
childhood, a period marked by lack of discernment. Betty is such a character, particularly after
her sudden death. Such characters are haunting, their images surface and there is a sense of
awakening in their quest for answers. In this respect, Betty emerges in the narrator’s life as the
person who was misunderstood. In the past, Betty was perceived as a plain character and in her
adult years the narrator acknowledges the meaningful presence she was especially in the
formation of her personality: In the end, she tells us that the faith of this woman(she died from a
brain tumor) kept her from making the “demanded choices.”
In “True Trash” which belongs to the Wilderness Tips collection, the female character that
takes much of the main character’s thoughts is not dead but her memory is still haunting. The
short story focuses on the experience of a group of girls who work as waitresses at a camp. The
fate of the girl from the camp who got pregnant after having a relationship with a younger boy
raises some questions in the main character’s mind: “And what has become of Ronette after all
left behind in the past, dappled by its chiaroscuro, stained and haloed by it, stuck with other
people’s adjectives?” (1998: 30).
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The link between past and present, or more specifically between past mindsets and
present ones is detailed in “True Trash” (Wilderness Tips) and “Betty” (Bluebeard’s Egg).
Ronette was the haunting presence of “True Trash” ’s main character. In the past, the act of
having intercourse with a younger boy was seen as unacceptable but in the character’s present
times it was part of the general direction in which the society evolved:
A fourteen year old boy. Ludicrous.[…] Ludicrous then, possible now. You can
do anything now and it won’t cause a shock. Just a shrug. Everything is cool. A
line has been drawn and on the other side of it is the past, both darker and more
brightly intense than the present (1998: 29)
The pass from a more innocent outlook on life to an awakened state of mind is recurrent
in both Atwood’s short fiction and novels. “Death by Landscape “tells the story of two girls Lois
and Lucy who were very close during the period in which they were campers. Lucy disappears
during a trip in the woods and her body never comes into sight, leaving Lois with gaps and
bewilderment. When she is pressured by Cappie, the camp leader, to take the blame for her
friend’s disappearance the character feels hurt but as she matures the reasons behind Cappie’s
attitude unravel: “Later, when she was grown up, Lois was able to understand what this
interview had been about. She could see Cappie’s desperation, her need for a story, a real story
with a reason in it; anything but a senseless vacancy Lucy had left for her to deal with […]Lois
worked all this out, twenty years later.. But it was far too late” (1998: 116). Fiona Tolan brings
into discussion Freud’s analysis of the unconscious by relating it to Atwood’s fiction and which
says that : “the mind which appears so chaotic, contradictory, beyond causation, is ruled by
inexorable laws. Mental events are like pearls on an invisible chain, a chain largely invisible
precisely because many of the links are unconscious” (Freud qtd. in Tolan 2007: 191). As I will
argue in the second chapter of the dissertation, the main character and narrator of Cat’s Eye
experiences such memories which she analyzes by visual means.
The poor self- image that women in Atwood’s novels have is constructed through popular
culture media. Women learn to act unassertively because a lot of power is assigned to those
representations of popular culture which rely on patriarchal conventions. Nischik informs us that
in Atwood’s 1969 collection of short stories Dancing Girls her characters “confuse their
dependence on their partners with love” (2009: 73). In fact, love is in her prose and poetry, a
16
concept that was given shape by the mechanisms of mass media. In Power Politics the lyrical I
complains that “you take my hand and I’m suddenly in a bad movie” (1978: 142) suggesting that
there is a thin line between what one sees on the screen and what has been transferred into day to
day reality. This also proves the unevenness in gender relations. Because the form that love took
in the sixties was mostly to the disadvantage of women and to emphasize this point Nischik
provides the reader with a German philosopher Fichte description of women and men’s manner
of loving:
The uncorrupted woman possesses no sexual instinct; none manifests itself in her.
Rather she is filled with love and this love is the natural instinct of a woman to
satisfy a man (2009: 39).
Moreover, love is idealized through popular culture practices and such representations
have in foreground a mysticised feminine identity like the one that was developed by Fichte. The
idealization of such features was done more effectively through visual media. Focusing on the
unevenness of gender relations and on finding answers about what impels individuals to act in a
certain manner, Atwood brings into discussion the visual culture which, as I will demonstrate
further on in my work, has the highest potential for forming one’s character.
She brings forward, in a majority of her novels, the patterns of behavior and appearance
that are distributed by both popular culture and paintings. Repetitive plot patterns are introduced
in the life of the lyrical I from the collection of poems Power Politics and in these circumstances
the I expresses awareness of her addiction to them (Nischik 2009: 132). Gender relationship and
the existence of power games in a contemporary social milieu constitute issues that are
thoroughly explored in Atwoodian fiction. A lot of these issues are represented in relation to
visual culture. She draws inspiration from so-called high and low art, from photographic material
to pictorial styles. In the following passages, I will explain why visual culture is significant to
Atwood’s fiction.
In many of her works Atwood provides her readers with descriptions of magazines,
especially those that are marketed for a female readership. Her collection of short stories entitled
“Wilderness Tips” involves journalistic practices and popular culture references. In “Hack
Wednesday”, Marcia, the main character, buys on her way to work a magazine entitled True
Woman. As she browses through it we are presented with a few of the topics that such a
17
magazine might have: “she thumbs through the holiday fashions and the diet of the month,
licking chocolate from her fingers. Then she settles into a piece entitled, with misplaced
assurance, ‘What Men Really Think ’” (1998: 213). The characters of these short stories often
make associations with popular culture examples which they apply to their own lives. By
drawing from a tampon ad the characters from “The Age of Lead” defined their desire of
unconstrained living: “As he dipped Jane backwards he whispered into her ears: “No belts, no
pins, no pads, no chafing.”[…] It was what they both wanted: freedom from the world of
mothers, from the world of precautions […] they wanted a life without consequences” (1998:
134).
1.2. Intermediality and the Word-Image Relationship in Margaret Atwood’ s
Works: A Few Notes on Visuality
Intermediality is an interdisciplinary field of study which is involved with the analysis of
the works of art which, in one way or another, spring from the incorporation of one artistic form
into another. Peter Wagner describes intermediality as “the intertextual use of one medium
[which for example, can be a painting] into another medium (prose fiction)” (17). The question
from which critics depart is what makes intermediality (examining the relation between a visual
artistic mode of spreading certain values, of passing over knowledge, and a verbal one) a
valuable research project? As we will find out before images have potential for shaping the
manner in which reality is being viewed. In relation to this, Umberto Eco stated that the image,
Possesses an irresistible force. It produces and effect of reality, even when it is
false. It cannot say by itself that it does not exist or that it is false, whereas the text
can do that. Without text, the image lies or gives way to a multitude of
interpretations (Eco qtd. in Wagner 1996: 30).
The text acts in Umberto Eco’s view as an addition to the image, as a manner of
responding to a necessity for the image to be interpreted. In this case, the text can either impose
on the image, attaching to it various interpretations, or provide a good medium for the readers
18
and viewers to unearth an aspect of certain visual materials which, perhaps, they have not
considered. To exemplify, Atwood represents the present strategies of creating a picture as
usually having a negative influence on the psyche of her characters. Language cooperates with
image because through language she has the opportunity of examining the way in which one
views a picture and the way in which the picture is being (mis)perceived. In her novels, the
routine of gazing at an image has been shaped by representational conventions: lighting makes
the subject look differently than in real life or the posture which the artist picks for his/her model
alludes to certain features which do not necessarily belong to the nature of the individual.
On the one hand we are promised a discursive science of images, a mastering of
the icon by the logos; on the other hand (as Wood notes), certain persistent
images and likenesses insinuate themselves into that discourse, leading it into
totalizing “world-pictures” and “world-views” (Mitchell 1986: 24).
This expansion of images has been examined in different fields of study, from sociology
to anthropology. Fashion magazines provide substantial material for study because of their
combination between image and word through which they succeed in influencing the way in
which their consumers view gender identity.
Since the late nineteenth century, word and image have increasingly propagated
style. Images of desire are constantly in circulation; increasingly it has been the
image as well as the artefact that the individual has purchased. Fashion is a
magical system, and what we see as we leaf through glossy magazines is ‘the
look’(Wilson qtd. in White 2000: 29).
Through the lens of iconological investigations, one notices that traditional
understandings of femininity live on within visual culture. In Mitchell’ s view, “what we are
matching against pictorial representations is not any sort of naked reality but a world already
clothed in our systems of representation” (1986: 38). In addition, he underlines that knowledge is
“a social product, a matter of dialogue between different versions of the world, including
different languages, ideologies and modes of representations” (1986: 38). In this light, one
deducts that vision is a social and cultural construct, as we are trained through our system of
representations to understand the world in a certain given/pre-established way.
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Mitchell places emphasis on Wittgenstein’s view that in present-day society, a
considerable effort must be put into examining “the ways in which we put images ‘into our
heads’” (1986: 15).I argue that another important question is why we give authority to some
images, a question which will be clarified in the next chapters. To provide another critical
support for Atwood’s writings is Susan Sontag’s theory that in photographic practices “ideology
determines what constitutes an event” (2005: 14).One chooses what to show, what to include in
an image. With this in mind, Mitchell’s statement that: “we can never understand a picture unless
we grasp the ways in which it shows what cannot be seen” (1986: 39) shows us that one should
give up the belief that, for example, what we see in a photograph is a through and through
representation of reality.
Historical accounts of the increasing power of images pinpoint the fact that, in the
Western world, from the period in time when images started to proliferate at a faster rate, the
visual took a step towards a higher level. Consequently, “forms of knowledge” started to depend
on a “scopic regime that equated seeing with knowledge”, a shift of values which is called
ocularcentrism and which refers to the “ apparent centrality of the vision in contemporary
Western life” (Rose 2007: 7). There are opinions which state that the focus on knowledge
through vision began with the invention of the camera obscura.2 In fact, ocular epistemology was
given a high amount of importance before the invention of camera obscura and as Lalvani
argues, there was a “general ocular concern for accuracy, evinced by a rising bourgeois merchant
class” (8). To support his view, Lalvani quotes Sartre who said in relation to visuality in
Renaissance period that “ Europeans came more and more to believe that things planned or seen
from a central viewpoint had greater monumentality and moral authority than those which were
not” (Sartre qtd. in Lalvani 1996: 8). Lalvani continues his argument by mentioning Renaissance
commercial practices and by quoting Edgerton who noted that “Florentine businessmen were in
all likelihood ´disposed to a visual order that would accord with the tidy principles of
mathematical order that they applied to their bank ledgers” (Edgerton qtd. in Lalvani 1996: 8).
As mechanical reproductions bloomed and entered the market in the form of commodities,
ocularcentrism began to be more powerful starting from the period between the late 19th centuryearly 20th century which included the first steps which were taken towards the development of
2
According to Susan Sontag, camera obscura was a device that “projected [an] image, but did not fix it (2005: 67).”
20
camera as we now know it. The role of images in the social context was strengthened by
commercial practices.
In Atwood’s fiction, the inclination towards the visual in Western culture is literarily
illustrated when she explains the choice of one of her characters from “Wilderness Tips” to pick
a certain type of popular culture material so that he could improve his English: “Perhaps it was
another sort of tip, as in the “ Handy Tips for Happy Homemakers” columns in the women’s
magazines he had taken to reading in order to improve his English- the vocabularies were fairly
simple and there were pictures which was a big help” (1998: 191). In this context of ruling visual
representations, images are signs that need to be decoded in order to understand social practices.
The individual has to learn what constructed his/her identity. In this regard, Margaret Atwood’s
characters seek to find answers to a particular question that, as the story goes on, consumes them,
more specifically the question of who they “really” are. The reasons for their failure to gather
answers for this question are the external pressures, unwritten rules of behavior, mass-produced
images and mass-produced ways of viewing the world. Nevertheless, they strive. Concerning
media’s role within our society, Sontag argues that “the real is increasingly inaccessible because
of the intrusiveness of media in our lives” and there are reasonable arguments to say that “reality
is a construct subject to the interests of those with power and influence” (2005: 4). In “Hairball”
the author finds in magazines the potential to shape public opinion and to make individuals lose
track of what it means to have a “true’ self(if there is still one to begin with):
It’s simple, Kat told them. You bombard them with images of what they ought to
be, and you make them feel grotty for being the way they are. You’re working
with the gap between reality and perception. That’s why you have to hit them
with something new, something they never seen before, something they aren’t.
Nothing sells like anxiety (1998: 41).
As these sentences show, the practice behind the creation of fashion magazines causes a
perpetual state of confusion as one is pressured into being a person that a magazine virtually
creates. The reason why decoding images holds an important place in finding out what makes us
who we are is the fact that nowadays visual pieces are mass produced. After such a process art
and visual images become commodities. When art becomes a commodity, mass-produced artistic
creations will be vulnerable to conform to the demands of the market. The mirror self that
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Wendy Steiner mentions in her Introduction to The Real Real Thing will reflect less of that real
thing which artists have been searching for. Considering that viewers emulate what they see in a
visual piece, the viewing experience must take center stage in the analysis of visual culture and
its effects on individuals. Gen Doy argues in her book Picturing the Self: Changing Views of the
Subject in Visual Culture that, in order to realize how selfhood relates to visual images,
we need to consider the viewing subject, her/his positioning and the way in which
the visual image or artwork may address a particular spectator. Meanings are not
simply encoded into the image by its maker, but arise from the encounter of
individuals or groups of viewers with the work, whether this is an original fine art
painting in a gallery, or a film, viewed in a cinema under rather different
conditions, and devoid of its ‘aura’ of uniqueness in time, place and origin, as
Walter Benjamin pointed out in his influential essay from the late 1930s, ‘The
Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (2005: 7).
