Body as a Symbol of Oppression in Margaret Atwood’s ‘Lady Oracle’

Iplanned my death carefully, unlike my life, which meandered along from one thing to another, despite my feeble attempt to control it" (Atwood, 3).So arresting is the opening line of the novel that the reader is forced to contemplate on the reason that has driven the protagonist Joan Foster to plan her own death.As the novel progresses, it is revealed that she stages her death in order to escape from her past.A childhood that is fraught with insults by her mother and bullying by her friends Elizabeth, Marlene and Lynne, she confides in her husband Arthur that her mother named her after Joan Crawford.She cannot understand why her mother named her after her whether it was because she wanted her to be successful or destructive to men?When she was eight or nine years old, her mother reproached her, regretting the fact that she had named her after Joan Crawford.As Joan reflects, "my stomach would contract and plummet and I would be overcome with shame; I knew I was being reproached, but I"m still not sure, what for" (40).Even the sentimental act of going through the childhood albums,is marred by the realisation that her pictures stopped being taken when she was six years old and she feels, it was then that her mother gave up on her, she thought it was because it brought unpleasant memories for her mother to be reminded of, as she realised that Joan would not do.The next incident which rankles in the readers mind is an easily identifiable one.Joan used to attend a dancing school where a woman by the name of Miss Flegg, used to teach tap dancing and ballet.Her mother enrolled her in the hope that she would lose some of her puppy fat and because it was fashionable for seven-yearolds to attend such schools.For the Annual Spring Recital there were groups called Teenies, Tallers, Tensies, and Teeners (43).Joan was in the Teenies but as she writes herself, "I was a Teenie, which in ABSTRACT Margaret Atwood (1939-) is that gem of Canadian Literature who began writing at the early age of six.She is the author of over forty books and is a social activist and a keen environmentalist.The novel 'Lady Oracle' is in the form of an autobiography of the protagonist, Joan Foster, her journey from a young girl to an established writer.Her early childhood is filled with various incidents of body shaming mainly by her mother.The whole society looks upon slenderness as a virtue.The plump Joan is looked upon as an undisciplinedcreature.Leading a life of multiple identities, whether it is the colour of her hair or country of residence, or her choice of partners.She is forced to take up residencein an Italian hill town in order to analyse the pitfalls of her life.Her husband Arthur is a radical and she fears to reveal her writing to him mainly because she had been introduced to the concept of automatic writing through a lady called the Reverend Leda Sprott who had first informed Joan that she had huge powers and should try using them.Heavily influenced by her aunt whom she lovingly referred to as Aunt Lou, Joan spent some of her happiest times with her, where she was never made fun of, or reminded of her excess weight.Unfortunately, her aunt died and left Joan a sum of two thousand dollars, which she could get only if she lost a hundred pounds of her weight.Whether it was the money or her aunt's wish, Joan embarked on a journey of losingweight ,even to the extent ,that she assumed a new lifestyle as a writer and to escape from the past assumed the identity of her dead aunt.She was so upset with her past that she decided to stage her own death and escaped with her new identity to another place.However in an attempt to redeem her friends, Sam and Marlene who had helped her escape, but had been arrested on charges of murdering Joan, she is forced to return as her true self and confront the demons of her past.

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