The Fat Lady Dances: Margaret Atwood's Lady Oracle

Marjorie Retzleff teaches English at Champlain College in Lennoxville,
Quebec.

The best parts in this volume are to be found in the apparatus sections.
The “Chronology” section offers useful elaboration of various
incidents in Atwood’s life, and the “Works Cited” section is
thorough and well annotated. The least satisfactory section is
“Critical Reception,” in which the summary of reviews, articles, and
chapters is ponderously academic and somewhat difficult to sort out.

The central section, “Reading of the Text,” presents a
well-developed thesis concerning society’s role in shaping the
identity of young women, but it was disappointing to find absolutely no
reference to Carl Jung’s theories of the subconscious and almost no
sustained reference to the many image patterns that enrich the novel.
Nonetheless, Fee looks at various themes in the novel—family
conditioning, female identity, feminism, the Gothic, and Joan’s
fantasies—and provides a coherent and interesting analysis of the
interplay of these concepts and forces, in a writing style that is clear
and accessible. In a book this short, one can hardly ask for more.