The dynamic between audience, artwork and artist shows that what is at work in our
society is the shared social and cultural understanding of different concepts. The mass media
which produce the images which influence our thinking because of the social and cultural codes
which they hold within them has this formative power, but, at the same time, it can be molded by
the audience. In my thesis, I argue that when characters challenge and re-assess the
representations of femininity conveyed by mass media they reveal a yearning for change:
To use an old postmodern metaphor, the media is like a virus. It infects everything
it touches, but it is also, in turn, changed by what it comes into contact with—it
mutates (Lumby qtd. in Alvermann 1999: 143).
As a result, one understands that the concept of the “real”(self) is far from our reach. For
Susan Sontag, “To live is to pose” (Sontag qtd. in Steiner 2010: 2). In this respect “Hairball”
character Gerald is seen by the narrator as a person who needs to look at himself from the outside
as he needs to constantly check how he is perceived: he likes mirrors and “he kisses […] as if he
thinks someone else is watching him, judging the image they make together” (35). This attitude
finds its explanation also in the fact that “banal gestures” and a “hunger to impress” make up a
great part of Gerald’s personality. He typifies the tendency to conduct his life according to mass
22
culture’s visual representations. Ernst van Alphen refers to art “as the realm where ideas and
values, the building stones of culture, are actively created, constituted and mobilized (xiii)”. In
Stuart Hall’s words “culture is concerned with the giving and taking of meaning” and it “depends
on its participants interpreting meaningfully what is around them, making sense of the world in
broadly similar ways (Hall qtd. in Rose 2007: 5)”. In other words, we reproduce what art
displays to us because it is among the elements that constructed our culture as we know it.
However, Margaret Atwood’s speech at Stratford University in 1997 puts forward another
important view that the artist depicts in his/her art what he/she is conditioned to see. To illustrate
this matter, Atwood talks about Susanna Moodie, an author who was contemporary with Grace
Marks, the main character of her historical novel , Alias Grace. The “tainted glasses” through
which Susanna Moodie was looking when she created the literary image of Grace Marks as a
mad woman are a metaphor for the role of social and cultural conditioning in the creation of an
artwork, be it literary or visual:
the real-life Susanna Moodie, who saw the real-life Grace Marks in the Toronto
Lunatic Asylum during her visit there in 1851, was looking at her through tinted
glasses. She saw the kind of madwoman she had been conditioned to see, and
presented her accordingly; since Grace had been involved in a murder, she leans
towards the Lady MacBeth end of things. Her account of Grace in the asylum
appears in her 1853 book, Life in the Clearings Versus the Bush, and right after it
she prints her own poem, “The Maniac,” which, although written in the same jolly
verse form as “The Night Before Christmas,” has the virtue of hitting all of the
expected Victorian notes (Atwood qtd. in talkingpeople.net).
Wendy Steiner maintains that as “a realm of mirrors, of fantasy and feint, the arts have
always presented a conundrum in terms of their real-world efficacy” and as such, “art makes
something happen- ethical events that are not just represented in artworks, but happen in
life”(2010: 3). Artistic reflections on different concepts or states of mind are thus a subject for
consideration. In the above-mentioned speech, Atwood chose to tackle the artistic depictions of
madness in relation to her character Grace Marks and to Shakespeare’s Ophelia. In the case of
Ophelia, the scenic details which are rendered in the play become relevant to the analysis when
they are taken from a gender point of view; she notes that in various literary works the flower
23
arrangement indicated the death of a female character and these elements are mostly associated
with femininity rather than masculinity:
This floral motif, though it probably didn’t originate with Ophelia, was given such
a push by her that it became almost de rigeur for nineteenth-century literary
madwomen; though mad persons of the male gender don’t go in for plant and
flower arrangements much in the nineteenth century(Atwood qtd. in
talkingpeople.net).
This manner of dying translated into a stereotype, and with regard to such processes of
stereotyping Atwood argues that “people who haven’t known any real mad people think [ that
this is the behavior] madwomen ought to have”(Atwood qtd. in talkingpeople.net). The flower
motifs were taken on by the Pre-Raphaelites, Millais’ painting Ophelia being related to this
particular stereotype of the idealized mad woman. His Ophelia flows on the water with her
mouth half opened ( a commonly encountered style of presenting the female character in PreRaphaelite paintings) encircled by flowers wearing a dress that blends with the surroundings.
The practice of captivating the public with images of femininity which romanticizes vulnerable
postures of women is also noticeable in mass culture’s visual products. The pictures below show
Millais’ painting and a photo of Vogue magazine, where the model is lying with the same
posture as Millais’ Ophelia and in the same setting.
Fig. 1.1. Millais, Sir John Everett. Ophelia. Oil on canvas. Tate Gallery, London.
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Fig. 1.2. Visual Representation of Femininity in Mass-Media. Vogue.
Seeing that unraveling the visual mechanisms that construct Western culture is a
significant process, the focus needs to be directed towards visual representations that form
gender identity. Feminist criticism is an important tool in this process. Dress has been regarded
by feminist scholars as a visual medium that has a strong effect on how women are viewed and
how they view themselves. Dress invests us with certain features which belong (in conventional
terms) to our respective genders. In the past it conferred status and it conveyed ideas of power. .
As Virginia Woolf famously writes in her essay “Three Guineas” (where she looks at
photographs of famous men in order to make connections between masculinity and war),
“Obviously the connection between dress and war is not far to seek; your finest clothes are those
that you wear as soldiers. Since the red and the gold, the brass and the feathers are discarded
upon active service, it is plain that their expensive and not, one might suppose, hygienic splendor
is invented partly to invest the beholder with the majesty of the military office” (2000: 27).
Atwood shares with Woolf the view that there is much more to clothes than we give them credit
for. In her ekphrastic poem “Manet’s Olympia” she lays a certain amount of emphasis on
Olympia’s nude posture and then she writes that “Above the head of the (clothed) maid/ is an
invisible voice balloon: Slut” (1995: 24). The poetic subject suggests that Olympia’s nakedness
has been represented in an unconventional manner. As the character’s pose is being described
she mentions the maid in the room underlining the fact that she is clothed.
25
All things considered, if getting to the core of the “real” self is an unattainable goal,
Atwood pleads instead for keeping a mind unconstrained by conventional mindsets, to shift from
being a follower of norms to being an observer of society. To do so, she argues that one needs to
have a deeper understanding of gender notions. When an interviewer asked her to comment on
some critics’ disapproval of using a feminist viewpoint in her works, which from where they
were standing indicated a form of propaganda, she answered that to be an observer of society
means dealing with feminist views: “ Am I a propagandist? Am I an observer of society? Yes!
And no one who observes society can fail to make observations which are feminist” (Atwood
qtd. in Kuhn 2005: 43). From what Atwood puts forward, we can deduce that a feminist
approach in analyzing visual culture is, by extension, significant. Thus, Atwood starts off from
the same idea as Mieke Bal who maintains that pictures are “ rhetoric or encoded signs that must
and can be ‘read’ with the tools provided by narratology and poststructural theories including
feminism” (Bal qtd. in Wagner 1993: 3).
In her writings that tackle visual culture issues, photography is another artistic practice
that more effectively illustrates the human need to hold on to ideas of undeniable representations
of reality. Atwood’s poem collection contains a series of works in which she talks about
photography and the subjects of a photographic image. Contemporary scholars point to a
commonplace idea in today’s culture of regarding photographs as an accurate representation of
reality. In relation to this, Sontag emphasizes that photographs should not be seen merely as facts
as they encompass both a “transcription of reality” (Sontag 2004: 23) and “an interpretation of
it” (Sontag 2004: 23). In addition, depending on style, a photograph is a transcription of reality in
mathematical terms. Because of these features which photographs retain, the same
ocularcentristic pattern of thought which was prevalent in Western society since the beginnings
of modernity, persists in our present times as well. What is being overlooked is the fact that
something happens behind the camera as the photographer can arrange his/her representation of
the world in a manner that would convey what he/she wants. Susan Sontag notes that a
photograph seems to have a more innocent and therefore a more accurate relation to the visible
reality than other mimetic objects do because, as she argues,
a narrowly selective interpretation, a photograph can be treated as a narrowly
selective transparency. But despite the presumption of veracity that gives all
photographs authority, interest, seductiveness, the work that photographers do is
26
no generic exception to the usually shady commerce between art and truth (2005:
5).
In “Girl and Horse, 1928” Atwood reveals to her readers the fact that there is a version of
reality behind the makings of a photograph which the viewer is not aware of. The poetic subject
is involved in a discussion with the subject of the photograph asking her about the reason why
she smiles and revealing that her happiness does not correspond to the surrounding atmosphere.
She suggests that what the viewer sees in the photo is illusory:
Why do you smile? Can't you
see the apple blossoms falling around
you, snow, sun, snow, listen, the tree
dries and is being burnt, the wind […]
is bending, your body, your face
ripples like water where did you go (Atwood 1978: 119)
With the aim of bringing down the scopic regime, Atwood presents visuality as
unreliable. In “Hairball” she uses terms like “frozen” and the “choosing eye” to exhibit the two
most important aspects of a pose: its objectification of time and space and the authority of the
photographer to manipulate it into looking authentic. She also underlines the habit of an
audience/ viewers to associate concepts like beauty and desire with a certain visual object. In
doing so, she presents the easiness with which an image can be fabricated and still retain the
sense of reality:
What they could never get through their heads was that it was done entirely with
cameras. Frozen light, frozen time. Given the angle she could make any woman
look ugly. Any man as well. She could make anyone look beautiful, or at least
interesting. It was all photography, it was all iconography. It was all in the
choosing eye (1998: 37)
For the reasons listed above, the main characters of the three novels on which I will focus
in the next chapters, are preoccupied with looking beyond appearance and the framed image in
order to put themselves in relation with the complex social and cultural structures in which the
27
surrounding visual materials of their society were produced. The alienation of the main
characters implies their need of change in their social contexts. However, as I will show, such
needs will be subjected to censure.
2. Culturally Coded Images of Femininity in Margaret Atwood’ s Lady Oracle
The next three chapters are concerned with the role of images in the development of
selfhood as the novels chosen focus on formative events of their female character’s childhood.
They underline the importance of memory as the act of remembering both unearths the visual
pieces which were applied to each individual case and is triggered by various visual media. I
begin by exploring the systems of meaning behind the visual representations of women which
are employed in mass culture as they are presented in Lady Oracle. I point out that the mass
culture recurrent images are saturated with cultural codes and for the purpose of this work, I refer
to the external powers which form identity and selfhood by focusing on popular culture and its
visual representations. In comparison to Cat’ s Eye, Lady Oracle explores to a larger extent the
role and consequences of the present state of commercial photography on the individual’s life
and for this reason, the analysis will concern mainly, mass culture.
One of the messages which the novel passes on to its readers is that mass culture is apt to
pervade the collective imaginary. First of all, it proliferates images that are designed, or at least,
that have the potential to bear upon the development of gender identity. Seeing as, from the 19th
century and onwards, ocularcentrism progressed rapidly and established itself in the Western
society, mass culture’ s use of visual media to promote certain attitudes, appearances and desires
over others makes its influence on the way the individual perceives the world more effective.
Secondly, as it is reflected in Lady Oracle, the artificiality of visual representations lies, in the
public’s eyes, behind a veil of realness as an entire movie industry works to make its images look
authentic. As Atwood suggests in the novel, the artificiality of mass-produced images becomes at
a closer and more observant look visible. Moreover, the novel points to various cultural codes
that were used in the development of the recurrent images which are intrinsic to mass cultural
productions (movies, magazines and advertisements).
28
The manner in which fashion influences the cognitive process of both men and women
proves Millet’s theory of internal colonization as the concepts and images which can be found on
the pages of women’s magazines and which are detrimental in the development of female
identity are taken in and incorporated:
Like advertising, women’s magazines have moved from the didactic to the
hallucinatory. Originally their purpose was informational, but what we see today
in both popular journalism and advertising is the mirage of a way of being, and
what we engage in is no longer only the relatively simple process of direct
imitation, but the less conscious one of identification (Wilson qtd. in White 2000:
29).
Fashion is one of the examples that show that the ‘real’ is molded to a high degree by the
visual representations that are proper to popular culture. The pictures leave their strong imprint
on people’ s imaginary along with the ideas which they stand for. In relation to this, Mitchell
informs us about Wittgenstein’s view on the misunderstanding of mental imagery. Wittgenstein
insisted that mental images should not be looked upon as “private, metaphysical, immaterial
entities any more than real images are” (Wittgenstein qtd. in Mitchell 1986: 15). Joan’s mother’s
desire to bring into her physical life images of femininity which were taken from popular culture
material, proves the effect that a picture (one that does not necessarily have direct connection
with nature) can alter the material world. Thus, such images fit into “the same logical space
(Mitchell 1986: 18)”. The boundaries between imaginary representations and real life material
objects or subjects begin to be blurred. Mass culture’ s ongoing power in forming Western
perception of reality finds its exemplification in Hollywood’ s mechanisms for promoting its
visual representations. The features of a star are believed to be authentic and natural and the fact
that a celebrity is a product of an industry is being overlooked. Gamson uses the phrase
“assembly line” to describe Hollywood’ s practice of turning its celebrities’ features marketable.
