Nearly thirty years have gone by since Nancy Chodorow published her pioneering work The Reproduction of Mothering (1978) and, unfortunately, the above-mentioned statement is still valid. The relevance of the “rule of force” as “an ever-present instrument of intimidation” (Millet 1979: 43) and control in a patriarchal society was already pointed out by Kate Millet in Sexual Politics, a leading text for feminist theory first published in 1971. As Anne Edwards argues in “Male Violence in Feminist Theory: an Analysis of the Changing Conceptions of Sex/Gender Violence and Male Dominance” (1987), since the date of Millet’s influential publication, the issue of male violence against women has been of central importance in feminist writing and political activity. Edwards states that in the early stages of second-wave feminism there was a predominance of analyses and activities which centered on specific types of male violence such as rape, domestic violence or incest. However, there has been a significant shift in feminist thinking towards male violence, as the later feminist theory approaches picture this issue as a “unitary phenomenon” (15); that is, male violence is viewed “as part of a general pattern or process” (22). In order to uncover the functioning of such process, this new feminist manner focuses on “social and cultural mechanisms for defining, shaping and constraining female (and male) sexuality as fundamental elements in male power over women and as of critical importance to patriarchy” (22). Among these cultural mechanisms or ideological forms Edwards includes motherhood.

 Chodorow, in an attempt to offer an explanation that could account for the fact that “in almost every society women are physically, politically, and/or economically dominated by men and are thought to be (and think themselves to be) inferior to men” (1989a: 23), first explored the psychological and cultural relevance of the mother-child dyad in male-dominant ideology in her essay “Being and Doing: A Cross-cultural Examination of the Socialization of Males and Females” (1971). Women are defined in this study as primary socialisers who have traditionally played an essential role in the differentiation that characterises masculine and feminine personalities. In a later essay entitled “Family Structure and Feminine Personality” (1974), Chodorow binds culture and personality anthropology with psychoanalytic sociology and sets forth the thesis she later develops in The Reproduction of Mothering. Following the premises of the object-relations psychoanalytic theory led by D. W. Winnicot, Chodorow considers that the boy’s or girl’s personality depends to a great extent on the kind of social relationships that the child experiences during his/her earliest infancy. Since the mother is considered the primary socialiser, the mother-child relationship is crucial to the infant’s later psychological development. To Chodorow, the reproduction of mothering should not be viewed as a biological practice but as a mechanism that “occurs through social structurally induced psychological processes” (1978: 7). This belief accounts for the fact that boys and girls experience the process of primary identification, separation and individuation in different ways:

Women, as mothers, produce daughters with mothering capacities and the desire to mother. These capacities and needs are built into and grow out of the mother-daugher relationship itself. By contrast, women as mothers (and men as not-mothers) produce sons whose nurturant capacities and needs have been systematically curtailed and repressed. This prepares men for their less affective later family role, and for primary participation in the impersonal extrafamilial world of work and public life. The sexual and familial division of labor in which women mother and are more involved in interpersonal, affective relationships than men produces in daughters and sons a division of psychological capacities which leads them to reproduce this sexual and familial division of labor. (7)

         In the light of Chodorow’s conclusions, which are strengthened in this particular point by Adrienne Rich’s definition of motherhood as a political institution that ensures that “all women shall remain under male control” (1986a: 13), the present essay argues that mothering, viewed as an ideological form, works as a social mechanism that, by adjusting to male-dominant assumptions, helps to perpetuate male abuse against women. Though the bond between mother and son is also of central importance in order to analyse the foundations of gender violence, the present study focuses on the ways the patriarchal relationship between mother and daughter functions as a pivotal element in a social organisation of gender where sexual inequality works as the basis of male violence against women.

Gender violence episodes constantly reproduce men’s dominance and women’s subordination. This basic, patriarchal power relation is one of the primary lessons that a daughter learns from a mother who has been in turn taught that her ultimate role in life is marriage and child-care. As Rich denounces, under the political institution of motherhood “all women are seen primarily as mothers; all mothers are expected to experience motherhood unambivalently and in accordance with patriarchal values; and the ‘nonmothering’ woman is seen as deviant” (1986b: 197). In Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere’s terms, “an emphasis on woman’s maternal role leads to a universal opposition between ‘domestic’ and ‘public’ roles that is necessarily asymmetrical” (1974: 8). Since nurturing belongs to the private realm, to a sphere which is relegated from the public, authoritative, powerful and male domain, the woman-mother is excluded as a social participant and is then viewed as inferior to men. As a consequence, this patriarchal mother brings up a daughter to believe that masculinity is synonymous with power and femininity with submission. Accordingly, as Chodorow states, “a self-perpetuating cycle of female deprecation apparently develops” (1989a: 41); patriarchal daughters have, for generations, “accept[ed] this devalued position and resign[ed] themselves to producing more men who will perpetuate the system that devalues them” (44). The daughter’s internalisation of her own feminine self as subordinate to a masculine socio-cultural superiority inevitably helps to lay the foundations for the strengthening and preservation of male dominance and male physical and psychological violence against women. This patriarchal mother-daughter relationship gives birth to potential victims of gender violence who have been trained to accept their own secondary status as passive, devalued and dependent beings.

