The Books: “Lady Oracle” (Margaret Atwood)

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:

Here is an excerpt from Lady Oracle – by Margaret Atwood.

This is her third novel – and in my opinion this is when Atwood really starts to become herself. She has written about the breakthru that was this book … she said (and I’m paraphrasing) that her first 2 books had been very clear and linear – with that pared-down language she is so good at. But she decided to make this book one long tangent … and the writing reflects that. The narrator (I love this character) is a romance-writer – she’s obese – she is funny – and even from the first paragraph, you can feel how easily distracted she gets. She’s all over the place. There are parts of this book that are laugh out loud funny – and that’s another breakthru. There isn’t a funny moment in Edible Woman or Surfacing – so Atwood here is letting the three-dimensionality of her artistry come out. Like the narrator in Lady Oracle eventually gets involved with a bunch of Toronto anarchists – they all live in the same apartment – they’re trying to build bombs – and they wear black turtlenecks, and are all earnest and humorless — and Atwood’s descriptions of these people are freakin’ HILARIOUS. I love it when she gets into social commentary – it really takes off in Cat’s Eye – but Lady Oracle is the start of that. Or … when she really starts to cement her position as a great writer. Her observations, the details …

It’s been years since I read this book so I can’t remember all of the intricacies – but I know that the narrator eventually ends up faking her own death. The book starts at the end of the story … and then she backtracks. She’s a lonely woman, a fat woman, writing bodice-rippers – and not dealing with her misery. She has unhappy marriages … and eventually, in a huge break with her own writing style – she writes this intensely feminist book called Lady Oracle – she writes it under an assumed name – because she’s already successful writing bodice-rippers … and nobody wants to read a bodice-ripper by an angry feminist. Atwood’s book ends up being about identity, and the fracturing thereof. Can people be two things at one time?? Of course they can, but society often treats such people as freaks, or as somehow suspicious. Labels abound, classification is required … and so to escape all of that – (and there’s more to it, I just can’t remember) – the narrator of this novel fakes her own death and moves to a small Greek island, to completely reinvent herself.

I love this book – or I remember loving it. I should read it again.

Here is an excerpt where she describes her childhood experiences in the Brownies. Anyone who has read and loved Cat’s Eye will recognize the themes here … even some of the images … Atwood is putting her own interior landscape into words … These are things she will return to again and again … The meanness of girls, the sneakiness of girls, the isolation of girls … the pack mentality … the loneliness … and the long-lasting effects of childhood social experiences on all of us. This is Atwood’s milieu.

Excerpt from Lady Oracle – by Margaret Atwood.

I worshiped Brownies, even more than I had worshiped dancing classes. At Miss Flegg’s you were supposed to try to be better than everyone else, but at Brownies you were supposed to try to be the same, and I was beginning to find this idea quite attractive. So I liked wearing the same bagy uniform with its odd military beret and tie, learning the same ritual rhymes, handshakes and salutes, and chanting in unison with the others,

A Brownie gives in to the older folkd;
A Brownie does NOT give in to herself!

There was even some dancing involved. At the beginning of every session, when the slightly dilapidated papier-mache toadstool which was the group fetish had been set in place on its grassy-green felt mat, and the gray-haired woman in the blue Guide uniform had said, with a twinkle in her eye, “Hoot! Hoot!” the Brownies would hurtle from the four corners of the room, six at a time, and perform a whirling, frenzied dance, screeching out the words to their group songs as loud as they could. Mine was:

Here you see the laughing Gnomes,
Helping mothers in our homes.