A celebrity is, in basic terms, a person who has gained the awe and attention of the masses.
According to Gamson, a critic who recorded the development of Hollywood industry starting
with the forties, the consumers of mass culture became “ simultaneous voyeurs of and
performers in commercial culture” ( Gamson qtd in Cashmore 2006: 64).
29
In this case, it is not only the prevailing societal norms and cultural codes that give the
recurrent images in Hollywood movies an appearance of genuineness, it is also the mechanism
behind the production of such images. Ellis Cashmore refers to Gamson’ s explanation of
Hollywood’ s manufacturing process and notes that the studios relied on their ability to obscure
their own rationale and to hide the artifice behind the making of their stars because otherwise
“the entire narrative would have been collapsed” ( Cashmore 2006: 65). Nevertheless, the images
proliferated through this industry hold within them a set of cultural codes which the public is
prone to apply to its own life. Through publicity images, advertising constructs ideas of what it
means to lead an “improved” life. Berger uses the term “spectator-buyer” to refer to the
consumer who buys objects which are visually constructed to support a certain life style. Behind
the makings of visual images for mass consumption lies the drive of “publicity to make the
spectator marginally dissatisfied with his present way of life” (Berger 2008: 142). As a female
character who is unsatisfied with her present condition ( dissatisfaction which occurs every time
she realizes that her appearance breaks certain patterns), Joan says that she “was a sucker for ads,
especially those that promised happiness” (Atwood 2009: 28). The objectives of advertising are
thusly met because the consumer is ready to change features of his/her personality to find the
promoted happiness. Such images impel one to feel dissatisfied with oneself and at the same
time, they claim to offer a better alternative to one’s own self. The spectator-buyer takes issue,
Not with the way of life of the society, but with his own within it. It suggests that
if he buys what it is offering, his life will become better. It offers him an
improved alternative to what he is (Berger 2008: 141).
In relation to the female viewer, the images within publicity contain visual guidelines
which impel her to want to change what she has. In the following quote, the narrator puts before
the reader a visual pattern of femininity which is typical of comic books, with a special emphasis
on the ones marketed for women. The passage shows the particularities of representations of
femininity along with the visions of female identity which their producers diffuse in their efforts
to steer and control behavior. As it is shown below, in trying to visually represent femininity, the
neatness of the physical aspect is the most salient feature:
I never learned to cry with style, silently, the pearl-shaped tears rolling down my
cheeks from wide luminous eyes, as on the cover of True Love comics, leaving no
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smears or streaks. I wish I had; then I could have done it in front of people (2009:
6).
Additionally, Joan questions the icon of the goddess, which left its deep mark on Western
society’ s collective imaginary. In Lady Oracle, Atwood draws attention to what she called the
“absolute obsession in Western’ s society with the shape of women’ s bodies in terms of fatness
and thinness” (Atwood qtd. in Kuhn 2005: 38). Slimness is a feature of the goddess figure which
is also extensively employed in popular culture representations. When the Polish Count, Joan’s
boyfriend, tells her that she looks like a goddess, she asks herself:
But which goddess did he mean? There was more than one, I knew. The one on
the Venus pencil package, with no arms and all covered with cracks. Some
goddesses didn’t have bodies at all[…]Many were shaped like vases, many like
stones. (Atwood 2009: 153)
As popular culture is inspired to a large extent by commonplace ideas of gender identity,
the widely accepted ideal of feminine beauty functions as the hub of its visual representations of
gender features. For instance, from the point of view of physical aspect the thinness of the female
body is a general expectation which is based on cultural codes. Joan’s mother, Fran was in a
constant effort for being “in shape” which entailed a slender figure and symmetrical features.
Her efforts grew more overbearing as she desired to be “an attractive woman, even into her late
thirties” (Atwood 2009: 67). Popular culture’ s effect on an individual’ s actions and behavior is
reflected by the form one’s body takes when one is forced by one’s society to control body
image by (un)written dictates which are found in mass culture material. In relation to this,
Winkel informs us that “fashion disciplines the body and subjects it to the reign of signs while
promising a better, upgraded life – a process that is described as ‘imprisonment-throughliberation’”(Winkel qtd in Zarzycka 2009: 156). The use of fashion for putting across ideas for a
good lifestyle entails the employment of a number of cultural discourses on the self. In the same
chapter, Zarzycka argues that the increasing fragmentation of the body in contemporary
commercial photography causes the female body to be “packaged and commodified” and
“fashion in itself is the primal space where men look at women and women watch themselves
being looked at” (2009: 155). A reflection of this status quo is Fran’s photograph from her youth,
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which is described by the narrator as being one of the mementos of her mother’ s past which was
dear to her. The photograph where she was surrounded by men who were looking at her while
she was looking at the camera is not a fashion photograph but it is very suggestive of the
previously mentioned theories on fashion industry and the female body. Considering that she was
a woman who rigorously applied consumerist norms to herself and her daughter, she stands as an
embodiment of fashion dictates. As such, the photo weighs heavily when the effects of this
aspect of mass culture ( i.e. fashion industry) on both the female body and identity are evaluated.
Fran was a woman who incessantly sought to stay “fit” and who liked to be regarded with
pleasure and to receive the approval of her peers.
It was shown above that, in the novel, the commodification of the female body is reflected
by the actions of Joan’s mother, the avid consumer of commercial culture and more specifically
of magazines which dictated the norms for female appearance and behavior. Furthermore,
emphasizing the recollections of Lady Oracle’s narrator, we can deduce that if visual art can
become an object to be consumed, the female body undergoes the same process, because it is
shaped according to popular culture material. As regards her body and the part of herself that she
presented to the world, the narrator tells us that her mother was to be the manager, the creator,
the agent and she was the product(Atwood 2009: 68). The reader is informed that with
acknowledging the status of commodity comes her desire for freedom: “ but I reacted to the diet
booklets she left on my pillow, to the bribes of dresses she would give me if I would reduce to fit
them – formal gowns with layers of tulle and wired busts, perky little frocks, skirts with slim
waists and frothy crinolines” (Atwood 2009: 71) . This exemplifies that she needed to be aware
of the external forces which were meant to shape her mind and body in order for her to know
what she was resisting against. In Lady Oracle, retrospection is treated in the same way as in
Cat’s Eye and Surfacing; as a process which makes the characters more able to attain a certain
degree of self-awareness which helps them assess and then resist against imposed manners of
perceiving the world.
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fig. 2.1. Kruger, Barbara. Your Body Is a Battleground. 1989. The Broad Art Foundation,
Santa Monica.
In the chapter from Joan’s childhood when she wanted to take part in a ballet recital,
Margaret Atwood touches upon the feminist topic of criticism on the state of the female body in
a consumerist society, a topic which gained strength in the eighties. In the spirit of this criticism,
Barbara Kruger did an artwork where word and image work together to convey a message.
Kruger focused her works on the relationship between the consumer and the representations
which he/she is influenced by (arthistoryarchive.com). The photo shows a woman’s face overlaid
by a message saying that: “Your body is a battleground”(fig.1.1). The picture which is
juxtaposed by collages of words is seen as a way of bringing to surface the struggle between
maintaining subjectivity and surrendering to external influences. The idealized female body
becomes an epitome of this struggle. The photograph of the woman is divided into a negative
photographic material and its developed version, revealing two opposite states. This relates to
Joan’s predicament because she sees herself split between what she wants to be and what others
want her to be. In addition, Gen Doy theorizes that in this cultural environment “active
subjectivity” is superseded by “ a more passive, consumerist self-fashioning” (19). From this
quote, I consider Kuhn’ s term “self-fashioning” a key term because it brings into discussion the
cultural patterns(those that are fashionable) which one applies to one’s own body. As Margaret
Atwood notes:
33
I think that people very much experience themselves through their bodies and
through concepts of the body which get applied to their own bodies. Which they
pick up from their own culture and apply to their bodies (Atwood qtd. in Kuhn
2005: 38).
The line between pure desire, uninfluenced by external factors, is practically invisible.
Being vulnerable to the multitude of images of consumerist fashion, turns the task of defining
agency difficult. Since childhood Joan had been easily influenced by the images she saw in
advertisements. Moreover, she wanted the pink dresses which girls who were taking ballet
lessons were wearing. Joan scours through these recollections to find out what reasons she had to
desire something that she was unable to incorporate. Firstly, she goes through a struggle to
define her identity to the extent to which she can, and then, when she grows up to be a teenager
she finds a more sound definition of her selfhood, only to have it counteracted by her mother.
On this battleground, there is a fight of the individual to maintain a sense of selfhood.
Selfhood is in Kristeva’ s view, dependent on the presence of the abject: “There is no selfhood
without a simultaneous abjection” (Kristeva qtd. in Doy 2005: 65). Thus, the abject represents
something that is produced outside the “bounded envelope” where “the socialized and
culturalised subject is continually producing itself” (Doy 2005: 65). In Joan’s case, stepping over
those socially-created boundaries which concerned the female body, disobeying the rules of her
social environment was something repellant. Her ballerina teacher pushes her to wear a suit
which was shaped as a mothball. She had to wear a sign where the word “mothball” was written
in case the audience did not recognize what her costume signified. Among the girls dressed as
butterflies and flowers, she had to embody an object which is used as a repellant against moths.
The moments from her life when she desired to be a ballerina but couldn’t because of her
body tell the reader a lot about the mainstream convictions on the relationship between body and
self. Wearing pink skirts and leggings, pieces of clothing that displayed her legs was seen as
grotesque while her body was deemed inappropriate to be shown on stage. As the teacher did not
want to disobey cultural codes (which informed people about the way a girl should appear in a
ballet scene) or to disappoint the public’s expectations, she considered that the costume
which covered her excess of bodily weight was more acceptable.
34
The problem was fairly simple in the short pink skirt with my waist arms and legs
exposed, I was grotesque. I am reconstructing this from the point of view of an
adult, an anxious, prudish adult like my mother or Mrs. Flegg(Atwood 2009: 4445).
In these passages, Atwood points to the anxiety of passing over the boundaries and the
regulations of one’s social environment. As we have seen, the thoughts of a negative response
from the audience seemed dreadful to them and the fear of losing the audience because of Joan’s
appearance on stage impelled them to take measures. From the perspective of the outsider(i.e.
Joan), this anxiety manifests itself when she protests against the treatment she has to endure
because of the state of her body. Gen Doy talks about the practice of making tattoos and she
quotes Susan Benson who said that in tattoo-making practice “what seems to be central is the
fear of fragmentation, anxiety about boundaries and about the relationship between will and self;
the body is the battleground in which such anxieties are played out” (Benson qtd. in Doy 2005:
70). When she is put on stage to perform the mothball dance, she gets into character but insists
on playing it in the way in which she chooses. While she was performing the dance, she was
trying to convince herself that the public’s view of herself was not in accordance with her
perspective of herself:
"This isn't me," I kept saying to myself, "they're making me do it"; yet even
though I was concealed in the teddy-bear suit, which flopped about me and made
me sweat, I felt naked and exposed, as if this ridiculous dance was the truth about
me and everyone could see it (Atwood 2009: 49).
However, as the final lines show, she had doubts whether the manner in which she
envisioned herself was accurate or flawed. This crisis of subjectivity and the problem of the self
are transposed into literature by Margaret Atwood in a manner that reflects what Mansfield said
about the theorization of subjectivity “as a cultural phenomena in its own right” ( Doy 2005: 63).
In a quote provided by Gen Doy in the chapter “Bodies and Selves”, the idea that comes across is
that theorizing the self leads one into a paradox because, while all around us ideas on the
importance of an original self circulate, theories on this concept point to its frail existence:
35
the subject has had its meaning endlessly theorised and proliferated only after
being declared dead. In other words, the subject has become an absolutely intense
focus of theoretical anxiety at the same time as it is said to be over… everywhere
in our art, our entertainment, our popular psychology and journalism, the self is
represented as absolutely important but somehow insubstantial, even absent
(Mansfield qtd. in Doy 2005: 63-64).
As such, in order to comprehend the nature of subjectivity in present-day society, one
must focus on conventional standards, particularly when they relate to visual culture. With all its
references to movies and magazines, Lady Oracle contains passages which come across as a
critique of commercial culture because, by means of it, values of humanity which remain
uncontested by the admass circulate on a roll. They are set beyond any question because they are
inspired by cultural codes and at the same time, they help spread those codes. In this respect,
conformism is one of the key themes of the novel, because Joan’ s mother, the character which
has the heaviest influence in Joan’ s life follows some “acceptable” patterns of behavior in a
strict manner. Conventionality is one of the character’s traits as she wants everything that
surrounds her to be fitting to particular social rules. This character’s tendency is epitomized by
the state of her house, more specifically by her living room. Being a place which is designed to
receive guests and which is open to the eyes of others, the living room has a significant role in
the character analysis of the mother. First of all, Joan mentions that the woman wanted her living
rooms to be “acceptable” and designing them was a method through which she could gain social
acceptance. Secondly, being acceptable also meant creating a space which was the same as
everybody else’s; this description of her mother’ s desires conveys the idea of conformism. This
socially acceptable and conformist environment, which her mother built seemed to the narrator
like a museum display or most importantly like the show windows of department stores. The
latter object of comparison for the above-mentioned living rooms reveal the consumerist
practices that were dominant in Joan’ s home by virtue of her mother’ s actions.