The literary terrain, as a “site of institutional and ideological contestation” (Greenblatt 1997: 3), offers multiple examples of the psychological and social outcome of the mother-daughter dyad as revealed by Marianne Hirsch in The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism (1989)[1]. The literary approach of the present essay shows how narrative can function as a feminist discursive practice that exposes the fact that patriarchal motherhood is intimately connected to male violence as presented by Margaret Atwood in her novel Lady Oracle (1976). The novel presents a dysfunctional relationship between Joan Foster and her mother, Frances Delacourt, which is the source of Joan’s continuous desire to escape and not to be found or not to be known. Such desire results in a permanent questioning of the nature of Joan’s identity. Eleonora Rao (1993) contends that Joan´s multiple selves “undermine the definition of character associated with realism, that is, of a coherent, indivisible and continuous whole” (43). For Rao, the novel shows a “self that is dispersed and plural” (43) and presents “an acceptance of the various different selves which constitute a single identity” (65). Likewise, Sherrill Grace (1980) considers that at the end of the novel Joan “has found a new life” and that, for her, “rebirth consists in accepting her selves” (128). However, the novel does not merely close with Joan’s acceptance of her identity as something multiple and unstable, but with the assertion that Joan’s multiple selves reflect the character’s lack of a healthy psychological and emotional evolution which has never been totally completed. The novel shows how Joan’s unsatisfactory relationship with her mother culminates in the protagonist’s incomplete sense of individuality. Such incompleteness pictures a character who, as Coral Ann Howells (1996) points out, offers multiple versions of her life “which never quite fit together to form the image of a unified and coherent self” (65).

By referring to concepts which are developed by analysts such as Jacques Lacan, Winnicot or Chodorow, this paper attempts to show how Joan’s experience is identified with a mental regressive phase that leads her to repeat an incomplete psychological process that she should have developed and concluded during her infancy. This stage corresponds to the necessary transition from the subjective perception to the objective recognition of the external world. That is, the evolution from the feeling of a universal self (me) to the final step in which the individual distinguishes himself/herself from the outer world (not-me). This clear distinction results in the healthy evolution of the self.[2] Various psychological changes and experiences take place during this maturational process. First of all, in the novel,  the outstanding role of the mirror as a symbol should be observed. Its symbolism is related to Lacan’s exposition of the “mirror stage” in his psychoanalytical theory of the formation of the child’s “I”. Secondly, both the protagonist’s multiplicity of identities and her refusal to reveal her real self are related to Winnicot’s notions of “false self” and “split self,” and his theory of “communicating and not-communicating” as elements of the infant’s individuality developed during the “holding phase.” Thirdly, Lady Oracle´s structure is wholly based on the blending and also confusion between fantasy and reality. Such a narrative organisation is linked to Winnicot’s theory of the intermediate area of experience called “transitional phenomena” during which “illusion” is a primary concept for the child’s growth of the self. Finally, all these notions and theories prefigure the all-pervading theory of the mother-child relationship developed by Chodorow.

         The psychoanalytical approach is merged in this essay with the sociological and cultural view of motherhood presented by Rich in her works Of Woman Born (1976) and On Lies, Secrets and Silence (1979). The damaging bond between Joan and her mother shows the destructive consequences of the institutionalisation of motherhood. On the one hand, Joan’s desire to escape reflects a clear case of “matrophobia.” However, her inability to free herself from her mother’s devastating influence fashions her into a woman whose lack of self-confidence and sense of male social superiority turns her into an easy target for patriarchal violence.

Joan’s discontinuous narrative account is a faithful reflection of her life. She decides to leave Toronto and escape to England in search for a new life. However, her return to Toronto forces her to face her past again. She desires to “get rid of it entirely and construct a different one for [herself], a more agreeable one” (139) but she is finally aware that she “can’t change the past” (6) since “it refused to forget [her], it waited for sleep, then cornered [her]” (213). Such turning back to her former life reflects a state of regression, a retreat to the stage during which a breach in her psychological evolution is produced: “And yet, as time went by, I began to feel something was missing. Perhaps, I thought, I had no soul” (215). In psychoanalytical terms, Chodorow states that “the infant comes to define aspects of its self in relation to internalized representation of aspects of its mother and the perceived quality of her care” (1978: 78). When the infant is female, the bond with her mother is even stronger

because they are the same gender as their daughters and have been girls, mothers of daughters tend not to experience these infant daughters as separate from them in the same way as do mothers of infant sons. In both cases, a mother is likely to experience a sense of oneness and continuity with her infant. However, this sense is stronger and lasts longer, vis-à-vis daughters. (109)

Atwood’s novel highlights the relevance of the mother-daughter dyad in Joan’s personality to such an extent that her emotional and psychological gap finds its source in the disturbing and destructive relationship that she has with her mother.

The origin of such a damaging bond can be found in Atwood’s presentation of Frances as a frustrated patriarchal mother. As Joan states,

in my mother’s view both I and my father had totally failed to justify her life the way she felt it should have been justified … even though she had done the right thing, she had devoted her life to us, she had made her family her career as she had been told to do, and look at us: a sulky fat slob of a daughter and a husband who wouldn’t talk to her. (177)

         Brought up by “very strict and religious” (64) parents, Frances transmits to her daughter the lesson that she was in turn taught by her family: the justification of a woman’s existence lies in her role as mother and wife. In order to find a husband and have a family, Joan’s mother strongly believes that her daughter must acquire a certain set of feminine traits that will allow her to be accepted as an adequate female member of society. Extremely aware of external appearances, Frances considers that, by teaching her daughter to be a “lady” (73, 134), she will reach public recognition as a good mother. Thus, Joan’s lack of socially constructed female characteristics, such as beauty, originates the problematic relationship between mother and daughter since, as Joan states, she turns into “a throwback, the walking contradiction of her [mother’s] pretensions to status and elegance” (179).