This was not strictly true; I didn’t help my mother. I wasn’t allowed to. On the few occasions I’d attempted it, the results had not pleased her. The only way I could have helped her to her satisfaction would have been to change into someone else, but I didn’t know this yet. My mother didn’t approve of my freeform style of making beds, nor of the crashes and fragments when I dried the dishes. She didn’t like scraping charcoal off the bottoms of pots when I tried to cook (“a cooked dessert” was one Brownie test requirement), or having to reset the table after I’d done it backwards. At first I tried to surprise her with sudden Good Turns, as suggested in the Brownie handbook. One Sunday I brought her breakfast in bed on a tray, tripped, and covered her with wet cornflakes. I polished her good navy-blue suede shoes with black boot polish. And once I carried out the garbage can, which was too heavy for me, and tipped it down the back steps. She wasn’t a very patient woman; she told me quite soon that she would rather do things right herself the first time than have to do them over again for me. She used the word “clumsy,” which made me cry; but I was excused from household chores, which I saw as an advantage only much later. I sang out the words unflinchingly though, as I stomped around the toadstool in clouds of church-basement dust,with a damp Gnome hand clutched in each of mine.

The lady who ran the pack was known as Brown Owl; owls, we were told, meant wisdom. I always remembered what she looked like: the dried-apple face, the silvery gray hair, the snapping blue eyes, quick to stop a patch of tarnish on the brass fairy pin or a dirty fingernail or a poorly tied shoelace. Unlike my mother, she was impartial and kind, and she gave points for good intentions. I was entranced by her. It was hard to believe that an adult, older than my mother even, would actually squat on the floor and say things like, “Tu-whit, Tu-whoo” and “When Brownies make their fairy ring, They can magic everything!” Brown Owl acted as though she believed all this, and thought that we did too. This was the novelty: someone even more gullible than I was. Occasionally I felt sorry for her, because I knew how much pinching, shoving and mudging went on during Thinking Time and who made faces behind Brown Owl’s back when we were saying, “I promise to do my duty to God and the King and to help others every day, especially those at home.” Brown Owl had a younger sidekick known as Tawny Owl. Like vice-principals everywhere, she was less deceivable and less beloved.

The three girls with whom I crossed the ravine each Brownie day were called Elizabeth, Marlene and Lynne. They were ten, and almost ready to join the Girl Guides; “flying up” it was called if you had obtained your Golden Wings. Otherwise you had to walk up. Elizabeth was going to fly, no doubt about it: she was plastered with badges like a diplomat’s suitcase. Marlene probably would, and Lynne probably wouldn’t. Elizabeth was a Sixer and had two stripes on her arm to prove it. Marlene was a Pixie and I can’t remember what Lynne was. I admired Elizabeth and feared the other two, who competed for her attention in more or less sinister ways.

At first they tolerated me, on those long perilous walks to the streetcar stop. I had to walk a little behind, but that was a small enough price to pay for protection from the invisible bad men. That went on through September and October, while the leaves turned yellow and fell and were burned in the sidewalk fires that were not yet illegal, during roller skating and skipping, past knee socks and into long stockings and winter coats. The days became shorter, we walked home in the dark across the bridge, which was lit only by one feeble bulb at either end. When it began to snow we had to go into leggings, heavy lined pants that were pulled on over our skirts, causing them to bunch into the crotch, and held up by elastic shoulder straps. In those days girls were not allowed to wear slacks to school.

The memory of this darkness, this winter, the leggins, and the soft snow weighing down the branches of the willow trees in the ravine so that they made a bluish arch over the bridge, the white vista from its edge that should have been so beautiful, I associate with misery. Because by that time Elizabeth and her troop had discovered my secret: they had discovered how easy it was to make me cry. At our school young girls weren’t supposed to hit each other or fight or rub snow in each other’s faces, and they didn’t. During recess they stayed in the Girls’ Yard, where everything was whispering and conspiracy. Words were not a prelude to war but the war itself, a devious, subterranean war that was unending because there were no decisive acts, no knockdown blows that could be delivered, no point at which you could say I give in. She who cried first was lost.

Elizabeth, Marlene and Lynne were in other grades or they would have found out about me sooner. I was a public sniveller still, at the age of eight; my feelings were easily hurt, despite my mother, who by this time was telling me sharply to act my age. She herself was flint-eyed, distinct, never wavery or moist; it was not until later that I was able to reduce her to tears, a triumph when I finally managed it.