In the context of such culturally coded icons, Joan is trying to be able to get a clearer view
of her identity. Among such visual representations as the ones listed above, the individual
becomes alienated and develops feelings of inappropriateness. Joan is surrounded by ideal
images of femininity and does not want to comply with them but at the same time she feels like
36
an odd fish and a deficient person. The induced desires which the Hollywood industry pushes
through are reflected in the passages where Joan narrates the days when she went with her aunt
to the cinema. When she talks about the movies which she saw in her childhood, she declares: “I
wanted those things too, I wanted to dance and be married with a handsome orchestra conductorand when she finally threw herself in front of a train I let out a bellowing snort that made people
three rows ahead turn around indignantly” (Atwood 2009: 84).
This immediately brings about Joan’s alienation as she puts forward the idea that she was
invisible or detestable to those who were supposed to be her peers or to the people around her
because she did not fit within the widely accepted (visual) patterns. In her childhood her body
was different and in relation to this, she asks herself: “If Desdemona was fat who would care
whether or not Othello strangled her?” (Atwood 2009: 51). One can notice culture being
transferred in contemporary times into the construction of mass images whether they are found in
movies, advertisements or in commercial photograph which is supplied on the pages of a
magazine marketed for female consumers. One can argue that mass culture is involved
extensively with appearance rather than substance. When Joan achieved fame, she realized that
she had to do something about her hair because its “ length and color had been a sort of
trademark. Every newspaper clipping, friendly or hostile, had mentioned it, in fact a lot of space
has been devoted to it: hair in the female was regarded as more important than either talent or
lack of it” (Atwood 2009: 11). However, as these passages show, along with the abovementioned observations on the female body as a battleground, it is mostly the women who are
required to concentrate on their looks, bearing and expression. The reader is also presented with
a passage from a newspaper where Joan is compared to a “lush Rossetti portrait, radiating
intensity, [and] hypnotized the audience with her unearthly…” (Atwood 2009: 11). In connection
to these passages, it is important to note what Berger says about the female viewers of a painting,
namely that “they survey, like men, their own femininity” (Berger 2008: 63). Thus, Joan
modeled herself to get a positive response from a public which, as it is implied in the description
of the newspaper, nostalgically looked back to conventional representations of femininity similar
to those made by a Pre-Raphaelite painter. As we will see in Cat’s Eye, such female
representations were devised to please a male gaze. The descriptions from Lady Oracle
encompass some of the main features of a Pre-Raphaelite portrait: “unearthly” aspects, “flowing
37
red hair”, “green robe” and “intensity.” In addition, a Pre-Rapahaelite female figure is there to
entice the male viewer and to be “surveyable”:
Prose poetess looked impressively Junoesque in her flowing red hair and green
robe; unfortunately she was largely inaudible (Atwood 2009: 11).
Such examples show Joan’s awareness of the external forces that controlled her life and
consequently, she wants her death to be the result of individual agency in action. At the same
time, she stages it so that she can maintain a certain public image. Through her selfcontemplation, Joan is searching in a roundabout way for a core self that could be able to emerge
without any external influence which turns out to be a Sisyphean task. In this case, I will refer to
the mother as to the embodiment of the constrictive social norms which set the narrator back in
her quest for self-determination. The images that she tried to enforce on her daughter were not
connected to nature and Joan’ s inability to apply them to her own situation demonstrates their
artificiality. Moreover, it was not a matter of lacking ability to do it, it was an example of
resistance. Nevertheless, Joan’ s mother/society stubbornly appreciated this artificial state for the
fact that it was simply not viewed as such. Instead it was thought of as the proper way in which a
person should order his/her life. During her teenage years she came to the realization that she
wants a lifestyle which is different from the one which was planned by her mother/society and
she refused to withdraw in her attempts to achieve it. As such, the mental image that her
mother/society had concerning her femininity did not go hand in hand with the way in which she
construed herself.
Furthermore, despite her lack of conformity she falls into the trap of self-disgust. Thus,
her situation tells us once again that the individual who does not want to abide by conventions,
who is persistent in maintaining a self that does not fit within conventionality is bound to
develop feelings of inappropriateness. As much as mass culture gives the impression that
following conventions is a recipe for blissful living, the novel comes to prove this idea wrong.
Joan is not the only character who is unsatisfied because of limitations. Her mother who
determinedly follows them feels a certain form of dissatisfaction because as she tries to compose
herself, her sadness comes to surface. It is a different way of reacting to the pressures which
conventions bring along with them. As Joan’ s mother was trying to put on her make-up, she was
falling into glum: “ Instead of making her happier, these sessions make her sadder, as if she was
38
behind or within the mirror some fleeting image of who she was unable to capture or duplicate“
(Atwood 2009: 67). While she openly accepted this activity of self-examination, she did not
experience fulfillment. Joan realized in the final stages of the novel that her mother’s disregard
for her was a cause of her own sense of discontent. She was a housewife that did not have a full
grasp of her own self (which, at this point in the novel, was an older self) as she continuously
insisted on following patterns for her appearance.
While the narration develops, Joan is getting closer to finding out one significant aspect
of her identity. Her aunt’ s words “ you can’t always choose your life, but you can learn to accept
it “ signal the resolution of the novel when Joan realizes that she took after her mother in more
ways than she thought and by doing so, she digs up certain features of her personality which she
discarded so far. The beginning describes Joan’ s “planned death”, a staged suicide that had the
purpose of distancing her from the judgment of others, bringing her to a small town in Italy. She
envisioned her life: “meander[ing] along from one thing to another, despite my feeble attempts to
control it. “My life had a tendency to spread, to get flabby, to scroll and festoon like the frame of
a baroque mirror, which came from following the line of least resistance” (Atwood 2009: 1).
Preferably, she wanted her death “to be neat and simple, understated, even a little severe, like a
Quaker church or the basic black dress with a single strand of pearls much praised by fashion
magazines when I was fifteen” (Atwood 2009: 1). In the end, when her trick unravels she
achieves detachment from what were considered to be her flaws and she states : “I made a mess;
but then, I don’t think I’ll be a very tidy person” ( Atwood 2009: 375). Thus, through the
awareness which she gained by remembering the visual and social patterns which defined her
gender, neatness in conformity began to be irrelevant to her life.
3. Visual Culture and Memory in Margaret Atwood’ s Cat’s Eye
Lady Oracle is a novel that presents the pressures of an individual who lives in a
consumer society infused with norms that are upheld by a conformist majority. Whereas in Lady
Oracle the act of remembering moments from the main character’s past entailed the realization
of the effects of visual culture on identity, the narrator and protagonist of Cat’ s Eye employs
39
visual media to make memories which formed her selfhood emerge. While I continue my
analysis of visual representations in popular culture and the discussions on contemporary
consumerist society which are sparked by the practice of commercial artists, I direct my attention
towards the relation between art and memory. The commercial visual practices are still analyzed
but the discussion will be centered on the relation between photographs, modern and classic
paintings and memory. In Cat’ s Eye painting is a form of bringing to the surface elements of her
unconscious and writing is a way of laying bare the effects which those elements had on the
construction of herself.
Atwood speaks about the relation between media and art and about how paintings and
images are used in a contemporary consumerist society. This novel encompasses the
characteristics of Atwood’s fiction that have been listed in the introductory chapter: the visual
artwork as commodity, the female presence in visual culture as alluring force, the identification
of women with publicity images. As I will show, it also presents the female artist character who
is engaged with the world and who directs her gaze at it. Most importantly, it deals with the
iconography of women and it explores the relation between selfhood, memory and the visual
arts.
The narrator and main character of the story comes back to her hometown and her
narration goes back and forth through time, from Elaine’s childhood to her adult years. Elaine is
a modern artist and her works are either hand-drawn or collages which are made from other
visual materials which she regards as molding forces of her identity and of the other female
characters’ identity. As a painter, she brings forward a description of commercial art by means of
which she explains that art is generally thought of in terms of its market value. More often than
not, it captures attention through the sensationalism which encircles it and less through its
aesthetics. In relation to this, Elaine ironically asks herself if the act of cutting her ear would
draw more people to buy her artworks. These passages reveal what Barrett theorized about the
artistic process and practice, namely that “the logic of [such] practice is obscured by the
commodification of the work as object” (Barrett 2011: 45). Elaine’s paintings are described by
her as objects whose buyers equate ownership with creation:
Whoever owns them is not me; worse luck, I’d get a better price now. The
owners’ names will be on little white cards beside the paintings, along with mine,
40
as if mere ownership is on a par with creation. Which they think it is (Atwood
2009: 100).
Considering this tendency to increasingly commodify the artwork, Barrett emphasizes the
need to develop a “metalanguage of interpretation in order to recuperate, at least partially, the
logic of practice that is lost once the work is subsumed into the logic of the symbolic and of
institutional discourses” ( Barrett 2011: 45). In Cat’s Eye, the narrator gives an example of how
the value of a work increases as it has a story behind it. In the passages that refer ironically to
contemporary tendencies in evaluating a work of art (for example, the huge response to Van
Gogh’s ear cutting), sensationalism gives a different significance to the work of art: “What rich
art collectors like to buy, among many things, is a little vicarious craziness” (Atwood 2009: 100).
The explanation for such a response is given by Barrett who says that “the reception of an
artwork does not occur in a vacuum, but is embedded in various discourses that frame audience
responses” ( 2009: 107). The idea of creating material by concentrating on its financial feasibility
can be found in Lady Oracle as well. As such, the point which both novels share is that a
particular object which is designed to enforce certain (un)written rules regarding behavior and/or
aspect gives up substance in favor of conformity to market demands.
Margaret Atwood’s literary depictions of visual culture span the so-called low and high
art. In Cat’s Eye, she talks about various moments in pictorial tradition: Pre-Raphaelite and early
Renaissance, and adds to them popular culture examples. In an ekphrastic manner, she briefly
describes Van Eyck’s “Arnolfini Marriage”, an object of interest for Elaine from the period when
she was an art student. From the painting which depicts in foreground a couple holding hands,
the point on which she focuses her attention is the mirror reflection of another figure that faces
the couple. The convex mirror is placed in the background and even though its position would
not be of interest, it draws attention through its different nature:
These figures reflected in the mirror are slightly askew, as if a different law of
gravity, a different arrangement of space, exists inside, locked in, sealed up in the
glass as if in a paperweight. This round mirror is like an eye, a single eye that sees
more than anyone else looking: over this mirror is written, Johannes de Eyck fuit
hic. 1434. (Atwood 2009: 382-383).
41
Fig.3.1. Eyck, Jan van. Portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and his Wife. 1434. National
Gallery. London.
In addition to her literary representations of classical paintings, Atwood discusses the
values and concepts which commercial artists are prone to use in their artworks. The students of
Advertising Art are described by Elaine as more neatly looking than the ones at Fine Arts.
Unlike the students from Fine Arts, they give a higher importance to the financial feasibility of
their works so that they could be able to earn their money: “they’re cleaner and more earnest, and
they want paying jobs. So do I” (Atwood 2009: 383). Cat’s Eye contains a theme which will be
more extensively explored in the 3rd chapter, which is the mass media’ s transference of old
visual practices of representing different concepts into its present-day images. She experiences
the revelation that her boyfriend insisted in modeling her by the style of a typical Pre-Raphaelite
character when she notices her altered appearance as she gazes at herself in the elevator mirror.
Moments like these reveal that retrospection and introspection are two interrelated and
interdependent acts which help the individual clarify questions related to his/her personality.
With regard to gendered visual representations, Cat’s Eye provides an instance of mental
imagery related to the female body which is transposed into everyday reality. As I mentioned
before, Elaine’s lover Joseph wanted her to look like a Pre-Raphaelite character. Through these
42
passages, the theories of the gaze are brought into discussion. Hengen argues that the much
contested power of patriarchy is “to hold the gaze in which woman is seen only as man would
see her, in his image, or as a mirror reflection of his gaze” (1993: 34-35). Furthermore, what the
product of an extensively admired and studied art movement like the Pre-Raphaelite does is to
include the idea of women as alluring forces into the common social and cultural understanding
of femininity. In this context, femininity will be defined in patriarchal terms and women will
contribute to forming themselves by bearing in mind the male gaze. As the novel shows, the
model in the Pre-Raphaelite tradition has an influence on the mentality of the 20th century. As
shown in the following passages, the representation of femininity which recurred in the PreRaphaelite paintings is up to this day transferred into reality; it has within it the pose and other
features of the Pre-Raphaelite model which were created to pass on particular ideas of
femininity.
Although it can be argued that, by choosing nature as the portraits’ setting, the female
characters are placed in a more open environment instead of a closed domestic one, the
sensuality that their characters effuse breeds another stereotype of women as enticing figures and
femininity in Pre-Raphaelite paintings is equal to enchantment. The same stereotype is present in
contemporary mass culture. Glamour, a word which is much encountered in the fashion
vocabulary, denotes magic as well. “Even in contemporary life, individuals become deeply and
irrationally attached to various items of clothing so that the items become talismanic” (Kuhn
2005: 42). In Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, glamour is defined as “ the exciting
and charming quality of something unusual or special, with a magic power of attraction”.