Instead of depicting her relationship with her mother as a caring bond, Joan describes it as a “professionalized relationship” (63) in which Frances “was to be the manager, the creator, the agent; [she] was to be the product” (63). Their union presents a complete absence of affection and physical bonding. Such an unaffectionate tie could be interpreted under the light of Winnicot’s analysis of the infant’s psychological development during what this analyst denominates the “holding phase.” During such a stage the child undergoes a transformation from “an unintegrated state to a structured integration” (1965: 44). The term “holding” refers to the physical relationship between the infant and the mother, which is basic to “the mental health of the individual” (42). However, the mother-daughter relationship presented in Lady Oracle is not mediated by physical contact:

My mother ... seldom touched me ... I could always recall what my mother looked like but not what she felt like ... My mother didn´t hold me by the hand, there were her gloves to think of. She held me by the arm or the back of the collar. (85)

         The result of a correct development of Winnicot´s “holding phase” “might be called ‘unit status’. The infant becomes a person, an individual in his own right” (1965: 44). However, Frances ’ maternal attitude constitutes a threat to her daughter’s self-constituting act. It does not lead to the formation of Joan’s “unit status” but to the development of her split personality and, consequently, of what Winnicot calls a “false or compliant self” (183) – or, in Joan’s case, “false selves” - as opposed to the “true self” (184): “I was two people at once, with two sets of identification papers, two bank accounts, two different groups of people who believed I existed” (212).

Winnicot also suggests that in a healthy psychological evolution a “limiting membrane” appears “which to some extent (in health) is equated with the surface of the skin, and has a position between the infant’s ‘me’ and ‘not-me’” (1965: 45). Joan’s “limiting membrane” is her obesity. Her fat sets up a barrier that she uses not to distinguish herself from the outer world, but to protect herself from it (139) and also from her mother: “I was eating steadily, doggedly, stubbornly, anything I could get. The war between myself and my mother was on in earnest; the disputed territory was my body” (65-66). However, Joan’s eating disorders are also related to the fear of being abandoned by her mother: “I ate to defy her, but I also ate from panic ... Did I want to become solid, solid as a stone so she wouldn´t get rid of me?” (74). Joan tries to content her mother in every possible way but “the results had not pleased her. The only way [she] could have helped her to her satisfaction would have been to change into someone else” (51). Acting as a destructive primary socialiser, Joan’s mother does not allow her daughter to develop her own self-esteem by letting her be faithful to her own personality; she is determined to shape Joan “into anything for which she could get a prize” (67). Winnicot’s following remark: “the result of each failure in maternal care is that the continuity of being is interrupted by reactions to the consequences of that failure, with resultant ego-weakening” (1965: 52), could be perfectly applied to the destructive psychological progression experimented by Joan as a consequence of Frances ’ maternal failures.

Frances utterly rejects her daughter’s lack of female decorum but, above all, she cannot admit her obesity, “one of the things my mother never quite forgave me” (39), says Joan. Beauty and thinness constitute for Frances two necessary traits that a woman must have in order to be successful: “my mother’s version was that nobody who looked like me could ever accomplish anything” (81): for Frances the main female accomplishment is to find a good husband. Cruelly betrayed by her mother at the age of seven at Miss Flegg’s recital, Joan is forced to change her beautiful butterfly costume for a humiliating mothball suit as she asks herself: “who would think of marrying a mothball? A question my mother put to me often, in other forms” (47). Female physical appearance and marriage are constantly linked by Atwood throughout the novel and obesity is presented to Joan as an obstacle to woman’s principal achievement: becoming a wife. After refusing to take the pills and follow her mother’s imposed diets, Joan is sent to a psychiatrist who, in order to encourage her to lose weight, asks her: “don’t you want to get married?” (79).

The reiterative image that Atwood presents of Frances putting on her makeup at her vanity table in front of her three-sided mirror points at the crucial role played by female beauty in a patriarchal society that exerts its power over a female docile body “that may be subjected, used, transformed, improved” (Foucault 1991: 136) and fashioned by the requirements of a male gaze. As Pamela S. Bromberg (1988) argues, mirrors in the novel symbolise “the crippling emphasis that society places on the female image as a consumer item” (13) and reflect “a culture where women are objectified and packaged for the marriage market” (13). Frances ’ impossibility to recapture her former allure and reach beauty archetypes turns her make-up ritual into an ungratifying process:

She often frowned at herself, shaking her head as if she was dissatisfied; and occasionally she’d talk to herself as if she’d forgotten I was there. Instead of making her happier, these sessions appeared to make her sadder, as if she saw behind or within the mirror some fleeting image she was unable to capture or duplicate; and when she was finished she was always a little cross. (62-63)

         Her body seems to be culturally controlled as she internalises the patriarchal assumption that women are objects whose value depends on their external appearance. She has become completely imprisoned within her own body and within the ideals she successfully imposes on her daughter.