According to The Oxford English Dictionary(1961), the archaic version referred to “magic,
enchantment, spell ” . The characters in the paintings are slim and they are rendered through the
use of colors such as fiery red which is set against a green background. Their faces are pale and
their dresses are fading in the atmosphere. In this passage, it is shown that Elaine took in such
features:
My hair is loose, and damp. I think it looks like a mop. But I catch a glimpse of
myself, without expecting it, in the smoked-mirror wall of the elevator as we go
up, and I see for an instant what Josef sees: a slim woman with cloudy hair,
pensive eyes in a thin white face. I recognize the style: late nineteenth century.
Pre-Raphaelite. I should be holding a poppy (Atwood 2009: 359).
43
When Josef arranges her according to his vision or mental image of femininity, he asks
her to loosen her hair and he concludes that after this, she resembles a gypsy. The latter
association led him to think of an existence unfettered by various norms as, in Western
imaginary, it signifies nomadism. This is an instance of what Winkel calls in relation to the
fashion system “imprisonment-through-liberation” (Winkel qtd. in Zarzycka 2009: 156). As
such, the female presence is highly sensualized to delight the male gaze, having as a result the
regulation of the female body. On the basis of Prettejohn’ s argument, one can note that in PreRaphaelite tradition the role of women was reorganized, giving a false sense of emancipation:
the beloved bride tendency in late Pre-Raphaelite art represents a move from
seeing female excellence as spiritual, with its emphasis on domesticity, grace and
purity to seeing female excellence in terms of physical beauty, an embodiment of
male heterosexual desire (1999: 179).
fig.3.2. Solomon, Simeon. Priestess Offering Poppies.1894. Oil on Canvas. Leicester
Galleries, Leicester.
Like in the case of a Pre-Raphaelite painting, in a publicity image pieces of clothing are
not merely objects, they exist to sell a certain “look” or fashionably acceptable appearance.
Moreover, the narrator of Cat’s Eye describes the prevailing popular products of a given time
and highlights that attitudes are in accordance with the aesthetic values of those products. Elaine
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is in the habit of gathering popular culture visual material for the production of her works. As a
student, the images which stirred her interest seemed to be reproduced from shopping catalogues:
“[…] what have I done so far? Nothing that doesn’t look like a random sampling from Eaton’s
catalogue. But I keep on” (Atwood 2009: 383). However, this fascination with popular culture’ s
images does not make her a passive consumer. On the contrary, she challenges the values which
are disseminated by them. While she passes by stores and looks around at the trends of teenagers
she notices their imitation of fashion images and she ponders on the specificities of each
generation’s popular style: “What are they aiming for? Is each an imitation of the other? Or does
it only seem that way to me because they’re all so alarmingly young? Despite their cool poses
they wear their cravings on the outside, like the suckers on a squid. They want it all” (Atwood
2009: 132). The compulsive preoccupation of fitting within publicity images and the obsession
for a youthful appearance takes the form of religion, of “Voodoo and spells. I want to believe in
it, the creams, the rejuvenating lotions, the transparent unguents in vials that slick on like roll-top
glue” (Atwood 2009: 133). This quote reiterates the idea that glamour signifies enchantment.
The desire to fit within a fashionable appearance obliterates completely the notion of a
selfhood untouched by popular systems of belief. Nevertheless, authenticity of character has not
been completely lost and, at times, it shyly surfaces. The evasiveness with which a sales person
answers Elaine’s question if she likes the type of perfume that she is selling shows that market
demands are based on certain patterns:
The stuff smells like grape Kool-Aid. I can’t imagine it seducing anything but a
fruit fly.[…]“You like this?” I say to the girl. […]“It’s been very popular,” she
says evasively. Briefly I glimpse myself through her eyes: bloom off the rose,
teetering on the brink of matronhood, hoping for the best. I am the
market(Atwood 2009: 133).
In accordance with the other two novels of this dissertation, Cat’s Eye is involved with
the early formative years of an individual’s life and for this reason the images which the main
character was exposed to during her childhood are under a particular focus. In Cat’s Eye the
construction of the character’s selfhood is credited to the female characters from her childhood,
each one leaving their presence engraved on her personality. The female characters which
emerge in her paintings are key players in the development of her identity. The events whose
45
course was more often than not directed by these particular characters are also crucial and the
tools which she uses to understand the events and characters are of a visual nature. A lot of
attention is given to the housewife icon which, in this novel, is found on the pages of the
magazines which Elaine uses for her collages. The characters on which she focuses her works are
thought of in terms of conventional visual representations of women. To render them she often
uses collages with material that she gathers from magazines. Because she grew up in the forties,
her artworks include a variety of commercial visual material from the magazines of that period.
In one of Elaine’s collages, her mother is envisioned as the embodiment of the housewife
icon which was created by the magazines of that time. She explains the visual representations of
her mother as they could be found in her paintings. The description of her artworks starts with a
hand-drawn image with colored pencils and continues with the collage which was gathered from
various magazines. The magazines which she chose for the purpose of visually rendering her
mother were, as their titles hint, magazines marketed for women: Ladies’ Home Journals and
Chatelaines.
Sometimes I cut things out of magazines and paste them into a scrapbook with
LePage’s mucilage, from the bottle that looks like a chess bishop. I cut out
pictures of women, from Good Housekeeping, The Ladies’ Home Journal,
Chatelaine. If I don’t like their faces I cut off the heads and glue other heads on.
These women have dresses with puffed sleeves and full skirts, and white aprons
that tie very tightly around their waists(Atwood 2009: 163).
Elaine offers a description of the dresses which the women in magazines used to wear: the
puffed sleeves, white aprons tight around the waist. In the 1940s, the pages of the abovementioned magazines contained pencil-drawn designs of ladies’ clothes wear. In the picture
below(fig.2.2), the palette coincides with the collage through which the narrator depicts her
mother. Elaine describes the pictures that she gathered with the purpose of visually representing
her mother: “the artwork, with those rancid greens and faded blues and dirty looking pinks”
(2009: 170) which were the colors for women’s dresses of that period(fig 2.2). They also have
the extra-slim waists which Elaine is talking about when she remembers the fashion tendencies
of the period in which she grew up:
46
It’s incredible to me that I myself was alive when all those chalk things were
going on, all those statistical deaths. I was alive when women wore those
ridiculous clothes with the big shoulder pads and the nipped-in waists, with
peplums over their bums like backward aprons. I draw a woman with wide
shoulders and a picture hat (Atwood 2009: 279).
The visual means through which the housewife image is constructed is fortified/increased
by the texts that went along with the visual. To show the complications which arise when one has
to be convinced to accept certain values, Elaine indicates to the reader that her mother was
reluctant in adopting the housewife status which was advertized by the popular culture of her
period: “The first was my mother in colored pencil, in her city house kitchen and her late-forties
dress. Even she had a bib apron, blue flowers with navy piping, even she wore it, from time to
time” (Atwood 2009: 170). By the use of the words “even she”, one notices a contrast between
what was represented in the magazines and her mother’s identity. Unlike the other significant
female influence in her life, Mrs. Smeath, she did not enjoy conforming to norms and did not
display passivity.
Fig. 3.3. Australian Home Journal. August 1949.
Coming back to Elaine’s early artistic method of merely copying popular culture’s visual
pieces, one can argue that it exemplifies Barret’s view on “the excessive demands of consumer
culture and the speed and distraction of contemporary life [which] leave little opportunity for
47
nurturing imaginative capacities” (2011: 77). Nevertheless, as Elaine matures she employs a
different artistic practice of transferring the negative energy which was triggered by one or a
chain of events from her life into art. In Kristeva’s theories on creative practice and the artist’s
achievement of moral relief, affect is “ a structuring of psychic space that through creative
practice attributes value and valency to experience and is transferred to the audience via artworks
(Barrett 4).” Affect is a term that refers to inner manifestations or “archaic energy signals
initially occurring as undifferentiated ‘intensities’” (Barrett 2011: 159) which come to surface as
emotions or feelings that will finally be transposed into an artwork. As many of Atwood’s female
characters, Mrs. Smeath is a haunting presence which undoubtedly had an effect on Elaine’ s
self-esteem. She emerges on canvas but the explanation for the impact that this character had on
the painter is revealed through language. The paintings in the novel do not have a
correspondence in real life, as they are framed within the literary work, being the results of
notional ekphrasis. In John Hollander’ s term, notional ekphrasis is the “representation of an
imaginary work of art” ( Hollander qtd. in Heffernan 1993: 7). However, their description says
something about the significance of the visual in an individual’s life who in this case is a visual
artist. The visual serves the purpose of placing into the material world haunting memories. It is a
primary stage in the quest for finding out the source of frustration and anger. For example, after
Elaine makes the visual association between Mrs. Smeath and heaven, she goes on with relating
the time which she spent with this character. The painting of Mrs. Smeath comes across as the
result of a repressed memory from childhood : “The angels around her are 1940s Christmas
stickers, laundered little girls in white, with rag-set curly hair. The word Heaven is stenciled at
the top of the painting with a child’s school stencil set. I thought that was a nifty thing to do, at
the time” (Atwood 2009: 101). As a result of Elaine’s supposed religious convictions, she was
chastised by Mrs. Smeath and her family. As such, religion is given a particular attention in
Elaine’s visual works. Mrs. Smeath was a strongly religious and even doctrinal woman who
abided by Christian ideas of heaven and hell. She believed herself to be a “pure” soul and
regarded Elaine as a heathen and such self-righteousness became a reason for Elaine to dread her
presence:
I hate Mrs. Smeath, because what I thought was a secret, something going on
among girls, among children, is not one. It has been discussed before, and
tolerated. Mrs. Smeath has known and approved. She has done nothing to stop it.
48
She thinks it serves me right.[…] She is right, I am a heathen. I cannot forgive
(Atwood 2009: 214).
On the basis of the description which is found in the passages where the narrator talks
about the Sundays which she spent with the Smeath family, Mrs. Smeath is represented in many
of Elaine’s paintings floating on air via heaven. One can see the connection between the mental
image which Elaine kept of Mrs. Smeath and her visual representation of this character. She
makes a connection between Mrs. Smeath extreme religiousness and madness (she was “grinning
like a maniac”) which shows us that at the moment when the painting was being done she
already detached herself from the harsh criticism which was directed towards her in her early
years; instead of maintaining the victim position one sees her with the status of active evaluator:
There are indeed three photos. One is of my head, shot a little from beneath so it
looks as if I have a double chin. The other two are of paintings. One is of Mrs.
Smeath, bare-naked, flying heavily through the air. The church spire with the
onion on it is in the distance. Mr. Smeath is stuck to her back like an asparagus
beetle, grinning like a maniac; both of them have shiny brown insect wings, done
to scale and meticulously painted. Erbug, The Annunciation, it’s called (Atwood
2009: 265-266).
In the same manner as in Lady Oracle conventionalism is an issue that brings about the
character’s feelings of inappropriateness. Mrs. Smeath is one the most conventional characters in
the novel and it is not surprising that she is also the character who is the most influential in her
paintings. As a child, she prompted in her feelings of unworthiness on grounds of her religion. In
addition, the old woman’s passivity recurs in her later paintings. Passivity is another key feature
of Mrs. Smeath and it is characteristic of the housewife icon. In comparison with the painter’ s
mother, Mrs. Smeath remains firm in her purpose of abiding by certain norms, a feature which
originates in her passion for religious codes. Her mother, on the other hand, does not comply
with her role of housewife which such an easiness as the activities that she does more often than
not bring her dissatisfaction.
However, feminist views on the state of the female body in visual arts are inspired by the
paintings of Mrs. Smeath. They hint at the conventional visual constructions of the body and
49
highlight the tendency of painting it in an idealized manner. Jody, a member of the group of
feminist artists to which Elaine belonged for a period in her career, commended the character of
Mrs. Smeath for having an aging female body that was treated with respect: “’It’s woman as
anticheesecake,’ she said. ‘Why should it always be young, beautiful women? It’s good to see
the aging female body treated with compassion, for a change.’ This, only in more high-flown
language, is what she’s written in the catalogue” (Atwood 2009: 408). The last sentence reflects
the museum experience, where alongside paintings there is a need for text. The text which was
included in the catalogue of the exhibition pinpoints to a system of ideas which is always
attached to the visual piece. In this case, this system springs from feminist criticism on visual
artworks and it emphasizes the need for a de-idealization of the female body.
Next to the paintings of her mother and Mrs. Smeath, Elaine exhibits “a self-portrait of
sorts” entitled Cat’s Eye, where she placed herself in “the right foreground, though it’s shown
only from the middle of the nose up: just the upper half of the nose, the eyes looking outward,
the forehead and the topping of hair” (Atwood 2009: 480). It represents Elaine at maturity with
“the incipient wrinkles, the little chicken feet at the corners of the lids” (Atwood 2009: 480-481).
The setting of the painting is a snow covered field which resembles the place where Cordelia,
Grace and Carol left her to freeze. The painting displays an element which resembles the convex
mirror from the “The Arnolfini Marriage”.
Behind my half-head, in the center of the picture, in the empty sky, a pier glass is
hanging, convex and encircled by an ornate frame, In it, a section of the back of
my head is visible; but the hair is different, younger.[…] At a distance, and
condensed by the curved space of the mirror, there are three small figures, dressed
in the winter clothing of the girls of forty years ago. They walk forward, their
faces shadowed, against a field of snow (Atwood 2009: 480-481).
This literary depiction of an imaginary work of art uncovers the connection between past
and present and it reveals more clearly the role of memory in the construction of selfhood. The
three small figures are identified with Elaine’s childhood friends and tormentors, namely
Cordelia, Grace Smeath and Carol. It represents a defining moment of her childhood surfacing
on canvas. In it, the figure that faces its potential viewer is adult Elaine and in the convex mirror
is her younger version whose back is reflected. It is an example of a work of art which cannot be
50
considered either spatial or temporal. Spatiality and temporality can blend rendering obsolete the
Western –produced binary opposition between the two concepts. Mitchell claims that “painting
expresses temporal action indirectly, by means of bodies; poetry represents bodily forms
indirectly, by means of actions” (1986: 101) and insists that “ works of art, like all other object of
human experience, are structures in space-time, and that the interesting problem is to
comprehend a particular spatial-temporal construction, not to label it as temporal or spatial”
(1986: 103). In this sense, in “Cat’s Eye” painting, the co-dependence between temporality and
spatiality is indicated by the setting (the snow field where she was left to freeze) and the bodies
(the three girls who were dressed like the girls from the forties, their form indicating that they
were the three friends from her past who left her to freeze in the snow).
In addition to revealing the central position which visual products hold within Western
society, Atwood focuses on personal photographs. This type of photograph does not require as
much planning as a commercial photograph does. It is taken for the purpose of recording
memorable but personal events, or to be reminded of the loved ones. Susan Sontag holds that
“photographs are more memorable than moving images, because they are a neat slice of time, not
a flow” (2005: 13) and “each still photograph is a privileged moment, turned into a slim object
that one can keep and look at again” (2005: 13). The photo album helps Elaine fill in some
blanks that she had in relation to the formative events of her childhood; for example what was
happening during the time when she got her first camera. Even though a personal photograph is
less staged than a commercial photograph, because the photographer does not need to take into
consideration market demands and other social conditions which come along with the production
of a commercial picture, what appears on the plain surface is not an example of authenticity. The
photographer knows in advance what he/she wants to include in the picture. In relation to this,
Elaine tells the reader that before she presses the button she thinks “about how each picture will
look like” (Atwood 2009: 64).
While she browses through her photo album, Elaine sees her brother getting ready for a
snowball fight. After she goes through other photos from the album, she correlates her brother’s
gestures of calling her to a snowball fight with how Christmas time was celebrated in her family.
These passages go hand in hand with Woolf’s explanation of a photograph’s effect on our
minds; it testifies to the fact that “As the eye is connected to the brain [and] the brain to the
nervous system, this system sends it’s messages in a flash through every past memory and
51
present feeling” (Woolf qtd. in Sontag 2004: 24). At this stage of her narration, between
remembering one of her Christmas celebrations and pondering on her childhood as a whole,
Elaine adds another picture to the story, one which was taken at a more mature stage of her life.
By doing so, she sees her evolution and recognizes her younger self as “a poorer, farther away,
ignorant version” of herself (2009: 64). Through these takes on the relation between photography
and memory, Atwood insists that there are gaps and other layers of reality which remain to be
found. For this reason, in Cat’s Eye, what happens beyond the frames of a photograph is exactly
what matters in the search for finding how identity has been built. Thus, the photographs help her
remember events and people, not because of their accurate representations of the way things
were but because of their resemblance to reality as some of the features of the subjects which are
photographed have a recognizable form.
The memory of childhood events which appear in Elaine’s visual pieces mirrors the
connection between temporality and spatiality in an artwork, as the painting “Cat’s Eye” which
was described in the paragraphs from above demonstrates. This echoes the idea from of the
novel’s first passages that time has a spatial dimension. This literary perspective on time stands
as a metaphoric rendering for the act of remembering. It also stands as a metaphor for the act of
looking deeper into the unconscious mind to find the memories and the events from the past
which were influential in one’s development:
But I began then to think of time as having a shape, something you could see, like
a series of liquid transparencies, one laid one top of another. You don’t look back
along time down though it, like water. Sometimes this comes to surface,
sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away(Atwood 2009: 1).
After going through childhood images and reevaluating her artwork, Elaine realized that
she had a series of mental pictures of how her life should evolve and what should happen at a
particular moment in time. The final tone is one of acceptance and the message is similar to Lady
Oracle, namely that we go through different experiences and our desires are gradually being
neutralized as life prevents us from transferring them into the real world: “This is what I miss,
Cordelia: not something that’s gone but something that will never happen. Two old women
giggling over their tea” (Atwood 2009: 498). In the end, after an examination of herself in
52
various instances from her life, Elaine was able to articulate the regrets which were submerged in
her unconscious.
In conclusion, the main character and narrator’s reflections on visual culture emphasize
its formative abilities. Cat’s Eye reveals that memory is the cognitive process through which
self-awareness is achieved because it implies the re-assessment of the external influences which
interfered in the formation of the main character and narrator’s identity.
4. Challenging Cultural Conditioning and Visual Images of Femininity in
Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing
By focusing on Atwood’s Surfacing, in this chapter I will discuss the importance of
challenging recurrent visual representations which are put forward by Western society’ s media.
As revealed by the condition of Surfacing’ s main character, such representations trigger feelings
of alienation and give rise to a crisis of identity. The main character and narrator of the novel
evolves from steering the course of her work by culturally acceptable patterns to going through a
process of renewal in nature. Additionally, as suggested in this novel, originality in an individual
emerges after the normative rules of behavior and appearance are being questioned.
One of the practices within Western contemporary culture which Atwood brings forward
through Surfacing is imitation: the copies of copies which are fabricated through commercial
production and the imitation of those commercial products which is carried on by each
individual. When the narrator arrives at her home town, she passes by the place of an old family
friend who owned a bar. In a visible location of this bar, he placed a photograph of a picturesque
scenery where there was a stream and a man fishing( 1979: 17). In reference to this photograph,
the narrator tells the reader that:
It's an imitation of other places, more southern ones, which are themselves
imitations, the original someone's distorted memory of a nineteenth century
English gentleman's shooting lodge, the kind with trophy heads and furniture
made from deer antlers, Queen Victoria had a set like that. But if this is what
succeeds why shouldn't they do it(1979: 17)?
53
From the narrator’s perspective, photographs are a form of confinement. Before she
begins her cleansing process, she burns her family photo album describing how “the imitation
mother and father is turning to ashes” (1979: 130) and judging the photographs as “confining”
(1979: 130). Moreover, she tells the reader, at the beginning of her trip, that she used to “hate
standing still waiting for the click” (1979: 48) and after viewing her photo album she sees in it
“successive incarnations” (1979: 48) of herself. According to Susan Sontag, “to possess reality in
the form of images is, precisely, to re-experience unreality and remoteness of the real” (2005:
120), and the act of “deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another,
photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects” (2005: 4). Because they imply
poses, photographs have a substantial influence in the convention-making process and through
them the experience of reality becomes fainter. In this context of images produced by everlasting
conventions, the narrator’ s search to find her father transforms itself into a search for answers
into what it means to be an individual. In addition, the trip is full of attempts on her part to find a
self which would make her feel more satisfied, for “something [she] could recognize as
[herself]” (1979: 65). The visual images which formed her identity are brought forward so as to
be questioned. The theme of the return to one’s birthplace appears in Cat’s Eye as well. The trip
back home has the same function as in Surfacing, it stands for the uncovering of memories which
remained in the main character and narrator’s unconscious. The reader cannot identify the
narrator by any name and because the novel begins with a series of self-doubts and with a hardly
explainable feeling of melancholia, namelessness stands for the narrator’s lack of self-awareness.
By remembering and thinking about her past, the main character succeeds in surpassing the
dissatisfaction related to her life choices. Furthermore, by relinquishing the artificiality (which,
in fact, brought her to her present state) in favor of nature, or of a place in nature where the
presence of humans has been scarce, she is able to move forward with a more serene state of
mind.
This experience represents also a psychological journey into unknown places of the main
character and narrator’ s mind. Sue Thomas briefly describes in her article “Mythic
Reconception and the Mother/Daughter Relationship in Margaret Atwood's Surfacing” the
main objectives and purposes of the novel, namely the laying bare of the “psychological
processes, maturational crises and cultural conditioning which may lay waste the sexual selfexpression of women” while “draw[ing] together psychological, cultural and mythic dimensions
54
of human experience in her contemporary culture” (74). Cultural conditioning is the key term
with which I am concerned in this chapter because it encompasses the visual culture which
conditioned the main character’s development and not only hers.
In Western culture, children’s stories lay the foundation of a person’s identity as they
provide the early lessons one receives. Consequently, the novel places a high amount of
emphasis on them. The fact that the narrator designs the illustrations for fairy tale books is not
incidental, as it is a method to underline the ways in which cultural patterns are embedded in
one’s identity. It is suggested that for the sake of the profit which enabled her to continue with
her work she had to imitate, or, in other words, to conform to some social expectations that
provided the patterns which she had to follow in creating her work:” then I turn back to my
work, my deadline, the career I suddenly found myself having, I didn't intend to but I had to find
something I could sell”(Atwood 1979: 35).
In this novel, Atwood equates consumerism with Americanism where from the viewpoint
of the novel and its main character “ Americans are both perpetrators and products of a
‘laminated’ and debased culture” (Thomas 74). The novel gives another instance of commercial
mechanisms and the production of artistic works within commercial culture. As an artist who had
to produce works in this field, the narrator talks about the compromise she had to make in order
for her works to be marketable.
So I compromised; now I compromise before I take the work in, it saves time. I've
learned the sort of thing he wants: elegant and stylized, decoratively coloured, like
patisserie cakes. I can do that, I can imitate anything: fake Walt Disney, Victorian
etchings in sepia, Bavarian cookies, ersatz Eskimo for the home market. Though
what they like best is something they hope will interest the English and American
publishers too( 1979: 35-36).
By choosing a commercial artist as the main character and narrator of the novel, Atwood
shows, in a similar manner to Cat’s Eye, the mechanism behind the production of an artwork.
The work of Surfacing’s narrator involves more compromise from the part of the main character
seeing that it is related to commercialism to a higher degree than Elaine’s work. She paints
around what she reads. Her paintings are born out of her interpretation of the fairy tale but that
interpretation is socially mediated. The manner in which the narrator tells us how she carries on
55
with her work proves what Berger theorized in Ways of Seeing that the way we see things is
affected by what we know or what we believe which in turn is conditioned by society(2008: 8).
What the narrator has to reproduce is not taken from the world around her, it is taken from
another entity’s view on the world (“the fake Walt Disney, the Victorian etchings in sepia”).
According to Berger, “an image is a sight that has been recreated or reproduced” (2008: 9). With
this observation in mind, one of the aims of the novel is to identify the social influences in the
production of a visual piece. The narrator draws the female figure in one of her illustrations with
a body that fits within social patterns: “I outline a princess, an ordinary one, emaciated fashionmodel torso and infantile face, like those I did for ‘Favourite Fairy Tales’” (1979: 36).
Incongruously, the effects of fairy tales are articulated by Anna, the character who more
often than not internalizes the patriarchal values which are ascribed to women. The contrast
between Anna’ s contemplation of the status of a woman in her society and her actions is evident
in the lines where she tells the narrator that parents should not let their children read stories about
princesses that end up married and move into a castle: “‘Did you believe that stuff when you
were little?’ she says. ‘I did, I thought I was really a princess and I'd end up living in a castle.
They shouldn't let kids have stuff like that.’”(1979: 39). After her musings on this subject, she
falls into narcissistic act of looking in the mirror and arranging her face.
As Berger points out, there is a long tradition in visual arts that could be traced to the 15th
century where women are encouraged to be participants in their own objectification(2008: 1).
Vanity is presented as a feminine characteristic and narcissistic acts are associated with the
female gender. Two of the examples that he provides show the paintings’ female characters
gazing at the mirror. In relation to this, Berger argues that mirrors have been used as a symbol of
vanity in women and through the act of gazing at their own images they became “spectators of
[themselves]” (Berger 2008: 50) which meant that women “conniv[ed] in treating [themselves]
as, first and foremost, a sight” (Berger 2008: 51). Thus, in the case of Surfacing’s character
Anna, she stands before the reader as a product of these representations.
The problematic of the pose reveals that visual images of publicity are the product of
social knowledge and of a common understanding of how a person should act or appear, in
screen or in day-to-day life. Looking at her album, the nameless narrator feels revulsion towards
“imitation mother” and father. Later on in the novel, David initiates a cinematic project called
Random Samples and asks Anna to pose nude for it which she finally does despite her
56
disagreement. In this case, the one which claims to produce an artwork, arranges a pose for the
model of the artwork from which it expected to gain an audience that is attuned to the
sexualization of the female body. Anna’s condition reveals that:
In the case of an artist’s model, she and her pose are directed towards someoneintially toward a creator and ultimately, towards a larger audience. The audience,
in countless subtle ways, is attuned to the artist’ s treatment of the model,
wondering, for example about the “faithfulness” of a given rendering or the
artist’s emotional investment in the representation and its source. As a human
being in the studio or the presence in the painting, the model is connected to both
artist and audience (Steiner 2010: 12).