Despite the fact that Joan refuses to let her mother “make [her] over in her image, thin and beautiful” (84), and despite the fact that she turns her obesity into a weapon in order to defy her mother’s orders to slim down, Joan internalises her mother’s repulsion of her body and her worship of male-ordered patterns of femininity. “’Look at you’”, says Frances to her daughter, “’eat, eat, that’s all you ever do. You’re disgusting, you really are, if I were you I’d be ashamed to show my face outside the house’” (120). Joan interiorises such repugnance and is not able to see her body as a totality but as a mere assemblage of fragments that prevents the shaping of her identity to be completed: “I didn’t usually look at my body, in a mirror or in any other way; I snuck glances at parts of it now and then but the whole thing was too overwhelming” (117). The mirror acquires now a psychological meaning. At this point, the Lacanian theory of the “mirror stage” could be applied to Joan’s self-development. According to Lacan, the “mirror stage” is located in the evolution from the “me-world” to the “not-me world.” The moment in which children are able to recognize their own image and the persons and things around them in a mirror is basic to their identification as selves separated from their environment (1977: 1). As Lacan states, “the function of the mirror stage is to establish a relation between the organism and its reality ... between the Innenwelt and the Umwelt” (4). Children experience their bodies as fragmented before this stage and by looking at themselves in the mirror they achieve, for the first time, a sense of totality that will eventually lead to a sense of selfhood. The mirror reflection as synonymous with distortion and, as such, opposed to the individuating nature of Lacan’s “mirror stage” is presented in the Canadian National Exhibition episode where Joan encounters a place that “had phosphorescent skeletons, and distorting mirrors that stretched you and shrank you. I found those mirrors disturbing” (86). Therefore, mirrors in the novel also foreground the deficiencies pervading Joan’s psychological development since they are depicted as a source of fragmentation and distortion instead of becoming the reflection of Joan’s totality, unity and self-confidence.

This absence of self-worth and the internalisation of her mother’s male-oriented ideas increase Joan’s frustration as she desires to conform to the feminine codes. After one of her reiterative fantasies about the Fat Lady from the freak show at the Canadian National Exhibition – walking onto a high wire while dressed as a ballet dancer with a fluffy pink skirt, satin ballet slippers and a sparkling tiara – Joan admits “how destructive to [her] were the attitudes of society, forcing [her] into a mold of femininity that [she] could never fit” (99). She is conscious of the fact that she would be happier if she had “been accepted for what [she] was and had learned to accept [herself], too” (99). However, she still wants to become part of that society by “fitting into its molds”: “I wanted those things, that fluffy skirt, that glittering tiara. I liked them” (99). As a girl, she idealised “ballet dancers” (40); she was fascinated by her mother’s “collections of cosmetics and implements” (62); she “treasured images of [herself] exuding femininity and soft surrender” (138); she longed to be like the ballet dancer and actress Moira Shearer since she “wanted to dance and be married to a handsome orchestra conductor, both at once” (78); but, above all, she desired to be like her thin and beautiful female friends at school who could dream about “the brand of china and the style of wedding dress they had lined up for themselves already at the age of fifteen” (91). Though she knew everything about these friends, they knew nothing about her “temptation to tell everything, all [her] hatred and jealousy, to reveal [herself] as the duplicitous monster” (91).

Joan defines her mother as a “huge but ill-defined figure … blocking the foreground” (118). Atwood herself describes Frances as a “mother-monster” (Bouson 1993: 65), as a threat to a daughter whose relationship with her mother is based on cruelty, humiliation, despise and reproach. Monstrosity becomes a key term in the novel since it turns into the principal image of Joan’s internalised representation of aspects of her mother. As we have seen, Joan considers herself a “duplicitous monster” as a girl at school; her obesity turns her into a grotesque and, in a way, monstrous image (66, 117); she also turns into an object of fear for the Italian old women in Terremoto: “What did they see, the eyes behind those stone-wall windows? A female monster, larger than life” (336). In a dream where Joan stares at her mother’s make-up ritual in front of the triple mirror, she suddenly realises that “instead of three reflections she had three actual heads, which rose from her towelled shoulders on three separate necks … my mother was a monster” (63). The fact that both mother and daughter turn metaphorically into monsters reveals the destructive consequences of their bonding for both of them. For Joan, her mother’s concern about her “always meant pain” (108).

Pain materialises in the novel when the devastating effects of their relationship are clearly disclosed in the scene in which Joan is physically attacked by her mother-monster after announcing her plans to move out:

Then she took a knife from the kitchen counter – I had been using it to spread cottage cheese on my RyKrisp – and stuck it into my arm, above the elbow. It went through my sweater, pricked the flesh, then bounced out and fell to the floor. Neither of us could believe she had done this. (120)

         In one of the chapters included within Of Woman Born, entitled “Violence: The Heart of Maternal Darkness”, Rich narrates the story of Joanne Michulski, mother of eight children, who, in 1974, “decapitated and chopped up the bodies of her two youngest” (1986a: 257). Rejecting the social fashion that merely labels violent mothers as psychopathological, Rich finds the source of this maternal aggressive mode in the “institutional violence of patriarchal motherhood” (263), and also in the “violence of the institution of marriage” (264). In Michulski’s case, her eight children were forced upon her through what Rich calls “marital rape.” She “felt the hopelessness of any control of her life which is indoctrinated into so many women” (265), and lived a “motherhood without autonomy, without choice” (265). In Lady Oracle, Joan finds out that she was an unwanted, probably illegitimate child and discovers that her mother’s unwanted pregnancy forced her to marry her father. Overhearing one of her parents’ conversations, she also comes across the fact that her mother would have preferred to have an abortion instead of giving birth (73). We could analyse Frances ’ violent reaction in the light of Rich’s conclusions. She is depicted as a clear victim of motherhood as a patriarchal institution that traps women within their own bodies and, as a consequence, can turn children into the image of their own frustration or, as Joan sees herself, as “a reproach to her, the embodiment of her own failure and depression” (64). It is quite interesting to observe that Joan’s mother, presented as a woman who faithfully follows the male-determined feminine codes, rejected her pregnancy, the ultimate proof of femininity in a patriarchal society. This fact is clear evidence of Frances ’ conflictive inner self: she appears as her daughter’s victimiser, but she is also, and primarily, a victim.