From this quote, one can establish that the efforts of those who create visual images
within mass media are put into satisfying an audience. The nude presence in a film will draw
attention especially to its sexualized form. The images which form gender identity belong to the
shared cultural and social understanding of femininity and masculinity concepts. In relation to
this, a feminist approach will pinpoint to the fact that:
the meaning of a written message, a visual image, or an auditory sound bite rests
not in the thing itself but instead in us—the reader, the viewer, the listener. We
are the ones who make meaning through a complex and mediated relationship
with things (real or imagined objects, people, events, ideas), the concepts we hold
of these things, and the language we use to communicate such concepts
(Alvermann 1999: 142).
Atwood shows the reader that fashion models act as role models for teenage girls. Those
images of culturally and socially accepted feminine beauty pervade the imaginary of the young
main character and it is evident that consumerism has taken control of her life beginning with her
teenage years. With reference to the adolescent stage of the narrators’ life, Sue Thomas explains
that the character’ s scrapbook from that period contained “no original drawings, merely
illustrations culled uncritically from magazines and pasted in”(80-81). I argue that, while the
illustrations she included in the scrapbook were not original, the whole arrangement was meant
to express and represent her personality. Thus, the question which is being raised is: Does any
57
originality exist in an individual? When Berger describes the collages which can be found in
adults or children’s rooms he says that “all the images belong to the same language and all are
more or less equal within it because they have been chosen in a highly personal way to match
and express the experience of the room’s inhabitant” (2008: 30). The same happens in the case of
Elaine’s collages on her mother. When she puts together the collage which represented the
mental image that she had with regard to her mother she uses the same material as the narrator
from Surfacing( cuttings from magazines) which proves that the individual is molded by the
images of a consumerist society. In Atwood’ s novels, characters are a mosaic of images drawn
from both high and popular culture and the visual representation of people through a collage or
“culling” of such images is in itself original because it is the product of one’s perspective of the
world which was made in a personal manner.
The question of identity and originality is further problematized. The first point that
Atwood puts forward by means of Surfacing is that the quest for originality is based on
renouncing embodied stereotypes. As Wendy Steiner points out, “focusing on the model as a
human being is a way to disentangle the notion of model from that of stereotype and commercial
product” (2010: 91). The narrator and main character succeeded in breaking free from
stereotypes by seeking refuge in nature. After she goes through all the images from her
childhood, adolescent years and even her adult years, the images which she embodied, the
patterns which she considered and the icons which she admired, she realizes that she is
overwhelmed by the artifice which began to represent her life and that she was giving up her
self-esteem for some absorbing representations which she disrelished. The symbolism of the
color red was analyzed by Sue Thomas in comparison with the pale faces of the women shown
on the pages of magazines. She argues that the princesses from the narrator’s artwork “look
bland and pretty; and anaemically lack the red associated with blood, anger and passion [which
are] held sacred in the Amerindian culture” (81). Based on chromatics, the main character and
narrator establishes a hierarchy of fruits: “There is one late strawberry, I find it among the matted
weeds and suckers. Red foods, heart colour, they are the best kind, they are sacred; then yellow,
then blue; green foods are mixed from blue and yellow” (131). Sue Thomas continues to
underline the contrast between devotion to nature and the blind dedication to consumerist
practices as she argues that “the fashion model poses constrain women’s natural bodies” (81).
During the moments when she has not yet learned about the advantages of connecting with
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nature, the narrator is shown in a state of moral decline, lacking energy or a positive view of the
world. Furthermore, the elements which existed before the artifice created by humans are
important for the purpose of solving such a crisis of identity. For the narrator, the colors red, blue
and yellow are sacred and the colors which result from their blending are on a lower level in her
hierarchy. The idea of going back to a state which existed before codes and rules is found in
Kristeva’ s theory as well. However, in this case, the theory is related mainly to language. She
argues that the forced separation between the semiotic and the symbolic brings about
melancholic feelings in a subject; the semiotic being the expressing of one’s feelings through
instinctual drives and the symbolic being the language which is based on codes and rules (Barrett
2011: 163-164).
The moment of awareness comes when she starts inquiring into the roles which she
followed so far. First of all, she analyzes them and after a process of self-examination, she
confronts them. At the end, she needs to retreat into nature, to a place which by definition is
untouched by human artifice. The climate in which her parents raised her was intended to be as
free from artifice as possible as her mother hated the glamour which the main character wanted
to achieve when she was young: "You don't need that here," I say, "there's no one to look at you"
My mother's phrase, used to me once when I was fourteen; she was watching, dismayed, as I
covered my mouth with Tango Tangerine. I told her I was just practicing” (1979: 29). The
narrator’s mother was the character who was closest to nature. She sought all her life to distance
herself and her daughter from unnaturalness. When the narrator told her that she was not coming
to her funeral she declared that she did not like them, hinting that their staginess represented, in
her view, an unpleasant aspect:” ‘I never enjoyed them,’ she said to me, one word at a time. ‘You
have to wear a hat. I don't like liquor’”(Atwood 1979: 13). In an earlier instance of the narrator’s
life, when she was putting together her collages, her mother expressed disapproval at the fact that
she is trying to embody the artifice of magazines and fashion models.
While the narrator is browsing through her childhood’s scrapbooks, the light is shed on
two main themes. Firstly, she presents the socially created male and female values whereby boys
are drawn to warfare and mechanical things and girls are more attracted to family life, marriage
and domestic activities. To exemplify, her brother’s scrapbook from when he was a boy
contained “explosions in red and orange, soldiers dismembering in the air, planes and tanks”
(1979: 65). While her scrapbook was packed with illustrations from magazines with “ladies of all
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kinds: holding up cans of cleanser, knitting, smiling, modelling toeless high heels and nylons
with dark seams and pillbox hats and veils” (1979: 65). Secondly, the effect of consumerism on
the female buyer of magazines is deeper as the Surfacing’ s main character and narrator reveals.
As a child she eagerly took in the icons which she saw in magazines, “ladies in exotic costumes,
sausage rolls of hair across their foreheads, with puffed red mouths and eyelashes like toothbrush
bristles: when I was ten I believed in glamour, it was a kind of religion and these were my icons”
(Atwood 1979: 28). As an adult, the narrator describes the pose of the fashion models which she
adored during her childhood: “one gloved hand over the hip, one foot stuck out in front”
(Atwood 1979: 28). It is important to note that these representations were passed forward
through the various visual media because, next to fairy tales, they were also a defining force in
the life of a teenage girl. In Surfacing, such followers of “glamour religion” (which are not only
the teenagers, as the character of Anna proves), take these images as their main source of life
lessons. The internalization of social norms regarding feminine beauty is proven by what Wendy
Steiner holds in The Real Real Thing when she says that:
A life model typically constructs herself as an image, however much the artist
may feel he is the one posing her and determining what aspects of her will be
represented. Many models invent their own poses, dress themselves for the studio
sessions, choose their makeup and hairdo-in short, fashion themselves as the
image to be rendered (2010: 22).
Although one can say that there is a trace of agency/self-determination in some female
models’ choice of pose, they contribute in the idealization of the female body and appearance.
The narrator distanced herself from the representations of the feminine ideal which were found in
magazines. In comparison, Anna displays the same conduct as the narrator had as a teenager. She
is described by her as: “a seamed and folded imitation of a magazine picture that is itself an
imitation of a woman who is also an imitation, the original nowhere” (1979: 121). By
referencing this character earlier in the novel, the narrator states that she never saw her face
without make up: “shorn of the pink cheeks and heightened eyes her face is curiously battered, a
worn doll's, her artificial face is the natural one” (1979: 29). Thus, in the society whose rules and
inner workings exhaust the main character, artificiality is presented as a natural state. It is hard in
such conditions to distinguish what comes down naturally from what is socially conditioned.
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As the main character and narrator is in search of an original self, Anna moves further
away from it. The distinction between the narrator and Anna is that the latter continues to
heedlessly follow the patterns of a consumerist society while the narrator questions them. It is
not only the consumerist society which is put in limelight in these passages, it is also the
collective fantasy of the “captive princess.” Atwood uses a play of words whereby she describes
Anna as “a captive princess in someone’s head” (1979: 121). Apart from being a reference to the
Rapunzel or Snow White types of stories, it is also a manner of saying that she will always
embody and be viewed as the princess cliché, exemplifying the embodiment of mental images
regarding femininity.
The patterns of female images are drawn from what would be called the yesteryear of
visual art, only that in this case, the term is inapplicable because aspects of such visual
representations found their way into the present mass media. The comparison which Berger
makes in Ways of Seeing, between traditional paintings and contemporary visual images of
publicity is evident in Cat´s Eye as well: the Pre-Raphaelite features. He says that publicity is
“nostalgic” and that it propagates through images the consumer´s society beliefs and if they “are
used in a strictly contemporary language” they “would lack both confidence and credibility”
(2008: 139). Berger puts in the limelight the similarities between traditional paintings and the
images of advertising. He shows us that the stereotypes of women are being continued. To
exemplify, two of his pictures put forward the posture of women which has an iconic status in
fashion. In Surfacing, the narrator mentions the representations she could find during her teenage
years on the pages of magazines, pointing out to the typical “leg in front” posture. Berger traces
this tendency of representing femininity back to the tradition of paintings which focused on
mythology. Glamour, as we´ve seen in Cat´s Eye, needs to have connections to the past, to
traditional concepts of femininity where ideas for what it means to be a man or a woman are
generated through stereotypes.
As I have established above, in Surfacing, there is an intense analysis of Western
society’s involvement with reproduced images which are seen as devoid of emotion. Basing her
book on Kristeva’ s perspective on art and psychoanalysis, Estelle Barrett informs the reader that
in this society “ ‘new maladies of the soul’ have emerged in response to the “empty spectacle
and the bombardment of readymade images” (2011: 77). Throughout the first part of the novel,
the character struggles with a sense of disappointment and dissatisfaction which is not clearly
61
stated for the reason that she cannot pinpoint the source and motives for this feeling. As she
begins to get further apart from the society which influenced the largest part of her life, she is
able to feel a sense of renewal. Kristeva holds that the artwork is a response to the human
condition in a contemporary Western society. Through her analysis of Kristeva’s book Black
Sun, Barrett argues that:
for the artist it is not a matter of illustrating grief, but of making an artwork out of
it, and in doing so restoring and renewing the subject and interpretations of
experience(2011: 77).
The novel works to large extent with the imagery of the woman brushing her hair while
being seated in front of a mirror. It describes the act of scrutinizing one’s physique. At the end of
the novel, the main character refuses to see her reflection and is full of despise towards the act of
arranging herself. This was part of the renewal process as it happened before she immersed
herself in water:
But when I pick up the brush there is a surge of fear in my hand, the power is
there again in a different form, it must have seeped up through the ground during
the lightning. I know that the brush is forbidden, I must stop being in the mirror. I
look for the last time at my distorted glass face: eyes lightblue in dark red skin,
hair standing tangled out from my head, reflection intruding between my eyes and
vision. Not to see myself but to see. I reverse the mirror so it's toward the wall, it
no longer traps me, Anna's soul closed in the gold compact, that and not the
camera is what I should have broken(1979: 129).
She stops focusing on her appearance and begins to concentrate on her relation with the
rest of the world (“Not to see myself but to see”), to realize what her role within society is. The
narrator is a commercial artist which, in light of the nameless character’ s description of her job’s
requirements, points to the fact that she is a pawn in the myth-making3 process of Western
tradition: “I'm what they call a commercial artist, or, when the job is more pretentious, an
illustrator. I do posters, covers, a little advertising and magazine work and the occasional
3
The term was used by Roland Barthes to explain the “production of social knowledge through the manipulation
of the sign” (which in broad terms can be an image, or a word)(Barthes qtd. in White 2000: 29).
62
commissioned book like this one” (1979: 35). She provides the visual details which help
proliferate the cultural ideals of Western mass cultured society. For this reason, the novel has
been regarded by one critic as being a case in point for “the implications of the artist in the mythmaking process” (Brown qtd. in Gupta 2006: 31).Western myths are analyzed through the lens of
fairy-tale production because within it one can find some of the strategies of Western society’s
myth making process. It is important to note and to remind people about the elements which are
left out when myths are being created. The narrator makes us aware of the fact that in fairy-tales
some basic human functions are not represented, an illustration which further on reveals the
Western habit of polishing and hiding aspects of human lives that are considered displeasing:
Earlier they annoyed me, the stories never revealed the essential things about
them, such as what they ate or whether their towers and dungeons had bathrooms,
it was as though their bodies were pure air. It wasn't Peter Pan's ability to fly that
made him incredible for me, it was the lack of an outhouse near his underground
burrow(1979: 36).
In Surfacing, the reader sees that these feelings are set in motion by cultural factors. Such
factors halt the freedom of expression and artificially separate the pleasing from the displeasing,
sanity from madness, putting such concepts within clearly defined boundaries which more often
than not are of visual nature: the mental image of a mad person includes a certain features such
as a messy hair, or the mental image of a beautiful woman includes make-up, slim figure and so
on. Such contentions reveal that the mind can be trained to see and then perceive the world in a
culturalized manner. In the passages below, the narrator foresees that the state in which she was
when she came back from the woods would be subject to criticism:
They would never believe it’s only a natural woman, state of nature, they think of
that as a tanned body on a beach with washed hair waving like scarves; not this,
face dirt-caked and streaked, skin grimed and scabby, hair like a frayed bath-mat
stuck with leaves and twigs. Anew kind of centerfold(Atwood 1979: 140).
In this light, the narrator’ s difficulty in figuring out the sketches based on Indian rock
paintings is explainable: Western systems of representation have a different form than the Indian
ones and the cultural codes that influence our knowledge of the world vary and as this varies the
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way we see a picture is diversified. Hence, the narrator inclined to move further away from one
system of knowledge into another that was unfamiliar to the one she was used to. The paintings
which she wanted to understand were the product of a social and cultural knowledge which was
not hers. To interpret the pictures, the main character needed a historical account. For her it was
a non-Western art which needed to be put in Western terms. In this case, it was her father who
imposed explanations on pictures. Very influential in his thought pattern were his main subjects
of interest, geometry and arithmetic:
he taught us arithmetic, our mother taught us to read and write. Geometry, the
first thing I learned was how to draw flowers with compasses, they were like acid
patterns. Once they thought you could see God that way but all I saw was
landscapes and geometrical shapes(1979: 75).
Her father was in the habit of measuring and making calculations and represented the
world from a purely mathematical and strict perspective. Reality was measured in the images and
pictures which could be explained in clear-cut terms. What did not have boundaries,
measurements and what could not be explained in the light of conventions did not exist. Thus, in
Western imaginary, an image must be describable through a known linguistic system in order to
obtain validity. In relation to this, Mitchell notes that:
Images which are regulated by the ideal purposes of language, by the rule of
judgment and prosaic difference, will be “clear and distinct” (Mitchell 1986: 122).
Through his treatment of Indian rock paintings, the narrator’s father displays a tendency
of putting prevalent cultural forms/products of Native Americans and European into distinct
categories, as he notes that: “The static rigidity is in marked contrast to the rock paintings of
other cultures, most notably the European cave paintings” (1979: 74). In connection to this, it is
necessary to mention Mitchell’s table which charts Locke’s theory of imagery where
resemblance and difference, images and words, obscure images and clear images (122).
The realm of prose and discursive values turns out to be aligned with clear,
distinct ideas or mental pictures, and the realm of poetry and fancy that
proliferates these images seems to cancel itself out by producing images that
cannot be seen (Mitchell 1986: 123).
64
In the same chapter the author includes Edmund Burke’s counter arguments to Locke’s
theory, whereby, through the act of “making resemblances we produce new images, we unite, we
create,[…]but in making distinctions we offer no food at all to the imagination” (Burke qtd. in
Mitchell 1986: 123). The obscurity which the narrator’s father perceived in images comes from
the absence of a system of knowledge through which one could relate to such images. The
ethnocentrism and the preoccupation with sticking to conventions make the understanding of
these images harder. Mitchell uses the term “ethnocentric projection”, “ a fantasy devised to
secure a conviction that our [i.e. the images of the Western tradition] images are free from any
taint of superstition, fantasy or compulsive behavior” (1986: 91). Thus, on the basis of this quote,
he proposes to look closely at cultural values and to keep an open mind to the idea that a Western
evaluation of various cultures is the product of a through and through ethnocentric perspective.
In addition to an ethnocentric perspective, there is a tendency in Western culture to
suppress natural inclinations with the “symbolic order”. Following the psychoanalythical
theories of Lacan, French psychoanalysts like Kristeva and Irigaray aim to reveal the importance
of a “ language that simulates a return to the Imaginary in its subversion of the intervening
Symbolic order” (Hengen 1993: 30). As Kristeva noted: “Language as a symbolic function
constitutes itself at the cost of repressing instinctual drives and continuous relation to the
mother” (Kristeva qtd. in Hengen 1993: 32). The narrator and main character went through such
a process of repression, seeing that as growing up she dismissed her mother’s interventions. Her
mother was a character that criticized the artifices of the surrounding social rituals and mass
cultural factors. The description of hunted and murdered animals and the exploitation of land, as
it is seen in the passages where the narrator realizes she cannot find one of the drawings marked
on the map because the water level was artificially raised through the construction of dams, is
representative of the Western drive to impose the symbolic over the semiotic, or in other words,
to impose its rules over a more natural development. In Carol Ann Howells’ words,” Surfacing
might be read not only as a psychological and spiritual quest but also as the record of a gendered
quest for a new language which is more responsive to an organic conceptualization of reality” (
Howells qtd. in Bruckner 2006: 77). In Surfacing, all things related to nature are separate from
the symbolic order and from the system of knowledge which holds center stage in the Western
society. As the narrative evolves and as the narrator gradually feels her complicity in the
exploitation of all things speechless, she begins to resemble the type of artist Kristeva lauds; the
65
one “who consciously seeks the verbal and visual means to reveal what is not contained in the
established discourses” (Barrett 2011: 32). The words unspoken or the images which cannot be
seen represent the focus of the narrator’s story. As she concentrates on the things she finds hard
to interpret or the memories which discarded before the trip, she begins to have a different
understanding of the difference between illusion and reality. Only at the end of the novel, the
memory of the narrator’s abortion surfaces as she trains herself to separate fake memories from
actual occurrences and their effects on her psyche:
It was all real enough, it was enough reality for ever, I couldn't accept it, that
mutilation, ruin I'd made, I needed a different version. I pieced it together the best
way I could, flattening it, scrapbook, collage, pasting over the wrong parts. A
faked album, the memories fraudulent as passports; but a paper house was better
than none and I could almost live in it, I'd lived in it until now (1979: 105).
She doesn’t know which thoughts belong to herself, a condition which raises in her the
feeling of powerlessness. During the trip back to her hometown, she realizes that there has come
a time when she has to separate what others’ think and what she thinks. The feeling of power is
unknown to her and she cannot fully grasp it. Power in this case is exercised when it can be
applied to one’s own life. In relation to this, the narrator in the story, at every glance into the
moment when she did the abortion, she is divided between feelings of guilt at her own decision
of doing it and powerlessness in the face of her lover’s coercion. Only at the end, is she
determined to shed off the victim behavior and old patterns of belief to realize that she was an
active participant in the development of her life.
Atwood describes the effect of cultural codes on the process of understanding and
interpreting an image ( a painting of any sort). As I mentioned earlier, the narrator’s producer
insisted for her to copy the style and form of previous commercial works which were done in
relation to fairy-tales for them to be more admissible by the public. At the end of the novel, the
narrator provides another depiction of this effect, when she grapples with the interpretation of the
Indian rock paintings which were copied on paper by her father. The symbolical references were
distant from her understanding as they broke a certain pattern which she followed when she was
seeing and understanding a certain artwork. The paintings were Indian and as such they
contained symbols which related to a culture which was foreign to Western viewer. While
66
retreating into the forest, the narrator goes further away from her culture and immerses into
another environment which she knows little about. In other words, she leaves behind something
she knows and something which so far defined her identity in order to go through a different
formative experience. In conventional terms, the final acts of the narrator can be interpreted as a
switch to mad state but there are consistent explanations which serve to show the revelatory
nature of her actions. In the novel “the only cure […]is the journey of self-discovery: down and
through the darkness of the divided self to the undifferentiated wholeness of archaic
consciousness-and back” (Rubenstein qtd. in Bouson 1993: 55). These passages put across the
idea that the self is divided into the necessity of abiding by the status quo and the inclination to
find new perspectives and world views.
In conclusion, Surfacing presents a crisis of identity where the subject lacks control over
her life. I argue that the main character needed to distance herself from the consumerist society
in order for her to go through the renewing process at the end of the novel. She could not achieve
this soul purging through her visual work because it had been influenced since the beginning of
her career by consumerism and by the custom built images which, in turn, she had to reproduce.
5. Conclusion
Visual culture is seen in the three novels as a key player in the formation of gender
identity and selfhood. The characters are exposed to a world of images through which ideas on
how to behave, look and feel circulate at a fast pace. In those images the visible elements which
appear on the plain surface are not as important as what can be found outside the frames.
Individuals hold in high esteem the presence of images as theories of ocularcentrism have
showed so far. Atwood’ s fiction displays her awareness of this condition which is typical of
contemporary culture. As a result, her novels and short fiction show the readers that social
organization and practices are expressed through images and by looking at them closely one will
find explanations and answers about one’s individuality.
Intermediality and the interrelationship between words and images appear in Atwood’s
novels as a significant strategy for getting a clearer view on what forms selfhood in present-day
societies. As we have seen, especially in Lady Oracle, the way images are constructed make the
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individual feel insignificant. Most importantly, they pass along concepts which bridle the
freedom of expression of the female character. They surround her as they play with and are
based on cultural codes which give them authority. As suggested by the readings above, the most
important thing to note in relation to our readiness to embody the images that we see in the world
around us is that we think of ourselves in images.
The three novels are literary renderings of the significant effects which the act of
unleashing memory has. It helps the character to let go of negative feelings and it brings selfawareness as well as spiritual relief. In Lady Oracle the events from Joan’s past are full of visual
material which she took in because feelings of inappropriateness arose as she placed herself in
comparison to the surrounding (visual) representations. In the case of Cat’s Eye, where the
narrator is a visual artist, the recollection of events appears on canvas. On the other hand,
Surfacing deals more with cultural patterns which influenced her childhood and adult life while
providing examples of the visual culture which includes and makes them proliferate.
In order to reveal the role of visual culture in the process of remembering past events and
figures, I have argued that memory serves to re-assess the influence of the visual media in the
main characters and narrators’ lives. Retrospection and introspection are two psychological
processes which bring into existence the narrators and main characters’ self-awareness.
Another significant theme that arises from the chapters above is the common shared
knowledge in Western society that what is recognizable as reality is in fact, reality. Photography,
as we have seen, is the exemplifying mechanism that represents and at the same time, hides the
truth. It is not reality as a whole, it is a person’s interpretation of reality. Cat’s Eye shows the
reader that the photographer chooses the aspect from the outside world which she wants to
appear in her photographs. As it has been established in the first chapter of the dissertation, the
techniques of photographing show that the photographer stages the picture that he/she wants to
be seen by the public. When it comes to representing female identity, Lady Oracle shows the
reader that features of femininity which appear in publicity images are limiting and do not offer
many opportunities for the female subject to construct a more complex identity: she is taught by
her mother that nobody cares about the people who do not fit into established patterns of
personal appearance.
Mirror gazing is represented as an act of vanity which is conditioned by society. Joan’s
mother focuses at every step on her and her daughter’ s outward aspects and wants to alter them
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in order to make them fit mainstream expectations, as defined and promoted in visual culture. In
Surfacing, Anna is consumed with her own image-reflection and with the mental image that she
has of femininity and what she is supposed to embody. Based on these considerations, she
composes her look. However, in Cat’s Eye, mirror gazing triggers self-awareness when Elaine
looks at her reflection and realizes that she has been modeled by the mental image which her
boyfriend had of desirable features of femininity. Regardless of the different perspectives on
mirror gazing, the idea which comes across is that the characters have to look critically at the
world in order to recognize the patterns which are imposed on them.
As such, we are presented with a public which accepts the codes and conventions of
Western visual culture and the viewing subject must be taken into consideration when we speak
about the alienation of an individual in this society. Audience response is what the ones that
produce commercial art bear in mind. Through the characters’ consideration of their audience’s
response, Atwood renders the social influence on her main characters’ behavior and appearance.
Readers learn that her characters’ freedom to express themselves is counteracted with the
weapons of social norms. As such, Joan’ s body was subject to scrutinity and regulation by her
mother who was a consumer of publicity images, Elaine’ s behavior was controlled by her
childhood tormentors and the nameless character from Surfacing is required by her job to
reproduce readymade images.
Seeing that, in the makings of visual culture, some aspects are presented and some aspects
are left out, memory also serves to take a look at the things which the characters did not take into
consideration until the moment of remembering. Thus, the novels also contemplate the things
that are unseen, or the words that are not yet spoken. All three characters take a critical stance
toward the mass-produced representations within their culture. Joan looks at visual features of
mass culture and ponders on their effect; Elaine looks at them, considers their effects and re-uses
them in an original manner to create artwork.
I have argued that in the three novels the necessity for a different system of knowledge
and a different process of myth-making is being expressed. In the case of the three female
characters, the visual images which are created along patriarchal lines need to include different
discourses and representations. In Lady Oracle and Cat’ s Eye, the images which are considered
by a majority to be visual guidelines for behavior and appearance are re-considered by the main
69
characters who search beyond the pictures that come directly into sight and beyond preestablished manners of interpreting those pictures. In Surfacing this idea is most noticeable
because of the extensive change of perspective which the narrator undergoes. While at the
beginning she finds herself is a state of mental disarray, the experience in a convention-free
space brings about her awakening. At the end of Surfacing, the nature which has been overruled
by the artifice of humans stands as a source of inspiration.
All three characters enter unchartered territories and through their experiences Atwood
conveys the increasing need for change in visual conventions so as to suit more individuals.
Through my observations, arguments and analysis of Lady Oracle, Cat’s Eye and Surfacing, I
conclude that instead of helping to create new systems of knowledge and/or worldviews, the
present images of mass culture consolidate the traditional ones. From the perspective of gender
identity, new ways of producing visual representations will include more possibilities for the
female subject to express herself freely.
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6. Works Cited
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Atwood, Margaret. Surfacing. London: Virago Press, 1979.
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