         Joan’s maternal desires are repressed by her fears of becoming like her mother: “I wanted children, but what if I had a child who would turn out like me? Even worse, what if I turned out to be like my mother?” (213). Atwood presents us with a clear example of “matrophobia”:

Matrophobia can be seen as a womanly splitting of the self, in the desire to become purged once and for all of our mothers’ bondage, to become individuated and free. The mother stands for the victim in ourselves, the unfree woman, the martyr. Our personalities seem dangerously to blur and overlap with our mothers’; and in a desperate attempt to know where mother ends and daughter begins, we perform radical surgery. (Rich 1986a: 236)

         In order for Joan to survive and develop her own self-esteem, she abandons her mother, changes her name to Miss Louisa K. Delacourt as she admits that “this was the formal beginning of [her] second self” (135). The breach between mother and daughter is finally completed when Frances is eliminated from the narrative after her early death. However, Chodorow’s following statement: “issues of separation from and attachment to her mother remain important throughout a woman’s life” (1989b: 53) is manifested through the novel’s mother-daughter dyad. The nature of such a bond is so strong that the mother-monster figure is constantly present in Joan’s mind even after her death. She deeply desires to forget about her mother but she admits that “all this time I carried my mother around my neck like a rotting albatross. I dreamed about her often, my three-headed mother, menacing and cold” (213); “why did I have to dream about my mother, have nightmares about her, sleepwalk to meet her?” (330). Joan’s mental and spiritual encounters with her mother reflect Rich’s assertion that “where a mother is hated to the point of matrophobia there may also be a deep underlying pull toward her, a dread that if one relaxes one’s guard one will identify with her completely” (1986a: 235).

         During her experiments with Automatic Writing, Joan sits in front of her dressing-table mirror: “I’d recently bought a three-sided one, like my mother’s” (218). The image of Joan in front of her triple mirror reflects an earlier dream of her three-headed mother sitting at her vanity table and acts as a representation of a complete and unhealthy identification between mother and daughter. The scene in which Joan sees her reflection in the mirror, but cannot see the figure that she feels standing behind her (219), could be interpreted as the failure of Lacan’s “mirror stage.” In order for this developmental phase to be resolved, the infant should also see the objects that surround him/her, and especially his/her mother, reflected in the mirror. However, the simultaneous reflection of herself and her mother in the mirror, that is, the representation of the “me-world” and the “not-me-world” has not yet taken place in Joan’s case. This fact reveals a clear indistinctness between the internal and external elements that structure her whole sense of identity. It is only at the end of the novel that Joan finally realises that the figure which she could always feel behind her in the mirror was her mother’s: “She’d never really let go of me because I had never let her go. It had been she standing behind me in the mirror” (330). It is now that she finds out that both, mother and daughter, do not constitute the identical unit that had always been trapped in her disturbing reflection: “She needed her freedom also; she had been my reflection too long” (330).

In order to free her mother, Joan strives to look into the reasons why she treated her in such a mean way: “Why wasn’t she happier? Why could I never make her laugh?” (76) “What had been done to her to make her treat me the way she did?” (178). As Rich states, it is “easier by far to hate and reject a mother outright than to see beyond her to the forces acting upon her” (1986a: 235). Joan is determined to discover the forces that so negatively affected Frances ’ life and finally realises that her mother “had been the lady in the boat, the death barge, the tragic lady with flowing hair and stricken eyes, the lady in the tower. She couldn’t stand the view from her window, life was her curse” (330). Joan compares her mother’s life and fate with Tennyson’s “Lady of Shalott.” Confined in her tower, the Lady of Shalott is only allowed to see reality through a mirror; otherwise, her life would be doomed. However, she finally succumbs to temptation and looks directly at Camelot. She then leaves the tower, finds a boat, and floats down the river on her way to Camelot where she arrives frozen to death. By relating her mother to the Lady of Shalott, Joan approaches her experience from a different angle. She can now feel her mother’s pain and frustration as she understands that “she was not what she seemed” (179). For the first time, she strives to see her mother as a caring woman and their union as a bond of love: “after all she was my mother, she must once have treated me as a child” (179). She envisions her now, not as a powerful mother-monster, but as a woman secluded within her own tower: her house.

Joan pictures her mother trapped “in this house, this plastic-shrouded tomb from which there was no exit. That was what she must have felt” (179). The life her mother could “view from her window” restricted her scope of action to such an extent that it only allowed her to occupy the private domain. The novel constantly reiterates Joan’s mother’s obsession with the order and cleanness of her home, her interest in decoration, and her constant search for a house that she could picture “as the proper dwelling for her” (49). Since she is only allowed to gain some kind of prestige and sense of value through the domestic world, her preoccupation with the aspect of her house signals her efforts to control what in patriarchal terms would be defined as the “female domain.” However, her sense of control is delusional since female seclusion within the private sphere works as a subtle mechanism of male authority, and her strict domestic supervision symbolises the inert and constraining nature of her socially defined role as a woman:

By this time my mother had made it a rule that no shoes were to be allowed inside the house. It was a new house and she had just finished getting it into shape; now that it was finally right she didn’t want anything touched, she wanted it static and dustless and final, until that moment when she would see what a mistake she had made and the painters or movers would arrive once more, trailing disruption. (67)

As opposed to a “domestically powerful but socially devalued mother,” the novel presents an “absent, but socially powerful, father” (Bouson 1993: 64). When meeting her father at the hospital, Joan pictures him as being “much more impressive than he ever had at home, he looked like someone with power” (136). However, at home he “was simply an absence” (65), an “indistinct” (5) figure. The relationship established between father and daughter is highly influenced by her relation to her mother. In psychoanalytical terms we could here apply Chodorow’s assertion that “a woman’s preoedipal attachment to her mother largely determines both her subsequent oedipal attachment to her father and her later relationship to men in general” (1978: 96).  While he is fighting in the Second World War, Joan’s opinions about her father are determined by her mother’s dual stories about him:

Sometimes he was a nice man who was coming home soon, bringing with him all kinds of improvements and delightful surprises: we would live in a bigger house, eat better, have more clothes, and the landlord would be put in his place once and for all. At other times, when I was getting out of hand, he was retribution personified, the judgment day that would catch up with me at last; or (and I think this was closer to her true feelings) he was a heartless wretch who had abandoned her, leaving her to cope with everything all by herself. (65)

         Joan does not know how to define her own father: “was he a bad man or a nice man?” (65). She learns from her mother that men can fall into two different categories: “nice men did things for you, bad men did things to you” (65). On her way to the Brownies weekly meeting, at the age of eight, Joan had to cross a ravine that terrified her mother, since there, behind every willow tree and bush, she “pictured a lurking pervert, an old derelict rendered insane by rubbing alcohol, a child molester or worse” (49): “The way she put it made me somehow responsible, as if I myself had planted the bushes in the ravine and concealed the bad men behind them, as if, should I be caught, it would be my own doing” (50). Frances brings her daughter up in the belief that beautiful women act as victims at the hands of bad men. But she also transmits to her daughter the idea that, since women know about this fact, they are to blame if they are abused and they should do their best to avoid it.

         As a little girl, Joan is then brought up with fear and guilt of being a woman-victim, “the guilt of those who lose, those who can be exposed, those who fail” (229). This situation stresses her feelings of insecurity and low self-esteem. As she grows up and puts on weight, her mother stops worrying about her being molested by men since “it would have been like molesting a giant basketball … I knew I would be able to squash any potential molester against a wall merely by breathing out” (138). Thus, Joan’s obesity cancels her fear of “aggressive lechers” (138). However, as she loses weight she has to remind herself that she is now an attractive woman liable to be attacked by bad men as her mother used to warn her:

So when I shrank to normal size I had none of these fears, and I had to develop them artificially. I had to keep reminding myself: Don’t go there alone. Don’t go out at night. Eyes front. Don’t look, even if it interests you. Don’t stop. Don’t get out of the car. Keep going. (138)

         As we can see, it is Joan’s mother “through whom patriarchy early teaches the small female her proper expectations” (Rich 1986a: 243). Frances plays the part of a cultural agent that conveys to her daughter the idea that female beauty is linked to marriage but also to male aggression, and that grotesque obesity leads to male obliviousness. Since her earliest childhood Joan is a recipient of male-dominant notions of femininity to which she has been told to conform. Frances transmits her own victimisation, her own admission of inferiority to her daughter, but she does not offer her any kind of mechanism in order to fight against such patriarchal constraints. In Rich’s terms, we could conclude that Frances ’ victimisation

mutilates the daughter who watches her for clues as to what it means to be a woman. Like the traditional foot-bound Chinese woman, she passes on her own affliction. The mother’s self-hatred and low expectations are the binding-rags for the psyche of the daughter. (243)

         Frances’ insistence on the dangerous and aggressive use that men make of the female body points to the power patriarchy has, not only to force on women a certain ideal of female beauty, but also to turn the socially constructed and idealised female body into male property; that is, into an object of male desire and abuse.  Joan pictures the assaulted or sexually harassed beautiful female body as liable to be pitied or to produce sexual excitement, whereas she envisions tortured female obesity as inspiring male repulsion and laughter:

If Desdemona was fat who would care whether or nor Othello strangled her? Why is it that the girls Nazis torture on the covers of the sleazier men’s magazines are always goodlooking? The effect would be quite different if they were overweight. The men would find it hilarious instead of immoral or sexually titillating. However, plump unattractive women are just as likely to be tortured as thin ones. More so, in fact. (49)

         Joan’s words disclose a message that her patriarchal mother passes on to her and that the narrative succeeds in communicating to the reader: the patriarchal conception and fashioning of the female body - no matter whether it is beautiful or grotesque, thin or obese - helps to define women as objects of male physical and psychological aggression.

Lady Oracle shows a clear reiteration of images of male physical violence against women in the descriptions that Atwood offers of Joan’s relationships with men. As Joan states, “every man I’d ever been involved with, I realized, had had two selves” (293). Following her mother’s presentation of men as either good or bad, Joan envisions them as being like the male characters of the Gothic novels she writes, that is, as either rescuers or villains (60). As Ann McMillan (1988) observes, these two selves are “actually projections of her transforming eye” (58), whose conversions become “more frustrating than satisfying” (61). Whereas the daffodil man is pictured as her childhood rescuer, however, he is also presented as the sexual deviate she meets at the ravine as her mother predicted (56). Joan’s father, a saviour of human lives, is suspected of having murdered his wife (178, 293). Paul, the Polish Count, depicted by Joan as “my lost love, my rescuer” (280), is a man who believes that “a rape victim is responsible for being raped” (157) and keeps a revolver which frightens Joan and makes her anxious (159-60). The “Byronic” (254) Royal Porcupine is described as “a homicidal maniac” (272) whose response after he is rejected by Joan is: “how about a double suicide? Or maybe I could shoot you and then jump off the Toronto Dominion Centre with your body in my arms?” (271). Finally, Arthur, pictured in the first place as a mysterious hero, because “heroes were supposed to be aloof” (196), is suspected to be the man who torments Joan by sending her death threats and by devising a “plan to get rid of [her]” (292). As Joan identifies with Felicia in the final maze scene (341-42), Arthur is twice identified with her husband Redmond, the hero-villain of Joan’s novel-in-progress Stalked by Love, who is finally pictured by her wife as “the killer. He was the killer in disguise, he wanted to murder her as he had murdered his other wives” (342).

Through Joan’s writing of Gothic literature, Atwood “recognizes [its] dangerous and persisting mass-culture fantasies … which inscribes the female heroine as the potential victim of male violence” (Bouson 1993: 63). Joan’s determination not to tell Arthur about her Gothic novels is based on the knowledge that these books were “worse than trash, for didn’t they exploit the masses, corrupt by distracting, and perpetuate degrading stereotypes of woman as helpless and persecuted? They did and I knew it, but I couldn’t stop” (31). Joan justifies the enormous success of Gothic romance by viewing it as a “necessity” (31) for millions of women who have “the desire, the pure quintessential need … for escape” (31). She presents a world inhabited by women, among whom she includes herself, who “wanted men in mysterious cloaks who would rescue them from balconies” (215), and who later on realised that their husbands were all but “strong, lustful, passionate and exciting” (215). Lady Oracle presents Joan and her readers as women who have assimilated the Gothic correspondence between woman/victim/weakness and man/rescuer/strength to such an extent that they aspire to shape their life in accordance with such gender categories. Such an internalisation of gender binaries, as Atwood denounces in the novel, favours social female victimisation and the resulting appearance of male violence episodes.

By applying Gothic stereotypes to her own experiences, Joan presents herself as one of her heroines: a weak and vulnerable woman who expects to be rescued by a strong and self-confident hero: 

I’d always been fond of balconies. I felt that if I could only manage to stand on one long enough, the right one, wearing a long white trailing gown, preferably during the first quarter of the moon, something would happen: music would sound, a shape would appear below, sinuous and dark, and climb towards me, while I leaned fearfully, hopefully, gracefully, against the wrought-iron railing and quivered. (4) 

         Joan uses Gothic elements to construct the story line of her own life and, as we have also observed, she also puts to use her own experience in order to devise the plot of her novels. The passages of the romance that Joan encloses within the novel “function as crazy mirrors for the main story” (Grace 1980: 116). In psychoanalytical terms, Joan’s intermingling of fantasy and reality seems to immerse the protagonist into the area that Winnicot denominates as “transitional phenomena”; that is, “an intermediate area between a baby’s inability and his growing ability to recognize and accept reality” (1971: 2). During this phase the infant does not clearly distinguish between fantasy and facts and compares this phase with a “journey from the purely subjective to objectivity,” with “a progress towards experiencing” (1971: 6). This intermediate state belongs to the “realm of illusion” in which infants believe that they create the world around them whereas they are not able to comprehend the nature of symbolism correctly. During this “transitional phenomena”, Winnicot states, “there may emerge some thing or some phenomenon ... that becomes vitally important to the infant ... and is a defence against anxiety” (1971: 4). Such a “transitional object” is, in Joan´s case, the writing of her novels behind which she can hide and protect herself from the outer world:

My writing became for me anything more than an easy way of earning a living ... it became important ... As long as I could spend a certain amount of time each week as Louisa, I was all right, I was patient and forbearing, warm, a sympathetic listener. But if I was cut off, if I couldn’t work at my current Costume Gothic, I would become mean and irritable, drink too much and start to cry. (212)

         Joan’s “inclination to live partly in a fantasy romance world acquires the positive significance of a strategic defensive and survival device” (Rao 1994: 147). Her own life is embedded within a “realm of illusion”, of fantasy, that harbours her from pain. As does the Lady of Shalott’s tower, romance keeps her safe from a real life that, as she has learned over the years, only leads to fatality:

You could stay in the tower for years, weaving away, looking in the mirror, but one glance out the window at real life and that was that. The curse, the doom. (313)

Winnicot remarks that “sometimes there is no transitional object except the mother herself” (1971: 5). In Joan’s case, however, the easing effect of Gothic writing works as a substitute for Frances ’ maternal and protective love. Janice A. Radway, in her work Reading the Romance (1984), points out “the ability of romance reading to address the women’s longing for emotional replenisment” (1987: 12) and uses Chodorow’s theories of the mother-daughter preoedipal relationship to explain the contradiction that lies in the fact that women are interested in a kind of literature that reinforces patriarchal categories. She finds  one of the sources of this fascination for romance in a female “ongoing need for the style of care associated originally with her primary parent, that is, with her mother” (12). Radway contends that, since “that need [is] not being met adequately in their day-to-day existence” (13), this kind of writing can be the answer to the “need to be nurtured and cared for” (13) of female readers. By applying Radway’s interesting theory to Joan’s case, we could conclude that it is not the reading but the writing of such novels what helps her to fill the gap that the failed relationship with her mother has left within her.

Such a gap does not allow her to face reality and thrusts her into a fantasy world that “always turns into a trap” (334). The feeling of entrapment takes the form of a fictional maze by the end of the novel. Joan is trying to finish Stalked by Love by making her stand-in, Felicia, enter a maze:

Suddenly she found herself in the central plot. A stone bench ran along one side, and on it were seated four women. Two of them looked a lot like her, with red hair and green eyes and small white teeth. The third was middle-aged, dressed in a strange garment that ended halfway up her calves, with a ratty piece of fur around her neck. The last was enormously fat. (341)

         The four women that Felicia meets in the centre of the maze resemble Joan’s former selves. We recognise Joan Foster as wife and poetess, the writer Louisa K. Delacourt and Joan as an overweight girl. Rao and Grace consider that the maze helps the protagonist to face and accept that her identity is, as everyone else’s, multiple. According to Rao, “Joan comes to terms with her own self-division, with the ‘otherness’ within herself. This time she does not suppress one self in favour of another. Instead, she realises that she has to accept her multiple, numerous selves” (1993: 66).  However, the significance of the maze lies in the fact that Joan uses it as an appropriate narrative device that functions as a neat recapitulation of the anarchic story that she has presented to us and as a mirror of her whole life. It is still a mirror in which Joan’s reflection remains fragmented since her life “meandered along from one thing to another, despite [her] feeble attempts to control it” (3); Joan’s experience has “no paths at all. Thickets, ditches, ponds, labyrinths, morasses, but no paths” (168). If Stalked by Love ends up being a mirror of Joan’s life, its inconclusive ending is a reflection of the incompleteness of Joan’s psychological evolution. Her final statement metaphorically sums up her own sense of self, ruled by disorder, confusion and fragmentation: “I don’t think I’ll ever be a very tidy person” (345).

That is precisely one of the things that Arthur reproaches Joan: her disorganisation (23). Arthur and Frances’ love of order is just one of the multiple elements that connect both characters. The main trait that they share is that both of them are portrayed as Joan’s abusers as they are, to a great extent, responsible for her emotional and psychological needs. Atwood’s clear links between both characters point to the fact that psychological male violence has a direct relation to a patriarchal maternal education. When meeting Arthur, Joan states: “the right man had come along, with a complete cause I could devote myself to. My life had significance” (170). Joan pictures him as her rescuer, as her salvation from a past life under her mother’s control. As Rich states, “the woman who has felt ‘unmothered’ may seek mothers all her life – may even seek them in men” (1986a: 242). Atwood presents Joan as one of those women. The initial description of her relationship with Arthur resembles traits of a mother-child bond: “he would brush my hair for me, clumsily but with concentration, and he would sometimes come up behind me and hug me, apropos of nothing, as if I were a teddy bear. I myself was bliss-filled and limpid-eyed” (170). As Aunt Lou, Arthur seems to be acting as a caring surrogate mother to Joan. However, their relationship is presented as a reduplication of the mother-monster and daughter bond presented by the novel as he is progressively presented by Joan as France ’s sinister double. Joan constantly reiterates the controlling power Arthur has over her life (21). As her mother, who “thought [she] should buy clothes that would make [her] less conspicuous” (83), Arthur also “had a strange relationship with [her] clothes” (19). He makes Joan so self-conscious of her own physical appearance that she avoids wearing her favourite clothes in public. Brought up by her mother in the belief that her personality reflects a lack of “a brain in [her] head” (75), Joan looks up to Arthur’s intellectual capacities as she feels “deficient and somehow absurd, a sort of intellectual village idiot” (31). Whereas, as a girl, Joan strives to please her mother, as an adult she constantly endeavours to “do something he would admire” (24) to such an extent that she “had wanted to turn into what Arthur thought [she] was, or what he thought [she] should be. He was full of plans for [her], ambitions, ways in which [she] could exercise her intelligence constructively” (210). Joan betrays her own past and denies her own self (88) in order to obtain Arthur’s love: “If he’d known what I was really like, would he still have loved me?” (33). Raised up by a patriarchal mother, Joan endeavours to fit into the idea of the perfect wife and, “for Arthur’s sake” (208), she devotes her time to housework. She now feels that she is “not a good woman” (212) if her love is not able to make her husband happy and she finally realises that “no matter what [she] did, Arthur was bound to despise [her]. [She] could never be what he wanted” (246). The clear identification that Atwood establishes between Frances and Arthur metaphorically presents the image of the mother as a male figure that accepts patriarchal assumptions. The similarities found in Joan’s relationship with her mother and husband show how the consequences of Frances ’ sexist education reinforce Joan’s lack of self-regard and construct her as one of the submissive and inferior female members of a male-dominant society.

Throughout the present analysis I have argued that Joan’s multiplicity of selves, of identities, functions as an escape mechanism that helps her to remain unknown. Her refusal to acknowledge her real past and to show her hidden self is the outcome of Frances ’ maternal failure to help her daughter to develop a strong sense of self. Instead of turning Joan into a self-confident woman, Frances ’ patriarchal ideology makes her ashamed of her own physical and psychological traits since they do not fit into the socially and culturally accepted model of femininity. Joan’s lack of self-worth strengthens her view of women as beings who are obliged to follow those models if they want to be incorporated as members of society. Therefore, to Joan, female social participation entails an awareness of female subordination to male postulations. Women’s indoctrination into victimisation functions as a patriarchal mechanism that contributes to the rapid spread of gender violence situations. In order to exterminate male abuse against women, the bond between mother and daughter must be based on a maternal caring reinforcement of the daughter’s self-esteem that involves putting aside all kinds of culturally imposed patterns of gender. As Rich states, it is difficult to achieve such a goal since, first of all, “the nurture of daughters in patriarchy calls for a strong sense of self-nurture in the mother” (1986a: 245). That is, we should not forget that mothers transmit and perpetuate to their daughters what they have first learned from their family and from society. As we have seen, Atwood is aware of this and does not demonise Frances . On the contrary, she presents both Joan and her mother as victims of the same social femininity codes. In order to raise strong and independent daughters, mothers have to get rid of those codes so as to be able to bring them up in freedom. As Rich affirms:

The psychic interplay between mother and daughter can be destructive, but there is no reason why it is doomed to be. A woman who has respect and affection for her own body, who does not view it as unclean or as a sex-object, will wordlessly transmit to her daughter that a woman’s body is a good and healthy place to live. A woman who feels pride in being female will not visit her self-depreciation upon her female child. (245)

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